A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

There was some shuffling but no direct response.

  ‘Why don’t we get to meet Fallon before the programme?’ Merrily whispered.

  Tania Beauman hardly moved her lips. ‘You’d know more about this than me, but I don’t imagine they’d normally introduce the Christians to the lion.’

  They called this the gallery. It was a narrow room with a bank of TV monitors, through which the director and the sound and vision mixers could view the studio floor from different angles. Once the show was on the air, the director would be in audio contact with the producer and the presenter, John Fallon, down in the bear pit. They actually called it that. In fact, Jane had found it a little disappointing at first. It was much smaller than it looked on the box – like a little theatre-in-the-round, with about six rows of banked-up seating.

  ‘Does the whole audience have some angle on the debate?’ she asked a white-haired bloke called Gerry, an ex-Daily Star reporter who was the senior member of Tania Beauman’s research team.

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a decent enough budget now, but it’s not that big. The audience are just ordinary punters bussed in – tonight’s bunch is from a paint factory in Walsall: packers, cleaners, management – a cross section of society.’

  Gerry glanced at Eirion, who looked awfully young and innocent – and not happy. He had no stomach for subterfuge, Jane was realizing. He’d been appalled to discover that her mum, down there, did not know they were up here. Or, indeed, within sixty miles of Livenight.

  Even in Eirion’s car, with the patched-up silencer, it hadn’t taken long to get here. The Warehouse studio complex had been quite easy to find, on the edge of a new business park, under a mile from the M5 and ten miles out of the central Birmingham traffic hell.

  It was not until they’d actually left the motorway that Jane had revealed to Eirion the faintly illicit nature of this operation. ‘Irene, I’m doing this for you. This could be your future. This is like cutting-edge telly. It’s an in, OK. You might even get a holiday job.’

  Eirion had looked appalled, like a taxi driver who’d just discovered he was providing the wheels in a wages snatch. He’d thought they were only driving up separately because Jane’s mum might have to stay the night. He did not know how Jane came to have Tania Beauman in her pocket, and would probably not be finding out. Neither would Mum; the plan was, they’d clear off about two minutes before the programme ended, go bombing back down the motorway, and Jane would be up in her apartment with the lights out by the time Mum got home.

  Tania Beauman had turned out to be actually OK. She’d told both Gerry and the grizzled director, Maurice, that Jane was her cousin, doing a media studies college course. Which could well be true, one day.

  ‘How old is she?’ Maurice had enquired suspiciously.

  ‘Nineteen next month,’ Jane said crisply. Eirion looked queasy.

  ‘Stone me,’ Gerry muttered. ‘When the nineteen-year-olds start looking fourteen, you know you’re getting too old for it.’

  Maurice took off his cans. ‘See, the problem with this particular programme is that we’re not Songs of Praise and this is not the God Slot. What we do not want is a religious debate. We don’t want the history of Druidism, we want to know what they get up to in their stone circles when the film crew’s gone home. We don’t want to hear about the people the witches’ve healed, we want to know about the ones they’ve cursed and the virgins they’ve deflowered on their altars. This is late-night TV. Our job – to put it crudely – is to send you off to bed with a hard-on.’

  ‘I’ll be interested to see how the little priest handles it,’ Gerry said thoughtfully. ‘She’s got enough of her own demons.’

  Jane stared at him.

  ‘Marital problems,’ Gerry said. ‘Husband playing away... though what the hell possessed him, with that at home.’

  ‘You never know what goes on behind bedroom doors.’ Maurice shook his head, smiling sadly. ‘You turned all that up, did you, Gerald?’

  ‘And then, when it’s all looking a bit messy... Bang! The husband goes and gets killed in the car, with his girlfriend. Merrily wakes up a widow... and soon after that she’s become a priest. Interesting, do I detect guilt in there somewhere, or do I just have a suspicious—’

  ‘Christ!’ Jane snarled. ‘She didn’t become a bloody nun! She—’ She felt Eirion’s hand on her arm and shook it off and bit her lip.

  Gerry grinned. ‘My, my. Women do stick together, don’t they?’

