Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘...I ...’

Jane was shouting at Howe, who was holding up both hands. A policeman moved in behind Jane. Merrily couldn’t hear the shouting, but she saw, in a moment of rigid disbelief, that Jane’s face was pulsing with rage and tears.

‘... have to go. I’m sorry.’

Sorry ... orry, the speakers snapped back, as she stumbled away from the mike, down the wooden steps.

As she pushed through the crowd, she heard a man remark that if he’d known the vicar was coming he’d have worn a plastic mac.

Annie Howe said, ‘I should take your daughter inside, Ms Watkins, she’s had a shock.’

Jane glared at her, muttered, ‘Cow.’

‘Right!’ Merrily pointed at the vicarage gates. ‘In! Now!’

Jane scowled and walked about ten yards, to just inside the gates. Stood there, defiant, streaks down her face.

Merrily said to Howe, ‘You’d better tell me.’

‘There was an accident. One of the traffic people will be along in due course to take a statement from Jane.’

‘Accident?’

Howe said impatiently, ‘Jane appears to have bummed a lift from a radio reporter who’d discovered an aspect of our investigation we were not prepared to discuss. On the way back, they swerved to avoid a road accident which had already happened. Jane claimed to know the victim and became very distressed. She was reluctant to leave the scene, and we had to bring her back.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Not formally identified yet. Look, I have to go. I suggest that unless she has something specific to tell us, you keep the child out of our hair.’

‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘if one of my parishioners has been hurt in a car accident, I want to know about it.’

Annie Howe, walking away, told her who they understood it was and that she was dead.

Merrily thought Lol was going to collapse. She made him sit down. He sat at the kitchen table and stared at a white wall. He didn’t move. Around him, the kitchen was black and white and grey. Jane’s eyes were smudges. She was standing in the middle of the room, pulling at her hair.

‘Stop it, flower. Please.’

‘ That apple! ’ Jane sobbed. ‘The apple was Lucy. Why didn’t I realize that?’

‘Sit down, Jane. This is—’

‘ She didn’t want to know.’ Jane’s eyes were hot and flashing. ‘It was, Get traffic out here, Mumford, we don’t want the damned road blocked all afternoon. I said, Do you know who this is? For Christ’s sake, do you know who this is?’

‘It was just another accident to her, Jane. And she’s CID. Not her problem.’

‘They wouldn’t let me stay. I wanted to stay with her. I wanted somebody she knew to be there when she woke up.’

‘But she wasn’t going to wake up,’ Merrily said gently. ‘Was she? Look ... it was one of those freak accidents. A sheep seems to have run out into the road and she hit it and came off her bike and hit her head on the road. It must have been instantaneous. She wouldn’t have known a thing about it.’

‘She was the apple,’ Jane said bleakly. ‘It was an old and withered apple. I even told her about the apple. I told her. I told her about her own death!’

She started to pull her hair again.

Merrily walked over and pulled her hands down. They stood there facing each other, Merrily clutching both Jane’s hands.

‘This is no time,’ Merrily said, ‘for that superstitious crap.’

And knew as soon as it was out, Jane’s expression curdling, that this was about the worst thing she could have said.

MERRILY WAS ON her knees with a plastic dustpan over the rubble of mugs Jane had swept from the drainer.

She was very, very sorry about Lucy. She’d really liked Lucy for her independence, her forthright attitude, her wonderful eccentricity. But – she could hear Jane’s feet on the stairs, big, childish clomps – the fact remained that the old woman had caused the kid to reinvent her life as a fairy tale.

The phone started ringing. Lol took over the dustpan. Ted Clowes’s lawyer-voice on the line. The it’s-my-job-to-protect-your-interests-but-you-aren’t-making-it-easy-for-me voice. The sound of another gulf fast widening.

‘You say you’re well, but you clearly aren’t. Far from it. Have to say, Merrily, that what I’d very strongly advise, as your churchwarden, is that you permit me to revert to my original plan. Bring in Norman Gemmell to conduct tomorrow’s services.’

‘Ted. No. Wait.’ Everything spinning away from her, like the fragments of the mugs. ‘If you’re talking about the opening ceremony just now – the police brought Jane back. She’d just seen the accident ... Miss Devenish? She was distressed. You see your daughter brought back in a police car, in tears—’

‘Very tragic,’ Ted said – his measured, will-reading voice. ‘But everyone said it was going to happen one day, the way she’d ride that thing in the middle of the road, too old for it, refused to wear a crash helmet, and the local police too tolerant – or scared of her, more like – to enforce the law. Ridiculous situation. An accident—’

‘—waiting to happen. Sure.’

Didn’t some people just love it when an accident-in-waiting finally came through? She remembered Ted, in his quick guide to village characters, telling her how you’d find the famous moped on its side on some grassy verge and you’d slam on your brakes, only to discover Miss Devenish lying in a field on her back, smiling contentedly at the sky, a straw in her mouth.

‘And the way Jane’s been hanging around her ... I did warn you about that. Don’t get too close, I think were my words.’

‘Yes. Thank you, Ted.’ She felt like clubbing him with the phone. ‘I need to ask you, are there any relatives in the parish?’

‘None left alive I know of. McCready’s her solicitor, he’ll deal with all that.’

‘No, I meant— Oh, forget it.’

‘I’m trying to be down to earth, Merrily. Trying to rescue a runaway situation. Somebody has to.’

‘ Situation ...?’

‘You should never have gone out on that platform this afternoon. Here was I, telling people you’d contracted a stomach bug, and now it starts to look like, shall we say a nervous complaint?’

‘Oh, a nervous complaint. I see.’

‘Merrily, I don’t know what your personal problems are, as you haven’t seen fit to come and talk to me about them, but I do know that people are beginning to see you as a little too ... too ...’

He broke off. The line throbbed with the unspoken: he’d seen the posters and God knew what else. And one did have to think of one’s own position in the community.

‘Lucy Devenish,’ Lol said, ‘can’t die like this.’

‘Lucy Devenish just did,’ Merrily said gently. ‘And there’s nothing you or Jane, with due regard to superstitions and omens, can do to alter that.’

He stopped pacing. From the market square came the merry wail and thump of an accordion band, for the morris dancing.

‘Not Christian, I suppose. Omens.’

Merrily shook out a cigarette. ‘You smoke, Lol? I can’t remember.’

‘Used to.’ He took one, his fingers twitching. ‘Thanks. There’ve been shocks, but this ... She could make you believe you weren’t abnormal, you know? Everything has a rational explanation, she’d say. Just that most people’s idea of what’s rational is severely limited.’

‘Especially the Church’s?’

‘Maybe. She’s dead, I’m alive. Where’s the divine logic there?’

‘I’m supposed to know that? Being a priest?’

‘I can’t see you as a priest,’ Lol said. ‘I don’t know why someone like you would want to be a priest.’