Barry made a backwards turning motion with his fingers, and Gomer switched off the engine but left the lights on. Danny had his window down, leaning out, yelling,
‘ Body…’
Barry said, ‘Dead or alive?’
‘Dunno, blood everywhere.’
Barry shouted into the hut.
‘Out now, please. Everybody. Slowly.’
A patch of silence and then one small voice.
‘Gomer?’
Jesus. Lol’s feet threw him forward, stumbling for the doorway, whispering, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Barry grabbed his shoulder, spun him round and away.
‘It’s Jane-’ Lol stumbled round the digger’s caterpillar tracks to Danny’s door, under the open window. ‘Danny, it-’
‘Best for Jane, boy, if we don’t get killed.’
‘If this thing goes down them steps,’ Gomer was saying, ‘and there’s anybody in the way…’
Lol saw Barry emerge on the other side of the digger, staying out of the lights, his back to the inside wall of the hut. A single sharp crack and its rapid echo and the headlight on Gomer’s side had gone out and Barry’s urgent hiss came out of darkness.
‘Geddown! Everybody! Down! ’
Lol slid onto hands and knees between the digger and the remains of one of the doors. Couldn’t just do nothing. He began creeping slowly forward. Ahead of him, a meagre ochre glow like a nursery night light wrapped in dusty muslin. A moment of waxy silence and then a long, torn cry, and that had to be Jane, and Lol was back on his feet, squeezing past the JCB, clambering up the broken wooden door.
Then he stopped. A man about his own height was facing him, knees slightly bent, arms extended like short girders in front of his face.
A spatter of impressions coming at Lol, questions answered almost as soon as they were formed, like, What’s that between his hands? Why are the hands wearing red gloves?
He was halfway along the big wooden door now, and the door was hanging half over the steps, seesawing. Legs apart, battling for balance, he was going up and down, and the man’s extended arms were tracking his movements, and the man’s blank eyes, inside a red mask, found his for an instant, and Barry was screaming at him.
‘Down. Lie the fuck down!’
And then something hit Lol and he did go down and, while he was falling, the arms of the man, his face glistening scarlet, swung round, away from him, and Lol registered Barry’s silhouette in rapid motion and a twitch from the man’s hands, then a small, gas-jet flash and the sound of a single massive handclap.
The shot’s echo died.
Lol turned sideways, his cheek against the wood. He saw Barry’s face twisting back.
Barry sinking to his knees, a red halo misting around his head.
‘ Oh… oh for God’s sake…’
This was Danny Thomas’s voice from inside the JCB, all fractured, as Barry’s heavy body toppled back across the shovel’s blade.
PART SEVEN
GOOD FRIDAY
They did not lose themselves, as did the other sects, in contemplative mysticism; for them the good dwelt in action.
…the perfect soldier of Mithras, non-attached, passionless, disciplined, inured to hardship, sleeping for whole months on the frozen snow and hard earth; ambitious, cruel and ruthless, but possessed of immense personal courage…
Mithras, the Fellow in the Cap
Nothing can be what it was
But through the drifting mist of loss
You hope to find a home.
79
Uncle Ted would say call it off, but then Uncle Ted had been against it from the start, the whole idea of dumping Evensong and replacing it with this swami stuff. Uncle Ted was probably also suspicious of Mother Julian, a woman with a man’s name and torrid crucifixion fantasies, but he’d said nothing about that.
Anyway… it was going on. Although a stand-in had been arranged for today’s early services, Merrily, striving for normality, was up while the early sun was still struggling in twisted ropes of cloud and the village was as silent as an empty film set.
Standing in her dressing gown at the scullery window with Revelations of Divine Love open on the desk and Ethel curled between her feet. Watching a fox slide off home, the way Lol had half an hour ago, while it was still dark, another neurotic damsel-fly episode.
Don’t have long to decide before something makes the decision for you. And that may not be the one you hope for.
Not now, Athena.
The Julian meditation would begin at two, and Jane would be there and Lol, where Merrily could see them. And she would do her best. Better than she had last night in the moonwashed churchyard at Brinsop while, less than a mile away, Jane… her daughter… eighteen… was watching men being killed.
She gripped the window sill until her fingers hurt.
Jane had gone, finally, to her attic about four hours ago, and if Eirion was up there too, instead of in the guest room, that would be no bad thing. When they had finally got home, they’d found him asleep in his car on the square and, for the first time, Jane had wept. Catharsis? Well, it was a start. Even as a child, Jane had never been a weeper.
Merrily watched the fox, a familiar visitor, creeping away between the church wall and the shed.
And no, she wasn’t naive. She wasn’t expecting a warm radiance rising in the nave as they all welcomed Easter after tomorrow night’s vigil – beatific smiles, villagers embracing one another. That was Lark Rise to Candleford. This was Ledwardine, on the border.
Jane had already been offered professional counselling, and Merrily had said, It wouldn’t be a sign of weakness, flower, these people -And Jane, stone-faced, had cut her off. You are kidding, right?
The new jacket Jane had worn for the first time on her day out with Charles Cornel had been put out for the wash and was destined for the Oxfam shop. This was all going to take time, lots of it, but compared with any one of several things that might have happened last night to close your whole life down, time – weeks, months, years – didn’t matter at all.
Mid-morning, Annie Howe came to the vicarage door, alone, her grey trench coat streaked with red mud and wrinkled as if she’d slept in it, although her eyes didn’t look as if she’d slept at all.
‘Some things I need to go over again,’ Annie said. ‘With Jane. I’m sorry about this.’
‘She doesn’t make things up,’ Merrily said irrationally. ‘She just sometimes sees them from… a different place.’
‘I won’t keep her long. This is not official.’
So much that Annie Howe had done and said since yesterday evening that was not official – blindingly, uncharacteristically not official. One day there might be an explanation unconnected with the full moon.
‘Is Frannie Bliss…?’
Merrily waited, kettle in hand. A sunbeam from the highest window was pale and coffin-shaped.
‘The Chief Constable’s on his way over. Have his picture taken going into the hospital, hold a press conference. Two results in one night. Well worth interrupting his holiday weekend for.’
‘So Frannie…?’
‘His voice is very slurred. He’s lost two teeth, his nose is broken and they think there may be brain-stem damage.’
‘Oh God. What’s that mean?’
‘Doesn’t mean he’ll be a cabbage, but functions like balance could be impaired. Speech, eyesight, coordination. It will all improve with time, they say, but Bliss isn’t noted for his patience. He-’ Annie Howe’s smile was swift and crooked. ‘He says that if the Chief shows up at his bedside he’ll strangle the, ah, twat, with the nearest drip tube. Or I may have mis-Oh.’ Annie glanced at the door. Jane had come in.