Lol followed Merrily out to the grey Saab, its engine running. She was wearing a short, orange-coloured skirt and a crumpled white jacket and carrying a canvas shoulder bag under an arm. The exorcist.
He thought: They’ll do it. They’ll sacrifice her.
At the car, as though she’d simultaneously reached the same conclusion, Merrily turned to him, tried for a smile but failed. She shrugged instead.
Her image misted. Behind her, in the meadow sloping down to the Frome, the hay had been cut and turned and lay heavy, like acres of gold leaf, a heat haze hanging over it.
From behind the wheel of the Saab, the stately Sophie raised a hand in formal greeting, like the Queen or somebody. She wore a dark blue business suit and no smile. She revved the Saab like a getaway driver. Sophie would do her best for Merrily. Probably even the Bishop would do what he could. But in the end they’d both have to walk away.
Lol watched the Saab turn, crunching baked red earth, vanishing around the curve of the track. A cold electricity was branching through him as he walked rapidly away, down the footpath, across the hay meadow, to the river that seeped below the brambles, under the hedge and the fat, purple-spotted banks of willowherb.
The River Frome, flowing invisibly. Like the truth.
Just when it seemed entirely unimportant, the substance of the final verse of his river song seeped unbidden into his head.
What you did, Lol realized, was join another river.
Walking through Knight’s Frome, he saw nobody: no police, no press. He crossed the bridge, to the small, sunken church. The churchyard was wilderness, so overgrown around the perimeter that you couldn’t tell where the countryside began, several gravestones even poking out of bushes.
Lol stood in the porch and listened: no voices, no clatter. He went in, letting the iron latch fall behind him.
Sometimes they still oppressed him, churches, with their rigidity and weight, the ungivingness of them, their atmospheres dense with the residue of humourless old hymns. This one was almost frugally plain, the air inside ochre with sunlight and dust. Lol went and sat in a back pew, over in a corner. He couldn’t quite see the altar; that was OK.
He sat for a while in silence. The prayer-book shelf was thick with dust; in it, someone had finger-drawn two sets of initials and a heart.
Lol took off his glasses, wondering how often Merrily did this, how many times a day — how long it took to break the ice. His feeling was that it could be like meditation, that you’d have to connect with your deepest inner self, the part that flowed into some collective unconscious, rippling under the light of whatever it was you called God.
Rivers again.
‘Listen,’ he whispered, when the level seemed beyond his reach. ‘I mean, we don’t really know each other — at least, I don’t know you. But we’ve got one mutual interest, and I hope you’re not going to let her down.’
His eyes had half closed and all he could see was a dark yellow haze, with blobs of white where the windows were.
‘Because she’s not going to help herself, you know that. She’ll just keep on telling the truth as she sees it, and that might be the wrong kind of truth for certain people. And I realize we only learn by suffering, by screwing up, and maybe she did screw up… but her heart was in it, and what else can you ask? And if she goes, she won’t come back, and I don’t think that’s going to help anybody. I mean, how do you want to play this? You want a church run by politicians or by people who actually give a shit?’
He glanced over his shoulder towards the vestry, which Merrily had entered as a woman and emerged from as a priest. He leaned back and thought for a few minutes.
‘So, like… don’t you think some things need to start coming out? I mean, don’t know how far this goes back, but I think it probably pre-dates Stewart Ash. I think something bad happened there, apart from Stewart’s murder. And I think that Stewart, as a lingering presence… was an irrelevance, and I think Stock knew that. So what did Stock really want? Why did he want an exorcism? Why did he approach Simon and then go after Merrily?’
Talking to himself, now. He’d tried to puzzle it out last night and early this morning as he’d mopped and scrubbed the kitchen. But puzzling had produced nothing. He just didn’t know enough.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘This is bollocks, isn’t it?’
He stood up. Nothing resolved. No revelation. No inspirational feedback from his inner self.
When he put on his glasses, the white blobs hardened into pearly Gothic windows. He slid wearily out of the pew and across to the church door.
Daylight filled the crack around the door. When he put a hand up to the latch, he found it was already up. Which was odd, because he was sure he’d closed the door and heard the latch fall into place.
It was probably warped. He opened it and went out, and there she was in the porch, blocking his path with her wheelchair.
‘A religious man after all, then, is it, Lol?’
