Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

Gomer had been worried they might get stopped. Under his bomber jacket, he had his sweatshirt on back to front, so it no longer said, ‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire’.

Behind them, the fire was just fumes on the air, almost unnoticeable as they reached the St Michael’s entrance. No protesters here yet. No coppers, neither. And no reporters. A woman’s body and some bugger figuring to fry three hundred people had to be more important than God and the Devil.

The five-bar gate was closed across the track, but the padlock hung loose from the hasp on a chain. Gomer was about to open it when Jane let out a gasp.

Two women were approaching up the road.

Jane hesitates a moment, then starts to run. Gomer levels his torch.

It lights up Judy Prosser. Also the vicar.

The kiddie runs to her mam and they starts hugging, but Gomer knows straight off this en’t normal. He walks over, slowly.

‘’Ow’re you, Judy?’

But he’s looking at the vicar in the torchlight, where her eye’s black and swelled-up, her face lopsided.

Jane’s now spotted it, too. ‘Mum, what have you—’

But Judy cuts in. ‘Gomer, we’re looking for the police, we are. Something terrible’s happened.’

‘What’s that, Judy?’

‘I have to report a suicide.’ She’s holding herself up straight in this long, black quilted coat. ‘Mr Weal – he’s shot himself, I’m afraid to say.’

‘Big Weal?’

‘Blew his head off with a shotgun. In his wife’s tomb, this was, poor man. Turned his mind, isn’t it? The grief. Tried to stop him, didn’t I, Mrs Watkins? Tried to talk him out of it.’

The vicar says, in this clear voice, like in the pulpit, ‘No one could have done more, Mrs Prosser.’

‘You all right, vicar?’

‘Yeah, I’m... fine. Apart from a few bruises where... Mr Weal hit me.’

‘I warned her not to approach him,’ said Mrs Prosser. ‘Silly girl.’

‘Yes, I’ve been a very silly girl.’

Judy says, ‘We all were terrified that he might do something stupid. So, as a close neighbour, I was keeping an eye on him. I go there every night, I do, to check he’s all right, and sometimes I finds him beside the tomb, with the top open, just staring at Menna’s remains. Mrs Watkins said she did not think this was healthy and she asked me to take her to see Mr Weal, and we finds the poor man in there, with his wife on show and his twelve-bore in his hands. Mrs Watkins panics, see—’

‘Gomer...?’ the vicar says. ‘Ar?’

‘Are there any police around? I thought there’d be some here.’

‘Over the harchaeologist site, vicar,’ Gomer says warily. ‘Any number o’ the buggers.’

‘Could you take Mrs Prosser. Ask for a senior officer, and tell them Mrs Prosser has a lot of... information.’

‘You can tell them my husband’s on the police committee,’ Judy says. ‘That should expedite matters. But surely you’re coming, too, Mrs Watkins?’

‘I have to take my child back to the vicarage, Mrs Prosser. She’s too young to hear about this kind of thing.’

The vicar hugs young Jane very close for a few seconds.

‘Say goodnight to Gomer, Jane,’ the vicar says.

The kiddie comes over, puts her arms round Gomer’s neck and hugs him real tight, and in his ear in this shocked, trembling whisper, her says,

‘Mum says to tell the police not to let her go. She’s killed twice.’

They followed the path to the old archaeological site. Some thirty yards away, they could see two police cars lined up, a radio crackling from one of them. They could see the low, white tent, the orange tape. The second car was parked on the edge of a small wood full of dead trees, white branches shining like bone. Jane had told her what was probably still lying under the tent.

‘Are you sure?’ the kid kept saying. ‘Are you sure? ’

‘I promised.’

‘But with everything that’s... And look at you... Look at you. You need a doctor.’

‘Dr Coll?’ Merrily started to laugh, and the laughter wouldn’t stop.

‘Stop it!’ Jane screamed. ‘What’s that on your hands?’

Merrily looked down, still laughing.

‘Oh.’

Thock , she heard. Thock .

Seeing the ridiculous dismay on Judith’s face... watching her step back, angrily breaking open the gun, and coming out with that brilliantly dry observation.

‘Wouldn’t you know it, Mrs Watkins? A Radnor man to the core. Never load two cartridges when you may not even need the one.’

The funniest line Merrily had heard in a long time. Possibly, at that moment, the funniest line being spoken in the whole, insane world. When she started to laugh, she was half expecting Judith to come at her with both fists or take a swing at her with the shotgun. But smart Judith, canny Judith... this was not how Judith reacted at all. She simply laid down the empty gun, a few inches away from the half-curled hand out of which she’d snatched it before the fingers could spasm around its barrel.

‘The stupid man.’ Voice flat, eyes flat like aluminium. ‘What did he want to do that for? You saw it, Mrs Watkins, you saw how I tried to stop him.’

As if the previous minutes had never happened – as if editing her life like a videotape. Instinctively compiling the alternative version, with an efficient jump-cut from the second the gun went off. So practical, this Judith.

And Merrily had reacted quickly for once, getting it exactly right.

‘You’d better tell the police what happened then, Mrs Prosser.’

‘It’s my duty, Mrs Watkins. Give me a hand here, will you?’

Both of them then pulling the body away from the door, as though it was a huge dead sheep, so they could squeeze outside.

This was how Merrily had got the blood on her hands.

To the left, she could hear the sound of the Hindwell Brook.

Jane said, ‘She killed Barbara Buckingham, that woman?’

‘Yes.’ Strangled her with her own silk scarf. Beat her up first, probably . ‘Perhaps when Barbara went to see her and challenged her over... certain things. I think Gomer said her husband owned a digger. I suppose one of them would’ve driven her car over to the Elan Valley, with the other following.’

‘Who is she?’

‘She’s Mrs Councillor Prosser, flower – fortified by the local community: the doctor, the lawyer, the councillor... even the priest. Solid as a rock, she was, until someone from Off blew it all open. Someone who hadn’t always been from Off, and realized what she was seeing here.’

And Merrily couldn’t help wondering to herself, then, if anything had ever gone on, way back, between Judith and Barbara – something Barbara had suppressed, erased from her memory as simply as Judith Prosser had erased from her mental tape the murder of Weal and the attempted murder of Merrily.

Over her shoulder was slung her airline bag, bought because it was blue and gold. She’d brought it out of the tomb with her, but there was no blood on it, a small miracle. It contained the Bibles, prayers, altar wine and holy water. So medieval?

They stopped at the bridge, and there was the church across the water, and also reflected in the water. Betty’s birthday cake.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Jane breathed. ‘It’s... son et lumière . Without the son .’

Merrily smiled wildly. Less than an hour ago, she was staring into eternity down the barrels of a twelve-bore. Now she was back in airy-fairyland.

‘Are you sure about this?’ Jane said. Merrily squeezed her arm.

‘Jane... look... I don’t want to have to worry about you, OK? So I’d like you to stay out of the way. I know you’re sixteen and everything...’