A Crown of Lights

47 Breath of the Dragon

MERRILY HAD ARRANGED to meet Gomer in the Black Lion for a sandwich around two-thirty. She was early, but the pub was already filling up with those civilized rambling-club types – anoraks and soft drinks – who seemed to constitute Ellis’s core congregation.

More of them today, substantially more. You looked at them individually and they seemed worryingly genuine: young people with a vision of a new day, elderly people with a new and healthy approach to the evening of the day. There was a buzz of energy in the dispirited, part-painted Black Lion bar, each hug, each ‘Praise God’ passing on a vibration.

Merrily found herself standing next to a white-bearded man of about sixty, one of the few with a glass of beer. She asked him where he was from. Wolverhampton, he said, West Midland Pentecostal.

‘How far’ve you come, sister?’

‘Oh, just from Ledwardine, just over the border. How many of you are there?’

‘About... what, fifty-five? Hired ourselves a coach. Luckily, there’s a lot of retired people in our church, but quite a few youngsters’ve taken a day off work.’ He grinned, relaxed. ‘It’s a question of whose work you put first, isn’t it? We’re going to walk down to this satanist place after lunch and hold some Bible readings outside the gate. I’ve not actually seen Father Ellis yet, but I’m told he’s a very inspiring man.’

‘So they say.’

‘Praise God,’ said the man from Wolverhampton.

Merrily saw Gomer coming in and pointed to the table near the door. She ordered drinks and cheese sandwiches at the bar. Greg Starkey avoided her eyes.

Gomer was wearing his bomber jacket over a grey sweatshirt with ‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire’ on it in red.

‘Three bloody coaches on the car park, vicar.’

‘Mmm. It’s what happens these days – everything goes to extremes. Fastest growing movement in the Church and, hey, they’re going to prove it.’

‘En’t the only ones. Bunch of ole vans backed into a forestry clearing up towards the ole rectory. Lighting camp fires, bloody fools.’

‘Travellers?’

‘Pagans, they reckons.’

Merrily sighed. ‘All we need.’

‘Two police vans set up in the ole schoolyard – Dr Coll’s surgery. Another one in Big Weal’s drive – the ole rectory. Makes you laugh, don’t it? Two biggest bloody villains in East Radnor, both well in with the cops.’

Merrily dumped her cigarettes and lighter on the table. ‘You find out some more?’

‘Been over to Nev’s.’

‘Your nephew, yes?’

‘Ar. Drop in now and then, make sure the boy’s lookin’ after the ole diggers. Anyway, Nev’s with a lawyer in Llandod, plays bloody golf with him. He gived him a ring for me, off the record, like. Word is Big Weal’s favourite clients is ole clients, specially them not too quick up top n’more.’

‘Going senile?’

‘Worries a lot about their wills when they gets like that, see. Who’s gonner get what, how it’s gonner get sorted when they snuffs it. What they needs is a good lawyer – and a good doctor. Puts their mind at rest, ennit? ’Specially folk as en’t had a family lawyer for generations, see.’

‘Incomers? Refugees from Off, in need of guidance?’

‘Exac’ly it, vicar. This boy in Llandod, he reckons Weal gets a steady stream of ole clients recommended by their nice, kindly doctor. That confirm what you yeard, vicar?’

‘Fits in. And if we were to go a step further down that road, we might find a nice kindly priest.’

‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer said. ‘Church gets to be more important, the nearer you gets to that big ole farm gate.’

Two bikers came in. One wore a leather jacket open to a white T-shirt with a black dragon motif. The dragon was on its back, with a spear down its throat. It was hard to be sure which side they represented.

At four o’clock, the ruined church of St Michael looked like an old, beached boat, waiting for the tide of night to set it afloat.

‘Going to be lit up like a birthday cake,’ Betty said with distaste. ‘You can’t spot them from here, but there are clusters of candles and garden torches all over it. In the windows, on ledges, between the battlements on the tower. It’ll be visible for miles from the hills.’

‘Making a statement?’

‘Yeah. After centuries of holding ceremonies discreetly in the woods and behind curtains in suburban back rooms, we’re coming out.’

They’d met in the decaying copse, Merrily walking from the old archaeological site, where Gomer had parked, Betty coming across the bridge from the farmhouse and joining the footpath.

The sky had dulled, low clouds pocketing the sunken sun, and you could feel the dusk, carrying spores of frost. Betty looked cold. Merrily tightened her scarf.

‘Bain still wants to do it naked?’

‘Possibly. They’ll light a small fire inside a circle of stones in the open nave. Dance back to back with arms linked behind. Not as silly as it sounds. After a while you don’t feel it. You’re aglow.’

Like singing in tongues, Merrily thought. A long, flat cloud lay over the church now, like a wide-brimmed hat. From the other side of the ruins, beyond the pines and the Sitka spruce, they could hear the sounds of a hymn: straggly singing, off-key. The Christians at the gate.

‘They’re going to keep that up all night long, aren’t they?’ Betty said.

‘You’ve heard nothing yet. There are scores more in the village now.’

‘Bad.’ Betty shivered. ‘Ned believes the spiritual tension will fuel the rite. He says we can appropriate their energy. That is way, way out of order.’ She shook herself. ‘I need to get them out of here, lock the gates and... try and save my marriage.’

‘Will you stay here... afterwards?’

Betty shook her head. ‘We won’t survive this. We’ll lose everything we’ve got with that house, but I don’t care if we’re destitute. Only problem is, I’m going to feel guilty about anyone else living here. I wish we could sell it to a waste disposal firm or something.’

‘But we’re going to deal with that,’ Merrily said firmly.

‘No. It was very stupid of me to ask you.’ Betty looked at her, green eyes sorrowful, without hope. ‘I wasn’t thinking. This is part of a prehistoric ritual complex. We don’t know who or what those original inhabitants were, but they chose their sites well. They knew all the doorways. Can’t you feel the earth and the air fusing together as it gets dark? This is a place that knows itself – but we don’t know it. Can’t you hear it?’

‘Just the singing,’ Merrily admitted.

‘I can hear a constant low humming now. I know it’s in my head, but it’s this place that’s put it there. We don’t know what went on here, nobody does. There are no stones left standing, only the holes where they were... and that church. And whatever – metaphorically, if you like – is underneath that church. And whatever it is, it’s much older than Christianity.’

‘And much, much older than Wicca?’ Merrily said.

‘Sure. We were invented in the fifties and sixties by well-meaning people who knew there was no continuous tradition. Most of Wicca’s either made up or culled from Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune. It has no tradition. There. I’ve said it. Is that what you wanted?’

The singing was already louder; more Christians had arrived.

‘There’s a tradition here,’ Merrily said, ‘of sorts. A strand of something that goes back at least to medieval times. Unfortunately, it seems to have been preserved by my lot.’

‘Yeah. You can certainly feel it in Cascob. Oh, and St Michael’s, Cefnllys. I meant to tell you – I looked this up – that when they eventually built a new church at Llandrindod the rector had the roof taken off Cefnllys Church to stop people worshipping there.’

‘He did?’

‘It was in a book. I suddenly remembered it from when I was a kid in Llandrindod. So I looked it up. I mean, was he thinking like Penney? Did they both feel the breath of the dragon? Probably didn’t understand any of it, but something scared them badly. Now people like Ned Bain are coming along and saying: it’s OK, it’s fine, its cool... because we’re the dragon. Do you still want to go in there with your holy water?’

‘What time?’

‘Any time after... I dunno, nine? If you don’t come, I’ll understand. Who’s that?’

It was a vehicle, creaking over the footpath, where it had been widened by the archaeologists. Merrily ran to the edge of the copse. She could see Gomer’s ancient Land Rover parked the other side, with Gomer leaning on the bonnet, smoking a roll-up, watching the new vehicle trundling towards him. It was Sophie’s Saab.

48 Black Christianity

NO CANDLES? THE candles had gone from the windows. Not just gone out, but gone: the trays, the Bibles, everything.

At first, it seemed an encouraging sign, and then Merrily thought, It isn’t. It isn’t at all. In the face of the invasion, the local people had withdrawn, disconnected; whatever happened tonight would not be their fault.

It was about five-fifty p.m. The post office and shop had closed, there were few lights in the cottages. Only the pub was conspicuously active; otherwise Old Hindwell, under dark forestry and the hump of Burfa Hill, had retracted into itself, leaving the streets to them from Off.

The multitude!

In the centre of the village, maybe three or four-hundred people had gathered in front of the former school. They had Christian placards and torches and lamps. They were not singing hymns. They seemed leaderless.

Gomer put the Land Rover at the side of the road, in front of the entrance to the pub’s yard, where it said ‘No Parking’. The car park was so full that none of the coaches would get out until several cars were removed. Two dark blue police vans lurked inside the school gates. Four TV crews hovered.

The minority of pagans here seemed to be the kind with green hair and eyebrow rings. Maybe twenty of them, in bunches – harmless probably. One group, squatting outside the pub, were chanting ‘Harken to the Witches’ Rune’, to the hollow thump of a hand drum.

‘Sad,’ Jane commented. She and Eirion were in the back of the Land Rover; Merrily sat next to Gomer in the front. ‘They’re just playing at it, just being annoying.’

‘You’ll be joining the Young Conservatives next, flower.’

‘But those so-called Christians really make me sick. They’re tossers, holier-than-thou gits.’

‘Phew,’ Merrily said. Through the wing mirror, she saw Sophie’s Saab pulling in behind them. Sophie didn’t get out.

Eirion said, ‘What do you want us to do, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Just stay with Gomer and Sophie. Perhaps you could get something to eat in the pub?’

Jane was dismayed. ‘That’s all the thanks we get? A mouldy cheese sandwich and a can of Coke?’

‘Don’t think I’m not immensely grateful for what you two and Sophie’ve uncovered. Just that I need to put it to Ellis by myself. If there are any witnesses, he won’t even talk to me.’

They’d talked intently for over an hour in the Land Rover, listened to a cassette recording of a phone call involving Sophie and some journalist in Tennessee, and then Merrily had watched as Betty, now armed with many things she hadn’t known about Ned Bain, had walked away into the last of the dusk, not looking back.

Merrily leaned against the Land Rover’s passenger door, and it opened with a savage rending sound.

‘How long will you be?’ Jane asked.

‘As long as it takes. He hasn’t even shown yet. An hour and a half maybe?’

‘And then we come looking for you?’

‘And then do whatever Gomer tells you.’

The crazy violence seemed to start as soon as Merrily’s feet touched the tarmac: lights flaring, a woman’s scream, a beer can thrown. A black cross reared out of a mesh of torch beams amid a tangle of angry voices.

‘... finished, you fuckers. Had your time. Christ was a wanker!’

‘... your level, isn’t it? The gutter! Get out of my—’

Sickening crunch of bone on flesh. Blood geysering up.

‘Oh dear God—’

‘So why don’t you just fuck off back to your churches, ’fore we have ’em all off you?’

‘Stand back!’

‘Reverend?’ A hand pulling Merrily back, as the police came through.

‘Marianne?’

She was pushed. ‘Stand back, please. Everybody, back!’

Headlights arriving. Then Collard Banks-Morgan with his medical bag. Next to him, a man in a dark suit. Not a white monk’s habit, but a dark suit.

A woman shrieked, ‘You’ll be damned for ever!’ and started to cry.

‘Listen, Reverend,’ Marianne said calmly. ‘I’m better now.’

‘Good.’

‘Things you oughta know.’ She pulled Merrily into the yard.

She followed when they took the man with the broken nose into the surgery. A woman too, spattered with his blood, wailing, Ellis’s arm around her. ‘He’s in good hands, sister. The best.’

In the waiting room, the lighting was harsh, the seats old and hard, the ceiling still school-hall high, with cream-painted metal girders. A woman receptionist smiled smugly through a hatch in the wall. ‘Come through,’ Dr Coll sang, voice like muzak. ‘Bring him through, that’s right.’

