The Wrong Rite (16 page)

And on they came and over they went, but still Mary hadn’t leaped. Janet could make out her tall steeple hat back there in the dark. It looked as if some people were urging her on—there was a little bustle around her—but Mary was taking her time, waiting her moment. The fire needed more wood now and got some, maybe a little more than it ought to have had because the young chaps were flaunting their muscles in front of Iseult. No matter, the blaze would soon settle down. At the moment, it was casting a flickering brightness over the entire scene. Janet could pick out everyone in the little crowd of watchers; she was surprised to spy Dafydd standing apart from the rest. She thought he looked rather strange, but then so did everybody else in this eerie play of glare and shadow.

But now the flames were dying back, and here came Mary on the dead run, high hat and all. And now she leaped, straight through the middle of the fire. And now—great God! A violent
poof,
like a giant’s sneeze. A huge ball of searing, blazing light. An acrid smell, a great puff of whitish smoke rising high toward the sickle moon. And Mary, what was left of her, sprawled facedown across the Beltane fire.

N
OBODY SCREAMED. THAT WAS
the oddest part, nobody screamed. Janet wished somebody would, the sound might help to unfreeze her legs. She couldn’t herself, her heart must be blocking her windpipe. She felt as if it would be impossible to move. Not that she had to. Madoc was moving, he and his Uncle Huw and Huw’s son, Owain, shouting at the rest to keep back, lining Mary off the coals, laying her out on the ground away from the smoke, raising her head, laying it back.

Now Huw was running toward the farmhouse. To telephone a doctor? No, not the doctor, not from the way Madoc had put Mary’s head down. It would be the police Uncle Huw would have to call. Janet knew why. So must everyone else, with the smell of gunpowder hanging so heavy in the air.

Now there was screaming. That was Bob. Owain was trying to shut him up, but he kept on and on, shrieking out the one word over and over. “Sorcery! Sorcery! Sorcery!”

Huw was back, carrying a sheet or a tablecloth or something to cover Mary with, thank God. Trust Huw Rhys to observe the amenities. He was glaring at the fire as though it were his personal enemy, but he couldn’t stamp it out because they needed the light.

Now a man was coming forward. Janet recognized him as the local doctor. He’d sung a funny song this afternoon, or maybe he’d just sung a song funnily; anyway, people had laughed. They were making way for him, released from their shocked silence by the magic of his little black bag. Huw was hailing him with a relief you could almost reach out and touch.

The doctor was pushing up Bob’s sleeve, baring the fat arm, swabbing the flabby, pallid flesh with something out of a bottle. Alcohol, Janet assumed. Now Owain was holding the arm, and the doctor was filling a hypodermic syringe out of a tiny vial. Now both Owain and Huw were trying to hold Bob steady while the doctor stuck him in the arm.

At last Bob was stopping that horrible screaming. Owain and Huw had him propped up between them, walking him back to the farmhouse. Dai was behind them, trying to help and being shooed away. The doctor was bending over Mary, raising the sheet, shaking his lead, covering her up again. Now Dai was at the doctor’s elbow, pestering. Madoc at least was willing to talk to Dai, he got the boy’s attention, started asking questions. Janet had known he couldn’t resist getting in a spot of police work. Dai was shaking his head, waving his hands, beginning to fall apart. The doctor was pointing over at the farmhouse, telling him to go in and keep an eye on Bob, or take an aspirin and go to bed, or just get out from underfoot. More likely to phone for an ambulance. They couldn’t leave Mary’s ghastly remains just lying there.

Where would they take her? There’d have to be an autopsy, even though the cause of death was only too hideously obvious.

Having grown up in hunting country. Janet knew a little about gunpowder. Mary must have had a pocketful, to cause a reaction like that. Gunpowder wasn’t hard to get hold of, back home you could buy it by the pound at any sporting-goods shop. It came in different grains: coarse, medium, and fine. Sam Neddick back home had an old muzzle-loader he fired off every year on the Queen’s birthday, and on various other occasions when the mood seized him. He’d ram coarse-grained gunpowder down the barrel, then put a pinch of a specially fine-ground powder in the priming pan to set off the discharge, since it was only the finest grain that could burn fast enough on its own to create the necessary explosion and detonate the rest. Coarser powder, if ignited directly, would simply fizz and burn itself out.

