A Crown of Lights (49 page)

‘You’re late, Mrs Watkins. Had you down for an early riser, I did.’

The banter was wrapped around Judith’s need always to be ahead of the situation. This visit must, on no account, be seen as a surprise.

‘Late night, Mrs Prosser.’

‘I’ve coffee on.’

‘That would be good... Erm, I felt there were things left in the air from last night.’

‘No bad thing, sometimes,’ Judith replied swiftly. ‘Left in the air, they have a chance to blow away.’

‘But sometimes they stick around and the air goes sour, and that’s not a good thing in my experience.’

‘Oh,
your
experience.’ Holding open the door for Merrily. ‘Profound today, is it, Mrs Watkins?’

‘You have a problem with profound?’ Merrily blinked. It was dark inside and the hulking furniture made it darker.

‘Life’s too short to tolerate problems.’

‘Life’s too short for cover-ups, Mrs Prosser,’ Merrily said.

Judith turned to face her. They were standing in a square hall dominated by a huge, over-ornate chair with a nameplate on the back. It looked like the seat of a council chairman or a presiding magistrate. Judith leaned an elbow on one of its carved shoulders.

‘As I said last night, it would be stupid for you to react to silly rumours.’

‘Here’s the situation,’ Merrily said. ‘I was there, I saw the whole thing: the cross, the petroleum jelly. Also Dr Coll
standing in the doorway – and didn’t
that
explain why a bunch of local matrons were able to sit there and watch Ellis violate a woman with a metal cross? Because there was a
doctor
present. This, of course, makes everything all right, above board, entirely respectable, clinically proven.’

Judith Prosser flicked a speck of dust or ash from the point of the chairman’s chair.

‘I’m not sure how far from being a police matter this is,’ Merrily continued, ‘but we’re very close to finding out.’

J
ANE TYPED IN
the word ‘charismatic’. The usual, mainly irrelevant list appeared. She grabbed the mouse, dithered over ‘Charismatic Q and A’.

‘Try it,’ Eirion suggested. ‘Might lead somewhere better.’ On the screen: ‘The Charismatic Movement: what in the name of God is it all about?’

‘Click,’ Eirion said.

The Charismatic Movement (from the Greek
charismata,
meaning ‘spiritual gifts’) developed in the 1950s and ’60s from the Pentecostal movement, crossing over the denominations, embracing the sphere of angelology and the gifts of healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues and power-prayer. It reached a new peak worldwide in the 1990s...

There was a list of options. Jane clicked on ‘Yes, I want to talk to God.’

They needed all the help they could get.

Sophie had said she shouldn’t be allowing this, before shutting them in the Deliverance office with the computer.

And she wanted copies of anything they found.

Jane had said, ‘This is awfully good of you... Mrs Hill.’

Collecting a contemptuous frown and, ‘Jane, you are not
among the people with whose patronage I can cope. Try “evangelism”.’

On the way here, Jane had told Eirion virtually everything she’d learned so far – about Terry Penney, about pentagrams... The poor little Chapel boy had seemed unnerved, regaining his cool only when he saw the computer. Smiling his famous smile at Sophie, who wore a checked woollen skirt with a grey twinset and pearls – Sophie, who might one day be the last person in the entire universe still wearing a twinset and pearls.

Jane clicked again, losing enthusiasm for talking to God. When it was working fast and well, the Internet could give you the illusion of
being
God – you could imagine Him operating like this, constructing human situations with a click of the mouse, running programs, consigning icons to the dumpbin.

‘Evangelism’, though, had been a bummer. There were background articles on St John the Evangelist. There were four Web sites about some kind of computer software with that name. There were no obvious links into crank preachers in the American South who might have known Nick Ellis; and ‘Charismatics’ proved little better.

‘I could try “Bible Belt”,’ Eirion offered.

‘You’d probably get suppliers of religious fashion accessories,’ Jane said gloomily.

‘ “Cults”?’

‘No chance. People never think of themselves as being in a cult. “Just off to the cult, don’t wait up” – doesn’t happen.’

‘What we need is a Christian search engine.’

‘What we need is divine intervention.’ Jane walked over to the window which overlooked the forecourt of the Bishop’s Palace. No good searching for it out there.

‘OK,’ Eirion said. ‘What are we
really
asking for?’

