A Crown of Lights (15 page)

‘OK.’ Tania nodded briskly. ‘Well, we get the programme peg out of the way first, right? The couple who want their kid to be allowed to do his pagan prayers and whatnot at school.’ She nodded towards a solemn, bearded man in a home-made-looking sweater. His partner had a waist-length plait. They might have been Muslims. They might even have been Christians.

Merrily said, ‘Am I right in thinking you’re not going to be spending very long on them?’

‘Dead right. Boring, boring, boring. Actually, the headmaster of the school’s going to be better value. Born-again Christian. Actually talks like Sir Cliff, like he’s got a boiled sweet in his cheek. OK, over there... Patrick Ryan – long hair, velvet jacket – Cambridge professor who’s done a study of pagan practices. And shagged half the priestesses in the Home Counties by all accounts, but I doubt he’ll be discussing
that
. If Ryan’s too heavy, the little guy with the shaven head’s Tim Fagan, ex-hack from the
Sun
, was sent out to do an exposé on some sexy coven and wound up joining them. Now edits a popular witchy magazine called – ha ha –
The Moon
.’

Edward Bain excepted, they all looked fairly innocuous.

‘What about the other side?’

‘Right. Well, we’ve got a really angry mother who claims paganism turned her daughter into a basket case. She is
very
strong. The kid got drawn into white witchcraft and ended up peeing in churches. Which leads neatly into you, I think.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Mmm.’ Tania had revealed on the phone that she had seen news cuttings on last year’s Herefordshire desecration case, involving the sacrifice of a crow in a country church. Not entirely appropriate, in Merrily’s view.

‘I mean, I can’t say that was your orthodox paganism – if there is such a thing, which I doubt. It was a peculiar kind of black magic. It was a one-off.’

Tania Beauman shrugged.

‘By “the other side”,’ Merrily said, ‘I actually meant
us
, the Church. You said I wouldn’t be on my own here.’ How pathetic did
that
sound?

Tania looked mildly concerned. ‘I didn’t say that, did I? I’m sure I didn’t say that.’

‘You did, Tania.’

‘Oh, well, what happened, the other bloke let us down. I think his wife had a miscarriage or something.’ She was blatantly improvising. ‘But if you’re looking for back-up, the headmaster’s brought along a few members of his church. See the guy in the white—’

‘Which church would that be?’

‘Well, Christian, obviously, but I suppose you’d probably call it more of a cult.’

‘Wonderful.’

‘They’ll be doing some heavy apocalyptic stuff about the Antichrist walking the earth disguised as... Hang on – looks like Steve wants to do his pep talk.’

A bald man of about thirty, in white jeans and a crumpled paisley shirt, strode into the centre of the green room, lifted up his arms for silence, and went – Merrily guessed – into autopilot.

‘OK, listen up, everybody, my name’s Steve Ewing. I’m the editor of
Livenight
. I’d like to welcome you all to the programme and point out that we’ll be on the air in about fifty minutes. You’ve all seen the show – if not, then that’s your problem for sticking with boring old Paxman or the dirty movie on Channel 5. OK, now what I mainly want to stress to you is that
Livenight
is like life – you don’t get a second chance.’

A woman cackled. ‘All
you
know, mate.’

‘Yeah, very good.’ Steve Ewing smiled thinly. ‘What I’m trying to get over here is that we don’t hang around and neither should you. If you have something to say, don’t hold back, because it’ll be too late and we’ll have moved on to another aspect of the debate, and you’ll be kicking yourself all the way home because you missed your chance of getting your argument across on the programme.’

Merrily looked around for any exit sign. Wasn’t too late to get the hell out of here.

‘What I’m looking for,’ said Steve, ‘is straight talking and – above all – quick, snappy responses. There’s a lot of choice material to get across, and we want to help you do that. So it’s straight to the point, no pussyfooting, and if it’s going to take longer than about thirty seconds, save it for your PhD thesis. John Fallon’s the ringmaster. You won’t meet him until you go in, but you’ve all seen John, he’s a smart guy, a pro, and his bullshit threshold is zero. Any questions?’

There was some shuffling but no direct response.

‘Why don’t we get to meet Fallon before the programme?’ Merrily whispered.

Tania Beauman hardly moved her lips. ‘You’d know more about this than me, but I don’t imagine they’d normally introduce the Christians to the lion.’