Sam had explained to Janet once how careful a person had to be not to get the different grinds mixed up. If he were to make a mistake and ram a whole load of fine-ground powder down the barrel, it would cause a big enough explosion to blow up the musket. And himself with it, like as not. Could Mary not have realized what a dangerous substance she was monkeying with? Had somebody else been better informed than she?

The remains of Mary’s clothing would have to be examined as well as the remains of Mary herself, of course; that was a job for a forensic specialist. Since her costume had mostly been made of wool, there might, with luck, be enough left of the garments to show where the powder had been stashed. Mary would have had to be pretty crazy to carry gunpowder on her knowingly when she performed her allegedly famous leap; but who was to say she wasn’t? She’d bragged about her expertise as a gemologist; she’d been absurdly self-congratulatory over her prowess as a fire-leaper. Mightn’t she have felt cocky enough to think she could jump safely over, then perhaps flick the packet of gunpowder behind her just as she landed to create a spectacular effect, little realizing what kind of effect she’d be likeliest to create?

Her timing would have had to be on the button, assuming she’d been deft enough to pull it off; any sort of gunpowder would have flared up the instant it hit the fire. Gem-cutters must surely have to possess great skill with their hands, but that wasn’t to say they had to be fast. Dai had been Mary’s apprentice; maybe he’d have some information about where the gunpowder had come from. Probably Madoc had already asked him. Madoc wouldn’t be handling the case, of course; but he’d go on bird-dogging from sheer instinct until whoever was in charge locally showed up.

Somebody did show up. One constable on a bike. Typical British understatement. Well, how many cops did you need to start an investigation? How many did you want charging around, disturbing the peace of an influential old gentleman like Sir Caradoc Rhys on his ninetieth birthday?

Thank God Uncle Caradoc had gone to bed before the Beltane fire was lighted. When you came to the end of a perfect day, you didn’t need one hideous memory to spoil it. What would the verdict be: accident, suicide, murder, or sorcery?

Uncle Huw was the local magistrate. Would he have to preside at the inquest? No, more likely it would be the county coroner. Madoc would know. Janet wished she could go over and talk to him, but she knew enough not to. She might better occupy herself going back to the main house and breaking the news to his parents before they got a garbled account from somebody else.

No, she mustn’t leave. She was a witness, and potentially a more reliable one than some of the others present, since she hadn’t had anything stronger than tea to drink. Besides, Madoc might need her here at the scene, if only for a look or a nod. This must be even worse for him than it was for her. After all, Mary was family, he’d known her more or less all his life. Oh, why did this awful thing have to happen tonight?

And when else could it have happened? How many Beltane fires would Mary have had the chance to jump in the course of a year?

The constable had his notebook and pencil out, Huw was putting more wood on the fire so that he could see to take notes. The blaze was making people uneasy, making them want to get away, and who could blame them? Huw was answering the constable’s questions now. Janet worked her way around to where she could catch Madoc’s eye, and he came over to her.

“All right, Jenny love?”

“Bearing up. How about you?”

“Hanging in. Want to talk to the constable?”

“Yes, I don’t mind. What’s his name?”

“Rhys the Police, what else? He read a poem this afternoon—you slept through it. Cyril’s a nice fellow, we used to play football together. Did you get a good view of what happened?”

“Too good.” Janet had to swallow hard before she could speak again. “I don’t have to look at her, do I?”

“God, no.” He stood with his arm around her till Huw had got done talking, then spoke up. “Cyril, would you like to talk to my wife? Jenny, you remember Constable Rhys, he was at the party this afternoon. We’re forty-third cousins, I think.”

Janet and the constable expressed their mutual pleasure at meeting again so soon and their regret at the reason for their unanticipated reunion. Then she, being Janet, got straight to the point.

“I suppose the first thing is to find out where Mary got hold of fine-grain gunpowder. Have you asked Uncle Huw?”

“Fine-grain gunpowder, Mrs. Madoc?”

“Oh yes, it must have been, to have acted the way it did. Didn’t Madoc tell you? There was this great, loud poof, then a ball of flame like a bomb going off. Not that I’ve ever seen a bomb explode, but that’s what it made me think of.”

“Could this explosion not have been caused by petrol or some other volatile substance?”