Doors slammed routinely. There were health posters all over the walls: posters to make you feel ill, paranoid, dependent. No surprise that Dr Coll had taken over the school, a local bastion of authority and wisdom.

‘I’d like to talk to you,’ Merrily said to Ellis.

‘I’m sure you would, Mrs Watkins,’ he said briskly, ‘but I don’t have the time or the interest to talk to you. You’re a vain and stupid woman.’ Under his suit he wore a black shirt, no tie, no clerical collar.

‘What happened to your messiah kit?’

‘Libby, tell Dr Coll I’ll talk to him later,’ Ellis said to the receptionist.

Merrily said, ‘There’s going to be trouble out there.’ She waited as Ellis dabbed with a tissue at a small blood speck on his sleeve. ‘Are you going to stop them marching to the church?’

‘Who am I,’ he said, ‘to stop anyone?’

‘You started it. You lit the blue touchpaper.’

‘The media started it. As you say, it’s already out of hand. It’d be highly irresponsible of me to inflame it further. Now, if you don’t mind...’

‘You could stop them. You could stop it now. It isn’t worth it for a crumbling old building with a bad reputation.’

‘I’d lock the door after us if I were you, Libby,’ Ellis said to the receptionist.

‘I’ll do that, Father.’

Ellis held open the main door for Merrily, looking over her head. ‘After you.’ She didn’t move. ‘Don’t make me ask the police to come in,’ Ellis said.

‘Could you clear up a few points for me, Nick?’

‘Goodnight.’

She had no confidence for this, still couldn’t quite believe it.

‘ “I am a brother to dragons”,’ Merrily said.

‘Go away.’ He didn’t look at her, opened the door wider.

‘Book of Job.’

‘I do know the Book of Job.’

The sounds of the street outside came in, carried on cold air, sounds alien to Old Hindwell – shouts, jeers, a man’s unstable voice, on high, ‘May God have mercy on you!’

‘I think your real name is Simon Wesson,’ Merrily said. ‘You went out to the States with your mother and sister in the mid-seventies, after the death of your stepfather. Over there, your mother married an evangelist called Marshall McAllman. You later became his personal assistant. He made a lot of money before he was exposed and disgraced and your mother divorced him – very lucratively, I believe.’

She couldn’t look at him while she was saying all this, terrified that it was going to be wrong, that Jane and Eirion had found the wrong person, that the journalist whose voice Sophie had so efficiently recorded was talking about someone with no connection at all to Nicholas Ellis.

‘McAllman concentrated on little backwoods communities. His technique was to do thorough research before he brought his show to town. He’d employ investigators. And although he would appear aloof when he first arrived...’

None of your good-old-boy stuff from Marshall, the journalist had told Sophie on the tape. Marshall was cool, Marshall was laid-back, Marshall would target a town that was hungry and he’d spread a table and he’d check into a hotel and sit back and wait for them to come sniffing and drooling...

‘... his remoteness only added to his mystique. They came to him – the local dignitaries, the civic leaders, the business people – and he passed on, almost reluctantly, what the Holy Spirit had communicated to him about them and their lives and their past and their future... and he convinced them that they and their town were riddled with all kinds of demons.’

Merrily focused on a wall poster about the symptoms of meningitis. She spoke in a low voice, could see Libby the receptionist straining to hear while pretending to rearrange leaflets behind the window of her hutch.

‘Time and time again, the local people would pull Marshall into the bosom of the community, everyone begging him to take away their demons, and their children’s demons... especially the daughters, those wayward kids. A little internal ministry... well, it beats abortion. He was a prophet and a local hero in different localities. He only went to selected places, little, introverted, no-hope places with poor communications – the places that were gagging for it.’

The print on the meningitis poster began to blur. She turned at last to look up at Ellis, his nose lifted in disdain, but she could see his hand whitening around the doorknob.

‘He taught you a lot, Nick, about the psychology of rural communities. And about manipulation. Plus, he gave you the inner strength and the brass neck to come back to this country and finally take on your hated, still-vengeful stepbrother.’

She stood in the doorway and waited.

Ellis closed the door again.

In the Black Lion, Jane saw Gomer was talking at the bar to a fat man of about thirty in a thick plaid shirt that came down halfway to his knees. At their table by the door, Sophie gathered her expensive and elegant camel coat over her knees to protect them from the draught.

‘I’d take you two back to Hereford with me, if I thought you’d stay put in the office.’

‘No chance.’ Jane ripped open a bag of crisps, stretched out her legs.

‘Nothing’s going to happen here, Jane,’ Sophie said. ‘The whole thing comes down to two obsessive men settling a childhood grudge.’

‘But what a grudge, Sophie. Serious, serious hatred fermenting for over a quarter of a century. A fundamentalist bigot and a warlock steeped in old magic. A white witch and a black Christian.’

‘Jane!’

‘He is. If you, like, subvert Christianity, if you use it aggressively to try and hurt or crush people of a different religion... or if you go around exorcizing demons out of people who haven’t actually got demons in them, just to get power over them – like this guy McAllman – then you’re using Christianity for evil, so that’s got to be black Christianity.’

‘I wouldn’t exactly call Bain a white witch, either,’ Eirion murmured.

Sophie said, ‘Jane, your grasp of theology—’

But Gomer was back with them, thoughtfully rolling and unrolling his cap. ‘That’s Nev,’ he said, watching the man in the plaid shirt go out. ‘My nephew, Nev, see. Er, some’ing’s come up, ennit? Mrs Hill, if there’s a chance you could stay with these kids till the vicar gets back...’

‘Uh-huh.’ Jane shook her head. ‘Mum said to stick with Gomer.’

Gomer sighed. He opened the pub door, peered out. Jane got up and leaned over his shoulder. There were still a lot of people out there and more police – about seven of them. Also, the guy in the plaid shirt standing by a truck. In the back of the truck was a yellow thing partly under a canvas cover.

‘What’s that?’ Jane demanded.

‘Mini-JCB.’

‘Like for digging?’

‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer admitted gruffly.

Ellis took her into the second surgery: a plain room with a big, dark desk, Victorian-looking. Authority. A big chair and a small chair. Ellis sat in the big chair; Merrily didn’t sit down. She was thinking rapidly back over the history of her faith, the unsavoury aspects.

In the Middle Ages, Christianity was still magic: charms and blessings indistinguishable. The Reformation was supposed to have wiped that out but, in seventeenth-century Britain, religious healers and exorcists were still putting on public displays, just like modern Bible Belt evangelists. And when it was finally over in most of Britain, here in Radnorshire – inside the inverted pentagram of churches dedicated to the warrior archangel – it continued. In a place with a strong tradition of pagan magic, the people transferred their allegiances to the priests... the more perspicacious of whom took on the role of the conjuror, the cunning man.

Few more cunning than Nicholas Ellis, formerly Simon Wesson. His face was unlined, bland, insolent – looking up at her but really looking down.

‘Where’s your mother now, Nick?’

‘Dead. Drowned in her swimming pool in Orlando, four years ago. An accident.’

‘Your sister?’

‘Still out there. Married with kids.’

‘You came back to Britain because of what happened over Marshall McAllman and this Tennessee newspaper?’

‘I’ve told you I won’t discuss that.’ He brought a hand down hard on the desk. He was sweating. ‘And if you say a word about any of this outside these walls, I shall instruct my solicitor to obtain an immediate injunction to restrain you and make preparations to take you to court for libel. Do you understand?’

‘This is Mr Weal, is it?’

‘Never underestimate him.’

‘I wouldn’t. He’ll do anything for you, won’t he? After what you did for him. And for his wife – before she died.’

Ellis kept his lips tight, his face uplifted to the lights and shining.

‘You must have investigated this parish pretty thoroughly before you applied for it. Or were you looking specifically for a parish that suited your kind of ministry? Or was it just luck?’

‘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 said 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 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 the 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.’

‘Like Kali Three?’ Betty said.

Robin saw Bain throw her a short, knife-like glance; she didn’t even react. ‘I used several agencies.’ He turned away, like this was an irrelevance. ‘And then, when “Father Ellis” began to make waves on the Welsh border, I came down to take a look for myself. Fell rather in love with the place.’

Bain then talked of how the archaeological excavation was under way at the time, just across the brook from the church; how the immense importance of the site as a place of ancient worship was becoming apparent. ‘One of the archaeologists told me he’d dearly love to know what lay under that church. Circular churchyard, pre-Christian site. I took a walk over there myself, and met some eagle-eyed old boy who told me he’d just bought it.’

‘Major Wilshire,’ Robin said. He couldn’t believe how this was shaping up.

‘Something like that. I didn’t pay too much attention to him, as I was being knocked sideways by the ambience. It was while I was talking to this guy that I had... the vision, I suppose. A moment beyond inspiration, when past and future collided in the present. Boom. I became aware how wonderful and apt it would be if the power of this place could be channelled. If this church was to become a temple again.’

‘Under the very nose of your fundamentalist Christian brother,’ Betty said quietly.

‘In fact’ – Bain raised his voice, irritated – ‘it was rather the other way round. For the first time I was almost grateful to Simon, for bringing me here. Ironic, really. But the church had now been sold, and that was that. I went home to London. You can imagine my reaction when, just a few months later, I learned that St Michael’s Farm and Old Hindwell Church were on the market again.’

‘No,’ Betty said coldly. ‘What exactly was your reaction?’

‘Betty,’ said Max, ‘I really don’t think we should prejudge this.’

Ned said, ‘Simply that I wanted it to be bought by someone sympathetic to the pagan cause.’

Bulbs finally started flashing big time inside Robin’s head.

The actual tomb was bigger than Merrily had expected: perhaps seven feet long, close to three feet wide, more than three feet deep. From outside, with the funeral party of Prossers, Dr Coll and Nick Ellis grouped around it, it had resembled a stone horse trough. Now, under the cream light from the wrought-iron electric lanterns hanging above the head and the foot of the tomb, she could see that it was far more ornate. A complex design of linked crosses had been carved out of the side panels. The lid was not stone, but perhaps as good as: an oak slab four inches thick. The great tomb had been concreted into its stone plinth.

‘All local stone,’ Judith said proudly. ‘From the quarry.’

‘Got that done quickly, didn’t he?’

Judith closed the oak door, so their voices were sharpened by the walls of the mausoleum, which were solid concrete, inches thick. The chamber was about twenty feet square, nothing in it but the tomb, and the two of them, and dead Menna.

Judith said, ‘Mal Walters, the monumental mason, is a long-established client of J.W. Mal worked through the night.’

‘Right.’

Judith Prosser stood by the head of the tomb, disquietingly priest-like in her tubular black quilted coat – not quite cassock-length, but close. Her short, strong hair had been bleached, her pewter-coloured earrings were thin, metal pyramids. She was waiting, behind the shade of a sardonic smile.

‘I thought...’ Merrily put down the airline bag she’d brought from the car. The junior exorcist’s starter kit. ‘I thought I’d keep it simple.’

But should she even be doing it here, rather than in that big room behind the bay window, where the ‘baptism’ had taken place?

Yes, she should. She didn’t want the complication of having to try to restore peace to a room where the atmosphere had apparently been ravaged by another priest. Also, she had been asked by Menna’s next of kin to calm the spirit. No one had invited her to deal with that room, least of all Weal. She didn’t want to go in there, didn’t want to enter his actual house in his absence. She really needed guidance. If she’d predicted this situation might develop, she’d have rung her spiritual adviser, Huw Owen, in advance. But there’d been no time for that.

Judith moved to a double switch on the wall, and the lantern at the head of the tomb went out, leaving Menna’s concrete cell softly lit, like a drawing room.

‘Are you a Christian, Mrs Prosser?’

‘That’s a funny question.’

‘I know you go to church. I know you support Father Ellis. I don’t really know what you believe.’

‘Nor will you ever,’ Judith said tartly. ‘What’s your point? What are you getting at?’

‘Do you believe in the unquiet dead?’

