A Crown of Lights (36 page)

The sick bastard
.

Merrily turned away, found her hands were clenched together. Shame. Fury. When she could stand to look again, she saw that someone was bearing a white wooden crucifix aloft, in front of Ellis. At the apex of the village hall roof, the neon cross became a beacon in the rain. Like it was all a crusade.

She didn’t recognize anyone in Ellis’s group, but why should she? She guessed they were not locals anyway. A couple of the men wore suits but most others were casually but warmly dressed, like members of a serious hiking club. Nobody was speaking. Shouldn’t they be singing some charismatic anthem, swaying, clapping?

Killing the shakes, Merrily walked erratically along the lane to the corner where a bunch of reporters stood under umbrellas and Gomer was waiting for her in the rain, an unlit ciggy drooping from his mouth.

‘Vicar... you all right, girl?’ Following her behind a Range Rover parked under some fir trees, he regarded her gravely. ‘You looks a bit pale.’

‘Don’t fuss, Gomer.’ Merrily dropped a cigarette in the process of trying to light it.

Gomer straightened his glasses.

‘Sorry.’ She touched his arm. ‘It’s
me
. I’m furious with me, that’s all.’

‘Happened in there, vicar?’

‘Exorcism – of sorts. I ought to have stopped it. I just’ – she thumped her thigh with a fist – ‘stood there... let it happen.’

‘Hexorcism?’ Gomer said, bewildered. ‘This’d be Greg’s missus?’

‘Must’ve been.’

‘The bugger hexorcized Greg’s missus for fancyin’ a feller?’

‘For embracing the dark,’ Merrily said, with unsuppressible venom. ‘For letting herself become possessed by most unholy and blasphemous lust.’

‘Load of ole wallop. You gonner tell Greg?’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘Boy oughter know,’ said Gomer, ‘whatever it was.’ He nodded towards a man getting into the Range Rover. ‘Dr Coll,’ he observed.

The cameramen were backing away down the street ahead of Ellis and his entourage. Dr Coll drove away in his Range Rover, leaving Merrily and Gomer exposed.

‘I can’t believe I let it happen,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it
was
happening. I can’t tell Greg. You saw the state he was in. He’d go after Ellis with a baseball bat. That...
bastard
.’

Ellis walked without looking to either side. When a couple of the reporters tried to get a word with him, his anoraked minders pressed closer around him – the holy man. Merrily and Gomer walked well behind, Merrily turning things over and over.

Internal ministry
, it had been called when the phenomenon had first been noted in the North of England. Mostly it was for supposed incidents of satanic child abuse – a number of allegations, but not much proven. It was a charismatic extreme, an evangelical madness: the warped and primitive conviction that
demonic forces entered through bodily orifices and could only be expelled the same way.

It had all happened too quickly, clinically, like a doctor taking a cervical smear. The fact that it was also degrading, humiliating – and, as it happened, amounted to sexual assault – would not be an issue for someone who had convinced himself of it being a legitimate weapon in the war against Satan. Someone invoking the power of the Archangel Michael against a manufactured dragon.

When, in fact,
he
was the monster.

Got to stop him
.

But if she spoke out there would be a dozen respectable women ready to say she was a liar with a chip on her shoulder; about a dozen women who had watched the ritual in silence. Then, afterwards, tears and hugs and ‘Praise God!’

‘Gomer... those women over there, who are they?’

Gomer identified Mrs Eleri Cobbold, the village sub-post-mistress, Mrs Smith whose cottage they’d passed, Linda Llewellyn who managed a riding stables towards Presteigne. The others he didn’t know. Mostly from Off, he reckoned.

Marianne wasn’t among them.

‘No back way out of the hall, is there?’

‘Yes, but not without comin’ down them steps, vicar, less you wants to squeeze through a fence and lose yourself in the forestry.’

So she was still up there. That made sense; they’d hardly want to bring her out looking like a road casualty, not with TV crews around.

Ellis had reached the car park of the Black Lion. He was evidently about to hold a press conference.

‘Gomer, could you kind of hang around and listen to what he says? I need to go back in there.’

All eyes were fixed on Ellis as Merrily walked inconspicuously back through the rain towards the steps.

Nobody on the door this time. Inside the hall, all the blinds were now raised, the chairs were spread out and a plain wooden
lectern stood in the centre of the room. This time, one corner looked very much like another and only a vague smell of wax indicated that anything more contentious than an ad hoc meeting of the community council had taken place.

