A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  Howls of protest and serious consternation at this, shared by Robin. In some ways, the recent revelations had made him feel better about the situation – the great Ned Bain brought down to human level.

  ‘Bets, look,’ he said hoarsely, ‘you can’t precisely say we were set up. We decided to go for this place. All the omens said it was right at the time. Plus, we had the promise of the Blackmore deal and all that it could bring. We were on a roll.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Betty said, ‘the Blackmore deal.’

  Ned Bain shifted. Robin felt a pulse of alarm. I still think Kirk could be persuaded to listen to reason. This was all gonna crash now, the rainbows in the puddles turning black.

  ‘Robin, love...’ Betty’s eyes had misted, or was it his own? ‘Kirk Blackmore’s been working you like a puppet, hasn’t he? All your highs and all your lows.’

  ‘He was important, sure.’ Robin looked at Ned. Ned was staring at the stone flags in the floor, elbow on knee and arm outstretched, cigarette loose between his fingers.

  And suddenly Robin knew.

  ‘I guess you’re Kirk Blackmore, huh?’

  Bain didn’t reply. The room was silent.

  Robin turned to Betty. ‘How did you find that out?’ Inside his rough woollen tunic he was starting to sweat like a hog.

  ‘Some... friends of mine got some information from the Internet. Blackmore’s this notorious recluse supposedly living on a Welsh mountain and communicating only by fax. People speculate endlessly on the Net about the true identities of authors. Publishers often write novels under pseudonyms: usually lurid, mass-market novels they might not want to be associated with. I’m really sorry, Robin.’

  Ned’s brow was suddenly a little shiny.

  ‘But he could’ve bought this place out of his small change,’ Betty continued.

  ‘It was your destiny, not mine,’ Bain said calmly. ‘At the time.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Robin said quietly.

  ‘Any time you wanted to get out, I’d have taken it off your hands.’

  ‘You mean like after we ran out of money? After we’d taken all the shit from the local people? After Ellis got safely kicked out on his ass by the Church? After our marriage got smashed up on the fucking rocks?’

  ‘There was always this growing atmosphere of turbulence,’ Betty said. ‘We were made to feel insecure from the first. He wanted us to feel beleaguered, maybe a little scared.’ She looked down at Bain. ‘You needed this, didn’t you? Were you working on it with your coven, Ned, or was it some magical construction of your own – long and intrictate, like one of your novels? Generating unrest – backed up by a campaign of mysterious letters and phone calls directed at Ellis. The dragon rising? Were you working towards some kind of cataclysm... only forestalled by stupid Vivvie giving it away – resulting in this farce.’

  Vivvie snarled, ‘What are you these days, Betty? Because you’re not one of us any more.’

  Bain said, ‘If you really want to discuss this, I’m perfectly willing—’

  ‘Did you buy the witch box from Major Wilshire? Did you have someone deliver it to us, place it on our doorstep?’ Betty paused. ‘And were you... were you really that surprised when Major Wilshire fell from his ladder?’

  Ned Bain sprang up in a single movement. ‘Don’t you fucking dare...

  His stiffened finger inches from Betty’s soft cheek.

  Which was enough.

  Robin lurched across the room to the altar. George reached out to stop him, but Robin shook George savagely away. He felt the weight of his hair on his shoulders. He heard warbling sirens in the night. He saw through a deepening mist. He remembered the pit of desperation that swallowed him when Al Delaney, of Talisman, had called to say, He wants someone else to do it, Robin. He doesn’t want you.

  Robin wrenched from the altar the great ceremonial sword. No toy this, no lightweight replica, but three and a half feet of high-tensile steel.

  Robin raised it in both hands, high above his head. He heard Vivvie screaming.

  53

  Snakeskin

  MERRILY SAID, ‘YOU really did look after her, didn’t you? You really took care of her.’

  Judith Prosser adjusted a fold in the corpse’s shroud. ‘I was the only one ever took care of her.’

  ‘Could we close the lid now?’

  Judith didn’t touch the lid. ‘Why don’t you conduct your ceremony, Merrily? Take off your coat, make yourself into a priest.’

