It all looked like some half-assed fancy dress party that never quite took off. The air was sick with confusion, incomprehension, embarrassment – affecting everyone here, except for Ned Bain, who was still entirely relaxed in the lotus position, his butt on the stone-flag floor.
And Betty, in her green medieval robe, remained expressionless, having come out with stuff about Ned that Robin, with his famously huge imagination, couldn’t begin to fathom how she’d gotten hold of. Was that where she’d been last night – obtaining Ned Bain’s life story? And never saying a word to Robin because he was this big-mouthed asshole whom all subtlety deserted the second he put away his paints.
He felt royally betrayed, shafted up the ass, by everyone. Like, how many of them already knew this? How many knew that Nicholas Ellis was Bain’s stepbrother, who covered up for his old lady after she stabbed Bain’s father to death? Was this some British Wiccan conspiracy, to which only he was denied access?
But Robin only had to look at Vivvie’s pinched and frozen face to be pretty damn sure that few, if any, of them had been aware of it all. They might’ve known about Ned’s father and the lingering bitterness over his killing, but not about the real identity of the saintly Nick Ellis.
‘Ned...’ Max came to his feet, nervously massaging his massive beard. ‘I do rather think we’re due an explanation.’
All of them, except for Betty, were now looking over at black-robed Ned Bain, still relaxed, but moody now, kind of saturnine. Betty, having rolled a grenade into the room, just gazed down into her lap.
Ned brought his hands together, elbows tucked inside his knees, the sleeves of his robe falling back. He smiled ruefully, slowly shaking his head. Then, in the face of Max’s evident disapproval, he brought out a packet of cigarettes and a small lighter, and they had to wait while he organized himself a smoke.
‘First of all, what Betty says is broadly correct.’ He sounded kind of detached, like it was dope he was smoking. ‘My father married Frances Wesson, and our intelligent, freethinking, liberal household changed almost overnight into a strict Christian, grace-at-mealtimes, church-twice-on-Sunday bloody purgatory. Icons on every wall, religious tracts on every flat surface... and the beatific face of my smug, pious little stepbrother. Well, of course I hated him. I hated him long before he lied to the police.’
There was another smoky silence.
‘So Simon Wesson... changed his name?’ Max prompted.
‘I believe Ellis was Frances’s maiden name. She’d already met the appalling Marshall McAllman during one of his early missions to the UK, but this only became evident later.’
‘In other words,’ said Max, too obviously anxious to help Ned clear up this little misunderstanding, ‘with the promise of American nouveaux riches, your father had somewhat outlived his usefulness.’
‘Oh, I’ve conjured a number of scenarios, Max, in the years since – none of which allows for the possibility of my father’s death being self-defence. Simon knows the truth. I realized part of my destiny was to make him bloody well confess it. It became a focus for me, led me into areas I might never have entered. Into Wicca.’
Robin saw Betty look up, her green eyes hard, but lit with intelligence and insight. There would be no get-outs, no short cuts. Ned Bain took another drag at his cigarette.
‘I’d tried to be a simple iconoclast at first, telling myself I was an atheist. Then, for a while – I’d be about nineteen – I was into ceremonial magic. Until I realized that was as cramped and pompous as Frances’s High Church Christianity. Only paganism appeared free of such crap, and there was a great sense of release. Naked, elemental, no hierarchy it was what I needed.’
Betty said, without looking up, ‘How long have you known about this place?’
‘Oh, only since Simon arrived here. Since he took over the church hall. Since he became “Father Ellis”. When he first came back to Britain, he was a curate in the north-east, but that was no use to me. He wasn’t doing anything that left him... open. I’d had people watching him in America for years – there’s an enormous pagan network over there now, happy to be accessed. And other links too.’
‘Like Kali Three?’ Betty said.
Robin saw Bain throw her a short, knife-like glance; she didn’t even react. ‘I used several agencies.’ He turned away, like this was an irrelevance. ‘And then, when “Father Ellis” began to make waves on the Welsh border, I came down to take a look for myself. Fell rather in love with the place.’
Bain then talked of how the archaeological excavation was under way at the time, just across the brook from the church; how the immense importance of the site as a place of ancient worship was becoming apparent. ‘One of the archaeologists told me he’d dearly love to know what lay under that church. Circular churchyard, pre-Christian site. I took a walk over there myself, and met some eagle-eyed old boy who told me he’d just bought it.’
‘Major Wilshire,’ Robin said. He couldn’t believe how this was shaping up.
‘Something like that. I didn’t pay too much attention to him, as I was being knocked sideways by the ambience. It was while I was talking to this guy that I had... the vision, I suppose. A moment beyond inspiration, when past and future collided in the present. Boom. I became aware how wonderful and apt it would be if the power of this place could be channelled. If this church was to become a temple again.’
‘Under the very nose of your fundamentalist Christian brother,’ Betty said quietly.
‘In fact’ – Bain raised his voice, irritated – ‘it was rather the other way round. For the first time I was almost grateful to Simon, for bringing me here. Ironic, really. But the church had now been sold, and that was that. I went home to London. You can imagine my reaction when, just a few months later, I learned that St Michael’s Farm and Old Hindwell Church were on the market again.’
‘No,’ Betty said coldly. ‘What exactly was your reaction?’
‘Betty,’ said Max, ‘I really don’t think we should prejudge this.’
Ned said, ‘Simply that I wanted it to be bought by someone sympathetic to the pagan cause.’
Bulbs finally started flashing big time inside Robin’s head.
The actual tomb was bigger than Merrily had expected: perhaps seven feet long, close to three feet wide, more than three feet deep. From outside, with the funeral party of Prossers, Dr Coll and Nick Ellis grouped around it, it had resembled a stone horse trough. Now, under the cream light from the wrought-iron electric lanterns hanging above the head and the foot of the tomb, she could see that it was far more ornate. A complex design of linked crosses had been carved out of the side panels. The lid was not stone, but perhaps as good as: an oak slab four inches thick. The great tomb had been concreted into its stone plinth.
‘All local stone,’ Judith said proudly. ‘From the quarry.’
‘Got that done quickly, didn’t he?’
Judith closed the oak door, so their voices were sharpened by the walls of the mausoleum, which were solid concrete, inches thick. The chamber was about twenty feet square, nothing in it but the tomb, and the two of them, and dead Menna.
Judith said, ‘Mal Walters, the monumental mason, is a long-established client of J.W. Mal worked through the night.’
‘Right.’
Judith Prosser stood by the head of the tomb, disquietingly priest-like in her tubular black quilted coat – not quite cassock-length, but close. Her short, strong hair had been bleached, her pewter-coloured earrings were thin, metal pyramids. She was waiting, behind the shade of a sardonic smile.