The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘I don’t know. Bastards. I’ll have to put over a “mystery surrounds” piece, and then the telly’ll be on to it. Bastards.’

  Bella reversed the car into the entrance to the King’s Oak car park and pointed it back towards Hereford and Ledwardine.

  Jane said, ‘What have you got against the TV?’

  Bella laughed. Her side window was wound down and her elbow rested casually on the ledge. ‘What could I possibly have against people who get paid about twice as much as me for working less than half as hard? I love those guys.’

  There was no other traffic in sight in either direction, and when they rounded a bend and came upon the carnage in the road, Bella was doing over seventy.

  ‘But where is he?’ Merrily said. ‘Where’s he gone? What evidence have you got that he was even here, that he even exists, that you didn’t make him up?’

  ‘Jane saw him,’ Lol said.

  ‘When?’ It was nearly lunchtime. Time Jane was making a reappearance. It no longer seemed an entirely good thing for Jane to be out there, despite the police on the streets.

  ‘She came into the shop this particular afternoon ... to ask about Wil Williams. I ... asked her to mind the shop while I ... went and hid.’

  ‘Hid.’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  Nobody, Merrily thought, would make that up.

  ‘She could see I was scared and she was having fun with that. Like building him up as a drug dealer or something. She seems to have ... quite an active imagination.’

  ‘You’re not wrong.’

  ‘So I told her to forget all about him. I said he was just a guy it was hard to get out of your hair. And to tell Colette to keep out of his way too.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Merrily said. ‘You’re not big on child psychology, are you?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘So here she is – hypothetically – on the cottage doorstep at two in the morning. This is a girl who’d really quite like to get laid tonight – Jane said that. What happens? He invites her in?’

  ‘Or he says, why don’t I give you a lift home? You shouldn’t be out on your own on a dark night like this. And – I know this guy – once he had her in the car, he’d just keep on driving.’

  Merrily thought about this. ‘All right. We’ll wait till Jane comes back and we’ll talk it over with her. She’s had time to think about things. Several things, I hope. And then perhaps we’ll both go and see Howe.’

  ‘She’d only split us up, question us separately. That’s what they do.’

  ‘She couldn’t,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m not a suspect.’

  ‘You’re an accessory.’

  Merrily lit a cigarette. She said, ‘It’s at times like these when I usually suggest we kneel down together and pray for guidance.’

  ‘You’re not serious,’ Lol said.

  ‘It’s what I do,’ Merrily said.

  ‘I’d forgotten.’

  Outside, across on the square, a brass band began to play.

  32

  Bastard God

  BELLA SPUN THE wheel, hand over hand over hand, and the brakes and the tyres screamed and the hedge burst out at them from the wrong side of the road.

  ‘Shiiiiiiiiit!’

  Bella shrieking as they were torn across a tangle of branches and thorns with a grating noise rising to a high, thin whine like a scythe on a sharpening wheel.

  And ‘Shiiiiiit!’ again, and a wing mirror snipped away as Jane lurched against Bella, all the breath kicked out of her, and the windscreen was full of slapping branches before the radio car seemed to wrench itself out of the hedge, hit the tarmac again with a clanging jolt.

  The engine coughed once and stalled.

  Jane wasn’t aware of losing consciousness, but she seemed to awake into a deep, uncanny stillness, during which she could only think about that newspaper picture of her dad’s car, balled like paper, with him and his secretary and lover, Karen, all mashed up together inside.

  She became aware of a distant voice: Bella saying, almost calmly, ‘Got to get out. We’ve got to get out of here.’

  The voice repeating itself over and over again, but that was probably only in Jane’s head because Bella was saying now, ‘Are you all right? Are you all right, Jane?’

  Jane’s mind was searching back through thirty seconds of snapshot memories for the horrific reason Bella had braked and swerved and they’d come off the road.

  She sat up. The car was full of twigs and leaves. The recorder had fallen on to her trainers and she pulled one foot from underneath it, feeling for the door-pull. It still worked, but the door wouldn’t open.

  ‘Can’t get out my side,’ Bella said. Her velvet hat had come off and there were twigs in her hair and her face was raked with blood.

  ‘Hang on.’ Jane turned herself round, wedged both shoulders against the passenger door, her feet up against the handbrake. Heaved backwards, and the door sprang open and she slid out, clawing wildly at the air. Bella grabbed her hands before she could hit the tarmac. Let her sink down gently to the road.

  Bella was easing herself out of the car as Jane struggled to her feet. She saw the car was side-on to the road, blocking one narrow carriageway and half of the other. The steeple of Ledwardine Church prodded out of some trees about half a mile away. Bella leaned back against the car, put a tentative hand to her face.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Bella said. Jane remembered the window had been wound all the way down on the driver’s side, Bella leaning an elbow out, offering a bare face to the slashing twigs.

