A Crown of Lights

was, in fact, one of the first people to suspect that the Radnor Basin had a prehistory as significant as anywhere in Wales. His part-time job became a full-time obsession. He was overworking. He collapsed.

‘Dr Collard Banks-Morgan was like a small, bearded, ministering angel,’ Mrs Pottinger had said wryly. ‘Whisked poor Stanley into the cottage hospital. Those were the days when anyone could occupy a bed for virtually as long as they wished. Stanley practically had to discharge himself in the end, to get back to his beloved excavation.’

And while Stanley was trowelling away at his favoured site, a round barrow at Harpton, Dr Coll paid Mrs P. a discreet visit. He informed her, in absolute confidence, that he was more than a little worried about Stanley’s heart; that Stanley, not to dress up the situation, had just had a very lucky escape, and he could one day very easily push the enfeebled organ... just a little too far.

‘Oh, don’t tell him that. Good heavens, don’t have him carrying it around like an unexploded bomb!’ said Dr Coll jovially. ‘I shall keep tabs on him, myself.’ Chuckling, he added, ‘I believe I’m developing a latent interest in prehistory!’

Dr Coll had been discretion itself, popping in for a regular chat – perhaps to ask Stanley the possible significance of some mound he could see from his surgery window or bring him photocopies of articles on Victorian excavations from the Radnorshire Transactions. And all the time, as he told Juliet with a wink, he was observing Stanley’s colour, his breathing, his general demeanour. Keeping tabs.

She thought the man’s style was wonderful: perfect preventative medicine. How different from the city, where a GP could barely spare one the time of day.

And Betty was rehearing Lizzie Wilshire: Dr Coll’s been marvellous... such a caring, caring man.

Juliet Pottinger had said as much, without spelling anything out, to their most solicitous solicitor, Mr Weal, who was handling their purchase of a small strip of land – ‘for a quite ludicrous amount’ – from the Prosser brothers. How could she possibly repay Dr Coll’s kindness?

Oh, well, said Mr Weal, when pressed, there was a certain local charity, to which Dr Coll was particularly attached. Oh, nothing now, he wouldn’t want that, he’d be most embarrassed. But something to bear in mind for the future perhaps? And please don’t tell Dr Coll that he’d mentioned this – he would hate to alienate a client.

It was two years later, while they were on holiday in Scotland – a particularly hot summer – that Stanley, exhibiting symptoms of what might be sunstroke or something worse, was whisked off by his anxious wife to a local hospital. Where two doctors were unable to detect a heart problem of any kind.

‘Stanley died three and a half years ago of what, in the days before everything had to be explained, would have been simply termed old age,’ said Mrs Pottinger.

‘And did you ever take this misdiagnosis up with Dr Coll?’ Betty was imagining Juliet waking up in the night listening for his breathing, monitoring his diet, being nervous whenever he was driving. It must have been awfully worrying.

‘I took the coward’s way out, and persuaded Stanley to move somewhere else, a bit more convenient. I said I was finding the village too claustrophobic, which was true. By then I’d discovered that Dr Coll had... well, appeared to have created a... dependency among several of his patients, and all of them, as it happened, incomers to the area. People who might be feeling a little isolated there, and would be overjoyed to find such a friendly and concerned local GP.’

‘Making up illnesses for them, too?’

‘I don’t know. People don’t like to talk about certain things. People are only too happy to praise their local doctor, to boast about what a good and caring GP they have. Perhaps ours was an isolated case. Certainly, some of them did die quite soon. One rather lonely elderly couple, childless and reclusive, died’ – her voice faded – ‘within only months of each other.’

‘And did they by any chance leave money,’ Betty asked her, ‘to this...?’

‘The Hindwell Trust. Yes, I rather believe there was a substantial bequest.’

‘Did you never say anything?’

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Mrs Pottinger snapped. ‘Was I supposed to go to the police? I’d have been a laughing stock. I believe Dr Coll even helped out as a police surgeon for some years. Yes, I did, when we were about to leave the village, suggest to the Connellys, who’d bought a rather rundown smallholding... but... No, it was a waste of time. Dr Coll is a very popular man: he has five children, he hosts garden parties at his lovely home on the Evenjobb road. Even now, I don’t necessarily believe—’

‘What about the solicitor?’

‘Oh, Mr Weal and Dr Coll go right back. Fellow pupils at the Old Hindwell Primary School. In fact, Mr Weal administers the Hindwell Trust – and its trustees include Councillor Gareth Prosser. You see?’

I see. Oh yes, I do see.

Such a caring, caring man.

Driving out of the hamlet of Kinnerton, Betty felt a rising panic, an inability to cope with this news on her own. The Radnor Valley was all around her, a green enigma. Abruptly, she turned into a lane which she already knew of because it led to the Four Stones.

She stopped the car on the edge of a field beyond Hindwell Farm – Hindwell, not Old Hindwell. Different somehow – placid and open and almost lush in summer. She could see the stones through the hedge. She loved this place, this little circle. She and Robin must have been here ten or fifteen times already. It was still raining, but she got out of the car and climbed eagerly over the gate. It felt like coming home.

The Four Stones were close to the hedge, not high but plump and rounded. Betty went down on her knees and put her arms around one and looked across the open countryside to the jagged middle-distant hillside where stood the sentinel church of Old Radnor. She hugged the stone, surrendering to the energies of the prehistoric landscape.

This was the religion – and the Radnorshire – that she understood.

The rain intensified, beating down on her out of a blackening sky. Betty didn’t care; she wished the rain would wash her into the stone. When she stood up, she was pretty well soaked, but she felt better, stronger.

And angry. Bitterly angry at the corruption of this old and sacred place. Angry at the bloody local people, the level to which they appeared to have degenerated.

She drove to the end of the lane and, instead of turning left towards Walton and Old Hindwell, headed right, towards New Radnor, against the rain.

Even if the woman’s bungalow was strewn with copies of the Daily Mail, she would charm Lizzie Wilshire around to her side. She would ask her directly if the Hindwell Trust was mentioned in her will.

‘Above all,’ Max said, pouring himself a glass of red wine, ‘we can challenge them intellectually.’

Max had this big, wildman beard. You could’ve lost him at a ZZ Top convention. But any suggestion of menace vanished as soon as he spoke, for Max had a voice like a one-note flute. He was a lecturer someplace; he liked to lecture.

‘St Michael equates with the Irish god Mannon, of the Tuatha de Danaan. Mannon was the sea god, and also the mediator between the gods and humankind and the conductor of souls into the Otherworld. In Coptic and cabbalistic texts, you will find these roles also attributed to Michael. Therefore, every “Saint” Michael church is, regardless of its origins, in essence a pagan Celtic temple. Which is why this reconsecration is absolutely valid.’

Normally, even coming from Max, Robin would have found this amazing, total cosmic vindication. Right now he really couldn’t give a shit.

Because it was close to dark now, and still Betty had not returned, had not even called.

He walked tensely around the beamed living room, which they had taken over, stationing candles in the four corners, feeding gathered twigs to a feeble fire they’d gotten going in the inglenook where the witch-charm box had been stored. When George and Vivvie had come down, the first weekend, Betty had