A Crown of Lights

Judith’s hands were on her hips. ‘Now you have overstepped the mark.’

‘And of course she must continue to take her Pill because children would not be a good thing at all. Having a child can make someone grow up awfully quickly.’

‘She was not strong enough for children,’ Judith said sullenly.

‘Was that how Weal eventually found out about you and Menna? Because he wanted children – with the family business to pass on to them. “Pills – what pills are these, Menna?” ’ She put up a hand. ‘No, all right. I reckon he did find out, though, didn’t he?’

‘You reckon,’ Judith sneered, ‘you guess, you theorize.’

‘Is that why you wanted me to come here tonight? To find out what direction the speculation was taking? I’d guess the answer is that you don’t really know for sure whether Weal knows about you and Menna, or not. But if he does, he wouldn’t say a word to you. It’s not the local way. Besides, I suppose you were useful to him. I expect there were aspects of Menna he couldn’t deal with. Maybe she’d finally changed – becoming a woman.’

‘You don’t know what you’re—’

‘But that wouldn’t be awfully good for you either, would it? To have Menna becoming a bit worldly-wise as she reached middle age? What actually was her mental state? I wouldn’t know but, my God’ – Merrily pointed into the tomb – ‘look at her now. Look at her face. It’s all coming out now, isn’t it, in that face? God Almighty, Judith, it’s almost turning into your face.’

Judith Prosser stood very still, seemed hardly to be breathing. Merrily moved away, back towards the door.

‘You know what I think? What I’d bet big money on?’ She was aware of her voice rising in pitch, more than a bit scared now of where this was inexorably leading. ‘When Weal had Ellis exorcize his wife, that was nothing to do with her father at all. Ellis seemed to be able to demonize anything and then get rid of it. He stopped your boy from nicking cars, didn’t he? So maybe Weal thought that Nicholas Ellis could purge Menna of the demon... the demon that was you.’

Merrily was shattered. She hadn’t quite realized what she had been about to say. But the evident truth of it was explosive.

Judith took a swift step towards her, then stopped, and said brightly, too brightly, ‘You are off your head, Mrs Watkins. You do know that?’ She laughed, her eyes glittering with rage.

‘That was only the half of it, though,’ Merrily said, to defuse things a little. ‘The next part would be the baptism of the two of them, in the same little bowl of holy water, I guess. Something medieval going on there: the fusion of two souls?’

Merrily stared down at the soured face in the tomb. In the medieval church, baptism was exorcism. Exorcism charms had been included in marriage services, or blessing of the sick. Pregnant women were exorcized too. In those days, demons were getting expelled from people like tapeworms.

A scenario: late afternoon, the sky like sheet metal. The baywindowed room north-facing, so not much of the sunset visible. A cold room and a cold time of day. Menna standing there like some white slave, her skin waxy, her arms like straws. Perhaps a bruise forming blue where Ellis had gripped her roughly – in his mind gripping not her but it. Perhaps she was wrapping her arms around herself and shivering. Or was she entirely unmoved? Compliant? Accepting this ritual as just another of those things men liked to do to her.

‘Do you embrace God?’ Ellis’s customizing of the rite.

J.W. Weal standing there, big as God.

Menna hesitating, perhaps a little worried by the word ‘embrace’ and thoughts of what else God might do to her after this.

‘Do you embrace Him?’

‘I... Yes... Yes.’

Around the high, white room, dark oak chairs with long pointed spines, standing like judge and jury.

‘Do you renounce the evil which corrupts that which God has created? And the sick and sinful, perverted desires which draw you away from the love of God?’

Menna beginning to cry again.

‘Say it!’

Her head going back. A sniff.

‘Say, “I so renounce them”!’

‘I s... so... renounce them.’

‘I can’t begin to know where Ellis derived that rite from,’ Merrily said. ‘Or if he made it up. But there’s an awfully long tradition of bodged religion around the Forest, isn’t there?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Judith Prosser said sulkily.

‘Like, what’s the good of religion if it isn’t practical? Whatever he did, it was nasty and unhealthy and yet... and yet somehow it worked, Judith. In some horrible, insidious way, it bloody well worked. And he has her now.’ Merrily felt she was drifting away on a formaldehyde fog, sailing so far from the land of normality that she was afraid of never getting back there. ‘Got her to himself. At least part of her. Part of something. Something half realized, fluttering after him like a crippled bird. It’s obscene.’

There was a slithering sound. Judith was shedding her long, black, quilted coat, like a snakeskin.

54 No God’s Land

EVEN JANE COULD see the police didn’t quite know how to handle this any more. A routine peacekeeping assignment had turned into a confusion of arson and murder. They’d taken over the doctor’s surgery as an incident room, for two separate investigations which might be totally unconnected.

Jane and Gomer were keeping well back from it all. They stood with Sophie and Eirion in the shadow of the rear entry to the pub yard. Gomer had a ciggy going, and looked more his old self. Jane, too, felt more in control since Sophie had taken her to the chief fire officer, and he’d confirmed that they’d now managed to get inside the hall and had found no bodies there.

But the police had a body: a body with no face, dug out of the mud. And now that the immediate fire crisis was over, this had become their priority again, and they wanted very much to talk to Gomer. Wanted to know why he’d been so sure that something was buried in the old archaeological site that he’d gone up there with a digger, at night. Sophie, her white hair in almost hag-like disarray, was trying to explain to him that all they wanted was a statement, to allay their suspicions.

Gomer didn’t want to know, though. It was a plant hire thing that would take too long to explain; Jane understood this. ‘It’s stupid. Why would Gomer have sent you to tell the police if he had something to do with it?’

Eirion said to Gomer, ‘I think what Mrs Hill’s trying to say is it would be better if you approached them, rather than have them come find you.’

‘Eirion, what can I tell ’em that’s gonner be any help?’ Gomer growled. ‘I’ll talk to the buggers tomorrow, ennit?’

And Jane realized that he was worrying about Mum.

She looked out of the entry to the street, where a sombre assembly had formed around two priests – or, at least, two men in dog collars. One of them was raising his hands as if holding up a huge rock he was about to smash down on something. Jane just knew that some crazy scenario was being manufactured around the village hall fire, involving not a furtive little green-haired plonker with a can of petrol and a grudge, but some great satanic panoply clanking through the night. They’d asked Father Ellis what he wanted them to do, but Ellis had said,