‘And this is where…?’
‘You’re standing on it,’ Mr Stock said.
Although a despicable shiver had started somewhere below her knees, Merrily made a point of not moving.
‘The police, it seems, don’t operate a cleaning service,’ he said. ‘So we could hardly avoid knowing precisely where it was.’
They were standing, just the two of them, on stone flags in the circular kitchen at the base of the kiln-tower. The place had a churchy feel, because of its shape and its shadows. The light was compressed into three small windows, like square port-holes, above head height — above Merrily’s, anyway. And it was cold. Outside, July; in here, November — what was that about?
It’s about doing your job, isn’t it? It’s about not prejudging the issue on second-hand evidence.
She let the shiver run its course, let it sharpen her focus.
She’d driven over here with a head full of Amy Shelbone and Layla Riddock and Jane — everybody but Gerard Stock, whose problem had been devalued because he was allegedly a professional conman, a manipulator, a spin-doctor.
And then you walked out of a summer morning into this temple of perpetual gloom, and it came home to you, in hard tabloid flashes, that a man had actually been beaten to death, in cold blood, right here where you were standing, his face, his skull repeatedly crunched into these same stone flags.
Violent death would often have psychic repercussions; you knew that.
Then there was Gerard Stock himself — bombastic, bit of an operator, possible drink problem. This morning Gerard Stock was wearing a clean white shirt and cream-coloured slacks. His hair was slicked down and his beard trimmed. The impression you had was that Mr Stock had bathed this morning in the hope of washing away the weariness in his bones, changed into clothes that would make him feel crisp and fresh. But the weariness remained in his bleary eyes and the sag of his shoulders.
If this was an act, he was good.
‘There are… two different versions of the story.’ He was standing with his back to the cold Rayburn stove that sat on a concrete plinth, probably where the old furnace had once been. His voice was as arid as cinders. ‘The prosecution’s submission was that Stewart had been in bed upstairs — alone — when the boys broke in.’
‘Boys?’
‘Glen and Jerome Smith, nineteen and seventeen. Travellers. Members of their family had been helping Stewart with his research into the links between the gypsies and the Frome Valley hop farms. He’d bought the boys drinks in the Hop Devil, paid them also in cash for their “research assistance” — mainly a question of finding Romanies who were willing to talk to him. But, according to the prosecution, the Smiths got greedy, and they came to believe he had a fair bit of money on the premises.’
Merrily looked around. No indications of wealth and no obvious hiding places in a circular room that didn’t seem to have altered much from its days as the lower chamber of a hopkiln. Its walls were of old, bare brick, hung with shadowy implements, non-culinary.
Romantic, maybe, but not an easy place to live.
‘In their defence,’ Mr Stock said, ‘the Smith brothers told a different story which, to me, has more than a ring of truth. It certainly didn’t do their reputation any favours. Basically, they admitted visiting poor old Stewart on a number of occasions at night to… administer to his needs.’
‘You mean sexual,’ Merrily said. ‘For money.’
Next to her was a dark wood rectangular table top on a crossed frame which looked as if it had once been something else. A large-format book called The Hop Grower’s Year lay face down on it. On the back of the book was a photograph of the author — small features under grey-white hair so dense it was like a turban. The photo was one of those old-fashioned studio portraits with a pastel backcloth like the sky of another world, and the face brought home to her the reality — and the unreality — of why she was here. For this was him: the kiln-house ghost.
Her first task: to determine whether it was reasonable to believe that some wisp, some essence of this person was still here. Madness. Even half the clergy thought it was madness.
‘… Agreed they’d accepted money several times,’ Gerard Stock was saying, ‘for research and for giving him… hand relief, as it was described to the court. All rather sordid, but gypsies aren’t squeamish about sex. As Stewart pointed out in his book, their society might be closed to the outside world, but it’s very open and liberal when you’re on the inside. Gypsy kids tend to get their first carnal knowledge at the hands of siblings, if not parents. Prudish, they’re not, which is healthy in a way, I suppose — you won’t find many Romanies in need of counselling.’