Judith Prosser regarded Merrily across the tomb, her eyes half closed. ‘The dead are always quiet, Mrs Watkins. The dead are dead, and only the weak-minded are afraid of them. They cannot touch us. Nor, I assume...’ She laid a forefinger gently on Menna’s small inscription, ‘... can we touch them.’

‘Meaning Mr Weal.’

‘Mr Weal’s a tragic figure, isn’t it? He wanted what he thought Menna was. He liked it that she was quiet. He liked it that she was polite to her father and did not go with boys. A real, three-dimensional woman was far too complicated for J.W. He wanted, I suppose, a shadow of a woman.’

Oh my God.

Merrily said, ‘You have to tell me this. If not you yourself, then has anyone else seen the... spirit of Menna Weal?’

Judith made a scornful pfft noise. She half turned and began to unbutton her coat. ‘Anyway...’ Sweeping the coat back to place her hands on her hips, turning to face Merrily. ‘Time is getting on. What do you propose to do here, my girl?’

‘Well... I’m going to say some prayers. What I really should be doing – I mean to be halfway sure of this – is holding a Requiem Eucharist. And for that there really ought to be a few of us. Like I said this morning, it would be better if we’d had Mr Weal with us. I mean with us.’

‘And as I said, that would be imposs—’

‘Or even Barbara. If Barbara were here, it—’

Merrily heard her own words rebound from the concrete walls. She lurched away from the tomb, as if it were mined.

Such a vast tomb for one small body.

Judith looked mildly curious. ‘Someone walk over your grave, Mrs Watkins?’

Merrily knew she’d gone pale. ‘Judith...?’

‘Go ahead,’ said Mrs Prosser. ‘We’re quite alone, almost.’

Merrily swallowed. The scarf felt tight around her throat.

‘What do you think J.W. Weal would have done if he’d discovered that Barbara Buckingham had found out about Father Ellis’s exorcism of Menna, performed at his behest?’

Judith’s eyes were not laughing. ‘What on earth am I supposed to say to that?’ She stepped back.

Now they were both looking at the tomb.

‘Oh, I see,’ Judith said.

Merrily said nothing.

‘You mean, after he dumped the car in the Claerwen Reservoir, what, precisely, did he do with the body?’

Merrily said nothing.

‘Does Barbara perhaps lie below her poor sister? Were her remains, in those fine English clothes, already set in concrete when Menna’s coffin was laid to... unrest?’

Merrily bit her lip.

‘Come on, woman! Is that what you meant?’

‘It looks very deep,’ Merrily said. ‘And... as you said, the monumental mason worked all night.’

‘All right!’ Judith’s voice rang with challenge. ‘Then let’s find out, shall we?’

Merrily found she’d backed against the door.

‘Oh, Mrs Watkins, did you think poor J.W. could bring himself to say such a final farewell to his beloved? What other reason would a man like him have for going to all this trouble?’ She pointed.

From back here, Merrily didn’t even have to bend down to see that the tomb’s handsome oakwood lid was hinged.

‘It’s very heavy, all the same,’ Judith said. ‘You may have to help me.’

Merrily remembered, when she was a little kid, being towed along by her mother to make the arrangements for her gran’s funeral, and how the undertaker’s inner door had been left open. Merrily’s mother thinking she was too young to understand. But not too young to absorb the smell of formaldehyde from the embalming room.

She’d been four years old, the formaldehyde alternating with the equally piercing tang of furniture polish, making her afraid to go to sleep that night, and she didn’t know why. There was only this grim, opaque fear, the sense of a deep, unpleasant mystery.

Which returned when Judith threw back the solid oak lid of the tomb. Judith hadn’t needed help with it after all. She looked down into the tomb and smiled.

The dead are always quiet, Mrs Watkins. The dead are dead, and only the weak-minded are afraid of them.

But Merrily who, since ordination, had seen any number of laid-out bodies was afraid. The same grim opaque fear, and she didn’t know why.

What would be the point, anyway? Judith had only done this for effect, to put herself in control from the start. And if the body of Barbara Buckingham was in there too, it would be in the base, set in concrete, never to be discovered, certainly not in J.W. Weal’s lifetime.

Menna, though – Menna was readily accessible. It was clear that Judith was not now looking down on merely a coffin lid.

‘Close it, please,’ Merrily said.

‘How do you know it isn’t Barbara? Come on, see for yourself.’

‘This is intrusion,’ Merrily said.

‘It was always intrusion, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Then close the lid and I’ll say some prayers and we’ll go.’

‘If I close the lid,’ Judith said, ‘she won’t be able to hear you, will she?’

The whole mausoleum stank of embalming fluid. Merrily needed air, a fortifying cigarette. She went back to the door.

‘Don’t open it, you silly girl. The light!’ Judith let go of the lid and it hung for a moment and then fell against the stone side of the tomb with a shuddering crash, leaving the interior fully exposed. The single lantern, over the foot of the tomb, swung slightly, and Merrily saw a quiver of parchment-coloured lace from inside.

‘Come over yere, Mrs Watkins,’ Judith said.

‘This is wrong.’ Merrily’s hand went to the centre of her breast where, under her coat, under her jumper, the pectoral cross lay. Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me...

‘Come and see how peaceful she looks. It’ll make you feel better. Then we’ll say goodnight to her. Come yere.’

... Christ before me. Merrily walked into the centre of the mausoleum. If necessary, she’d close the lid herself.

‘You silly girl.’ Judith reached out suddenly and grabbed her by the arm, pulled her close. ‘Don’t be afraid. I’ll look after you.’

I don’t think so. As the formaldehyde seared the back of Merrily’s throat, the lantern swung again at the sudden movement and shot spears of light and shadow from Menna’s swaddled feet to Menna’s exposed face.

See how peaceful she looks.

No.

That night in the hospital, with the freshly applied water on her brow, Menna had appeared simply and calmly dead. The body hadn’t, from a distance, seemed much different during her funeral. Now, embalmed, only days later, her face was pinched and rigid, her mouth downturned, lips slightly parted to reveal the teeth... and that particularly, Merrily thought in revulsion, was surely not the work of the embalmer.

She recoiled slightly. Judith’s arm was around her, gently squeezing.

‘Thank you,’ Merrily said. ‘Now I know it isn’t Barbara.’

‘You’re trembling.’ Merrily felt Judith’s breath on her face.

‘Don’t,’ she said mildly.

Things you oughta know, Marianne had said. And earlier: That Judy. She took you outside, din’t she? I was glad when she did that.

‘It’s been hard for you, Merrily, hasn’t it?’ Judith said, quite tenderly. ‘All the pressures. All the things you didn’t understand.’

‘I’m getting there.’ Marianne had been in shock. Marianne needed help. Marianne, who sometimes preyed on men, had herself become vulnerable, pitiable, accessible.

‘Yes, I believe you are,’ Judith said tonelessly.

52 Beast is Come

JANE WATCHED, EATEN up with dread, as the multitude assembled where two lanes in the village converged. The uniformed chief inspector in charge tried to organize some kind of roll-call, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Only two people known to be missing, and one of them was Mum.

Once the fire brigade was in – four machines, two Welsh, two English – the police had sealed off Old Hindwell. Firefighters with breathing apparatus tried to get into the village hall but were eventually ordered out for their own safety. Jane was there when the order was given, and that was when she began to sob.

When – soon after the brigade got there – the porch’s wooden roof had collapsed, lighting up the night and several Sitka spruce, many people fell down on their knees and prayed to the violent, orange sky. Jane was frantic and clung to Eirion, by the side of the police Transit in the filthy, choking air. She didn’t remember when Eirion had appeared, or where he’d appeared from. Sophie was here too, now, and many local people had come out of their homes.

And Gomer... Gomer was a deeply reluctant hero. The media kept wanting to talk to him. They wanted to hear him describe how he’d spotted the flames and gone round to the rear entrance and opened it up and guided 350 Christians to safety. Gomer kept saying, ‘Later, boys, all right?’ But later he was muttering, Bugger off, as the firefighters went on blasting thousands of gallons into the roaring hall.

And still they hadn’t found Mum.

Jane, by now hyperactive with fear, had dragged Eirion into the middle of the milling people, and she kept shouting through her tears, ‘Small, dark woman in a tatty duffel coat, anybody? Anybody!’

But nobody had seen her. Nobody.

Though a number elected to pray for her.

Not nearly as many, however, as were praying for Father Ellis, last seen, apparently, stepping from the stage to sing with the crowd. Nobody, at that time, had been aware of the fire in the porch because of the fire doors, and nobody had heard it because of the glorious exultation of the Holy Spirit amplified through their hearts and lungs.

Nobody had known a thing, in fact, until a skinny little man with wild white hair and thick glasses had appeared at the bottom of the hall and had begun bawling at them to bloody well shut up and follow him. By then the fire doors were surrounded by flame and the air was turning brown and the tongues were torn with coughing.

Now Jane’s arms were gripped firmly. Sophie said incisively into her ear, ‘Jane, she is not in there, do you understand? She cannot possibly be in there.’ Jane opened her mouth to protest and took in a wad of smoke, and was bent double with the coughing, and heard a man shouting in rage.

‘They’ve found a petrol can!’

Obvious what this meant. Jane straightened up, eyes streaming.

A senior-looking policeman was saying, ‘We don’t know anything yet, so don’t anybody go jumping to conclusions.’ But he was wasting his breath, because everybody knew what the petrol can meant.

And then, suddenly, the white monk was there.

He was just suddenly there, about thirty yards away from the crowd, up against the schoolyard wall.

Jane’s feeling was that he’d been sitting quietly in one of the cars or something, staying well out of it, and had come out casually when everyone’s attention was diverted by the sound of the porch crashing down or something. Two women in their thirties noticed him first, and it was like Mary Magdalene and the other woman finding an empty tomb and then turning around and there He was. They ran towards him, shouting, ‘Thank God, thank God, thank God.’

And it just kind of escalated like that. Jane saw all these people falling down on their knees at his feet and all shouting, ‘Praise God,’ and, ‘Thank you, God,’ and some of them even looked like local people. Jane heard a tut of disdain from Sophie, and, for the first time, felt something approaching genuine affection for the cool cathedral woman in the wreckage of her camel coat.

There wasn’t a mark on the white monk.

‘Please,’ he was saying, ‘don’t you worry about me. I’m fine.’ He bent to one of the women. ‘Stand up, please.’ He raised her up and hugged her and then he walked away from the wall. And his arms were raised, palms towards the crowd, fingers splayed. ‘Stand up, everyone –

‘Stand up and smell the foetid stench of Satan!’

There was this shattering hush.

‘Feel the heat of the dragon’s breath!’

A woman moaned.

‘And know that the beast is come!’

‘It was you?’ In the dingy parlour-turned-temple, Robin stared at Ned Bain; Bain didn’t look at Robin. ‘You had the estate agents send us the stuff?’

‘Not... directly.’ For the first time, the guy was showing some discomfort. ‘We put out feelers through the Pagan Federation to see if anyone might be interested.’

‘We?’ Betty said.

‘I did.’

‘But, like, how come you didn’t just buy this place yourself?’ Robin was still only half getting this.

‘And reveal himself to Ellis?’ Betty said. ‘Before he could get his plans in hand?’

‘Coulda bought it through a third party.’

‘He has,’ Betty said acidly.

‘I don’t think that’s quite fair,’ said Max. ‘There was hardly time for plans – except, perhaps, in spheres beyond our own. I’m inclined to believe this came about as a spontaneous response to what one might call serendipitous circumstance.’

‘Max.’ Betty was laying on that heavy patience Robin knew too well. ‘Do you think, for one minute, that we’d all be here today, trying to pull something together at the eleventh hour, if Vivvie hadn’t crassly shot her mouth off on a piece of late-night trash television and alerted Ellis to what he immediately perceived as the Devil on his doorstep? No, Ned would have waited for Beltane, Lammas, Samhain... and got it all nicely set up for maximum impact.’

Max started to speak, then his beard knitted back together.

George was up now – squat, stubbly George, partner of Vivvie.

