A Crown of Lights (53 page)

‘They’ve found something.’

‘Then let’s call the police.’

‘He needs to make sure, Sophie.’

Realizing, with a horrible, freezing feeling that Gomer wasn’t in any position to make sure of this. Only
she
was.

She would
have
to face it.

‘Sorry.’ Eirion came back. His baseball cap had gone. His face gleamed with greasy clay and sweat. There were touchingly
childish mud streaks around his mouth where he’d wiped it with his hand. ‘That was inexcusable.’

‘Irene...?’

‘It was the smell, I suppose.’ He shuddered. ‘I just put my hand down this kind of fissure and this whole wall of stuff came down and like... Oh God.’ He turned away, pushing slimy fingers through his hair.

Gomer came back for the spade.

‘Is it?’ Jane was shocked at the weakness of her own voice.

‘’Ang about,’ Gomer said non-committally.

Sophie said, her voice dry and clipped, ‘
Is
it, Mr Parry?’

‘Well... likely.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, give me that torch!’ Sophie snatched the rubber-covered lamp from a caterpillar of the mini-JCB and stalked off into the murk.

Gomer followed her with the spade, called back over his shoulder, ‘Better stay there, girl. En’t nothin’ you can do.’

‘I kind of think there is, actually,’ Jane said sadly. She slithered after him towards the bank. Eirion plunged into the mud, grabbed her.

‘No...’

‘Irene, I’m the only one of us who’s actually seen her.’

‘Jane, believe me... that is not going to help you.’

‘What?’

Even over the clatter of three engines, she heard Sophie’s moan. Ahead of her, the newly unearthed soil and clay was shining almost white in the intersecting beams, and had that multihued, stretched look, like when you bent a Mars bar in half. Sophie came back, slapping dirt from her hands.

‘Go back. Now!’

‘Sophie...?’

‘It’s a woman.’

‘Could it be Barb—?’

‘Cashmere and tweed,’ Sophie said. ‘She’s wearing cashmere and tweed.’

‘What does she look like? I’ve seen her, you see. When she
first came up to Mum at the funeral...’

‘Come on, Jane.’

‘I’m not a little kid, you know. Let me just—’

‘Jane.’ Eirion took her hand in his mud-encrusted paw. ‘We don’t know
what
she looks like.’

Sophie said coldly, ‘Someone seems to have hacked her face to pieces before they buried her.’

Sophie’s camel coat was ruined.

A
LONE IN THE
yard, Robin looked back at the farmhouse, lit by the underfed porchlight, and it was like he was finally waking up.

Here were the once-white walls, stained and crumbling to reveal rubble underneath. There were the four front windows, small and sunken, like squinting eyes.

Then it just, like, hit him in the gut:
What a dump!
What was he doing here, stranded in this squalid hovel, with a coughing stove and a pile of wet wood, and his wife coming and going like some kind of elemental spirit, and his portfolios coming back marked ‘Piece of shit’, this whole godforsaken place rejecting him?

All day he’d felt a madness around him, wild fluctuations of mood, chasms of disaster opening up at his feet, like the potholes in the yard... and then the sun suddenly breaking out again, the puddles streaked with rainbows.

I still think Kirk could be persuaded to listen to reason.

The elegant and cultured Ned Bain could change it all about, even though Bain was doing this not for Robin, whom he didn’t really need, but for Betty, whom he apparently did. Whom everyone did.

Even witches talked in hushed tones about Betty. There were all kinds of people in Wicca, and the ones you needed to be most wary of tended to be the men – guys who’d read about
group sex and ritual flagellation, guys who’d heard you could learn to magic your dick into staying hard all night long. Every coven attracted a few of these, and they never stuck it long, and they were the trash end of the Craft. And at the other end were women like Betty, about whom even witches talked in hushed tones.
I was very much looking forward to meeting her,
Ned Bain had said.
Word gets around.

And yet, since Betty had returned home, she and Bain seemed hardly to have spoken, as though neither wanted the other to read their private agenda. Because there sure as hell
were
private agendas here, even stupid and decidedly unpsychic Robin could sense that. Maybe – like high priest and high priestess – Bain and Betty were communicating without words. Robin’s fists tightened. He couldn’t bear the thought of that.

The night was as cold as you could get without inches of snow on the ground, but it was bright, with a last-quarter moon and a scattering of stars. So what, in the names of all the gods, were they waiting for?

