Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘This was not when Menna was a child. Good heavens, Merv was never a child-molester. He’d wait till they filled out. Ha! No, there was never anything for Barbara to worry about there. Nothing . She could go on living her rich, soft, English life without a qualm.’

‘Hasn’t she been to see you in the past week or so?’

Judith sniffed. ‘I heard she was around, pestering people – including you, it seems. Evidently she couldn’t face me.’

‘Wasn’t it you who told her about Menna’s stroke?’

‘I sent her a short note. Somebody had to.’

‘But not her husband.’

Mrs Prosser smiled and nodded. ‘Let me also tell you, Mrs Watkins, that Jeffery Weal was the best thing that could have happened to Menna. If you knew her – which Barbara, lest we forget, never really did – Menna was a wispy, flimsy little thing. Insubstantial, see, like a ghost. She—Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily swallowed. ‘I’m fine. Why was Mr Weal so good for her?’

‘If you knew her, you would know she would always need someone to direct her life. And while he was not the most demonstrative of men, he adored her. Kept her like a jewel.’

In a padded box, Merrily thought, in a private vault.

‘Anyway,’ Judith said, ‘I do hope the Diocese of Hereford is not going to interfere with Father Ellis. He suits this area very well. He meets our needs.’

‘Really? How many other people has he exorcized?’

Judith Prosser sighed in exasperation. ‘As far as local people are concerned, he’s giving back the church the authority it used to have. Time was when we had a village policeman and troublesome youngsters would get a clip around the ear. Now they have to go up before people like my husband, Councillor Prosser, and receive some paltry sentence – a conditional discharge, or a period of community service if they’re very bad. Time was when sinners would be dealt with by the Church, isn’t it? They weren’t so ready to reoffend then .’

‘The way Father Ellis deals with them?’

Judith smiled thinly. ‘The way God deals with them, he would say, isn’t it? Excuse me, I must go back and minister to Mrs Starkey.’

Halfway down the steps, Merrily encountered Gomer coming up. There were now a lot of things she needed to ask him. But, behind his glasses, Gomer’s eyes were luridly alive.

‘It’s on, vicar.’

‘The march?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Tonight. No stoppin’ the bugger now. Somebody been over to St Michael’s, and they reckons Thorogood’s back. En’t on his own, neither.’

Merrily felt dejected. All she wanted was to get home, do some hard thinking, ring the bishop to discuss the issue of internal ministry . She didn’t want to even have to look at Nicholas Ellis again tonight.

‘Bunch o’ cars and vans been arrivin’ at St Michael’s since ’bout half an hour ago. One of ’em had, like, a big badge on the back, ’cordin’ to Eleri Cobbold. Like a star in a circle?’

‘Pentagram,’ Merrily said dully.

‘Ar,’ said Gomer, ‘they figured it wasn’t the bloody RAC.’

‘How’s Ellis reacted?’

‘Oh, dead serious. Heavy, grim – for the cameras. Man called upon to do God’s holy work, kind o’ thing.’

‘Yeah, I can imagine. But underneath...’

‘Underneath – pardon me, vicar – like a dog with two dicks.’

‘I don’t need this,’ Merrily said.

BETTY LEFT MRS Pottinger’s lodge in weak sunshine, wanting nothing more than to collapse in front of that cranky farmhouse stove and pour it all out to Robin.

Except that Robin would go insane.

She called for a quick salad at a supermarket cafe on the outskirts of Leominster. By the time she reached the Welsh border, it was approaching an early dusk and raining and, in her mind, she was back in the shop with Mrs Cobbold and the slender man with the pointed beard.

Oh, good morning, Doctor.

A sharp day, Eleri.

Dr Coll.

She needed to tell somebody about Dr Coll and the Hindwell Trust. She wished it could be Robin. Wished she could trust him not to go shooting his mouth off and have them facing legal action on top of everything else.

The Hindwell Trust, Juliet Pottinger had explained, was a local charity originally started to assist local youngsters from hard-pressed farming families to go on to higher education. To become – for instance – doctors and lawyers, so that they might return and serve the local community.

A local people’s charity.

Juliet Pottinger had come to Old Hindwell because of her husband’s job. Stanley had been much older, an archaeologist with the Clwyd-Powys Trust, who had continued to work part-time after his official retirement. He was, in fact, one of the first people to suspect that the Radnor Basin had a prehistory as significant as anywhere in Wales. His part-time job became a full-time obsession. He was overworking. He collapsed.

‘Dr Collard Banks-Morgan was like a small, bearded, ministering angel,’ Mrs Pottinger had said wryly. ‘Whisked poor Stanley into the cottage hospital. Those were the days when anyone could occupy a bed for virtually as long as they wished. Stanley practically had to discharge himself in the end, to get back to his beloved excavation.’

And while Stanley was trowelling away at his favoured site, a round barrow at Harpton, Dr Coll paid Mrs P. a discreet visit. He informed her, in absolute confidence, that he was more than a little worried about Stanley’s heart; that Stanley, not to dress up the situation, had just had a very lucky escape, and he could one day very easily push the enfeebled organ... just a little too far.

‘Oh, don’t tell him that. Good heavens, don’t have him carrying it around like an unexploded bomb!’ said Dr Coll jovially. ‘I shall keep tabs on him, myself.’ Chuckling, he added, ‘I believe I’m developing a latent interest in prehistory!’

Dr Coll had been discretion itself, popping in for a regular chat – perhaps to ask Stanley the possible significance of some mound he could see from his surgery window or bring him photocopies of articles on Victorian excavations from the Radnorshire Transactions . And all the time, as he told Juliet with a wink, he was observing Stanley’s colour, his breathing, his general demeanour. Keeping tabs .

She thought the man’s style was wonderful: perfect preventative medicine. How different from the city, where a GP could barely spare one the time of day.

And Betty was rehearing Lizzie Wilshire: Dr Coll’s been marvellous... such a caring, caring man.

Juliet Pottinger had said as much, without spelling anything out, to their most solicitous solicitor, Mr Weal, who was handling their purchase of a small strip of land – ‘for a quite ludicrous amount’ – from the Prosser brothers. How could she possibly repay Dr Coll’s kindness?

Oh, well, said Mr Weal, when pressed, there was a certain local charity, to which Dr Coll was particularly attached. Oh, nothing now , he wouldn’t want that, he’d be most embarrassed. But something to bear in mind for the future perhaps? And please don’t tell Dr Coll that he’d mentioned this – he would hate to alienate a client.

It was two years later, while they were on holiday in Scotland – a particularly hot summer – that Stanley, exhibiting symptoms of what might be sunstroke or something worse, was whisked off by his anxious wife to a local hospital. Where two doctors were unable to detect a heart problem of any kind.

‘Stanley died three and a half years ago of what, in the days before everything had to be explained, would have been simply termed old age,’ said Mrs Pottinger.