  Taking control again.

  Merrily moved to the head of the coffin, looking down towards Menna’s feet. Her airline bag, with the Bible, the prayer texts, the flask of holy water, stood by the door.

  ‘Why don’t you finally leave her alone? Why don’t you just accept that maybe you’ve done enough harm?’

  ‘Meaning what precisely, Mrs Watkins?’ Judith said briskly. She went to stand at the foot of the coffin, from where she could observe the faces of both Merrily and Menna.

  ‘You had her on the Pill from an early age. Dr Coll’s good like that, isn’t he? Ministering to the real needs of the local people? Dr Coll understands these things.’

  ‘She’d have been pregnant by fourteen if we hadn’t done something.’

  ‘Mmm, her father really was abusing her, wasn’t he? Maybe over quite a long period.’

  Judith shrugged.

  ‘And, of course, you knew that.’

  ‘We didn’t talk about such things then. Other people’s domestic arrangements, that was their own affair.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, but also because... whenever it happened, she would come to you.’

  ‘Oh, well, yes. Almost a mile.’ Judith smiled. Incredibly, it looked like a smile of nostalgia. ‘Almost a mile across the fields to our farm. To my parents’ farm. In tears, usually – or you could see where the tears had dried in the wind.’

  ‘And you would comfort her.’

  Judith breathed in very slowly, her black coat flung back, breasts pushing out the rugby shirt. Merrily thought of her in the toilet at the village hall, tenderly ministering to Marianne. Always victims: always vulnerability, confusion, helplessness, terror, desperation. Like Menna, alone on that remote hill farm with her beast of a father.

  ‘What a turn-on that must have been,’ Merrily said.

  Judith’s face became granite. ‘Don’t overstep the mark, Mrs Watkins.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just take her to the police?’

  ‘To give evidence against her own father? Apart from the fact that, as I say, such things were not done yere in those days, not talked about, how would she have managed on her own, with her father in prison? How would she have coped?’

  ‘Probably have been taken into care. And that’s probably the best thing that could have happened, in Menna’s case.’ Merrily paused. ‘If not in yours.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about this area!’ Judith snapped. ‘Social services? Pah! We have always managed our own social services.’

  ‘I’m sure. Especially after you got married and you were operating from the perfect, secure social platform.’

  Marriage to Gareth Prosser. Councillor, magistrate, on this committee, that committee. Big man. Dull bugger, mind. Lucky he’s got Judy to do his thinkin’ for him.

  A very satisfactory arrangement that, in almost all areas of life, Judith needed Gareth for the framework, the structure, the tradition: a facade, and a good one. What did sexual orientation have to do with it? Fancy, meaningless phrase from Off. Self-sacrifice was sometimes necessary – for a while.

  ‘The foundations of rural life,’ Merrily said. ‘A husband, a farm and sons – preferably two of them, in case something happens to one of them, or the other grows up strange and wants to live in Cardiff and be an interior designer.’

  Judith smiled thinly. ‘Oh, you’re such a clever little bitch. What about your life, Mrs Watkins? They say your husband died some years ago. Does the love of God meet all your needs?’

  Merrily let it go. ‘When you’re
married to a man like Gareth, nothing needs to change. You go to Menna, she comes to you. And then, when her father dies, you have the contingency plan for her: Jeffery Weal. Good old J.W., the solid, silent family solicitor. A local man, and discreet.’

  He was too old for her, yes. Too rigid in his ways, perhaps. But it was what she was used to, isn’t it? She was a flimsy, delicate thing. She would always need protection.

  What could be more perfect? His clothes smelling of mothballs, and little or no experience of women. And living just a few hundred yards down the hill from the Prosser farm.

  ‘You arranged that ideal marriage, Judith. You probably coached Menna in what would be expected of her. But she was used to all that, anyway, poor kid. She’d always been a kid – a sad, pale little girl. He must have frightened her a bit, at first, the size of him. He frightens me. But that would be no bad thing either, for you, if she needed a lot more comforting.’

  Judith’s hands were on her hips. ‘Now you have overstepped the mark.’