‘Some big, rattling skeleton in Ellis’s vestment closet. Something that maybe caused him to leave America, come back here in a hurry. When you think about it, most Brits who go over to the States tend to stay there, making piles of money. So it’s reasonable to think Ellis came back because something happened
to make him kind of persona non grata. Like he was the leader of a mass suicide cult who contrived not to go down with the rest.’

‘We’d have heard about it.’

‘We’re stuffed.’ Jane angrily keyed in ‘loony fundamentalist bastards’, and the Web found, for some no doubt entirely logical reason, a bunch of science fiction and fantasy writers including David Wingrove, David Gemmell and Kirk Blackmore.

‘We’re just not asking the right questions.’

‘Kirk Blackmore... where did I hear that?’

Sophie came in then, with a piece of paper, a name written on it. ‘Try this.’

‘Ah,’ Jane said, as Blackmore came up on the screen. ‘This was the guy whose covers Robin Thorogood was going to design, but they pulled the plug.’

Eirion was staring up at Sophie, bewildered.

‘I used the telephone.’ Sophie inclined her neck, swan-like. ‘It’s rather old-tech, it involves the less-exact medium of human speech, but it does tend to be more effective when dealing with the clergy.’

‘ “Marshall McAllman”,’ Eirion read.

‘Before the Reverend Nicholas Ellis came to New Radnor and then Old Hindwell, he was a curate for just over a year at a parish outside Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I’ve talked to his former vicar, the Reverend Alan Patterson, who only found out after the Reverend Mr Ellis had been with him for several months that he’d previously been a personal assistant to the Reverend Mr McAllman – which did not entirely please him.’

‘Let’s put it in, Jane.’ Eirion keyed in the name, while the computer was still showing:

KIRK BLACKMORE ORACLE.
The reclusive Celtic scribe returns with a
remarkable new Lord Madoc novel which...

‘Found,’ Eirion said, after a few seconds. ‘ “The Mobile Ministry of Marshall McAllman”.’

He clicked. Kirk Blackmore vanished.

‘There you are.’ Sophie peered. ‘ “Angelweb Factfile. The journeys of Reverend Marshall McAllman were directed by the Will of God and took him from Oklahoma...” ’

‘ “... to South Carolina”,’ Eirion read from the screen, ‘ “via Arkansas and Tennessee, dispensing a low-key but extremely potent evangelism effectively tailored to the needs of small towns and simple folk. He developed a loyal following after several witnessed instances of prophecy, divine inspiration and angelic” blah blah blah... “Reverend McAllman retired in 1998, a disillusioned man, after surviving a campaign by an unscrupulous journalist on a Tennessee newspaper, the
Goshawk Talon
. Although there remains considerable debate about Reverend McAllman’s ministry, his name is still revered in” blah, blah—’

‘There you have it, then,’ Sophie interrupted. ‘Your next port of call must surely be the, ah,
Goshawk Talon
.’

‘Does that mean it’s in a place called Goshawk?’ Jane wondered.

‘Doesn’t matter, let’s just put it in,’ Eirion said.

‘ “Found”. Some stuff on birds of prey. And... “The
Goshawk Talon
and Marshall McAllman”... OK.’ Eirion clicked, waited. ‘Oh.’

The file you are seeking is unavailable.

Jane’s face fell. ‘What do we do now?’

‘A technical brick wall.’ Sophie sighed. ‘Hard to imagine how we survived for so long without all this.’ Then she did something most un-Sophie-like – stamped her foot. ‘
Phone
them, child! They presumably
have
telephones in Goshawk, Tennessee. If this publication still exists, it shouldn’t take long to find the number. If it doesn’t, we shall have to think of something else. Get on to international directory enquiries.’

‘I don’t know how.’

Sophie sighed in mild contempt. ‘Leave it to me.’ She stalked out.

‘Wow,’ Jane said. ‘The turbo twinset.’

Eirion smiled his Eirion smile. It did things to her, but this
was not the time. There never seemed to be a time. The sudden urgency manifested by Sophie made Jane quite tense. What if someone was ringing home with information far more important than anything they could hope to find on the Net, and she wasn’t there to relay it. Paranoid, she rang the vicarage answering machine. One message for Mum to call Uncle Ted.
Sod that
.

‘We seem to be drifting a long way from Kali Three,’ Eirion said. He started to key it in.

‘No, don’t.’ Jane leapt up and stood at the window, staring down at the woodpile below. There was a sense of being very close to something, but it was too indistinct, ghostly. She felt that invoking Kali Three would somehow bring bad luck. She turned back to the room.

