Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘Will of God.’ Gomer turned into Old Barn Lane. ‘En’t that the bottom line of it for you, Vicar?’

‘I’m a bit unsure about the strength of my faith, Gomer. If something happened to Jane I’d be swearing at the heavens and cursing in the night like nobody ever did.’

The sights and smells of the dream cider house swelled in her head. In the vaporous humidity, no longer the pulpy, sweating cheeks of the pumping Child but the emotionless, rhythmical rise and thrust of a piece of well-preserved, well-oiled farm machinery.

Gomer glanced at her and then turned back to the lane.

Lol had spoken to him only once before, when he and Alison had bought the apple wood for fragrant fires. But on another occasion, the week after Alison had left, he’d seen Lol buying cat food in the Spar shop and had laughed quietly.

‘What you doin’ yere?’ Lloyd Powell said now. Not a man who smiled, but he laughed sometimes.

Lol stood uncertainly on the edge of the field, where it gave way to a weed-spattered gravel forecourt.

‘I’m speaking to you, sunshine,’ Lloyd said. ‘Come over yere in the light.’

The only light was a dome-shaded bulb in a holder like a question mark over the door of what Lol took to be the cider house. He moved shyly to within six feet of it.

‘Hello,’ he said.

Lloyd was Marlboro County Man in denims but with no cigarette. Lol saw Karl Windling with no beard.

‘Ah.’ Lloyd put his hands on his hips. ‘I know who you are. You’re that bloke Alison Kinnersley left for James.’

Lol nodded. The pint-sized cuckold.

Lloyd’s expression was blank.

Pint-sized cuckold. With no bottle. Just phrases he’d overheard in the shop when they were laughing quietly, Lloyd and another bloke.

Lloyd examined him for a moment then seemed to lose interest. ‘Go away, little man,’ he said. ‘I’m busy.’

He turned his back on Lol, taking some keys out of his pocket.

‘No,’ Lol said. ‘I won’t, if you don’t mind.’

‘What was that?’ Lloyd didn’t turn round. Lol saw that his dashing white truck was parked a few yards away with its tailgate open. In the back was a dead sheep and something not much bigger wrapped in bin sacks.

‘Got it all loaded then, Lloyd?’

Lloyd still didn’t turn.

‘Give you a hand, maybe?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Lloyd said. ‘Don’t reckon you’d have the strength. Bugger off. Go’n look at your owls, your badgers, whatever you little fellers do at night.’

The pink moon shone surrealistically down on a pastoral dreamscape. Lol wasn’t quite sure if he was actually here. He glimpsed the past few days in a series of frozen incidents fanned out like playing cards – the vicarage days, his own mirror image bizarrely in a dog collar, Alison unmasked, the glow of firelight on Merrily’s eyelids – and then the fan was closed and he was standing back where it all began, in Blackberry Lane, in front of the invaded cottage, the torn-up pages of Traherne like petals on the lawn, Karl Windling in the window.

‘I thought as I was passing,’ Lol heard himself saying, as though from some distance, ‘that I would take Jane home.’

Lloyd turned slowly back from the door.

‘Come yere a minute.’

Lol heard Karl Windling say, Now you fucking stay there. You understand? You go anywhere, I’ll find you. You don’t move the rest of the night. I’m coming over.

He walked up to the door and stood there.

‘Right, then,’ Lloyd said.

The pink moon bulged as Lloyd half turned and hit him in the mouth. As he fell back, Lloyd hit him in the stomach. As he doubled up and his face came down, Lloyd’s fist was waiting to meet it, crunching his glasses into his eyes.

As he rolled over on the gravel, Lloyd kicked him in the head.

‘Tell me the truth,’ the vicar said as they came up to the junction of Old Barn Lane and the new road. Terrible stupid junction, this was, Gomer reckoned, right on a bad bend. ‘You don’t actually think Lol’s going to find her lying drunk in the orchard. Do you?’

‘Oh, Vicar ...’ Gomer slowed down, not wanting to come up to the junction right behind Rod, pretending that concentrating on his driving was the reason he hadn’t finished the sentence.

‘You think she’s in the cider house, don’t you?’

‘En’t my place to think nonsense like that,’ Gomer said gruffly.

‘What happens in the cider house?’

‘They makes cider. Used to.’

They passed into a tunnel of trees, blocking the moonlight.

‘I dreamt about it once.’ Her voice was very low. ‘I’ve never been in one, but I dreamt about it. It was Dermot Child in there.’

Gomer thought that Dermot Child, nasty little bugger though he was, wasn’t in the same evil league as the Powells, so inbred, deep-down evil they didn’t even know they was evil. He turned out on to the new road and had to brake sharply on account of Rod Powell’s Escort was dead in front of him, having slowed for a big lorry rumbling round the bend.

‘Strewth, you don’t expect heavy goods traffic this time o’ night.’

It was a low loader with a big stack of crates on the back. The driver cranked the gears and the lorry built up to a steady speed as they approached the spot where poor ole Lucy bought it, just before you hit the straight, Powells’ farm turning about half a mile off.

Too late. Before Rod, too, changed gear and speeded up, Gomer saw him look in his mirror to see who’d come up behind him. Not many folk in this village drove a US Army Jeep with a cigarette glowing in their gobs.

‘Bugger.’

He’d have seen the vicar, too. He’d know they were following him. He wouldn’t like that.

Gomer eased up, left some space between him and Rod. His view of it was that Rod was heading home fast to check everything was in order, mabbe throw some disinfectant around then figure out how he was going to play it. He wouldn’t want no company tonight.

But whatever he did to clean up the cider house, there wasn’t a thing he could do about the orchard. About this Patricia Young, who Gomer was convinced lay under the Apple Tree Man. He weren’t that old. Thirty years was a good age for an untended apple tree.

Bugger. Rod giving it some clog now, getting up behind the lorry so he could get past when they hit the straight. Gomer put his foot down.

What happened next happened so quick that he’d hardly registered it before the Jeep was up the bank and not-so-clean through the hedge.

‘Where are you? Where are you? Where you gone?’ Moving about in the bilious fluorescence, throwing hay around, old bin sacks. ‘Don’t mess me about, you bitch, you little scrubber. You come out now and mabbe I won’t give you to Father for his pleasure, mabbe I’ll just finish it quick, quick as a chicken, see, humane ... You want humane, you come out now. Father, he en’t humane, n’more. You come out now, you hear. I know you can’t’ve got out, had my eye on you the whole time I’m removin’ your friend, efficient, we are, you don’t get round the back of us ... Don’t mess me about, Jane, you listen to me, I en’t got time ... When I find you I’m gonner hurt you, gonner hurt you very bad, you hear me, Jane, you hear me, you little slut? You can’t’ve gone, you can’t’ve gone, you cannot’ve gone, Jane. Jane. Jane. JANE! ’

He comes out, boiling with bewilderment.

‘Where is she?’

Advancing on Lol, tottering away from the truck, half blind, body burning.

‘Think I’m daft enough to leave the keys in, is it? Think you can drive off? Think I’m daft? ’

Big, tough hands, farmer’s hands, bass player’s hands, picking him up and slamming him back against some wall.