No, there
was
something else: the atmosphere you often caught in a church after a packed service – tiny shivers in the air like dust motes waiting to settle.

A black coat slung over one of the chairs suggested someone was still around, if only a cleaner. Presently, Merrily became aware of voices from beyond the door with the ‘Toilets’ sign above it – where that solitary man had stood. She crossed the hall, not caring about the sound of her shoes on the polished floorboards.

The door opened into an ante-room leading to separate women’s and men’s lavatories. It contained a sink and one of the chairs from the main room – Marianne sitting in it. A woman was bending over her with a moistened paper towel, patting her brow. Marianne didn’t react when the door swung shut behind Merrily, but the other woman looked up at once, clear blue eyes unblinking.

‘We can manage, thank you.’

The voice echoed off the tiles: cold white tiles, floor to ceiling, reminding Merrily of the stark bathroom at Ledwardine vicarage.

‘How is she?’

‘She’s much better, thank you. Had problems at home, haven’t you, my love?’

The woman wore jeans and a black and orange rugby shirt. She had a lean, wind-roughened face, bleakly handsome. A face which had long since become insensitive to slaps from the weather and the world. A face last seen lit by the lanterns in Menna’s mausoleum.

The woman dabbed at Marianne’s cheek, screwed up the paper towel and looked again at Merrily, in annoyance. ‘You want the lavatory, is it?’

‘No. I’d just like a word with Marianne – when you’ve
finished.’ Merrily unwound her scarf. ‘Merrily Watkins. Hereford Diocese.’

‘Oh? Come to spy on Father Ellis, is it? We’re not stupid. We know what the diocese thinks of him.’

Marianne looked glassy-eyed.
She
didn’t care one way or the other.

‘And anyway,’ the woman said, ‘Mrs Starkey hasn’t been through anything she didn’t personally request. Father Ellis doesn’t do a soft ministry.’

‘Obviously not.’

‘Practical man who gets results. She’ll be fine, if people will let her alone. If you want to talk to anybody, you can talk to me. Judith Prosser, my name. Councillor Prosser’s wife. Come outside.’

She gave Marianne’s shoulder a squeeze then went and held open the door for Merrily, ushering her out and down the central aisle of the hall, past Ellis’s lectern. She picked up the black quilted coat from a chair back, and they went out through the main doors.

The rain had stopped. At the top of the steps, Judith Prosser didn’t turn to look at Merrily; she leaned on the metal railings and gazed over to the village centre, where Ellis and his entourage were assembling for the media.

‘And was it the diocese sent you to Menna’s funeral, too, Reverend Watkins?’

Above Old Hindwell, a hopeless sun was trying vainly to burn a hole in the clouds. Mist still filigreed the firs on Burfa Hill but the tower of the old church was clear to the north.

‘I didn’t think you’d recognized me,’ Merrily said.

‘Well, of course I recognized you.’

This was the intelligent woman who Gomer seemed to admire. Who did her husband’s thinking for him. Who could sit and watch another woman physically invaded in the name of God.

‘For what it’s worth, that was nothing at all to do with the diocese,’ Merrily told her. ‘I’d arranged to meet Barbara
Buckingham at her sister’s funeral. You remember Barbara?’

Judith Prosser’s head turned slowly until her eyes locked on Merrily’s.

‘
Had
you now?’

‘She was referred to me by a nurse at Hereford Hospital, after her sister died there. I do... counselling work, in certain areas.’

‘Didn’t come to the funeral, though, did she?’

‘She’s disappeared,’ Merrily said. ‘She spent some days here and now she’s disappeared. The police are worried about her safety.’

‘Oh, her
safety
? An eyebrow arched under Judith’s stiff, short hair. ‘And what are we to assume they mean by that?’

‘We both know what they mean, Mrs Prosser.’

The sun had given up the struggle, was no more than a pale grey circle embossed on the cloud.

‘Poor Barbara,’ Judith said.

Merrily did some thinking. While she hadn’t come up here to discuss Barbara and Menna, as soon as the conversation had been diverted away from Ellis himself, Judith Prosser had become instantly more forthcoming.

‘Barbara told me you used to write to her.’

‘For many years. We were best friends for a time, as girls.’