‘Look, people, I think... that however this all came about, we’ve got to put it behind us for tonight. If we allow it to destroy this seminal sabbat, under the spotlight of the entire pagan world, we are going to regret it for the rest of our lives, man. I agree that maybe Ned’s not been as up-front as he might’ve been. I know we could start to accuse him of only setting this thing up to have this Ellis man go down in history totally humiliated, as the priest who lost his church to the Old Religion, but...’

‘It’s more than that,’ Betty said. ‘For a start, he set us up. And in a place which none of us—’

‘It doesn’t matter, Betty. We cannot let personal issues fuck up a seminal event. We have to hold the sabbat, we have to reconsecrate this church in the names of Mannon and Brigid and...’

George stopped. Betty had stood up. In this damp, chilly room she was a heat source: the only one here who didn’t look kind of tawdry. She looked like a goddess.

‘Ask him what he’s waiting for,’ she demanded.

‘Please...’ George wilted back. ‘Just leave it.’

Ned Bain didn’t move.

‘He’s waiting for his stepbrother,’ Betty said. ‘He’s waiting for the hymns to start up, only louder. He’s waiting for his stepbrother to lead the enemy to the gate.’

‘But, Betty, we need that tension,’ George said. ‘That’s what this is about – the changeover. In the dawn of the year, the dawn of a millennium, a pretender is banished.’

‘Christ, you mean?’

‘If you like. I prefer to think in terms of the warlike Michael. I’ve got nothing against Christ, but he was, at best, an irrelevance. Yeah, Christ, if you like.’

‘I don’t like,’ Betty said. ‘We’re an alternative. We’re not the opposition. I mean, he might be – he and Ellis both. Whatever else they are, whatever they claim to represent, it’s completely soured by what lies between them. I don’t want that. I don’t want to go into that old, fouled place on the back of twenty-five years of pent-up hatred. I suggest everybody gets changed and leaves now.’

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.

‘Before I leave,’ Bain said, ‘I want to make it clear that no one else here was involved, no one conspired. No one else deserves to suffer.’

And then he turned and gathered his robe and walked out without another word.

There’d been a long period of quiet then, broken only by some weeping. Betty leaned against a wall, drained. Vivvie had her head in her hands. Even Max had nothing to say. His kids hovered in the doorway, the fiendish Hermes looking satisfyingly scared. The pregnant witch, whose name Robin couldn’t recall, had left the room with her partner. Robin only hoped she was OK. He was starting to feel sick and cold. The twig-fire hissed. A thick piece of altar candle rolled into a corner.

Alexandra, who’d been sitting calmly, with the crown of lights on her knees to protect it, was the first to speak. ‘I think we should all leave Betty and Robin alone for a while.’

And so Robin and Betty, covenless, had rediscovered one another. I take thee to my hand, my heart and my spirit at the setting of the sun and rising of the stars. Robin started to weep again and buried his face in her hair. Clinging together in their stupid robes, in the wreckage of the altar.

They went hand in hand to the door, and looked out at Winnebagos, the barn and puddles. Robin watched the moon in the puddles, icing over. You could almost get sentimental about those puddles. But not quite.

‘We should get outa here tomorrow. Go check into a hotel someplace. Think things over. I love you.’

Betty had her red ski jacket around her shoulders. ‘And I love you,’ she said. ‘But Robin, honey...’

Betty fell silent. He hated when Betty became silent.

‘OK, what?’ he said.

She held his hand to the centre of her breast, her emotional centre.

‘We can’t just leave it.’

‘Watch me,’ Robin said.

But his spirit took a dive. She’d already explained how she’d spent the night at a Christian priest’s house. A woman priest, who was also the county exorcist or some such, and knew a lot of stuff. He had the idea it had all come about through Betty’s meeting with Juliet Pottinger. A part of him still didn’t want to know about any of this.

He thought he could hear distant voices, beyond the trees. Like from a barbecue. Or maybe he just thought barbecue on account of the red glow in the sky. Perhaps a glimmering of Imbolc.

‘There’s a fire somewhere,’ Betty said. ‘Can’t you smell it? Didn’t you hear the sirens?’

‘I was maybe smashing things at the time. Coming on like the Reverend Penney.’

‘Let me tell you the truth about Penney,’ Betty said. ‘He had a bad time in Old Hindwell Church. I think he was basically a very good man, probably determined to make a success of his ministry. But I think there were some aspects of what he found here that he couldn’t handle. Began taking all kinds of drugs.’

‘Didn’t the Pottinger woman say, in her letter to the Major, she didn’t think he was doing drugs?’

‘She was wrong. He seems to have had a vision, or a hallucination... of a dragon... Satan... in the church. And he seems to have thought that by discontinuing active worship there, it would... make it go away.’

Nothing very new there. ‘But?’ Robin said.

‘But I don’t think what he experienced was anything to do with the Old Religion or the rise of the new paganism. I think he became aware of the dualistic nature of religion as it already existed in this area; that there is a paganism here, but it’s all mixed in with Christianity. A kind of residual medieval Christianity – when magic was very much a part of the whole thing. When prayer was seen as a tool to get things done. It’s practical. It suits the area. Marginal land. Hand to mouth.’

Robin thought of the witch box, the charm. Christian, but not entirely Christian. Those astrological symbols, and some of the words – using witchcraft against witchcraft.

‘There are five St Michael churches,’ Betty said. ‘A pentagram of churches, apparently to confine the dragon. But it’s an inverted pentagram, right?’

‘That... doesn’t sound good.’

‘Perhaps,’ Betty said, ‘it was accepted that, at some time, they might need to invoke the dragon. It’s border mentality. I met a bloke called Gomer Parry. Radnorshire born and bred. He’ll tell you this place took a lot of hammering from both the English and the Welsh and survived, he reckons, by knowing when to sit on the fence and which side to come down on.’

Robin took some time to absorb this. He could smell those bonfire fumes on the air now. It was, in some ways, a sharp and exciting smell carrying the essence of paganism.

He said, ‘You mean they’re... I don’t know this stuff, the Book of Revelation and all...’

‘Sitting on the fence while the war in heaven rages,’ Betty said. ‘Five little old churches in a depopulated area with a rock-bottom economy. No-man’s-land.’

‘No-god’s-land?’ Robin said, awed. ‘But, like... way back... way, way back... this place was something... the archaeology shows that.’

‘Maybe that accounts for its inner strength. I don’t know. We don’t know what we’re standing in front of. We don’t know the full nature of what lies the other side of that barn.’

‘Does Ellis?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Or Bain?’

‘Partly. Maybe.’

‘But Bain’s big thing was personal. That’s dark magic. Low magic.’

‘There are people round here who would understand it. It’s notorious for feuds lasting from generation to generation.’

Robin said, ‘I wonder, how did Ned Bain get the box from the Major? He buy it? Or just push the old guy off of his ladder and steal it?’

‘I don’t think he’d push the Major off the ladder. But I don’t think he’d have been averse to posting his name on the Kali Three Web site.’

‘What is that, anyway?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ Betty said.

‘Don’t wanna dump on my idyll, huh? There’s no idyll, babes. No more idyll. Where’s that leave us?’

‘Leaves us with eleven disappointed witches,’ Betty said. ‘And a contaminated church.’

Robin breathed in the distant smoke. ‘What do we do?’

‘I was expecting somebody. I thought she’d have come by now.’

‘The woman priest? The Christian priest?’

‘She’s also an exorcist.’

‘Excuse me,’ Robin said, ‘but didn’t we pass this way before?’

‘It would’ve been very wrong to let Ellis do it. You were right about that. From the start.’

‘Don’t try and get me on your side.’

‘OK.’

They looked out over the freezing puddles to the barn on the other side of which the Church of St Michael overhung the restless Hindwell Brook, probably the very same brook into which that guy’s son’s blood flowed from his hair, in the old Welsh poem Max had read out.

‘On account of you know you never need to,’ Robin said eventually. ‘You know that whatever shit comes down, I am on your side. Do what you think is best.’

He felt like crying. He wished for subsidence, an earthquake. He wished the freaking church would fall into the freaking brook.

Presently, Alexandra stood on the edge of one of the puddles, her long, grey hair loose, a thick woollen shawl wrapped around her.

The emissary. The negotiator. The one they were most likely to talk to.

‘It has to be your decision,’ Alexandra told them.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Betty said.

‘Babes,’ Robin said gently, ‘it’s getting late. And the priest isn’t here. If she was ever gonna come at all.’

‘We don’t know what that place is really about.’ Betty looked out into the night, in the direction of the church. ‘We don’t know what rituals they were performing, what kind of magic they were trying to arouse or for what purpose. All those millennia ago.’

‘Bets,’ Robin said, pained, ‘the ancient powers locked into the land? The magic of the Old Ones? This is Blackmore shit.’

She looked at him, puzzled. She was probably thinking of him standing watching the water rushing below the church and ranting about the cool energy, him and George with their dowsing rods working out how many old, old bodies were under there, where the energy lines converged. She didn’t understand – as Robin now did – that to do his paintings, to be what he was, a true creative artist, he just had to live the legend. That was all. That was as deep as it went.

Alexandra said hesitantly, ‘May I make a suggestion?’

‘Please,’ said Robin.

‘We abandon all reconsecration plans. That’s been tainted now, anyway, because of Ned. And Ned’s gone, and we talked about that and we were all relieved, even George, because Ned’s... Ned’s a little bit dark.’

‘Fucker,’ Robin said.

‘So we forget all that. We forget the politics.’

‘Even Vivvie?’

Alexandra glanced behind her. Robin saw the whole coven in the shadows.

Vivvie came forward, looking like some rescued urchin. She stood beside Alexandra. ‘Whatever,’ she said.

‘My suggestion,’ Alexandra said, ‘is that we simply enact the Imbolc rite.’

‘Who’d be the high priest?’ Robin said.

‘It should be you.’

Robin knew this was a major concession, with George and Max out there. Although he’d been through second-degree initiation, he’d never led a coven.

‘And when we come to the Great Rite,’ Alexandra said, ‘we’ll leave so that you can complete it.’

For Robin, the cold February night began to acquire luminosity.

Alexandra smiled. ‘You’ve both had a bad time. We want this night to be yours.’

Robin tingled. He did not dare look at Betty.

55 Grey, Lightless

ONLY A DEAD body.

Whatever else remained was not here; it was probably earth-bound in that back room, where a medieval exorcism replayed itself again and again, until the spirit was flailing and crackling and beating at the glass. The grey and lightless thing that J.W. Weal brought home from Hereford County Hospital.

‘Look at her...’ said Merrily, in whom guilt constantly dwelt, like an old schoolmistress. ‘That’s what you all did. That’s what you left behind. Take a proper look at her face. Go on.’

But Judith Prosser looked only at Merrily. And there was no guilt. Practical Judith in her tight blue jeans, the sleeves of her shirt pushed up to the elbows, her black coat in a heap on the floor. Practical Judith Prosser, ready to act, thinking what to do next, how to make her move. A smart woman, a hard woman, a survivor.

But Merrily, perhaps taking on the guilt that Judith would never feel, pushed harder.

‘Maybe that’s why J.W. invited you to the interment – you and Gareth and the good Dr Coll. Did Dr Coll, by the way, prescribe Valium to keep Menna afloat, keep her quiet when she threatened to be an embarrassment? Was there medication for Marianne, too? I thought Marianne seemed awfully compliant during her cleansing.’

‘You have it all worked out, Mrs Watkins,’ Judith said.

‘Yeah,’ Merrily said. ‘I finally think I do. It stinks worse than this embalming stuff.’

‘And what will you do with it all? Will you go to the police and make accusations against Dr Collard Banks-Morgan and Mr Weal, the solicitor, and Mrs Councillor Prosser?’

‘It would help,’ Merrily conceded, ‘if Barbara Buckingham’s body was in here.’

‘So why don’t you come back here with a pickaxe? Or with your good friend Gomer Parry and one of his road-breakers?’

