A Crown of Lights (21 page)

‘He was apparently a big guy. Played rugby. Very strong. His most impressive feat was to rip out the stone font. He must’ve rolled it out the double doors. They found it sticking out of the water, like a big rock.’

Betty glanced bleakly across at him, then picked up her glass and drank the rest of the warm water like it was a double Scotch.

‘And where was he? Where was Penney?’

‘Gone. They never saw him again. The Prossers and some other guys they could trust salvaged what they could. Took about four of them to get the font out – they waited nearly a week till the water level dropped down, and draped tarpaulin and stuff over it meantime. Couple of weeks later, the diocese
gets a cheque for several thousand. Whole damn thing was hushed up.’

‘They never found out why he did it?’

‘Just he’d grown to hate the church, was all. There was no further explanation. He’d cleaned it out. Musta taken him hours, working at it through the night, by the oil lamps – no electricity in there. Trashing his own church like a maniac. When they went inside, it was all bare. Just the Bible from off of the lectern. The Bible lying there in the middle of the nave. Lying open.’

Betty waited a long time before she asked him.

‘Open at?’

Robin smiled, shaking his head.

‘The Book of Revelations, wouldn’t you guess? About Michael and his angels taking on the Devil and
his
angels? The great dragon getting cast out into the earth? All of this underlined in ink.’

‘I see.’ Betty stood up.

‘Shows us where Ellis is coming from, doesn’t it? He’s clearly heard about Penney and the dragon fixation that gets him so screwed up he trashes his own church. Well, OK, maybe the poor guy experiences some pre-Christian energy on that site which is so awesome it shakes his Christian faith, scares the shit outa him. To Penney it’s devilish. It blows his mind... he wrecks the joint.’

‘Thereby becoming a
vehicle
for this energy, I suppose,’ Betty said wearily.

‘Holy shit!’ A big light came on in Robin’s head. ‘Hey, that’s so cool! The priest is unwittingly helping the church to cast off Christianity – to revert.’

Betty took her glass to the sink, not looking at him, like she didn’t want to hear what was coming next. But, hell, he had to say it. It was staring them right in the face.

‘Bets... it’s down to us, now, isn’t it? To, like, finish the job. It puts us hard against Ellis, but... like, is this fate, or what?’

He was tingling with excitement. This was their clear future.

At the sink, Betty put down the glass, turned both taps on full. She was staring into the water running out of the taps. ‘I doubt this is as simple as you imagine.’

‘Or maybe it just
is
. Maybe it’s also fate that the local people weren’t so attached to the church the way it was that they wanted to fight to save it.’

‘It was in a poor state, anyway. It was going to cost a fortune in repairs. That’s what the Pottinger woman said.’

‘And maybe Ellis was right about something coming to the surface. Bad news for him... but not for us, babes.’

‘Oh, don’t be so bloody simplistic! Just for a moment stop trying to make
everything
fit into your dream scenario.’

‘Well, sure... OK.’ He felt hurt. ‘I mean let’s talk this thing through.’

‘I have to go out. I have to go and see Mrs Wilshire.’

‘Again? What the fuck
is
this?’

‘It’s not your problem.’

‘Oh really?’ Hell, this needed saying, this was long overdue. ‘Well what
is
my problem is why you always have to find excuses to get out of here. Like going in the
car
. Why don’t you ever even go into the village? The place we live next to? Why don’t you get to know the people
here
? People like Judith Prosser next door. OK, Gareth might be a dumb bastard, but she’s OK, not what I imagined. Maybe we were wrong to start condemning the local people as total redneck bigots, purely on your flawed fucking childhood memories.’

Betty didn’t flare up. She just stared hard at him for a couple of seconds, and he stared back.

And then she said, ‘I never said that. I’m sure there are some decent, liberal, perceptive, outward-looking people down there.’ She went to the table, picked up a piece of white notepaper, pushed it at him. ‘Like, for instance, the person who sent that.’

T
HE
G
OTHIC LETTER
D was still on the office door, but hanging loose now, at an angle. D for Deliverance – Bishop Hunter’s idea.

As had been the Reverend Watkins becoming Deliverance Consultant.

