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.