The House of Susan Lulham

Phil Rickman

• Publisher: Corvus
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781782399582
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

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

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 LIKE old,’ 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.

‘Couldn’t believe it was so cheap, look.’

She was china-doll pretty, probably mid-thirties, not fat, just overweight. She wore a shiny, lime-green top and had short, dark hair with highlights, and an emerald nose-stud.

‘Jonno,’ she said, ‘he had this surveyor guy give it a going-over, and he couldn’t find nothing wrong, so…’

‘The vendors didn’t say anything?’

‘Ah well…’ Zoe tossing out a bitter smirk. ‘Turns out they was in property, you know what I mean? Obviously picked it up dirt-cheap when nobody else wanted it, cos of what happened. And when we come to view, they’re both here, him and his girlfriend, so naturally we was thinking they lived here. Bastards.’

‘Who told you, in the end?’

‘Oh… Anita – neighbour. We been here a month by then. She thought we knew. As if.’ Zoe sat back. ‘Can you fix it?’

She had one arm bared as if for an injection. Through the low, horizontal window, with its frame of reddish-wood, the October morning, under waxen cloud, was as white and ungiving as the room, where the only detail was in the white bookcase – half-filled with books on education, politics, psychology and, at the end, Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Hitchens’s God is Not Great and The Hole in the Sky by Matthew Stooke.

Between the conifers, across the city, Merrily could see the Cathedral tower, a fat warning finger. She wanted time to think. On her first deliverance course, they’d been shown a DVD of a woman claiming there were bad things happening in her house. The priest, sceptical, suspecting domestic abuse – the husband – had left, wanting time to think. The woman had been found later with an empty pill bottle and a radio tuned to easy-listening.

‘Who told you about me, Zoe, you mind me asking?’

‘Just a friend.’ Reluctantly. ‘She posted your number on Facebook.’

‘I see.’ Dear God. ‘Erm… could you tell me about the mirror again?’

It was over by the door, vertical, in a chrome frame and bright with reflections of white walls, white squashy sofa, light grey carpet, white, cordless phone on a small table near the sofa. And Merrily, in the unzipped black hoody over the well-worn cashmere sweater. No dog collar, just the smallest pectoral cross. She thought her face looked pale and blurred.

‘Smeared all over, look.’ Zoe shuddered. ‘Hadn’t barely woken up, and Jonno’s away, like I said.’

‘So what exactly did you think—?’

‘Christ!’ Zoe sprang away from the sofa’s bloated arm. ‘Susan Lulham lived here. Susan Lulham. You know what I mean?’

Only the lurid basics. Sophie, at the Cathedral, was putting together some detailed background.

‘And it was definitely lipstick.’

‘It… yeah.’

‘And you scrubbed it away. All of it.’

Zoe said nothing. A smartphone lay on the sofa, switched on to a display of coloured planets. If she’d taken pictures of the mirror with that, would they have shown only a reflection of the room?

‘Erm… was it your lipstick, Zoe?’

Ready for the sharp look, and it came, small features crowding.

‘Didn’t expect you’d be going at it like the police or something.’

Merrily smiled. The police had victims and offenders and sometimes a result. A police inquiry wasn’t a dance with invisible partners in a dark and possibly imaginary ballroom.

‘When…’ She wanted a cigarette, but it was unlikely anybody had smoked in here since the new carpet had gone down. ‘When you found out about Susan Lulham, what did your husband say?’

‘Said we finally had a reason why it was so cheap. He’s laughing. Nothing to worry about, kind of thing. Nothing, you know…’

‘Structural?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But maybe… laughing because he didn’t believe anything that had happened here in the past could have any lingering effect? Except in the imagination.’

There was a wedding picture on the bookcase. Jonno had thinning hair and a close beard. Zoe looked young and lovely.

‘Look, we was going through a bad patch before we come here. It was like a new start, you know what I mean? In a fantastic new house we couldn’t’ve afforded. No way is that bitch driving me out.’