  ‘Jesus, my whole face is on fire. I’m gonna be disfigured for life. Still ...’ She smiled wanly at Jane through the streaks of blood. ‘You’re OK. And we’re not dead, are we?’ She pushed her hands through her hair, as though feeling for fractures. ‘And it’s not as if ... Oh no.’

  She sagged against the car, and they looked at each other, remembering. There was a white, almost wintry sun now, in a sky like tinfoil. Jane didn’t seem to be hurt at all, no cuts, no scratches, no aches, except for an ankle where the recorder had fallen. But she felt sick with dread, remembering what had been in the road. What was now concealed by the radio car, side-on against the traffic, except there was none, no vehicles in sight, no sounds of traffic, the road clear in both directions. This was the straight stretch into Ledwardine from Madley and few people came this way on a Saturday.

  Jane said softly, Til look.’

  ‘No.’ Bella stood up stiffly. ‘You stay there.’

  But they knew they were both going. They went slowly around the car, taking different routes to show they weren’t scared, Jane round by the boot, Bella by the bonnet.

  Somewhere in the car, a phone bleeped. Neither Bella nor Jane looked back.

  Jane saw the dead eyes of the ewe first. The ewe lay in a lump at her feet, like you sometimes came upon them dead in fields, bloodlessly dead for no apparent reason. Sheep seemed able to leave life behind in an instant, without suffering, without a thought. Poor sheep. They should die in grass, not on tarmac because of stupid farmers too mean to put in proper stock-proof fences. ‘Poor sheep,’ Jane said aloud, as though, by focusing all her sorrow on the ewe, there would be nothing more.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Bella said.

  There was some blood where she stood. Though not much of it. The blood was over a yard from the sheep, where there was another hump, a black and white checked blanket thrown over something. The blood was seeping from underneath the blanket.

  Jane stared at it, rejecting it. It was a blanket. There was nothing underneath it. It was a familiar pattern. It was just a blanket.

  ‘Please,’ she said, feeling her eyes bulge, her lips already stretching in pain and shock. ‘Please ...’

  ‘Don’t look,’ Bella said. ‘Let me.’

  But Jane was already bending down and lifting the hem. Out of the corner of an eye, she could see a wheel in the hedge.

  Jane looked down. Kept on looking.

&
nbsp; Under the summer-fine wool, the old warrior’s head lay in profile on the road. The lips closed under the hooked nose, one eye wide open, as blank as the ewe’s. The face weathered and reddened by the many years of wind, and now by sticky blood.

  When she’d come off her moped, the light, summer poncho had been thrown over her head.

  Bella was back in the car. Jane could hear the tight little bleeps as her fingers stabbed at the mobile phone.

  ‘No,’ Jane said. ‘No.’

  She pulled the poncho away, sank down to the tarmac. She didn’t know what to do. She was sure Lucy was breathing. She had to be breathing. She put her cheek against Lucy’s breast. That was a heartbeat, wasn’t it? She didn’t know what do.

  She looked up.

  The sky wore a remote, uncaring sheen.

  Through the blurred screen of her tears, Jane screamed into the mindless, heartless, self-satisfied face of her mother’s bastard God.

  33

  Superstitious Crap

  FROM THE HALL window, Lol watched her walking out of the gates, head down, shoulders squeezed in. He’d seen the shadows on her face and one of them was him.

  Should have kicked me out when you had the chance, Vicar.

  He looked around for Ethel, but she’d pattered off somewhere in the big, bare house in which they were both effectively trapped. Leaving him to walk round and round the kitchen in despair at what a really fucking small person he was, in every conceivable sense.

  He thought of his suicide. All the care and logic he’d put into the scheme to bring Alison to his door. Which was, face it, an insane thing to do. As insane as going to Alison last night and asking her why she’d left him, like this was going to make her think, yeah, why did I leave the poor little guy, what kind of a bitch did I become? And then return. Which he didn’t want. He didn’t want Alison back. He didn’t want his cottage back. He didn’t want to pick up his car.

  He was mad. Still very sick. He needed a small room and all his meals prepared. He needed his medication.

  Lol walked round and round the kitchen like a mouse looking for a gap in the skirting.

  Ascending the three steps to the wooden platform under the mirror sky, Merrily had this absurd vision of a scaffold, a beheading block. Or, even worse right now, the pulpit.

  ‘Oyez! Oyez!’ wailed the hired town crier, in his long red coat and three-cornered hat. ‘Villagers of Ledwardine! Be it known that ye festival will be commenced at three of the clock!’

  Merrily waited for Lucy Devenish to come striding out condemning it as a ludicrous travesty because, in over a thousand years of recorded history, Ledwardine had never had a town crier.

