There was a screen behind the altar in the Barnchurch. Not a rood screen but the sort of concertina thing women used to toss their robes over in Victorian bathrooms.
The grey-white figure was hanging from this screen like a giant moth.
Jane stayed back. The face was chipped and grotesque: the face of a black, dress-shop dummy, greasy white rings smeared around the eyes.
‘People touch her clothes, usually,’ Layla Riddock said, weaving in the candlelight, ‘for healing.’
Jane recalled Kirsty: Gypsies got their own virgin — like a patron saint or a goddess — the Black Virgin.
‘Sara,’ Layla Riddock said carelessly. ‘Yes, she helps. Amy’s had so much starchy religion pumped into her that we have to bring her down slowly. Sara’s the Black Virgin, and you can view that two ways, can’t you? A saint or an inversion — or a semi-Christian mother goddess. All ways, she helps. Amy’s finding her true mother. And, through that, her true self.’
‘Where is Amy?’ Eirion said.
‘Haven’t you taught him any other words yet, Jane?’ Layla tossed her hair. Jane was realizing for the first time how scarily intelligent she was. ‘Watch my lips. I — don’t — know. Perhaps she went home. Perhaps she’s walking the streets. Perhaps she let a rapist in.’
‘Don’t,’ Jane shouted, ‘talk like that.’
… alk like at… The walls sent back the echo. This was a big, empty place, bigger than the average parish church. Layla seemed very much at home here.
‘Your mother came to see Allan,’ she said. ‘And me.’
‘What?’
‘Yesterday. She was with another woman, from the Cathedral, looking for Amy. Didn’t you know?’
‘No.’
‘That’s funny, because it sounded like someone had told her all about the Steve’s Shed Experience.’
‘So?’ Jane had backed up against something low and hard, an old manger.
‘Well, that wasn’t a very nice thing to do, grass up your mates, was it? And it caused a nasty little row between me and Allan, making it difficult to get away tonight. I arranged to meet Amy here, but I’m late, and now she’s pissed off. Anything could’ve happened to her. All because you had to blab.’
‘What do you expect me to do? My mum was in a hassle with the Bishop, because Amy had laid it all on me. Because she was scared to put you in the frame. What was I supposed to do?’
Layla shook her head in disgust. The ring in her navel shone like the edge of a coin. Jane was bewildered and furious with herself. How could she have let all this get turned around?
‘Anyway,’ she found herself saying petulantly, ‘it was you who set her up.’
‘This is Kirsty again, yeah?’
‘It’s the truth, though, isn’t it? You hated that family ever since her old man got your fortune-telling act pulled at the Christmas Fair.’
Layla smiled. ‘Oh, Jane, one forgets, you’re so young…’
Jane gritted her teeth. ‘Caution, cariad,’ Eirion whispered.
‘I’d go to all this trouble for that?’ Layla exploded. ‘For fuck’s sake, what am I?’
‘You predicted all kinds of bad stuff. You sent old women home thinking they were going to die-’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, I was pissed! I’d spent a couple of hours in the pub with some guys, then I go back to the school, put on the clobber, and I just couldn’t bear to do all that you-will-come-into-money-and-go-over-the-water shit. So I just let it come through.’
Jane stared at Layla in her black top and her black jeans standing next to the Black Virgin in her white robes and white headdress.
‘I can do this stuff. The dukkering. It’s a mixture of insight and scam. You do the patter, and sometimes the real stuff comes through. But you’re also observing, judging what kind of a punter you’ve got and tailoring your predictions accordingly. But I was pissed, like I say. I mean, you wouldn’t believe some of the people you get in there. There was this old woman, well dressed, dripping with jewellery, all she wanted to know was whether her friend, who was in the hospice, was going to leave all her money to her. You think, that age and all she cares about is more money? I said, yeah, you’ll get the money but you’d better spend it quick ’cause you ain’t got long yourself, dearie.’
Silence. Jane looked at Eirion. There was a little smile twitching at his mouth.
Layla chuckled in her throaty way. ‘The one I was a little sorry about afterwards — but, yeah, I said it, sure I said it — was Libby Walker who used to do school dinners part-time. You know Libby? She’s about thirty and she’s got about five kids, all by different dads, and everybody knows she just does it for a council house and the family allowance, that’s how thick and irresponsible she is. And as soon as she came in the booth I could see she’d got another one in the oven, and I just lost patience and told her in this sinister voice that I could see “a withering” in her womb. Course, the stupid bitch went bloody spare.’
