A Crown of Lights

the same things, most of us. Don’t we?’

‘Maybe.’

Jane said loudly, ‘No, I’m sorry, she’s not here. I was kind of expecting her back, but in her job you can’t count on anything. Sometimes she spends, like, whole nights battling with crazed demonic entities and then she comes home and sleeps for two days. It’s like she’s in a coma – really disturbing. Sure, no problem. Bye.’

‘Flower,’ Merrily said, ‘you do realize that little exercise in whimsy might be lost in the transition to cold print.’

‘In the Independent?’

Merrily nodded. ‘So just don’t say it to the Daily Star.’

She went over to switch on the answering machine. When she came back Betty was saying, ‘In Shrewsbury, we were members of a coven containing quite a few... pagan activists, I suppose you’d have to call them. Teachers, mainly. They’re good people in their way, but they’d be more use on the council. They’re looking for organized religion, for structure.’

‘These are the people who’ve moved in on your house?’ Merrily asked her.

‘Some of them. It’s what I wanted to come down here and get away from. You don’t have to work in a coven. The only structures I’m really interested in now are the ones you build for yourself. But Robin will go along with anybody, I’m afraid.’

‘Why don’t you phone him?’

‘I will. I just don’t want to speak to any of the others. We came down here to work alone. At least, I did. Robin just wanted to live somewhere inspiring and to show it off to his friends. He’d tell you we were sent here because of a series of omens. All that was irrelevant to me.’

Interesting. What was slowly becoming apparent to Merrily was that Betty had come to Old Hindwell in a state of personal spiritual crisis. She’d been drawn into witchcraft by the need to understand the psychic experiences she’d been having from an early age. But maybe paganism hadn’t come up with the answers she’d sought.

‘Omens?’ Merrily brought out her cigarettes. To Jane’s evident disgust, Betty accepted one.

‘Estate agent particulars arriving out of the blue, that kind of thing. When Robin saw the church, he was hooked. Just like Major Wilshire.’

‘Tell me about Mrs Wilshire again,’ Merrily said.

The police had questioned Betty for almost an hour at Mrs Wilshire’s bungalow. A detective constable had arrived who probably had never had a suspicious death to himself before.

‘I’d no idea she suffered angina,’ Betty had told them. ‘I just concocted something harmless for her arthritis.’

No, she could not imagine why Mrs Wilshire would stop taking the Trinitrin tablets prescribed for her angina, a full, unopened bottle of which had been discovered by Dr Banks-Morgan. No, she would never in a million years have advised Mrs Wilshire to stop taking them. She had only suggested a possible winding-down of the steroids if and when the herbal remedy had any appreciable effects on the arthritis.

‘She told me Dr Coll knew all about me, and he was very much in favour of complementary medicines for some complaints.’

‘You know that’s not true, Mrs Thorogood,’ the CID man had said. ‘Dr Banks-Morgan says he has no respect at all for alternative medicines and he makes this clear to all his patients.’

It got worse. If Mrs Wilshire was not becoming unduly influenced by Mrs Thorogood and her witch-remedies, why would she tell Dr Banks-Morgan he needn’t bother coming to visit her again?

Betty could not believe for one minute that Mrs Wilshire had told her caring, caring GP not to come back. But she knew which of them was going to be believed.

‘What a bastard,’ Jane said. ‘He’s trying to fit you up.’

‘Where did they leave things?’ Merrily said. ‘The police, I mean.’

‘They said they might be in touch again.’

‘They probably won’t be. There’s nothing they can prove.’

Betty said, ‘Do you believe me?’

‘Course we do,’ Jane said.

‘Merrily?’

‘From what little I know of Dr Coll, I wouldn’t trust him too far. Gomer?’

Gomer thought about it. ‘Smarmy little bugger, Dr Coll. Always persuading folk to ’ave tests and things for their own good, like, but it’s just so’s he can pick up cash from the big drug companies – that’s what Greta reckons.’

‘Then I’ll tell you the rest,’ Betty said.

And she told them about Mrs Juliet Pottinger and what she’d said about the Hindwell Trust.

‘En’t never yeard of it,’ Gomer said when she’d finished.

Merrily didn’t find that too surprising if the trust was administered by J.W. Weal.

‘Lot of incomers is retired folk,’ Gomer confirmed. ‘Like young Greg says, they comes out yere in the summer, thinks how nice it all looks and they’re amazed at how low house prices is, compared to where they comes from. So they sells up, buys a crappy ole cottage, moves out yere, gets ill...’

‘Fair game?’

‘Like poor bloody hand-reared pheasants,’ Gomer said.

Merrily asked Betty, ‘Is it your feeling Mrs Wilshire’s left money to the Hindwell Trust?’

Betty nodded.

‘This stinks,’ Merrily said.

‘Works both ways, see,’ said Gomer. ‘Patient needs their will sortin’, mabbe some poor ole biddy goin’ a bit soft in the head, and Dr Coll recommends a good lawyer, local man, trust him with your life. Big Weal turns up, you’re some little ole lady, you en’t gonner argue too much. ’Sides which, it’s easy for a lawyer to tamper with a will, ennit? Get the doctor to witness it. All local people, eh?’

Betty explained why she’d gone to see Mrs Pottinger in the first place. Talking about that particular atmosphere she’d perceived in the old church, but hesitating before finally describing the image of a stricken and desperate man in what might have been a stained cassock.

‘Wow,’ said Jane.

Merrily tried not to react too obviously, but she was becoming increasingly interested in the Reverend Terence Penney. ‘What year was this, again?’

‘Seventy-five,’ Betty said. ‘He seems to have been turning into a latent hippy.’

Gomer looked up. ‘Loads o’ hippies round yere. You could get an ole cottage, no electric, for a few ’undred, back then, see, and nobody asked no questions. More drugs in Radnor them days than you’d find the whole o’ Birmingham.’

‘But you never actually ran into Penney yourself?’ Merrily lit another cigarette.

‘No, but I been thinkin’ of Danny Thomas. That boy knew all the hippies, see. Most locals they didn’t have nothin’ to do with ’em, but Danny, ’e was right in there. Up in court for growin’ cannabis, the whole bit. You want me to get Danny on the phone?’

‘It’s a bit late,’ Merrily suggested.

‘Boy don’t keep normal farmin’ hours,’ Gomer said.

Danny Thomas had now turned down the music. In Danny’s barn there were speaker cabinets the size of wardrobes, all covered with chicken shit. Gomer also recalled an intercom on the wall. Bawling down it at Danny when he was wanted on the phone was how most folk reckoned Greta’s voice had reached air-raid siren level.

It must be cold tonight out in Danny’s barn, but Danny would jump around a lot to the music before collapsing into the hay with a joint. Gomer pictured him sitting on a bale, straggly grey hair down the back of his donkey jacket, with Jimi at his feet – Mid-Wales’s only deaf sheepdog.

Gomer sat on the edge of the vicar’s desk and waited while Greta had summoned Danny back to the