The Cure of Souls (3 page)

Merrily glanced at the clock. She was going to have to leave soon to pick up the kid after her English exam. No anxiety on that one, at least; English came naturally to Jane and it was the one GCSE that required no revision.

The Bishop coughed. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for a while.’

‘Mmm?’

‘You’re still young.’

‘Ish.’

‘Young,’ he said firmly. He had grandchildren Jane’s age. He turned back into the room. ‘And a very young widow.’

Merrily was about to remind him that if it hadn’t been for a particular fatal car-crash on the M5 she might have been a notso-young divorcee and therefore would never have made it into the priesthood. But she guessed they’d been into all that before.

Bernie said, ‘We all know that when Tommy Dobbs was exorcist here he felt it incumbent upon him to develop a rather rigid, monastic way of life. Frugal. Steeped himself in prayer.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I can understand that fully now – why he did that.’

‘However, he was an old man. You’re a—’

‘Whatever.’ She stood up.

‘Obviously, stepping into Dobbs’s shoes, you were bound to feel you were walking on eggshells.’

‘Well… that, and for other reasons, too.’ She had a vague idea what was coming and clapped her hands together briskly. ‘Look, Bernie, I’m afraid I’ve got to be off in a minute. Have to collect Jane from the school. GCSE-time? Once they finish an exam they can go home. I don’t really want her heading down the pub.’

He nodded, not really taking it in. ‘I… we’ve never minced words, you and I. Both accept that Hunter set you up to succeed Dobbs, to appear trendy… politically correct… all that tosh. And again, in my opinion, as I’ve told you on a number of occasions, in spite of all that it was probably one of Hunter’s better moves. Not least because people who wouldn’t dare go near that gruesome old bugger Dobbs will talk to you, as a human being. Young people, for instance. It’s very important that we should help the young people.’ He screwed up his face. ‘What I’m trying to say, Merrily… I don’t want you to be
scared
to be a human being.’

‘Huh?’

‘I mean, there must be times when you find yourself looking at young Jane – with all of it just beginning for her. Boyfriends, parties, you know what I mean. You must feel—’

‘They’re fairly human, too, in my experience.’ Merrily raised an eyebrow. ‘Nuns.’

There was a moment of silence, then the Bishop sighed softly. ‘Well, you said it.’

‘I was trying to help you out.’

‘Bloody hell, Merrily!’ He brought his left fist down on the back of a dining chair.

Well, what was she supposed to say? She hadn’t exactly
applied
for the job down here on the coalface of Christianity: day-to-day confrontation with the intangible, the amorphous and the unproven, as experienced by the damaged, the vulnerable, the disturbed and the fraudulent.

Was the Bishop actually implying that she might find all this easier to cope with if she went out, got drunk, and got laid a time or two?

Probably not. He was probably just covering himself.

‘All I’m saying’ – Bernie thrust his left hand into his hip pocket, maybe to conceal the fact that he’d hurt it on the back of the chair – ‘is that Deliverance has started taking on a much higher profile than any of us imagined. I don’t want you cracking up on me, or
tightening
up – building some kind of impenetrable spiritual shell around yourself, the way Dobbs did.’

‘Oh, I doubt I’d have the personal strength for that, Bernie.’

‘Didn’t matter with Dobbs, because half the Hereford clergy didn’t even know what he actually did. He could go his own way. All his pressures were… inner ones.’

‘Yes.’

She noticed that a few of the little green apples had either fallen or been plucked from the orchard trees and now lay forlornly on new-mown grass that was already showing signs of sun-scorching. She wondered if there was some sinister piece of local folklore about premature windfalls.

‘Anyway,’ the Bishop said, ‘I’ll want you to email me that list by tomorrow night.’

‘I will, I will.’

‘And start helping yourself to a bit of ordinary life, Merrily. Before it gets eaten away.’

I
T WAS LIKE
some illicit members’ club for which she’d accidentally given the secret sign. One foot over the threshold, and she was pulled in and Layla Riddock had closed the door behind them. Then she heard a lock turn and Layla was pulling the key out of the door, sliding it into her skirt pocket.

What?

