But Jane did.
She saw Cornel move. Cornel was lying bent like a burst pipe, and it was as if he was laughing. Shaking with laughter. Just another scary exercise, a test for a hard man. What happens is anything you want.
His body jerked once, in spasm, that big chin jutting out like a shelf of rock over a waterfall. Jane felt the pressure of a scream in her throat, but no sound came out. She just stood there, watching from the gallery, watching all the blood belching out of the hole in Cornel’s long neck, filling up the gulley.
Kenny Mostyn was sitting down now, on the concrete bench opposite, wiping his forehead with the back of a hand. Blank-faced as the blood ran past his boots, spreading almost the width of the gulley but never quite reaching the other face on which Cornel’s glassy eyes were focused.
A face without a head or a body. A straight nose, a petulant twist to the mouth and a hat like a caterpillar.
The face sculpted into the shard of concrete that Jane had grabbed from the rubble after Cornel had attacked the altar-piece with his lump hammer. She thought a smile formed for a moment on the face in the concrete, as her scream passed into echo and all she could hear was the thin, wet sound of Cornel dying.
78
The scream had been muffled, choked off, but it was still reaching for Lol like an imploring hand and, for just a moment, he’d thought it was Jane.
It sent him to the Nissen hut. The padlock had been broken, but the big doors were firm. A wall of wood, new oak that would break your shoulder. He turned in desperation to Danny who was alongside him, hands exploring the panels.
‘Bolted, it is, from inside.’
‘What do we do?’
‘All right,’ Barry whispered. ‘Options. We could bang on the door, shout “police, open up now”.’
‘But that’d warn ’em,’ Danny Thomas said. ‘We wanner do that?’
‘It would, yeah.’
‘And when they seen us… if there’s a whole bunch of ’em in there…’
‘True.’ Barry turned to Gomer, pointed across the compound to the biggest shed. ‘That old JCB… you reckon…?’
‘Oh aye.’ Twin moons floating in Gomer’s bottle glasses. ‘Sure to. Less he’s broke.’
‘You can hot-wire it?’
‘Don’t need no hot-wire.’ Gomer had dragged out a jangle of keys on a ring. ‘Digger that age, one size fits all.’
‘Try it. Go with him Danny, eh? If it don’t look promising, get out before you make too much noise and we’ll try something else.’
Barry moved away from the doors and Lol followed him to the original hole in the barbed wire, its ends springing free like brambles. Barry ran an uncertain hand across his jaw.
‘Bit too much like the old days, Laurence. But this is not the old days, it’s not warfare, it’s not terrorism… and I’m not your gaffer. Bearing in mind there could be very serious repercussions, you don’t have to do what I say, none of you.’
Lol threw up his hands. ‘You want me to make decisions? The songwriter? Barry, I don’t give a shit about repercussions. There’s something here makes my blood go cold.’
‘All right. Let’s quickly go over the situation one last time. What’s the worst we know happens that might be happening in there?’
‘They kill a bull.’
‘With?’
‘A knife. In theory.’
‘How many people involved in that?’
‘No idea.’
He looked back at the Nissen hut. Underground, Athena had said, to simulate a cave. Certainly no windows. It was a possibility.
‘If this was Regiment business,’ Barry said, ‘we’d have smoke bombs, masks and automatic bleedin’ hardware from Heckler and Koch.’
‘And one of us might even know what to do with it.’
There was a metallic clang from the JCB, then silence. Barry gazed across the compound, light as a dull day down there.
‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘Look at us, Laurence. Even you’d be too old to qualify for selection.’
From behind the big shed, they heard the slow clatter of an old, cold engine being coaxed back into active service.
‘And as for him…’
The moon lay in the palm of Merrily’s hand, its symbolism fully apparent.
The night before Good Friday was the night of the Last Supper.
This is my body.
Merrily looked down at the tiny full moon. Two of them, in fact, both consecrated. Must’ve fallen off the communion plate last Sunday morning and she’d found them when she’d come in at night for the meditation, slipped them into her back pocket and forgotten about them. One – still intact, she guessed because it had lodged near a seam – must have fallen out of her pocket when she’d sat down on the stone over the well. The other was already in pieces.
She looked towards the church porch, directly across from the well, and recalled the sorrowful shadow over the door on the inside, the weary, defeated Jesus, drained and desiccated, in the act of dying . Fading into the wall and into history. And soon, the way things were going, out of history and into myth and legend sooner than anyone would have imagined, least of all Mother Julian, who in some way had experienced the reality. An anchoress, a solitary, not part of a religious community. They spent their lives in prayer and contemplation, in a particular place which was felt to be blessed by their presence there, the way the atmosphere of an area could be darkened by the shadows of violence.
Merrily held up the intact communion wafer until it covered the moon, so that it looked like the fan of white-gold rays were spraying from the wafer.
Like, when a place gets into disaster mode, expecting the worst all the time, the worst just seems to go on happening. Unless you step in with an act of sacrifice.
Jane. Who’d been known to venerate the moon as Mother Goddess – how seriously Merrily was still unsure, but it was a very different concept from Julian’s Mother God. Who, in an odd way, was more like Syd Spicer’s God, the SAS commander in the field, on first-name terms with his team. Your best mate, none of that sir crap, no salutes. In the same way, back in the days when God was seen as a touchy tyrant with a pile of plagues and thunderbolts at his elbow, Julian had sensed only a source of infinite kindness and patience and politeness, without which, she’d insisted, it would be impossible for this flawed world to exist.
Merrily closed her fingers on the wafer. It felt warm. She had the surreal thought that here, in a place whose sanctity pre-dated both Christianity and Mithraism, there could be some act of fusion between the wafer and the moon.
It was cold now, her trainers crunching on frost as she went back over the stile and across the field to the car, where she took off Annie’s coat and laid it on the back seat. She stashed Syd’s books, Lol’s map and the compass from the glove compartment in her bag, checked her manicure case for nail scissors and went back to the churchyard, and now it was very cold.
In the swivelling seat of the old JCB, Gomer lit up a ciggy and then was still, looking across at Barry like an old toy dog with glass eyes.
Barry took a breath, held it for several seconds. They listened. There was no sound from inside the hut.
‘Remember the steps,’ Lol said.
‘And afterwards, Gomer, leave your lights on full-beam, but don’t get out. Danny, see he don’t get out.’ Barry moved back. ‘OK, off you go.’
Lol clocked Danny’s worried eyes over the beard, gave him a tight nod and slammed the cab door as the big shovel wobbled, the cig came spinning out of the window, the engine noise changed into a minor-key growl.
‘Back off till it’s done,’ Barry told him. ‘There’ll be flying splinters.’
But the hinges were weaker than the doors. The shovel, nearly as wide as the doors, just punched them off the side walls, and they collapsed into the void.
Job done.
Lol crouching, an arm thrown across his face, turned for guidance to Barry, but Barry had already gone. Lol saw him flattened against the wall at the entrance to the Nissen hut as the JCB roared and trembled massively in the entrance, like some wounded charging animal.