The church itself was primed for its reversion to the Old Religion. A hundred fat candles were in place, plus garden torches and sconces and fireworks for when it was all over. There was a purposeful silence around the place, unbroken even by crazy Vivvie and fluty-voiced Max. Even the god-damned Christians had cooled their hymn-singing.

Robin had had to get out of the house; he couldn’t stand the tension, had kept getting up and walking around, irritating the witches who were sitting in the parlour, hanging out, waiting, their robes – in view of the extreme cold, they were at least starting this one robed – stowed in bags at their feet, and the crown of lights ready in the centre of the room. But whose house was this anyway? He’d wanted Betty to come outside with him, confide in him. She was a great priestess but she was still his wife, for heaven’s sake.

But Betty had avoided his eyes.

Was there something she didn’t want him to know? Something secretly confided to her by Bain? He who would
later join with her in the Great Rite – simulated.
Simulated, right?
Robin’s nails dug into his palms. Bain was a handsome and, he guessed, very sexual guy.

Usually – invariably, in fact – the hours before any sabbat were lit with this gorgeous anticipation. Tonight was
the
sabbat. An event likely to be more resonant, in Robin’s view, than the collapse of the Berlin Wall, than the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese. This should be the finest night of his life. So how come, as he walked back toward the house, all he felt was a sick apprehension?

The pub car park, the point where the village streets come together, is full of nothing much. Coppers and reporters, yes – but where were all the funny Christians, then?

Gomer leaves the truck on the double-yellows outside the school, and that boy Eirion brings the Land Rover in behind him. Eirion’s going along with Mrs Hill to tell the coppers what they’ve dug up. Better coming from somebody cultured, see, so the cops move faster. Besides which, Gomer and young Jane need to find the vicar in a hurry, on account of there’s somebody out there has done for Barbara Thomas, then took what Gomer judges to be a log-splitter to her face, before her was planted in Prosser’s ground.

One of the telly cameramen is pointing his lens at the mini-JCB. A bored-looking woman reporter asks, ‘What have you been digging?’

‘Sprouts,’ Gomer tells her. He’s spotted a light in the old school that’s now become Dr Coll’s surgery. ‘Why don’t we give this a try, girl?’ he asks Jane. ‘Vicar was in yere earlier, we knows that.’

They walk into the yard. Don’t seem two minutes since this old place was a working school. Don’t seem two minutes since Gomer had
friends
went to this school. That’s life, too bloody short. Too short for bloody old wallop and bullshit.

So, who should they meet but Dr Coll himself in the doorway, coming out. Gomer stands his ground, and Dr Coll’s got to take
a step back into the building. Has to be a reason, going way back, that Gomer don’t care for doctors, but he bloody don’t, and that’s the only mercy about the way Minnie went: no long years of being at the mercy of no bloody doctors.

‘Look, I’m afraid surgery’s long over.’

‘It bloody en’t, pal.’ Gomer lets the youngster in, and then slams the door behind them all.

‘I know you, don’t I?’ Dr Coll says, with a vague bit of a smile. Must be close on sixty now, but he never seems to change. Dapper, the word is. Beard a bit grey now, but never allowed to go ratty.

‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire,’ Gomer says.

‘Ah, yes.’

‘Never goes near no bloody doctors meself, but you might recall as how you used to peddle drugs to a friend o’ mine, Danny Thomas.’

‘I really don’t think so.’ The smile coming off like grease on a rag.

‘And Terry Penney, remember? But that’s all water up the ole brook, now, ennit?’

‘If you’re trying to tell me,’ Dr Coll says severely, ‘that you’re hoping I’ll supply you with proscribed drugs, I think you should decide to leave very quickly. In case you didn’t notice, there’s a police van parked directly outside.’

‘Shows what kind of a bloody nerve you got then, ennit, Doc?’

‘Mr Parry—’

‘Them coppers knew what we knew, they’d be in yere, turnin’ the place over.’

‘Are you
drunk
, man?’

Young Jane picks up the thread now. ‘
We
know you killed that old lady in New Radnor. You’ve probably killed, like,
loads
of people. You’re probably like that Dr Shipman.’

‘All right!’ Dr Coll turning nasty at last. ‘I haven’t got all night to listen to a lot of ludicrous nonsense. Out of here, the pair of you!’