The two candles on the workbench made shadows rise and turned the metal handles of the oldest lawnmower into twin cobra-heads. One of the flames was reflected, magnified and distorted, in the bevelled side of a glass. It looked like one of the water glasses from the dining hall, upturned in the centre of the bench-top.

‘Welcome,’ Layla Riddock said.

If Candida Butler looked mature, Layla looked somehow
old
, as in seasoned, as in tainted, as in kind of corrupt – or maybe you just thought that because of what you knew about her and all the guys she’d had. Like, actual
guys
, not boys.

But there were no guys in here today, not even Steve the beer-gutted groundsman.

‘Take a seat, then.’ Layla pulled out some kind of oil drum, tapped on the top of it with her nails.

The other girls said nothing.

Only the chunky Kirsty Ryan, Layla’s mate, turned her spiky red head towards Jane. Kirsty was sitting on the mower’s grassbox turned on its side. The other girl, on a stool, kept on
looking down at the bench-top where pieces of cardboard the size of playing cards were arranged in a circle, the candles standing outside of it, in what looked like tobacco tins.

‘Well, go
on
,’ Layla said.

Jane sat down on the oil drum, next to Kirsty Ryan, because… well, because when Layla told you to do something, you somehow just did it. Layla was tall and good-looking in this kind of pouting, sexual way, and she somehow had this
forceful
thing about her, an aura of grim authority. Her father had been a gypsy – she liked to tell people that, liked hinting she had a long tradition of secret powers behind her. The gypsy must have moved on pretty quick, though, because Layla’s mother was long-married to Allan Henry, the well-known builder and property developer –
ALLAN HENRY HOMES
– and they lived in this huge, crass, ranch-style bungalow, with a swimming pool and a snooker room, out near Canon Pyon. Riddock was presumably her mother’s family name… or the gypsy’s.

‘It’s Jane, right?’ Layla sat down on a stool at the head of the bench, behind the candle tins. ‘Kirsty you know, I assume. And that’s Amy. Fourth year.’ She pushed the candles further apart, so that they were arranged either side of her and she looked like some sombre, smouldering idol in an Indian temple.

The card in front of Jane said
NO
. The letters were printed on white paper stuck to the card. Now she had an idea what this was.

Kirsty Ryan turned to her. ‘You got the ten quid on you?’

Jane said nothing.

‘She can bring it in tomorrow,’ Layla said crisply, then looked at Jane without smiling. ‘Cheap at the price, love, you’ll find out.’

Kirsty smirked.

Jane thought she saw Amy stiffen. The kid was slight and fair-haired and was the only one in here wearing her school blazer, despite the heat. She was sitting directly opposite Jane. In front of her was the card that said
YES
.

Kirsty said to Jane, ‘You come with a special question? Got a problem you want sorted?’

Jane shook her head.

‘Lying little cow,’ Kirsty said.

Jane said nothing. She had to get out of here, but it would be seriously unwise to let any of them know that.

‘Told you there’d be another one along, didn’t I?’ Layla folded her arms in satisfaction.

‘There was this other kid,’ Kirsty explained, ‘but she got shit-scared and backed out, and we were worried they wouldn’t like it. There should be four.’

They?
Jane cleared her throat. ‘Why?’

‘’Cause we
started out
with four. So, like… your mother’s a vicar, yeah?’

‘So?’

‘Oh, not just a vicar,’ Layla said, ‘is she, love?’

Jane shrugged, keeping her lips clamped. She didn’t like talking about what Mum did, especially to someone like Layla Riddock.

‘So what would she say to this, your old lady?’

Jane managed a nervous grin but still said nothing. Her old lady would probably have snatched up the glass, scattered the letters and called on God and all His angels to cleanse this soiled place like
now
.

Kirsty said, ‘Who told you about this?’

‘Nobody,’ Jane said. ‘I was just—’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Layla leaned forward, those big, heavy breasts straining to come bouncing out of her blouse. ‘This is excellent. I think… I really do think that this is going to be a really good sitting.’

‘Yeah,’ said Kirsty, rebuked. ‘Right.’

Jane had never actually done this before. It belonged to the realm of sad gits, people with no real hold on life. It was a joke. Unhealthy, maybe, but still a joke.

