Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘Speaks for itself, doesn’t it? I’ll go and see her. I’ll explain about Karl. I’ll spell it all out.’

‘Are you completely crazy?’ Jane snatched up the paper, waved it in his face. ‘She’ll nail you to the wall. How are you going to explain where you’ve been?’

‘She could be right, Lol,’ Merrily said. ‘With hindsight, it would’ve been better if you’d been sitting there when she came to talk to Jane yesterday. You’re still the best they’ve got. There’s at least enough circumstantial evidence to hang on to you for a few days. Which would be ... a strain.’

Thinking that if Howe’s team found a body Lol would be signing a confession before the week was out, just to get them off his back.

‘Give it another day,’ she said. ‘None of us needs to have seen a paper. Perhaps they’ll find her.’

‘Every day drops me further in it.’

‘Why? They carefully haven’t named you as a suspect.’

‘She cares, Lol.’ Jane smiled mischievously. ‘Don’t knock it.’

‘Don’t push it, flower.’

‘It was that good, huh?’

‘Make the breakfast.’ Merrily picked up the paper. ‘Where did this come from, anyway?’

‘It was on the mat,’ Lol said. ‘Is this the only Sunday paper you take?’

‘I don’t take it.’

‘I told you she didn’t,’ Jane said.

‘I normally collect the papers from the newsagent on the way back from Communion. This isn’t one of them.’

‘Well, it was on the mat,’ Lol said. ‘It must be a mistake.’

‘Laurence, in a village this size, you don’t mistakenly deliver papers to the vicarage. Somebody wanted us to see it.’

‘ Us? Lol said.

‘Alison know you’re here?’

‘Yes.’

‘That wise?’

‘She’ll keep quiet; she’s on her own knife-edge. I’ll tell you about that.’

Jane blinked. ‘Young Alison? You cracked it?’

Merrily said, ‘Make the breakfast, Jane. All right?’

Jane found some eggs. Put the toaster on. It was infuriating, but maybe, after what she’d said to Lol, this was not the best time to listen at the door.

And also, Mrs Leather’s The Folklore of Herefordshire was still open on the kitchen table. It had fallen open at that page. Portentous, right?

Search was made for her and she appeared to her friends

from time to time, but when they spoke to her she

immediately disappeared.

But suppose the friends had known the score? Suppose the friends had it totally sussed?

Her mother was told (probably by the wise man or woman)

... for whom read Lucy Devenish ...

that if seen again she must be very quickly seized, without speaking, or she would never come back. So one day, a year after her disappearance, her mother saw her and took hold of her dress before she could escape. ‘Why, Mother,’ she said, ‘where have you been since yesterday? ’

Jane had this sudden, crazy image of grabbing hold of the shoulder of the freshly materialized Colette’s sexy black dress, and Colette rounding on her, shrieking, ‘What the fuck are you playing at Janey? This is my poxy party!’

Jane laughed.

But why not? Why the hell not? OK, if it was all airy-fairy nonsense, total cobblers, if Colette had actually gone off with some smooth crack dealer from Hereford, then what was lost? Who was hurt?

The plain fact is, nobody, but nobody, apart from me, is ever going to try it.

OK. Practicalities. She couldn’t simply keep taking walks through the orchard on the off chance Colette would show. There had to be method in this. She thought back to the night it all began. The apple tree, the little golden lights.

Another element, though, if you followed Lucy’s logic, was crucial.

Cider.

‘Does she know what she’s playing with here?’

Merrily had a clear picture of Alison in the church that morning. Black shirt, gold pendant, knowing smile. James is full of shit.

Oh yes, Alison knew precisely what she was playing with.

And Lol, who’d been used and discarded, seemed to be able to live with that, now that he knew the circumstances, now that he understood. He was either a natural-born Christian or a natural-born sucker.

‘It’s good, at least, to have explanations,’ he said. ‘Looking back, my life’s been pretty short on explanations.’

‘It’s horrifying. What’s she want out of it? Half the hall? The farm? Half the debts?’

‘Goes deeper than money.’

‘Obviously. But this is a very old-fashioned guy. I really hate to imagine how he’s going to react when he finds out he’s been f—’

Merrily glanced at the door. They’d been whispering, but the kid had good ears and no scruples.

‘... and that his father may have killed someone. There’s certainly enough ground there to bury a body in.’

‘I don’t think,’ Lol said, ‘that Bull-Davies is under any illusions about his family. Last year, he apparently spent a lot of money on the only copy of some unpublished, handwritten addendum Mrs Leather had written to her folklore book. It was going to be auctioned; he got in first. It was all about apple orchards. With special reference to Wil Williams.’

‘Lucy know about it?’

‘Found out too late, presumably. Maybe she doesn’t have friends in auction houses. Alison came across it a few weeks ago. Not on the bookshelves. Rotting in the attic’

‘It shows the Bull family in a bad light?’

‘All it shows is how flimsy the evidence against Williams was. The farmer who accused him of bewitching his orchard ... according to Mrs Leather, all that amounted to was that it had been a very bad year for apples, except in the Ledwardine orchard, where the crop was very acceptable. The orchard, at that time, belonging entirely to the Church.’

‘So? God looks after his own. That was it? He bought the thing purely because it suggested his ancestor accepted iffy evidence of witchcraft in the year sixteen sixty-whatever?’

Lol shrugged. ‘Just, you know, an illustration of the level of James’s paranoia about his family. According to Alison.’

‘She’s got to be hard as nails.’

‘Hardened by circumstance.’

‘You are too generous, Lol. This is her brother.’

‘Half-brother.’

The sun had gone in. Another capricious spring day.

‘Lol, did she mention anything about another document? The Journal of Thomas Bull?’

‘There’re some volumes of it in a bank in Hereford.’

‘Which is where, I suppose, they’re destined to stay,’ Merrily said.

Breakfast was a muted meal.

Jane produced boiled eggs and toast. Nobody mentioned Alison or Bull-Davies or the deaths of Lucy and Karl Windling or little golden lights or the Nighthouse. They talked like ordinary people with ordinary lives and only ordinary undercurrents. Like a family, thought Lol, who’d forgotten what a family was like.

They discussed how Merrily was going to spread the word about the personal appearance in Ledwardine Parish Church that night of its former incumbent, the Reverend Wil Williams, without attracting unwelcome publicity.

‘It’s a village thing,’ Merrily said. ‘And it has to stay that way. That’s why I want it done quickly. Done, finished with, everybody gets their say. The issue decides itself. That’s the theory, anyway. It would be good to get the Women’s Institute out in force. They’ll all fall for Stefan in a big way, lots of tear-filled hankies.’

‘What about the Press?’ Lol said. ‘You can’t keep them out.’

‘The way I see it, the search for Colette will overshadow everything. I really don’t think the Press would be interested. Unless someone told them.’