The Cure of Souls

a more popular figure as a result – attracting a lot more interest, even some sympathy, for a change. But Henry realizes that Layla, being Layla, is going to come up with something far more elaborate.’

Merrily thought of Gypsy Layla: black hat, dark veil, predictions of death and destruction. Had Layla also been aware that it was the father of Amy Shelbone who’d complained about her at the Christmas Fair and ended her show – the very same David Shelbone who was now trying to shut down Allan Henry’s show?

‘So Gypsy Layla becomes Madame Layla, confidante of the dead, in session every lunchtime in the caretaker’s hut. She has at least one friend in on the secret and, between them, they work the glass. She has a lovely name to play with – Justine. She takes it very slowly, feeding out bits at a time to Amy… there are probably usually other girls involved as well so it won’t look suspicious – like Jane, in fact. And slowly and exquisitely, little Amy is hooked.’

The barb really taking hold when Amy went home and asked Hazel Shelbone certain questions – saw the instant dramatic effect on Hazel. Immediately, Amy would feel herself to be at the centre of this awful conspiracy – her beloved adoptive parents had been lying to her for all these years. The only person who wasn’t lying to her was her real mother, reaching out from beyond the grave. Layla, with her sense of drama, could create whatever kind of Justine she needed for the purpose: lonely, sad, unloved, imploring.

And horribly seductive to an adolescent who perhaps did sometimes feel like an alien – without previously having known why. Had something previously hidden been unblocked, horrific memories awoken?

‘So gradually Layla was feeding it out to Amy: blood in the church, blood on the altar. Then here’s Dennis Beckett in his vestments, with his chalice: “The blood which he shed for you… The blood of Christ keep you in eternal life.” And Amy Shelbone, kneeling in the chancel, is getting a whole different slant on this.’

All smelly and musty and horrible, and it’s full of dead people… There must have been some ghastly images in her head by then – Wayne Jukes, maddened with pain and shock, half his face hanging off, plunging the kitchen knife into Justine. And ‘eternal life’ was some church-bound, tortured spirit.

‘The big lie, the great cover-up.’ Merrily was rocking in the passenger seat, everything suddenly making blinding sense. He watches us suffer and die and he doesn’t help us, ever, ever, ever… Nobody’s going to ever save you. It’s all a horrible sick lie! ‘Amy only knows one church, one altar. She’s imagining her mother dead… in Dilwyn Church.’

She stopped, hearing what else Amy had screamed from her room: And I don’t… I don’t want to die in… Had ‘Justine’ predicted that Amy too was going to be killed or at least die in church? Had she given some kind of terrible warning that made suicide seem like a soft option?

‘The essence of all this,’ Sophie said, ‘is that the child has been virtually programmed to turn against everything the Shelbones cling on to. If that’s true, then, in its insidious way, it’s actually extremely sophisticated. Almost Satanic in its… Do you know what I mean?’

‘In the way the poison’s been introduced.’

‘However, I don’t even see that any laws have been broken. And I still don’t think you should get out of this car.’

‘You bastards.’ Kirsty Ryan lay flat in the churned hay, staring up at the deepening blue. ‘I don’t know whether you’re lying to me, or what. It don’t matter either way to me, though, look, ’cause I en’t catching no armful of shit for that bitch, I can tell you that much.’

‘Why don’t you just tell us everything?’ Eirion suggested.

Kirsty rolled her spiky head back into the hay. ‘Who is this guy thinks he’s Geoffrey Paxman?’

‘Just a friend,’ Jane explained.

‘Thanks, Jane,’ Eirion said.

‘Well, all right, a really good friend,’ Jane conceded.

Kirsty grinned. ‘Then why’n’t you both just go and have a roll behind that hedge and leave me alone, eh?’

‘Please, Kirsty.’ Jane leaned over her. ‘This is really important.’

Kirsty sat up. ‘All right. Siddown. Got any blow? Naw, forget it. Only kidding. Wouldn’t do at the vicarage, would it? Listen, I’ll go so far and no further, so don’t go asking me more stuff when I say no. And you keep me out of this, right? Else I’ll come after you with the four-ten.’

‘OK.’ Jane sat down in the mown grass. Kirsty with a shotgun – that was entirely believable. ‘We never even spoke to you.’

‘This thing, it got out of hand, right? I went so far with it then I was out. Finished. I even tried to bust it all up, but that didn’t work. So that was it, I was outer there. Plus, I mean, in school you need diversions, right? You gotter have things to get you through it. Though I don’t need that now, do I? I look like I got time to mess with the mind of some stupid little cow?’

‘No,’ Jane said.

‘All right, well, it’s simple enough. Layla knew some things about Shelbone, look – about her parents, her real parents.’

‘How did she—?’ Eirion began, but Jane put a warning hand on his knee and he shut up.

‘Like, for instance, that her dad knifed her ma to death in this church,’ Kirsty said.

Jane clutched at the hay.

‘Both of them bloody junkies. Both parents junkies and her dad’s a murderer – and Shelbone’s this holier- than-thou, pain-in-the-arse, stuck-up little cow who’d grass you up to the teachers soon as—Unbelievable, ennit?’

‘Where did this happen?’ Eirion asked.

‘Somewhere up the Midlands? Not round yere.’

‘In a church?’ Jane felt numb.

‘Now Layla, she had a very good reason to bring down that family. On account it was Shelbone’s ol’ man, her adopted ol’ man that messed it up when Layla done that gypsy thing at the Christmas Fair.’

‘I wasn’t there. I was sick.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you, Jane, that was real scary, that stuff she was coming out with. When she gets in that gypsy gear, it’s like she’s another person. Wouldn’t have my fortune told by her, no way. But that’s beside the point. The point is ol’ man Shelbone protests that it’s unChristian and he gets it stopped. So in Layla’s view they all got it coming to them now, big-time. Gypsies don’t forget, right? And she done me a few favours, mostly money, you know? So I couldn’t say no.’

‘To helping her stage the ouija?’

‘But, after a while, I could tell this was fucking the kid up, serious.’

Merrily gazed over the glass waterfall that was Allan Henry’s home. She thought about getting out, going for a meditative walk around, with a cigarette. Perhaps there was something obvious she was missing.

‘Where’s her mother stand in all this?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Sandra Henry,’ Sophie said. ‘Sandra Riddock?’

‘You know her?’

‘Not personally, but she worked for an estate agency where my sister was manager for a while. It was how she met Henry. They were the agents for one of his first shoddy housing estates – twelve, fifteen years ago? She was quite a beauty, apparently. I remember my sister saying that no one knew she even had a child, then.’

‘The father was a gypsy, Jane says.’

‘I wouldn’t know. But you’re right – I do wonder if Sandra Henry knows what her daughter’s been up to.’

‘I wonder if she’s in. I wonder if she’s down there now – on her own. I wonder if Layla’s away, supposedly staying with friends or something equally suspicious.’

Sophie stiffened. ‘On what basis would we be calling on her?’

‘We? Well, me, I’d have to play it straight. I’m a minister of the Church. I’ve just found out my daughter’s been involved in experiments to contact the dead, along with Mrs Henry’s daughter and a girl who attempted suicide. As a priest I’m naturally very worried about that. What’s she going to do, laugh it off, turn me away?’