The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Some. After that, I went a bit ...’

  Gigging doesn’t come easy when your last public appearance was in court. When your parents have thrown you out – spawn of Satan – and you’re living in one room over a fish and chip shop in Swindon. And your music is stuck in a time warp and you keep dwelling on Nick Drake who was afraid of playing live and so never built up a following, so his records didn’t sell and the black depression set in – the ‘Black-Eyed Dog’ at the door, like the ‘Hellhound on my Trail’ of the 1930s blues singer Robert Johnson who was so shy they had to record him facing the wall and died at twenty-six, just like Nick Drake. And you’re getting more and more confused and taking pills and you get it into your head that there’s some dark virus in the music, passed from Johnson to Drake and maybe other people in between, and now it’s in you.

  The band fizzles out, as bands do. You’re living alone in one room and a toilet. One day, Dennis Clarke, the drummer, comes to see you.

  Suburban Dennis is appalled at the way you’re living, the stuff you’re taking, your hair unwashed, your eyes way back in your head where it’s always night. And your current girlfriend, who picked you up in a pub, is nearly old enough to be your mother, almost certainly on the game, and she takes your money and brings you drugs. You’re ill and she’s making you worse.

  The truth of it was blindingly obvious to Merrily.

  ‘You were afraid of young girls, weren’t you? You were probably even afraid of girls your own age in case they turned out to be younger than they said they were, right? You felt safe with this woman.’

  Lol shrugged.

  ‘Are you still afraid of them, Lol? Were you afraid of Jane? Even though you came into the house with her last night? Went up to her room?’

  Lol’s fist tightened.

  It was this Dennis who realized Lol had had a breakdown. Dennis who got him into the hospital. Dennis and a mate of his who was a doctor. Voluntary, of course. Lol was a voluntary patient. No kicking and screaming, no straitjackets. On the other hand, no analysis. No therapy that you couldn’t swallow with a glass of water. But he was glad of the rest.

  And time passed.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Yeah, I know, I know. It’s very easy for people on the outside to say you should have got yourself out. But you get very ... grateful. It’s to do with people helping you. Stopping people helping you, that’s the hard bit. Saying, no, I don’t want help, I don’t need your help. I’m all right, piss off. It was like Karl – he helped me get through the court thing.’

  ‘How did he do that, Lol?’

  Lol sighed. ‘He gave me stuff to make it so that it didn’t matter.’

  ‘Or so you didn’t have second thoughts about implicating him. Was that how you got started? Was it heroin?’

  ‘No. I don’t know what it was. Well, I do. But that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t addiction, just reliance. That’s different. I think. But the more you took, the less it mattered, sure. In hospital, they call it your medication.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Can we skip the hospital? I did get out eventually. People helped. Dennis again. Then this sound-engineer we once worked with, Prof Levin, who was an alcoholic, nice guy, he put me in touch with Gary Kennedy, who was looking for a lyricist. So things looked up, money came in, quite a lot. Things were better.’

  And then there was Alison. Alison was a friend of one of the nurses at the hospital, who’d become a friend of Lol’s and kept in touch. Alison was the first girlfriend he’d had in a long, long time who was younger than him. So Alison was progress. She also made Lol realize he wasn’t such a young person any more, and where had it gone, his youth?

  Missing years. You never make up for missing years. But he’d made it through to the other side of something. Unlike Nick Drake and Robert Johnson, he had not died, although there’d been a period when the thought of it hadn’t frightened him too much.

  Listen, Alison had said – this beautiful creature, too beautiful to entirely believe in – listen, why don’t we get out of here?

  They’d found the cottage the very next day. Like it was meant, Lol said, and something about the way he said it made Merrily wonder. She found herself thinking of Alison. On the square at night with an upper-class drunk calling her a whore, a slinky, slinky, whore. And that morning in the church. James is full of shit, I thought I should tell you that.

  What are you full of, Alison?

  She stood up. ‘Let’s have some more tea, Lol’

  He looked at her. He nodded. He didn’t ask her if she believed him, and because of that she found she did.

