A Crown of Lights

audience are just ordinary punters bussed in – tonight’s bunch is from a paint factory in Walsall: packers, cleaners, management – a cross section of society.’

Gerry glanced at Eirion, who looked awfully young and innocent – and not happy. He had no stomach for subterfuge, Jane was realizing. He’d been appalled to discover that her mum, down there, did not know they were up here. Or, indeed, within sixty miles of Livenight.

Even in Eirion’s car, with the patched-up silencer, it hadn’t taken long to get here. The Warehouse studio complex had been quite easy to find, on the edge of a new business park, under a mile from the M5 and ten miles out of the central Birmingham traffic hell.

It was not until they’d actually left the motorway that Jane had revealed to Eirion the faintly illicit nature of this operation. ‘Irene, I’m doing this for you. This could be your future. This is like cutting-edge telly. It’s an in, OK. You might even get a holiday job.’

Eirion had looked appalled, like a taxi driver who’d just discovered he was providing the wheels in a wages snatch. He’d thought they were only driving up separately because Jane’s mum might have to stay the night. He did not know how Jane came to have Tania Beauman in her pocket, and would probably not be finding out. Neither would Mum; the plan was, they’d clear off about two minutes before the programme ended, go bombing back down the motorway, and Jane would be up in her apartment with the lights out by the time Mum got home.

Tania Beauman had turned out to be actually OK. She’d told both Gerry and the grizzled director, Maurice, that Jane was her cousin, doing a media studies college course. Which could well be true, one day.

‘How old is she?’ Maurice had enquired suspiciously.

‘Nineteen next month,’ Jane said crisply. Eirion looked queasy.

‘Stone me,’ Gerry muttered. ‘When the nineteen-year-olds start looking fourteen, you know you’re getting too old for it.’

Maurice took off his cans. ‘See, the problem with this particular programme is that we’re not Songs of Praise and this is not the God Slot. What we do not want is a religious debate. We don’t want the history of Druidism, we want to know what they get up to in their stone circles when the film crew’s gone home. We don’t want to hear about the people the witches’ve healed, we want to know about the ones they’ve cursed and the virgins they’ve deflowered on their altars. This is late-night TV. Our job – to put it crudely – is to send you off to bed with a hard-on.’

‘I’ll be interested to see how the little priest handles it,’ Gerry said thoughtfully. ‘She’s got enough of her own demons.’

Jane stared at him.

‘Marital problems,’ Gerry said. ‘Husband playing away... though what the hell possessed him, with that at home.’

‘You never know what goes on behind bedroom doors.’ Maurice shook his head, smiling sadly. ‘You turned all that up, did you, Gerald?’

‘And then, when it’s all looking a bit messy... Bang! The husband goes and gets killed in the car, with his girlfriend. Merrily wakes up a widow... and soon after that she’s become a priest. Interesting, do I detect guilt in there somewhere, or do I just have a suspicious—’

‘Christ!’ Jane snarled. ‘She didn’t become a bloody nun! She—’ She felt Eirion’s hand on her arm and shook it off and bit her lip.

Gerry grinned. ‘My, my. Women do stick together, don’t they?’

‘Lay off, Gerald.’ Maurice slipped on his headphones, flipped a switch on his console. ‘You there, Martin? Speak to me, son.’

‘So.’ Gerry leaned against the edge of the mixing desk. ‘There you are, Jane. Now you know how easy it is to get people going. You just watch the monitors. Within about seven minutes, everybody’s forgotten there are cameras.’ He pencilled a note on a copy of the programme’s running order; Jane made out the word Merrily. ‘Be a lot of heat, tonight, I think. When it gets going, it’s very possible one of those weirdos is gonna try some spooky stuff.’

Eirion stiffened. ‘Spooky stuff?’

‘I dunno, son. A spell or something, I suppose. Something to prove they can make things happen. I dunno, basically – it’s all cobblers, anyway.’

Jane looked at Eirion. She was still shaking. They had a little file on Mum; if the show lost momentum, shafting her became an option.

13 A Surreal Memory

BETTY’S DAY CLEARLY hadn’t been too great either. You could tell not so much from her face as from her manner: no bustle.

‘You don’t tell me yours, and I won’t tell you mine.’ Robin didn’t even lift his head from the kitchen table where he’d fallen into a sleep of dismay and frustration. ‘We’ll call it a shit amnesty.’

Ten-fifteen on this cold, misty, moonless night. Betty had been out since mid-afternoon. She’d been to see the widow Wilshire in New Radnor again, taking with her an arthritis potion involving ‘burdock and honeysuckle, garlic and nettle and a little healing magic’. Betty was good with healing plants; after pissing off her parents by walking out of teacher training, she’d worked at a herb garden and studied with a herbalist at nights for two and a half years. She’d gone to a whole lot of trouble with this potion, driving over to a place the other side of Hereford yesterday to pick up the ingredients.

‘How is she now?’

‘Oh... more comfortable. And happier, I think.’

Around six she’d phoned him to say she was hanging on there a while. Seemed Mrs Wilshire’s home help had not made it this week and she was distressed about the state of her house and her inability to clean it up. So Betty would clean up, sure she would. Wherever she went, Betty added to her collection of aunts.

‘OK,’ Robin said, ‘if she’s so much better, I give up. Where’s the bad stuff come in?’

‘It isn’t necessarily bad – just odd.’ Betty took off her coat, hung it behind the back door, went to get warm by the stuttering Rayburn. ‘So you first. It’s Ellis, isn’t it?’

‘No, haven’t heard a word from Ellis. This is Blackmore. He faxed. He doesn’t like the artwork.’

‘Oh.’ Betty pushed her hands through her hair, letting it tumble. ‘I did say it was a mistake, dealing with him directly. You should have carried on communicating through the publishers. If he can get hold of you any time he wants, he’ll just keep on quibbling.’

‘It was what he wanted. And he is Kirk Blackmore. And, frankly, quibbling doesn’t quite reach it.’

‘Not something you can alter easily?’

Robin laughed bleakly. ‘What the asshole doesn’t like is... everything. He doesn’t like my concept of Lord Madoc – his face is wrong, his hair is wrong, his clothes are wrong, his freaking boots are wrong. Oh, and he walks in the wrong colour of mist.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Betty came round the back of his chair, put her hands on his shoulders, began to knead. ‘All that work. What does it mean? What happens now?’

‘Means I grovel. Or I take the one-off money and someone else’s artwork goes on the book.’

‘There’s no way—’

‘Betty... OK. I am a well-regarded illustrator. Any ordinary, midlist fantasy writer, they’d have to go with it. Blackmore, however, is now into a one-and-a-half-million-pound three-book deal. He walks with the gods. Different rules apply.’

Betty scowled. ‘Doesn’t change the fact that he writes moronic crap. Tell him to sod off. It’s just one book.’

He sat up. ‘It’s not moronic. The guy knows his stuff. And it’s not just one book. His whole backlist’s gonna be rejacketed in the Sword of Twilight format, whoever’s artwork that should be. Which is seven books – a lot of work. Face it, I need Blackmore. I need