A Crown of Lights

‘Don’t fuss, Gomer.’ Merrily dropped a cigarette in the process of trying to light it.

Gomer straightened his glasses.

‘Sorry.’ She touched his arm. ‘It’s me. I’m furious with me, that’s all.’

‘Happened in there, vicar?’

‘Exorcism – of sorts. I ought to have stopped it. I just’ – she thumped her thigh with a fist – ‘stood there... let it happen.’

‘Hexorcism?’ Gomer said, bewildered. ‘This’d be Greg’s missus?’

‘Must’ve been.’

‘The bugger hexorcized Greg’s missus for fancyin’ a feller?’

‘For embracing the dark,’ Merrily said, with unsuppressible venom. ‘For letting herself become possessed by most unholy and blasphemous lust.’

‘Load of ole wallop. You gonner tell Greg?’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘Boy oughter know,’ said Gomer, ‘whatever it was.’ He nodded towards a man getting into the Range Rover. ‘Dr Coll,’ he observed.

The cameramen were backing away down the street ahead of Ellis and his entourage. Dr Coll drove away in his Range Rover, leaving Merrily and Gomer exposed.

‘I can’t believe I let it happen,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it was happening. I can’t tell Greg. You saw the state he was in. He’d go after Ellis with a baseball bat. That... bastard.’

Ellis walked without looking to either side. When a couple of the reporters tried to get a word with him, his anoraked minders pressed closer around him – the holy man. Merrily and Gomer walked well behind, Merrily turning things over and over.

Internal ministry, it had been called when the phenomenon had first been noted in the North of England. Mostly it was for supposed incidents of satanic child abuse – a number of allegations, but not much proven. It was a charismatic extreme, an evangelical madness: the warped and primitive conviction that demonic forces entered through bodily orifices and could only be expelled the same way.

It had all happened too quickly, clinically, like a doctor taking a cervical smear. The fact that it was also degrading, humiliating – and, as it happened, amounted to sexual assault – would not be an issue for someone who had convinced himself of it being a legitimate weapon in the war against Satan. Someone invoking the power of the Archangel Michael against a manufactured dragon.

When, in fact, he was the monster.

Got to stop him.

But if she spoke out there would be a dozen respectable women ready to say she was a liar with a chip on her shoulder; about a dozen women who had watched the ritual in silence. Then, afterwards, tears and hugs and ‘Praise God!’

‘Gomer... those women over there, who are they?’

Gomer identified Mrs Eleri Cobbold, the village sub-post-mistress, Mrs Smith whose cottage they’d passed, Linda Llewellyn who managed a riding stables towards Presteigne. The others he didn’t know. Mostly from Off, he reckoned.

Marianne wasn’t among them.

‘No back way out of the hall, is there?’

‘Yes, but not without comin’ down them steps, vicar, less you wants to squeeze through a fence and lose yourself in the forestry.’

So she was still up there. That made sense; they’d hardly want to bring her out looking like a road casualty, not with TV crews around.

Ellis had reached the car park of the Black Lion. He was evidently about to hold a press conference.

‘Gomer, could you kind of hang around and listen to what he says? I need to go back in there.’

All eyes were fixed on Ellis as Merrily walked inconspicuously back through the rain towards the steps.

Nobody on the door this time. Inside the hall, all the blinds were now raised, the chairs were spread out and a plain wooden lectern stood in the centre of the room. This time, one corner looked very much like another and only a vague smell of wax indicated that anything more contentious than an ad hoc meeting of the community council had taken place.

No, there was something else: the atmosphere you often caught in a church after a packed service – tiny shivers in the air like dust motes waiting to settle.

A black coat slung over one of the chairs suggested someone was still around, if only a cleaner. Presently, Merrily became aware of voices from beyond the door with the ‘Toilets’ sign above it – where that solitary man had stood. She crossed the hall, not caring about the sound of her shoes on the polished floorboards.

The door opened into an ante-room leading to separate women’s and men’s lavatories. It contained a sink and one of the chairs from the main room – Marianne sitting in it. A woman was bending over her with a moistened paper towel, patting her brow. Marianne didn’t react when the door swung shut behind Merrily, but the other woman looked up at once, clear blue eyes unblinking.

‘We can manage, thank you.’

The voice echoed off the tiles: cold white tiles, floor to ceiling, reminding Merrily of the stark bathroom at Ledwardine vicarage.

‘How is she?’

‘She’s much better, thank you. Had problems at home, haven’t you, my love?’

The woman wore jeans and a black and orange rugby shirt. She had a lean, wind-roughened face, bleakly handsome. A face which had long since become insensitive to slaps from the weather and the world. A face last seen lit by the lanterns in Menna’s mausoleum.

The woman dabbed at Marianne’s cheek, screwed up the paper towel and looked again at Merrily, in annoyance. ‘You want the lavatory, is it?’

‘No. I’d just like a word with Marianne – when you’ve finished.’ Merrily unwound her scarf. ‘Merrily Watkins. Hereford Diocese.’

‘Oh? Come to spy on Father Ellis, is it? We’re not stupid. We know what the diocese thinks of him.’

Marianne looked glassy-eyed. She didn’t care one way or the other.

‘And anyway,’ the woman said, ‘Mrs Starkey hasn’t been through anything she didn’t personally request. Father Ellis doesn’t do a soft ministry.’

‘Obviously not.’

‘Practical man who gets results. She’ll be fine, if people will let her alone. If you want to talk to anybody, you can talk to me. Judith Prosser, my name. Councillor Prosser’s wife. Come outside.’

She gave Marianne’s shoulder a squeeze then went and held open the door for Merrily, ushering her out and down the central aisle of the hall, past Ellis’s lectern. She picked up the black quilted coat from a chair back, and they went out through the main doors.

The rain had stopped. At the top of the steps, Judith Prosser didn’t turn to look at Merrily; she leaned on the metal railings and gazed over to the village centre, where Ellis and his entourage were assembling for the media.

‘And was it the diocese sent you to Menna’s funeral, too, Reverend Watkins?’

Above Old Hindwell, a hopeless sun was trying vainly to burn a hole in the clouds. Mist still filigreed the firs on Burfa Hill but the tower of the old church was clear to the north.

‘I didn’t think you’d recognized me,’ Merrily said.

‘Well, of course I recognized you.’

This was the intelligent woman who Gomer seemed to admire. Who did her husband’s thinking for him. Who could sit and watch another woman physically invaded in the name of God.

‘For what it’s worth, that was nothing at all to do with the diocese,’ Merrily told her. ‘I’d arranged to meet Barbara Buckingham at her sister’s funeral. You remember Barbara?’