A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Or the will of God?’

  ‘From what I gather, your mother was into a particularly mystical form of High Church—’

  He turned his chair away with a wrench. ‘No. No. No! I will not.’

  ‘Perhaps she found the connections. Perhaps she was a particular influence on McAllman’s ministry.’ Merrily stood with her back to the door. ‘Any point in asking you if you did actually help to cover up a less-than-hot-blooded murder?’

  His eyes burned.

  ‘All that matters is Ned Bain thinks you did,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Edward is a despicable nonentity.’

  ‘Not in pagan circles he isn’t. I mean, I suppose it’s easy to say that’s why he became a pagan. It’s rough, natural, wild... very much a reaction against your mother’s suffocating churchiness.’

  He rose up. ‘Blasphemer!’

  Merrily lost it, bounced from the door. ‘Do you know what real blasphemy is, Nick? It’s a man with a nine-inch cross.’

  ‘I will not—’

  ‘Do you sterilize it first?’

  ‘May God have mercy on you!’

  ‘Only, I was there when you exorcized Marianne Starkey. Who...’ Merrily prayed swiftly for forgiveness. ‘Who’s now prepared to make a detailed statement.’

  A lie. But she had him. He stared at her.

  ‘We’ve prepared a press release, Nick. Unless she hears from me by seven o’clock, my secretary’s been instructed to fax it to the Press Association in London.’

  Ellis folded his arms.

  Merrily looked at her watch. ‘I make it you’ve got just under an hour.’

  ‘To do what?’ He leaned back, expressionless.

  ‘Put on your white messiah gear,’ Merrily said. ‘Get out there and tell them it’s all over. Tell them to go home. Or lead them all up to the village hall and keep them there.’

  Ellis spread his hands. ‘They’ll be there, anyway. The police wanted them off the streets. I believe the Prossers have taken them to the hall.’

  ‘Keep them there then. Tell them you don’t want to risk their immortal souls by having them stepping onto the contaminated ground of St Michael’s.’

  He shrugged. ‘OK, sure.’ He leaned back, two fingers along the side of his head, curious. ‘But I don’t understand. Why do you care?’

  She didn’t follow him. She stayed on the edge of the schoolyard, near the police vans, and saw lights eventually come on in what she reckoned was Ellis’s house. Dr Coll came out of the surgery, but didn’t so much as glance at her. Perhaps Judith hadn’t told him. At the same time, two policemen went in, presumably to obtain statements from the injured man and his wife. Merrily resisted an impulse to yell at Dr Coll, ‘Why did you kill Mrs Wilshire?’ in the hope that some copper might hear.

  The village was comparatively quiet again. The lights were still few and bleary. Or maybe it was her eyes. Was there more she could have done? If there was, she couldn’t think what it might be. She was tired. She prayed that Ellis would see sense.

  A few minutes later, she saw him coming down from the council estate, a Hollywood ghost in his white monk’s habit. He walked past the school and didn’t turn his head towards her. Leaving twenty or thirty yards between them, she followed him to the hall. A cameraman spotted him and ran ahead of him and crouched in the road, recording his weary, stately progress to his place of worship. A journalist, puffing out white steam, ran back to the pub to alert the others. Merrily prayed that they were all going to be very disappointed. Like the Christians.

  ‘With respect, Father, what was the point of us coming at all?’

  One man on his feet in the crowded hall. It was the biker with the black dragon.

  Ellis brought his hands together. ‘You came here because you were moved by the Holy Spirit. We must all obey those impulses which we recognize as a response to the will of God.’

  ‘But,’ the man persisted, ‘what does God want us to do?’

  Ellis let the question hang a while, then he said softly, ‘You all saw what happened earlier to our brother. I can tell you that two men have been charged with assault causing actual bodily harm. That will be the least of their punishment. But, in allowing that to happen, God was telling us that a public demonstration is no longer the answer. The answer is prayer.’

  ‘Praise God,’ someone cried, but it was half-hearted. They wanted...

  Blood? Merrily sat at the back, demoralized even in victory.

  ‘There will be no more... violence.’ Ellis emphasized it with open hands. There was desultory applause. ‘But our task is still far from over.’