He inspected Merrily, as if checking how prudish she might be. No way could she align this Stock with the slick PR man described by Fred Potter, the reporter, and hinted at by Simon St John. He was just someone trying to rationalize the irrational, more scared by it than he’d ever imagined he could be. He’d told her frankly that Stewart Ash and he had never got on — Ash always blaming him for leading his niece into a world of ducking, diving and periodic penury.
People will talk to you, as a human being, the Bishop had said, meaning she came over as small and harmless — no black bag.
‘Look… if you want to sit down over there…’ Mr Stock indicated a chair pulled out from the table. ‘I’m afraid Stewart really was found lying with his head almost exactly where your feet are.’
‘I’m OK. Go on.’
‘Well, he was wearing pyjamas. There was a lot of blood. His face was almost unrecognizable. We’ve scrubbed and scrubbed at the flag, but when the sun’s in the right position you can still see the stains distinctly.’
Merrily made a point of not looking down, inspecting the upper part of the room instead. She’d been in hop-kilns before, and couldn’t help noticing how basic this restoration had been — rough boarding fitted where once thin laths would have been spaced out across the rafters, supporting a cloth to hold the hops for drying over the furnace.
‘The Smiths always fiercely denied killing him, insisting, at first, to the police that someone must have followed them in and done it after they’d left.’
‘Any evidence of that?’
‘Of sexual activity? Apparently not. When there was nothing in the forensic evidence, nothing from the post-mortem, to suggest Stewart had recently had sex, they panicked and one of them changed his story — claiming they’d come here to do the business and found him already dead.’
‘That couldn’t have helped them,’ Merrily said.
‘Finished them completely, far as the jury was concerned. Found guilty, sent down for life. They’ve appealed now — every one appeals. Couple of civil-liberties groups assisting. Probably won’t succeed, but I imagine one or two people in the area are getting a touch jittery about it. We certainly are.’ He laughed nervously. ‘If they didn’t do it, who did? It’s one thing to live in a place where a murder was committed; something else to live with the possibility that the murderer’s still out there.’
‘You think that’s a real possibility?’
‘Oh yes.’
He walked over to the wall, pulled down a wooden pole with a slender sickle on one end. Unexpectedly, the crescent blade flashed in the shaft of sunlight from the middle window. Merrily stayed very still as he hefted it from hand to hand.
‘They used these things for cutting down bines. I sharpened it. I thought, they’re not going to get me like they got Stewart. Ridiculous.’ He shuddered, replaced the tool. ‘I just don’t trust the countryside.’
So why hadn’t the Stocks sold the place and got out?
‘I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to get to you?’
‘I-’ He looked at her, as if he was about to say something, then he hung his head. ‘I don’t really know. I just don’t feel safe here. Never have. Lie awake sometimes, listening for noises. Hearing them, too. The country is-’
‘What sort of noises?’
‘Oh — creaks, knocking. Birds and bats and squirrels.’ He shrugged uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know. Nothing alarming, I suppose. Except for the footsteps. I do know what a footstep sounds like.’
‘You’ve actually heard footsteps?’
‘Not loud crashing footsteps echoing all over the place, like in the movies. These are little creeping steps. Always come when you’re half asleep. It’s like they’re walking into your head. You think you’ve heard them, though you’re never sure. But in the middle of the night, thinking is… quite enough, really.’
It wasn’t quite enough for Merrily. ‘What about the furniture being moved?’
He looked up sharply. ‘Oh, we didn’t hear that happen. We had the table over the bloodstained flag — to cover it, keep it out of sight. We’d come down in the morning and find it was back where… where it is now. This happened twice. But we never heard anything.’
‘And you talked about a figure? You said in the paper you’d seen a figure coming out-’
‘Yeah.’ He walked over to the part of the wall opposite the door. ‘Coming out… just here. I said “a figure” because you’ve got to make it simple for these crass hacks — my working life’s been about avoiding big words. But actually it was simply a… a lightform. Do you know what I mean?’