  ‘Lay off, Gerald.’ Maurice slipped on his headphones, flipped a switch on his console. ‘You there, Martin? Speak to me, son.’

  ‘So.’ Gerry leaned against the edge of the mixing desk. ‘There you are, Jane. Now you know how easy it is to get people going. You just watch the monitors. Within about seven minutes, everybody’s forgotten there are cameras.’ He pencilled a note on a copy of the programme’s running order; Jane made out the word Merrily. ‘Be a lot of heat, tonight, I think. When it gets going, it’s very possible one of those weirdos is gonna try some spooky stuff.’

  Eirion stiffened. ‘Spooky stuff?’

  ‘I dunno, son. A spell or something, I suppose. Something to prove they can make things happen. I dunno, basically – it’s all cobblers, anyway.’

  Jane looked at Eirion. She was still shaking. They had a little file on Mum; if the show lost momentum, shafting her became an option.

  13

  A Surreal Memory

  BETTY’S DAY CLEARLY hadn’t been too great either. You could tell not so much from her face as from her manner: no bustle.

  ‘You don’t tell me yours, and I won’t tell you mine.’ Robin didn’t even lift his head from the kitchen table where he’d fallen into a sleep of dismay and frustration. ‘We’ll call it a shit amnesty.’

  Ten-fifteen on this cold, misty, moonless night. Betty had been out since mid-afternoon. She’d been to see the widow Wilshire in New Radnor again, taking with her an arthritis potion involving ‘burdock and honeysuckle, garlic and nettle and a little healing magic’. Betty was good with healing plants; after pissing off her parents by walking out of teacher training, she’d worked at a herb garden and studied with a herbalist at nights for two and a half years. She’d gone to a whole lot of trouble with this potion, driving over to a place the other side of Hereford yesterday to pick up the ingredients.

  ‘How is she now?’

  ‘Oh... more comfortable. And happier, I think.’

  Around six she’d phoned him to say she was hanging on there a while. Seemed Mrs Wilshire’s home help had not made it this week and she was distressed about the state of her house and her inability to clean it up. So Betty would clean up, sure she would. Wherever she went, Betty added to her collection of aunts.

  ‘OK,’ Robin said, ‘if she’s so much better, I give up. Where’s the bad stuff come in?’

  ‘It isn’t necessarily bad – just odd.’ Betty took off her coat, hung it behind the back door, went to get warm by the stuttering Rayburn. ‘So you first. It’s Ellis, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, haven’t heard a word from Ellis. This is Blackmore. He faxed. He doesn’t like the artwork.’

  ‘Oh.’ Betty pushed her hands through her hair, letting it tumble. ‘I did say it was a mistake, dealing with him directly. You should have carried on communicating through the publishers. If he can get hold of you any time he wants, he’ll just keep on quibbling.’

  ‘It was what he wanted. And he is Kirk Blackmore. And, frankly, quibbling doesn’t quite reach it.’

  ‘Not something you can alter easily?’

  Robin laughed bleakly. ‘What the asshole doesn’t like is... everything. He doesn’t like my concept of Lord Madoc – his face is wrong, his hair is wrong, his clothes are wrong, his freaking boots are wrong. Oh, and he walks in the wrong colour of mist.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Betty came round the back of his chair, put her hands on his shoulders, began to knead. ‘All that work. What does it mean? What happens now?’

  ‘Means
I grovel. Or I take the one-off money and someone else’s artwork goes on the book.’

  ‘There’s no way—’

  ‘Betty... OK. I am a well-regarded illustrator. Any ordinary, midlist fantasy writer, they’d have to go with it. Blackmore, however, is now into a one-and-a-half-million-pound three-book deal. He walks with the gods. Different rules apply.’

  Betty scowled. ‘Doesn’t change the fact that he writes moronic crap. Tell him to sod off. It’s just one book.’

  He sat up. ‘It’s not moronic. The guy knows his stuff. And it’s not just one book. His whole backlist’s gonna be rejacketed in the Sword of Twilight format, whoever’s artwork that should be. Which is seven books – a lot of work. Face it, I need Blackmore. I need to have my images under his big name. Also, we need the money if we’re gonna make a start on getting this place into any kind of good condition. We were counting on that money, were we not?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Right, end of story. Back to the airbrush.’