  On the square, a TV cameraman was unpacking his video gear. The local radio woman snorted. ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘Bella ...’

  The radio woman turned towards a man leaning out of the window of a chunky, blue four-wheel-drive thing. He beckoned her over. Jane followed, not sure why.

  ‘You know where King’s Oak Corner is, Bella?’ the man in the four-wheel-drive asked.

  ‘Maybe. What for?’

  ‘Developments,’ the man in the four-wheel-drive said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ The radio woman hugged her recording kit, looked unconvinced.

  The man held up a mobile phone. ‘I know a man with a police scanner. He reckons there’s some interest in King’s Oak Corner. Just if you’re going that way, Bella, my darling, we could follow you, and don’t say I never do you any favours.’

  ‘Yeah, all right.’ Bella nodded towards the cameraman, who’d met up with this sassy-looking girl in a long, black mac. ‘Be casual. Don’t want the circus, do we?’

  He nodded, and the four-wheel-drive crawled to the edge of the cobbles. Bella made a play of standing around and looking at her watch before making her way to the radio car.

  Where Jane was waiting for her.

  ‘OK, if I come with you?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Bella said.

  ‘She’s my best friend. Colette.’

  ‘Sounded like it. I bet you don’t even know what she looks like.’

  Jane stepped out of the way of a troupe of jingling morris dancers alighting from a minibus. Several of them were laughing at something, evidently unaware of anything going on apart from the launch of the Ledwardine Festival.

  ‘Please,’ Jane said.

  ‘We’re not supposed to take members of the public in this.’ Bella unlocked the radio car with a bleeper. ‘BBC regulations. Sorry.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s OK.’ Jane sighed. ‘I suppose I could ask those TV people.’

  The morris dancers headed up the steps to the Black Swan. There was a muted cheer from inside.

  ‘All right, you evil little bitch,’ said Bella. ‘Get in. But if they’ve found a body, you keep well out of the way or we’ll both be stuffed.’

  31

  Accessory

  OF THE THREE roads close to Ledwardine, the B road, in the west, was the quietest. It was an old road which had been rerouted, straightened and widened, taking a strip off the great orchard and dividing two farmhouses, including the Powells’, from the village. A mile out of Ledwardine, spectacular views opened up, across the lush, quilted Wye Valley to the Black Mountains on the Welsh border.

  ‘It’s beautiful, sure,’ Bella said, ‘but not so terrific as a news area. Well, not usually anyway.’

  It was clear that Bella was secretly hoping Colette was dead. Jane thought you must really hate yourself for that, if you were a reporter or an ambitious detective – wishing for something really awful to happen to somebody while you just happened to be on the spot.

  ‘I don’t really work here,’ Bella said. ‘I’m on what they call an attachment. I was in Manchester for two years, then London for a bit, but I was a naughty girl and it was either this or back into researching or out. Six months, then they’ll review my position, as we say. So how far’s this King’s Oak Corner?’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Jane, ‘I thought you knew.’

  ‘Do I hell. I did bloody
well to make it here from Hereford. If I’d said I didn’t know where it was, Chris might’ve clammed up.’

  ‘So how would you have found it if I hadn’t been with you?’

  ‘Stopped and asked somebody, I expect. But you do know, don’t you, chuck?’

  ‘There’s a pub called the King’s Oak about two miles on, where you turn left. We go past it on the school bus.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’ Bella speeded up.

  King’s Oak Corner. It was a long way from the orchard, wasn’t it? Perhaps the message the guy had picked up on his police scanner related to something else entirely. Because it was a long way from the orchard.

  In Jane’s mind, an old, withered apple rolled along the snowy-petalled orchard floor to her feet.

  She gave her head a brisk shake. ‘What do you think they might have found ... if not ... you know?’

  ‘Search me. Chris’s mate could’ve got it wrong, but at least it gets me out of bloody Ledwardine for the big opening ceremony. If there are no developments on the missing girl or she gets found alive, I’m supposed to put together a package on the festival as well, yawn yawn. What I want is just to tie it into the main story ... festival goes ahead despite missing girl drama. Rather than have to interview the little fat guy about his choral work, et cetera. What’s she really like, bit of a sod?’

