A Crown of Lights

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.

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.