‘So you know why she left home.’

‘Do
you?
’

‘I know it wasn’t a hydatid cyst.’

‘Ha. Good informants you must have. What else did they tell you?’

‘That you were looking out for Menna, and keeping Barbara informed. Menna was a source of... disquiet... for Barbara. Especially after their mother died.’

‘Ah.’ Judith Prosser nodded. ‘So that’s it.’ She leaned back with her elbows against the railings. ‘Well, let me assure you right now, Mrs...
is
it Mrs? Let me assure you emphatically that Mervyn Thomas never touched Menna. I know that, because I warned him myself what would happen to him if he ever did.’

‘But you’d have been just a kid... or not much more.’

‘This was not when Menna was a child. Good heavens, Merv was never a child-molester. He’d wait till they filled out. Ha! No, there was never anything for Barbara to worry about there.
Nothing
. She could go on living her rich, soft, English life without a qualm.’

‘Hasn’t she been to see you in the past week or so?’

Judith sniffed. ‘I heard she was around, pestering people – including you, it seems. Evidently she couldn’t face me.’

‘Wasn’t it you who told her about Menna’s stroke?’

‘I sent her a short note. Somebody had to.’

‘But not her husband.’

Mrs Prosser smiled and nodded. ‘Let me also tell you, Mrs Watkins, that Jeffery Weal was the best thing that could have happened to Menna. If you knew her – which Barbara, lest we forget, never really
did
– Menna was a wispy, flimsy little thing. Insubstantial, see, like a ghost. She—Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily swallowed. ‘I’m fine. Why was Mr Weal so good for her?’

‘If you knew her, you would know she would always need someone to direct her life. And while he was not the most demonstrative of men, he adored her. Kept her like a jewel.’

In a padded box, Merrily thought, in a private vault.

‘Anyway,’ Judith said, ‘I do hope the Diocese of Hereford is not going to interfere with Father Ellis. He suits this area very well. He meets our needs.’

‘Really? How many other people has he exorcized?’

Judith Prosser sighed in exasperation. ‘As far as local people are concerned, he’s giving back the church the authority it
used
to have. Time was when we had a village policeman and troublesome youngsters would get a clip around the ear. Now they have to go up before people like my husband, Councillor Prosser, and receive some paltry sentence – a conditional discharge, or a period of community service if they’re
very
bad. Time
was
when sinners would be dealt with by the Church, isn’t it? They weren’t so ready to reoffend
then
.’

‘The way Father Ellis deals with them?’

Judith smiled thinly. ‘The way God deals with them, he would say, isn’t it? Excuse me, I must go back and minister to Mrs Starkey.’

Halfway down the steps, Merrily encountered Gomer coming up. There were now a lot of things she needed to ask him. But, behind his glasses, Gomer’s eyes were luridly alive.

‘It’s on, vicar.’

‘The march?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Tonight. No stoppin’ the bugger now. Somebody been over to St Michael’s, and they reckons Thorogood’s back. En’t on his own, neither.’

Merrily felt dejected. All she wanted was to get home, do some hard thinking, ring the bishop to discuss the issue of
internal ministry
. She didn’t want to even have to look at Nicholas Ellis again tonight.

‘Bunch o’ cars and vans been arrivin’ at St Michael’s since ’bout half an hour ago. One of ’em had, like, a big badge on the back, ’cordin’ to Eleri Cobbold. Like a star in a circle?’

‘Pentagram,’ Merrily said dully.

‘Ar,’ said Gomer, ‘they figured it wasn’t the bloody RAC.’

‘How’s Ellis reacted?’

‘Oh, dead serious. Heavy, grim – for the cameras. Man called upon to do God’s holy work, kind o’ thing.’

‘Yeah, I can imagine. But underneath...’

‘Underneath – pardon me, vicar – like a dog with two dicks.’

‘I don’t need this,’ Merrily said.

B
ETTY LEFT
M
RS
Pottinger’s lodge in weak sunshine, wanting nothing more than to collapse in front of that cranky farmhouse stove and pour it all out to Robin.

Except that Robin would go insane.

She called for a quick salad at a supermarket cafe on the outskirts of Leominster. By the time she reached the Welsh border, it was approaching an early dusk and raining and, in her mind, she was back in the shop with Mrs Cobbold and the slender man with the pointed beard.