Eirion made a little noise horribly suggestive of amusement, which made Jane blurt out, ‘You cursed Mrs Etchinson!’
‘Yeah.’ Layla sighed and fingered the hem of the robe of the Black Virgin.
‘Yeah, I did that. I cursed Mrs Etchinson, and Mrs Etchinson had got MS and we didn’t know it, and that was why she was so bloody ratty all the time. I’m sorry. What is this, the Salem witch trials?’
‘Layla,’ Eirion said, the Welsh coming out in his voice, ‘can we come back to the Shelbone issue? Whatever you think about Mr and Mrs Shelbone, their dear little daughter has vanished and they’re worried sick. And they’ve been treated pretty abominably at your stepfather’s house — we saw this. First they had their car smashed in by a man with an aggression problem who calls himself a gardener, then your stepfather blatantly lied about it-’
‘Oh, Allan’s just a little boy,’ Layla said. ‘Turns peevish if he doesn’t get his own way. Forget all that. He’ll get Douglas Hutton, his lawyer, to fix it — money will change hands, faces will be saved. Allan’s not a bad guy, he’s just a crook, which everybody knows anyway. He needs a gardener on account of so many people want to punch his lights out.’
‘Hmm,’ Eirion said.
Jane wondered if Dafydd Sion Lewis had a gardener, too.
‘Look,’ Layla said. ‘Shelbone’s bonkers, and he’s the bane of Allan’s life. He’s this kind of loose cannon. Puts the blocks on lucrative development.’
‘That’s necessarily bonkers?’ Jane said.
‘From Allan’s point of view, yes,’ Layla said patiently. ‘The situation was that Allan had been after some dirt on Shelbone for years. Unfortunately, although he’s out to lunch, he’s cleaner than the Pope. But some councillor knew about Amy’s origins, and Allan told me, and I admit I got so utterly tired of his constant ravings and his threats to have Shelbone’s brakes seen to, that I thought maybe if Shelbone was already cracking up, like everybody said — maybe we could destabilize his life enough to push him into early retirement or something. No real harm done.’
‘So you admit it,’ Jane said.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I admit it, big deal. I am a bad, bad person. But, then, my old man was a gypsy who conned his way into my ma’s pants and pinched her car and stuff, so it’s in my genes. It’s a hard and ugly world, Jane. Also, Amy was such a pompous little sod that for quite a while it was very much a pleasure, I have to admit. And I had Kirsty, who’s this delightfully amoral creature with no sense of moderation — it was all too funny. But then…’
Layla went to sit on the altar between the candles. She looked cool and exotic. She didn’t look at all worried, about Amy or anything else. Jane supposed that growing up in Allan Henry’s household kind of emulsioned over your conscience.
But the really disturbing thing about all this was that the Layla with the cut-off jumper and the navel-ring didn’t really seem such a vicious, evil person. And this weird, echoey half-church, with the grotesque Black Virgin overseeing the proceedings wasn’t the best environment for working out whether this was simply because she could be witchily enchanting and insidiously plausible, or-
‘The word is, you’re quite interested in matters of the spirit yourself, Jane. And I don’t mean Church.’
‘Er, yeah — kind of…’
‘Which, of course, was why I let you into Stevie’s shed. Thinking you could be relied on. Thinking the last person you were going to tell was your old lady.’
‘I couldn’t know, could I, that she was going to get called in by the Shelbones, thinking their little girl’s possessed or something?’
‘Yeah.’ Layla tucked her legs under the altar. ‘That’s what they would think. Me, I just thought she was a pain. I don’t think any of us could’ve known.’
‘Known what?’ Eirion asked.
Layla glanced at him. ‘He OK with this stuff, Jane?’
‘He’s been around me for months.’
Layla smiled. ‘What none of us could’ve known was that Amy Shelbone is the most-it blew me away.’
‘What did?’
‘She’s a natural. That kid is the most amazing natural psychic I ever encountered.’
‘Huh?’
‘When we did the ouija — and I know how to do this, right? I know how to move the glass and you would never know I’m doing it. Which was what I did. I started it off — and it was like the bloody Internet. I punch in Justine and boom — like a search-engine: “We have forty-six listings for Justine.” You know what I’m saying? All this stuff comes pouring through, and I didn’t have to do a thing, the glass is moving like a bloody piston. Kirsty couldn’t write fast enough. She tell you this?’