‘A moving light?’
‘A luminescence. Something that isn’t actually shining but is lighter than the wall. And roughly the shape of a person. We’d finished supper… a very late supper; it was our wedding anniversary. And sudenly the room went cold — now that happened, that’s one cliche that did happen. It’s a funny sort of cold, you can’t confuse it with the normal… goes right into your spine… do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes, I do.’ This was, on the whole, convincing. When you thought of all the embellishments he might have added — the familiar smell of Stewart’s aftershave, that kind of stuff…
Merrily shivered again, glad she’d put a jacket on — to hide the Radiohead T-shirt, actually. She’d left the vicarage in a hurry — no breakfast, just a half-glass of water — throwing her vestment bag into the boot. Usually, she’d spend an hour or so in the church before a Deliverance job, but there’d been no time for that either.
‘Mind you, it’s so often like a morgue in here.’ Gerard Stock folded his arms. ‘And dark in itself creates a sense of cold, doesn’t it? The living room through there’s no better. That was formerly the part where the dried hops were bagged up, put into sacks.’
‘Hop-pockets,’ Merrily said.
‘Oh, you know about hops?’
‘A bit.’
‘Stewart had absolutely steeped himself in the mythology of hops — not that there’s much of one. He got quite obsessed over something that-I mean, it’s just an ingredient in beer, isn’t it? A not very interesting plant that you have to prop up on poles.’
‘There was a hop-yard at the back here?’
‘Was. The wilt got it.’
‘Is that still happening?’
‘I believe there are new varieties of hop, so far resistant to it. But it happened here.’
‘You said you saw lights out in the hop-yard.’
‘My wife. My wife saw them. I never have. That was the first thing that happened. It was soon after we moved in. Winter. Just after dusk. We’d brought in some logs for the stove, and she was standing in the doorway looking down the hill towards the hop-yard and she said she saw this light. A moving light. Not like a torch — more of a glow than a beam. Hovering and moving up and down among the hop-frames — appearing in one place and then another, faster than a human being could move. She wasn’t scared, though. She said it was rather beautiful.’
‘Just that once?’
‘No. I suppose not. After a while we didn’t-This might sound unlikely to you, but we stopped even mentioning those lights. When far worse things were happening in the house itself, I suppose unexplained lights in the old hop-yard seemed comparatively unimportant.’
‘Hops,’ Merrily said. ‘When you say Stewart was obsessed by hops, you mean from an historical point of view, or what?’
‘Well, that too, obviously. But also hops themselves. I wouldn’t claim to understand what he saw in them. To me, they’re messy, flakey things, not even particularly attractive to look at. But when we first took possession of the house, the walls and the ceiling were a mass of them: all these dusty, crumbling hop-bines — twelve, fifteen feet long — and the whole place stank of hops. I mean, I like a glass or two of beer as much as anyone, but the constant smell of hops… no, thank you. And when you opened a door, they’d all start rustling. It was like-’ He shook his head roughly.
‘Go on.’
‘Like a lot of people whispering, I suppose. Anyway, we cleared out the bines. It felt as though they were keeping even more light out of the place. Some of them were straggling over the windows. The windows in the living room back there once looked out down the valley. Apparently.’
Through the central window in here she could see blue sky. Through the other two, blue paint. It probably hadn’t even been this dark when it was a functioning kiln with a brick furnace in the centre.
‘The barns,’ she said.
He nodded.
‘That’s awful,’ Merrily agreed, ‘but I’m afraid it’s not-’
‘Your problem. No.’
‘Have you talked to a solicitor?’
‘I’ve talked to a lot of people,’ Mr Stock said.
‘Erm — that aroma of hops.’ Merrily breathed in slowly, through her nose. ‘I almost expected you to say you’d been smelling it again.’
She thought his eyes flickered, but it was too dim to be sure. He shook his head. ‘No, nothing like that.’