  ‘And of course she must continue to take her Pill because children would not be a good thing at all. Having a child can make someone grow up awfully quickly.’

  ‘She was not strong enough for children,’ Judith said sullenly.

  ‘Was that how Weal eventually found out about you and Menna? Because he wanted children – with the family business to pass on to them. “Pills – what pills are these, Menna?” ’ She put up a hand. ‘No, all right. I reckon he did find out, though, didn’t he?’

  ‘You reckon,’ Judith sneered, ‘you guess, you theorize.’

  ‘Is that why you wanted me to come here tonight? To find out what direction the speculation was taking? I’d guess the answer is that you don’t really know for sure whether Weal knows about you and Menna, or not. But if he does, he wouldn’t say a word to you. It’s not the local way. Besides, I suppose you were useful to him. I expect there were aspects of Menna he couldn’t deal with. Maybe she’d finally changed – becoming a woman.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re—’

  ‘But that wouldn’t be awfully good for you either, would it? To have Menna becoming a bit worldly-wise as she reached middle age? What actually was her mental state? I wouldn’t know but, my God’ – Merrily pointed into the tomb – ‘look at her now. Look at her face. It’s all coming out now, isn’t it, in that face? God Almighty, Judith, it’s almost turning into your face.’

  Judith Prosser stood very still, seemed hardly to be breathing. Merrily moved away, back towards the door.

  ‘You know what I think? What I’d bet big money on?’ She was aware of her voice rising in pitch, more than a bit scared now of where this was inexorably leading. ‘When Weal had Ellis exorcize his wife, that was nothing to do with her father at all. Ellis seemed to be able to demonize anything and then get rid of it. He stopped your boy from nicking cars, didn’t he? So maybe Weal thought that Nicholas Ellis could purge Menna of the demon... the demon that was you.’

  Merrily was shattered. She hadn’t quite realized what she had been about to say. But the evident truth of it was explosive.

  Judith took a swift step towards her, then stopped, and said brightly, too brightly, ‘You are off your head, Mrs Watkins. You do know that?’ She laughed, her eyes glittering with rage.

  ‘That was only the half of it, though,’ Merrily said, to defuse things a little. ‘The next part would be the baptism of the two of them, in the same little bowl of holy water, I guess. Something medieval going on there: the fusion of two souls?’

  Merrily stared down at the soured face in the tomb. In the medieval church, baptism was exorcism. Exorcism charms had been included in marriage services, or blessing of the sick. Pregnant women were exorcized too. In those days, demons were getting expelled from people like tapeworms.

  A scenario: late afternoon, the sky like sheet metal. The baywindowed room north-facing, so not much of the sunset visible. A cold room and a cold time of day. Menna standing there like some white slave, her skin waxy, her arms like straws. Perhaps a bruise forming blue where Ellis had gripped her roughly – in his mind gripping not her but it. Perhaps she was wrapping her arms around herself and shivering. Or was she entirely unmoved? Compliant? Accepting this ritual as just another of those things men liked to do to her.

  ‘Do you embrace God?’ Ellis’s customizing of the rite.

  J.W. Weal standing there, big as God.

  Menna hesitating, perhaps a little worried by the word ‘embrace’ and thoughts of what else God might do to her after this.

  ‘Do you embrace Him?’

  ‘I... Yes... Yes.’

  Around the high, white room, dark oak chairs with long pointed spines, standing like judge and jury.

  ‘Do you renounce the evil which corrupts that which God has created? And the sick and sinful, perverted desires which draw you away from the love of God?’

  Menna beginning to cry again.

  ‘Say it!’

  Her head going back. A sniff.

  ‘Say, “I so renounce them”!’

  ‘I s... so... renounce them.’

  ‘I can’t begin to know where Ellis derived that rite from,’ Merrily said. ‘Or if he made it up. But there’s an awfully long tradition of bodged religion around the Forest, isn’t there?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Judith Prosser said sulkily.