‘Not the way you’re telling it,’ Jane admitted.
‘Ah, she’s in denial, is Kirsty. It was just a scam to Kirsty. Beyond that she wasn’t interested. All the time, she wanted to think it was me swinging the glass. I wanted to think it was me. For a couple of weeks, I did think it was me — me as a psychic. I got a little cocky. Then I did it with somebody else.’
‘The ouija?’
‘Got squat.’ Layla looked down at her feet. ‘Sod-all. Embarrassing. This was at the end of term. Next day, I called Amy, picked her up when the Shelbones were out, and we came here.’ She looked up. ‘Jane, what a blast! We get into Justine, I ask a question, the glass doesn’t move. Won’t move. I couldn’t push it. I ask the question again… Amy starts speaking. Only it’s not her. It’s not the little squeaky I’ll tell my mummy voice; this is grown-up, it’s kind of raunchy — and it’s got this Brummy accent.’
‘Oh, wow.’ Jane felt Eirion squeezing her hand. A warning. He was telling her not to take all this as gospel. He was reminding her that Layla Riddock was a notorious manipulator.
But, like, wow.
‘What I’m listening to is a detailed description of a killing. Little Amy Shelbone sitting there in her prim little summer frock, and her mouth’s twisting, spittle on her lips, and this like slurred, bitter voice, going, “I’m gonna cut him this time, I swear, I’m gonna put him away for ever…” ’
‘-way for ever,’ the walls sang. Jane dragged her hand away from Eirion’s, shoved it down into a pocket of her fleece.
‘So she… like, she really was possessed, then. Mum got it completely wrong.’
‘No.’ Layla shook her head briskly. ‘No way. She’s a medium. It’s a different thing altogether. The medium has control. The medium can let the spirit come through and shut it off whenever. Jane, I am psychic. I get insights. A lot of people are, you know that. It’s either in the blood or it isn’t. But it’s nothing I can control. I’ve spent years trying to master it — since I was about twelve. Read hundreds of books, tried all kinds of stuff. And I’m not a medium. I’m just one of a million people who get insights. She made me very jealous, did little Amy.’
Layla stood up, lifted up the chalice, sniffed the contents and put it back. Whatever Eirion thought, Jane’s feeling was that this was the absolute unvarnished truth, as Layla saw it.
‘So what did you do?’
‘I just marvelled, Jane. I just wanted to understand. The complete injustice of it. I wanted to understand how come this obnoxious little-I’m going, “How long’s this been happening to you? You had experiences like this before? You must have!” She’s like “What d’you mean?” ’
‘Did that mean she hadn’t? Or she just didn’t understand what you were talking about?’
‘I still don’t know for sure. What I felt — feel — is that she hadn’t, or wasn’t aware of having had any serious psychic experience. Quite often it’s something that doesn’t happen until puberty. But also she’d been brought up in this strict religious household, with the fear of the Devil and all this stuff hanging over her, and the Bible on the bedside table. She was surrounded by this big, white wall of sterile, puritanical-You know what I mean?’
‘Yeah,’ Jane said, excited now. ‘You kind of dislodged that. You knew about her past, you did the ouija thing, you pushed out the block. It all came flooding out, and not only these awful suppressed memories, but the whole-’
‘The whole wall collapsed.’ Layla nodded. ‘The wall her parents — the Shelbones — had thrown up around her, maybe thinking they were protecting her, I don’t know, but I think more likely they were just making sure she was theirs. I’ve read about this loads of times — often people’s psychic side gets awoken by some trauma. Like it could be physical, a bump on the head — or, in this case, something deeply emotional.’
‘Like you suddenly find out what your dad did to your mum.’
‘No, Jane, you remember what your dad did to your mum, ’cause you were there and you saw it all.’
‘This is incredible stuff,’ Jane said.
‘Let’s not…’ Eirion walked off into what she could now see was an aisle between, not rows of pews, but stalls and mangers. ‘Let’s not get carried away, ladies.’
‘Doesn’t this move you at all, Irene?’
‘It makes me a little scared, if you want the truth. But then I come from a stiff, puritanical, religious-’
‘But not so much any more.’
