A Crown of Lights (26 page)

Robin stepped out of the porch. Through the trees, he could hear the racing of the Hindwell Brook.

‘OK,’ Prentice said, ‘that’s your decision.’

And if they’d gone at that moment, things might all have been so much less fraught.

Unfortunately, at this point the porch and Robin were lit up brightly, and Robin realized the younger guy suddenly had a camera out.

The rushing of the brook filled his head.
Cold white noise
. Robin thought of silent Betty with her back to him in the sack. He thought he heard, somewhere on the ether, the rich sound of Kirk Blackmore laughing at his artwork.

Robin made like Lord freaking Madoc.

M
ERRILY COULD SEE
the battlemented outline of Old Hindwell church tower over the bristle of trees, and the spiteful voice cawed in her head.

I can show you a church with a tower and graves and everything... which is now a pagan church. You don’t know what’s happening on your own doorstep.

If these pagans had been around for a while, it would explain why Ellis had adopted Old Hindwell – extremes attract extremes. The only other abandoned Anglican church she could think of in the diocese was at Llanwarne, down towards Ross-on-Wye, and that was close to the centre of a village and open to the road, a tourist attraction.

But whether this was or wasn’t the alleged neo-pagan temple was not the issue right now. What she needed to make for was the former rectory, which was not ruined, far from abandoned... but about to accommodate its first grave.

She would probably encounter Sophie’s car along the way.

And Barbara Buckingham?

That grumbling foreboding in her stomach – that was subjective, right? Merrily walked faster, aware that the only sound on the street was the soft padding of her own flat shoes. She walked into the centre of the village, where there was a small shop and post office – closed already – and the pub had frosted windows and looked inviting only compared with everywhere else.

In one of the cottages, a dog howled suddenly, a spiralling sound; maybe it had picked up a distant discordant wailing emanating from the village hall. Something which was not, perhaps, quite human.

The pub car park was still full. With the cars – of course – of outsiders. The singing in tongues should have given it away: many people in today’s congregation were not, in fact, family mourners or friends or long-time clients of J.W. Weal, but core members of Nicholas Ellis’s church.

And the tongues was not a spontaneous phenomenon; for them it had become routine, a habit, almost an addiction, a Christian trip. She’d learned that while at theological college when a bunch of students, well into the born-again thing, had persuaded her to join them at a weekend event known as the Big Bible Fest, held in a huge marquee near Warwick. Two long days of everybody smiling at everybody else and doing the ‘
Praise Him!
’ routine like kids with a new schoolyard catchphrase, and by the end of the first day Merrily had been ready to swing for the next person who addressed her as ‘sister’.

It had been Jeremy, one of the faithful, who’d told her that the cynical bitch persona was simply concealing her fear of complete surrender to the Holy Spirit. He was challenging her to go along that night with an open mind, without prejudice, without resistance. Praise Him! So, OK, she’d attended a service where all the hymns had been simple, rhythmic pop anthems, sung by happy people in Hawaiian shirts and sweatpants – and all ending in tongues.

Tongues was the gift of Christ, originally granted to a select few. The Bible did not spell out what tongues actually sounded like, its linguistic roots, its grammatical structure, but modern evangelical Christians insisted it was a way of talking directly to God, who Himself did not necessarily speak English.

Not entirely convincing, but for the first two hymns she’d held out. After all, hadn’t her own formative mystical moment
occurred in total silence, lit by the blue and the gold, alone in a little hermit’s cave of a church?

And then –
Praise Him, praise God!
– her mouth had been open like everyone else’s, and out it all came like those flimsy coloured scarves produced by conjurers. Words which were flowing and lyrical and meant nothing, but sounded as if they ought to. Lush, liquid worship. Dynamic, wordless prayer. A disconnecting of the senses. A transcendent experience, up there around the marquee’s striped roof.

She could, in fact, still bring it on when she wanted to, could summon that wild Christian high, simple as popping a pill, as though just doing it that once had been a lifetime’s initiation. It was easy.

Maybe too easy.

She wondered to what extent the locals had joined in. Were slow-speaking farmers now singing in tongues? Did they say ‘Praise God’ when they met by the sheep pens on market day, instead of the time-honoured ‘’Ow’re you?’