‘So… what about your wife?’
He was silent. His face seemed to have stiffened.
‘I mean, how badly has she been affected? She saw the… lightform?’
‘My wife…’ He turned away, shoulders hunched. ‘Won’t talk much about it. When the hacks were here, we had to virtually manufacture some suitable quotes for her. Maybe she thinks it’ll all just go away.’
‘You mean she’s not so scared…?’
‘As me? Probably not. Obviously, neither of us likes the darkness — it’s the kind of darkness you have to fight. And you lose. In here, a two-hundred-watt bulb’s like a forty. Bills’ve been horrendous. But Stephie — perhaps she just doesn’t believe Stewart would harm her. Also, more of a religious background than me. Catholic, lapsed. But it doesn’t go away. Not like…’
Merrily smiled.
‘I’m sorry, didn’t mean to be insulting. I was raised in the C of E.’
‘All I meant about your wife,’ Merrily said, ‘is that I think she should be here too, when we do whatever we do. As a blood relative of Mr Ash.’
‘Well, she will be… She’ll be here tonight.’
‘Mr Stock,’ Merrily said, ‘if I could just make a point here. Unless you really think that for some reason it’s important for this to be done at night, I don’t necessarily think that’s a good idea. I think it might be better for all of us’ — better for the Bishop, too — ‘if we said some initial prayers, perhaps a small requiem service for Mr Ash. Without delay.’
‘Now?’ He didn’t quite back away.
‘By daylight, anyway. Personally, I always think there’s an inherent danger in making this all too-’
‘Serious?’ Almost snapping.
‘Sinister. I’ll probably need the book, but we can dispense with the bell and the candle.’
She could almost see his thoughts racing, something almost feverish in his eyes. Did he have plans to involve the media? Had something already been arranged for tonight?
He unfolded his arms. ‘All right. I can call Stephie at work. Maybe she can take time off. How long will the exorcism take?’
‘That might be too big a word for what we do. Not very long, I shouldn’t think. Best to keep things simple. Oh — and I’d also want to ask the vicar if he’d like to join us. Two ministers are better than one in this kind of situation and it’s usual to involve the local guy when possible.’
‘St John?’ Hint of a sneer. ‘He won’t want to know, tell you that now.’
‘I’d like to ask him, anyway, if that’s all right with you.’
He shrugged. ‘Your show.’
‘Yours, actually. And your wife’s. And it would actually be helpful to have a few other people who knew your wife’s uncle. Is there anyone you think-?’
‘Oh no!’ Both hands went up. ‘Definitely not! I don’t want local people in here, I’m sorry. We don’t exactly have any close friends in the area. I’d rather this wasn’t talked about.’
‘But you went to the press.’
‘I was desperate. I’ve told you, I felt threatened. I didn’t know who I could trust, especially after the vicar refused to help us. Bottom line is I don’t want any of those people in here. All right?’
‘OK. Erm, another point — at a service of this kind, we need to draw a line under the past. A big element is forgiveness. I think that means we’re looking for some kind of reconciliation between you and Stewart, which of course has to be initiated by you.’
He laughed. ‘I’d guess that for Stewart one of the best things about death would be never having to see Gerard Stock again. But… you know best.’
‘Well, I don’t really know anything for sure,’ Merrily said. ‘We’re assuming Mr Ash is what you might call an unquiet spirit.’ Huw Owen would call it an insomniac. ‘Our fundamental purpose has to be to guide him away from whatever’s holding him down here towards a state of-’
‘Look!’ He put his hands on his hips, faced her. ‘Is this going to, you know, tell us anything?’
‘I’m not a medium, Mr Stock.’
‘What if Stewart’s… spirit, whatever you want to call it, is unable to rest because it wants to get a message across? Like, for instance, that his killer’s still out there.’
‘Ah.’ Merrily looked down at the flags. Around her shoes she could now make out the outline of what might have been a stain. Hidden agenda coming out at last? ‘Who’s the killer, then, in your view?’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ he said.