She stood on the stone stairs, in front of the closed door, and decided, after all, to go back home. Her head ached. What the hell was she doing here? As she turned to creep back down the stairs, the office door opened.

‘I
thought
it was!’

Merrily stopped, and slowly and sheepishly turned around again.

‘I
thought
it was your car.’ Sophie was expensively casual in a blue and white Alpine sweater. ‘What on earth are you doing here? Nobody would have expected you to come in today.’

She’d spoken briefly to Sophie on the phone, asking her to put the bishop in the picture.

‘Merrily, you look—’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Starved.’ Sophie stood aside for her.

Merrily slung Jane’s duffel coat on the back of her chair, and slumped into it. ‘If I hadn’t come in
today
, I might never have come in again.’

Sophie frowned and began making tea. Through the gatehouse window, above Broad Street, the late morning sun
flickered unstably in and out between hard clouds. The air outside had felt as though it was full of razor blades. The weather forecast had said there might be snow showers tonight – which was better than fog.

‘The bishop tried to ring you.’ Sophie laid out two cups and saucers. ‘He said if I spoke to you to tell you there was no need to phone back.’

‘Ever.’

‘Don’t be silly, Merrily. On reflection, I’m glad you did come in. Are you listening to me?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘You
cannot
drive to Worcester.’

‘I’ll be perfectly—’

‘You will not.
I
shall drive you. Leave your car here. I don’t want an argument about this, do you understand?’

‘Well, I can take a bit of a rest this afternoon. They’re not releasing her until after five.’

‘She should stay there another night,’ Sophie said stiffly. ‘Concussion’s unpredictable.’

‘I think, on the whole, I can probably do without her discharging herself and stalking the streets of Worcester at midnight.’

‘I should have thought that she’d be sufficiently penitent not to dare to—’

‘Sophie’ – Merrily cradled her face in cupped hands, looked up sorrowfully – ‘this is Jane we’re talking about.’

‘If she were
my
daughter...’

‘Don’t give yourself nightmares.’ Merrily dropped her hands, trying not to cry from exhaustion, anxiety, confusion and a terror which seemed to be lodged deep inside her, which every so often would pulse, hot-wiring her entire nervous system.

‘Delayed shock, Merrily.’

‘If you tell me I need trauma counselling, I’ll put this computer through the window.’

Sophie brought over a chair, sat down opposite Merrily.

‘Tell
me
then.’

The sun had put itself away again. Sophie added two sugars into Merrily’s tea and switched on the answering machine.

Sophie? Sophie in her incredibly expensive Alpine sweater. Sophie who served the cathedral and all it represented. Yeah, why not?

‘When you really contemplate the nature of this job,’ Merrily said, ‘you can start to think you’re more than half mad. When the line between reality and whatever else there is... is no longer distinct. When it’s no longer even a
line
.’

And when you swerve around a crashed lorry in the fog, and there’s a figure staggering in the road that you just know you’re going to hit, and in the last second, while you’re throwing yourself around the wheel, you see her face.

‘I’m starting actually to understand the Church’s conservatism on the supernatural. Shut the door and bar it. Block the gap at the bottom with a thick mat. Let no chink of unnatural light seep in, because a chink’s as good as a... whatever you call a big blast of light that renders you blind.’

‘As in Paul on the road to Damascus?’ Sophie said.

‘Not exactly. Paul was... sure.’

‘You
are
tired.’

‘I mean,
I’m
sure... I’m just not quite sure what I’m sure
of
. It’s only by being dull and conservative that the Church remains relatively intact. Bricks and mortar and
Songs of Praise
. Leave the weird stuff to Deliverance. It’s a dirty job, and they’ve never been totally convinced someone has to do it.’

‘I did watch the
Livenight
programme,’ Sophie said. ‘I didn’t really see how else you could have handled it. Without coming over as a... crank.’