  She bent and kissed his hair. ‘You’ve gone pale.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I didn’t expect it. It was a kick in the mouth. Do me good – getting too sure of myself. All right, go ahead. Regale me with the unglad tidings you bring back from the big metropolis.’

  They’d taken to calling New Radnor the big metropolis, on account of it having three shops.

  ‘Well...’ Betty sat down next to him. ‘Mrs Wilshire was all worked up because she remembered she’d promised to get the home help to hunt out some of the Major’s papers relating to... this place. He kept them in a wooden summer house in the garden. And of course, the home help didn’t show up. Anyway, she gave me the key. That’s why I’m so late. I was in there for over an hour. Quite a little field HQ the Major had there: lighting, electric heater, kettle, steel filing cabinet.’

  ‘And she let you loose in there? Almost a stranger?’

  ‘She needs somebody to trust.’

  ‘Yeah.’ People trusted Betty on sight; it was a rare quality.

  ‘And she wanted it sorting out, but quite clearly couldn’t face going down there, because of the extra responsibility it might heap on her, which she’s never been good at. And also because there’s a lot of him still there. You can feel him – a clean, precise sort of mind; and frustration because he couldn’t find enough to do with it. So when he was buying a house, he was determined to know everything, get the very best deal.’

  ‘Not like me, huh?’

  Betty smiled. ‘You’re the worst kind of impulse buyer. You even hide things from yourself. You and the Major wouldn’t have got on at all.’

  ‘So what did you find?’

  ‘Mrs Wilshire said I could bring anything home that might be useful. I’ve got a cardboard box full of stuff in the car.’

  ‘But you didn’t bring it in?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’ Betty leaned her head back. ‘I’ve read enough for one night. No wonder he kept it in the shed.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I mean, in one respect, Major Wilshire was like you – once he’d seen this place, he had to have it. But it also had to be at the right price. And of course he wasn’t remotely superstitious. An old soldier, he wasn’t afraid of anything that couldn’t shoot him. But I suppose that if he happened to come up with certain information that might upset any other potential buyers...’ Betty stopped and rolled her head around to ease tension. ‘It’s funny... the first time I ever went in those ruins, I thought, this is really not a happy place.’

  ‘This is something the agent should’ve told us? We get to sue the agent?’

  ‘How very American of you. No, I rather doubt it. All too long ago. Anyway, they told us about Major Wilshire’s death, which was the main drawback, presumably, as far as they were concerned.’

  ‘So what is this? The ruins are haunted?’

  ‘We jumped to conclusions. We assumed the church was abandoned because of flooding or no access for cars. Or at least you did.’

  ‘I assumed. Yeah, assuming is what I do. All the time. OK.’ Robin stood up. ‘I can’t stand it. Gimme the car keys, I’ll go fetch your box of goodies.’

  When he arrived back with the stuff, she had cocoa coming up. He slammed and barred the door. He was tingling with cold and damp.

  ‘Whooo, it’s turned into fog! Was it like that when you were driving home?’

  ‘Some of the way.’

  Just as well he’d fallen asleep earlier and hadn’t known about the fog; he’d have been worried sick about her, with the ice on the roads and all.

  He dumped the cardboard wine box on the table. ‘Best not to go out at night this time of year, living in a place like this. Suppose it was so thick you drove into the creek?’

  ‘Brook,’ Betty said.

  ‘Whatever.’ Robin unpacked the box. Mostly, it seemed to be photocopies, the top one evidently from some official list of historic buildings.

  CHURCH OF ST MICHAEL, OLD HINDWELL.

  Ruins of former parish church. Mainly C13 and C14, with later south porch and chancel. Embattled three-stage tower of late C14, rubble-construction with diagonal buttresses to north-west and south-west...

  And so on. There were a couple more pages of this stuff, which Robin put aside for further study.

  ‘Like you said, looks like the Major built up a fairly comprehensive background file.’

  He turned up some sale particulars similar to the one he and Betty had received. Same agent – and same wording, give or take.