It wasn’t going to be there, was it? There was no one under Menna. Yet Merrily was sure now that Barbara Buckingham was dead.

‘Did Barbara find out about the exorcism?’

Judith slowly shook her head, smiling her pasted-on smile, back on top of the situation, giving nothing away.

‘Still,’ Merrily said, ‘Menna’s here. For any time you want to look at her and remember the old days before she turned into a woman and became less malleable. And J.W.’s left you with a key. So you can come in any time and watch what you once had... see what you did. Watch it slowly decaying before your—’

Merrily sank to her knees.

She’d been expecting, if anything, a shriek of outrage and clawing hands. She hadn’t seen this coming. Judith Prosser didn’t seem to be close enough. Now Merrily was on her knees, with the flash memory of a fist out of nowhere, hard as a kitchen pestle. On a cheekbone.

She had never been hit like this before. It was shattering, like a car crash. She cried out in shock and agony.

Judith Prosser bent with a hand out as if to help her, and then hit her again with the heel of it, full in the eye. Merrily even saw it, as if in slow motion, but still couldn’t move. It drove her back into the wall, her head connecting with the concrete, her left eye closing.

‘You can tell the police about that, too, Mrs Watkins.’ Judith was panting with satisfaction. ‘And see who they believe – a hysterical little pretend-priest from Off, or Mrs Councillor Prosser. Ah...’

One hand over her weeping eye, Merrily saw through the other one that the door had swung open. And the doorway was filled. Really filled.

‘Good evening, Jeffery,’ Judith said.

‘You have me, Judith, as a witness that she hit you first.’ Weal’s voice was colourless and flat as card. ‘But only if you make no further mess of her than that, or it would not be a reasonable defence.’

He was carrying what looked like a kind of garden implement. He came in and gently closed the door of the mausoleum behind him. He was wearing a charcoal grey three-piece suit and a white shirt, and a black tie to show he was still in mourning. His face was pouchy, red veins prominent in his grey cheeks.

He propped the garden implement against the door. Merrily saw that it was a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun.

‘Thought it was the hippies, see.’ He nodded at the twelve-bore. ‘Some satanist hippies are parked up in the clearing by the Fedw Dingle. Father Ellis phoned to warn me. They break in anywhere.’

‘Isn’t loaded, is it, Jeffery?’ Judith said.

‘It’s always loaded. There are foxes about. And feral cats. I hate cats, as you know.’

‘Not going to the Masonic?’

‘I was going, Judith, till I saw all those troublemakers in the village. Can’t leave your house unguarded, all this going on, can you?’

Talking politely, like neighbours over the wall, people who knew each other but not that well.

They must have known one another for most of their lives.

Merrily didn’t try to move. Judith looked down at her.

‘Recognize this one, do you, Jeffery? Came to see me this morning. Asking all kinds of questions about Father Ellis. And about you, and Menna. When she left, I saw that the keys... You know where I keep your keys, on the hook beside the door? Stupid of me, I know, but I trust people, see, and we’ve never had anything stolen before. But when she left I seen the keys were gone.’

Weal stood over Merrily. ‘Called the police?’

‘Well, next thing, there she is coming down the lane tonight. I thought, I’ll follow her, I will, and sure enough, up the drive she goes, lets herself in and when I came in here, she’d already done that.’ They both looked at the open tomb. ‘Disgusting little bitch. I shouldn’t have touched her but, as you say, she went for me. Like a cat.’

I hate cats, as you know. How instinctive she was.

Merrily was able to open her swelling eye, just a little. She looked up at Weal. It was like standing under some weathered civic monument. She didn’t think there was any point at all in telling him that Judith had lured her here, picking up, with psychopathic acumen, Merrily’s guilt, her sense of responsibility for Barbara Buckingham.

‘Why did you do this? Why do you keep coming here? Why do you keep wanting to see my wife?’

J.W. Weal gazing down at her sorrowfully, giving Merrily the first real indication that there was something wrong with him. His speech was slow, his voice was dry.

‘The truth of it is,’ Judith said, ‘that she seems to have a vendetta against Father Ellis.’

‘Father Ellis is... a good man,’ Weal said calmly.

No, it wasn’t calmness so much as depletion. Something missing – almost as if he was drugged, not fully here. As if part of him existed on some intermediate plane, at grey-and-lightless level. Lying there in a cocoon of pain, detached, Merrily felt her senses heightened, her objectivity sharpened.

‘Supposed to be the exorcist for the Hereford Diocese, she is,’ Judith told Weal. ‘Doesn’t like him working in her back yard – a priest whose feet she is not fit to wash. What good would a woman like this be at what he does?’

Merrily tried to stand. Judith immediately pushed her down again and she slid into the corner by the door. Judith was wearing her leather gloves again, perhaps to cover up any slight abrasions or bruising from the punches. Merrily’s face felt numb and twisted. She wondered if her cheekbone was broken. She wondered where this would end. The way these two were talking to each other, it was like a bad play.

‘Gave me some nonsense story,’ Judith Prosser said. ‘About Barbara Buckingham being murdered and buried in there.’ Another nod to the open tomb.

Why, in God’s name, didn’t one of them close it?

‘Buckingham?’ Weal said vaguely. What was wrong with him?

‘Barbara Thomas.’

‘Murdered?’

‘She thinks Barbara was murdered.’ A gleeful, almost girlish lilt now. ‘Thinks you did it, Jeffery.’

Merrily didn’t look at him. She could almost hear his mind trying to make sense of it.

‘Because... Barbara Thomas... came to see me, is it?’ His voice thin and stretched, as though he was trying to remember something. ‘Because she... accused me?’

‘Did she?’ Merrily said.

‘Shut up!’ Judith moved towards her. Merrily shrank back into the corner. If she could just get to her feet, she might... but then there was Weal.

‘If you grievously injure her,’ he told Judith earnestly, ‘you know I may not be able to help you.’

Merrily shut her eyes. Think! Barbara believes Weal was responsible for Menna’s death, so she goes to see Weal and accuses him of bringing about Menna’s death by subjecting her to Ellis’s perverse ritual. What does Weal do then? What does he do to Barbara?

Nothing.

The way he was talking now, viewing the situation, almost naively, from a pedantic legal perspective, made one thing clear: whatever else he was, this man was not a killer.

There’s only one killer.

‘J.W.,’ Merrily said. ‘When Barbara came to see you... when she went a little crazy and started accusing you of... things, did you...’ She could hear the acceleration of Judith’s breathing, but she didn’t look at her; she was going to get this out if she was beaten into the ground for it. ‘Did you send her to see Judith?’

Weal didn’t answer. He glanced briefly at Judith, then down at Merrily. The question had thrown him. He looked at Judith again, his jaw moving uncertainly, as if he was trying to remember why it was that he hated her so much.

Merrily could suddenly see Weal and Barbara in the old rectory, Weal red-faced and anguished. Why are you plaguing me, you stupid, tiresome woman? Why don’t you talk to the one person who, for twenty-five years, has been...?

Judith said, ‘Jeffery, you’re tired.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m always tired these days.’

‘Why don’t you go back to the house now?’ Judith said kindly. ‘I’ll sort this out.’

He put his fingers vaguely to his forehead. ‘You won’t go doing anything stupid, will you, Judith? We are entitled to protect our property, but only...’

‘Don’t worry about me. I have never been a stupid woman. I was just carried away, see. Just carried away, Jeffery.’

He nodded.

‘Here,’ Judith picked up his shotgun. ‘Take this with you and lock it away. No one will try to get in now.’

She held the gun upright and handed it to him. Weal accepted it, holding the barrel loosely.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Judith.’

When Judith’s gloved hand slid gracefully down the barrel, down the stock, the blast was like the end of the world. Merrily, shrinking into her corner, into herself, saw J.W. Weal’s head burst like a melon in a rising red spray.

Felt it come down again, a warm hail.

56 Each of my Dyings

JUDITH STILL HELD the shotgun, her face creased in concern.

‘Poor man,’ she said. ‘But, see, what did he have to live for now?’

Judith held the gun with both gloved hands, the stock under her arm.

‘Not much,’ she added. ‘Not much at all.’

Weal’s great body blocked the door. His blood and flesh and bone and brain blotched the walls, but most of the mess, still dripping, was on the ceiling. Merrily, sobbing, was still hearing the sound of Weal’s head hitting the ceiling. Would hear it for ever.

‘A terrible accident,’ Judith said.

Two smells now: the embalming room and the slaughterhouse. Merrily hung her head. She felt very cold. She heard something sliding stickily down the wall behind and above her.

‘An accident, Mrs Watkins. A terrible accident.’

‘Yes,’ Merrily croaked.

‘Or perhaps he meant to do it, do you think? You saw me handing it to him. Such a tall man, it was pointing directly under his chin.’ She laughed shrilly. ‘Such a big man. They calls him Big Weal in Kington and around. Big Weal – The Big Wheel.’

‘That’s very good,’ Merrily said.

Judith said flatly, ‘I’m making excuses, isn’t it?’

Merrily felt something warm on her forehead, wiped it roughly away with her sleeve. She thought that maybe being squashed into a corner had protected her from most of the carnage. She remembered Judith jumping quickly back, snatching the gun away too. Not a speck on Judith.

She heard herself say, ‘These things happen,’ and felt a bubble of hysteria. She began to get up, levering herself, hands flat behind her pushing against the floor, her bottom against the wall. Now she could see J.W. Weal’s huge shoes, shining in the lantern light, his legs...

‘Oh no, you don’t!’ Judith swung round, the stock hard against her shoulder. ‘You’ll stay there while I think, or you’ll have the other barrel.’

Merrily froze. Judith’s eyes were pale – but not distant like J.W.’s had been. Her gaze was fixed hard on Merrily.

‘You made me do that. It’s your fault. You suggested to J.W. that he must’ve sent Barbara Thomas to me. He never did. He wouldn’t do that.’

‘Didn’t she... tell you?’ Merrily’s gaze turned to the river of blood that had pumped from J.W. Weal’s collar. She gagged.

‘She was off her head, that woman,’ Judith said. ‘Off her head! Screaming at me. Standing there, screaming at me, in her fancy clothes. How dare she run away, go from here, spend her life in cushy... where was it? Where was it?’

‘Ham... Hampshire.’

‘Hampshire. Soft, cushy place that is. How dare she come back from Hampshire, start screaming at me – me who’s had it hard all my life. They comes here, the English, think they can say what they like.’

Half a mile over the border – just half a mile – and this myth of the English having it so good.

Judith’s accent seemed to deepen as she remembered the encounter. ‘But a scrawny neck, she had, like an old bird. Trying to hide her scrawny neck with a fancy, silk scarf. But I found it, Mrs Watkins.’

Oh God. Merrily stiffened in her half-crouch against the wall. Sinewy hands around a scrawny neck. Maybe a silk scarf pulled tight.

‘Going to tell everybody, she was, that bitch! Everybody! Going to shout it all over Radnorshire that Mrs Councillor Prosser was a lesbian! How dare the bitch call me a lesbian? “I’ll sue you!” I said to her. “I’ll hire J.W. to sue you. See how long your English money lasts you then!” ’

Merrily retched again.

‘Never seen blood before, Mrs Watkins? Used to kill all our own pigs, we did, when I was a girl. And whatever else we wanted to, until the regulations. Regulations about this and that... Regulations, it is, killing country life.’ She calmed down, sighed. ‘Poor Jeffery – it’s just like putting down an old horse.’

‘What was... the matter with him?’

‘It was since she died.’ A toss of her head towards the tomb. ‘He was hardly awake since. Couldn’t face being awake.’

‘Was he... on medication? From Dr Coll?’

‘Wouldn’t have it. Said it was the mourning took his energy, eating him up inside.’

Took his energy?

Menna.

‘Do you know what I think?’ Judith said, brightening. ‘I think he ought to have killed you, Mrs Watkins.’

Merrily felt the first spasm of a cramp in her right leg. She had to move.

