Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

James clenched his teeth.

‘... watching.’

Alison gasped.

‘Watching who, James?’ Merrily’s voice was very faint.

He wouldn’t answer. He hardly needed to. An engine roared suddenly and the side of the Land Rover was blasted by headlights.

‘Vicar!’

‘Gomer?’

Merrily saw, with a spasm of panic, that he was alone behind the wheel of his jeep.

‘Where’s Jane?’

‘You en’t seen her?’

‘Oh Christ! ’

Gomer reached over and threw open the passenger door.

‘Get in, Vicar.’

LOL STUMBLED OUT into the road before he knew it, the tarmac unrolling to either side, a fence opposite with a ploughed field rising steeply behind it, pink moon on pink soil, to a bristle of trees.

No vehicles, no lights, no sign of Gomer.

He felt confused and upset, didn’t know how much time had passed, swinging the torch from tree to tree, tensely shining it under bushes and briars. Once, he’d lit up a rag and nearly thrown up with dread.

There was no pavement; he’d have to stand in the hedge if a vehicle came past. He stared down at his feet on the tarmac and found himself praying that Jane was alive and back at the vicarage, then stopped, scared it might do more harm than good, as if he was tapping into Merrily’s line to a God he wasn’t sure of and Jane often mocked. Omens and portents seemed to have soaked up all his spirituality. Pink moons and black-eyed dogs. Please, Jane.

He looked up then and saw her.

She was standing in the middle of the pink, ploughed field. She didn’t smile at him or come running towards him. She didn’t seem to notice him at all. She was standing very still, although a wind he couldn’t feel lifted her dark hair.

And then there was only the field and the distant trees with buildings behind, under the hardening moon, and Lol knew the curse, by way of Robert Johnson and Nick Drake, was reaching for him.

Merrily was struggling not to give way. She asked Gomer if he’d tried the vicarage. Had he been upstairs? Had he called out? Had he called out to the third storey?

Gomer told her no way was Jane in the vicarage, but Lol had spotted two cider bottles missing from a case in Lucy’s kitchen.

Merrily let out a long, serrated breath. ‘I know Lucy’s dead, I know she was your friend. But I wish to God Jane had never known her.’

‘Lol’s in the orchard now, searchin’. She’s there, he’ll find her.’

‘How is he?’

‘How d’you mean like?’ Gomer was watching a car on the other side of the square.

‘Lol is’ – she bit off the word unstable – ‘unsure of himself sometimes.’

‘He’s all right. Good boy, I reckon.’ Gomer pointed across the cobbles. ‘That’s Rod Powell’s car, see. Keepin’ an eye on him, I am. He’s on the phone. Now who’d Rod be callin’ this time o’ night, you reckon?’

Merrily was silent.

A second later, Rod was getting out of his car and walking, in his stately and confident way, across to the Black Swan, where a lemony light still burned in windows either side of the front door. Rod went up the steps and rapped on a window. Presently the door opened and he was admitted. A couple of minutes later, he came out with a bottle of whisky.

‘Councillor Powell keeps his own licensin’ hours,’ Gomer said. ‘How about that? Man’s gonner have himself a drink in his car, I shouldn’t wonder. Coppers in and out, every hour on the hour lately, that’s how arrogant the feller is.’

‘Perhaps he needs some courage. Perhaps he could see a few things starting to ... ooze out of the woodwork.’

She told Gomer, very briefly, what she’d learned in the last hour and what she’d surmised. Everything, except for the very mixed implications for Alison.

‘Bugger me,’ said Gomer. ‘Wouldn’t it just suit the bastard to get his end away with the Bulls’ women? Where’d that happen, I wonder. No prizes.’

‘The cider house?’

‘Likely why John Bull-Davies give Rod that bit o’ land with the ole place on it.’

‘With a convenient hole in the wall?’

‘Hole in the loft prob’ly. That bloody ole John Bull-Davies. He weren’t never any good. You look at that whole situation, Vicar, you can see why James is the screwed-up bugger he is. Obvious, he’s backin’ off from the Powells. Tryin’ to.’

‘I think he perhaps wanted to do that on his own terms, but circumstances aren’t letting him.’

‘They comes over so loud and haughty-like, the Bulls, but they’re weak underneath, most of ’em. They’ll always come back to the Powells. It’s like some ole magnetism. They might think they got away, but they en’t.’

As the tail lights of Rod Powell’s car came on and the strings of medieval, electric lanterns across the square were extinguished by some timer mechanism, Merrily thought of James and Alison, free to resume their odd relationship.

James Bull-Davies and Alison Kinnersley. Or Powell, as she might have been. The Bulls and the Powells. She hoped there would never be a child.

Lol ran across the road. There was an iron gate on the other side, leading to the pink-washed field. For a moment, as he climbed over, he thought he saw her again, a flitting thing, a wisp, a trick of the light.

He turned and looked back across the road towards the orchard. He should wait here. He should wait for Gomer.

There was a flash, like magnesium, on the very periphery of his vision and he spun round and once more saw her, in total, absolute clarity, standing in the centre of the field with her arms by her sides. She was dressed in black.

This time, he saw, in a heart-freezing moment, that her feet were not quite touching the soil. A girl dressed in black, hovering under a pink moon.

He stood with his back to the gate, snatched off his glasses and rubbed his hands over his face, replaced the glasses, looked back at the road and then spun around again. But there was nothing now.

He wasn’t sure if it had been Jane.

Or Colette.

Both of them? Both of them out here?

His hands were trembling as he pushed himself away from the iron gate and began to walk across the churned-up field, soil the colour of raw meat, the pink moon above him, the black-eyed dog, he was sure, at his heels.

He knew where he was going. Among the farm buildings behind the trees was the cider house, where The Wine of Angels had not been made. The place where the Bulls had once taken their women.

Lol stopped and looked once over his shoulder before walking steadily towards the buildings.

The Escort had turned down Church Street for Old Barn Lane before Gomer started to follow. He’d pulled back into the shadows to avoid Minnie spotting the Jeep when she came out of the lych-gate, accompanied by Tess Roberts and the Prossers. ‘Never get to keep my ole Gwynneth after this,’ Gomer muttered.

Rod was turning into Old Barn Lane.

‘Never even signalled,’ Gomer observed. He sucked on his ciggy. ‘What you reckon a man like Powell does, he sees the blinds come down after three hundred years?’

‘Wondering that myself Merrily thought about the unmissable password she’d given Gomer to identify himself to Lol. Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’ was the song of his that seemed to get played more often than any other when she was a kid. She used to ask her step-brother, Jonathan, to put it on again because the idea sounded so pretty. It was years later before she found out the message was far from comforting, spoke of no escape. For anyone.

‘Magistrate like Rod,’ Gomer said soberly, ‘he feels it’s all over, last thing he wants is to sit the other side o’ the ole courtroom.’

Merrily fastened the webbing seat-belt. ‘I don’t know where this is going to end. I think we lost control a long time ago.’