Annie Howe stood on the step, young and spruce and clean, fast-track fresh against the swirling murk.
‘Ah, you are there, Ms Watkins. I was driving over from Leominster, so I thought I’d call.’ Her ash-blonde head tilted, taking in the dressing-gown – and the blotches and the bags, no doubt. ‘You really aren’t well, are you?’
‘Not wonderful.’
‘Flu?’
‘No, it’s OK to come in,’ Merrily said. ‘You won’t catch anything.’
‘I seldom do. Is this nervous exhaustion, perhaps?’
‘That might be closer.’
Howe stepped into the kitchen, with a slight wrinkling of the nose. Her own kitchen would be hardwood and stainless-steel, cool as a morgue. She sat down at the table, confidently pushing the ashtray away.
‘Ms Watkins, it’s the Paul Sayer thing again.’
Merrily filled the kettle. ‘That seemed to have gone quiet?’
‘That’s because we’re still choosing not to make too much noise about it. I’m wondering if we ought to.’
‘You want me to discuss it in a sermon?’
Howe smiled thinly. ‘Perhaps a sarcasm amnesty?’
‘Sure. Sorry, go on.’
So what did she do about this? If Howe knew she was in the process of shedding the Deliverance role, this conversation would never reach the coffee stage. Difficult, since she was unable to square it with the Bishop until his return from London. OK, say nothing.
‘You heard from DS Bliss, I believe,’ Howe said.
‘He told me about the supplier of crows. Did you get any further?’
‘Unfortunately not. They appeared to have paid their money, taken their crow, and melted back into their own netherworld. But, as you agreed with Bliss, the fee suggests that the people involved in this are not the usual… how shall I say-?’
‘Toerags.’
‘Quite.’
‘So, let me get this right – have you actually said publicly that Sayer was murdered yet?’
Howe shook her head. ‘We’re staying with the phrase “suspicious circumstances”. The situation is, as you must realize, that we could doubtless get widespread national publicity if we told the press about Sayer’s hobby.’
‘Especially if you gave them the pictures.’
‘Of course. But apart from producing an unseemly double-page spread in the Daily Star, I can’t see that it would help. I’m no longer sure the people we want to talk to would ever read a tabloid. Yes, it’s possible, Sayer may simply be a wanker. We’ve found some videotapes under a floorboard which seem to show ritual activities, but we don’t know if these are events that Sayer was personally involved in or sado-pornographic tapes he acquired for his own gratification. They’re quite explicit.’
‘Not commercial films?’
‘Oh, no, the quality’s not good enough. Lots of camera shake and the picture itself is so poor it seems to have been recorded with either old or very cheap equipment – which suggests it’s not simulated.’
‘What kind of ritual activities?’
‘You can view them if you like.’
‘I’d rather you just told me.’
‘Well, one shows a man penetrating a woman on an altar. She’s wearing a blindfold and a gag, and it looks like rape. The man’s face is not hidden, but well covered by long hair and a beard. In the background are several people whose faces are even less distinguishable. What does that sound like to you?’
‘Any suggestion of location?’
‘Possibly a church. And then there’s the inevitable passinground-the-chalice sequence.’
‘Black Mass?’
‘Someone drinks from the chalice, and there’s residue on the mouth suggestive of blood. But, as I say, the quality is appalling.’
‘You see, on the one hand,’ Merrily said, ‘the Black Mass is the best-known of all satanic rituals, and probably the easiest to carry out if you’re just idiots with a warped idea of fun. You just do everything in reverse – say the Lord’s Prayer backwards, et cetera. And you pervert everything – urinate in the chalice or… use blood instead of wine. Blood is the aspect which could, on the other hand, mean serious business. Blood represents the lifeforce, and it’s seen as the most potent of all magical substances. If you want to make something happen, you use real blood.’
‘Of course, we have no way of knowing whether this is. It looks too thin for ketchup, but it could be soy sauce or something.’
‘I’m not being much help. Am I?’
‘It’s more a question of what help you might be in the future,’ Howe said. ‘We’ve failed to identify a single person who’s been involved in any… any activity with Sayer. Or, indeed, with serious satanic activity of any kind. That’s not including the self-publicists, of course.’
‘When did you ever see a serious, heavy-duty, educated Satanist stripped off in the News of the World?’
‘You mean – as with organized crime – the big operators are the outwardly respectable types you’d never suspect?’
‘I suppose that’s a good parallel.’
‘It’s also largely a myth,’ said Howe. ‘The Mr Bigs of this world are very rare, and we do know who they are. But I’m still interested. Do you personally believe there are high-powered practitioners with big houses and executive posts?’
‘How would I know? I’m only a village vicar. But if Sayer was just a wanker, perhaps he was playing out of his league.’
