A Crown of Lights

‘Truth is... I’ve not been frank with you, Merrily – or with meself, come to that. There’s things I ought to’ve said.’ She dropped her voice to just above a whisper. ‘About the night Menna Weal died. And I can’t talk here, I’m on the public phone.’

‘You’ve got an office, haven’t you?’

‘It’s open house in there, so it is. Anyway, I won’t talk in this place, and I don’t get off now until the morning. You’ve got my home number, so call me when you can.’

‘Eileen, don’t... do not hang up. Let’s just talk about Menna, OK? The stroke could have been brought on by stress, right? Severe emotional stress?’

‘Hypertension due to emotional trauma. Distended arteries, then a clot gets shunted into the brain. What kind of trauma you thinking about?’

‘Exorcism,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh, terrific,’ Cullen said drably.

‘The expulsion of an evil entity. Intended expulsion.’

‘I know what it is, I was raised a Catholic. But, excuse me, Reverend, would not someone in your job be seeing it everywhere you bloody look?’

‘Just... bear with me, OK? You get some ministers – of an evangelical or charismatic persuasion – who believe that demonic forces... and angelic forces, come to that... are all around us in all kinds of guises. Like there are probably a few in California who’d offer to exorcize me in order to expel the demon nicotine.’

‘You mean eejits.’

‘So here’s poor Menna – withdrawn, maladjusted maybe, communication problems. OK, I won’t go into details, but there’s good reason to think she was abused by her dad.’

‘Is that a fact,’ said Cullen, who’d heard it all many times before.

‘Probably over a long period. But not necessarily when she was a kid.’

‘So you could be talking about more of an unnatural relationship.’

‘If she was as naive and immature as I’ve been told, I think we’re still talking about abuse.’

Merrily lit another cigarette and gathered her thoughts, staring out along the village street. From here, she could count candles in nine separate windows. The street lighting was so meagre and widely spaced that some of the candles seemed disproportionately bright through the rain-blobbed windscreen and unintentionally jolly, like Christmas lights.

She just wanted to air this stuff, to another woman.

‘I don’t want to speculate too much about the state of the Weal marriage... but it seems likely the obsessive love there was fairly one-sided. And Weal must have realized that – that the father was still very much in the background, even though dead.’

‘You mean Weal’s thinking he might be having a happier time altogether if he can remove whatever emotional block’s been left behind in Menna by her having a sex beast for a father.’

‘I doubt the concept of happiness means much to him, but yeah... And he wouldn’t have her seeing a psychiatrist or a therapist because that’s not the kind of thing you’re seen to do in Old Hindwell. So, after a lot of agonizing and soul-searching, perhaps, he goes to the priest.’

‘Who you say’s not your regular kind of priest, yeah?’

‘Mmm. At the funeral, Ellis disclosed that Weal and Menna were baptized together, not long before she died. I think that means she was exorcized. Historically, baptism’s always been linked with exorcism. In the medieval Church, it was more or less believed that until it was baptized, a baby was the property of the Devil and if it died before baptism it would be consigned to the fires of hell.’

‘No offence to you, personally,’ Cullen said, ‘but how I hate the Church.’

‘So, suppose Weal believed that having Menna rebaptized into the faith would free her from the influence of her father... from the effects of her childhood. And suppose the ceremony – conducted in the privacy of their home – involved... well, something considerably more stressful than a sprinkling of holy water. And I mean more stressful.’

‘Then, sure, you could be into stroke country.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘And...’ Cullen hesitated, ‘as you’ve mentioned baptism, the anointing of the forehead with water, if we cast our minds back to a certain wee side ward...’

‘Mmm.’

‘I always thought any anointing of a corpse was down to the priest.’

‘Me, too.’

Long silence.

‘Possession is nine points of the law,’ Merrily said. ‘That was what Barbara Buckingham said.’

‘Possession?’ Cullen said.

‘Possession of the dead by the living, was how she put it, ostensibly meaning the private tomb. But I think there were other things she wasn’t prepared to put into words, maybe even to herself.’

‘Ah, Merrily...’

‘Pretty much like you, really. Why don’t you just tell me the rest?’

Cullen said, ‘This is a pressure job, you know? You get overtired, so you do.’

‘And imagine things.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Like?’

‘Like things you don’t believe in.’

‘Did something happen when you went down to the morgue?’

Cullen sighed. ‘Maybe.’

‘He went along with you – which is not usual.’

‘Not only that, he sent the porters away. He asked could he spend some time with her, say his goodbyes.’

‘How long?’

‘A clear hour. To cut a long story short, they sent for me, in the end, to exercise my fabled diplomacy on the man. When I get down there, I’m delighted to see he’s finally leaving. Has on his hat and coat, a big dark solicitor’s overcoat, like he’s on his way to court. I didn’t approach him, but I thought it was as well to follow him, to make quite sure he left the premises. So I did that. I followed him.’

Cullen broke off. There was the sound of someone calling from a distance, then Cullen said, ‘Two minutes, Josie, all right?’

‘Bloody hell,’ Merrily said, ‘don’t stop now.’

‘Ach, normal way of things you wouldn’t get this out of me with thumbscrews. All right. Weal goes out by one of the back doors near the consultants’ car park. You can get across the yard there to the temporary visitors’ car park. It’s the quickest way, if you don’t mind there being no lights. Which I wish to God there had’ve been, then I could’ve said it was a reflection.’

Merrily revved the engine to blow more heat into the Volvo.

‘I could still say it was,’ Cullen said defiantly. ‘I can say any damn thing I want to, as I’m an atheist. I do not believe in God, I do not believe in angels or demons.’

‘And you don’t believe what you saw. A lot of people say that. That’s OK.’

‘Feel free to be patronizing, Reverend. I’ve woken up about seven times in the night since then. Gets into me fockin’ dreams, the way you get a virus in your computer. And everything freezes on you.’

‘I know.’

‘Oh, you know everything, so you do!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m standing in the doorway, just the other side of the big plastic doors, and I’m watching him walk across to the visitors’ car park, which is all but empty now. Nobody about but him and this... Jesus.’

Merrily’s eyes turned this way and that, determinedly counting nine candles in nine windows, banishing all wildly flickering thoughts of the old rectory garden, while Cullen kept her waiting.

Until, at last, over the sound of footsteps in the hospital corridor and a woman squealing, she whispered,