She first became aware of him in the green room.
Her initial thought was that he must be a priest, because he was wearing a suit, though not a dog collar — well, how many did these days, outside working hours? And then, because he was so smooth and assured, and — perhaps, she thought afterwards, because his shirt was wine-coloured — she even wondered if he might be a bishop.
He brought her a coffee. ‘This stuff could be worse,’ he said. ‘BBC coffee is much worse.’
‘You do this kind of thing fairly often then?’ she said. God, that wasn’t quite, ‘Do you come here often?’ but it was dangerously close.
‘When I must,’ he said. ‘Edward Bain, by the way.’
‘Merrily Watkins.’
‘I know,’ he said.
He was, of course, attractive: lean, pale features and dark curly hair with a twist of grey over the ears. He’d made straight for Merrily across the green room — it sounded like some notoriously haunted, country house bedchamber, but was simply the area where all the participants gathered before the show. It was long and narrow and starting to look like a pantomime dressing room because of some of the costumes: Dark Age chic meeting retro-punk in a tangle of braids and bracelets.
The producer and his team mingled with the main guests and the support acts, observing and listening, picking out the potential stars-for-an-hour. Meanwhile the guests drank tea and coffee and spring water — no alcohol — and nibbled things on sticks, talking a lot, losing inhibitions, unblocking their adrenal glands, developing that party mentality. As if most of them hadn’t brought it with them.
‘Lord,’ Edward Bain murmured, ‘do they really want to be taken seriously?’ He looked at Merrily with a faint, pained smile.
The smile chilled her. It was Sean’s smile — her dead husband’s. Boyish, disarming. Sean’s smile when accused. She turned sharply away, as though distracted by an argument in progress between a tight-faced security officer and a ginger-bearded man wearing a short, white cloak over a red tunic with a belt. Into the belt was stuck a knife with a black handle.
‘It’s my fucking athame, man. It’s a religious tool. You wouldn’t ask a fucking bishop to hand over his fucking crozier!’
Edward Bain’s smile became a wince, wiping away the similarity to Sean. If it had ever really been there. Merrily swallowed.
The security man turned to Tania Beauman for support. Tania wrinkled her nose. ‘Oh, leave it, Grant. I suspect it looks more dangerous than it actually is.’
‘Tania, it’s a knife. If we start allowing weapons in the studio, we may as well-’
‘It’s a f-’ The ginger guy blew out his cheeks in frustration, turned to Tania. ‘This doorman is really hacking me off, you know? This is religious persecution.’
‘Sure.’ Tania was a short, capable bottle-blonde of about forty. ‘If we just agree that it’s purely ornamental — yeah, sorry, religious — and that you won’t be taking it out of-’
‘Of course I won’t be fucking taking it out!’
‘And if you use that word on camera before midnight, you realize you’ll be excluded from the debate, yeah?’
The ginger man subsided in a surly kind of way, a semi-chastened schoolboy.
‘That’s his card marked,’ Edward Bain told Merrily. ‘He’ll be used purely for decoration, now. Won’t get asked a single question unless it starts to slow up and they’re really desperate for confrontation.’
‘I don’t see that happening, somehow,’ Merrily said, ‘do you?’
‘The boy’s an idiot, anyway. If the athame is to have any potency at all it should hardly be displayed like some sort of cycling club badge.’
He smiled down at Merrily — instant Sean once more — and glided away, leaving her feeling clammy. And she thought, Oh my God. He’s one of them.
‘Ooooooooh.’ Tania went into a sinuous shudder. ‘Magnetic — and more.’
Over by the door, Edward Bain was into an intense conversation with a woman in a long, loose, classical kind of dress, like someone from rent-a-Muse. Merrily saw now that one of Bain’s middle fingers wore a silver ring with a moonstone. She saw him and the woman clasp hands lightly and smile, and she imagined tiny blue electric stars crackling between their fingers. She wondered if they’d even met before tonight.
‘Who is he?’ Merrily muttered. ‘I mean, what is he?’
‘Don’t you vicars ever read the News of the World?’
‘Only if we’re really desperate for a sermon.’
‘He’s the Man,’ Tania said. ‘If you call him something like King of the Witches, he’ll look pained. He doesn’t like the word “witch”. He’s a champagne pagan, if you like. Works as a publishing executive and would rather be profiled in the Observer than the News of the World… and, yeah, he’s getting there.’
‘By way of Livenight?’
Tania frowned. ‘Don’t take this programme too lightly, Merrily. You can get deeply shafted out there. And we are watched by all kinds of people you wouldn’t expect.’
Especially this week! By the acting Bishop of Hereford this week, and probably half of Lambeth Palace. Take it lightly? She’d had to put down her glass of spring water because she couldn’t hold it still. Ridiculous; she conducted services every Sunday, she talked to hostile teenagers, she talked to God, she…
Sean was there, smiling in her mind. In getting here, she’d had to drive past where he died, on the M5, in flames. Go away!
She said, too loudly, ‘Tania, can you… give me a rundown? Who else is here?’
‘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 expose 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.