by Phil Rickman
And yet, since Betty had returned home, she and Bain seemed hardly to have spoken, as though neither 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?
The pub car park, the point where the village streets come together, is full of nothing much. Coppers and reporters, yes – but where were all the funny Christians, then?
Gomer leaves the truck on the double-yellows outside the school, and that boy Eirion brings the Land Rover in behind him. Eirion’s going along with Mrs Hill to tell the coppers what they’ve dug up. Better coming from somebody cultured, see, so the cops move faster. Besides which, Gomer and young Jane need to find the vicar in a hurry, on account of there’s somebody out there has done for Barbara Thomas, then took what Gomer judges to be a log-splitter to her face, before her was planted in Prosser’s ground.
One of the telly cameramen is pointing his lens at the mini-JCB. A bored-looking woman reporter asks, ‘What have you been digging?’
‘Sprouts,’ Gomer tells her. He’s spotted a light in the old school that’s now become Dr Coll’s surgery. ‘Why don’t we give this a try, girl?’ he asks Jane. ‘Vicar was in yere earlier, we knows that.’
They walk into the yard. Don’t seem two minutes since this old place was a working school. Don’t seem two minutes since Gomer had friends went to this school. That’s life, too bloody short. Too short for bloody old wallop and bullshit.
So, who should they meet but Dr Coll himself in the doorway, coming out. Gomer stands his ground, and Dr Coll’s got to take a step back into the building. Has to be a reason, going way back, that Gomer don’t care for doctors, but he bloody don’t, and that’s the only mercy about the way Minnie went: no long years of being at the mercy of no bloody doctors.
‘Look, I’m afraid surgery’s long over.’
‘It bloody en’t, pal.’ Gomer lets the youngster in, and then slams the door behind them all.
‘I know you, don’t I?’ Dr Coll says, with a vague bit of a smile. Must be close on sixty now, but he never seems to change. Dapper, the word is. Beard a bit grey now, but never allowed to go ratty.
‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire,’ Gomer says.
‘Ah, yes.’
‘Never goes near no bloody doctors meself, but you might recall as how you used to peddle drugs to a friend o’ mine, Danny Thomas.’
‘I really don’t think so.’ The smile coming off like grease on a rag.
‘And Terry Penney, remember? But that’s all water up the ole brook, now, ennit?’
‘If you’re trying to tell me,’ Dr Coll says severely, ‘that you’re hoping I’ll supply you with proscribed drugs, I think you should decide to leave very quickly. In case you didn’t notice, there’s a police van parked directly outside.’
‘Shows what kind of a bloody nerve you got then, ennit, Doc?’
‘Mr Parry—’
‘Them coppers knew what we knew, they’d be in yere, turnin’ the place over.’
‘Are you drunk, man?’
Young Jane picks up the thread now. ‘We know you killed that old lady in New Radnor. You’ve probably killed, like, loads of people. You’re probably like that Dr Shipman.’
‘All right!’ Dr Coll turning nasty at last. ‘I haven’t got all night to listen to a lot of ludicrous nonsense. Out of here, the pair of you!’
Gomer shoves himself back against the door. Dr Coll’s a fair bit younger than him. And taller, but then most blokes are. Don’t make no odds when you’re madder than what they are, and Gomer is sorely mad now.
‘Guess who just got dug up, Doc.’
Dr Coll tries to grab the door handle, but Gomer knocks his wrist away with his own wrist, which hurts like buggery. Gomer grits his teeth.
‘Remember Barbara Thomas? Come to see you the other week, ’bout her sister, Menna? Likely you’re one o’ the last people poor ole Barbara talked to ’fore some bugger ripped the face off her then planted her in Prosser’s bottom field, down where the harchaeologists was.’
Colour drains out of the doc’s face something beautiful. Gomer’s well heartened by this.
‘Course, the cops don’t know Barbara seen you ’fore she got done. Cops don’t know nothin’ about you an’ Weal, the bloody Hindwell Trust, all the doolally patients you recommended to Weal for sortin’ their wills...’
‘You’re making no sense to me.’ Dr Coll coming over with all the conviction of a bloke caught with a vanload of videos at two in the morning saying he’s just been to a bloody car boot sale.
‘Well, then.’ Gomer folds his arms. ‘I’ll be straight with you, Dr Death. All we wants to know right now is where we finds the vicar. The lady vicar? We finds the vicar, we’ll likely have that much to talk about, could be well into tomorrow ’fore we gets round to makin’ police statements ’bout anythin’ else – you gets my meanin’. Leavin’ quite a bit o’ time for a feller to pack his Range Rover with money and bugger off.’
‘I’ve got a wife and family,’ Dr Coll says. He blurts it out like he’s just suddenly realized. Anybody else but a bloody doctor and Gomer could almost feel sorry for him.
‘Where’s my mum?’ young Jane screams in his face.
