A Crown of Lights (43 page)

It was this undismissable haunting and the Church’s general disinterest which had prodded Merrily in the general direction
of Deliverance. There needed to be someone around to reassure people that they weren’t necessarily losing their minds.

Jane was saying, ‘Were you like sensitive
before
you became a witch?’

Betty looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s why I became one. If you exclude spiritualism, Wicca’s one of the few refuges for people who are... that way. My parents are C of E, which doesn’t encourage that kind of thing.’

An apologetic glance at Merrily, who also caught a triumphant glance from Jane, little cow, before she went greedily back into the interrogation. ‘But, like, who do you actually
worship
?’

‘That’s probably the wrong word. We recognize the male and female principles, and they can take several forms. Most of it comes down to fertility, in the widest sense – we don’t need more people in the world, but we do need expanded consciousness.’

‘And you, like, draw down the moon?’ The kid showing off her knowledge of witch jargon. ‘Invoke the goddess into yourself?’

‘Kind of.’

Betty was reticent, solemn in the subdued light of the big, cream-walled kitchen. Maybe having a vicar in the same room was an inhibiting factor, but this woman was certainly not
Livenight
material. Merrily sat down at the table and listened as Betty, pressured by Jane, began explaining how she’d actually got into Wicca at teacher training college, before dropping out to work for a herbalist. How she’d saved up to go with a friend to an international pagan conference in New England, where she met the American, Robin Thorogood, making a film with some old art school friends. So Robin had found Betty first, and
then
Wicca, in that order. Betty’s face momentarily shone at the memory. Her green eyes were clear as rock pools: she must literally have bewitched Robin Thorogood.

The phone rang. Jane dropped the cheese grater and carried the cordless into a corner.

‘You have a disciple,’ Merrily said softly.

‘Kids only find Wicca exotic because it’s forbidden. When it becomes a regular part of religious education they’ll find it just as boring as... anything else.’

‘Don’t feel you have to talk it down on my account.’

‘Merrily’ – Betty pushed back her hair – ‘there doesn’t need to be conflict. There’s actually a lot of common ground. Spiritual people of any kind have more in common than they do with total non-believers. In the end we want the same things, most of us. Don’t we?’

‘Maybe.’

Jane said loudly, ‘No, I’m sorry, she’s not here. I was kind of expecting her back, but in her job you can’t count on anything. Sometimes she spends, like, whole nights battling with crazed demonic entities and then she comes home and sleeps for two days. It’s like she’s in a coma – really disturbing. Sure, no problem. Bye.’

‘Flower,’ Merrily said, ‘you do realize that little exercise in whimsy might be lost in the transition to cold print.’

‘In the
Independent
?’

Merrily nodded. ‘So just don’t say it to the
Daily Star
.’

She went over to switch on the answering machine. When she came back Betty was saying, ‘In Shrewsbury, we were members of a coven containing quite a few... pagan activists, I suppose you’d have to call them. Teachers, mainly. They’re good people in their way, but they’d be more use on the council. They’re looking for organized religion, for structure.’

‘These are the people who’ve moved in on your house?’ Merrily asked her.

‘Some of them. It’s what I wanted to come down here and get away from. You don’t
have
to work in a coven. The only structures I’m really interested in now are the ones you build for yourself. But Robin will go along with anybody, I’m afraid.’

‘Why don’t you phone him?’

‘I will. I just don’t want to speak to any of the others. We came down here to work alone. At least, I did. Robin just
wanted to live somewhere inspiring and to show it off to his friends. He’d tell you we were sent here because of a series of omens. All that was irrelevant to me.’

Interesting. What was slowly becoming apparent to Merrily was that Betty had come to Old Hindwell in a state of personal spiritual crisis. She’d been drawn into witchcraft by the need to understand the psychic experiences she’d been having from an early age. But maybe paganism hadn’t come up with the answers she’d sought.

‘Omens?’ Merrily brought out her cigarettes. To Jane’s evident disgust, Betty accepted one.

‘Estate agent particulars arriving out of the blue, that kind of thing. When Robin saw the church, he was hooked. Just like Major Wilshire.’

‘Tell me about
Mrs
Wilshire again,’ Merrily said.

The police had questioned Betty for almost an hour at Mrs Wilshire’s bungalow. A detective constable had arrived who probably had never had a suspicious death to himself before.

‘I’d no idea she suffered angina,’ Betty had told them. ‘I just concocted something harmless for her arthritis.’

