‘If you follow her eyes,’ Huw said, ‘I think you’ll get a rough idea where it appeared. The Welsh Lourdes.’
‘You hear about it,’ Merrily said. ‘But not often.’
‘Four known sightings back in Father Iggy’s day.’
‘When was this?’
‘Eighteen eighty. One of the monks saw it.’ Huw lowered his voice. ‘Like a blue mist forming.’
Then he talked about the thirtieth of August, 1880. Eight o’clock in the evening. Some boys from the chapel choir playing cricket with a stick as a bat. A dazzling figure crossing the field: a veiled woman inside an oval halo, hands raised in blessing.
‘Being little lads, weren’t exactly filled with the holy spirit,’ Huw said. ‘One of ’em says, I don’t like that. If it comes near me I’ll hit it with me stick.’
‘Bless him,’ Merrily said.
The field was still lit up for a short time before the figure had melded with a bush and the hedge and vanished. The monks had kept watch, and the following Saturday the bush had lit up.
Merrily said, ‘You believe it?’
‘It’s the little lads does it for me. Hit it with me stick. I like that. Rings true.’ Huw shook his head. ‘The put-downs started soon after it came out. There’s another contemporary account in a book called Nunnery Life in the Church of England, by one Sister Marry Agnes. Sister Marry were a nun in the Anglican community here. Had a bad time at the hands of a bitch of a prioress who, she says, deprived her of food, thumped her round the head and made her lie in front of the church door for every bugger to walk over her into the services. She reckons Iggy did nowt to stop it.’
‘That true?’
‘Don’t know. But she takes him apart in her book, and then, not surprisingly, puts the knife in for the apparitions. Not that she were there at the time, you understand, but she puts forward the theory that the figure was somehow projected on to the mist or whatever by one of them new-fangled magic lanterns.’
‘A projector?’
‘Balls. They’d be hard pressed to do it now, wi’ a hologram machine.’
Merrily smiled.
‘You want to believe in it, don’t you?’
Huw scowled.
‘No, come on,’ Merrily said. ‘You do.’
‘Put it this way,’ Huw said. ‘If this were in Ireland, there’d be a load of tatty giftshops all down the bank. Lady of Llanthony key rings, luminous crucifixes, BVM T-shirts. It’s as valid as Lourdes and Fatima and Knock. But the BVM belongs to the Catholics, and that’s a good enough reason for it to get rubbished. Another reason is that all the other chapels round here were Baptist, and them buggers were hardly going to be in sympathy with a bloke who thought Rome had no exclusive rights over the Benedictine order.’
‘I see,’ Merrily said. ‘One of ours.’
She looked around through a fine mist that wasn’t quite rain. Thought about Father Ignatius performing his Lazarus routine with Lourdes water. As if he knew what the next stage was.
Perfect for Peter Rector, Huw said.
Perfect for what Rector did next.
On the way up to the monastery, she’d given him a précis of what Athena White had told her.
‘Up here,’ Huw said, ‘you can do owt you like.’
38
Take the money
‘ONE OF THEIR OWN,’ Kapoor said. ‘One of their own goes missing, they go a bit crazy.’
He’d been waiting for them in Back Fold, one of several shopkeepers standing outside their doors in the intermittent rain. All the atmosphere of a dark carnival.
‘But why were they hitting on me?’ Robin couldn’t stand still. British cops – this hurt. ‘Some kinda institutionalized xenophobia? Look at me – I’m still shaking. I thought the bastards were gonna cuff me, toss me in one of those cages, back of a van.’
Robin looked at Betty, but Betty was just staring out the window. They were still not talking much. She’d sold the damn bungalow for good money; should’ve been a great day. Did she think there was something in this? That he’d done something crazy last night?
Well, OK, he had.
And paid for it. A cold psychic rebuke for his presumption. But how could be tell her what he didn’t understand himself? How could he come out with this stuff in front of Kapoor?
‘You fink they know somefing?’ Kapoor said. ‘That she was here before she disappeared?’
‘Well, of course they know. They found her car.’ Robin wiped the air with both hands. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just…’
‘Nah, mate, not last night. I mean when she was in town asking questions about the old geezer in the pool.’