‘You mean, if he was regarded by some serious and outwardly respectable practitioner as a potential embarrassment…’
‘Or he was getting too ambitious. Or he angered some rival… group. I’m told there’s a lot of jealousy and infighting and power-struggling among certain occult sects.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘It was discussed during a course I was sent on. Is this what you wanted to hear?’
‘Go on.’
‘We were told that there are basically two classes of Satanist – what Huw, our tutor, calls the headbangers who are just in it for the experience or whatever psychic charge they can get; and the intellectuals. These are people who came out of Gnosticism and believe that knowledge is all, and so anything is valid if it leads to more knowledge.’
‘Including murder?’
‘Probably. Although they’d be as reluctant as the rest of us to break the law. Satanists, basically, are the people who hate Christianity. And they hate us because they see us as irrational. They despise us for our pomp and our smugness. All these great cathedrals costing millions of pounds a year to maintain, all the wasted psychic energy… to promote what they see as the idiot myth that you can get there by love.’
‘I see.’
‘Why do I get the feeling you also think it’s an idiot myth?’
‘Because I’m a police-person,’ Howe said. ‘Love is something we seldom encounter.’
When Howe had left, Merrily phoned Mrs Straker back four times, and never got an answer. Her own phone rang three times; she didn’t pick it up, but pressed 1471 each time. The calls were from Sophie, Uncle Ted and Sophie respectively.
She owed Sophie an explanation, but couldn’t face that now. And anyway, when Mick returned tomorrow, she’d have to talk to him – at length, no doubt. Before then, she wanted to have lost this… virus.
In the afternoon, she filled a plastic bottle with tapwater and took it across to the church and into the chancel, where she stood it before the altar. In the choir stalls, she meditated for almost an hour. Blue and gold. Lamplit path.
She went into the vestry and changed into the cassock and surplice she’d worn at St Cosmas and St Damien, since washed and replaced in the vestry wardrobe. She walked, head bowed, along the central aisle, back to the chancel, and stood before the altar.
‘Lord God Almighty, the Creator of Life, bless this water…’
Back in the vicarage, she went up to her bedroom and sprinkled holy water in all four corners. Then across the threshold and at the window, top and bottom.
She went down on her knees and prayed that the soul of our brother Denzil might be directed away from its suffering and its earthly obsessions and led into the Light.
Filtered through fog, the fading light lay like a dustsheet on the bedroom.
Jane felt uncomfortable on the school bus home. Increasingly so, as more and more students got off. The buses had arrived early at the school, on account of the fog which was getting worse; classes had been wound up twenty minutes ahead of time.
The bus was moving very slowly, in low gear. It must be like driving through frogspawn. Jane just hoped to God that Mum was feeling better – was not going to be really ill.
Ledwardine was near the end of the line. Dean Wall, legendary greaseball, knew that, so there was no need at all for him to dump his fat ass on the seat next to Jane. He was on his own tonight, his mate Danny Gittoes off sick, supposedly.
‘Just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss your stop in all this fog. Seein’ as how you en’t much used to buses these days.’
Very funny! Jane gathered her bag protectively on to her lap. ‘Don’t worry about me. I have a natural homing instinct.’
The bus was crawling now. She had no idea where the hell they were.
‘Only tryin’ t’be helpful, Watkins.’ Dean Wall shoved his fat thigh against hers, leaned back and stretched. The fat bastard clearly wasn’t going to move. ‘Goin’ out tonight?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Off with some bloke tonight, then, is she?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’
Wall’s big fat lips shambled into a loose smile.
‘Look, just sod off, OK?’ Jane said.
‘I wouldn’t worry, Watkins – you’ll still get yours. Er’s likely bisexual.’
‘Will you piss off?’
‘You don’t know nothin’, do you? You’re dead naive, you are.’
Jane gazed out of the window at dense nothing. ‘Stop trying to wind me up.’
‘I’m tryin’ to put you right, Jane. You wanner talk to Gittoes, you do. ’Cept he en’t capable of speech right now – still recoverin’, like. His ma’s thinkin’ of gettin’ him plastic surgery to take the smile off his face.’
‘I don’t want to know!’
‘I bet you do.’ Dean Wall leaned a little closer and Jane shrank against the streaming window. Dean lowered his voice. ‘’Er give Danny a blow job, back o’ the woodwork building.’
She spun and stared at him.
‘Listen, I en’t kiddin’, Jane.’ He threw up his hands like she was about to hit him. ‘Gittoes was pretty bloody gobsmacked himself, as it were.’
‘You totally disgusting slimeball.’
‘’Er needed a favour, see.’