  ‘Colette? She’s OK.’

  ‘Oh, so you do know her?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She got a boyfriend?’

  ‘Nobody regular.’

  ‘What about you, Jane? Gonna stick around and shack up with a farmer or get out soon as you can?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Bella was pretty direct; Jane could relate to that. ‘I don’t really know what I want to do. What’s your job like?’

  ‘Job’s fine. It’s some of the people you have to work for. What’s your old man do?’

  ‘He was a lawyer. He’s dead.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry, chuck.’

  ‘And my mother’s a priest.’

  ‘Really?’ Bella glanced sideways at Jane. ‘Hey, hold on ... bloody hell, Merrily—’

  ‘Watkins.’

  ‘Well, well. How d’you feel about that?’

  ‘Mixed.’

  ‘I’ve only seen her picture in the paper, but she looked like an otherwise normal person. Attractive. Why’d she do a thing like that?’

  ‘Become a priest? God knows.’

  ‘Grief? Like medieval widows used to go into a nunnery?’

  ‘Definitely not. It started before he died, anyway. Like, I know she got pretty friendly with our local vicar and his wife – this was when my dad ... when they were going through a difficult patch over a few things. And she started helping this guy with his parish stuff, advising people with problems. She’s pretty smart. And then it just seemed she was reading the lessons in church and stuff like that, and it just sort of crept up, and one day it was like, Jane, we need to have a little chat, Mummy’s going to train for a special new job. I was about nine.’

  ‘Your dad was alive then?’

  ‘Yeah. He got killed in a car crash. But he was alive when she decided to go for it. Hey ... you’re not planning to use any of this, are you?’

  ‘Me? No way. How did your dad feel about it?’

  ‘He was seriously pissed off about it. But things weren’t good between them by then, anyway.’

  She watched the countryside go past, views she’d seen a hundred times, fields of sheep and cows. But it all looked different today. Like it had a pulse.

  It was really weird, Bella asking about Mum, why she’d done it. Because there had to be something, didn’t there? Or there would be with her. It wouldn’t be like, Oh, I like helping people but I couldn’t cut it as a nurse, so I’ll be a vicar, that’s cool. Like there was the problem with Dad, things he was doing that she thought maybe she ought to like atone for. But that’s not enough, is it?

  Realizing she wouldn’t have thought, even a few weeks ago, that there would need to be anything else because the word spiritual didn’t mean much until she was having long talks with Lucy. Until after she got pissed on cider and fell asleep in Powell’s orchard and looked up.

  ‘This the turning?’ Bella said.

  ‘What? Oh ... Oh, yeah.’ The black and white pub was up ahead. Vehicles including a police car on its parking area. Not far around the corner, Bella had to pull up for a hurriedly erected sign saying, police, road closed.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Jane said. ‘There really is something.’

  Suddenly, she didn’t want to get out of the car.

  ‘All right,’ Merrily said, taking control. ‘You can’t go back to Blackberry Lane. They’ll nick you. Annie Howe will not believe you. She’ll make your life unbearable. Until they find Colette or some ... some other direction, you should stay here. The church does this sort of thing. It’s called sanctuary.’

  ‘It’s called being an accessory,’ Lol said.

  Merrily laughed. She didn’t know why.

  ‘Listen, you have enough problems,’ Lol said. ‘The longer I’m missing, the more the finger’s going to point my way. If they find out the vicar’s hiding me, what’s that going to look like?’

  ‘Priest-in-charge,’ Merrily said.

  In charge? Five minutes ago, she’d taken a phone call from Uncle Ted who’d informed her that, in view of her illness, they’d organized a locum for Sunday, a retired rector from Pembridge, Canon Norman Gemmell. Only too glad to step into the breech, old Norman. Merrily, who had not been consulted, had suggested Ted telephone Norman immediately to say that it wouldn’t, after all, be necessary to iron his surplice. Like the fallen jockey needs to get back into the saddle, the crashed pilot back behind the joystick, she had to get up in that pulpit, show to the congregation of doubters a face washed clean of vomit.

