‘Why was that, you reckon?’
‘Well, it might have been genuine. Maybe he was serious about needing an exorcism, and he didn’t want to put her off or make her suspicious. That was what I started to think, but now… I suppose that’d be for the tape, wouldn’t it? Like, if he was videoing the thing, he’d want to appear on it as a sincere and honest man, genuinely concerned about what was happening in his house.’
‘That’s a good point, Lol.’ Bliss thought about it. ‘Mind, he wasn’t being very appreciative at the end, was he, when he threw yer out?’
‘But he’d got it all in the camera by then, hadn’t he? Everything that counted. The Deliverance stuff. He could just have wiped the end of the tape afterwards.’
‘True. Why’d he turn nasty, you reckon? Apart from his wife’s attitude.’
‘I don’t think there was anything apart from that. Stephanie started taking the piss, so Stock took it out on Merrily.’
Bliss nodded. ‘Certainly the times you see him looking at her you can tell he’s trying to keep his temper – or something. But then, she was a lot younger than him. And clearly not too worried at being in a haunted house. Or was that bravado?’
‘She was a Catholic, like you. Protected. She said earlier – maybe before we went into the kitchen – that she didn’t think Uncle Stewart would do her any harm.’
‘Oh, we’re not scared of ghosts, us Catholics?’ Bliss blew out his lips. ‘News to me. How did Merrily react to the wife?’
‘Tried to ignore it. Just carried on.’
‘A true professional.’
‘A good person,’ Lol said. ‘Doing the best she could.’
‘You’re fond of her, aren’t you?’ Bliss smiled. ‘Who wouldn’t be, eh?’
Lol said, ‘You haven’t told me exactly what he did.’
‘How he killed her?’
Lol looked at Bliss: pale skin, freckles, an unusually small nose.
‘What happened when you all went upstairs, Lol?’
‘Well, just…’
Lol had a terrifying thought: the only cameras in the bedroom were the ones under the floorboards, pointing downwards, but suppose their microphones had picked up the voices from above, during Merrily’s blessing of the upstairs room? And during what happened afterwards, when Merrily had followed Stock downstairs. If there was anything on the tape, the quality would be terrible. But they could work on that. Someone like Prof Levin could clean up the thinnest of recordings.
‘… Just more or less what happened in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘With different words.’
He could tell Bliss about Stephie’s implicit invitation. But it sounded too incredible, unless you knew about the Lady of the Bines incident. Which he’d also kept quiet about. Which he hadn’t even told Merrily about.
Lol blanked it out. He was terrible at cover-ups. He would look furtive, he’d sweat.
Bliss said, ‘Nothing happened up there you think might throw more light?’
‘Not… not that I can think of.’
‘You wanna see the tape, Lol?’
‘Not really.’
‘Don’t blame yer. But… I think you’re gonna have to. I think we’re gonna have to take the both of you through it. I’m sorry.’ Bliss thought for a moment, then sighed. ‘Look, all right, I’ll be frank wid yer – he’s not saying a lot.’
‘Stock?’
‘In fact, the bugger’s not saying a thing. Won’t see a solicitor, won’t make a formal statement, just sits there like some bloody big Buddha.’
‘But he phoned you to confess…’
‘Oh aye. When we get there, he hands us the videos. Looking relieved, if anything. He won’t talk about it, though, won’t explain. That’s why you and Merrily are so important to us at the moment.’
‘I see.’
‘Don’t tell the Snow Queen I told you that.’
Annie Howe said, ‘Have you heard of the case of Michael Taylor?’
‘Yes.’
She’s loving this, Merrily thought. A case on a plate.
Me in the toaster.
She was desperate for a cigarette, but she wouldn’t give Howe the satisfaction. She was also desperate for silence, somewhere to collapse and think and, if necessary, scream. Nothing made any sense. Nothing had made sense for days. She felt a welling hatred for Gerard Stock and a bitterness towards Simon St John who had known enough to shut the door in his face.
‘Happened near Barnsley, in Yorkshire.’ Howe was back behind her desk. ‘In the mid-seventies. I know most of the details because of the pseudo-Satanist person we found in the Wye last year. I called up some background on Satanism and related issues, and this case was the first to come up on the screen.’
Merrily closed her eyes and inhaled on an imaginary cigarette. This was one of Huw’s cautionary favourites, which Howe would just love relating.
‘Michael Taylor was thirty-one, a good Christian, a family man – and a member, with his wife, of some local religious group. At some point, for reasons I’ve never found entirely understandable, he came to believe he’d been taken over by the Devil.’
Howe had a set of files on her desk. She opened one and extracted a cellophane folder.
‘Two church ministers agreed that Taylor appeared to be possessed by evil, and they spent all night trying to exorcize him, claiming to have expelled – I think – forty demons – the statistical exactitude here obviously adding important credibility to what most people might consider an inexact science. However, Taylor left the priests early the following morning, went home—’
‘I know,’ Merrily screwed up her eyes in anguish. ‘I know what he did, there’s no need to—’
‘He went home and, with incredible savagery, attacked his wife with his bare hands.’
‘Yes…’
‘He tore at her skin, ripped out her tongue. And her eyes.’
Merrily leaned her head back, stared at the ceiling.
‘Eventually, she choked to death on her own blood,’ Howe said.
‘And Taylor claimed, in his statement to police’ – Merrily’s voice was starved; she couldn’t look at Howe – ‘that he loved his wife very much but there was an evil inside her that had to be destroyed.’
‘Not, I think it’s fair to say, the Church’s finest hour.’
‘Exorcism of a person is a complex and dangerous process,’ Merrily said. ‘But this… this case wasn’t anything like that.’
‘Wasn’t it?’
‘It wasn’t an exorcism. I made that completely clear to Mr Stock from the start. I even decided to hold off the customary Requiem Eucharist because it might look too much like Christian magic. It was prayer, that’s all – prayer as the first stage in dealing with a suspected spiritual presence, there being no reason to suspect any demonic infestation.’
‘Let’s go back to Taylor,’ Howe said. ‘Found not guilty by a jury for reasons of insanity. Caused quite a stir, didn’t it?’
‘What should be said about that verdict… although Michael Taylor had been, by all accounts, a friendly and popular man with no history of violence, nobody – not the judge, nor the jury, nor the media – seemed prepared even to consider that he might actually have been possessed by a metaphysical evil.’
‘He was considered insane.’ To Howe the difference between insanity and possession would be indiscernible. ‘His mental decline appears to have coincided with his taking up membership of a Christian group. His recourse to almost unimaginable violence immediately followed his so-called exorcism by two Christian ministers, isn’t that true?’
Merrily could only nod, knowing now where this was going – a goods train with a toxic cargo inexorably picking up speed, and nothing she could do to stop it.