  He told them they must pray for the intervention of St Michael to keep his church out of the hands of Satan, out of the red claws of the dragon. And if they prayed, if their faith in God was strong enough, the Devil would fail tonight. The Lord would yet intervene.

  A frisson went through the hall; there were tentative moans.

  ‘God’ – Ellis’s arms were suddenly extended, ramrod stiff – ‘arises!’

  A man arose from the floor, his own arms raised, a mirror image of the priest. Others followed, with a squeaking and scraping of chairs.

  Hundreds of arms reaching for the ceiling.

  A woman began to gabble, ‘God, God, God, God, God!’ orgasmically.

  Soon, Merrily found she was the only one seated and was obliged to scramble to her feet. She looked up and saw that Ellis – who must surely know that this was as good as over, that there would be no more generating paranoia, no more wholesale exorcism, no more internal ministry – was aglow again, his eyes like foglamps, and they were focused, through the wintry forest of stiffened arms... focused on her.

  ‘God arises!’ Ellis snarled.

  Merrily left the hall. He was showing her that even in defeat his power was undiminished. That the Holy Spirit was with him.

  ‘A remarkable man, Mrs Watkins,’ said Judith Prosser.

  She was standing in the porch, in her long black quilted coat.

  ‘Yes,’ Merrily admitted.

  Judith gently closed the doors on the assembly. She contemplated Merrily with a wryly tilted smile. ‘I take it,’ she said lightly, ‘that you’ve made your decision.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Your “exorcism in reverse”,’ Judith said. ‘The laying to rest of the poor moth in the jar.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  ‘Jeffery will have left now, for his lodge. But perhaps this was not such a good idea.’

  Inside the hall, a hymn was beginning. It would end in tongues. Ellis and his followers were, for the time being, contained. Jane, too, by Gomer and Sophie. Merrily had a couple of hours yet before she was due at St Michael’s. She walked out into the cold and looked down on the meagre glimmer of the village. She shivered inside Jane’s duffel coat.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and do it.’

  49

  Cashmere and Tweed

  JANE HAD NEVER seen Gomer quite like this before, although she’d heard the tales. The legend.

  Ciggy glowing malevolently in the centre of his teeth, like a ruby in the face of some Indian idol, he rode the mini-JCB into the middle of the field to where the earth was banked. The digger was the size of a heavy-duty ride-on mower. A big yellow Tonka toy. Nev’s truck was parked a few yards back, engine running, headlights full beam. Next to it, at a slight angle, was Gomer’s Land Rover, with Sophie inside.

  In any other situation, Jane would have found this deeply, shockingly thrilling, but tonight she only wanted to get it over with, and find Mum.

  This was Prosser’s ground, turned over to the archaeologists who’d dug trenches all over the place, and then paid fat Nev to replace the tons of removed soil. Up here with Mum yesterday, Gomer had noticed a part that was not professionally finished. Not how he’d taught Nev to do it. Not seeded, but clumsily planted with turf. Not made good to Gomer Parry Plant Hire standards.

  Gomer had taken it up with Nev. Nev had been offended. Nev sa
id he’d left a bloody perfect job, banked up and seeded tidy.

  Now, it could be that Gareth Prosser had buried some sheep here, but no sheep grazed this area, and it was a long way to come for a dull, lazy bugger like Gareth.

  ‘Eirion!’ Gomer yelled. ‘Do me a favour, boy, back the ole Land Rover up a few feet, then we can see the top o’ the mound.’

  ‘OK.’ Eirion ran through the mud.

  ‘Jane!’ Sophie called from the truck. ‘Either you come in here, or I’m coming out for you.’ Knowing Jane was quite keen to sneak away and snatch a look at the ruins of the church across the brook, to see if they were all lit up.

  ‘Oh, Sophie, Gomer might need some help.’

  ‘Very well.’ The truck’s passenger door creaked open. There was a squelch. ‘Blast!’

  Jane grinned. Sophie was not the kind to carry wellies in the boot.

  The bucket of the little digger went into the soft bank like a spoon into chocolate fudge. Gomer had thought this mini-JCB might be more appropriate than a big one, in the circumstances, and also less conspicuous. It couldn’t be an awful lot less conspicuous, with all the noise Gomer was making.