‘No,’ he said, as if this was a cause for regret. ‘Not so much any more.’
‘So where do things stand now?’ Jane said to Layla.
‘You tell me. It’s all out now. The Shelbones are on the rampage. I suppose the police’ll be out looking for the kid. I mean, I was excited, sure, but I also felt responsible for her — still do, obviously. A person I don’t even like. But it was me that broke her through, trying to help Allan. Does that matter now? Seems so trivial: money, again. He’ll go on piling it up, and then he’ll die.’
‘And you were going to meet her tonight,’ Eirion said. ‘Here?’
‘I’ve already said. We were both excited. Hyped up for the full moon. Look, it’s started to run away with itself. Bit like me when I first found out about my dad. Changed my whole world. She’s been rejecting the Shelbones’ church for a while — which is OK. Except she needs something to replace it and what’s been replacing it is her.’
‘Justine,’ Jane said. Her own voice sounded hollow.
‘Justine was real, God wasn’t. I think she thought that tonight she was actually going to see-It nearly happened before… I would swear, it nearly happened.’
‘What?’ But Jane was not sure she wanted to know.
‘It was just a haze, a mist — a fine, grey mist. But it was coming.’
‘Justine.’ Jane was shivering inside the fleece.
‘I think.’ It was as if the cold was even getting to Layla now, she was hugging herself. ‘You want the truth, I’m not sure how much I like Justine.’ She looked up, towards the ventilation slit. ‘Why doesn’t the bloody kid come back? She can’t think I’ve deserted her, just because I was late. Sometimes you could almost believe the stupid Shelbones were her parents.’
‘I think we should call the police,’ Eirion said. ‘If she’s wandering the streets of Hereford… Well, it’s not the genteel country town it might once have been, is it?’
‘Christ, no,’ Layla said. ‘Junkies out there, muggers, violent people — like Amy’s dad. Yeah, give it a few minutes, then call the police. Maybe it’s working out for the best, after all. Maybe it’s better if she does go back into care. Maybe I let a bloody monster loose.’
‘Justine?’ That name had a disturbing symmetrical sound for Jane now. She had to keep saying it.
Layla looked up at the Black Virgin. ‘I lied about this lady. She’s my protection — nothing to do with Amy. I always felt this affinity with Sara. The patron saint of gypsies. But more than that, like I said: as long as she’s up there, watching over me, I feel protected — against whatever Justine turns out to be.’
‘More than I do,’ Jane confessed. Not that it was hard confessing anything to Layla Riddock any more. It was as if, in these past few minutes, she’d shed some age, was far closer in years to Jane. ‘Look, I’m sorry, you know? I got this badly wrong.’
Layla patted Jane’s arm. ‘We’ve all got this wrong at some stage.’
Eirion watched them from a few yards away. ‘Now that,’ he said, ‘is something I find moving. I’ll go out to the car and ring the police. Where…?’
‘Follow the aisle and you’ll find a wooden door at the end. It’s barred on this side. Hang on, take a candle with you.’
Layla walked back to the flickering altar, where the grotesque but evidently benevolent Black Virgin hung above it in her white robe.
As she reached the altar, the Black Virgin fell, with a slithering sound, down from the screen, in front of the candles. ‘Oh God.’ Jane rushed back down the aisle. ‘She’ll catch light.’
The Black Virgin rose up to meet her, its white arms flapping, which was kind of spooky, but Jane laughed and brushed the cotton robe aside, and then Layla fell into her arms.
‘Oh Jesus!’ Eirion cried out.
Layla was coughing. Jane was aware of movement to her left, but she was too intent on staying upright because Layla was pretty heavy, a big girl. Jane staggered back into the aisle under her weight, her arms wrapped around Layla, who just kept coughing. Jane’s chin and neck were hot and wet now with what Layla was coughing up — vomit or bile. Oh, gross.
It was when she became aware of the salty, coppery tang that Jane’s arms sprang apart in true horror.
One of the candles did set light to the robe of Sara, the patron saint of the Romanies. Jane saw the flames suddenly leap. And then, in their light, she saw the girl with straight, blonde hair in a white dress — it looked like a confirmation dress — standing on the altar with the carving knife held high and dripping.
Then Amy Shelbone leaped down from the altar and ran jerkily up the aisle and, as Jane stood there, with Layla’s lifeblood on her throat and chest, Amy also stabbed Eirion.