There were no unfamiliar cars in the palace yard; no one was waiting under the arch or at the top of the stairs.
Sophie unlocked the office door. ‘If he doesn’t show up now, I think I shall be very annoyed indeed.’
Inside, the phone was ringing. They heard the machine pick it up. ‘This is for Mrs Watkins. We’ve met before. Tania Beauman, formerly of the Livenight programme, now researching for the Witness series on Channel Four. I’d appreciate a call back. Thank you.’
Merrily drew a surprised breath. ‘She’s got a nerve after last winter’s fiasco.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Sophie said. ‘I can handle this. I didn’t tell you, but we’ve had a similar approach from Panorama at the BBC. They’re all thinking ahead to the court case. They make a background programme in advance, to be screened immediately the case is over and the shackles are off. The spiel is that they’re going to make the programme anyway, and if you don’t agree to appear, your views may not be fully represented.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘I said we’d discuss it when you returned from your holiday, adding — God forgive me — that I was sure we could trust the British Broadcasting Corporation to produce a balanced and accurate account, with or without your help.’
There were two other messages on the machine, one from the Bishop, nervously demanding an update, the other from Fred Potter, of the Three Counties News Agency.
‘Look, nobody can print anything now, so I won’t be on your back for a good while. I just wanted to say thanks for your help, and if there’s anything I can do to help you at all… because, you know, I’ve heard one or two things which don’t sound that promising from your point of view… so, if you think there’s anything I can maybe tell you… you know where I am, OK. Thanks. I’ll give you the number again, just in case…’
‘Little shark.’ Sophie lifted a finger to delete the message.
‘No, I’m going to ring him.’
‘You’re not!’
‘What have I got to lose? Besides, he was-’
‘Everything,’ Sophie snapped. ‘For a start, you’re supposed to be on holiday.’
But Merrily was already tapping in the Worcester number. The young woman who answered said Fred was on the phone, asked who was speaking.
‘It’s Mrs… Sharkey, from Hereford. I’ll hold.’
When Fred Potter came on the line, Merrily said quickly, ‘Just don’t say my name aloud, or I’ll have to hang up.’
‘Mrs Sharkey?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Well, thanks for calling back, Mrs Sharkey. Hold on a moment. Ah, Sinead, you don’t fancy getting me a tuna on rye from the sarny bar? Plus whatever rabbity morsels you allow yourself. Excellent, thank you. This enough? Cheers.’ Pause. ‘Right, Mrs Sharkey, we’re on our own. Bloody hell, that was a bit of a turn-up, wasn’t it?’
‘A turn-up. Yes, it was.’
‘You know about the video?’
‘Video?’
‘All right, I’ll be honest. I knew Stock had the place bugged and wired up for sound and pictures. He told me himself.’
‘Did he?’
‘He had one camera wedged into a shelf at the time, and of course it fell over while I was there, and it was dangling by the strap. He asked me if I’d mind keeping quiet about it. Said he was convinced he was going to get something mind-blowing on tape that would prove he wasn’t making it up. That’s why I said I believed he was on the level — I couldn’t tell you, I’d agreed to say nothing.’
‘That’s OK.’ Thanks a bunch.
‘Besides, I was thinking, if he does get something mind-boggling…’
‘Seems like he has,’ Merrily said.
‘You reckon he thought something might appear during the exorcism?’
‘You’re just trying to find out whether I did one or not.’
He laughed. ‘All right, forget it. Anything I can tell you, stuff you might not know? No notes, no recording, swear to God.’
‘What did you think of Mrs Stock, Fred?’
‘Good question. Er… well, the first thing I thought was, he’s landed on his feet there, hasn’t he just, jammy bugger?’
‘Meaning what’s a clapped-out old drunk doing with a charming young thing like that?’
‘I wouldn’t say say charming. Sexy. Not beautiful, but she’d got a certain… It’s funny, he was going on about what it had done to them, living in that place, making them withdrawn, nervous, all this… and she kept very quiet while I was there. But after it came out about the murder, when we’d got all we could in the village, I drove into Hereford and hung around outside the secretarial agency where Stephanie worked, back of Aubrey Street, and I had a word with a few of the girls when they came out. And I got just a completely different story.’
There was a tapping on the door. Merrily glanced up as Sophie let in a man who had to stoop in the doorway. She saw grey and white tufted hair, a face like a tired horse. David Shelbone?