No, she could not imagine why Mrs Wilshire would stop taking the Trinitrin tablets prescribed for her angina, a full, unopened bottle of which had been discovered by Dr Banks-Morgan. No, she would never in a million years have advised Mrs Wilshire to stop taking them. She had only suggested a possible winding-down of the steroids if and when the herbal remedy had any appreciable effects on the arthritis.

‘She told me Dr Coll knew all about me, and he was very much in favour of complementary medicines for some complaints.’

‘You know that’s not true, Mrs Thorogood,’ the CID man had said. ‘Dr Banks-Morgan says he has no respect at all for alternative medicines and he makes this clear to all his patients.’

It got worse. If Mrs Wilshire was not becoming unduly influenced by Mrs Thorogood and her witch-remedies, why
would she tell Dr Banks-Morgan he needn’t bother coming to visit her again?

Betty could not believe for one minute that Mrs Wilshire had told her caring, caring GP not to come back. But she knew which of them was going to be believed.

‘What a bastard,’ Jane said. ‘He’s trying to fit you up.’

‘Where did they leave things?’ Merrily said. ‘The police, I mean.’

‘They said they might be in touch again.’

‘They probably won’t be. There’s nothing they can prove.’

Betty said, ‘Do you believe me?’

‘Course we do,’ Jane said.

‘Merrily?’

‘From what little I know of Dr Coll, I wouldn’t trust him too far. Gomer?’

Gomer thought about it. ‘Smarmy little bugger, Dr Coll. Always persuading folk to ’ave tests and things for their own good, like, but it’s just so’s he can pick up cash from the big drug companies – that’s what Greta reckons.’

‘Then I’ll tell you the rest,’ Betty said.

And she told them about Mrs Juliet Pottinger and what she’d said about the Hindwell Trust.

‘En’t never yeard of it,’ Gomer said when she’d finished.

Merrily didn’t find that too surprising if the trust was administered by J.W. Weal.

‘Lot of incomers is retired folk,’ Gomer confirmed. ‘Like young Greg says, they comes out yere in the summer, thinks how nice it all looks and they’re amazed at how low house prices is, compared to where they comes from. So they sells up, buys a crappy ole cottage, moves out yere, gets ill...’

‘Fair game?’

‘Like poor bloody hand-reared pheasants,’ Gomer said.

Merrily asked Betty, ‘Is it your feeling Mrs Wilshire’s left money to the Hindwell Trust?’

Betty nodded.

‘This stinks,’ Merrily said.

‘Works both ways, see,’ said Gomer. ‘Patient needs their will sortin’, mabbe some poor ole biddy goin’ a bit soft in the head, and Dr Coll recommends a good lawyer, local man, trust him with your life. Big Weal turns up, you’re some little ole lady, you en’t gonner argue too much. ’Sides which, it’s easy for a lawyer to tamper with a will, ennit? Get the doctor to witness it. All local people, eh?’

Betty explained why she’d gone to see Mrs Pottinger in the first place. Talking about that particular atmosphere she’d perceived in the old church, but hesitating before finally describing the image of a stricken and desperate man in what might have been a stained cassock.

‘Wow,’ said Jane.

Merrily tried not to react too obviously, but she was becoming increasingly interested in the Reverend Terence Penney. ‘What year was this, again?’

‘Seventy-five,’ Betty said. ‘He seems to have been turning into a latent hippy.’

Gomer looked up. ‘Loads o’ hippies round yere. You could get an ole cottage, no electric, for a few ’undred, back then, see, and nobody asked no questions. More drugs in Radnor them days than you’d find the whole o’ Birmingham.’

‘But you never actually ran into Penney yourself?’ Merrily lit another cigarette.

‘No, but I been thinkin’ of Danny Thomas. That boy knew all the hippies, see. Most locals they didn’t have nothin’ to do with ’em, but Danny, ’e was right in there. Up in court for growin’ cannabis, the whole bit. You want me to get Danny on the phone?’

‘It’s a bit late,’ Merrily suggested.

‘Boy don’t keep normal farmin’ hours,’ Gomer said.

Danny Thomas had now turned down the music. In Danny’s barn there were speaker cabinets the size of wardrobes, all
covered with chicken shit. Gomer also recalled an intercom on the wall. Bawling down it at Danny when he was wanted on the phone was how most folk reckoned Greta’s voice had reached air-raid siren level.