A large chalice of red wine stood on the temple altar, with the scourge and the handbell, the wand for air, the sword for fire. Royally pissed off by now, sitting just inside the door, on the doormat for Chrissakes, Robin wanted to suggest they share it out or at least open another bottle.
Across the parlour, Betty sensed his impatience and sent him a small warning smile. The moment was close to intimate. Her face was warm and young and wonderful in the glow from the Tilley lamp which sat in the centre of the floor – what would have been the centre of the circle if they’d drawn one. But tonight’s circle would be drawn outside.
If it ever happened, though they were robed and ready. Maybe this was no night for naked, and anyway Robin could appreciate the need for a sense of ceremony. He also loved to see Betty in the loose, green, medieval gown she’d made herself two, three years ago. Robin just wore this kind of grey woollen tunic; he didn’t have
anything more ceremonial. But then he would be peripheral tonight, an extra, a spear-carrier.
Ned Bain, in a long, black robe, sat on a bare flagstone below the window, opposite the hearth, where the heatless twig-fire burned. He was obviously listening, but Robin suspected he was not listening to Max.
In preparation, Max had led a meditation on the nature of the border, and read to them, in translation, an old Welsh poem about the death of Pwyll, son of Llywarch the Old, who sang, ‘When my son was killed, his hair was bloody and flowed on both banks of the brook.’ Robin had been painting it in his head – that long, bloodied hair was a gift to an illustrator. Wicca worked in strange ways; he himself might not be able to see spirits or know the future, but his imagination could be sent into instant freeflow by any image you cared to pitch him. Hell, that was something.
‘On this holy Celtic night,’ Max intoned, ‘let us close our eyes and picture – all around us – the ghostly monuments of our ancestors. We are in a wide, silent valley, the stones in a grey mist around us. But over it soars Burfa Hill, and we can dimly make out the notch marking the rising of the sun at the equinox. In the black of the night is born the bright day, the new spring. And we, too, shall be born again into a new day, a new era.’
That was it. There was silence. The stones had loomed out of the mist for Robin, his soul reached for the new day, but he dispatched it back to his subconscious. He’d had enough. He shifted uncomfortably on his mat and, across the room, closest to the altar, Betty saw him and knew he was about to say something.
Instead, she did. But first, she smiled sadly in the lamplight, and it was for him, and Robin thought his heart would burst with love.
And then Betty said, very quietly, ‘Once, not so very long ago, there were two stepbrothers...’
Jane and Gomer hurried across the street, making for the hall. It was, Jane thought, crazy to let the doctor just go, but Gomer said that if they didn’t want to spend the rest of the night in some police station, they didn’t have a choice.
The doctor had told them Mum had gone off with Father Ellis, and he knew Father Ellis was up in the hall, conducting a service. The doctor had then put his dignity back together, walked out across the yard, his medical bag swinging from his wrist, as if he was off on a house call.
Scumbag.
You couldn’t miss the village hall, with that cross lit up on the roof. As soon as you turned up the track to the steps, you could hear the singing. A song which had no tune but lots of tunes, and endless words but no sense.
Jane started racing up the steps, saw that the hall was blazing with light. But, at the same time, she became aware that Gomer, behind her, was panting quite painfully. It had been a gruelling night and you tended to forget how old he was and how many roll-ups he smoked. She stopped halfway up and waited for him to catch up.
She reckoned afterwards, after the glass in the porch burst and the flames came out in a great gouging whooomp of heat, that Gomer’s lungs had probably saved their lives.
51
Laid to Unrest
THE LAUREL ALLEY.
Later, its leaves would be crisp with frost. Merrily could see only the alley’s outline, rippling black walls under the worn pebble moon.
‘We could use a torch.’
‘Amply bright enough,’ Judith said, ‘if you know the way.’
Which she, of course, did. She took Merrily’s arm, leading her down to the fork in the drive. ‘Mind the step, now.’ Merrily remembered Marianne’s hand on her arm, as the police burst through. Things you oughta know. Judith’s grip was firmer. Judith was without trepidation. What did Judith believe in? Not ghosts, perhaps not even God – except maybe some strictly local deity, the guardian spirit of Old Hindwell.
At the corner of the rectory, where the drive split, Merrily looked for a car, but there was just an empty space. J.W. Weal had gone to don his Masonic apron. It must look like a postage stamp on him. Lodge night: a crude ritual structure to further stiffen his already rigid life.
The police had gone, too, now. There seemed to have been a winding-down of the action at the gates of St Michael’s. Nothing to see or hear when Merrily and Judith had walked past the farm entrance.
They dropped down to the tarmac and then the crazy paving to the lawn. Sharp conifers were all around, pricking stars. Merrily glanced back once at the grey-stone rectory, at the angular bulge of the bay window: lightless, no magisterial shadows of furniture, no frenetic flickering, crackling...
Stop it!
