Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘It’ll be fun.’

‘Be fun for you , watching at home.’

‘Er... yeah,’ Jane said airily.

That night, after a wedding rehearsal at the church for a couple whose chief bridesmaid would be their own granddaughter, Merrily phoned Eileen Cullen from the scullery.

‘I just got the feeling you might have heard from Barbara Buckingham again.’

‘And why would you be thinking that, Reverend?’ Cullen sounded more than usually impatient, as if she was carrying an overflowing bedpan in her other hand.

‘She’s keen to find out why Menna died.’

‘High blood pressure.’

‘Well, yes, sure. But why did she have high blood pressure at her age?’

‘I told you why, and I haven’t changed my mind. I reckon she’d been on the Pill for longer than she ought to’ve been. Years longer, that’s my guess. Prolonged ingestion of synthetic oestrogen. Bad news – but then you’d know all that.’

‘Eileen, I live the life of a nun. I’ve forgotten all that.’

‘Well, it’s not your problem, and it’s not mine either and it’s not poor Menna’s any longer.’ A pause, then she came back a little softer. ‘Listen, if you’ve got the Buckingham woman on your back in a big way, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I sent her over, so I am.’

‘You must have felt at the time that she had a valid problem.’

‘Just wanted her out of me hair. You know what I’m like.’

‘Mmm, that’s why I don’t think you’re being entirely upfront.’

‘Jesus Christ, I’m always upfront. Nobody in this fockin’ job’s got time to go round the side any more.’

‘Did you by any chance tell her about Weal and that business with the water?’

‘You mean so they could have a big row and disturb all my patients? Are you kidding? Did you tell her?’

‘No.’

‘Well, good.’

‘Confidentially—’

‘Merrily, when the hell do we ever talk any other way?’

‘Barbara’s getting troubled dreams.’

‘Troubled, how?’

‘Says she sees Menna.’

A pause. ‘Does she?’

‘Night after night.’

‘Stress,’ Cullen said. ‘Look, I’ve got to—’

‘Well, you would say that. No ghosts, no God. You think my whole life’s a sorry sham.’

‘Aye, but you’re a well-meaning wee creature. Listen, I really do have to go.’

‘So you haven’t seen her then?’

‘Of course I haven’t fockin’ seen her!’ Cullen snapped. ‘What the hell d’you think I am?’

Merrily’s head spun. She stared at the circle of light thrown on the Holy Bible. The rosebush chattered at the dark window.

‘I meant Barbara,’ Merrily said.

‘I have to go.’ Cullen hung up.

SHE FIRST BECAME aware of him in the green room.

Her initial thought was that he must be a priest, because he was wearing a suit, though not a dog collar – well, how many did these days, outside working hours? And then, because he was so smooth and assured, and – perhaps, she thought afterwards, because his shirt was wine-coloured – she even wondered if he might be a bishop.

He brought her a coffee. ‘This stuff could be worse,’ he said. ‘BBC coffee is much worse.’

‘You do this kind of thing fairly often then?’ she said. God, that wasn’t quite, ‘Do you come here often?’ but it was dangerously close.

‘When I must,’ he said. ‘Edward Bain, by the way.’

‘Merrily Watkins.’

‘I know,’ he said.

He was, of course, attractive: lean, pale features and dark curly hair with a twist of grey over the ears. He’d made straight for Merrily across the green room – it sounded like some notoriously haunted, country house bedchamber, but was simply the area where all the participants gathered before the show. It was long and narrow and starting to look like a pantomime dressing room because of some of the costumes: Dark Age chic meeting retro-punk in a tangle of braids and bracelets.

The producer and his team mingled with the main guests and the support acts, observing and listening, picking out the potential stars-for-an-hour. Meanwhile the guests drank tea and coffee and spring water – no alcohol – and nibbled things on sticks, talking a lot, losing inhibitions, unblocking their adrenal glands, developing that party mentality. As if most of them hadn’t brought it with them.

‘Lord,’ Edward Bain murmured, ‘do they really want to be taken seriously?’ He looked at Merrily with a faint, pained smile.

The smile chilled her. It was Sean’s smile – her dead husband’s. Boyish, disarming. Sean’s smile when accused. She turned sharply away, as though distracted by an argument in progress between a tight-faced security officer and a ginger-bearded man wearing a short, white cloak over a red tunic with a belt. Into the belt was stuck a knife with a black handle.

‘It’s my fucking athame , man. It’s a religious tool. You wouldn’t ask a fucking bishop to hand over his fucking crozier!’

Edward Bain’s smile became a wince, wiping away the similarity to Sean. If it had ever really been there. Merrily swallowed.

The security man turned to Tania Beauman for support. Tania wrinkled her nose. ‘Oh, leave it, Grant. I suspect it looks more dangerous than it actually is.’

‘Tania, it’s a knife. If we start allowing weapons in the studio, we may as well—’

‘It’s a f—’ The ginger guy blew out his cheeks in frustration, turned to Tania. ‘This doorman is really hacking me off, you know? This is religious persecution.’

‘Sure.’ Tania was a short, capable bottle-blonde of about forty. ‘If we just agree that it’s purely ornamental – yeah, sorry, religious – and that you won’t be taking it out of—’

‘Of course I won’t be fucking taking it out!’

‘And if you use that word on camera before midnight, you realize you’ll be excluded from the debate, yeah?’

The ginger man subsided in a surly kind of way, a semi-chastened schoolboy.

‘That’s his card marked,’ Edward Bain told Merrily. ‘He’ll be used purely for decoration, now. Won’t get asked a single question unless it starts to slow up and they’re really desperate for confrontation.’

‘I don’t see that happening, somehow,’ Merrily said, ‘do you?’

‘The boy’s an idiot, anyway. If the athame is to have any potency at all it should hardly be displayed like some sort of cycling club badge.’

He smiled down at Merrily – instant Sean once more – and glided away, leaving her feeling clammy. And she thought, Oh my God. He’s one of them.

‘Ooooooooh.’ Tania went into a sinuous shudder. ‘Magnetic – and more.’

Over by the door, Edward Bain was into an intense conversation with a woman in a long, loose, classical kind of dress, like someone from rent-a-Muse. Merrily saw now that one of Bain’s middle fingers wore a silver ring with a moonstone. She saw him and the woman clasp hands lightly and smile, and she imagined tiny blue electric stars crackling between their fingers. She wondered if they’d even met before tonight.

‘Who is he?’ Merrily muttered. ‘I mean, what is he?’

‘Don’t you vicars ever read the News of the World ?’

‘Only if we’re really desperate for a sermon.’