‘That’s what I think. Meddling little bitch, you are, come to spy on Father Ellis.’

Merrily braced herself against the wall, straightened the leg in front of her, looking up. Into the black, metal-smelling barrels of the twelve-bore hovering six inches from her face.

Judith said, ‘Perhaps he did shoot you.’ She raised a hand to her head for a moment, horribly childlike, as if putting something together in her mind. ‘Likely he shot you before he killed himself. Blew your little head off with the one barrel, saved the other for himself. He was a solicitor. A logical man, see.’

She looked delighted – the woman was mad.

Merrily looked along the barrel of the great gun towards the stock. She saw two triggers, one slightly in front of the other, Judith’s finger around the second one. The speed she’d managed it last time, there must be hardly any tension in those triggers.

Merrily jerked her head to one side, but the two holes followed her.

Judith was a practical woman.

‘First used one of these when I was nine year old,’ she said proudly, ‘when I could hardly lift it. Saw my father shooting crows.’ She smiled happily. ‘Country girl, see, always the tomboy. Always a better shot than Councillor Prosser.’

The trigger finger relaxed. Merrily still held her breath. Could she summon the strength to throw herself from the wall, knock the barrel aside? As if she’d picked up the thought, Judith backed away smartly, smiling.

‘Jeffery thought you were one of the hippies broken in. Thought you were a hippy, and you went for him and his gun went off. That’s what they’ll say, isn’t it? Then, when he saw what he’d done, he turned the gun on himself. Suicide while the balance of mind was disturbed. Went to an inquest two year ago, we did, Councillor Prosser and I. One of our old neighbours hanged himself – verdict of suicide while the balance of mind was disturbed. Everyone here knew J.W.’s balance of mind was gone.’

Merrily shook her head helplessly.

Judith waggled her fingers to show she was still wearing gloves. ‘Dropped the gun as he died. Two of you dead.’ She glanced at the open tomb. ‘Went to say goodbye to his wife, before he killed himself. Poor Jeffery, he’s with her now – is that what you think, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Yes.’

Judith’s face turned red. ‘Rubbish! Nonsense! How can a woman be so stupid. There is nothing after death! Menna waiting in the clouds with her arms open, waiting for her J.W. with no head? Is that what you would tell them in your church, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Is that what you say to Father Ellis?’

The barrel moved down to Merrily’s chest. At this range, the blast would cut her in half, and it could happen any time. If she moved too quickly, Judith would blow her apart. She wouldn’t feel anything. She wouldn’t even hear the shot. Her last moment would be a moment just like this.

‘We could have been friends, you and I, Merrily Watkins.’

‘I’m not sure that we could,’ Merrily said honestly.

‘I’m not a lesbian, you know. Are you calling me a lesbian?’

Merrily thought of Jane, glad that Gomer was with her. Would the kid later remember hearing a distant explosion from the village, hear it echoing down her life. Pray that these concrete walls were too thick. Pray: Please, God, Oh God. Please, Jesus, hold me safe from the forces of evil. On each of my dyings shed your light and your love. Would she die wearing Jane’s coat? She saw not her own life flashing before her, but Jane’s. Jane aged three on the beach in Pembrokeshire, following a ball, tripping over it, starting to cry because she thought she should, and then bursting into wild laughter, rolling over and over like a kitten.

Merrily tore herself wretchedly back into the present.

‘Frankly, Judith, I couldn’t care less where you stand sexually. It’s insignificant.’

‘Not to me, Mrs Watkins. Not to my reputation.’

‘The real point is, you’re a monster. A monster that feeds on the vulnerable. Anything that brings out pity in the rest of us, it just makes you more excited. Tears turn you on. You were probably everything to Menna – all she had sometimes. But she was nothing to you, no more than a slim, white, trembling body to play with.’

She stood up, looked at Judith and shrugged.

‘You may close your eyes, if you wish,’ Judith said coldly, but she’d squeezed the second trigger before Merrily even had time to decide.

Betty and the stately Alexandra drifted about the ruins like mother and daughter ghosts, moving things around while Robin watched and held the lamp.

The fat candles mostly stayed: on sills and ledges, and in glass lanterns on the top of the tower.

The altar got moved. This was an old workbench from the barn, with a wood vice still clamped on the side. Robin helped Alexandra carry it from the north wall to a place in the middle of the nave, opposite the tower but facing where Betty figured the chancel had been. East-facing, like a Christian altar, in case this Merrily Watkins turned up.

The ruins hung around them like old and tattered drapes, moonlight showing up all the moth-holes. The moon was real white now, like a slice of Philadelphia cheese over the tower. Robin thought he saw a movement up there. An owl, maybe.

Across the roofless nave, Betty was taking some crystals from a drawstring bag. She kept her eyes down.

When it was all ready, the coven was summoned in, and Alexandra said to Betty, ‘Will it be?’

Robin looked at Betty, and he knew she had at last accepted that the Christian priest would not come.

Betty nodded.

Tapers and matches were handed out. The coven moved like shadows, dipping and bending, and when each one rose there was a new glimmering.

Max’s wife Bella did the tower. ‘Creepy,’ she said when she came down. ‘Felt I was being watched.’

In the end, there must have been seventy or eighty candles alight. Lined up in every jagged, glassless window. Along the walls of the roofless nave. In the arrow-cracks of the tower. On top of the cold battlements, in glass lanterns.

St Michael’s, Old Hindwell, was ethereal, unearthly, shivering with lights, and the display reflected, crystallized, in the Hindwell Brook.

57 In Shock

NEVER HAD a gun, never wanted one, but Gomer knew about gunshots, how loud they could be at night, how the sound would carry miles, and he’d figured out roughly where this one had come from, and it wasn’t likely to be poachers or lampers of hares – not tonight with all these coppers on the loose.

‘The church?’ young Jane said, scared.

‘Further on, more like.’

He wasn’t gonner say it was the ole rectory yet, but he was gonner check it out.

As they reached Prossers’ farm, a police van shot past them – far too fast, in Gomer’s view, to be heading for the entrance to the ole church. They wouldn’t’ve heard the shot. Most likely they was heading for the camp the coppers would’ve now set up where they’d dug up Barbara Thomas.

Gomer had been worried they might get stopped. Under his bomber jacket, he had his sweatshirt on back to front, so it no longer said, ‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire’.

Behind them, the fire was just fumes on the air, almost unnoticeable as they reached the St Michael’s entrance. No protesters here yet. No coppers, neither. And no reporters. A woman’s body and some bugger figuring to fry three hundred people had to be more important than God and the Devil.

The five-bar gate was closed across the track, but the padlock hung loose from the hasp on a chain. Gomer was about to open it when Jane let out a gasp.

Two women were approaching up the road.

Jane hesitates a moment, then starts to run. Gomer levels his torch.

It lights up Judy Prosser. Also the vicar.

The kiddie runs to her mam and they starts hugging, but Gomer knows straight off this en’t normal. He walks over, slowly.

‘’Ow’re you, Judy?’

But he’s looking at the vicar in the torchlight, where her eye’s black and swelled-up, her face lopsided.

Jane’s now spotted it, too. ‘Mum, what have you—’

But Judy cuts in. ‘Gomer, we’re looking for the police, we are. Something terrible’s happened.’

‘What’s that, Judy?’

‘I have to report a suicide.’ She’s holding herself up straight in this long, black quilted coat. ‘Mr Weal – he’s shot himself, I’m afraid to say.’

‘Big Weal?’

‘Blew his head off with a shotgun. In his wife’s tomb, this was, poor man. Turned his mind, isn’t it? The grief. Tried to stop him, didn’t I, Mrs Watkins? Tried to talk him out of it.’

The vicar says, in this clear voice, like in the pulpit, ‘No one could have done more, Mrs Prosser.’

‘You all right, vicar?’

‘Yeah, I’m... fine. Apart from a few bruises where... Mr Weal hit me.’

‘I warned her not to approach him,’ said Mrs Prosser. ‘Silly girl.’

‘Yes, I’ve been a very silly girl.’

Judy says, ‘We all were terrified that he might do something stupid. So, as a close neighbour, I was keeping an eye on him. I go there every night, I do, to check he’s all right, and sometimes I finds him beside the tomb, with the top open, just staring at Menna’s remains. Mrs Watkins said she did not think this was healthy and she asked me to take her to see Mr Weal, and we finds the poor man in there, with his wife on show and his twelve-bore in his hands. Mrs Watkins panics, see—’

‘Gomer...?’ the vicar says. ‘Ar?’

‘Are there any police around? I thought there’d be some here.’

‘Over the harchaeologist site, vicar,’ Gomer says warily. ‘Any number o’ the buggers.’

‘Could you take Mrs Prosser. Ask for a senior officer, and tell them Mrs Prosser has a lot of... information.’

‘You can tell them my husband’s on the police committee,’ Judy says. ‘That should expedite matters. But surely you’re coming, too, Mrs Watkins?’

‘I have to take my child back to the vicarage, Mrs Prosser. She’s too young to hear about this kind of thing.’

The vicar hugs young Jane very close for a few seconds.

‘Say goodnight to Gomer, Jane,’ the vicar says.

The kiddie comes over, puts her arms round Gomer’s neck and hugs him real tight, and in his ear in this shocked, trembling whisper, her says,

‘Mum says to tell the police not to let her go. She’s killed twice.’

They followed the path to the old archaeological site. Some thirty yards away, they could see two police cars lined up, a radio crackling from one of them. They could see the low, white tent, the orange tape. The second car was parked on the edge of a small wood full of dead trees, white branches shining like bone. Jane had told her what was probably still lying under the tent.

‘Are you sure?’ the kid kept saying. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I promised.’

‘But with everything that’s... And look at you... Look at you. You need a doctor.’

‘Dr Coll?’ Merrily started to laugh, and the laughter wouldn’t stop.

‘Stop it!’ Jane screamed. ‘What’s that on your hands?’

Merrily looked down, still laughing.

‘Oh.’

Thock, she heard. Thock.

Seeing the ridiculous dismay on Judith’s face... watching her step back, angrily breaking open the gun, and coming out with that brilliantly dry observation.

‘Wouldn’t you know it, Mrs Watkins? A Radnor man to the core. Never load two cartridges when you may not even need the one.’

The funniest line Merrily had heard in a long time. Possibly, at that moment, the funniest line being spoken in the whole, insane world. When she started to laugh, she was half expecting Judith to come at her with both fists or take a swing at her with the shotgun. But smart Judith, canny Judith... this was not how Judith reacted at all. She simply laid down the empty gun, a few inches away from the half-curled hand out of which she’d snatched it before the fingers could spasm around its barrel.

‘The stupid man.’ Voice flat, eyes flat like aluminium. ‘What did he want to do that for? You saw it, Mrs Watkins, you saw how I tried to stop him.’

As if the previous minutes had never happened – as if editing her life like a videotape. Instinctively compiling the alternative version, with an efficient jump-cut from the second the gun went off. So practical, this Judith.

And Merrily had reacted quickly for once, getting it exactly right.

‘You’d better tell the police what happened then, Mrs Prosser.’

‘It’s my duty, Mrs Watkins. Give me a hand here, will you?’

Both of them then pulling the body away from the door, as though it was a huge dead sheep, so they could squeeze outside.

This was how Merrily had got the blood on her hands.

To the left, she could hear the sound of the Hindwell Brook.

Jane said, ‘She killed Barbara Buckingham, that woman?’

‘Yes.’ Strangled her with her own silk scarf. Beat her up first, probably. ‘Perhaps when Barbara went to see her and challenged her over... certain things. I think Gomer said her husband owned a digger. I suppose one of them would’ve driven her car over to the Elan Valley, with the other following.’

‘Who is she?’

‘She’s Mrs Councillor Prosser, flower – fortified by the local community: the doctor, the lawyer, the councillor... even the priest. Solid as a rock, she was, until someone from Off blew it all open. Someone who hadn’t always been from Off, and realized what she was seeing here.’