‘We have to go there.’

‘Old Hindwell?’ Eirion said. ‘I’m not sure about that. Why?’

‘We just
do
.’

‘Absolutely not.’ Sophie was in the doorway.

‘Sophie, there’s some really heavy—’

‘Don’t you think your mother has enough to worry about? Sit down and speak to the man from the paper. Or would you prefer me to do it? Perhaps it might be better if I did.’

‘She’s right,’ Eirion said. ‘She’s going to sound so much more authoritative than either of us. Especially to Joe-Bob McCabe, of the
Goshawk Talon
.’

‘Ah sure lerve your
ac
cent, ma’am,’ said Jane. The only person from Tennessee she’d ever heard talk was Elvis.

‘The man’s name,’ said Sophie, ‘is Eliot Williams. He’s busy at the moment, but his editor’s getting him to call me back. I think he rather senses a story.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said, ‘you’re, like, incredible.’

But Sophie had already returned to her office, where the phone was ringing.

A
DARK
, V
ICTORIAN
living room. Merrily imprisoned in the lap of a huge, high-sided leather armchair, coat folded on her knees, cup and saucer on top of that.

Judith Prosser was adept at disadvantaging her visitors.

‘And since when is religion a matter for the police, Mrs Watkins?’

‘When it’s sexual assault.’ Merrily drank some of the coffee. Perversely, it was good coffee.

‘Do you know what I think?’ Judith’s own chair put her about a foot higher than Merrily. ‘I’ve been enquiring about you, and do you know what I think? I think that Father Ellis has dared to intrude into what you consider to be your back yard. He is doing what you think only you should be doing.’

‘You think
I’d
do—?’

‘How would I know
what
namby-pamby thing you would do these days, when the Church is like a branch of the social services?’ A withering contempt for both.

‘Now we’re getting to it,’ Merrily said.

‘
Are
we, Mrs Watkins?’

Merrily tried to sit up in the chair. She felt like a child. Around the walls were dozens of photographs, mostly of men wearing chains of office, although a group of more recent ones showed boys with motorbikes and trophies.

‘What
are
“we” getting to?’ Judith leaned back, arms folded.

‘The question of Old Hindwell preferring to do its own thing. Which is kind of admirable in one sense, I suppose.’

Judith reared up. ‘It is
entirely
admirable, my girl. This is an independent part of the world. What do we need with the mandarins in Cardiff and London and Canterbury? The English. Even the Welshies... they all think they can come out yere and do what they like. When Councillor Prosser was on the old Radnor District Council, they used to have to employ young officials, trotting out their fancy ideas – hippies and vegetarians, half of them. It was, “Oh, you can’t build
there
... you have to use
this
colour of slate on your roofs... you can’t do
this
, you can’t do
that
.” Well, they were put in their place soon enough. The
local
people, it is, who decides.
We
know what’s needed,
we
know what works. And Father Ellis, even though he’s not from yere, is a man with old values and a clear, straightforward, practical approach, based on tradition. He
understands
tradition.’

Merrily was tired of this. ‘How many people has he exorcized so far?’

‘I can tell you that all of them have come freely to him and asked for it to be done.’

‘Like your son?’

A pause. ‘Gomer Parry again, I suppose.’

‘Doesn’t matter where it came from. I just wondered if your son actually went along to Ellis and asked to be cleansed of the taking-and-driving-away demon.’

‘His parents took him.’ Judith scowled. ‘Another problem in today’s world is that parents don’t take responsibility.
We
took him to Father Ellis, Councillor Prosser and I. It was our duty.’

‘And you really think he had a demon inside him that demanded the full casting-out bit?’

‘Oh... Mrs... Watkins...’ Exasperated, Judith stood and went to lean an arm on the high mantelpiece. ‘They
all
have demons in them, whether it’s mischievous imps or worse. In the old days, the demons were beaten out of them at school. Now, if a teacher raises a hand to a child, he’s in court for assault, and nothing the poor magistrate can do to help him.’

‘I see.’ There was an awful logic to this: exorcism as a tool of public order. Evidently the local women had decided that the wanton demon in Marianne Starkey – which perhaps made some local men a little restless, a touch frisky – should be eradicated before it led to trouble. Marianne’s reaction to the male witch adding a piquantly topical flavour to the exercise.