It must be cold tonight out in Danny’s barn, but Danny would jump around a lot to the music before collapsing into the hay with a joint. Gomer pictured him sitting on a bale, straggly grey hair down the back of his donkey jacket, with Jimi at his feet – Mid-Wales’s only deaf sheepdog.

Gomer sat on the edge of the vicar’s desk and waited while Greta had summoned Danny back to the farmhouse.

‘What’s goin’ down, Gomer, my man? You become a private eye, is it? Every bugger I meet these days, they just been grilled by Gomer Parry.’

‘All right, listen to me, boy,’ Gomer said. ‘Give your ole drug-raddled memory a rattle on the subject of Terry Penney.’

A few seconds of quiet. Bit of a rarity around Danny unless he’d had a puff or two.

‘Poor bugger,’ he says at last.

‘Come to a sad end, what I yeard.’

‘I liked ole Terry.’

‘You go to ’is church?’

‘Din’t like him
that
much. But he was all right. He lent me his Dylan albums. This to do with that bugger Ellis? Tricky bastard, he is. Blew poor ole Gret’s mind. Gets ’em all in a bloody trance.’

‘Why’d he do it, Danny? Why’d Penney fill up the ole brook with good pews?’

‘Dope, ennit?’

‘Ar, well, that’s what they all says. Don’t mean bugger all.’

Danny went quiet again.

‘What you know about Penney, Danny? What you know about Penney you en’t sayin’?’

‘Long while back, Gomer. Terry’s dead. Let the poor bugger lie.’

‘Can’t.’

‘It’s that vicar o’ yours, ennit? Diggin’ the dirt.’

‘We needs to know, boy.’

‘Gimme a day or so to think about it.’

‘Can’t. C’mon, Danny, who’s it gonner harm?’

‘Me.’ Danny’s voice went thin. ‘I’m as guilty as any bugger, Gomer. It was me got Terry into it. Well... me and Coll.’

‘Dr Coll?’

‘
Me
and Dr Coll,’ Danny says. ‘And the bloody era that promised us the earth. And here we all are nigh on forty year later and further in the shit.’

‘Stay there,’ Gomer said. ‘Don’t move.’

When Betty Thorogood started to cry, it turned everything around.

Until now, talking about a world she knew, she’d been cool and assured. The otherworldly – visions and gods and archetypes – did not scare her, any more than neuroses scared a psychologist. In the everyday world, implicated in the death of a harmless widow, Betty came apart.

‘I just wanted to help her. I was
sorry
for her... that’s all there was to it.’

Jane had moved her chair back, appalled. Witches don’t cry! Merrily leaned across the table, put a hand over Betty’s.

Betty parted her hair, peered at Merrily through her tears. ‘What if their tests show up something nasty in that potion I gave her? Something I didn’t put there.’

‘What are they going to find? Henbane? Deadly night-shade? Rat poison? He doesn’t need all that. He’s got natural causes, apparently hastened by her overreliance on you.’

‘I just don’t understand why she would stop taking the pills he’d prescribed. She thought he was wonderful. She thought...’ Betty’s eyes filled up again. ‘She thought
everyone
was wonderful. Everyone who tried to help her. The local people were
so good
. Because she was from Off, anyone local who didn’t actually spit on her front step seemed wonderful and caring. I was so sorry for her. And dying there, in her chair, in front of that lukewarm fire... Perhaps he
is
telling the truth. Perhaps poor,
fuddled Mrs Wilshire thought my little herbal remedy, bottled under the moon, was some sort of cure-all.’

‘There’s an experienced nurse I know,’ Merrily said. ‘Perhaps I’ll give her a call.’

She stopped as Gomer returned. His glasses shone like twin torch-bulbs.

‘Come and talk to Danny, vicar.’

A
S
D
ANNY TALKED
, the picture formed for Merrily in ragged, fluttering colours. Radnor Forest in the 1960s and 1970s: hippy paradise.

The flower children had wandered in from Off and settled in this border country in their hundreds because it was cheap and remote. They rented or even bought half-ruined cottages far from the roads. Thin boys in yellow trousers chopping wood from the hedges. Beautiful, long-haired girls in ankle-length medieval dresses fetching water from the well.

In spite of the electricity supply being at best intermittent, they brought the new music – why, The Incredible String Band even lived for a while near Llandegley towards the northwestern end of the Forest.

And the dope. The hippies also brought the dope.

The local people were amused rather than hostile – the hippies didn’t do any damage and they were always a talking point.