‘I want you to sit somewhere else, all right?’ Jane said. ‘I’m going to count to five. If you haven’t gone by then, I’ll start screaming. Then I’ll tell the driver you put your hand up my skirt.’
‘Mrs Straker?’
‘Yes?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s Merrily Watkins again. I’ve tried several times to call back, but I suppose you had to go out.’
‘Who’d you say you were?’
‘Merrily – it’s Jane’s mum. She’s Rowenna’s friend. We spoke earlier.’
‘I think you’ve got the wrong number, dear.’
‘We spoke about an hour and a half ago. You said there was something I should know about Rowenna.’
You won’t find it funny. I’ll guarantee that.
‘You must be thinking of somebody else,’ Mrs Straker said. ‘I’ve never spoken to you before in my life.’
She couldn’t talk, Merrily decided. Someone had come into the house who shouldn’t hear this. Or someone she was afraid of.
‘Is there somebody with you? Has Rowenna come back? Is Jane with her? Could you just answer yes or no?’
‘Listen,’ Mrs Straker hissed, ‘I don’t know who you are, but if you pester me again I’ll call the police. That clear enough for you, dear? Now get off the fucking line.’
She lay awake that night for over an hour, a whole carillon of alarm bells ringing.
It was the first evening this week that she and Jane had eaten together. Afterwards, they made a log fire in the drawing room and watched TV, all very mellow and companionable. Later they put out the lamps and moved out of the draughts and close to the fire, sipped their tea and talked. And then she got around to telling Jane about Katherine Moon.
‘Dead?’
So she hadn’t known. It was hard to tell how Jane really felt about this; she seemed to have assumed Moon and Lol had been, at some stage, an item. When Merrily came to Moon’s use of the Iron Age knife – this kind of stuff never seemed to upset Jane particularly, as long as no animals were involved – the kid nodded solemnly.
‘Sure. The later Celtic period, coming up to the Dark Ages, that was like this really screwed-up time.’
‘It was?’ Merrily curling her legs on to the sofa.
‘Bad magic. The Druids were getting into blood sacrifices and stuff. If your family was rooted in all that, you’re quite likely to get reverberations. Plus, who knows what else happened on the site of that barn? I mean way back. It could be really poisoned, giving off all kinds of mind-warping vibrations. If you don’t know how to handle these things, it could go badly wrong for you.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ Merrily had said mildly. ‘Where did you learn all that, flower?’
‘Everybody knows that,’ Jane said inscrutably. She was sitting on a big cushion at the edge of the hearth. ‘So this Moon was bonkers all along?’
‘She had a history of psychiatric problems.’
Which led to a long and fairly sensible discussion about Lol and the kind of unsuitable women into whose ambience he seemed to have been drawn, beginning with his born-again Christian mother, then the problem over a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, when he himself was about nineteen but no more mature than the girl, and then some older woman who was into drugs, and later Alison Kinnersley who’d first drawn him to Herefordshire for entirely her own ends.
‘How’s he taken it?’ Jane set her mug down on the hearth and prodded at a log with the poker.
‘He thinks he should have known the way things were going, which is what people always say after a suicide. But in this case people were trying to help her. It’s very odd. It doesn’t add up.’
‘So, like, Lol… was he in love with her?’
‘I really don’t think so, flower.’
And at this point the phone had rung and she’d waited and dialled 1471, finding it had been Lol himself. She called him back from the scullery-office, still answering monosyllabically, because Jane was sometimes a stealthy mover. So she never did learn how he’d discovered the kid had become involved with something called the Pod, which met above a cafe in Hereford. It could be worse, however, Lol said: women only, nothing sexual. Self-development through meditation and spiritual exercises. Progressing – possibly – to journeys out of the body.
Oh, was that all?
When she went back to the drawing room, Jane had put on the stereo and it was playing one of the warmest, breathiest, Nick Drake-iest songs on the second and final Hazey Jane album. The one which went, Waking in the misty dawn and finding you there.
Merrily lay on the sofa and listened to the music, her thoughts tumbling like water on to rocks.
During the remainder of the evening, the phone rang twice. Merrily said the machine would get it, although she knew it was still unplugged.
The last caller, she’d discovered from the bedside phone, was Huw Owen. She fell asleep trying to make sense of him and Dobbs.
She lay there, half awake for quite a while, dimly aware of both palms itching, before the jagged cold ripped up her, from vagina to throat, and then she was throwing herself out of bed and rolling away into a corner, where the carpet was still damp from holy water, and she curled up dripping with sweat and terror and saw from the neon-red digits of the illuminated clock that the time was four a.m., the hour of his death in Hereford General.
Across the room, with a waft of cat’s faeces and gangrene, a shadow sat up in her bed.