The Cure of Souls

THEY FOLLOWED THE yellow car down to the silent city, past Hereford United’s ground and the livestock market, losing the Dutch lorry at the big traffic island.

Just the BMW and the Mazda now and, on Greyfriars Bridge, Eirion let Layla widen the gap.

‘You’ll lose her!’ Jane wailed.

‘Not now. I know where I am now. I know all the escape routes.’

‘What if the lights turn against us at the bottom, and she’s away? You want to lose her, don’t you?’

‘That would be nice,’ Eirion admitted, ‘but unfortunately I’m an honourable sort of person.’

‘Sorry.’ Jane glanced back across the River Wye where the Cathedral sat placidly beyond the old bridge, above a nest of modern buildings turned greyly medieval under the moon.

They watched the Mazda go around the bottom island and up towards Belmont and the Abergavenny road, Jane leaning forward, peering through the windscreen to see if there were two heads in there. But the sports car was too low; Amy could be sunk down in the seat. The clock in the BMW said five past two.

‘Look – how do we know she’s got the kid?’ Eirion said.

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Layla was there all the time – behind Allan Henry at the gates. I’m sure I even saw her once. She’d have heard everything. She knew the Shelbones were raising hell and the police were likely to be involved. She had to get Amy out.’

‘Out of where? She was staying with the Henrys? Does that sound likely to you?’

‘Irene, the whole thing’s sick. I don’t know what the arrangement was. For instance, Layla’s supposed to have a gypsy caravan somewhere in that wood. Maybe the kid was in there, maybe that’s where they were doing their seances, I don’t know.’

‘All this presupposing she’s so much under Layla’s thumb that she’d let her nearly run her mother down on the way out, without protesting, leaping up, shouting out. Admit it, none of this is making a lot of sense.’

‘Just stay behind her.’

They tailed the Mazda through the Belmont District, past the all-night Tesco, another roundabout, a half-mile or so of main road, and then Layla took a left, and Eirion slowed but didn’t turn.

‘This looks like a minor minor road. If we so much as turn down here she’ll know we’re following her.’

‘Who cares?’

‘Let’s not blow it now, Jane, for the sake of a bit of caution.’ There was woodland both sides of the entrance, but it wasn’t too thick; anyone the other side would see their headlights. Eirion switched them off. ‘I don’t think there are many places you can get to from here, anyway, I think it just goes into plant roads.’

‘Huh?’

‘Industrial development.’

‘So like maybe she killed Amy and she’s going to have her body set into some concrete foundations?’

‘Let’s try and retain just a modicum of proportion here.’

‘Oh yeah, let’s be sensible.’

‘OK, let’s not, then.’ Eirion turned left, put his headlights back on. They were into a newly made road through woodland that you could tell was being cleared: another ecological disaster zone. About half a mile in, they came to a fully cleared area washed by sterile, high-level security lamps. Eirion suddenly slammed on the brakes, cut his lights.

Because there was the Mazda, parked outside some utility wire-meshed metal gates. A sign behind and above them said:

DANGER. KEEP OUT.

ALL TRESPASSERS WILL BE

PROSECUTED.

At the side of it, another sign:

Arrow Valley Commercial Properties

BARNCHURCH TRADING ESTATE

Phase 2

‘I don’t get it,’ Jane said.

‘Stay here,’ Eirion warned.

Jane snorted. What was the point of that? She zipped up her fleece and got out of the car. She walked out into the middle of the clearing, the big lights shining down like this was a prison yard. A lone tree, a Scots pine, towered over the site, its steep trunk filigreed with moonlight.

There was nobody in the Mazda. It was dead quiet, surreal.

After a couple of seconds, Eirion stepped out, too, and Jane turned to wait for him. It was now that a shadow peeled off the base of the pine.

Jane squeaked.

The shadow spoke.

‘Little Jane Watkins. The vicar’s child. We are honoured.’

Allan Henry leaned down to the Astra’s wound-down window. ‘My solicitor’s on his way. Not his usual office hours, but with all the money I pay the fat bastard, he’d’ve been reaching for his pinstripes even as we spoke.’

He grinned, all those nice white crowns shining in the moonlight: teeth like stars. Basically unworried, Merrily concluded, up against it yet perversely energized; a stroll around the grounds with a cigarette and he was ready for anything. Been here before, and he’d be here again.

‘Where are the Shelbones now?’ she asked him.

‘Finally gone to the police, I imagine. I told them the bloody kid wasn’t here, never had been here. They weren’t convinced. My own fault: I’d antagonized them – maybe a mistake. Can’t believe they got you out again. Those people are frighteningly unbalanced. Look, how about you come down to the house and have that drink, Mrs Watkins. Is that your friend in there, the very proper Mrs Hill?’

‘It’s my other friend, the very self-effacing Mr Robinson.’

‘Boyfriend, eh? What a shame. When you’d gone yesterday, I had a little fantasy about you in your cassock.’

‘Thirty-nine buttons to undo, one by one,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s an old one. You haven’t seen a couple of teenagers around, boy and a girl?’

‘I told you: nobody here but me.’

‘But you’re a notorious liar, Allan.’

‘I swear on my Swiss bank account.’

‘OK.’ Merrily got out, Lol too, leaving the sidelights on, locking the car.

‘What’s he do, then?’ Allan Henry asked. ‘Archdeacon?’

‘He makes music. He writes songs.’

‘I think I feel one coming on now,’ Lol said.

‘Be careful, my friend,’ Allan Henry said, as if by instinct. ‘I don’t just threaten, I sue. I always sue. Go for everything. Bleed dry – it’s the only way.’

Layla unlocked the metal gate with a steel key. She was wearing tight jeans and a black cotton top that finished three inches above her gold-ringed navel. Her tumbled hair was dyed black, with a long, streak of gold that seemed to have been spun from the moon. Jane could tell Eirion was unexpectedly impressed; he’d gone very quiet.

‘You don’t know about the Barnchurch, Jane?’ Layla’s voice was throaty, almost gravelly.

It stood no more than twenty yards behind the gates. All the ground around it had been cleared, and a small mountain of sand had been dumped a few yards away. It was a regular red-brick building with a slate roof. There were brick steps up the outside, tough grass sprouting between them.

It looked like, well, just a barn, and not a very old one – except that, where the gable end was half-lit by the security lamps, you could make out where a Gothic window had been bricked up, just the ridge now, like an old operation scar.

‘This Welsh miracle-worker used to preach here, way back,’ Layla said. ‘Sinners reborn, the sick taking up