‘In these situations,’ Fred Potter said, ‘you’re just after kind of, “We’re all absolutely shattered, she was a lovely person who remembered everybody’s birthday” — predictable stuff, because this is the victim and it usually helps if the victim’s a nice person. You normally find the workmates or the neighbours’ve already had the cops round and the initial excitement’s worn off a bit. But on this occasion, as it happened, I was in there first. These women didn’t know about it.’
Sophie offered the visitor a seat. Merrily put a hand over the phone, whispered, ‘Sorry, I’ll be one minute.’
‘So what I was getting was genuine, off-the-cuff reaction,’ Fred said. ‘The women looking at each other, shocked, naturally, gasps of horror, as you’d expect, then grilling me for information. But the quotes I was getting from them were not what I was looking for. In the end I put the notebook away because I was getting a load of stuff I couldn’t have used — asking more questions than it answered. And we weren’t going to get any answers, not now, with her dead and him-’
‘Questions?’
‘What I was getting was not a lot of genuine sorrow, to be honest. She’d worked for that agency four or five months. When she first arrived, she seemed very, very quiet. Very proper, very polite, butter wouldn’t melt. The kind, if she met a bloke on the stairs, she’d shrink into the wall to avoid him brushing against her.’
‘Stephanie Stock?’
‘And when she talked about her husband, it was like he was some sort of guru — her mentor, her guardian. Gerard this, Gerard that. “Oh, I don’t know, I’d better ask Gerard.” “No, I don’t think Gerard would approve.” This was when she talked at all.’
‘So what happened?’
‘She changed.’
‘Damn right she changed,’ Merrily said.
‘Not overnight; it was a continuing process. If I’d been writing it up for the tabs, I’d’ve had the girls saying something like, “Stephanie was very quiet at first and hard to get to know, but the job really brought her out of herself, and in her last few days she’d been full of life and getting on with everybody.” ’
‘Meaning?’
‘You’re clergy, Mrs Watkins. I can’t…’
‘Oh, sod off-’ Merrily looked up, uncomfortably, with a strained smile for Mr Shelbone.
‘All right,’ Fred Potter said. ‘There was a bloke upstairs, an accountant. Divorced. Sports car. There’s always one, isn’t there? The one no woman likes to meet on the stairs on a dark morning. The one where they always prefer to hold open the door for him, yes?’
‘I know.’
‘Again, this is one of those bits where the girls’re exchanging knowing glances, and frankly I don’t think any of them knows exactly what happened between Stephanie and this randy accountant. But someone saw her coming down from his office one lunchtime, and after that the man was very subdued.’
‘More than he bargained for?’
‘No, he was actually scared — that was the consensus. I don’t know if this was an exaggeration, but they said he was working from home the rest of the week. Like he was frightened.’
‘You serious?’
‘Yeah,’ Fred said. ‘Yeah, I am actually.’
‘These women — they didn’t like her.’
‘I think it’s fair to say they did not like poor Stephie. One of them started whispering that she was probably a bit mental, and who knows what her husband had to put up with, and then another one’s shouting, “Hey, this isn’t going to be in the papers, is it?” and of course that was it for me — everybody clams up. Well, no way was it going in the papers, even if he didn’t get charged last night — this is the victim; if you make a victim sound too much like a slag, the level of interest goes right down.’
‘Meaning the amount of space you get, the amount of money…’
‘Well… yeah.’
‘What about the haunting? Did she ever talk about that at work? I mean, she must have, after that spread in the People.’
‘Somebody apparently said something like, “How can you go on living there?” but she just laughed, and then the boss sent her off to this garage, Tanner’s, temping, so they never saw her again.’
‘What’s the name of the agency?’
‘The Joanna Stokes Bureau.’
Merrily made a note. ‘Thanks, Fred.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wanting to tell somebody. It’s like I’ve been carrying her around.’ A little laugh, part cynical, part embarrassed… part something else.
‘It’s different, isn’t it,’ Merrily said, ‘when a murder victim is somebody you knew, however slightly. Somebody you’d seen not long before it happened.’
‘Yes,’ Fred Potter said, ‘it’s different. Look, is it OK if I ring you again, if I… if you…?
‘Of course.’
She gave him her mobile number. She didn’t usually do that. It was that phrase carrying her around.