‘Or a bigot. Both of which are probably better than a drowning wimp.’ Merrily drank her tea, both hands around the cup, like someone pulled out of the sea and wrapped in a blanket. ‘You spend an interminable hour making a fool of yourself on TV, you walk out thinking all religion’s a joke. You’re unhappy and ashamed and cynical all at the same time.
You get in your car, you drive maybe not quite as carefully as you ought to, given the ubiquitous fog warnings and the fact that your husband just happened to have died horrifically on this same stretch of motorway. You drive into a fog bank. You become aware of two dull specks of red that you think must be a hundred yards away and which turn out to be this bloody great crashed lorry dead in your path. You spin the wheel in panic. You become aware of a figure dragging another figure across the road in front of you. The second figure stares full into your headlights, and you see... you see the face of your daughter who you know for a fact is at home in bed fifty-odd miles away. Your daughter’s face... blank, white, expressionless. Like the face of a corpse.’

Sophie shuddered. ‘It must have been... I can’t imagine what that must have been like.’

‘Like... Nemesis,’ Merrily said. ‘You know what I was thinking about in the few minutes before? I was thinking about this woman who believes she’s seeing her sister’s ghost. I was just deciding she really didn’t have a psychiatric problem— Oh
no!
’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I told her I’d go with her to her sister’s funeral. It’s this afternoon. It’s in about two hours. Or less.’

‘Oh, Merrily, nobody could possibly expect—’

‘I’ve got to.’

‘You’ve had no
sleep
.’

‘Oh, I’ve had... had an hour on the sofa. Fed the cat, grabbed a slice of toast, rung Worcester Infirmary twice to make sure Jane’s not... worse. No, look, I’ve got to go, because...’
Because if I don’t and something awful happens
... ‘Because it’s something I can’t just leave in the air.’

‘Then you must lie down for a while first. I’ll find somewhere in the palace. Look at you – you’re trembling. Are you saying this pile-up actually happened in the same area where your husband was killed?’

‘Well, that was on the other side, the northbound lanes. He was... I suppose he was on my mind, when...’

When she’d walked into that studio? Was Sean stalking her then? Was he already deep-harboured in her head when she’d entered the TV building? Having driven along the same stretch of the M5, under the very same bridge against which his car had balled on impact and bounced in its final firedance, while he and Karen were torn and roasted.

Couldn’t tell Sophie any of that. Couldn’t tell her about the eloquent pagan, Ned Bain, sitting there with his lazy, knowing Sean-like eyes, and even his legs crossed à la Sean.

Just stay with the main event.

‘And, you think... what you think is that this can’t be happening. And if it can’t be happening then it’s a hallucination. And you
know
you’re not hallucinating. Therefore – click, click – it has to be a paranormal experience, just like all the paranormal experiences other people have told you about and you’ve nodded sagely and given your balanced opinion.’

‘But only you would think that. Only someone in your—’

‘Only someone in my weird, cranky job.’

‘But you didn’t hit her,’ Sophie said intensely. ‘Did you? You did not hit Jane.’

‘No. There was no impact. I didn’t hit anyone. But still a complete nightmare – I mean dreamlike. You haven’t physically driven into your daughter, therefore it must be a premonition: a vision of
killing your own child
.’

‘But it wasn’t, was it?’

‘I could see Sean in her face... that little bump in the nose, the twist of the lips. I could see Sean in her, like I’d never seen him there before.’

‘Juxtaposition of ideas,’ Sophie said, ‘or something.’

‘I swerved, violently. Stopped the car and got out, terrified out of my mind. Only to discover...’ Sophie reached across the desk, squeezed Merrily’s cold right hand. ‘... that this really was Jane. The actual Jane, being pulled away by a terrified Eirion after being very nearly killed when this speeding low-loader smashed into the back of his car. She was pale and expressionless not because she was dead, but because she was
semi-concussed. This is the mind-blowing perversity of it, that there is
an absolutely cold, earthly, rational explanation
... for everything. For every aspect of it. Why do I find that even more frightening? The most horrifying moment in my life, and there is, in the end, a simple, rational explanation.’

‘You’re afraid that you’ve stopped looking for simple rational explanations? Is that what you mean?’

‘Maybe.’

‘How many people were killed?’ Sophie asked. ‘In the end.’

‘Three. And one critical in hospital. I think about four slightly hurt, including Jane. There were about six cars involved, and a couple of lorries. Seemed like the parameds and the fire brigade were on the scene before I was out of my car. There was one poor woman...’