A Crown of Lights

‘Bullshit,’ Robin said quietly.

‘Any time you wanted to get out, I’d have taken it off your hands.’

‘You mean like after we ran out of money? After we’d taken all the shit from the local people? After Ellis got safely kicked out on his ass by the Church? After our marriage got smashed up on the fucking rocks?’

‘There was always this growing atmosphere of turbulence,’ Betty said. ‘We were made to feel insecure from the first. He wanted us to feel beleaguered, maybe a little scared.’ She looked down at Bain. ‘You needed this, didn’t you? Were you working on it with your coven, Ned, or was it some magical construction of your own – long and intrictate, like one of your novels? Generating unrest – backed up by a campaign of mysterious letters and phone calls directed at Ellis. The dragon rising? Were you working towards some kind of cataclysm... only forestalled by stupid Vivvie giving it away – resulting in this farce.’

Vivvie snarled, ‘What are you these days, Betty? Because you’re not one of us any more.’

Bain said, ‘If you really want to discuss this, I’m perfectly willing—’

‘Did you buy the witch box from Major Wilshire? Did you have someone deliver it to us, place it on our doorstep?’ Betty paused. ‘And were you... were you really that surprised when Major Wilshire fell from his ladder?’

Ned Bain sprang up in a single movement. ‘Don’t you fucking dare...

His stiffened finger inches from Betty’s soft cheek.

Which was enough.

Robin lurched across the room to the altar. George reached out to stop him, but Robin shook George savagely away. He felt the weight of his hair on his shoulders. He heard warbling sirens in the night. He saw through a deepening mist. He remembered the pit of desperation that swallowed him when Al Delaney, of Talisman, had called to say, He wants someone else to do it, Robin. He doesn’t want you.

Robin wrenched from the altar the great ceremonial sword. No toy this, no lightweight replica, but three and a half feet of high-tensile steel.

Robin raised it in both hands, high above his head. He heard Vivvie screaming.

53 Snakeskin

MERRILY SAID, ‘YOU really did look after her, didn’t you? You really took care of her.’

Judith Prosser adjusted a fold in the corpse’s shroud. ‘I was the only one ever took care of her.’

‘Could we close the lid now?’

Judith didn’t touch the lid. ‘Why don’t you conduct your ceremony, Merrily? Take off your coat, make yourself into a priest.’

Taking control again.

Merrily moved to the head of the coffin, looking down towards Menna’s feet. Her airline bag, with the Bible, the prayer texts, the flask of holy water, stood by the door.

‘Why don’t you finally leave her alone? Why don’t you just accept that maybe you’ve done enough harm?’

‘Meaning what precisely, Mrs Watkins?’ Judith said briskly. She went to stand at the foot of the coffin, from where she could observe the faces of both Merrily and Menna.

‘You had her on the Pill from an early age. Dr Coll’s good like that, isn’t he? Ministering to the real needs of the local people? Dr Coll understands these things.’

‘She’d have been pregnant by fourteen if we hadn’t done something.’

‘Mmm, her father really was abusing her, wasn’t he? Maybe over quite a long period.’

Judith shrugged.

‘And, of course, you knew that.’

‘We didn’t talk about such things then. Other people’s domestic arrangements, that was their own affair.’

‘Yeah, yeah, but also because... whenever it happened, she would come to you.’

‘Oh, well, yes. Almost a mile.’ Judith smiled. Incredibly, it looked like a smile of nostalgia. ‘Almost a mile across the fields to our farm. To my parents’ farm. In tears, usually – or you could see where the tears had dried in the wind.’

‘And you would comfort her.’

Judith breathed in very slowly, her black coat flung back, breasts pushing out the rugby shirt. Merrily thought of her in the toilet at the village hall, tenderly ministering to Marianne. Always victims: always vulnerability, confusion, helplessness, terror, desperation. Like Menna, alone on that remote hill farm with her beast of a father.

‘What a turn-on that must have been,’ Merrily said.

Judith’s face became granite. ‘Don’t overstep the mark, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Why didn’t you just take her to the police?’

‘To give evidence against her own father? Apart from the fact that, as I say, such things were not done yere in those days, not talked about, how would she have managed on her own, with her father in prison? How would she have coped?’

‘Probably have been taken into care. And that’s probably the best thing that could have happened, in Menna’s case.’ Merrily paused. ‘If not in yours.’

‘You don’t know anything about this area!’ Judith snapped. ‘Social services? Pah! We have always managed our own social services.’

‘I’m sure. Especially after you got married and you were operating from the perfect, secure social platform.’

Marriage to Gareth Prosser. Councillor, magistrate, on this committee, that committee. Big man. Dull bugger, mind. Lucky he’s got Judy to do his thinkin’ for him.

A very satisfactory arrangement that, in almost all areas of life, Judith needed Gareth for the framework, the structure, the tradition: a facade, and a good one. What did sexual orientation have to do with it? Fancy, meaningless phrase from Off. Self-sacrifice was sometimes necessary – for a while.

‘The foundations of rural life,’ Merrily said. ‘A husband, a farm and sons – preferably two of them, in case something happens to one of them, or the other grows up strange and wants to live in Cardiff and be an interior designer.’

Judith smiled thinly. ‘Oh, you’re such a clever little bitch. What about your life, Mrs Watkins? They say your husband died some years ago. Does the love of God meet all your needs?’

Merrily let it go. ‘When you’re married to a man like Gareth, nothing needs to change. You go to Menna, she comes to you. And then, when her father dies, you have the contingency plan for her: Jeffery Weal. Good old J.W., the solid, silent family solicitor. A local man, and discreet.’

He was too old for her, yes. Too rigid in his ways, perhaps. But it was what she was used to, isn’t it? She was a flimsy, delicate thing. She would always need protection.

What could be more perfect? His clothes smelling of mothballs, and little or no experience of women. And living just a few hundred yards down the hill from the Prosser farm.

‘You arranged that ideal marriage, Judith. You probably coached Menna in what would be expected of her. But she was used to all that, anyway, poor kid. She’d always been a kid – a sad, pale little girl. He must have frightened her a bit, at first, the size of him. He frightens me. But that would be no bad thing either, for you, if she needed a lot more comforting.’