‘The neck – one blow, looks like. A single slash. I’m guessing that came first, while he was still on his feet. The blows to the top of the head would’ve put him straight down.’
Billy took a couple of long strides into the middle of the farmyard, all the uniforms and techies moving away as his right arm went back for role-play.
‘If you imagine he’s standing here when the blade makes contact, slamming into the windpipe. Not exactly what you’d call a butcher’s strike, but the sheer impact of it would leave the poor bastard reeling, spouting blood and tissue everywhere. A great dollop… as you see.’
Billy gestured at the separate puddle. Bliss felt queasy.
‘Poor old Mansel tottering away, couple of metres and then…’ He began to back off unsteadily. ‘ Bang, on the skull, and Mansel comes down like a block of flats.’
Bliss said, ‘And the killer…?’
‘Just watches.’
‘Watches?’
‘Well, obviously, I don’t know that, but… I’ll be able to give you a full list of injuries and possibly confirm the sequence tomorrow, but if you want to take a closer look…’
‘For now, I’ll take your word. So the killer knew he’d killed. There was serious intent…’
‘Hardly trying to fend the poor chap off.’
‘And then slinks away. With his big knife.’ Bliss turned to Terry Stagg, the wind in his face like barbed wire. ‘First light, we go over the whole frigging farm, inch by inch. I also think we’re gonna have to drag Howe away from her dinner party, or wherever. Gorra mad bastard here.’
‘Or someone pumped up with drugs.’ Billy’s teeth shining with carnivorous glee. ‘Whoever he is, Francis, I wouldn’t like to face him in an alley.’
Terry Stagg said, ‘Mr Sollers Bull… you need to know…’
‘Where is he?’
‘I suggested he went home. You go down to the fork in the drive, turn right-’
‘Where’ve I heard that name before, Terence? Sollers Bull…’
‘TV?’ Stagg said. ‘Pictures in the papers? I’ve been trying to tell you.’
Bliss turned. Billy Grace was grinning.
‘Oh shit,’ Bliss said. ‘He’s got form.’
‘That might be how you see it, Francis,’ Billy said. ‘But to quite a few people hereabouts, he’s a bloody hero.’
6
Even now, even in a room full of priests, it was hard to relive. Years later, it would still start burning in her memory like acid. If it caught her in the night, she’d have to get out of bed and pray. Recite St Patrick’s Breastplate, the way she had the night Denzil Joy died.
‘Let me set the scene for you,’ Huw Owen said to the students. ‘When Merrily were appointed as deliverance consultant, the man she replaced was the last Diocesan Exorcist. His name were Canon Dobbs and he couldn’t be doing wi’ namby-pamby terminology like deliverance.’
He paused, looking down to the darkest part of the chapel again.
‘An austere owd bugger, Dobbs. Former academic. Not a supporter of the ordination of women. Merrily’s a university dropout who received her calling in the last days of a wonky marriage – he got killed in a car crash. Was there an element of guilt after that? I wouldn’t like to spec-’
‘Huw-’
‘Always an element of summat, in’t there? We’re all on the threshold of imbalance. As this job keeps reminding us.’
She saw his left hand quiver. And again he looked out towards the shadows in the left-hand corner, where Merrily could see a man now, leaning back, an arm thrown across the back of the empty chair next to his.
‘Anyroad, Canon Dobbs felt it were his duty to expose the upstart bint to the kind of evil the very existence of which would be denied by the progressive bishop who’d appointed her. And – happen – by some of you. Lass?’
Huw extended an arm. Merrily stood up.
‘Erm… I don’t know whether anybody here’s ever been a nurse. Or knows one. But I’ve found it’s always useful to listen to nurses.’
A rush of wind hit the chapel and there was a distant splintering, all heads turning except for Huw’s.
‘Not least because they’ve seen most things relating to death. This, erm, this is about a death. It was my first deliverance job and probably should’ve been Canon Dobbs’s last before he retired, but he was… unavailable.’
Merrily was already uncomfortable. All she had to do was lift the cellar hatch of memory, just a crack, and out it sprang again, and she could almost feel it on the underside of her wrist.
Scritch-scratch.
The smell coming back at once: cat-shit and gangrene, one of the nurses had said.
‘Mr Joy was a hospital patient in Hereford, and he didn’t have long. I was called out in the night because the nurses said he was asking for a priest and the hospital chaplain wasn’t available. The truth was that it was the nurses who needed the priest.’
The nurses who didn’t like to touch Mr Joy. The nurses who had seen the way he used his wife when she came to visit.
The nurses who never could forget the sensation of his fingers when they bent over him to take his temperature or change one of the tubes.
Scritch-scratch. On the soft skin on the underside of the wrist.
‘But I was new at this,’ Merrily said. ‘I told them it wasn’t my job to judge him, only to try and bring him peace. Something was still insisting, back then, that there was no such thing as an evil presence.’
A hand went up. Shona, the woman who’d been a prison governor, hair like a light brown balaclava.
‘You mean your own life-experience or your training?’
‘Look,’ Merrily said. ‘Here you are at the bedside of a dying man. He ’s dying, you’re a priest, there to bring comfort. How can you do that if you accept that he’s infested with evil? So you go with the rational view. No such thing as an abstract, incorporeal evil. You need to relax.’
He can enter you without moving, that man, one of the nurses had said.
Merrily’s hand instinctively moving to the pectoral cross. Don’t shudder. Do not shudder now.
‘Cut to the car chase, lass,’ Huw said. ‘And don’t omit the exhaust.’
She told them the rest. Well, most of it.
Trying to convey that sense of all the light in the room being sucked sourly into a man on the very rim of extinction, whose touch was like an enema.
‘Looking back, it leaves me asking a number of questions. Fierce sexual energy coming from an old, dying man – can that be explained medically? Possibly it can, I’m not qualified to say, but the nurses didn’t think so, and nurses, no matter how compassionate, can be very cynical people.’
It was quieter now, the wind in remission.
‘The psychological explanation,’ Merrily said, ‘might be that here was a man who’d enjoyed exploiting women sexually, degrading them. A man in search of increasingly perverse pleasures – to what extent you want to demonize this is up to you.’
Huw was looking at her, head on one side. OK, I’m coming to it.
‘You can usually find a rational explanation, but there has to be a cut-off point. You need to recognize when you’re trying too hard to explain something away, because that can be when you’re most vulnerable. And if it reaches you, there’s not much hope for whoever you’re trying to protect.’
Shona said, ‘When you say “if it reaches you”…?’
‘What do I mean by it? Not sure. But I think if you’re unable to accept the premise of an external evil, you may not be able to deal with some problems. I think… looking back, I don’t think I handled it forcefully enough. I let the psychology make too many decisions. And afterwards I failed to draw a line under it, as a result of which… something… seemed to be hanging around, for some time.’
Looking at Shona, hoping she’d ask another question, move the thread.
Nobody spoke.
‘I felt unclean. Bad dreams. Night… sensations. Subjective, you might say, psychological. I’ve since encountered criminals, accepted as being disturbed, and this was just an ordinary old man. Yet Mr Joy was a notorious case in that hospital. Canon Dobbs had had dealings with him before and could have done so this time, but he set me up.’