‘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...’
Jane and Gomer hurried across the street, making for the hall. It was, Jane thought, crazy to let the doctor just go, but Gomer said that if they didn’t want to spend the rest of the night in some police station, they didn’t have a choice.
The doctor had told them Mum had gone off with Father Ellis, and he knew Father Ellis was up in the hall, conducting a service. The doctor had then put his dignity back together, walked out across the yard, his medical bag swinging from his wrist, as if he was off on a house call.
Scumbag.
You couldn’t miss the village hall, with that cross lit up on the roof. As soon as you turned up the track to the steps, you could hear the singing. A song which had no tune but lots of tunes, and endless words but no sense.
Jane started racing up the steps, saw that the hall was blazing with light. But, at the same time, she became aware that Gomer, behind her, was panting quite painfully. It had been a gruelling night and you tended to forget how old he was and how many roll-ups he smoked. She stopped halfway up and waited for him to catch up.
She reckoned afterwards, after the glass in the porch burst and the flames came out in a great gouging whooomp of heat, that Gomer’s lungs had probably saved their lives.
51
Laid to Unrest
THE LAUREL ALLEY.
Later, its leaves would be crisp with frost. Merrily could see only the alley’s outline, rippling black walls under the worn pebble moon.
‘We could use a torch.’
‘Amply bright enough,’ Judith said, ‘if you know the way.’
Which she, of course, did. She took Merrily’s arm, leading her down to the fork in the drive. ‘Mind the step, now.’ Merrily remembered Marianne’s hand on her arm, as the police burst through. Things you oughta know. Judith’s grip was firmer. Judith was without trepidation. What did Judith believe in? Not ghosts, perhaps not even God – except maybe some strictly local deity, the guardian spirit of Old Hindwell.
At the corner of the rectory, where the drive split, Merrily looked for a car, but there was just an empty space. J.W. Weal had gone to don his Masonic apron. It must look like a postage stamp on him. Lodge night: a crude ritual structure to further stiffen his already rigid life.
The police had gone, too, now. There seemed to have been a winding-down of the action at the gates of St Michael’s. Nothing to see or hear when Merrily and Judith had walked past the farm entrance.
They dropped down to the tarmac and then the crazy paving to the lawn. Sharp conifers were all around, pricking stars. Merrily glanced back once at the grey-stone rectory, at the angular bulge of the bay window: lightless, no magisterial shadows of furniture, no frenetic flickering, crackling...
Stop it!
‘Something bothering you, Mrs Watkins?’
‘Nothing at all, Mrs Prosser.’
At the end of the lawn, pale grey and shining slightly, was the squat conical building, the wine store... ice house... now tomb. Merrily stumbled on a lump in the lawn; Judith’s arm easily found her waist, helped her up. Merrily tightened inside. It was about here that Weal had wrapped his arms around her, lifting her, whirling her around. Men-na.
Merrily shivered suddenly, and Judith knew.
‘You’re frightened.’
‘I’m cold.’ She clutched her blue airline bag to her side.
‘As you wish.’ Judith bit the end of one of her leather gloves to pull it off and produced from a pocket something that jingled: the keys to the mausoleum. ‘But it will, I’m afraid, be even colder in here.’
When Betty had been talking for a while – calm, succinct, devastating – someone actually got up, went over and switched on all the lights. Hard reality time.
It was a starkly meaningful moment. Robin stared in cold dismay around the parlour, with its damp patches, its dull fire of smoky, sizzling green twigs, its sad assembly of robed witches and the crown of lights on the floor like some unfinished product of a kids’ handicraft class left behind at the end of the semester.