Gomer shoves himself back against the door. Dr Coll’s a fair bit younger than him. And taller, but then most blokes are. Don’t make no odds when you’re madder than what they are, and Gomer is sorely mad now.

‘Guess who just got dug up, Doc.’

Dr Coll tries to grab the door handle, but Gomer knocks his wrist away with his own wrist, which hurts like buggery. Gomer grits his teeth.

‘Remember Barbara Thomas? Come to see you the other week, ’bout her sister, Menna? Likely you’re one o’ the last people poor ole Barbara talked to ’fore some bugger ripped the face off her then planted her in Prosser’s bottom field, down where the harchaeologists was.’

Colour drains out of the doc’s face something beautiful. Gomer’s well heartened by this.

‘Course, the cops don’t know Barbara seen
you
’fore she got done. Cops don’t know nothin’ about you an’ Weal, the bloody Hindwell Trust, all the doolally patients you recommended to Weal for sortin’ their wills...’

‘You’re making no sense to me.’ Dr Coll coming over with all the conviction of a bloke caught with a vanload of videos at two in the morning saying he’s just been to a bloody car boot sale.

‘Well, then.’ Gomer folds his arms. ‘I’ll be straight with you, Dr Death. All we wants to know right now is where we finds the vicar. The lady vicar? We finds the vicar, we’ll likely have that much to talk about, could be well into tomorrow ’fore we gets round to makin’ police statements ’bout anythin’ else – you gets my meanin’. Leavin’ quite a bit o’ time for a feller to pack his Range Rover with money and bugger off.’

‘I’ve got a wife and family,’ Dr Coll says. He blurts it out like he’s just suddenly realized. Anybody else but a bloody doctor and Gomer could almost feel sorry for him.

‘Where’s my mum?’ young Jane screams in his face.

A large chalice of red wine stood on the temple altar, with the scourge and the handbell, the wand for air, the sword for fire.
Royally pissed off by now, sitting just inside the door, on the doormat for Chrissakes, Robin wanted to suggest they share it out or at least open another bottle.

Across the parlour, Betty sensed his impatience and sent him a small warning smile. The moment was close to intimate. Her face was warm and young and wonderful in the glow from the Tilley lamp which sat in the centre of the floor – what would have been the centre of the circle if they’d drawn one. But tonight’s circle would be drawn outside.

If
it ever happened, though they were robed and ready. Maybe this was no night for naked, and anyway Robin could appreciate the need for a sense of ceremony. He also loved to see Betty in the loose, green, medieval gown she’d made herself two, three years ago. Robin just wore this kind of grey woollen tunic; he didn’t have anything more ceremonial. But then he would be peripheral tonight, an extra, a spear-carrier.

Ned Bain, in a long, black robe, sat on a bare flagstone below the window, opposite the hearth, where the heatless twig-fire burned. He was obviously listening, but Robin suspected he was not listening to Max.

In preparation, Max had led a meditation on the nature of the border, and read to them, in translation, an old Welsh poem about the death of Pwyll, son of Llywarch the Old, who sang, ‘When my son was killed, his hair was bloody and flowed on both banks of the brook.’ Robin had been painting it in his head – that long, bloodied hair was a gift to an illustrator. Wicca worked in strange ways; he himself might not be able to see spirits or know the future, but his imagination could be sent into instant freeflow by any image you cared to pitch him. Hell, that was
something
.

‘On this holy Celtic night,’ Max intoned, ‘let us close our eyes and picture – all around us – the ghostly monuments of our ancestors. We are in a wide, silent valley, the stones in a grey mist around us. But over it soars Burfa Hill, and we can dimly make out the notch marking the rising of the sun at the equinox. In the black of the night is born the bright day, the new spring.
And we, too, shall be born again into a new day, a new era.’

That was it. There was silence. The stones had loomed out of the mist for Robin, his soul reached for the new day, but he dispatched it back to his subconscious. He’d had enough. He shifted uncomfortably on his mat and, across the room, closest to the altar, Betty saw him and knew he was about to say something.

Instead,
she
did. But first, she smiled sadly in the lamplight, and it was for him, and Robin thought his heart would burst with love.

And then Betty said, very quietly, ‘Once, not so very long ago, there were two stepbrothers...’