“No, I’d have smelled petrol. What I did smell was gunpowder, strong as anything. I was downwind of it, so I got a good whiff. It lingered in the air for a bit afterward, other people must have smelled it too. And there was that big puff of white smoke, the way gunpowder burns. Remember, Madoc?”

“Yes, love. I remember. How do you know so much about gunpowder?”

“Sam Neddick, mostly. Sam’s my brother’s hired man back in New Brunswick, Constable. He hunts a lot.”

In and out of season, but one needn’t go into particulars. “I shouldn’t be surprised if Mary’d had a pretty good load of it in her skirt pocket or someplace like that right next to her body, to have been burned so—” Janet swallowed again. “She might even have had some sprinkled on her clothes, or inside that steeple hat she was wearing. Your forensic lab can do powder tests on the clothes, can’t they?”

“That will be for the chief constable to be deciding,” Rhys the Police replied somewhat stuffily. “But why would the lady have done such a mad thing?”

“Why, Jenny?” said Madoc.

“Madoc, you know the way Mary’d been carrying on ever since we got here. I’d say she might have done just about anything to get people’s attention. Night before last, Constable, she was bragging all through dinner about what grand leaps she’d made over other Beltane fires and what a show she was going to put on this time around.”

Madoc gave her a squeeze to help steady her voice and she went on. “Mary claimed that the right way is to jump back and forth through the flames three times in a row. I’m wondering, and mind you this is nothing but speculation, whether Mary might have meant to put on some special effects after she’d got the range, as you might say. She could have brought the gunpowder along with her, not realizing what a terrible risk she was taking. Ordinary coarse-grained gunpowder doesn’t ignite all that easily, you know; she may simply not have realized she’d got hold of the wrong kind.”

“That is a possibility to be sure, Mrs. Madoc. Assuming your idea is right, would there have been anybody she might have let in on what she was planning, do you think? Somebody feckless enough not to stop her?”

Somebody disgusted enough not to stop her would be a more likely way of putting it, Janet thought. Mary must have worked her way on to plenty of hate lists with her antics today alone. Janet hedged.

“I suppose it’s possible Mary said something to her brother. I don’t know whether Madoc told you, but she and Bob were conducting some kind of mystic rite in the chapel before he came out to light the bonfire. At least we assumed that must be what they were doing—they’d lit candles and were prancing around the altar waving branches. We watched them for a minute or so through the window.”

“A mystic rite?” The set of Constable Rhys’s mustache showed what he thought of mystic rites. “And where is Mr. Bob Rhys now?”

“In bed, I expect. The doctor had to give him a shot to quiet him down, and Madoc’s cousin Owain helped him into the farmhouse. He’d gone straight into orbit when—well, you could hardly blame him, considering. He kept yelling ‘Sorcery! Sorcery!’ They couldn’t get him to stop.”

“Mystic rites and sorcery? That is bad, Mrs. Madoc, very bad. He will not have been putting you on, you will not think?”

“He sounded pretty convincing to me. I got the impression Bob thought somebody had ill-wished their charm and caused it to backfire. Which sounds crazy, but he and Mary both seemed to be fairly well hipped on that stuff. I probably shouldn’t even be saying this; I only met them two days ago. You’d do better to talk to their nephew, Dai. I gather they’ve more or less raised him from a kid and he’s been working as Mary’s apprentice. For that matter, I expect practically anybody here could give you more reliable information than I.”

“I would not be too sure about that, Mrs. Madoc, but I shall have to question them all.”

The constable sounded fairly dismal about the prospect, Janet could understand why. “Then I expect you’ll want to get everybody into the barn. There’s light enough to see by, and you could do your notes sitting down at the table. I don’t know if the tea urn’s still hot, but we could make you some fresh easily enough.”

“Tea is always helpful.”

To Rhys the Police as well as the next one, like as not. Half-incinerated corpses didn’t sit comfortably on anybody’s stomach. The constable blew a rousing blast on his whistle to collect everybody’s attention and addressed the gathering in stentorian tone.

“It will be necessary for me to be taking statements from everybody, so nobody must go away without first having been questioned. You will all please go into the big barn now and sit down. I will ask Mr. Huw Rhys to go and put in a call for Mr. Davies the chief constable and I will ask Detective Inspector Madoc Rhys to help with the questions if he will be so good, and that way we can get through this painful business without taking all night. Mrs. Madoc has offered fresh tea,” he added on a hopeful note.