‘When we travelled,’ Al said, ‘we camped at night, but we always stopped the wagons at noon: the time of no shadows. Do you understand? Noon is the dead moment in time. When the day belongs to the dead – all the energy of the day sucked in. Sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, you can almost see it, like a photograph turned negative. Everything is still, everything – the road, the fields, the sky – belonging to the dead.’
‘He means that noon is the time of the mulo,’ Simon said. ‘The only time you’ll see one by daylight.’
‘No.’ Al tossed a guitar bridge from one hand to the other. ‘In most cases, you won’t see it at all.’
Merrily shrank from the melodrama. The time of no shadows. And yet…
‘You do know, don’t you, that we did the Deliverance in the kiln around midday? Stock wanted me to do it at night. I said, let’s do it now, in the full light of a summer morning. Let’s not make it sinister. You did know that?’
‘And was this when the sulphur came to you?’
‘At midday, yes. Or very close.’
Al glanced at the photograph. ‘She could have had you. You were lucky.’
‘Or protected.’
‘And were you protected in the hop-yard last night?’
Merrily felt herself blush. ‘It happened too quickly.’
‘Lucky,’ Al said.
‘What is she?’ Merrily asked. ‘I need to know. You use these terms – muli. Very sinister. But what are we really talking about?’
Simon St John came over to sit down. He had a glass of water. All three of them were drinking water. No alcohol, no caffeine, not today.
‘Not quite a ghost,’ Simon said. ‘Not possession either, in the classic sense. You could say it’s a question of borrowing the aura.’
‘Very much a Romany thing,’ Al pointed out. ‘Live lightly and borrow.’
‘But the mulo doesn’t necessarily give back,’ Simon said. He kept rubbing his black-shirted arms as though they were cold.
‘This is true,’ Al accepted.
Simon said, ‘When Shakespeare talked about shuffling off the mortal coil, he was probably close to it. Death appears to be a staggered process – when the body dies, the spirit exists for a while in the aura, the astral body, the corporeal energy field. Its normal procedure, at this stage, is to look for the exit sign and get the hell out.’
‘But if the cycle’s incomplete,’ Al said, ‘if there’s a need for justice, for balance, for satisfaction…’
Merrily thought about it. ‘This is about what’s sometimes called the Second Death isn’t it?’
‘This is about avoiding the Second Death.’ Simon leaned forward. ‘I don’t think it’s common, not in our society. I don’t imagine it’s a common occurrence in the Romany culture either. I think it’s something they’ve tended to blow up out of proportion over the centuries – I bloody hope it is.’
‘It’s an unpleasant state to be in,’ Al said, ‘because the mulo is said to require life-energy to maintain its existence. Hence the term “living dead”. There are tales of a mulo or muli sucking the blood of the living, but’ – he waved a long hand dismissively – ‘it’s all energy. Sexual, mostly. The victim may be the former life-partner – you get tales of people having sex with their dead husbands or wives – or the person held responsible for the sudden death of the subject before their time.’
‘In the stories, they talk of a solid physical presence,’ Simon said. ‘But we prefer dreams, or sexual fantasies.’
‘You’re selling it as psychology?’ Merrily asked, doubtful.
‘It’s all psychology,’ Simon said. ‘That doesn’t make it any less real. It doesn’t make it any less frightening.’ His face was gaunt; it was one of those soft, pale faces which could alternate in seconds between looking youthful and prematurely aged. ‘The thought of Rebekah – or what she may have become – leaves me cold with—I’m sorry.’
Al stood up and walked over to the photograph. ‘It seems to me that our task is to separate the spirit of Rebekah from what’s formed around it. The evil that grows like fungus around hatred and rage. You follow, drukerimaskri?’
‘And lead it to God. To the light.’
‘And the evil,’ Simon said sourly. ‘Where does that go?’
‘My responsibility.’ Al walked to the door. ‘You two probably have Christian things to work out. I’m going to the place. I’m going to talk to my father. Come when you’re ready, you won’t disturb me.’
‘Al…?’ Merrily touched his sleeve.
‘It’ll work out, drukerimaskri.’ He looked again at the picture of the young woman amateurishly pouting at the sun. ‘She’s ripe. She’s swollen. We can’t delay.’
He walked out without looking back.
Councillor Howe said, ‘Small piece of advice, brother Robinson, in case you’re ever called upon to tail anybody again. Nobody comes shopping at a supermarket and parks half a mile away. Just a small point.’
‘Thanks.’ Lol took the two cups of tea off the tray, along with Charlie Howe’s doughnut. This time in the morning, fewer than a quarter of the tables in the supermarket coffee shop were taken. They were sitting at a window table, just up from the creche.
‘I take it this en’t council business, then.’ Charlie Howe’s brown, leathery face was not remotely wary. He bit into his doughnut. Dark, liquid jam spurted. Charlie licked his fingers. ‘And you’re not a newspaperman after my memoirs?’
‘Newspaper, no,’ Lol said. ‘Memoirs, probably.’
‘Cost you, boy.’
‘Bought you a doughnut.’
Charlie smiled. ‘That gets you as far as 1960. Nothing much happened that year, I was still a beat copper.’
‘How about sixty-three?’
‘Young DC, then. Still hadn’t done my first murder. What did you say you did for a living?’
‘Write songs.’
His eyes were deep-sunk in his craggy forehead, like rock-pools. ‘So this’d be ‘The Ballad of Charlie Howe’, then?’
Lol fought the urge to look away, out of the window. ‘How about “The Ballad of Rebekah Smith”?’
Charlie raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t reckon that’s a song would mean an awful lot to me.’
‘Maybe you’d only be in the last verse,’ Lol said.
Merrily lit a cigarette.
Simon St John eased his stool a few inches further along the bench. ‘You always smoke before an exorcism?’
‘Sounds like that old joke,’ Merrily said. ‘ “Do you always smoke after sex? No, only when…” What did he mean, talk to his father?’
‘His father, the chovihano, dead these twenty years. Didn’t speak to Al for the previous twenty because Al came off the road, married a gaujo. Cardinal sin, punishable by lifelong curse. Sally once told me he and Al have been communicating better in the past three years than the previous forty.’
‘Candidly,’ Merrily said, ‘do you believe that stuff?’
‘Why not? They talk to the ancestors like we try to talk to God. Their own ancestors, not anyone else’s.’
‘What about you?’
‘I have a fairly strict rule. I talk to living people, and I try to listen to God. Anything else I see or hear nowadays, I turn off the fucking set, rapido.’
‘You’re saying you’ve seen and heard more than most of us.’