The House of Susan Lulham E-Book

Phil Rickman

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The Diocesan Exorcist for Hereford must reveal the haunting presence of Susan Lulham... First rate crime with demons that go bump in the night. - Daily Mail The angular, modernist house was an unexpected bargain for Zoe and Jonathan Mahonie - newcomers to the city of Hereford and apparently unaware that the house's pristine, white interior walls had been coated with the lifeblood of a previous owner. How is Merrily Watkins, Diocesan Exorcist for Hereford, to know if Zoe Mahonie is lying or deluded when she claims that the wrathful Susan Lulham is still in residence? Then comes another bloody death. Who is the real killer? A MERRILY WATKINS SERIES NOVELLA

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Foreword

Part One

1 Imaginary ballroom

2 Cutting

3 The night job

4 Mostly sad old people

5 Fifty-three hits

6 She’s here

7 Raw liver

Part Two

8 Your mate

9 Expert witness

10 Her

11 Nice and bold

12 Keys

13 Bang!

14 Bells

15 Sham

16 Undawn

17 Spite

18 Diffident

19 Last-chance saloon

20 Travelling light

21 Send the light in

22 Remembrance

23 Video

Acknowledgements

An interview with the Reverend Merrily Watkins, featured in Newsnet magazine…

IN THE BISHOP’S SECRET SERVICE

She’s a single parent who smokes ‘15… OK maybe 20 some days,’ has to have her cassocks shortened and mumbles ‘Oh shit!’ when she spills her tea. Even some colleagues in the clergy prefer to avoid her.

JEMIMA LESSING meets the Rev. Merrily Watkins, Diocesan Deliverance Consultant.

YOU genuinely don’t know what to expect. You’ve seen the films with those dour, laconic priests in black hats with doctors’ bags containing flasks of holy water and a scuffed Bible. You tell yourself it can’t be like this in real life and yet you’re almost disappointed when it isn’t.

Opening the front door of Ledwardine Vicarage – 17th century, crookedly timber-framed – Merrily Watkins is wearing a light blue sweatshirt and clutching a smelly rag and a bucket into which you can’t help taking a nervous glance in case it’s full of green bile projected across the room by some satanic seven-year-old.

The Reverend Watkins smiles and raises her eyes in the general direction of heaven. ‘Sorry about this,’ she says, ‘but the cat’s just been sick…’

Her smiles tend to be apologetic and her eyes are full of a bruised humour. She is 39 years old, a widow with a daughter of 18. Yes, she agrees she was probably a political appointee in the first instance. A certain controversial bishop of Hereford wanted a woman at what Watkins calls ‘the coal face of Christianity’.

She means deliverance – the comparatively new name for exorcism. It’s not generally known that every diocese in the country must have a Deliverance Minister, whose job involves dealing with allegedly haunted houses and people who believe themselves to be psychically damaged.

This is probably the most derided and thankless role in the Church. ‘In the movies, it’s all over in a blast of dry ice or whatever, and everybody’s sobbing in relief. In reality, most times you really don’t know whether you’ve been any use or not. Oh God, am I supposed to have said that?’

Merrily Watkins is hunched over the pine refectory table in the vicarage kitchen, shaking the last Silk Cut from the packet. She’s a small woman and the vicarage seems vast around her. It has seven bedrooms and an attic apartment occupied by Jane, her daughter. Watkins’s husband died in a motorway crash before she was ordained. There are rumours of a boyfriend, but he evidently doesn’t live in.

‘Look,’ she says, ‘to be honest, some people in the Church are wary of deliverance, so we keep a low profile. We’re like…’

‘Spooks?’ I suggest. ‘In the MI5 sense?’

‘Mmm.’ She lights her cigarette. ‘The Bishop’s secret service. Cool.’ The smile fades. ‘Actually, it’s not. Half the cases I’m brought into involve people with mental or psychological problems. The difficulty lies in deciding which are genuine. If you get it wrong, you can make things so much worse… and I mean worse.’

Merrily Watkins was reading law at Liverpool University when she began going out with a fellow student and became pregnant. She gave up the course and says she’s not entirely sorry. She had all kinds of idealistic ideas which she suspects would never have been realized.

She’s guarded about how she became attracted to the Church, talks vaguely of a moral problem in her private life and spiritual assistance coming at the right time. She shakes her head helplessly. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, just that it sounds so woolly.’

When the Blairite bishop of Hereford, Michael Hunter, offered her the role of Diocesan Deliverance Consultant, she knew it was a set-up. ‘He liked to surround himself with youngish people – and women.’

Watkins says she took the job, without fully realizing what was involved, because of a personal experience here in the vicarage. ‘Noises… cold spots… fleeting images of things. I genuinely didn’t know whether it was something paranormal or a symptom of stress or nervous exhaustion. But people in the Church responded to my questions with… embarrassment, I suppose. Which made me feel even more isolated.

‘It still amazes me when I meet a member of the clergy who purports to believe in a supernatural God, but rejects the possibility of anything else. At the same time, it has to be said that nobody gullible is going to last long in this job.’

FOREWORD

THE ANGULAR, MODERNIST house was an unexpected bargain for Zoe and Jonathan Mahonie – newcomers to the city of Hereford and apparently unaware that the house’s pristine white interior walls had been coated with the lifeblood of a previous owner.

How is Merrily Watkins, diocesan exorcist for Hereford, to know if Zoe Mahonie is lying or deluded when she claims that the wrathful Susan Lulham is still in residence?

Then comes another bloody death.

Who is the real killer?

The House of Susan Lulham first appeared as a short story in the Oxfam anthology OxCrimes, in May 2014. After the short story appeared in OxCrimes some readers suggested there was more to be told. They were not wrong. Here’s the whole story, exploring the hornet’s nest of exorcism in a secular age. More than five times as long, this novella continues the story to its eerie conclusion.

PART ONE

While unquiet spirits do not themselves produce poltergeist phenomena, it may well be that they can act on living persons to cause them to produce psycho-kinetic effects…

Deliverance

an essential resource for anyone seeking effectively to understand and help people who believe themselves to be psychically disturbed.

SPCK 1996

Ed. Michael Perry

1

Imaginary ballroom

‘I DON’T LIKEold,’ Zoe Mahonie said. ‘Get creeped out in churches. Sorry, but I do. Old places, you know what I mean? It’s why we came here.’

‘This city?’

‘This house,’ Zoe said.

It wasn’t old, not in a way Zoe would see, and yet it was. Screened by the shaggy suburban conifers of Aylestone Hill, it was like an offcut from an arts centre from the 1960s: precast concrete, split-level, a jutting conservatory. Some architect’s strident statement, once alone, now with a small executive housing estate wrapped around it. Like a gag, Merrily thought as Zoe leaned into a puffy arm of the white leather sofa.