You couldn’t rule that out. After all, it was in Wales that traditional church worship had been massively abandoned in the rush to build stark, spartan Noncomformist chapels. So how far down the charismatic road did Old Hindwell go? Was it like the Toronto Blessing, with people collapsing everywhere? Were they discovering Galilean sand in the palms of their hands and gold fillings in their teeth?

But how appropriate was this at a funeral?

Merrily scanned the cars by the pub. Was one of them Barbara’s? What make had Barbara been driving? Merrily didn’t know.

She turned and walked on down the darkening street, a headache coming on, although it was dulled by the cold. Beyond the village shop and a lone bungalow with a 1970s-style rainbow-stone porch, the grass verge came to an end, so Merrily walked in the road, down into a conifered valley which would eventually open out to the hill country of Radnor Forest.

Soon afterwards, she heard the low mutter of approaching vehicles, and then dipped headlights began to cast a pale light on the road, and she pressed close to the hedge as the cortège came past.

As the mourners had started coming for their cars, Gomer had moved to the pub window to look out for Gareth and Judy Prosser. Chances were the Prossers would be on foot, but they’d still have to come this way. Most of the people picking up their vehicles Gomer didn’t recognize.

‘There a funeral tea up the hall?’ he asked Greg.

‘If there is, we weren’t asked to provide it. Nah, they say Father Ellis don’t go for eating and drinking in church.’

‘It’s a bloody village hall!’

‘Not when he’s there it ain’t.’

Gomer looked over his shoulder at Greg polishing glasses for the customers that didn’t come in. ‘You’re not a churchgoer, then, boy?’

‘Never was. But the bloody pressure’s on now.’ The anxious look flitted across Greg’s face again. ‘Lot of people’ve started going. He don’t look much, Ellis, but they reckon you come out feeling on cloud nine. I mean, whatever it is, I’m not sure I wanna catch it. The wife’s gone to this funeral. And I let ’em use the car park – all his fans from miles around. Not that many of ’em drop in for a pint or anyfing afterwards. Don’t need drink when you’re high on God.’

‘You got a few yere now, boy,’ Gomer observed. ‘Stand by your pumps.’

Two men and three women came in, all in black. One of the men was Tony Probert, farmer from Evenjobb – Gomer knew him to speak to, just about – and one of the women was...

‘Gomer Parry!’

‘Greta,’ Gomer said, ‘’ow’re you?’

Greta Thomas, wife of Danny, the rock-and-roll farmer from Kinnerton. She was little and busty, with a voice Nash Rocks could’ve used for blasting. Used to be receptionist for Dr Coll.

‘I hope you’re lookin’ after yourself, Gomer,’ Greta yelled. ‘Not goin’ back to the wild?’ Never one to make a meal of the ole condolences; once the funeral was over Greta believed it was time to start cheering you up.

‘I’m doing fine, Gret.’

‘’Cause if Min thought you was on the bevvy...’

‘Moderation in all things, you know me, girl. I dunno, I seen bloody Danny earlier, he never said you was goin’ to see Menna off.’

‘Never remembers nothing, ’cept his bloody chords. Tony and Julie was coming, so I had a lift.’ Greta pulled Gomer towards a table. ‘Reckoned
somebody
ought to represent Danny’s side of the family.’

‘Nothin’ to do with wantin’ to see the famous Reverend Ellis in action without goin’ to a reg’lar service, like?’

Greta looked sheepish. ‘No harm in that, is there?’

‘Worth it, was it?’

‘Well... strange, it is, actually, Gomer.’

‘Ar?’

‘Specially the funny singing. Like a trance – beautiful really, when it gets going. The voices are like harmonizing natural, the men and the women. Really gets you. It’s quite... I don’t know... sexy. That’s a stupid thing to say, ennit?’

‘Better get you a drink, Gret.’

He went to Greg at the bar, bought Greta a brandy. He might learn something here, and it beat going home to an empty bungalow with no fire, no tea, nothing but crap Saturday night telly and then a cold bed.

Greta looked up at him from under a fringe of hair dyed the colour of Hereford clay.

‘I didn’t mean that how it sounded, Gomer. I mean, I’ve never been that religious, but it makes you think. A lot of people’s saying that. Dr Coll – even Dr Coll – reckons Mr Ellis is the best thing ever happened to this area.’

‘Why do he reckon that?’ Clergy, in Gomer’s experience, came and went and never got noticed much, unless they started messing with people’s wives – or they were little and pretty.