And Merrily couldn’t help wondering to herself, then, if anything had ever gone on, way back, between Judith and Barbara – something Barbara had suppressed, erased from her memory as simply as Judith Prosser had erased from her mental tape the murder of Weal and the attempted murder of Merrily.

Over her shoulder was slung her airline bag, bought because it was blue and gold. She’d brought it out of the tomb with her, but there was no blood on it, a small miracle. It contained the Bibles, prayers, altar wine and holy water. So medieval?

They stopped at the bridge, and there was the church across the water, and also reflected in the water. Betty’s birthday cake.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Jane breathed. ‘It’s... son et lumière. Without the son.’

Merrily smiled wildly. Less than an hour ago, she was staring into eternity down the barrels of a twelve-bore. Now she was back in airy-fairyland.

‘Are you sure about this?’ Jane said. Merrily squeezed her arm.

‘Jane... look... I don’t want to have to worry about you, OK? So I’d like you to stay out of the way. I know you’re sixteen and everything...’

‘You’re in shock, aren’t you? I mean, you’ve just seen something totally horrific. You’ve been through a really horrifying—’

‘Yeah, I probably am in shock.’

‘You could do this tomorrow.’

‘I said I’d do it tonight.’

‘We could explain to Betty...’

They were halfway across the footbridge now. The ruins shimmered in a hollow of silence.

Then a woman’s voice rose up.

‘Dread lord of Death and Resurrection

Of life and the Giver of life

Lord within ourselves, whose name is Mystery of Mysteries encourage our hearts

Let thy light crystallize itself in our blood...’

Merrily slumped over the rail of the bridge.

Too late.

58 The Woman Clothed with the Sun

HIS COVEN AROUND him, Robin lifted the wand high, in his right hand, until it divided the moon.

The wand was a slender, foot-long piece of hazel wood, cut from the tree with a single stroke on a Wednesday, as laid down in the Book of Shadows. In his left hand Robin held the scourge, a mild token thing like a riding crop with silken cords.

Behind him were the crone – Alexandra – and a woman called Ilana, who was twenty-four but looked a lot younger and represented the maiden tonight.

The flames rose straight up out of the tight nest of stones in the centre of the nave as he brought down the wand in a long diagonal, right to left, then left to right in a forty-five-degree angle and straight back horizontally and down... and up.

To a point. One point.

The positive, invoking pentagram of Earth... drawn before his high priestess, whose hair shone brighter than the fire, whose eyes were deeper than crystals.

‘Blessed be,’ Robin whispered.

And never had meant it more.

Merrily followed Jane around the church tower. The kid had a small torch, borrowed from Gomer, but they didn’t need it; the church cast its own light. When she looked up to the top of the tower, she could no longer see the candle-lanterns, only the highlighted stones. She and Jane slipped – unseen, she assumed – from the tower, across a grassy, graveless churchyard, glittering with frost, to the side of what looked like a stone barn.

What to do? Watch and pray?

Christ be with us, Christ within us, Christ behind us.

They stood with their backs to the barn. From here, through an empty Gothic window in the nave, about twenty feet away, they could see the long candles on the altar, and they could see, by the fire and candlelight, Betty in her green robe. On one side of her was a girl of about eighteen, on the other a plump and placid woman, who looked like she ought to be running a day nursery. The girl was combing Betty’s blond hair.

There was now music on the freezing air: vaguely Celtic, string and reed music from some boombox stereo concealed in the ruins. It all seemed gentle and poetic and harmless and not a lot, in Merrily’s view, to do with religion.

The distance, the walls and the music allowed them to talk in low voices. Jane said, ‘Doesn’t look as if she’s been, like, coerced, does it?’

Betty stood with her back to the altar, the other women on either side. The male witch, who looked like he should be playing bass with Primal Scream, appeared in the Gothic window.

‘We saw him in the Daily Mail, right?’ Merrily said.

‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s Robin.’

‘And is he the high priest? You know this stuff better than me.’

‘Has to be.’

‘Not Ned Bain, then.’

‘Which is a mercy?’ Jane said.

‘Which has to be a mercy.’

A shadow moved beside her, as if off the barn. Any night but this, she might have cried out.

‘A mercy, you think, then?’ the shadow said.

‘Hello, Ned,’ said Merrily.

They’d customized the rite slightly, to allow for the place and the changed circumstances, but Robin thought it could still be OK. He tried to concentrate on the meaning of the ritual – the birth of spring. And the purpose – the bringing of fresh light to an old, dark place. He wondered if Terry Penney could see them in some way and feel what was happening. For in the absence of the woman priest, Betty said, this rite must also be a form of exorcism, to convey Terry’s spirit into a place of peace.

But Robin couldn’t dispel the awareness that they were doing this in a church. He would close his eyes for a moment and try to bring down the walls until there was only a circle of stones around them, but he was finding he couldn’t hold that image, and this wasn’t Robin Thorogood, visionary, seducer of souls, guardian of the softly lit doorways. He found himself wishing they were someplace else, in a frosted glade or on some open moorland... and that wasn’t Robin Thorogood, custodian of an ancient site which tonight was entering its third incarnation, quietly and harmoniously, without tension, without friction.

He laid the wand and scourge upon the altar and helped the maiden to arrange the shawl around the shoulders of the crone.

From a jam jar on the altar, he took a small bunch of snowdrops – the flowers of Imbolc – which Alexandra had found growing behind the barn and had bound together with some early catkins.

He presented this humble bouquet to Ilana, the maiden.

He lifted the crown of lights from the altar and waited while the three women arranged themselves.

He raised the crown of lights and placed it on Betty’s head, and the maiden and the crone tucked and curled her golden hair becomingly around it.

‘Merely spectators,’ Ned Bain whispered. ‘Isn’t it sad? Came for a baptism and they wouldn’t even let us be godparents.’

Merrily said nothing, keeping her eyes on the Gothic window, full of moving lights.

‘I’ve been barred,’ he said. ‘Might that be down to you?’

She flicked a glance at him. She hadn’t seen him clearly, but he was not robed, like the others. He seemed to be wearing a jacket and jeans. She made sure she kept Jane on the other side of her.

‘If you’ve been barred, why are you still here?’

‘Because Simon will come,’ Bain said. ‘If he isn’t here already.’

‘Simon?’

‘You know who I mean.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You really aren’t on his side, are you, Merrily?’

‘I’m not on anybody’s side.’ She was picking up a musky, sandy smell on him. It reminded her, for just a moment, of Sean. She made the sign of the cross and cloaked herself and Jane in the glow from the breastplate of St Patrick. The smell went away.

Bain said, ‘Am I right in thinking Simon’s offended you?’

‘Am I supposed to think this is ESP, Ned? Your awesome powers at work?’

‘Isn’t Father Ellis performing exorcisms?’

‘Is he?’

‘Do they work?’

‘Depends on what he intends them to do. That’s where the problems arise.’

‘Tell me.’

Jane touched her shoulder. ‘Mum... I think they’re coming.’

‘If I tell you what he did,’ Merrily said, ‘will you bugger off?’

‘OK.’

‘He performed some kind of baptismal ritual which effectively bound together two people who never should have been brought together in the first place. And when the woman died, her... spirit would not leave the man. And instead of bringing him comfort, it oppressed him and sapped his energy, and turned him into... even less than he was before.’

‘Mum...’

‘Thank you,’ Ned Bain said. ‘What will you do about that?’

‘I don’t know that I can do anything.’

She moved behind Jane to the corner of the barn, looked out across a yard, past the farmhouse to where a track was marked out by a line of swinging torches and lamps.

She heard singing – inane, redneck gospel, with all the spirituality of a football chant.

‘We shall raise the sword of Christ and strike the Devil down.’

‘Sounds like your people, Merrily,’ Ned Bain said. ‘And my cue to disappear.’

In the night, with all the spearing torches, the hymn sounded dense and menacing. Merrily remembered the Christian biker with the dead dragon on his T-shirt.

‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it, Ned?’

‘If I were you,’ Ned Bain said, ‘I’d stay well out of it. Call that a gentle warning. Call it a prophecy. Goodnight, Merrily.’ He turned and merged with the shadows. ‘There’s blood on your hands. Why’s that, I wonder?’

She didn’t see how, in this light, he could possibly have seen her hands. And she’d got it all off, hadn’t she?

In the shimmering silence of the open ruins, with the tower rearing behind his priestess, Robin brought a taper from the fire and lit the candles around the crown of lights. The little flames sprang brightly. Robin said,

‘Behold the Three-formed Goddess,

She who is ever Three

Yet is she ever One.

For without Spring there can be no Summer,

Without Summer, no Winter.

Without Winter, no new Spring.’

Tears in his eyes as he gazed on his goddess. She was everything he’d ever imagined, the beautiful book cover he’d painted so often in his head for the book which was too profound, too poetic, too resonant for anyone yet to have written. He looked into Betty’s eyes and then up at the blurred moon.

‘Listen to the words of the Great Mother – She who, of old, was also called among men Artemis, Astarte, Athene, Dion, Melusine, Aphrodite, Ceridwen, Dana, Arianrhod, Isis, Brigid and by many other names.’

And so it went on, and when it was over, the maid took up a broomstick and walked clockwise around the fire, followed by the mother and the crone, sweeping away the old, and Robin prayed to the moon for the badness and torment in this place to be swept away for ever.

When the torch and lamp lights were enlarged, beams crossing in the air, and the hymn behind her began to sound like the baying of wolves, Merrily looked up and saw him.

Just a shadow against the stars, then faintly lit by the lanterns on the battlements. He was not in his white robes, which would have been too conspicuous; someone would have seen him getting into the tower.

‘Oh Christ,’ Merrily said. She turned to Jane. ‘Stay there.’

‘No chance,’ Jane muttered, and followed her towards the church.

They kept close to the walls so they couldn’t be seen from the tower itself, passed by the Gothic window full of lights, edged around the building to the opening, where the south porch had been. Merrily began to pray softly and realized, with horror, that she was praying to God for protection against His servants at the gate.

She was very anxious now.

Robin picked up, from outside the ring of stones surrounding the fire, two twigs of holly he’d cut a week ago and hung over the back door, so that they were now nicely brittle.

The coven gathered around him. He knelt before the fire and set light to each twig in turn and held it up for them all to see. Then he tossed each of the twigs into the flames. And the coven chanted with him, in what ought to have been joy and optimism but sounded scarily flat and formulaic,

‘Thus we banish Winter,

Thus we welcome Spring,

Say farewell to what is dead

And greet each living thing.

Thus we banish Winter,

Thus we welcome Spring.’

Then the coven melted away, into the shadows and out of the church, Max patting Robin on the shoulder as he passed. ‘Well done, mate,’ Max whispered.

All over.

All over, but for the Great Rite.

A double sleeping bag lay directly under the tower, protected from the wind, a candle-lantern quietly alight at either end.

Robin stood by the fire. Betty walked away towards the base of the tower and when she reached it, she turned around, all aglow in her nest of candles. But the glow came from more than the candles, and there was a strange moment of fusion, as if the whole church was a crown of lights around them both, and Betty’s gown slipped down with a silken rustling, and Robin’s heart leapt like a fawn and he moved towards her along the open nave.

And then he heard a voice, cold and strident on the night.

‘Foul serpent!’

Robin looked up and saw the spectre on the battlements, its arms raised like the twin points of a pentagram upside down.

‘O most glorious leader of the heavenly armies, defend us in our war against the dark spirits which rule this world and the spirits of wickedness in the high places. For the Holy Church venerates you as her guardian and the Lord has entrusted to You the souls of the redeemed, to be led into heaven.’

‘St Michael,’ Merrily explained. ‘He’s invoking St Michael. It’s his exorcism.’

She stood in the entrance, with Jane.

‘You’ve got to do something,’ Jane said.

A bright light lanced over the kid’s shoulder. A TV cameraman was moving up behind her. They were all piling in now, whether they’d come over the gate or across the bridge, forming a big circle around the ruins. But it had been a small church and she and Jane were blocking the narrow entrance. People began to push at her back.

