Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

And when he heard, from above, this sickening, crumbling, creaking, cracking sound, he realized he was screaming too as he hurled himself towards Betty, threw his arms around her and bore her to the ground, covering her with his body and closing his eyes as the first stone came out of the sky.

He didn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel anything. But he could hear other people’s screams and, above them all, Ellis’s bellow.

‘And there was war in heaven!’

Robin just lay across his goddess on the sleeping bag, unmoving as the black sky tumbled.

He opened his eyes just once, to watch the crown of lights rolling away like a cheap Catherine wheel, the birthday candles going out one by one.

There were many other lights, too, but he closed his eyes on them; many other sounds, but he didn’t listen to them. He heard only the heart of his goddess, and his own voice whispering the words which moved him beyond all others.

In the fullness of time we shall be born again, at the same time and in the same place as each other, and we shall meet and know and remember... and love again...

HE WAS A tall, stooping man with a mournful, half-moon kind of face, a heavy grey moustache. He was the recently appointed head of Dyfed-Powys CID, a mere caretaker role, he said, before retirement. His name was Gwyn Arthur Jones, detective superintendent. Gomer Parry knew him from way back, which saved them some time.

But it was still close to three a.m. before they left the incident room – Dr Coll’s waiting room – for the comparative privacy of Dr Coll’s surgery. The door was closed, and a metal Anglepoise burned on a desk swept clean of all papers.

Formal statements had been taken and signed. Jane was asleep on Dr Coll’s couch. Sophie had taken Eirion back to Hereford and his stepmother’s car.

Detective Superintendent Gwyn Arthur Jones had brought out his pipe and discovered a bottle of single malt in Dr Coll’s filing cabinet.

‘Kept naggin’ at me, see,’ Gomer said, ‘that piece o’ ground. Amateur job, stood out a mile. Why would bloody Gareth dig it up again and put it back, ’less he was lookin’ for treasure, and Gareth wouldn’t know treasure ’less it come in a bloody brass-bound chest with “Treasure” wrote on it.’

‘And Mrs Prosser?’ The superintendent’s accent was West Wales, quite soft, a first-language Welsh-speaker’s voice. ‘Did no one ever nurture uncharitable suspicions about her?’

‘Judy?’ Gomer shook his head as though he would go on shaking it for ever. ‘Not me. Least nothin’ I could get a ring-spanner to. But her kept croppin’ up, ennit? I kept sayin’ to the vicar, didn’t I, vicar, you wanner talk to Judy... Judy’s smart... Judy knows . Bloody hell, Gwyn, I never guessed Judy knowed it all.’

‘And still holding out on us.’ Gwyn Arthur sipped Dr Coll’s whisky. Merrily had noticed that when he’d taken the bottle from the drawer he’d replaced it with a twenty-pound note. ‘I don’t somehow think she will ever do otherwise. “Mrs Councillor Prosser, wife of a former chairman of the police committee” – time and time again, like name, rank and number.’

‘Local credentials,’ Gomer said. ‘Means everythin’ here.’

‘And Dr Collard Banks-Morgan, former acting police surgeon – the allegations about him , he tells us, are quite risible. As we would have been further assured by Mr Weal, had the poor man not taken his own life. I suspect people cleverer than me will have to spend many days among Mr Weal’s files.’

Gwyn Arthur poured further measures of whisky into those little plastic measuring vessels you got with your medicine.

‘All in all,’ he said, ‘never, in my experience, have so many eminently respectable, conspicuously guilty people lied so consistently through their teeth. I’m awfully afraid, Mrs Watkins, that you are destined for a considerable period in the witness box.’

‘What will you do with Ellis?’ Merrily asked.

‘We’ll hold him until the morning, then we shall have to think in terms of charges, and I’m very much afraid that my imagination, at present, will not stretch a great deal further than wilful damage – if that – regardless of the tragic consequences. He didn’t even have to break into the tower. Just bolted himself in from the inside. What happened later was, he insists, an unfortunate accident. He hasn’t even described it as the will of God. The tower parapet, as the late Major Wilshire discovered to his ultimate cost, was horribly unstable. He did not mean for all those stones to fall.’

‘What about the TV pictures?’

‘Almost gratuitously graphic when it comes to portraying the results. But the lights on the cameras were insufficiently powerful to reach the top of the tower – or to illuminate Ellis’s movements in the moments before the stones were dislodged. I would give anything for it to be otherwise, but there we are.’

Merrily lit a cigarette with fingers which still would not stay steady. ‘I’m not giving up on that bastard. Expect me at the station later today, with a Mrs Starkey, if I’ve got to drag her. But I don’t think it’ll come to that. Not now.’

‘Yes, indecent assault is a better beginning.’ Gwyn Arthur Jones drained his medicine measure and went to stand at the window. The only vehicles left on view in the village were the police cars and vans, Merrily’s Volvo, Gomer’s Land Rover and Nev’s truck with the digger on the back. Gwyn Arthur came back and sat down and contemplated Merrily. ‘And what else? What else, in your wildest imaginings, Merrily, would you think Ellis might have done?’

She took a tiny sip of Scotch. ‘Well... have you got anybody yet for the village hall?’

‘Interesting,’ Gwyn Arthur said, ‘but no we haven’t. The travellers we brought in were most indignant.’

‘I mean, it was all getting a bit tame, wasn’t it? A few hymns, a little placard-waving. He’d had his chance to convince three hundred fundamentalist Christians that Satan was in residence in Old Hindwell, and he hadn’t really pulled it off, had he?’

‘You think he planned to inflame these people, as it were, with the thought that the pagans wanted to burn them alive? Maybe to drive them to excesses?’

‘Knowing full well he’d have been able to lead them to safety out of the rear entrance, even if Gomer hadn’t turned up and received the credit? I think that’s very much on the cards.’

‘Hmm,’ said the superintendent. ‘Certainly, emotions among those decent, church-going Christians were running at a level possibly unparalleled since the days of the witch-hunts. There’s no question in my mind that it could have become extremely nasty... if, ironically enough, those stones had not fallen when – and where – they did.’

‘You could always check out his robe for petrol traces or something.’

‘No one as yet, has been able to find his robe,’ said Gwyn Arthur Jones regretfully. ‘He doesn’t remember where he left it. Unlike Mrs Prosser, he’s being entirely cooperative. He tells us he chose to go alone to the church, one man against a horde of heathens, precisely because he did not want his legitimate Christian protest against the desecration of the house of God to become a bloodbath. Several witnesses confirm that he tried to stop them.’

Merrily closed her eyes. ‘He doesn’t like churches. Churches are disposable. Instead, he set up in this village hall because it was close to Old Hindwell Church... the battleground. He claimed he’d been getting anonymous letters, phone calls... signs on the Internet.’ She sighed. ‘Do you know the Book of Revelation at all? The paintings of William Blake?’