The Red Lion was a low-ceilinged old man’s pub in town. The carpet wore a red floral pattern stained with decades of spilled dark ale, and the tables were ring-marked and scratched. There were dartboards and a pool table, a little DJ booth with a frosted-glass panel around it, and a slightly raised stage with dirty black floorboards. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and an unnamed body odour that made my stomach turn.
It didn’t seem the type of place an upper-middle-class university lecturer like Dacre would frequent, but perhaps the incongruity was the point. Nobody would expect to find him here, and so he was free to conduct his sinister meetings in peace.
The car ride there had been hell. With a full noose of rubies around my neck, the lasso-stomach feeling was so intense I bent at the waist with agony, as though I was being sawn in half. My head exploded with white-silver sprays of stars, like the ones above the Observatory in Sister Maria’s visions. I heard myself scream as though from the end of a long dark tunnel, and then I passed out. When I woke up, Alice was stroking my hair.
‘Calm down, babes,’ I muttered to Sister Maria. ‘We’re on the case.’ Alice seemed to find this laugh-worthy.
The ‘Chamber’ session seemed already to have begun by the time we arrived at the Red Lion. Dacre was nowhere to be seen, but there was a private function room to the rear of the pub that rumbled with men’s voices and low laughter. Alice, Hafsah and I parked up in the table nearest the entrance – partly so we could confront him when he left, and partly so that every time the door opened, the influx of fresh air would disseminate some of the stale smoke.
I ordered us three pints of cider and blackcurrant, which we nursed in our dingy corner.
‘What do you think they’re doing in there?’ Alice asked, staring at the door to the back room.
‘Honestly, I’m not sure,’ I admitted. ‘There’s a chance Dacre is acting as a lone wolf, and this is just an innocent game of poker or something. But there’s also a chance these men are in on the whole sinister thing. What you said about Le Conte and his theology research . . . I don’t know. I just have a hunch that this is all connected.’
The rubies in my throat throbbed like a wound.
Where was the bone-deep desire to solve these mysteries coming from? Was it still from watching my parents mourn Janie? Or had it become something else entirely; borne of the centuries-old wrath of a hot-headed nun?
Or did I just want to save Alice?
Either way, I would solve this it if it killed me.
Straining my ears for anything that might float through the walls, I was out of luck. I had just about been able to pick out Dacre’s voice from the bar, but the walls of the old building were thick, and I couldn’t be certain. However, I had better success from the ladies’ loos, which were back to back with the function room. Hunched over a toilet without a seat, with my ear pressed to the wall, I got much clearer snatches of conversation:
‘Ritual.’
‘Feathering.’
‘Hysteria.’
‘Devil.’
‘Kerr.’
‘God.’
And then finally, the one that made me see red. ‘Wolfe.’
Alice. They were talking about Alice, in the same breath as the devil.
There was a great burst of heat in my ruby necklace that brought me to my knees on the filthy tiles.
Pure, unfettered fury; not just mine, but Sister Maria’s too.
She was the devil because they made her so.
I thought of angry women exorcised on stages, burned at the stake as witches, strapped down to metal tables and tortured with electrodes in private asylums.
I will make this right, I thought, with a desperation that robbed my lungs of air.
The scorch mark in my neck settled into an almost-pleasant pulse of warmth, as though Sister Maria were sayingthank you, thank you, thank you, and I vowed to do her justice. To do them all justice.
Around an hour later, the session was adjourned, and the men filed out of the room. I recognised Le Conte, as well as a tall, black-whiskered man I was sure was on the board of governors. He’d attended Mordue’s chapel address after Poppy was killed. He’d listened to the dean’s trite sentiments and bare-faced lies just like the rest of us, and he hadn’t said a word.
As the men started to file out, Le Conte offered Alice a nod of recognition as though he hadn’t just been discussing her in a filthy back room. If he was at all suspicious that we were there, he didn’t show it, although he was surely aware this was not a regular student haunt. The others followed him out, shuffling arms into black wool coats and exchanging inanities about the muffled snow falling on the street.
Dacre, however, stayed at the bar, resting his elbow on the sticky varnished wood and leaning over to talk to the blonde barmaid. She was young and slim, and from her expression looked like she’d much rather he wasn’t there.