Merrily thought of Jane, glad that Gomer was with her. Would the kid later remember hearing a distant explosion from the village, hear it echoing down her life. Pray that these concrete walls were too thick. Pray:
Merrily tore herself wretchedly back into the present.
‘Frankly, Judith, I couldn’t care less where you stand sexually. It’s insignificant.’
‘Not to me, Mrs Watkins. Not to my reputation.’
‘The real point is, you’re a monster. A monster that feeds on the vulnerable. Anything that brings out pity in the rest of us, it just makes you more excited. Tears turn you on. You were probably everything to Menna – all she had sometimes. But she was nothing to you, no more than a slim, white, trembling body to play with.’
She stood up, looked at Judith and shrugged.
‘You may close your eyes, if you wish,’ Judith said coldly, but she’d squeezed the second trigger before Merrily even had time to decide.
Betty and the stately Alexandra drifted about the ruins like mother and daughter ghosts, moving things around while Robin watched and held the lamp.
The fat candles mostly stayed: on sills and ledges, and in glass lanterns on the top of the tower.
The altar got moved. This was an old workbench from the barn, with a wood vice still clamped on the side. Robin helped Alexandra carry it from the north wall to a place in the middle of the nave, opposite the tower but facing where Betty figured the chancel had been. East-facing, like a Christian altar, in case this Merrily Watkins turned up.
The ruins hung around them like old and tattered drapes, moonlight showing up all the moth-holes. The moon was real white now, like a slice of Philadelphia cheese over the tower. Robin thought he saw a movement up there. An owl, maybe.
Across the roofless nave, Betty was taking some crystals from a drawstring bag. She kept her eyes down.
When it was all ready, the coven was summoned in, and Alexandra said to Betty, ‘Will it be?’
Robin looked at Betty, and he knew she had at last accepted that the Christian priest would not come.
Betty nodded.
Tapers and matches were handed out. The coven moved like shadows, dipping and bending, and when each one rose there was a new glimmering.
Max’s wife Bella did the tower. ‘Creepy,’ she said when she came down. ‘Felt I was being watched.’
In the end, there must have been seventy or eighty candles alight. Lined up in every jagged, glassless window. Along the walls of the roofless nave. In the arrow-cracks of the tower. On top of the cold battlements, in glass lanterns.
St Michael’s, Old Hindwell, was ethereal, unearthly, shivering with lights, and the display reflected, crystallized, in the Hindwell Brook.
57
In Shock
NEVER HAD a gun, never wanted one, but Gomer knew about gunshots, how loud they could be at night, how the sound would carry miles, and he’d figured out roughly where this one had come from, and it wasn’t likely to be poachers or lampers of hares – not tonight with all these coppers on the loose.
‘The church?’ young Jane said, scared.
‘Further on, more like.’
He wasn’t gonner say it was the ole rectory yet, but he was gonner check it out.
As they reached Prossers’ farm, a police van shot past them – far too fast, in Gomer’s view, to be heading for the entrance to the ole church. They wouldn’t’ve heard the shot. Most likely they was heading for the camp the coppers would’ve now set up where they’d dug up Barbara Thomas.
Gomer had been worried they might get stopped. Under his bomber jacket, he had his sweatshirt on back to front, so it no longer said, ‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire’.
Behind them, the fire was just fumes on the air, almost unnoticeable as they reached the St Michael’s entrance. No protesters here yet. No coppers, neither. And no reporters. A woman’s body and some bugger figuring to fry three hundred people had to be more important than God and the Devil.
The five-bar gate was closed across the track, but the padlock hung loose from the hasp on a chain. Gomer was about to open it when Jane let out a gasp.
Two women were approaching up the road.
Jane hesitates a moment, then starts to run. Gomer levels his torch.
It lights up Judy Prosser. Also the vicar.
The kiddie runs to her mam and they starts hugging, but Gomer knows straight off this en’t normal. He walks over, slowly.
‘’Ow’re you, Judy?’
But he’s looking at the vicar in the torchlight, where her eye’s black and swelled-up, her face lopsided.
Jane’s now spotted it, too. ‘Mum, what have you—’
But Judy cuts in. ‘Gomer, we’re looking for the police, we are. Something terrible’s happened.’
‘What’s that, Judy?’
‘I have to report a suicide.’ She’s holding herself up straight in this long, black quilted coat. ‘Mr Weal – he’s shot himself, I’m afraid to say.’
‘Big Weal?’
‘Blew his head off with a shotgun. In his wife’s tomb, this was, poor man. Turned his mind, isn’t it? The grief. Tried to stop him, didn’t I, Mrs Watkins? Tried to talk him out of it.’
The vicar says, in this clear voice, like in the pulpit, ‘No one could have done more, Mrs Prosser.’
‘You all right, vicar?’
‘Yeah, I’m... fine. Apart from a few bruises where... Mr Weal hit me.’
‘I warned her not to approach him,’ said Mrs Prosser. ‘Silly girl.’
‘Yes, I’ve been a very silly girl.’
Judy says, ‘We all were terrified that he might do something stupid. So, as a close neighbour, I was keeping an eye on him. I go there every night, I do, to check he’s all right, and sometimes I finds him beside the tomb, with the top open, just staring at Menna’s remains. Mrs Watkins said she did not think this was healthy and she asked me to take her to see Mr Weal, and we finds the poor man in there, with his wife on show and his twelve-bore in his hands. Mrs Watkins panics, see—’
‘Gomer...?’ the vicar says. ‘Ar?’
‘Are there any police around? I thought there’d be some here.’
‘Over the harchaeologist site, vicar,’ Gomer says warily. ‘Any number o’ the buggers.’
‘Could you take Mrs Prosser. Ask for a senior officer, and tell them Mrs Prosser has a lot of... information.’
‘You can tell them my husband’s on the police committee,’ Judy says. ‘That should expedite matters. But surely you’re coming, too, Mrs Watkins?’
‘I have to take my child back to the vicarage, Mrs Prosser. She’s too young to hear about this kind of thing.’
The vicar hugs young Jane very close for a few seconds.
‘Say goodnight to Gomer, Jane,’ the vicar says.
The kiddie comes over, puts her arms round Gomer’s neck and hugs him real tight, and in his ear in this shocked, trembling whisper, her says,
