but Cantilupe’s mummified body. The two candle-bearing boys in white tunics waited either side of the door, like sentries. One of them, a stocky shock-haired guy, saw Jane and raised a friendly eyebrow. She’d never seen him before and pretended she hadn’t noticed.
The bearded minister stood before one of the side-panels with those mutilated figures of knights on it – their faces obliterated like someone had attacked them centuries ago with a hammer and a stone-chisel, and a lot of hatred.
The minister crossed his hands over his stomach, gazed down with closed eyes. He saw nothing.
‘Almighty God,’ he said, ‘let us this night remember Your servant, Thomas, guardian of this cathedral church, defender of the weak, healer of the sick, friend to the poor, who well understood the action of Our Lord when His disciples asked of Him: which is the greatest in the Kingdom of God and He shewed to them a child and set him in the midst of them.’
Jane saw James Lyden’s full lips twist into a sour and superior sneer.
The minister said, ‘Father, we ask that the humility demonstrated by Thomas Cantilupe throughout his time as bishop here might be shared this night and always by your servant James.’
‘No chance,’ Jane breathed grimly, and the shock-haired boy must have seen the expression on her face, because he grinned.
‘It is to our shame,’ the minister went on, ‘that Thomas’s shrine, this cathedral’s most sacred jewel, should be in pieces, but we know that James will return here when it is once again whole.’
Which was more than James did when he put down his candle on a mason’s bench, and bent reverently to kiss the stone. Jane reckoned he must have spent some while dredging up this disgusting, venomous wedge of thick saliva.
When his face came up smiling, she felt sick. She also felt something strange and piercingly frightening: an unmistakable awareness, in her stomach, of the nearness of evil. She gasped, because it weakened her, her legs felt numb, and she wanted to be away from here, but was not sure she could move. She felt herself sinking into the stone of the arch. She felt soiled and corrupted, not so much by what she’d seen but by what she realized it meant, and she groped for the words she’d intoned with all the sincerity of a budgie – while Mum held her hands – before the altar at Ledwardine.
And then the electric lights went out.
‘Look, darling,’ he said, ‘it’s Mr Robinson. You remember Mr Robinson.’
Tim Purefoy held a large glass of red wine close to the tablecloth white of his surplice.
Anna wore a simple black shift, quite low-cut. She was a beautiful woman; she threw off a sensual charge like a miasma. Like an aura, Lol supposed.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I thought, one day, there would be somebody. I really didn’t think it would be you.’
‘The brother, perhaps.’ Tim lowered himself, with a grateful sigh, into the chair. ‘All rage and bombast, amounting, in the end, to very little – like most of them.’
‘Or the exorcist,’ Anna said, ‘Jane’s mother. I did so want to meet her before we moved on.’
‘But not this little chap here. No, indeed. Hidden depths, do you think?’ A bar of pewtery moonlight cut through the high window, reaching almost to the top of Tim Purefoy’s pale curls. He held up a dark bottle without a label. ‘Glass of wine, old son?’
‘No thanks,’ Lol said tightly. ‘I… seem to be interrupting something.’ Everything he said seemed to emerge slowly, the way words sometimes did in dreams, as though the breath which carried them had to tunnel its way through the atmosphere.
‘Not at all.’ Tim Purefoy took a long, unhurried sip of wine. ‘It’s finished now. It’s done. We’re glad to have the company, aren’t we, darling?’
‘Done?’
‘Ah, now, Mr Robinson…’ Tim put down his glass then used both hands to pull the white surplice over his head, letting it fall in a heap to the flags. ‘You must have some idea of what we’re about, or you wouldn’t be here.’
Anna Purefoy brought Lol a chair and stood in front of him until he sat down – like he was going to be executed, sacrificed. Anna looked young and fit and energized, as if she’d just had sex. She must, he thought, be about sixty, however. ‘Sure you won’t have a glass of wine?’
‘Communion wine?’ Lol said.
Tim Purefoy laughed. ‘With a tincture of bat’s blood.’
‘It’s our own plum wine, silly.’ Anna took the bottle from her husband and held it out to Lol. ‘See? You really shouldn’t believe everything you read about people like us.’
Lol remembered her patting floury hands on her apron.
He was almost disarmed by the ordinariness of it, the civility, the domesticity: candles like these, in holders like these, available in all good branches of Habitat. He blinked and forced himself to remember Katherine Moon congealing in her bath of blood – glancing across towards the bathroom door, holding the image of the dead, grinning Moon pickled like red cabbage. In
‘Thank you.’ Lol accepted the stoppered wine bottle from Anna. He held it up for a moment before grasping it by the neck and smashing it into the stone fireplace. He felt the sting of glass-shards as the fire hissed in rage. Rivers of wine and blood ran down his wrist. And down over the hanging photograph of Moon.
‘Now, tell me what you did to her,’ Lol whispered.
The choir faded into trails of unconducted melody.
‘Please remain in your seats.’ The Bishop’s voice, crisply from the speakers. ‘We appear to have a power failure, but we’re doing all we—’ And then the PA system cut out.
Merrily spotted Mick in his mitre, by candlelight amid jumping shadows, before the candles began to go out, one by one, the air laden with the odour of cooling wax, until there was only the oval of light on the corona, like a Catherine wheel over the central altar – the last holy outpost.
She pulled the cross from under her cloak, standing close to the pool of blood on the tiles, though she couldn’t see it now. A baby began to cry.
She looked across the aisle and the pews, towards the main door, to where the big black stove should have been jetting red, and saw nothing. The stove was out, too. The Cathedral gone dark – gone cold.
‘
‘James?’ the bearded minister called out. ‘Are you there?’
Jane stepped out from the archway and heard the swish of heavy robes as the Boy Bishop brushed past her in the dark. The candles held by the two attendants, the sentries, were also out. Only one small flame glowed – the two-inch votive candle given to James Lyden, now lying on the mason’s bench. Jane ran and snatched it up, hid the flame behind her hand, and moved out into the transept, listening for the swish of the robes.
Lyden was going somewhere, being taken somewhere, escorted.
She heard him again – his voice this time. ‘
She could see him now – a black, mitred silhouette against the wan light from the huge diamond-paned gothic windows in the nave.
Moonlight. Shadows of people, unmoving. Jane heard anxious whispers and a baby’s cry mingling into a vast soup of echoes. Where was Mum? Where was Mum with the cross? Why wasn’t she rushing for the pulpit, because, Christ, if there was a time for an exorcism, a time for the soul police to make like an armed response unit, this was it.