They called this the gallery. It was a narrow room with a bank of TV monitors, through which the director and the sound and vision mixers could view the studio floor from different angles. Once the show was on the air, the director would be in audio contact with the producer and the presenter, John Fallon, down in the bear pit. They actually called it that. In fact, Jane had found it a little disappointing at first. It was much smaller than it looked on the box – like a little theatre-in-the-round, with about six rows of banked-up seating.

‘Does the whole audience have some angle on the debate?’ she asked a white-haired bloke called Gerry, an ex-
Daily Star
reporter who was the senior member of Tania Beauman’s research team.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a decent enough budget now, but it’s not
that
big. The audience are just ordinary punters bussed in – tonight’s bunch is from a paint factory in Walsall: packers, cleaners, management – a cross section of society.’

Gerry glanced at Eirion, who looked awfully young and innocent – and not happy. He had no stomach for subterfuge, Jane was realizing. He’d been appalled to discover that her mum, down there, did not know they were up here. Or, indeed, within sixty miles of
Livenight
.

Even in Eirion’s car, with the patched-up silencer, it hadn’t taken long to get here. The Warehouse studio complex had been quite easy to find, on the edge of a new business park, under a mile from the M5 and ten miles out of the central Birmingham traffic hell.

It was not until they’d actually left the motorway that Jane had revealed to Eirion the faintly illicit nature of this operation. ‘Irene, I’m doing this for
you
. This could be your future. This is like cutting-edge telly. It’s an
in
, OK. You might even get a holiday job.’

Eirion had looked appalled, like a taxi driver who’d just discovered he was providing the wheels in a wages snatch. He’d thought they were only driving up separately because Jane’s mum might have to stay the night. He did not know how Jane came to have Tania Beauman in her pocket, and would probably not be finding out. Neither would Mum; the plan was, they’d clear off about two minutes before the programme ended, go bombing back down the motorway, and Jane would be up in her apartment with the lights out by the time Mum got home.

Tania Beauman had turned out to be actually OK. She’d told both Gerry and the grizzled director, Maurice, that Jane was her cousin, doing a media studies college course. Which could well be true, one day.

‘How old is she?’ Maurice had enquired suspiciously.

‘Nineteen next month,’ Jane said crisply. Eirion looked queasy.

‘Stone me,’ Gerry muttered. ‘When the nineteen-year-olds start looking fourteen, you know you’re getting too old for it.’

Maurice took off his cans. ‘See, the problem with this particular programme is that we’re not
Songs of Praise
and this is not the God Slot. What we do
not
want is a religious debate. We don’t want the history of Druidism, we want to know what they get up to in their stone circles when the film crew’s gone home. We don’t want to hear about the people the witches’ve healed, we want to know about the ones they’ve cursed and the virgins they’ve deflowered on their altars. This is late-night TV. Our job – to put it crudely – is to send you off to bed with a hard-on.’

‘I’ll be interested to see how the little priest handles it,’ Gerry said thoughtfully. ‘She’s got enough of her own demons.’

Jane stared at him.

‘Marital problems,’ Gerry said. ‘Husband playing away... though what the hell possessed him, with that at home.’

‘You never know what goes on behind bedroom doors.’ Maurice shook his head, smiling sadly. ‘You turned all that up, did you, Gerald?’

‘And then, when it’s all looking a bit messy...
Bang!
The husband goes and gets killed in the car, with his girlfriend. Merrily wakes up a widow... and soon after that she’s become a priest. Interesting, do I detect guilt in there somewhere, or do I just have a suspicious—’

‘Christ!’ Jane snarled. ‘She didn’t become a bloody nun! She—’ She felt Eirion’s hand on her arm and shook it off and bit her lip.

Gerry grinned. ‘My, my. Women do stick together, don’t they?’

‘Lay off, Gerald.’ Maurice slipped on his headphones, flipped a switch on his console. ‘You there, Martin? Speak to me, son.’

‘So.’ Gerry leaned against the edge of the mixing desk. ‘There you are, Jane. Now you know how easy it is to get people going.
You just watch the monitors. Within about seven minutes, everybody’s forgotten there are cameras.’ He pencilled a note on a copy of the programme’s running order; Jane made out the word
Merrily
. ‘Be a lot of heat, tonight, I think. When it gets going, it’s very possible one of those weirdos is gonna try some spooky stuff.’

Eirion stiffened. ‘Spooky stuff?’