‘So you haven’t told him,’ Merrily said. ‘About any of it.’

‘He’s busy all the time – head of department. Meetings, parent nights…’

‘Half term, isn’t it?’

‘He does courses. He’s on a course. In Bristol.’

Zoe folded her arms. Behind her was the TV screen, big as they came. The one she’d said had come on at three a.m., throwing out jagged music from a slasher movie on some all-night horror channel. The way lights came on in various rooms. On their own, came on, went off, came on again. She’d go upstairs and the bedroom light would be on, and she’d turn it off and it would be back on again when she went to bed, as if there was somebody already in there.

Then there was the night she’d awoken to a sound like laughing, throaty laughing, which Jonno said was the pipes.

‘Anyway,’ Zoe said, ‘I’d like it done before he comes back.’

‘And that’s…?’

‘Weekend.’

Zoe moved to the window. The flower bed outside was full of evergreen ground-cover. Below it was the terrace where she’d said the woman had been standing as the sun was going down. Short leather jacket, red leggings. Solid as you like, until she wasn’t there.

She. Her name had once been a lazy flourish of red, across a Hereford salon window. And, according to Zoe, across the mirror in lipstick the colour of fresh blood.

Suze.

2

Cutting

‘SEEMS SHE HATED her given name,’ Sophie Hill said in the Cathedral gatehouse office that afternoon. ‘Too neat and prissy, too old-fashioned. If you called her Susan she’d just scowl and ignore you.’

Merrily nodded. Her daughter Jane had once had her hair done at Suze’s salon, now a charity shop. Well overpriced, in Merrily’s view, but Jane had been sixteen, and Suze was as near as you could find to Hereford cool. Suze had been going out with this guy from EastEnders who she’d met when he’d presented her with a hairdressing award. Suze had broken up his marriage. Jane had been well impressed, but if she now knew that one of the teachers at her school had bought Suze’s house she hadn’t mentioned it.

‘Press cuttings.’

Sophie placing a laminate folder on the desk in front of Merrily, who looked up, curious.

‘Where did you get these?’

While diligently maintaining the deliverance database, Sophie trusted nothing you couldn’t keep in a fireproof filing cabinet. She plugged in the kettle by the sink.

‘I’ll make some tea. Susan’s mother’s a secretary at one of the solicitors’ offices across the road. We were at school together.’

‘You never told me that.’

‘Why would I?’ Sophie took down mugs, chained reading-glasses clinking against her pearls. ‘You don’t gossip, Merrily, when you work for…’

Her lips tightened. Not the deliverance ministry. Not the Bishop, to whom she was lay secretary. Sophie worked for the sandstone bookend to Hereford’s old city centre. The Cathedral. God, for Sophie, was a sun-soaked tower overlooking the most celebrated river in southern Britain.

‘Grace – Susan’s mother – keeps the cuttings in a file in her office. Well, you wouldn’t want them at home.’

‘No.’

From the folder, Merrily shook photocopies of newspaper stories and a glossy county magazine which fell open at a double-page photo-spread.

‘Bloody hell, Sophie.’

‘Ah.’ The glasses were back on Sophie’s nose as she peered over Merrily’s shoulder. ‘She did men as well. Specializing, for a time, in artistically shaven heads.’

In the picture, Susan Lulham held up a cut-throat razor, photoflash in the open blade. Behind it, her strong-boned face was blurred by lavish laughter below a wing of indigo hair. Underneath the magazine, Merrily found a photocopy, blackly over-inked, of a front page of the Hereford Times.

CITY STUNNED BY ‘BLOODBATH’ DEATH OF TOP STYLIST

‘Susan’s death, I’m afraid,’ Sophie said, ‘was like her private life. Entirely lacking in normal human restraint.’

‘You met her?’

‘Not since she was small. Long before she was excluded from school.’

Merrily looked up.

‘Passing ecstasy tablets aro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part One
• Part Two
• Also by Phil Rickman
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements