Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

Stefan was watching her now. The evening was quite warm, and ashen hair hung damply over his ears. He pushed some back. ‘And what’s in it for you, Merrily?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said truthfully. ‘I really don’t know. Answers, perhaps, to the things I don’t know.’

‘Anyone can ask questions. That’s the point, isn’t it? There’s nothing I won’t be able to answer. I’ve read all Richard’s research, but I’ve thrown away the script.’

Merrily walked into the empty church and sensed at once a disturbance.

There’d been a temporary estrangement between her and the church, but when you preached and prayed in a building, it began to send messages to you in the atmosphere and the echo.

Tonight, the church was agitated, and it wasn’t with anticipation. Something had happened. She walked out past the font and into the nave. In the north-west corner, the door to the tower and steeple was closed and padlocked. The vibration was not like the shiver of bells, but it did seem to be on this side of the church.

She stood by the tower door and looked along the northern aisle towards the organ pipes. The curtain screening the organ was drawn. She thought of malevolent goblins, strode up the aisle and swept it aside.

The organ loft was curiously like the cockpit of a very old-fashioned aircraft. Merrily switched on the curling brass lamps which lit the keyboards and the panels of knobs. Nothing seemed disturbed, but she lingered, allowing herself to consider what, until today, had been unthinkable: that Dermot Child might be connected with the disappearance of Colette Cassidy.

He might have been giggling when he exposed himself on the tombstone this morning, but it was in fact an act of rage, of violence. She’d made Dermot lose his temper, and he’d brandished his cock like a knife. A peevish child grown into a bitter, screwed-up, middle-aged man who thought he was entitled to more. Arrogant enough to believe younger women could fancy him. Remorselessly devious enough to lie in wait for a sixteen-year-old girl who everyone said was asking for it?

She backed out, snapped off the lights, drew back the curtain. Perhaps she should play Dermot’s own game and send an anonymous note to Annie Howe. Perhaps she should swallow her pride and go to see Annie Howe.

Still unsettled, she moved up the steps and under the rood screen into the chancel. The altar shone down at her in white and gold. Nothing wrong there.

She entered the side chapel which began a few yards behind the organ and ran parallel to the chancel. The Bull chapel. Its high east window was dulled now, but the bigger, north-facing, leaded panes cast a hard and coarsening light on the face of Thomas Bull, on its trim beard, its bulbous lips, its scarily wide-open eyes.

In the bleak, northern light, this was a dour and creepy place. But there was nothing here but the unsleeping Bull in his frugal sandstone clothing, the dull blade of his naked stone sword quiescent at his side. It irked her that this chapel should be next to the chancel, so that you couldn’t approach the altar without getting a glimpse of him.

Her shoe crunched something. She bent down. Cement or sandstone dust on the flags near the foot of the tomb and directly below the place where it seemed to have been repaired at some stage, where, she remembered thinking, it looked as though Tom Bull had stretched out his legs and kicked out a couple of bricks.

She sprang back in horror. It looked as though he had.

Merrily took a long breath, gritty with still-floating cement dust. The eyes of Tom Bull sneered at her as she pulled up her skirt and then, lowering herself beyond his field of vision, knelt on the flags by his stone-booted feet on their stone cushion.

She saw that all the cement had been chipped out around two bricks.

She put hands either side of one and lifted it. It was old and parched and not very heavy, and it came out easily and she laid it on the floor.

Removed the second brick, revealing a hole like a large letterbox.

It was black in there, and she had no torch. With a rising dread, she slipped a hand in. He’s bones. Unless you touch him, and then he’s dust.

She didn’t touch him. A small draught caressed her fingers. She snatched her hand back, shaking.

‘You’ll be OK, Lol?’

Jane seemed quite anxious to get away. ‘Sure,’ he said.

‘She’s not here, you know. In case you were worried.’

‘I wasn’t.’

He was sitting at Lucy’s desk, with the two lamps on and the velvet curtains drawn. The windows faced the street, but Jane had been outside and said no chinks of lights were visible. Unless they wandered round the back and into the garden, no one would have reason to think the house was occupied.

‘I thought she would be here,’ Jane said gloomily. ‘I really didn’t think she’d left us for ever.’

‘Well, maybe she’s ... gone on, as they say. To something better.’

‘But her work here isn’t finished!’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Perhaps it isn’t. What are you going to do now?’

‘Just muddle on, I suppose.’

‘No, I meant now as in ... now.’

‘Oh. I’m going to the church. I’m supposed to be in charge of lights. Wow. It means I get to switch on one spotlight just before it goes dark.’

‘That’s it?’

‘She just wants me there to keep an eye on me.’

‘So suspicious,’ he said, ‘mothers.’

Jane turned in the doorway. ‘She does like you. I can tell. I think, on reflection, the way things turned out, you probably did the best thing not actually sleeping with her.’

‘That’s what you think.’

‘It will stand you in good stead,’ Jane said solemnly.

When she’d gone, he thought about Lucy and he thought about Merrily.

He looked around the tidy little room. Jane was right. Lucy’s spirit was not here. Perhaps it never had been. You could look around this room and you would not know her. You’d know what she’d looked like from the photos on the walls, what she’d eaten from the food in the kitchen, what she’d worn from the clothes in the wardrobe, but you would not know Lucy. If there was a shrine, it would be the shop with its fruit and its fairies.

It seemed to Lol, though, that the spirit was too small to be confined in one small space. It would have to hover over Ledwardine, its guardian hills and its apple trees. The spirit would want to light up the orb.

But it was too late to help Lucy in any practical way. Lol opened the annotated copy of Ella Leather’s Folklore.

The living light tonight was in Merrily Watkins, and he was scared because it was flickering.

‘Let me help you. Please.’ Outside the porch, Stefan was bending over Mrs Goddard in her wheelchair, a rug over her knees. The stress lines had vanished from his handsome face, concern glowed out, the setting sun colouring his hair.

Stefan was acting. Or something.

‘Thank you,’ Mrs Goddard said, ‘Mr ...?’

‘Williams,’ he said simply.

The daughter pushing the wheelchair frowned, Merrily noticed, but Mrs Goddard smiled. ‘They didn’t want me to come, but I insisted.’ She patted his hand resting on the arm of the chair. ‘I believe in you.’

‘I am glad,’ Stefan said.

‘And, you know, I believe what poor Miss Devenish often used to say, that until we face up to our history and uncover the truth, we shall never be a real village again, merely a tourist museum. A sort of black and white theme park.’

Stefan listened and nodded. Merrily marvelled at the old girl, although she’d noticed this before, the way disabled people often became clearer sighted, more focused and certainly more outspoken.

Most of the others had been less forthcoming. A couple of men had uncomfortably declined to shake the hand Stefan offered them, as though they might contract HIV or something. A retired headmaster called Carrington had pushed past him into the church, grunting, ‘Don’t take us for fools, Mr Alder.’ But most of the women had seemed charmed, if, in some cases, reluctantly. They’d all seen him on television, many had been scandalized and titillated by the news that he was living in Ledwardine with an older man who was also a controversial playwright. But he was young and good-looking, magnetic, charismatic ... and he was performing exclusively for them, and they were part of that performance.