‘The way it’s bringing the community together,’ Greta said. ‘You’d never get that with an ordinary parson and an ordinary church. When did you ever see local people and folk from Off hugging each other?’

‘En’t natural,’ Gomer conceded.

‘And they also reckons you can get a private consultation.’

‘What for?’

‘Anything, really. Sickness, emotional problems...’

‘What’s he do for that?’

‘Fetches them out of you, Gomer. Lays his hands on you, fetches it all out.’

‘Bloody hell, Gret.’

‘There’s folk swears by it.’

‘Bloody hell.’

He leaned back and thought for a bit. Doctor’s receptionist for what – ten years? Her’d have been no more than a young girl when her first went to work for Dr Coll’s old feller. Still...

‘How well did you actually know Menna Thomas, Gret?’

Doctors’ receptionists, it was easier for them to talk about the dead than the living, and Greta Thomas was still talking when Tony Probert and his wife and the other couple had finished up their drinks and looked a bit restive, so Gomer told them it was OK, he’d take Greta home himself.

On the way, he said, ‘And how well did you know her sister Barbara?’

Which was how he found out the truth about the hydatid cyst.

Behind the hearse came an old-fashioned taxi, like a London black cab. Merrily saw brake lights come on about a hundred yards down the lane and she moved quietly towards them. Stone posts stood stark against the last of the light and she heard the grating of metal gates.

Silhouettes now. Someone in a long overcoat pushing a bier. Merrily watched the coffin sliding onto it under the raised tailgate of the hearse, saw the bier pushed through the gates. It
was followed by several people fused into one moving shadow.

Against the band of light below the grey roller blind of evening, she could see the roof of the old rectory. No lights on there. The taxi started up, rolled away down the lane. No sign of another car.

No sign of Barbara Buckingham.

Suppose Barbara had accosted Weal, made a nuisance of herself, and Weal – as a solicitor, able to expedite these things – had responded with some kind of injunction to restrain her. In which case, why hadn’t Barbara told Merrily? Why hadn’t she left a message?

At the gates, peering down an alley of laurels, Merrily was pulled sharply back by the realization that this whole situation was entirely ridiculous. Only Jane would do something like this. But then more headlights were glaring around the bend behind her, and she slipped inside the gates to avoid them.

The vehicle went past on full beams: not Sophie’s Saab but a fat four-wheel drive with two men in it. Leaving Merrily standing on the property of J.W. Weal as, somewhere beyond the laurels, a single warm light was anointing the bruised dusk with an amber balm.

She followed the laurel alley towards the house, now only half expecting the dramatic eleventh-hour appearance of Barbara Buckingham like the dissenting wedding guest with just cause for stopping the service.

By the house, the drive split into a fork, one prong ending at a concrete double garage, the other dropping down a step and narrowing into a path, its tarmac surface fragmenting into crazy paving to cross the lawn – which was wedge-shaped and bordered by spruce and Scots pine. At the narrow end of this wedge stood a conical building, the source of the light.

The wine store... the ice house... Menna’s waiting tomb.

Merrily stood by the last of the laurels, on the edge of the lawn, and looked up at the Victorian house – substantial, grey and gabled, three storeys high. The light from the open door of the tomb, maybe forty yards away, was bright enough to outline
the regular stone blocks in the back wall of the house. She could see the shadows of heavy, lumpen furniture in the room immediately behind a bay window on the ground floor. This house was very J.W. Weal.

At its end of the lawn, the mausoleum was a squat Palladian temple. Victorian kitsch, its interior was creamed with electric light from two wrought-iron hanging lanterns. Then the light was suddenly blocked and diffused... two men looming. Merrily backed up against the house wall, laurel leaves wet on her face.

‘Mind the step, George.’

‘He could use a light.’

‘Knows his way down yere in his sleep, I reckon.’

The undertakers maybe? Must be the departure of the last outsiders.

Feeling very much on her own now, Merrily moved down the lawn, stopping about fifteen yards from the door of the mausoleum. From an oblique angle, she could see inside, to where mourners were grouped around a stone trough set into the middle of the floor. She saw Ellis, in his white robe. She saw a wiry bearded man, a squat bulky man, and a woman. They were still as a painted tableau, faces lit with a Rembrandt glow. And she thought, aghast, This is intrusion, this is voyeurism, this is none of my business!