‘I don’t… I don’t know.’
‘I mean, does she ever think he wants to communicate with her?’
Mumford shook his head. ‘Don’t know.’
‘Does it frighten her at all?’
‘Frighten her?’ The corner of Mumford’s mouth twitched. ‘Robbie?’
‘Right.’
‘I see what you’re getting at, Merrily,’ Nigel Saltash said. ‘There’s clearly a contributory element of perceived guilt here — whether or not that guilt is misplaced. And also’ — he leaned across the table, holding his hands like bookends — ‘a desperate need to know exactly what happened.’
‘Does she know you were coming here, Andy?’ Merrily said.
‘I…’ Mumford shook his head. ‘She don’t like a fuss. Like she was very embarrassed at the size of turnout for the funeral — people from the castle, councillors, the Press. Like they were sitting in judgement, she thought. But all it was… it’s still a small town, see. They take something like this to heart. Bishop insisted on conducting the funeral hisself—’
‘David Cook?’
The Suffragan Bishop of Ludlow. Number two in the Hereford diocese. Bernie Dunmore, now Bishop of Hereford, had previously held the post. But surely David Cook…
‘—Even though it was only about a week before he went in for his heart bypass,’ Mumford said. ‘Not a well man, and he looked it.’
Mumford didn’t look a well man, either. His hair was grey and lank, his eyes baggy and wary, small veins wriggling in his cheeks. He had to be about twenty years younger than Nigel Saltash, but he seemed older. Just a civilian now — no longer Detective Sergeant, while Saltash was still Dr Saltash.
‘Look, I…’ Mumford came to his feet. ‘Might well be like you say, Mrs Watkins, imagination playing tricks.’
‘Well, that wasn’t necessarily what I—’
‘Old girl’s had a shock. She don’t want no fuss, neither do I. I just thought, as I knew you… You’ve cleared things up a bit. That’s fine. And the doc here…’
‘Glad to help an old mate, Andrew.’ Nigel Saltash sitting back, with his arms folded. Like when the driving- test examiner had told you to park and sat there making notes on his clipboard.
Merrily said on impulse, ‘I think I should probably talk to her.’ She saw Saltash raising an eyebrow. ‘So, if you want to ask her, Andy…’
‘You think you could, ah, get rid of it, Merrily?’ Saltash’s smile expressing professional curiosity.
‘Wrong terminology, Nigel.’
‘Ah, sorry. Help it on its way?’
‘Even that might be counter-productive.’
‘So you have this general policy of non-intervention, unless there’s a clear threat to the patient’s mental health.’
Patient. God.
‘Something like that,’ Merrily said.
She hated this. She hated it when lofty consultants exchanged viewpoints at the foot of the bed, like the third party was already brain-dead.
‘I have a lot to learn, don’t I?’ Saltash said. ‘On which basis, if you go to see this lady, might I perhaps tag along?’
She could see Mumford was uncomfortable about this. Saltash evidently picked up on it, too, smiling down at him.
‘Andrew, old boy… I’m retired, OK, like you? This is observation only.’ He was doing this windscreen-wiper gesture with both hands. ‘No reports, no referrals.’
‘I’ll talk to her about it.’ Mumford seemed less than reassured, which was quite understandable.
‘I’ll call you, Andy,’ Merrily said.
Coming up to midnight, she was lying full-length on the sofa at Lucy’s old house, with Lol sitting at one end, her head in his lap. Low music was seeping from a boombox beside the glowing hearth.
‘I suppose I’m going to have to do something,’ Merrily said, ‘before it all falls apart on me.’
The sofa, delivered that day, was the only furniture in the parlour. It was orange, like the too-dark ceiling — never trust Jane in Linda Barker mode.
‘Psychiatrists,’ Lol said.
The weight of his own experience turned the word into some kind of lead sarcophagus full of decomposing remains.
‘I think I want to kill him,’ Merrily said.
The sofa smelled of newness and showrooms, but the scent from the fire in the inglenook was of applewood, the kindest, mellowest aroma in the countryside.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘You know…’
Oh, he knew… She was thinking of ‘Heavy Medication Day’, the only angry song on the new album. It was about his experiences on a psychiatric ward with a doctor who… over-medicated. Someone has to pay, now Dr Gascoigne’s on his way. A lot of residual bitterness there.
Last year, before they were a unit, he’d enrolled on a training course for psychotherapists, with the feeling that he could maybe, in some way, alter things from the inside. Discovering fairly soon that mere psychotherapists weren’t anywhere near the inside and, like all therapists and crisis-counsellors, they were ten-a-penny nowadays. And so Lol had walked away from it, back into music.
He slid a hand under her hair. ‘How necessary are they?’
‘Shrinks?’
‘I mean in Deliverance.’
Merrily thought about it. ‘You could probably say they’re only actually essential when you’re dealing with someone who thinks he or she is possessed by something… external. A psychiatrist would be able to detect symptoms of, say, schizophrenia.’
‘Symptoms of schizophrenia don’t necessarily prove the person actually is schizo,’ Lol said.
‘No, but it’s something that needs to be eliminated.’
‘How often have you had a case of demonic possession, then?’
‘Never. As you know. Never had a case where it was down to schizophrenia, either.’
‘So the idea of having a psychiatrist as a permanent part of your Deliverance group…’
‘Could be overkill,’ Merrily said. ‘If you consider that most of what we’re dealing with are what you might call non-invasive psychic phenomena… then if you have your resident psychiatrist insisting that it’s always down to delusion, hallucination, comfort chemicals in the brain, et cetera…’
‘… Then what’s the point of people like you?’
‘Listen to us, we’re finishing one another’s sentences,’ Merrily said. ‘How cosy is that? What’s this music?’
‘Elbow.
‘It’s lovely.’
‘It’s bloody terrifying. I don’t know why I bother.’
‘Never mind, they were probably influenced by you.’
‘You vicars can be so patronizing.’
Merrily looked around in the firelight, among the paint cloths and the ladders, for a clock. Jane was out with Eirion, as usual on a Friday night. By agreement, she was always home by one.
There wasn’t a clock anywhere yet. She guessed she’d been here about an hour and a half.
‘So, anyway, I called Andy before I came out,’ she said. ‘I’m going over tomorrow to see his mother. Not being much help around here, am I?’
‘You’re crap at painting anyway. You told the shrink you’re going?’
‘I really don’t know what to do. I mean, this is routine pastoral stuff. I wouldn’t be going if it wasn’t Andy Mumford — I’d refer it to local clergy. It doesn’t need a psychiatrist, so why set a precedent? You’re right, it’s overkill. All this belt-and-braces stuff, the Church covering its back, never sticking its neck out…’
