‘I’m the first person you’ve told?’
‘Other than in my prayers.’
Merrily didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t exactly a huge surprise. There had to have been something. She wondered if Susannah had actually known, from Bell, or if she’d just suspected.
‘George,’ she said. ‘Bell… well, she’s a bit of an expert at this sort of thing. Knows how to…’
‘There can be no excuse!’ George’s knuckles shone like marbles. ‘If I hadn’t already been mayor-elect I’d have turned that down as well.’
‘But surely you realize it was…’
But how could he? How much could he possibly have known or even surmised about Bell’s behaviour?
Not for her to explain to him the probable truth about why Belladonna had seduced him… here…
… That the tower was the spindle in the centre of the wheel of Ludlow and he was its human equivalent. Bell gathering in all her magic, her charisma, and spraying it out in what Jon Scole had called blue sparks. Spraying her sparks all over poor George Lackland, first citizen.
Sympathetic magic, Huw Owen had said. All magic’s sympathetic magic.
‘George…’ Merrily moved away from the table of books. ‘Erm… it was… just the once, wasn’t it?’
George sprang away from the pew. ‘Good God, Mrs Watkins, what do you take me for?’
‘A bloke, George.’ She smiled. ‘You’re just a bloke.’
And, for all his local-government guile, a very naive bloke, even for his generation. He hadn’t seen it coming: the innocent Edwardian dress, the childlike glee at being in his town. And then his sudden exposure, on the top of his world, to this scented siren from another planet.
And what else was there besides the guilt and the shame at betraying his wife, his church, his status and his town? Had he also fallen – hopelessly, disgracefully, unforgivably – just a little in love with Mrs Pepper?
Or maybe more than a little. Oh God, yes.
I don’t go looking for her, Mrs Watkins.
‘You can’t bear to be near her, can you, George?’ she said gently.
George walked out of the aisle, his back to the high altar.
A whisper: ‘Can’t bear to see her.’ It seemed to spiral like smoke to the timbered ceiling.
The prostitutes in this town… they knows their place. And you will agree that place is not, for instance, St Leonard’s graveyard.
Could be that nothing of that nature had ever occurred in St Leonard’s graveyard. George, perhaps, had been expanding Bell’s myth for his own reasons. And always living in fear of it coming out.
‘You want her to leave.’
‘I need her to leave,’ he said. ‘She…’
Was still possessing him, like a dark spirit.
And his town as well. Did he know that?
George and Bell fighting for possession of the essence of Ludlow.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
‘Yes, we better had.’ Maybe Lol would be waiting.
He stepped back for her to go past. She wanted to do something vaguely priestly, if it was only patting him on the shoulder, but that would make him freeze up. So she just walked out.
As he stepped down after locking the church, an elderly man was walking up from the direction of the old college, with a German shepherd on a lead, the narrow street a valley of shadows around him.
‘Can’t hardly credit it, can you, George?’
George spun round. ‘Oh… Tom.’
‘Half of them’s touched, you ask me. Youngsters. Drugs, most likely. You ask me, this girl in the castle’s on drugs. That’s what they’re saying about the other one.’
‘Yes,’ George said. ‘I… I’ve heard that, too. Do you know Mrs Watkins, from the diocese? This is Mr Tom Pritchard. Has the hardware shop just down from us.’
‘Got broke into couple of months ago,’ Tom said severely, to Merrily. ‘Drugs again, I reckon. I hears a noise now, I don’t think twice, I sends this young feller in first.’ He patted the dog. ‘Suppose I’ll get sued if one of ’em gets bit, but I reckon I’ll risk it. Gotter protect yourself, ennit?’ He looked up at the Mayor. ‘Town’s not what it was, George. Our shop’s opened every morning, bar Sundays and Christmas, since the War, come snow, flood, flu, you name it. That boy gets drunk of a night, shop’s shut all day.’
‘What’s that, Tom?’ George pocketed the bunch of church keys.
‘Scole. Calls himself a shopkeeper. Makes you laugh.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Merrily said. ‘Jon Scole’s shop’s not been opened all day?’
‘They got too much money, these days, that’s the thing.’ Tom tugged on the lead. ‘Come on, Tyson.’
‘They’re… always called Tyson, aren’t they?’ Merrily said, as Tom disappeared into the alley to the Buttercross.
Her gaze met George’s.
‘We better take a look,’ George said.
44
Lab Rat
STANDING WITH HIS back to the sandstone, he might have been a Norman baron, his beard like fine chain mail around his face. A baron addressing a serf. Barons, Lol imagined, would seldom actually look at serfs.
And then, when the name of Lord Shipston came out, Saltash did look at him. Really looked at him, for all of a second: at the little round glasses, the too-long hair, the sweatshirt from some minor rural service industry.
Enough for Saltash to avert his eyes, having dismissed him, Lol guessed. Having chosen to forget that Lord Shipston had ever been mentioned, because the one-second inspection had told him that this couldn’t be a contest.
‘I don’t think I know you at all, do I?’ Saltash said.
The Inner Bailey, enclosed in stone, was more extensive than a prison exercise yard but, with police on the gate, just as secure. And it reminded Lol of the psychiatric hospital, although that had been Victorian. But Victorian Gothic, and so just as dominating as the castle, with one tower at least as high as the Keep.
‘I’m Lol Robinson,’ Lol said.
In the hospital, daring to be a person had always been the most difficult part. Remembering you were a person, not just a file, a subject for assessment and monitoring, a lab rat for the multinational pharmaceutical industry.
‘No,’ Saltash said, smiling, starting to walk away across the great courtyard, throwing out ‘Sorry’ in his slipstream.
And if he reached the gatehouse, where two police officers stood, there would be no second chance.
‘All right.’ Lol moved in front of him. ‘If you want to take the scenic route, let’s talk about Gascoigne.’
Saltash expelled a hiss of exasperation.
‘Look, my friend, you probably know that there’s a young girl in there, threatening to take her own life. I don’t have time to talk to you or anyone, about anything. If you want to make an appointment to see me, that might be arranged.’
Only one PC on the gate now, but he was watching them. Vital to keep Saltash down here. If they reached the gate-house and the police, Saltash would have him thrown out, or maybe even…
… Detained.
Don’t go thinking you’re ever going to leave here, Mr Robinson. You see that door? One day, when I’ve been long retired to the south of France, you’ll be straining to get your Zimmer frame through it.
But Gascoigne had not retired to the south of France.
‘Didn’t know…’ Something throbbed in Lol’s gut, and he started talking, too fast, to quell it. ‘Didn’t know, until today, that he’d gone to the Department of Health. And the House of Lords, now… a health spokesman. Bloody hell.’
‘Lord Shipston,’ Saltash said, ‘is a fine psychiatrist and a former pupil of mine. Now, I don’t know how you—’