A Crown of Lights

‘As long as it takes. He hasn’t even shown yet. An hour and a half maybe?’

‘And then we come looking for you?’

‘And then do whatever Gomer tells you.’

The crazy violence seemed to start as soon as Merrily’s feet touched the tarmac: lights flaring, a woman’s scream, a beer can thrown. A black cross reared out of a mesh of torch beams amid a tangle of angry voices.

‘... finished, you fuckers. Had your time. Christ was a wanker!’

‘... your level, isn’t it? The gutter! Get out of my—’

Sickening crunch of bone on flesh. Blood geysering up.

‘Oh dear God—’

‘So why don’t you just fuck off back to your churches, ’fore we have ’em all off you?’

‘Stand back!’

‘Reverend?’ A hand pulling Merrily back, as the police came through.

‘Marianne?’

She was pushed. ‘Stand back, please. Everybody, back!’

Headlights arriving. Then Collard Banks-Morgan with his medical bag. Next to him, a man in a dark suit. Not a white monk’s habit, but a dark suit.

A woman shrieked, ‘You’ll be damned for ever!’ and started to cry.

‘Listen, Reverend,’ Marianne said calmly. ‘I’m better now.’

‘Good.’

‘Things you oughta know.’ She pulled Merrily into the yard.

She followed when they took the man with the broken nose into the surgery. A woman too, spattered with his blood, wailing, Ellis’s arm around her. ‘He’s in good hands, sister. The best.’

In the waiting room, the lighting was harsh, the seats old and hard, the ceiling still school-hall high, with cream-painted metal girders. A woman receptionist smiled smugly through a hatch in the wall. ‘Come through,’ Dr Coll sang, voice like muzak. ‘Bring him through, that’s right.’

Doors slammed routinely. There were health posters all over the walls: posters to make you feel ill, paranoid, dependent. No surprise that Dr Coll had taken over the school, a local bastion of authority and wisdom.

‘I’d like to talk to you,’ Merrily said to Ellis.

‘I’m sure you would, Mrs Watkins,’ he said briskly, ‘but I don’t have the time or the interest to talk to you. You’re a vain and stupid woman.’ Under his suit he wore a black shirt, no tie, no clerical collar.

‘What happened to your messiah kit?’

‘Libby, tell Dr Coll I’ll talk to him later,’ Ellis said to the receptionist.

Merrily said, ‘There’s going to be trouble out there.’ She waited as Ellis dabbed with a tissue at a small blood speck on his sleeve. ‘Are you going to stop them marching to the church?’

‘Who am I,’ he said, ‘to stop anyone?’

‘You started it. You lit the blue touchpaper.’

‘The media started it. As you say, it’s already out of hand. It’d be highly irresponsible of me to inflame it further. Now, if you don’t mind...’

‘You could stop them. You could stop it now. It isn’t worth it for a crumbling old building with a bad reputation.’

‘I’d lock the door after us if I were you, Libby,’ Ellis said to the receptionist.

‘I’ll do that, Father.’

Ellis held open the main door for Merrily, looking over her head. ‘After you.’ She didn’t move. ‘Don’t make me ask the police to come in,’ Ellis said.

‘Could you clear up a few points for me, Nick?’

‘Goodnight.’

She had no confidence for this, still couldn’t quite believe it.

‘ “I am a brother to dragons”,’ Merrily said.

‘Go away.’ He didn’t look at her, opened the door wider.

‘Book of Job.’

‘I do know the Book of Job.’

The sounds of the street outside came in, carried on cold air, sounds alien to Old Hindwell – shouts, jeers, a man’s unstable voice, on high, ‘May God have mercy on you!’

‘I think your real name is Simon Wesson,’ Merrily said. ‘You went out to the States with your mother and sister in the mid-seventies, after the death of your stepfather. Over there, your mother married an evangelist called Marshall McAllman. You later became his personal assistant. He made a lot of money before he was exposed and disgraced and your mother divorced him – very lucratively, I believe.’

She couldn’t look at him while she was saying all this, terrified that it was going to be wrong, that Jane and Eirion had found the wrong person, that the journalist whose voice Sophie had so efficiently recorded was talking about someone with no connection at all to Nicholas Ellis.

‘McAllman concentrated on little backwoods communities. His technique was to do thorough research before he brought his show to town. He’d employ investigators. And although he would appear aloof when he first arrived...’

None of your good-old-boy stuff from Marshall, the journalist had told Sophie on the tape. Marshall was cool, Marshall was laid-back, Marshall would target a town that was hungry and he’d spread a table and he’d check into a hotel and sit back and wait for them to come sniffing and drooling...

‘... his remoteness only added to his mystique. They came to him – the local dignitaries, the civic leaders, the business people – and he passed on, almost reluctantly, what the Holy Spirit had communicated to him about them and their lives and their past and their future... and he convinced them that they and their town were riddled with all kinds of demons.’

Merrily focused on a wall poster about the symptoms of meningitis. She spoke in a low voice, could see Libby the receptionist straining to hear while pretending to rearrange leaflets behind the window of her hutch.

‘Time and time again, the local people would pull Marshall into the bosom of the community, everyone begging him to take away their demons, and their children’s demons... especially the daughters, those wayward kids. A little internal ministry... well, it beats abortion. He was a prophet and a local hero in different localities. He only went to selected places, little, introverted, no-hope places with poor communications – the places that were gagging for it.’

The print on the meningitis poster began to blur. She turned at last to look up at Ellis, his nose lifted in disdain, but she could see his hand whitening around the doorknob.

‘He taught you a lot, Nick, about the psychology of rural communities. And about manipulation. Plus, he gave you the inner strength and the brass neck to come back to this country and finally take on your hated, still-vengeful stepbrother.’

She stood in the doorway and waited.

Ellis closed the door again.

In the Black Lion, Jane saw Gomer was talking at the bar to a fat man of about thirty in a thick plaid shirt that came down halfway to his knees. At their table by the door, Sophie gathered her expensive and elegant camel coat over her knees to protect them from the draught.

‘I’d take you two back to Hereford with me, if I thought you’d stay put in the office.’

‘No chance.’ Jane ripped open a bag of crisps, stretched out her legs.

‘Nothing’s going to happen here, Jane,’ Sophie said. ‘The whole thing comes down to two obsessive men settling a childhood grudge.’

‘But what a grudge, Sophie. Serious, serious hatred fermenting for over a quarter of a century. A fundamentalist bigot and a warlock steeped in old magic. A white witch and a black Christian.’