  ‘This is quite ridiculous.’ Sophie was now limping across the field, serious mud-splashes on her camel coat. ‘I don’t know how I ever agreed—’

  ‘You didn’t agree. We dragged you along. I’m sorry, Sophie. You’ve been, like, really brilliant today.’

  ‘Shut up, Jane.’

  ‘We could have told the police, I suppose, but they probably couldn’t have done anything without going to a magistrate for a warrant or something, and that would have meant tomorrow.’

  ‘Mind yourselves!’ Gomer bawled. The arm of the digger swung, the bucket dipped with a slurping, sucking sound. Jane wondered if Minnie’s exasperated spirit was watching him now.

  The bucket clanged and shivered. ‘—ucking Nora!’ Gomer snarled. The digger’s hydraulic feet gripped at the slippery earth, the whole machine bucked and Gomer rose from the seat like a cowboy. He turned and spat out his cigarette end. ‘Eirion! Can you get the ole torch to that, see what we got there?’

  But it was a just a big rock, too big for the digger to shift. Gomer and Eirion had to manhandle it out of the way. It took ages; they both got filthy.

  After about half an hour, there was a new bank of earth, three feet high, at right angles to the one they were excavating. It was like some First World War landscape. Jane wandered over to the digger.

  ‘Gomer, look, suppose Sophie and I go back and see what’s happened to Mum? Is that OK?’

  ‘Sure t’be.’ Gomer sat back in the headlight beams, his glasses brown-filmed. ‘We en’t gettin’ nowhere fast yere. Bloody daft idea, most likely. Gotter put all this shit back, too, ’fore we leaves.’

  ‘It was worth a try, Gomer. You aren’t usually wrong. OK, look, we’ll get back just as soon as we—’

  ‘Mr Parry!’ Eirion’s face turned round from the gouged-out bank.

  ‘Ar?’

  ‘Oh bloody hell, Mr Parry.’ Eirion slurped desperately out of the clay. He dropped the lamp and his muddy hands went to his mouth. Jane heard him vomiting, the sick slapping into the mud.

  Gomer was out of his seat, grabbing the hand lamp from where it had rolled. ‘Stay there, Jane. Bloody stay there!’

  Jane froze where she was, in the clinging mud. All those crass remarks she’d made to Mum after Mumford had been, after the radio reports. It should have been her, not Eirion. She deserved to face this horror.

  Sophie was hopping towards her. ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’ve found something.’

  ‘Then let’s call the police.’

  ‘He needs to make sure, Sophie.’

  Realizing, with a horrible, freezing feeling that Gomer wasn’t in any position to make sure of this. Only she was.

  She would have to face it.

  ‘Sorry.’ Eirion came back. His baseball cap had gone. His face gleamed with greasy clay and sweat. There were touchingly childish mud streaks around his mouth where he’d wiped it with his hand. ‘That was inexcusable.’

  ‘Irene...?’

  ‘It was the smell, I suppose.’ He shuddered. ‘I just put my hand down this kind of fissure and this whole wall of stuff came down and like... Oh God.’ He turned away, pushing slimy fingers through his hair.

  Gomer came back for the spade.

  ‘Is it?’ Jane was shocked at the weakness of her own voice.

  ‘’Ang about,’ Gomer said non-committally.

  Sophie said, her voice dry and clipped, ‘Is it, Mr Parry?’

  ‘Well... likely.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, give me that torch!’ Sophie snatched the rubber-covered lamp from a caterpillar of the mini-JCB and stalked off into the murk.

  Gomer followed her with the spade, called back over his shoulder, ‘Better stay there, girl. En’t nothin’ you can do.’

  ‘I kind of think there is, actually,’ Jane said sadly. She slithered after him towards the bank. Eirion plunged into the mud, grabbed her.

  ‘No...’

  ‘Irene, I’m the only one of us who’s actually seen her.’

  ‘Jane, believe me... that is not going to help you.’

  ‘What?’