She had to keep thinking like that, because she knew there was no way she was going to get out of here until it was over. OK, she could leap up and demand the key and they probably wouldn’t use violence to stop her. (Or would they?)

But that wouldn’t be awfully cool, would it?

Besides, it might be, you know… kind of interesting.

The air in the groundsman’s hut smelled of oil and sweat. The candlelight had found a little moisture in the cleft over Layla Riddock’s upper lip as it curled at last into a sort of smile.

‘Let’s go for it, then,’ Layla said.

It was terrifying.

And like… really addictive.

The glass made an eerie sound as it moved across the greasy surface of Steve’s bench. Like a coffin sliding through the curtains of a crematorium, reflected Jane, who had never been inside a crematorium, not even when her dad had died.

The first time—

‘Are you here?’ Layla had asked calmly.

—the glass shot directly to
YES
with the snap precision of a fast cue ball on a snooker table, and the sudden movement made both candle-flames go almost horizontal, like in the wind created when someone suddenly slams a door. Jane was so shocked she almost jerked her finger away.

‘Good,’ Layla said.

Jane let out a fast breath. She hadn’t expected that to happen. Nobody could be pushing; it just wasn’t possible.

‘Now, tell us your name,’ Layla instructed.

It
, Jane thought.

There couldn’t be an
it
. Not on a summer afternoon in Slobbery Steve’s filthy shed in the precincts of the dreary once-modernist Moorfield High School, Herefordshire.

It was a scam, that was all. There had to be a trick to it, a method of setting up momentum without appearing to apply pressure – an interesting end-of-term conundrum for the anoraks in the new science block.

Jane looked into Layla’s face. Layla’s eyes were shut, but her wide mouth was set into a closed-lips smile that seemed to shimmer in the moist light, and Jane felt sure that Layla could see her through those lowered lids, as—

The glass glided, dragging Jane’s finger, then her hand across the oily bench-top towards the letter
J
.

OK, that was it. She was annoyed now. So, like, suppose
she
tried to manoeuvre it. Suppose she exerted a little deliberate pressure of her own next time. Suppose, with some really intense concentration, a blast of hyper-focused will power, she could make it spell out
Jane
…

Will power, yeah: thought-projection. She glanced up at Layla. Layla’s eyes still didn’t open.

All right. She located the letter
A
, halfway between Kirsty and the kid Amy, and she really,
really
concentrated on it, and when the glass began to move, she tried to—

The glass was dragged from under her forefinger, to slide unstoppably to the letter
U
.

Jane leaned back. She didn’t like this. She really didn’t like it.

She became aware that the girl opposite her, Amy of the fourth form, had begun panting. Her fair hair was pulled back tightly from her face and her skin seemed to be stretched taut. Now, Jane knew exactly who she was. She was the one who looked like one of those plaster mannequins in an old-fashioned school-outfitters: skirt always uncreased, blazer always buttoned, tie always straight, hair perfectly shoulder-length, perfectly brushed. Amy’s ultimate role model would be Candida Butler.

What was
wrong
with her? If this scared her so much, what was she doing here?

Because it was addictive? Because it worked?

Get me out of this
.

The glass moved under Jane’s finger, slid back into the centre of the circle of letters and off again. The bloody thing seemed to know exactly where it was going, and she just let it happen now, watching the finger in motion, with the fore fingers of the other three – all of them apparently just resting on the thick base of the glass – and all the time trying to
separate
herself from this, pretending that finger was no longer connected to her nervous system.

Watching the glass spelling out one word, before it stopped in the dead centre of the circle.

J-U-S-T-I-N-E

Amy drew in a long, ratchety kind of breath.

The hop belongs to the same family as hemp and cannabis and is a relative of the nettle. A hardy, long-lived climbing perennial, its shoots can reach 20 feet in length but die back to ground level every winter. It has no tendrils and climbs clockwise round its support. Although it will grow in the poorest soils, only optimum conditions will produce the quality needed for today’s shrinking markets. As a result, hop-growing in Herefordshire is now concentrated in the sheltered valleys of the Frome and Lugg, where there are at least 18 inches of loamy soil
.