Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘Would you?’ Caroline dabbed at her face with a tissue and went back to the coffee machine. She pulled two cups from a shelf. ‘Would you come back and tell us? If there was something. Anything at all?’

‘Of course.’

Terrence suddenly moaned. ‘The festival! I’d forgotten. We’ve got the ceremony this afternoon. To launch the festival. Crowds of people. We might even have the Press here.’

Oh yes, Merrily thought, you can certainly count on having the Press here this time.

‘ Fuck the festival!’ Caroline slammed down both cups. ‘How can you even think of that at a time like this?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Terrence’s shoulders shook. His unshaven cheeks were wet.

At the entrance to the mews, Merrily almost bumped into a woman distractedly coming down from the market place.

‘Oh.’ Alison Kinnersley stepped impatiently to one side. She wore a genuine Barbour, one of the very long, expensive ones, like a highwayman’s coat. ‘Vicar. I’m so sorry. Excuse me.’

She hurried past Merrily into Church Street then stopped, called back.

‘Lucy Devenish – the cottage with the red door?’

‘I think so.’ It was not yet seven-thirty, early for a social call. ‘Brass knocker in the shape of an elf or something.’

‘Thank you,’ Alison said. It had begun to rain. It was clear she was in no mood for a conversation. She didn’t seem to have heard about Colette’s disappearance or noticed any police activity.

Alison strode off down the street in her highwayman’s coat, and didn’t look back. Merrily tried to imagine what she could want with Lucy Devenish. Tried to imagine her with the less-than-flamboyant Lol Robinson – living with him, chatting with him over breakfast, sleeping with him. And couldn’t.

She turned back towards the vicarage, almost running, because her legs felt too short and everything in her life seemed to be moving too fast for her and it was raining harder.

Jane had the door open before she could even get out her key. The kid’s hair was uncombed, her eyes swollen. She looked very young and forlorn, like a battered child.

‘Mum?’

‘Could you make some tea, flower?’ Merrily stepped inside, unzipped her coat. ‘The sanctuary man still here?’

‘You haven’t had anything to eat again, have you?’

‘What’s eating? Remind me. Can you make some halfway-edible toast?’

She tossed her coat on to the hall table and went through to the kitchen.

‘Mrs Watkins ...’ Lol Robinson was on his feet. ‘It’s OK, I’m going. I just wanted to say thanks for what you did.’

‘Sit down, Lol,’ Merrily said. ‘You too, Jane.’

‘I’m making the toast.’ Jane walked across the stone flags, gathering up a half-wrapped loaf. She tossed three slices of bread into the toaster, plucked a butter knife from the drainer.

‘Listen. Colette Cassidy didn’t come home last night. The village is full of police.’

Jane dropped the butter knife.

‘They’ve searched the village and the orchard. They’re now starting to question her friends.’

Jane had gone pale.

‘Which includes you, flower.’

‘The stupid ...’ Jane picked up the knife and dug it into a slab of hard, cold butter.

‘So if you know anything,’ Merrily said, ‘maybe you should tell me first.’

Lol said, ‘This isn’t any of my business. I should go.’

‘You really don’t have to go,’ Merrily said. ‘But you should know the police are at your house. They found it had been broken into. In the course of their inquiries.’

Lol didn’t get up.

‘They probably think it was a bunch of stoned tearaways,’ she said, ‘from the party. So perhaps you need to tell them about your unpleasant musician friend.’

But she found herself wondering if this guy really existed. And what else she didn’t know about Lol Robinson, friend of Jane.

Lol was slowly interlacing his fingers. Jane pulled out the knife with a slab of yellow butter on the end, and looked at it. ‘What do they think happened to her?’

‘They don’t know, flower. Do they? What do you think happened to her?’

The kid pulled a smoking slice from the toaster, oblivious to the heat, laid it carefully on a Willow-pattern plate and began buttering it.

Lol Robinson turned his head towards her. Merrily turned her back on the Aga but hung on to its rail.

The knife was scraping backwards and forwards across the same crisp slice. Scritch, scratch, over and over.

‘Do they think she’s dead?’

‘Why do you say that?’ Merrily’s voice rose, like the voice of the single tone-deaf parishioner you regularly heard at the end of a hymn.

‘Somebody will be.’ Jane stopped buttering, picked up the plate and carried it across to her mother. Her hands shook.

‘You’re not making sense, Jane.’

‘I thought it might be you. Came in last night and I ... prayed for ... for a long time. I was going to go to the church this morning, do it properly, but then I thought you’d be there, so it ...’

‘Prayed? You?’

‘Only that you wouldn’t die,’ Jane said miserably. ‘I always have. I’ve never prayed for anything else in my whole life except that you wouldn’t bloody die on me.’

‘Flower,’ Merrily said gently, ‘why did you think I was going to die?’

‘When you see fruit and blossom on an apple tree at the same time, it means someone close to you—’

‘We haven’t got an apple tree.’

‘It was in the orchard! That used to be the church’s. The apple dropped off and rolled at my feet. My feet. Couldn’t have been more obvious if it was that big finger in the sky from the national lottery.’

‘That bloody Lucy Devenish!’

‘No! You bloody Christians!’ Jane said wildly. ‘You’ll believe any old shit if it’s in the Bible. Anything else—’ She sat down opposite Lol. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s dead or not. But somebody must be. These things don’t just happen.’

Lol said, ‘What happened with Colette?’

Merrily took a seat. All three of them around the table, like some screwed-up, dysfunctional family in a suitably dim and draughty kitchen. She told them everything that had happened this morning. Except for seeing Alison. And except for the poster about Merrily Watkins’s black mass.

‘Could she have gone off with some bloke?’

‘Maybe,’ Jane said moodily. ‘I think she did want to get laid at her party. Although being sixteen and able to do it legally seems to have taken the magic out of it.’

‘You think she wanted to go into the orchard to have sex with someone? Anyone in particular?’

‘The mood she was in, anyone other than Dean Wall. And in the orchard, maybe because ... because the orchard’s a taboo place. Colette loves, you know, breaking taboos.’

‘A taboo place? This is because of Edgar Powell’s suicide?’

‘Partly. And because things happen to you in the orchard, but they never happened to her. And—’

‘Excuse me,’ Merrily said. ‘Stop. Just stop there a minute. Things happen to you in the orchard? What things? And to who?’

‘Whom,’ Jane said.

‘Don’t push it, flower. Because sooner or later I’m going to have to talk to you about your sitting room. Plus, I’ve had next to no sleep. Plus a lot of other ... What things? ’

Jane looked down at the table. There came a clipped, authoritative knocking on the front door.

‘Oh.’ Merrily found a narrow smile. ‘I didn’t expect you so soon.’

‘Well, something was brought to my attention.’ Annie Howe wore a loose, white raincoat over her dark business suit. ‘Which rather puts Jane at the top of our list.’