Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘Take a hypothetical case. Person on Trinitrin for angina becomes converted to herbal remedies. Says I’m going to stop filling myself up with these nasty drugs. Then she feels an attack coming on, so what does she do?’

‘Reaches for the Trinitrin. Says I’ll stop fillin’ meself up with these awful drugs tomorrow .’

‘All right.’ No time for the subtle approach. ‘Hypothetically, if, in circumstances like this, a doctor saw an opportunity to do away with a patient in a way which might throw blame on someone else, say for instance the herbalist... how would he go about it?’

‘Jesus, Merrily, what is this?’

‘It’s, er... a question. Just a question.’

‘Well here’s your answer – a hundred ways. Could casually swap her Trinitrins for blanks, for starters. Who’s gonna know? It’s easy for a doctor. Always has been.’

Robin had been gazing from his studio window when he saw her walking, like some grounded angel, across the yard, and he’d gone running wildly through the farmhouse, like some big, stupid kid, knocking a bowl of cornflakes out of the hands of a mousy, pregnant witch from Gloucester, called Alice.

Now he held Betty’s hand, and he was breathing evenly for the first time in many hours. They shared this big cushion they used to have in their previous apartment. Only now it was on the floor of the parlour, the room with the inglenook which was now the house temple.

They’d been left alone in here, just Robin and Betty and the altar and the crown of lights.

The kindly, mature witch, Alexandra, Betty’s one-time tutor, had made it. Alexandra was a twig-weaver, or whatever you call it, and this was a tight wreath of hedgerow strands, like a crown of thorns without the thorns. Across the top of the wreath was shaped a kind of skullcap made out of one of those foil trays you got around your supermarket quiche. The candles which ringed its perimeter were the kind you had on birthday cakes, though not coloured.

‘A Blue Peter job,’ Betty had said with a wistful smile, referring to some TV show she used to watch as a kid, where you were taught how to make useful artefacts from household debris. Foil trays apparently featured big.

‘I love you,’ Robin said. ‘I want you to wear it tonight.’

Outside on a calm night, with all the candles lit around the head of a beautiful woman, the crown of lights looked awesome.

‘It’s the mother wears the lights,’ Betty said.

‘This is special.’

‘What would Ned say?’

‘He’ll be cool.’

Everything was cool, coming together, happening just like he’d known it would. He hadn’t asked where she’d spent last night. That didn’t matter. She sometimes needed time to think things out. He recalled how one moonlit night she’d gone out walking from Shrewsbury into the countryside, hadn’t returned until dawn, had covered maybe twenty miles and hadn’t noticed the time go by. He’d been frantic, but she was her own person. She was his priestess. He would trust her for ever, through life after life after life.

‘Ned’s even gonna fix things with Kirk Blackmore, I tell you about that?’

‘Yes,’ Betty said, ‘I’m sure he will.’

‘Bets, things are really turning around. It’s Imbolc. I can feel the light coming through.’

‘Yes,’ Betty said.

Down the hill, into the forestry land, until she came to the point where there were farm buildings either side of the road and a Land Rover with a ‘Christ is the Light’ sticker. Oh, he had his uses, did Jesus Christ: the very name served as a disinfectant.

Merrily turned in to a rutted track between two stone and timbered barns, and there was the farmhouse, grey brown, black windows. No garden, just a yard of dirt and brown gravel, where she parked the Volvo. There was a glazed front porch, its door hanging ajar. She saw the interior door swing open before she was even into the porch, and Judith Prosser standing there, cool and rangy in her orange rugby shirt.

‘You’re late, Mrs Watkins. Had you down for an early riser, I did.’

The banter was wrapped around Judith’s need always to be ahead of the situation. This visit must, on no account, be seen as a surprise.

‘Late night, Mrs Prosser.’

‘I’ve coffee on.’

‘That would be good... Erm, I felt there were things left in the air from last night.’

‘No bad thing, sometimes,’ Judith replied swiftly. ‘Left in the air, they have a chance to blow away.’

‘But sometimes they stick around and the air goes sour, and that’s not a good thing in my experience.’

‘Oh, your experience.’ Holding open the door for Merrily. ‘Profound today, is it, Mrs Watkins?’

‘You have a problem with profound?’ Merrily blinked. It was dark inside and the hulking furniture made it darker.

‘Life’s too short to tolerate problems.’

‘Life’s too short for cover-ups, Mrs Prosser,’ Merrily said.

Judith turned to face her. They were standing in a square hall dominated by a huge, over-ornate chair with a nameplate on the back. It looked like the seat of a council chairman or a presiding magistrate. Judith leaned an elbow on one of its carved shoulders.

‘As I said last night, it would be stupid for you to react to silly rumours.’

‘Here’s the situation,’ Merrily said. ‘I was there, I saw the whole thing: the cross, the petroleum jelly. Also Dr Coll standing in the doorway – and didn’t that explain why a bunch of local matrons were able to sit there and watch Ellis violate a woman with a metal cross? Because there was a doctor present. This, of course, makes everything all right, above board, entirely respectable, clinically proven.’

Judith Prosser flicked a speck of dust or ash from the point of the chairman’s chair.

‘I’m not sure how far from being a police matter this is,’ Merrily continued, ‘but we’re very close to finding out.’

JANE TYPED IN the word ‘charismatic’. The usual, mainly irrelevant list appeared. She grabbed the mouse, dithered over ‘Charismatic Q and A’.

‘Try it,’ Eirion suggested. ‘Might lead somewhere better.’ On the screen: ‘The Charismatic Movement: what in the name of God is it all about?’

‘Click,’ Eirion said.

The Charismatic Movement (from the Greek charismata, meaning ‘spiritual gifts’) developed in the 1950s and ’60s from the Pentecostal movement, crossing over the denominations, embracing the sphere of angelology and the gifts of healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues and power-prayer. It reached a new peak worldwide in the 1990s...

There was a list of options. Jane clicked on ‘Yes, I want to talk to God.’

They needed all the help they could get.

Sophie had said she shouldn’t be allowing this, before shutting them in the Deliverance office with the computer.

And she wanted copies of anything they found.

Jane had said, ‘This is awfully good of you... Mrs Hill.’

Collecting a contemptuous frown and, ‘Jane, you are not among the people with whose patronage I can cope. Try “evangelism”.’

On the way here, Jane had told Eirion virtually everything she’d learned so far – about Terry Penney, about pentagrams... The poor little Chapel boy had seemed unnerved, regaining his cool only when he saw the computer. Smiling his famous smile at Sophie, who wore a checked woollen skirt with a grey twinset and pearls – Sophie, who might one day be the last person in the entire universe still wearing a twinset and pearls.

Jane clicked again, losing enthusiasm for talking to God. When it was working fast and well, the Internet could give you the illusion of being God – you could imagine Him operating like this, constructing human situations with a click of the mouse, running programs, consigning icons to the dumpbin.