  Even over the clatter of three engines, she heard Sophie’s moan. Ahead of her, the newly unearthed soil and clay was shining almost white in the intersecting beams, and had that multihued, stretched look, like when you bent a Mars bar in half. Sophie came back, slapping dirt from her hands.

  ‘Go back. Now!’

  ‘Sophie...?’

  ‘It’s a woman.’

  ‘Could it be Barb—?’

  ‘Cashmere and tweed,’ Sophie said. ‘She’s wearing cashmere and tweed.’

  ‘What does she look like? I’ve seen her, you see. When she first came up to Mum at the funeral...’

  ‘Come on, Jane.’

  ‘I’m not a little kid, you know. Let me just—’

  ‘Jane.’ Eirion took her hand in his mud-encrusted paw. ‘We don’t know what she looks like.’

  Sophie said coldly, ‘Someone seems to have hacked her face to pieces before they buried her.’

  Sophie’s camel coat was ruined.

  50

  Scumbag

  ALONE IN THE yard, Robin looked back at the farmhouse, lit by the underfed porchlight, and it was like he was finally waking up.

  Here were the once-white walls, stained and crumbling to reveal rubble underneath. There were the four front windows, small and sunken, like squinting eyes.

  Then it just, like, hit him in the gut: What a dump! What was he doing here, stranded in this squalid hovel, with a coughing stove and a pile of wet wood, and his wife coming and going like some kind of elemental spirit, and his portfolios coming back marked ‘Piece of shit’, this whole godforsaken place rejecting him?

  All day he’d felt a madness around him, wild fluctuations of mood, chasms of disaster opening up at his feet, like the potholes in the yard... and then the sun suddenly breaking out again, the puddles streaked with rainbows.

  I still think Kirk could be persuaded to listen to reason.

  The elegant and cultured Ned Bain could change it all about, even though Bain was doing this not for Robin, whom he didn’t really need, but for Betty, whom he apparently did. Whom everyone did.

  Even witches talked in hushed tones about Betty. There were all kinds of people in Wicca, and the ones you needed to be most wary of tended to be the men – guys who’d read about group sex and ritual flagellation, guys who’d heard you could learn to magic your dick into staying hard all night long. Every coven attracted a few of these, and they never stuck it long, and they were the trash end of the Craft. And at the other end were women like Betty, about whom even witches talked in hushed tones. I was very much looking forward to meeting her, Ned Bain had said. Word gets around.

  And yet, since Betty had returned home, she and Bain seemed hardly to have spoken, as though neith
er wanted the other to read their private agenda. Because there sure as hell were private agendas here, even stupid and decidedly unpsychic Robin could sense that. Maybe – like high priest and high priestess – Bain and Betty were communicating without words. Robin’s fists tightened. He couldn’t bear the thought of that.

  The night was as cold as you could get without inches of snow on the ground, but it was bright, with a last-quarter moon and a scattering of stars. So what, in the names of all the gods, were they waiting for?

  The church itself was primed for its reversion to the Old Religion. A hundred fat candles were in place, plus garden torches and sconces and fireworks for when it was all over. There was a purposeful silence around the place, unbroken even by crazy Vivvie and fluty-voiced Max. Even the god-damned Christians had cooled their hymn-singing.

  Robin had had to get out of the house; he couldn’t stand the tension, had kept getting up and walking around, irritating the witches who were sitting in the parlour, hanging out, waiting, their robes – in view of the extreme cold, they were at least starting this one robed – stowed in bags at their feet, and the crown of lights ready in the centre of the room. But whose house was this anyway? He’d wanted Betty to come outside with him, confide in him. She was a great priestess but she was still his wife, for heaven’s sake.

  But Betty had avoided his eyes.

  Was there something she didn’t want him to know? Something secretly confided to her by Bain? He who would later join with her in the Great Rite – simulated. Simulated, right? Robin’s nails dug into his palms. Bain was a handsome and, he guessed, very sexual guy.

  Usually – invariably, in fact – the hours before any sabbat were lit with this gorgeous anticipation. Tonight was the sabbat. An event likely to be more resonant, in Robin’s view, than the collapse of the Berlin Wall, than the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese. This should be the finest night of his life. So how come, as he walked back toward the house, all he felt was a sick apprehension?