Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

Merrily retched again.

‘Never seen blood before, Mrs Watkins? Used to kill all our own pigs, we did, when I was a girl. And whatever else we wanted to, until the regulations. Regulations about this and that... Regulations, it is, killing country life.’ She calmed down, sighed. ‘Poor Jeffery – it’s just like putting down an old horse.’

‘What was... the matter with him?’

‘It was since she died.’ A toss of her head towards the tomb. ‘He was hardly awake since. Couldn’t face being awake.’

‘Was he... on medication? From Dr Coll?’

‘Wouldn’t have it. Said it was the mourning took his energy, eating him up inside.’

Took his energy?

Menna.

‘Do you know what I think?’ Judith said, brightening. ‘I think he ought to have killed you, Mrs Watkins.’

Merrily felt the first spasm of a cramp in her right leg. She had to move.

‘That’s what I think. Meddling little bitch, you are, come to spy on Father Ellis.’

Merrily braced herself against the wall, straightened the leg in front of her, looking up. Into the black, metal-smelling barrels of the twelve-bore hovering six inches from her face.

Judith said, ‘Perhaps he did shoot you.’ She raised a hand to her head for a moment, horribly childlike, as if putting something together in her mind. ‘Likely he shot you before he killed himself. Blew your little head off with the one barrel, saved the other for himself. He was a solicitor. A logical man, see.’

She looked delighted – the woman was mad.

Merrily looked along the barrel of the great gun towards the stock. She saw two triggers, one slightly in front of the other, Judith’s finger around the second one. The speed she’d managed it last time, there must be hardly any tension in those triggers.

Merrily jerked her head to one side, but the two holes followed her.

Judith was a practical woman.

‘First used one of these when I was nine year old,’ she said proudly, ‘when I could hardly lift it. Saw my father shooting crows.’ She smiled happily. ‘Country girl, see, always the tomboy. Always a better shot than Councillor Prosser.’

The trigger finger relaxed. Merrily still held her breath. Could she summon the strength to throw herself from the wall, knock the barrel aside? As if she’d picked up the thought, Judith backed away smartly, smiling.

‘Jeffery thought you were one of the hippies broken in. Thought you were a hippy, and you went for him and his gun went off. That’s what they’ll say, isn’t it? Then, when he saw what he’d done, he turned the gun on himself. Suicide while the balance of mind was disturbed. Went to an inquest two year ago, we did, Councillor Prosser and I. One of our old neighbours hanged himself – verdict of suicide while the balance of mind was disturbed. Everyone here knew J.W.’s balance of mind was gone.’

Merrily shook her head helplessly.

Judith waggled her fingers to show she was still wearing gloves. ‘Dropped the gun as he died. Two of you dead.’ She glanced at the open tomb. ‘Went to say goodbye to his wife, before he killed himself. Poor Jeffery, he’s with her now – is that what you think, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Yes.’

Judith’s face turned red. ‘Rubbish! Nonsense! How can a woman be so stupid. There is nothing after death! Menna waiting in the clouds with her arms open, waiting for her J.W. with no head? Is that what you would tell them in your church, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Is that what you say to Father Ellis?’

The barrel moved down to Merrily’s chest. At this range, the blast would cut her in half, and it could happen any time. If she moved too quickly, Judith would blow her apart. She wouldn’t feel anything. She wouldn’t even hear the shot. Her last moment would be a moment just like this.

‘We could have been friends, you and I, Merrily Watkins.’

‘I’m not sure that we could,’ Merrily said honestly.

‘I’m not a lesbian, you know. Are you calling me a lesbian?’

Merrily thought of Jane, glad that Gomer was with her. Would the kid later remember hearing a distant explosion from the village, hear it echoing down her life. Pray that these concrete walls were too thick. Pray: Please, God, Oh God. Please, Jesus, hold me safe from the forces of evil. On each of my dyings shed your light and your love . Would she die wearing Jane’s coat? She saw not her own life flashing before her, but Jane’s. Jane aged three on the beach in Pembrokeshire, following a ball, tripping over it, starting to cry because she thought she should, and then bursting into wild laughter, rolling over and over like a kitten.

Merrily tore herself wretchedly back into the present.

‘Frankly, Judith, I couldn’t care less where you stand sexually. It’s insignificant.’

‘Not to me, Mrs Watkins. Not to my reputation.’

‘The real point is, you’re a monster. A monster that feeds on the vulnerable. Anything that brings out pity in the rest of us, it just makes you more excited. Tears turn you on. You were probably everything to Menna – all she had sometimes. But she was nothing to you, no more than a slim, white, trembling body to play with.’

She stood up, looked at Judith and shrugged.

‘You may close your eyes, if you wish,’ Judith said coldly, but she’d squeezed the second trigger before Merrily even had time to decide.

Betty and the stately Alexandra drifted about the ruins like mother and daughter ghosts, moving things around while Robin watched and held the lamp.

The fat candles mostly stayed: on sills and ledges, and in glass lanterns on the top of the tower.

The altar got moved. This was an old workbench from the barn, with a wood vice still clamped on the side. Robin helped Alexandra carry it from the north wall to a place in the middle of the nave, opposite the tower but facing where Betty figured the chancel had been. East-facing, like a Christian altar, in case this Merrily Watkins turned up.

The ruins hung around them like old and tattered drapes, moonlight showing up all the moth-holes. The moon was real white now, like a slice of Philadelphia cheese over the tower. Robin thought he saw a movement up there. An owl, maybe.

Across the roofless nave, Betty was taking some crystals from a drawstring bag. She kept her eyes down.

When it was all ready, the coven was summoned in, and Alexandra said to Betty, ‘Will it be?’

Robin looked at Betty, and he knew she had at last accepted that the Christian priest would not come.

Betty nodded.

Tapers and matches were handed out. The coven moved like shadows, dipping and bending, and when each one rose there was a new glimmering.

Max’s wife Bella did the tower. ‘Creepy,’ she said when she came down. ‘Felt I was being watched.’

In the end, there must have been seventy or eighty candles alight. Lined up in every jagged, glassless window. Along the walls of the roofless nave. In the arrow-cracks of the tower. On top of the cold battlements, in glass lanterns.

St Michael’s, Old Hindwell, was ethereal, unearthly, shivering with lights, and the display reflected, crystallized, in the Hindwell Brook.

NEVER HAD a gun, never wanted one, but Gomer knew about gunshots, how loud they could be at night, how the sound would carry miles, and he’d figured out roughly where this one had come from, and it wasn’t likely to be poachers or lampers of hares – not tonight with all these coppers on the loose.

‘The church?’ young Jane said, scared.

‘Further on, more like.’

He wasn’t gonner say it was the ole rectory yet, but he was gonner check it out.

As they reached Prossers’ farm, a police van shot past them – far too fast, in Gomer’s view, to be heading for the entrance to the ole church. They wouldn’t’ve heard the shot. Most likely they was heading for the camp the coppers would’ve now set up where they’d dug up Barbara Thomas.