  ‘A characterful, historic farmhouse with outbuildings and the picturesque ruins of a parish church, in a most unusual location...’

  All true enough, as far as it went. Next, Robin found several pages ripped out of a spiral-bound notebook and bunched together with a bulldog clip. There was handwriting on them, not too intelligible, and a string of phone numbers.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Don’t know. Couldn’t make it out. There’s all kinds of junk in there. Mrs Wilshire told me to take it anyway. I think she just wanted to get rid of as much as she could. Right, there you are... that’s the start of it.’

  He lifted out a news cutting pasted to a piece of A4. The item was small and faded. ‘Rector Resigns due to Ill Health.’

  It said little more than that the Reverend Terence Penney had given up the living of Old Hindwell and had left the area. A replacement was being sought.

  ‘When was this?’ A date had been scrawled across the newsprint but he couldn’t make it out.

  ‘Nineteen seventy-seven.’

  ‘That late? You mean the Old Hindwell church was still operational until seventy-seven?’

  ‘’seventy-eight, actually.’

  ‘Why did I have it in mind it must have been abandoned back in the thirties or forties?’

  ‘Because you were sold on the idea that it was due to motor vehicles and the brook. Read the letter underneath. It’s from the same woman who wrote the piece in the newspaper.’

  It had been typewritten, on an old machine with an old ribbon.

  Lower Lodge

  Monkshall

  Leominster

  Herefordshire

  18 May

  Dear Major Wilshire,

  Thank you for your letter. Yes, you are quite right, I did have the dubious honour of being appointed Radnor Valley correspondent of the Brecon and Radnor Express for a few years in the 1970s, receiving, if I recall correctly, something like one halfpenny a line for my jottings about local events of note!

  My reports on the departure of the Reverend Penney were not, I must say, the ones of which I am most proud, amounting, as they did, to what I suppose would be termed these days a ‘cover up’. But my late husband and I were comparatively recent incomers to the area and I was ‘walking on eggshells’ and determined not to cause offence to anyone!

  However, I suppose after all this time there is no reason to conceal anything any more, especially as there was considerable local gossip about it at the time.<
br />
  Yes, the Reverend Penney was indeed rather a strange young man, although I am still inclined to discount the rumours that he ‘took drugs’. There were some hippy types living in the area at the time with whom he was quite friendly, so I suppose this is how the rumour originated.

  In retrospect, I think Mr Penney was not the most appropriate person to be put in charge of St Michael’s. He was a young man and very enthusiastic, full of ideas, but the local people were somewhat set in their ways and resistant to any kind of change. The church itself was not in very good condition (even before Mr Penney’s arrival!), and the parish was having difficulty raising money for repairs – there were not the grants available in those days – and it was a big responsibility for such a young and inexperienced minister.

  Yes, I am afraid that what you have been told is broadly correct, though I must say that I never found any signs of mental imbalance in Mr Penney, in his first year at least. He was always friendly, if a little remote.

  My memories of THAT day remain confused. Perhaps we should have suspected something after the small fire, the slippage of tiles from the roof and the repeated acts of apparent vandalism (I realize no charges ever resulted from these continued occurrences, so I hope I can trust you, as a soldier, to treat this correspondence as strictly confidential), but no one could really have predicted the events of that particular October morning. It would not have seemed so bad had it not been raining so hard and the brook in such spate. Naturally, quite a crowd – for Hindwell – gathered and there was much weeping and wailing, although this was quickly suppressed and after that day I do not remember anyone speaking of it – quite extraordinary. It was as if the whole village somehow shared the shame.

  No, as you note, the big newspapers never ‘got on’ to the story. Small communities have always been very good at smothering sensational events almost at birth. And what was I, the village correspondent, supposed to write? I was not a journalist, merely a recorder of names at funerals and prize-winners at the local show. Furthermore, later that day, I received a visit from Mr Gareth Prosser Snr, together with Mr Weal, his and our solicitor, who stressed to me that it would ‘not be in the best interests of the local people’ for this to be publicized in any way. Mr Prosser was the county councillor for the area and served on the police committee and was a personage of considerable gravitas. It was not for me, a newcomer, to cross him over an issue of such sensitivity!