‘I dunno, son. A spell or something, I suppose. Something to prove they can make things happen. I dunno, basically – it’s all cobblers, anyway.’

Jane looked at Eirion. She was still shaking. They had a little file on Mum; if the show lost momentum, shafting her became an option.

B
ETTY
’
S DAY CLEARLY
hadn’t been too great either. You could tell not so much from her face as from her manner: no bustle.

‘You don’t tell me yours, and I won’t tell you mine.’ Robin didn’t even lift his head from the kitchen table where he’d fallen into a sleep of dismay and frustration. ‘We’ll call it a shit amnesty.’

Ten-fifteen on this cold, misty, moonless night. Betty had been out since mid-afternoon. She’d been to see the widow Wilshire in New Radnor again, taking with her an arthritis potion involving ‘burdock and honeysuckle, garlic and nettle and a little healing magic’. Betty was good with healing plants; after pissing off her parents by walking out of teacher training, she’d worked at a herb garden and studied with a herbalist at nights for two and a half years. She’d gone to a whole lot of trouble with this potion, driving over to a place the other side of Hereford yesterday to pick up the ingredients.

‘How is she now?’

‘Oh... more comfortable. And happier, I think.’

Around six she’d phoned him to say she was hanging on there a while. Seemed Mrs Wilshire’s home help had not made it this week and she was distressed about the state of her house and her inability to clean it up. So Betty would clean up, sure she would. Wherever she went, Betty added to her collection of aunts.

‘OK,’ Robin said, ‘if she’s so much better, I give up. Where’s the bad stuff come in?’

‘It isn’t necessarily bad – just odd.’ Betty took off her coat, hung it behind the back door, went to get warm by the stuttering Rayburn. ‘So you first. It’s Ellis, isn’t it?’

‘No, haven’t heard a word from Ellis. This is Blackmore. He faxed. He doesn’t like the artwork.’

‘Oh.’ Betty pushed her hands through her hair, letting it tumble. ‘I did say it was a mistake, dealing with him directly. You should have carried on communicating through the publishers. If he can get hold of you any time he wants, he’ll just keep on quibbling.’

‘It was what he wanted. And
he
is Kirk Blackmore. And, frankly, quibbling doesn’t quite reach it.’

‘Not something you can alter easily?’

Robin laughed bleakly. ‘What the asshole doesn’t like is... everything. He doesn’t like my concept of Lord Madoc – his face is wrong, his hair is wrong, his clothes are wrong, his freaking
boots
are wrong. Oh, and he walks in the wrong colour of mist.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Betty came round the back of his chair, put her hands on his shoulders, began to knead. ‘All that work. What does it mean? What happens now?’

‘Means I grovel. Or I take the one-off money and someone else’s artwork goes on the book.’

‘There’s no way—’

‘Betty... OK. I am a well-regarded illustrator. Any ordinary, midlist fantasy writer, they’d have to go with it. Blackmore, however, is now into a one-and-a-half-million-pound three-book deal. He walks with the gods. Different rules apply.’

Betty scowled. ‘Doesn’t change the fact that he writes moronic crap. Tell him to sod off. It’s just one book.’

He sat up. ‘It’s not moronic. The guy knows his stuff. And it’s not just one book. His whole backlist’s gonna be rejacketed in the
Sword of Twilight
format, whoever’s artwork that should be. Which is
seven
books – a lot of work. Face it, I
need
Blackmore.
I need to have my images under his big name. Also, we need the money if we’re gonna make a start on getting this place into any kind of good condition. We were counting on that money, were we not?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Right, end of story. Back to the airbrush.’

She bent and kissed his hair. ‘You’ve gone pale.’

‘Yeah, well, I didn’t expect it. It was a kick in the mouth. Do me good – getting too sure of myself. All right, go ahead. Regale me with the unglad tidings you bring back from the big metropolis.’

They’d taken to calling New Radnor the big metropolis, on account of it having three shops.

‘Well...’ Betty sat down next to him. ‘Mrs Wilshire was all worked up because she remembered she’d promised to get the home help to hunt out some of the Major’s papers relating to... this place. He kept them in a wooden summer house in the garden. And of course, the home help didn’t show up. Anyway, she gave me the key. That’s why I’m so late. I was in there for over an hour. Quite a little field HQ the Major had there: lighting, electric heater, kettle, steel filing cabinet.’