Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘There you go. Something’s happened to Jane and you’re in denial about it because she’s just a kid and you’re an ordained minister. Lucy would say that was a fairly primitive attitude – everything not connected with God must be ...’

‘Yeah,’ Merrily said. ‘I get the message.’

‘I’m sorry. You’ve been really good to me and I’m insulting you.’

‘Listen, I’m ... OK, maybe what happened to Jane – and to you – was just ... Lucy.’

‘No,’ Lol said.

‘She was a very persuasive woman.’

‘It wasn’t just Lucy.’

‘There’s something else, isn’t there? Something you talked about to Lucy Devenish.’

‘Tried to,’ he said cautiously.

‘You and Lucy talked about my daughter and something that happened to her?’

‘Kind of.’

‘All right.’ She put up both hands. ‘I’m not accusing you of anything. But it relates to what you told me before? About the girls?’

‘Everything relates to that,’ Lol said. ‘But this was scary.’

‘It was scary, but nobody thought to tell me.’

‘Like you said, I suppose it was because of what you are. Lucy said that when you were ready to hear this stuff, you’d go to her.’

‘And now it’s too late for that.’ Merrily stood up. ‘So let’s go and ask Jane.’

‘Both of us?’

‘Oh yes. I think so.’

Together, in silence, they walked up to the Apartment. They were nearing the top of the second staircase when the radio came on in the sitting room/study. Newstime on Radio Hereford and Worcester.

‘ The search for a Herefordshire schoolgirl has been stepped up following the discovery of clothing in a ditch two miles from her home. Police say they’re now very concerned for the safety of Colette Cassidy, who disappeared from her sixteenth birthday party in the village of Ledwardine. This report from Bella Ford. ’

Bella Ford said over a telephone line, ‘ The items of clothing were found by a farmer about midday at King’s Oak Corner between Ledwardine and Madley. Police have declined to say what exactly they were but confirm that they’ve been identified by Colette’s parents as belonging to their daughter and probably worn by her when she disappeared. ’

‘Oh God, that means underwear,’ Merrily whispered, ‘or they’d be sure she was wearing them.’

‘ Detective Inspector Annie Howe, who’s leading the search for Colette, says they now have to be worried for her safety and are appealing to the public for any information. It was around two o’clock this morning when Colette, a student at the Hereford Cathedral School— ’

‘It’s him,’ Lol said. ‘It has to be.’

‘ —elderly woman has died in a road accident—

‘You don’t know that. Hang on. Lucy.’

‘ —country lane near Ledwardine. The dead woman, who was riding a moped, has not yet been officially identified. No other vehicles were involved. ’

They heard Jane moan. ‘You don’t know. You don’t know anything !’

‘ —Meanwhile, a man who died when his car left the Hereford to Abergavenny road and smashed into a stone wall at Wormbridge late last night has been identified as Anthony Karl Windling, from Abingdon, near Oxford. There’s been a mixed reaction to the news that fifty thousand pounds of National Lottery money is to go to— ’

The radio went off. Merrily turned to find Lol sitting on the stairs. She looked up to see Jane in the doorway of the sitting room/study. Nobody spoke.

LOL LOOKED UP at her from his stair, like one of those small dogs that quivered. He was still institutionalized, Merrily thought. Looking, with Lucy gone, for someone else to administer the drug of reassurance. Mutely asking what he was supposed to feel.

‘Where’s Wormbridge?’ he said at last.

‘It’s a place you pass through when you’re heading for Abergavenny and the M4.’

‘So he was leaving.’

‘He must have been very drunk,’ she said. ‘That’s the usual reason cars go out of control when no other vehicles are involved.’

‘Yes.’

He shook his head slowly, like a boxer coming up after being knocked to his knees, only to be told that he might still win on points. Some part of him trying to equate the random, meaningless deaths of his mentor and his tormentor within the same twenty-four hours, both in road accidents with nobody else involved. Punch-drunk. Not sure what any of it meant.

‘So Colette ...’

‘Ruled out, Lol. According to that report, he died last night. When she was still at the party. They never met. It’s all a bitterly ironic coincidence.’

I’ve been there, she wanted to say, sensing Sean moving towards her across bare, bedroom floorboards, smiling through his fatal injuries. I’ve been exactly there.

Feeling, in one of those spinning, crystal moments, that they must both be part of the same bizarre pattern.

And then, turning, she saw Jane looking down at them in manifest bewilderment from the doorway of the sitting room/ study. Her face was white and blotched, her usually sleek dark hair like knotted string.

She said, ‘Mum, will you come in? Please?’

They clung together for a long time, Jane’s hot, wet, sticky face against Merrily’s under the blue and gold ceiling, Jane’s body shuddering as the accordion was wheezing up from the market square, and Merrily found she was crying too, for Miss Devenish and Sean and even the wretched Windling, united in road-death. Crying for Colette and the suffering Cassidys and other sufferings, known and unknown, and Lol and all his wasted years and all those senseless wasted days for Jane and her, hiding from each other behind screens of divisive superstition.

From the square came a chattering of polite, muted applause. Jane broke away and stood in the centre of the room as if unsure where she was. She swallowed. Merrily looked around.

The cheap stereo and its white-cased speakers sat on bare boards. There was also the old couch the kid had insisted on having in her bedroom in Liverpool, even though you had to climb over one of its arms to get to the bed. There were paperbacks in piles. There was Edwin, the teddy, one-eared and balding. Familiar items. But the blue of the timber-framed walls and ceiling made the room dark and mystical, like a grotto in a wood. The yellow-white lights were out of an over-the-top starry night by Van Gogh.

‘Lucy said ...’ Jane sniffed and straightened up. ‘She told me to like paint it out of my head. To externalize it.’

‘She told you to paint all this?’

‘She gave me this book of hers to read, The Little Green Orchard, and this kid in the book did that. She was afraid of the orchard until she brought it home in her head and did drawings and that gave her ... not control, exactly, but like a stake in the orchard, a connection. I’d already told Lucy about the Mondrian walls idea, so ...’

‘This is what you saw in the orchard? The night you ...’

‘The night Colette dragged me into the orchard and she was trying to scare me, saying the ghost of Edgar Powell had been seen by the tree where he shot himself. But when I looked up, instead of seeing something horrible and grisly, it was—’

Jane looked up to the ceiling.

‘It was beautiful?’ Merrily said.

‘Yeah. I was floating. It was awesome. And warm. Dreamy. It was like outside time. And all these little lights moving about among the branches, and they were like ... like they had existence. Life. You felt they were responding to your moods. Needs. Lucy said it was kind of reaching out to me. The spirit of the orchard.’