‘Something bothering you, Mrs Watkins?’
‘Nothing at all, Mrs Prosser.’
At the end of the lawn, pale grey and shining slightly, was the squat conical building, the wine store... ice house... now tomb. Merrily stumbled on a lump in the lawn; Judith’s arm easily found her waist, helped her up. Merrily tightened inside. It was about here that Weal had wrapped his arms around her, lifting her, whirling her around. Men-na.
Merrily shivered suddenly, and Judith knew.
‘You’re frightened.’
‘I’m cold.’ She clutched her blue airline bag to her side.
‘As you wish.’ Judith bit the end of one of her leather gloves to pull it off and produced from a pocket something that jingled: the keys to the mausoleum. ‘But it will, I’m afraid, be even colder in here.’
When Betty had been talking for a while – calm, succinct, devastating – someone actually got up, went over and switched on all the lights. Hard reality time.
It was a starkly meaningful moment. Robin stared in cold dismay around the parlour, with its damp patches, its dull fire of smoky, sizzling green twigs, its sad assembly of robed witches and the crown of lights on the floor like some unfinished product of a kids’ handicraft class left behind at the end of the semester.
It all looked like some half-assed fancy dress party that never quite took off. The air was sick with confusion, incomprehension, embarrassment – affecting everyone here, except for Ned Bain, who was still entirely relaxed in the lotus position, his butt on the stone-flag floor.
And Betty, in her green medieval robe, remained expressionless, having come out with stuff about Ned that Robin, with his famously huge imagination, couldn’t begin to fathom how she’d gotten hold of. Was that where she’d been last night – obtaining Ned Bain’s life story? And never saying a word to Robin because he was this big-mouthed asshole whom all subtlety deserted the second he put away his paints.
He felt royally betrayed, shafted up the ass, by everyone. Like, how many of them already knew this? How many knew that Nicholas Ellis was Bain’s stepbrother, who covered up for his old lady after she stabbed Bain’s father to death? Was this some British Wiccan conspiracy, to which only he was denied access?
But Robin only had to look at Vivvie’s pinched and frozen face to be pretty damn sure that few, if any, of them had been aware of it all. They might’ve known about Ned’s father and the lingering bitterness over his killing, but not about the real identity of the saintly Nick Ellis.
‘Ned...’ Max came to his feet, nervously massaging his massive beard. ‘I do rather think we’re due an explanation.’
All of them, except for Betty, were now looking over at black-robed Ned Bain, still relaxed, but moody now, kind of saturnine. Betty, having rolled a grenade into the room, just gazed down into her lap.
Ned brought his hands together, elbows tucked inside his knees, the sleeves of his robe falling back. He smiled ruefully, slowly shaking his head. Then, in the face of Max’s evident disapproval, he brought out a packet of cigarettes and a small lighter, and they had to wait while he organized himself a smoke.
‘First of all, what Betty says is broadly correct.’ He sounded kind of detached, like it was dope he was smoking. ‘My father married Frances Wesson, and our intelligent, freethinking, liberal household changed almost overnight into a strict Christian, grace-at-mealtimes, church-twice-on-Sunday bloody purgatory. Icons on every wall, religious tracts on every flat surface... and t
he beatific face of my smug, pious little stepbrother. Well, of course I hated him. I hated him long before he lied to the police.’
There was another smoky silence.
‘So Simon Wesson... changed his name?’ Max prompted.
‘I believe Ellis was Frances’s maiden name. She’d already met the appalling Marshall McAllman during one of his early missions to the UK, but this only became evident later.’
‘In other words,’ said Max, too obviously anxious to help Ned clear up this little misunderstanding, ‘with the promise of American nouveaux riches, your father had somewhat outlived his usefulness.’
‘Oh, I’ve conjured a number of scenarios, Max, in the years since – none of which allows for the possibility of my father’s death being self-defence. Simon knows the truth. I realized part of my destiny was to make him bloody well confess it. It became a focus for me, led me into areas I might never have entered. Into Wicca.’
Robin saw Betty look up, her green eyes hard, but lit with intelligence and insight. There would be no get-outs, no short cuts. Ned Bain took another drag at his cigarette.
‘I’d tried to be a simple iconoclast at first, telling myself I was an atheist. Then, for a while – I’d be about nineteen – I was into ceremonial magic. Until I realized that was as cramped and pompous as Frances’s High Church Christianity. Only paganism appeared free of such crap, and there was a great sense of release. Naked, elemental, no hierarchy it was what I needed.’
Betty said, without looking up, ‘How long have you known about this place?’
‘Oh, only since Simon arrived here. Since he took over the church hall. Since he became “Father Ellis”. When he first came back to Britain, he was a curate in the north-east, but that was no use to me. He wasn’t doing anything that left him... open. I’d had people watching him in America for years – there’s an enormous pagan network over there now, happy to be accessed. And other links too.’
