Robin sat up, shook himself, took a drink then called across to Connie Wilby, who was hunched forward, letting the empty inglenook take her smoke.
‘This make any sense to you, Connie? What kind of movie might Jerry Brace’ve wanted to hide in his wall?’
‘No idea, lovie. Jerry didn’t do pillow-talk. Rocks orf, and I was history.’
‘VHS?’ Gareth Nunne said. ‘Kapoor has one, doesn’t he? Copies old test match tapes.’
‘Yeah, I, uh… I called him at home. No answer.’
By the time Robin had left the cricket shop, Kapoor had made two copies, one to DVD one to VHS.
‘Bugger,’ Gareth Nunne said. ‘Suppose that means I’ll have to fetch mine.’
Some people cheered. Robin lowered his gaze to Gore, who remained expressionless. The TV on the wall to the left of the bar was tuned to a news channel so customers could follow the search for the missing cop.
‘Oh, goody,’ Gwenda said. ‘That should be a fun way to end the night.’
She didn’t look at Gore. She just laughed.
Laughed the laugh.
Robin went cold to his spine.
Jeeter Kapoor, still running copies, said he’d leave his shop door open for Merrily, but she told him no.
‘Lock it. Don’t open it for anybody other than one of us.’
‘You fink somebody’s gonna try and get this stuff?’
‘Wouldn’t take any chances. I’d even hide a copy somewhere. Not in the wall.’
Jeeter laughed uncomfortably, and Merrily came out into unexpected heat, a moon heading for full, a sky manic with stars. She paused outside Thorogood Pagan Books, suddenly light-headed with dismay. The amorphous nature of this job sometimes made her feel flimsy, slightly ridiculous and, after all she’d seen and heard tonight, irrelevant. Faith seemed naive. As for belief… it wasn’t so much what you believed in as the nature of belief itself. What belief could make you do. Belief that killing could liberate the soul. The belief of the suicide bomber who mass-killed in expectation of a parade of willing virgins on the other side.
The case for atheism.
She peered through the window of Thorogood’s, where a lowwattage brownish light glimmered grimly. No sign of Betty. She tapped on the glass. No response. She tried the door.
Unlocked. She went in. No sense of forest glade any more, no starry night on the ceiling. You could barely see the ceiling in the smudgy brown light.
‘Betty?’
Nobody in the shop. She went between the bookshelves and opened the door to the tiny kitchen, scrabbling for lights but she couldn’t find a switch and there was no window.
‘Betty!’
She went in, putting out her hands, spinning round just to satisfy herself there was nobody in here, her foot kicking something that turned out to be the airline bag, the Deliverance kit. Wasn’t good to have left that in here. She picked it up and backed out, slamming the kitchen door, pausing at the foot of the stairs. She could see a feeble light up there. Were all the lights in this place feeble or was the power being drained?
Power being drained. That happened. Huw Owen said it actually happened, so it must be—
‘Betty!’
Some moments of silence, and then that hand-on-the-spine sensation of being watched from behind and she spun round and nearly screamed at the sight of a figure at the top of the stairs, white and wafery and vague as a ghost. Plain white dress, blond hair straggly, the Alice band gone.
‘Come up,’ Betty said.
Merrily hesitated. Betty walked back into the upstairs room, in a desultory way, head bowed.
Merrily went up. Followed her into the room where a trail of dust led to the hole in the back of the chimney as if it had been breathed out.
Robin had said they’d cleaned it all up.
‘Have you touched that again, Betty?’
‘I got it wrong,’ Betty said.
‘What have you done?’
‘Called them out,’ Betty said. ‘Both of them.’
Somehow he managed not to look at either Gwenda or Gore unless one of them spoke. Knowing that Gareth Nunne would be back soon with his VHS machine, he was struggling for conversation, aware that people were watching him. People he knew, people he didn’t, place was near full tonight. He turned to the woman whose cigar smoke was curling into the inglenook.
‘Connie… Brace… I hate to keep coming back to him.’
‘Robin, one can only take so much humiliation.’
‘Only, he ever talk about some ancestral link with the guy whose big wife built the castle? De Braose?’
‘Not to me.’ Connie Wilby flaked some ash into the ingle. ‘Someone once mentioned it. My own feeling, having read fairly widely on the subject, is that de Braose wasn’t quite as black as painted. Killed those Welsh chaps in revenge for his uncle. Nothing to be proud of, but in those days…’