‘Make them go away!’ A woman’s voice she’d heard somewhere before... I can show you a church with a tower and graves and everything... ‘This is sacrilege!’

Merrily put an arm around Jane and didn’t move.

Ellis boomed from the tower, his voice like a klaxon in the still, freezing air. ‘In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, and of Michael, the Archangel, we confidently undertake to repulse the deceits of Satan!’

Merrily was furious. He was not entitled. He was not entitled to wield the name of Christ like an axe... or the cross of Christ like a dildo...

Robin Thorogood couldn’t seem to move. He stood in the nave, staring up, as if his blood had turned to ice. Impaled by TV lights, he looked like a prisoner caught in the searchlights escaping from some concentration camp. Merrily couldn’t see Betty.

From the tower, in the haze of the lanterns, Ellis cried, ‘God arises! His enemies are dissembled, and those who hate Him shall fall down before him. Just as the smoke of hellfire is driven away, so are they driven. Just as wax melts before the fire, so shall the wicked perish before the presence of God. Behold—’

He stopped. Betty had walked out. She was robed again. She looked terrified, but she didn’t look up, not once.

She was somehow still wearing the crown of lights.

And Merrily, in a vibrantly dark moment, was already hearing the verse from Revelation when he started to broadcast the words.

‘Now a great sign appeared in heaven... a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet... and on her head... a garland of twelve stars...!’

Robin Thorogood shouted, ‘No... that’s not...’ Throwing out his arms in protest.

‘Serpent!’

Merrily saw what she knew that Ellis was seeing. She saw the picture in his war room, the one by William Blake, and it turned Robin’s arms into great webbed, leathery wings the colours of a freshly dug worm, and his wild hair into a ram’s curling horns. She saw the Woman Clothed with the Sun, stars around her head, a twinkling lure for the Great Red Dragon.

Merrily at last gave way to the prods and thrusts at her back.

Robin saw the small, dark-haired woman running into the nave.

‘No...’ she was yelling. ‘Please God, no.’

And when he heard, from above, this sickening, crumbling, creaking, cracking sound, he realized he was screaming too as he hurled himself towards Betty, threw his arms around her and bore her to the ground, covering her with his body and closing his eyes as the first stone came out of the sky.

He didn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel anything. But he could hear other people’s screams and, above them all, Ellis’s bellow.

‘And there was war in heaven!’

Robin just lay across his goddess on the sleeping bag, unmoving as the black sky tumbled.

He opened his eyes just once, to watch the crown of lights rolling away like a cheap Catherine wheel, the birthday candles going out one by one.

There were many other lights, too, but he closed his eyes on them; many other sounds, but he didn’t listen to them. He heard only the heart of his goddess, and his own voice whispering the words which moved him beyond all others.

In the fullness of time we shall be born again, at the same time and in the same place as each other, and we shall meet and know and remember... and love again...

59 Damage

HE WAS A tall, stooping man with a mournful, half-moon kind of face, a heavy grey moustache. He was the recently appointed head of Dyfed-Powys CID, a mere caretaker role, he said, before retirement. His name was Gwyn Arthur Jones, detective superintendent. Gomer Parry knew him from way back, which saved them some time.

But it was still close to three a.m. before they left the incident room – Dr Coll’s waiting room – for the comparative privacy of Dr Coll’s surgery. The door was closed, and a metal Anglepoise burned on a desk swept clean of all papers.

Formal statements had been taken and signed. Jane was asleep on Dr Coll’s couch. Sophie had taken Eirion back to Hereford and his stepmother’s car.

Detective Superintendent Gwyn Arthur Jones had brought out his pipe and discovered a bottle of single malt in Dr Coll’s filing cabinet.

‘Kept naggin’ at me, see,’ Gomer said, ‘that piece o’ ground. Amateur job, stood out a mile. Why would bloody Gareth dig it up again and put it back, ’less he was lookin’ for treasure, and Gareth wouldn’t know treasure ’less it come in a bloody brass-bound chest with “Treasure” wrote on it.’

‘And Mrs Prosser?’ The superintendent’s accent was West Wales, quite soft, a first-language Welsh-speaker’s voice. ‘Did no one ever nurture uncharitable suspicions about her?’

‘Judy?’ Gomer shook his head as though he would go on shaking it for ever. ‘Not me. Least nothin’ I could get a ring-spanner to. But her kept croppin’ up, ennit? I kept sayin’ to the vicar, didn’t I, vicar, you wanner talk to Judy... Judy’s smart... Judy knows. Bloody hell, Gwyn, I never guessed Judy knowed it all.’

‘And still holding out on us.’ Gwyn Arthur sipped Dr Coll’s whisky. Merrily had noticed that when he’d taken the bottle from the drawer he’d replaced it with a twenty-pound note. ‘I don’t somehow think she will ever do otherwise. “Mrs Councillor Prosser, wife of a former chairman of the police committee” – time and time again, like name, rank and number.’

‘Local credentials,’ Gomer said. ‘Means everythin’ here.’

‘And Dr Collard Banks-Morgan, former acting police surgeon – the allegations about him, he tells us, are quite risible. As we would have been further assured by Mr Weal, had the poor man not taken his own life. I suspect people cleverer than me will have to spend many days among Mr Weal’s files.’

Gwyn Arthur poured further measures of whisky into those little plastic measuring vessels you got with your medicine.

‘All in all,’ he said, ‘never, in my experience, have so many eminently respectable, conspicuously guilty people lied so consistently through their teeth. I’m awfully afraid, Mrs Watkins, that you are destined for a considerable period in the witness box.’

‘What will you do with Ellis?’ Merrily asked.

‘We’ll hold him until the morning, then we shall have to think in terms of charges, and I’m very much afraid that my imagination, at present, will not stretch a great deal further than wilful damage – if that – regardless of the tragic consequences. He didn’t even have to break into the tower. Just bolted himself in from the inside. What happened later was, he insists, an unfortunate accident. He hasn’t even described it as the will of God. The tower parapet, as the late Major Wilshire discovered to his ultimate cost, was horribly unstable. He did not mean for all those stones to fall.’

‘What about the TV pictures?’

‘Almost gratuitously graphic when it comes to portraying the results. But the lights on the cameras were insufficiently powerful to reach the top of the tower – or to illuminate Ellis’s movements in the moments before the stones were dislodged. I would give anything for it to be otherwise, but there we are.’

Merrily lit a cigarette with fingers which still would not stay steady. ‘I’m not giving up on that bastard. Expect me at the station later today, with a Mrs Starkey, if I’ve got to drag her. But I don’t think it’ll come to that. Not now.’

‘Yes, indecent assault is a better beginning.’ Gwyn Arthur Jones drained his medicine measure and went to stand at the window. The only vehicles left on view in the village were the police cars and vans, Merrily’s Volvo, Gomer’s Land Rover and Nev’s truck with the digger on the back. Gwyn Arthur came back and sat down and contemplated Merrily. ‘And what else? What else, in your wildest imaginings, Merrily, would you think Ellis might have done?’

She took a tiny sip of Scotch. ‘Well... have you got anybody yet for the village hall?’

‘Interesting,’ Gwyn Arthur said, ‘but no we haven’t. The travellers we brought in were most indignant.’

‘I mean, it was all getting a bit tame, wasn’t it? A few hymns, a little placard-waving. He’d had his chance to convince three hundred fundamentalist Christians that Satan was in residence in Old Hindwell, and he hadn’t really pulled it off, had he?’

‘You think he planned to inflame these people, as it were, with the thought that the pagans wanted to burn them alive? Maybe to drive them to excesses?’

‘Knowing full well he’d have been able to lead them to safety out of the rear entrance, even if Gomer hadn’t turned up and received the credit? I think that’s very much on the cards.’

‘Hmm,’ said the superintendent. ‘Certainly, emotions among those decent, church-going Christians were running at a level possibly unparalleled since the days of the witch-hunts. There’s no question in my mind that it could have become extremely nasty... if, ironically enough, those stones had not fallen when – and where – they did.’

‘You could always check out his robe for petrol traces or something.’

‘No one as yet, has been able to find his robe,’ said Gwyn Arthur Jones regretfully. ‘He doesn’t remember where he left it. Unlike Mrs Prosser, he’s being entirely cooperative. He tells us he chose to go alone to the church, one man against a horde of heathens, precisely because he did not want his legitimate Christian protest against the desecration of the house of God to become a bloodbath. Several witnesses confirm that he tried to stop them.’

Merrily closed her eyes. ‘He doesn’t like churches. Churches are disposable. Instead, he set up in this village hall because it was close to Old Hindwell Church... the battleground. He claimed he’d been getting anonymous letters, phone calls... signs on the Internet.’ She sighed. ‘Do you know the Book of Revelation at all? The paintings of William Blake?’

Betty stared down into the near-black water. She said slowly, ‘O Lord, Jesus Christ, Saviour Salvator, I beseech the salvation of all who dwell within from witchcraft and from the power of all evil men or women or spirits or wizards or hardness of heart. Amen Amen Amen.’

An ambulance warbled across the city. Maybe the one which had brought her here several hours ago.

From the viewing platform above Victoria Bridge, the suspension footbridge over the Wye, bushes hid the sprawl of Hereford County Hospital.

It was dawn, that coldest time, with only a few lights across the river, shining through the bare, grey trees.

‘Either the charm didn’t work,’ she said, ‘or it worked all too well.’

‘Get rid of it,’ Merrily said.

Half an hour ago, she’d been waiting with Betty when the orthopaedic surgeon, who was called Frank, had explained that Robin’s pelvis was smashed, and there was some spinal damage. ‘Will he walk again?’ Betty had asked. Frank couldn’t answer that one, yet, but he said he was hopeful.

Merrily said bitterly, ‘War in heaven, and all the casualties down here.’

‘Don’t you go losing your faith,’ Betty said. ‘It’s only religion. Faith is faith, but religions are no better than the people who practise them.’

60 Lamplit

IT WAS STILL only mid-morning when the bedside phone awoke her. She hadn’t been in bed long enough for it to be a sleep of any depth – although the half-dreams were dark – and she was instantly focused and expecting the worst.

She didn’t expect him.

‘It all comes down to demonization, you see, Merrily,’ he said, as if they’d been talking for hours. ‘I was demonized from an early age – twelve, to be exact. He was the little Christ, and I was the Antichrist. He and his mother were always very efficient at the demonization of anything in their way. And he still is, of course.’

He sounded as if he’d been drinking. His voice was dark and smooth and intimate. Merrily sat up in bed, fumbling a cardigan around her shoulders.

‘He wanted dragons, so I sent him dragons. I sent him serpents.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It isn’t all done by magic. The postal service can be equally effective, and now the Internet and e-mail... almost as fast as one can transmit a thought. But then it’s all electricity, isn’t it? Everything’s a form of electricity. Science is catching us up. Soon everyone will be doing magic. What a dispiriting thought.’

She heard the clink of a glass against his teeth.

‘I’ve been a bad man, in my way. No worse, I would submit, than Simon, but bad enough. Sometimes I yearn for redemption. Is that possible, do you think, Merrily?’

‘It’s possible for everybody.’

The sunlight penetrated through the crack in the curtains and put a pale stripe down the bed. Celtic spring had come.

‘I hoped you’d say that,’ he said. ‘So... will you help me? Will you help a poor sinner onto the... lamplit path?’

She froze. ‘Who told you about that?’

He laughed. ‘I know everything about you. You’re in bed, aren’t you?’

She felt his Sean-breath, the warm dusting, and she was afraid.

‘I can just see you in bed,’ he said, ‘all rumpled, a little creased around the eyes. Rumpled and smelling of softness and sleep.’

She remembered the blood he could not have seen on her hands. She remembered the red and white lights on the motorway, false lights in a night of filth.

‘Can we meet?’ Ned Bain said. ‘And discuss my redemption?’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ she said, and put down the phone and sat there in bed, shivering.