  ‘If I quit, I quit,’ she told Lol. ‘But I’m not slinking out the back way. And nobody tells me who I accommodate in my vicarage.’

  She saw he was looking at her with something verging on awe. She sat down, reached for cigarettes.

  ‘Lol, do you never feel you’ve been pushed around once too often?’

  ‘The problem is sorting out who’s pushing you around because it serves their purposes or it’s fun and who’s genuinely trying to help you.’

  And he’s been pushed around by the best, she thought. Alison, this Windling guy, Lucy Devenish.

  ‘That’s too complicated for me,’ she said. ‘But if you ever think I’m pushing, you tell me, OK?’

  The phone rang again in the hall. News travelled fast in Ledwardine. It was Dermot Child. He was delighted to hear she was so much better. He thought he just ought to mention – but, of course, everyone would understand if she still felt a little too frail – that she was to have said a few words at this afternoon’s opening ceremony. Poor old Terrence had had her down for two-thirty.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ Merrily said, not letting herself think.

  It was that word frail that did it.

  She put the phone down, went back into the kitchen, found Lol looking no less worried.

  ‘What if it was Karl?’ he said. ‘He was drunk, he was angry, and he’s not there any more.’

  ‘Oh.’ She sat down opposite him. ‘If Colette came to his door – your door – at two in the morning, how would he react?’

  ‘Like it was his birthday,’ Lol said.

  Bella pulled the recording gear from the well by Jane’s feet. ‘If you come, you keep quiet, OK?’

  ‘I think I’ll stay here.’

  Bella flashed her a look of concern. ‘She really is a good friend of yours, isn’t she?’

  ‘We go back,’ Jane said. They went back less than a month; it felt like half a lifetime.

  ‘Stay cool,’ Bella said. ‘It may not be.’

  Jane sat and watched her stride boldly towards the police barrier, clutching the recording gear. The four-wheel-drive had pulled up behind them, and Bella was joined by the other reporter, Chris,
and a photographer. A uniformed constable appeared, making these negative wiping gestures with his arms, but the photographer started taking pictures and Bella and Chris marched right up to the barrier.

  Jane couldn’t see, from where the car was parked, what was happening the other side. She was thinking about that faraway night in the orchard. Colette saying, I often come here.

  And Jane had said, Aren’t you scared?

  And Colette had turned sly. You mean of the ghost of Edgar Powell? Hey, listen, he’s been seen. Old Edgar Powell, the headless farmer. All aglow and hovering about nine inches off the ground.

  Colette hadn’t been scared of the ghost of Edgar Powell or anybody else. She thought it was all a joke. And yet – and this had occurred to Jane when she was giving Bella that spoof interview on tape – despite being a cool, city chick with a professed disdain for the countryside and wildlife and all that, Colette was secretly fascinated by the orchard. Compelled, kind of seduced. I often come here, she’d admitted, pissed. Before forcing Jane to look up into the branches. And then, when Jane’s reaction had been ... well, not what she’d expected, it must have hardened into a desire to really know about this. Giving Jane the third degree outside the chip shop, giving her the Hazey Jane album.

  Colette must have gone again and again to that orchard, drawn by something she couldn’t explain, that the cool chick in her sneered at but something deeper in her perceived as being sexy as hell.

  And when something happened, it happened to Jane.

  Bella was coming back, with Chris and the photographer, Chris smacking a fist into a palm. There was something. Jane tensed as Bella got into the car, handed her the tape machine.

  ‘What?’ Jane said. ‘What.

  Bella started the engine. ‘They won’t give us anything. They’re holding a Press conference at four, at Hereford Police Station. They’ve found something, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t a body. No sign of a meat wagon or anything. People in plastic suits, though. Chris is going to hang on here for half an hour, see if there’s anything. I’ll have to shoot back, grab some actuality of the opening of the festival in case the parents come out for it.’