‘Because you don’t know. Or maybe you’ve got ideas?’
‘I’ve got ideas. However, I might be open to legal action were I to share them with you, Mrs Watkins.’
‘OK. What’s the actual time now? I’m afraid I came out without my watch.’
He held his wrist up to the light. ‘Just after ten minutes to ten.’
God, was that all? She needed breathing space, prayer space.
‘Look, I’ll call her now,’ he said. Something seemed to have lifted inside him. ‘Daytime. Yes. I should’ve thought of that. Daytime’s much better.’
‘And meanwhile I’ll go down to the church, talk to the vicar and change. See you back here in… an hour, or less?’
‘Yes. Fine. Thank you.’
They went back through the living room, the former hop-store, where any extra light not blocked off by the barns was absorbed by drab leathery furniture — Stewart’s, probably. By the back door, Merrily turned, looked up at Stock.
‘Could I just ask you — what do want this to achieve? I mean you personally?’
He wasn’t ready for this one, didn’t meet her eyes. Instead, he went to open the door for her, and the day came in like a golden cavalry of angels.
‘I want things to be normal,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
She drove up to the minor road leading to Knight’s Frome and was almost through the village before she realized that it was the village. The church was out on the edge, the other side of the river; the white house nearby could only be the vicarage. No car outside.
She pulled on to the verge, about fifty yards away from the church, took off her jacket, threw it over the passenger seat, lit a cigarette and checked her mobile for messages.
Just the one. ‘Merrily. Sophie. I’m afraid I can’t raise the vicar, but Bernard says go ahead without him. He’ll clear up any political debris. Which I suppose means I shall.’
Right, then. Merrily switched off the phone and put out her cigarette. As she was climbing out of the Volvo, she saw, through the wing mirror, a rusting white Astra pulling in about twenty yards behind.
It was already hot, and not yet ten-fifteen. A single cloud powdered the sky over the church, which was low and comfortably sunken, with a part-timbered bell tower. Pigeons clattered in what had once been a hedge surrounding the vicarage.
From the car boot, Merrily pulled her vestment bag and a blue-and-gold airline case containing two flasks of holy water. She’d knock on the vicarage door, on the off chance someone was home. If not, she’d change in the church, always assuming it was open. Slinging the bags over her shoulder, she bent to lock the car. As she pulled out the key, there were footsteps behind her, a quiet padding on the grass. She turned quickly, wishing she hadn’t locked the car.
She froze.
The mirage was wearing a black T-shirt, jeans and those same round, brass-rimmed glasses. She was aware of the bird-song and the laboured chunter of a distant tractor as they stood and stared at one another for two long seconds.
He shuffled a little, nodded at the Radiohead motif on her chest. ‘So, er… what did you think of Kid A?’
‘Erm…’ Stunned, she put down the vestment bag, adjusted the plastic strap of the airline case. She swallowed. ‘Well… you know… it kind of grew on me. Parts of it.’
‘Uh huh.’ He nodded. Then he said rapidly, ‘Merrily, I’m sorry to, you know, spring out at you like this. I did come round to the vicarage quite early this morning, but-’
‘That — that was you knocking?’
‘But there was no answer, so I went to buy a Mars Bar and a paper at the shop, and then I ran into Gomer Parry and we talked for a few minutes and then… when I got back your car had gone.’
‘I… overslept.’ Merrily saw flecks of grey in his hair. It was shorter now; the ponytail hadn’t come back. She bit down on her smile, shaking her head. ‘You really choose your times, Lol.’
‘Because you’re working.’
‘Yeah. I mean, could we…? I mean…’
‘Gerard Stock, right?’
She felt the smile die completely.
‘As… as you know,’ Lol said hesitantly, ‘I’m about the last person to try and tell you anything about your job. But… don’t do this.’
‘What?’
‘Put him off — could you do that? Stall him? Please?’
‘I… No. No, I can’t do that.’
‘Then at least come and talk to the vicar,’ Lol said.