  ‘Like, what’s the good of religion if it isn’t practical? Whatever he did, it was nasty and unhealthy and yet... and yet somehow it worked, Judith. In some horrible, insidious way, it bloody well worked. And he has her now.’ Merrily felt she was drifting away on a formaldehyde fog, sailing so far from the land of normality that she was afraid of never getting back there. ‘Got her to himself. At least part of her. Part of something. Something half realized, fluttering after him like a crippled bird. It’s obscene.’

  There was a slithering sound. Judith was shedding her long, black, quilted coat, like a snakeskin.

  54

  No God’s Land

  EVEN JANE COULD see the police didn’t quite know how to handle this any more. A routine peacekeeping assignment had turned into a confusion of arson and murder. They’d taken over the doctor’s surgery as an incident room, for two separate investigations which might be totally unconnected.

  Jane and Gomer were keeping well back from it all. They stood with Sophie and Eirion in the shadow of the rear entry to the pub yard. Gomer had a ciggy going, and looked more his old self. Jane, too, felt more in control since Sophie had taken her to the chief fire officer, and he’d confirmed that they’d now managed to get inside the hall and had found no bodies there.

  But the police had a body: a body with no face, dug out of the mud. And now that the immediate fire crisis was over, this had become their priority again, and they wanted very much to talk to Gomer. Wanted to know why he’d been so sure that something was buried in the old archaeological site that he’d gone up there with a digger, at night. Sophie, her white hair in almost hag-like disarray, was trying to explain to him that all they wanted was a statement, to allay their suspicions.

  Gomer didn’t want to know, though. It was a plant hire thing that would take too long to explain; Jane understood this. ‘It’s stupid. Why would Gomer have sent you to tell the police if he had something to do with it?’

  Eirion said to Gomer, ‘I think what Mrs Hill’s trying to say is it would be better if you approached them, rather than have them come find you.’

  ‘Eirion, what can I tell ’em that’s gonner be any help?’ Gomer growled. ‘I’ll talk to the buggers tomorrow, ennit?’

  And Jane realized that he was worrying about Mum.

  She looked out of the entry to the street, where a sombre assembly had formed around two priests – or, at least, two men in dog collars. One of them was raising his hands as if holding up a huge rock he was about to smash down on something. Jane just knew that some crazy scenario was being manufactured around the village hall fire, involving not a furtive
little green-haired plonker with a can of petrol and a grudge, but some great satanic panoply clanking through the night. They’d asked Father Ellis what he wanted them to do, but Ellis had said, cleverly, ‘I’m not your leader. Listen to your hearts and let the Holy Spirit move within you.’ And he had walked away, leaving bitter, apocalyptic stuff on the air amidst the hellfire fumes. He knew what they’d do. He just wasn’t going to be seen to instigate it.

  Watching this, Gomer had nodded knowingly. ‘Truly a local man at last,’ he’d said – which Jane didn’t really understand.

  Sophie appeared at her shoulder. ‘There’s one place we haven’t tried,’ Jane said.

  ‘The church, I suppose,’ Sophie said. ‘She had a loose arrangement with that young pagan woman, didn’t she? To do some sort of Deliverance work? You’re probably right. If you and Gomer want to go down there, Eirion and I will stay here, in case she shows up.’

  Gomer nodded. He never liked to stand still for very long. ‘Thank you, Sophie,’ Jane said. ‘You’ve been—’

  ‘Shut up, Jane,’ Sophie said wearily. ‘Just go. And perhaps you could warn them over at the church’ – she nodded towards the assembly on the streets – ‘about that.’

  Robin and Betty were holding one another in some kind of sweet desperation. Everything seemed lost: Robin’s work, the house, their friends, their religion, their future here. Everything smashed in an act of sacrilege so gross it was worthy of a Christian. The candle chopped in half, the scourge handle snapped, the pentacle sent skimming like a frisbee into the wall. The chalice of red wine draining into the rug.

  Finally the one-time studio table hauled from its trestles, flung onto its side. Max’s wife Bella screaming, Vivvie raging, calling down the vengeance of the gods, or some shit like that. This was before Ned Bain had come and stood, unflinching, in front of Robin, who still held the sword. Robin had felt like decapitating the bastard, but Ned Bain had remained impressively cool. That quiet power, even Robin felt it.