  ‘Merrily.’ Dermot Child clasped her right hand in both of his. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ In a light-green polo shirt with an apple motif, he looked bright-eyed and excited. In the unfortunate absence of Terrence Cassidy, he appeared to have acquired a festival.

  ‘Just one of those twenty-four-hour satanic viruses,’ Merrily said tightly. ‘I’m told it’s going around.’

  ‘Oh, that ..’ Dermot laughed. ‘Some semi-literate youngster. Don’t let it worry you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The posters, Merrily. Ignore it. It’s a joke, albeit a poor one.’

  ‘Posters plural?’

  ‘Well, I did remove a couple. One from the market hall, one from the bus shelter in Old Barn Lane. Hey.’ He squeezed her shoulders. ‘Kids. It’s kids.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Someone was broadcasting a sick, specious rumour. Somebody out to do damage. The hi-tech version of the anonymous letter. With a printer, they could turn out dozens, hundreds.

  ‘Anyway,’ Dermot said, ‘poor joke. How many would even understand it?’

  And so she took her seat on the platform, at the opposite end to Bull-Davies, festival president, who nodded. Councillor Garrod Powell followed her up. ‘Sorry I’m late. Car accident out on the Madley Road.’

  Dermot glanced at him. ‘Serious?’

  ‘Didn’t look much. Some young lunatic. Hadn’t no time to find out.’

  Well over a hundred people had drifted on to the square, which wasn’t bad for a mere opening ceremony; opening ceremonies were for the organizers. There were quite a few strangers among the villagers, most of them either drinking outside the Black Swan, where tables and umbrellas had been set up, or gathered around the craft and refreshment stalls in the market hall. Or watching the police. The Ledwardine Festival providing the perfect cover for the curious.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Dermot Child. Wearing a dark suit and a pale face, Terrence Cassidy was crossing the cobbles. ‘What we don’t need is a spectre at the feast. Brave of him and everything, but bloody hell ...’

  ‘Give the man some credit, Child.’ Bull-Davies stood up. ‘Terrence ... any news?’

  Cassidy mounted the platform, smiled stiffly at Dermot and sat down between Bull-Davies and Powell. He shook his head.

  ‘Never say die,’ Bull-Davies said thoughtlessly.

  ‘I had to come out,’ Terrence said sombrely. ‘Atmosphere’s so utterly oppressive in there. Merrily, I don’t suppose Jane ...’

  Merrily said cautiously, ‘Jane has every confidence that Colette can take care of herself. But ... no. She doesn’t seem to have seen her after anyone else. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Terrence,’ Dermot said, ‘I was simply going to pay tribute, in my opening speech, to the tremendous amount of work you’ve put in. But is there ... I mean, the police presence is pretty obvious ... What do you want me to say about ...?’

  ‘Nothing, Dermot. It has absolutely nothing to do with the festival.’

  Terrence stared straight ahead as a photographer took a picture of him on the platform. Dermot Child scowled – not at the intrusion of the Press for the wrong reason, Merrily thought, but because the silent, tragic, dignified Cassidy was going to upstage him.

  ‘All right, let’s get on with it.’ Dermot approached the microphone, tapped it. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, could we have your attention now, please?’

  He handled it well. He’d become Mr Ledwardine, round and rosy and polished. He thanked the tourist board, English Heritage, the Marches Development Board. Then he talked, as a native, about his village.

  ‘A few centuries ago, we were a flourishing market town, as you can see from the beautiful little market hall behind me. In those days, like most country towns, we had half a dozen shops. We still have half a dozen shops. We remain as we were. But, like Pembridge and Eardisley and Weobley, we’re no longer a town. We are no longer famous for our orchards and our cider. Indeed, we were in danger of becoming famous only ... for what we were.’

  Dermot paused. Merrily saw a police car, followed by another car, turning into Church Street from Old Barn Lane.

  ‘It would have been too easy,’ Dermot said, ‘to live in the past. To be a village of ghosts. To preserve our exquisite black and white buildings as no more than an open-air museum. But that would be to deny the power of the present.’

  The police car pulled up a respectable distance from the square, the plain car behind it. Nobody got out. A policeman in the front was leaning over his seat, talking to people in the back. Merrily glanced at Terrence Cassidy. He was on the edge of his seat. Above his jaw, a muscle twitched.

  ‘... the wealth of creative talent in our midst which makes Ledwardine a unique centre of excellence, an excellence which, between now and September, we plan – throwing off our traditional Herefordshire modesty – quite shamelessly to show off!’

  Mild laughter. The passenger door of the police car opened and a policewoman got out, moved to a rear door. ‘Please, God,’ Terrence whispered. ‘Please.’

  ‘Later, there’ll be concerts, exhibitions, morris dancing here on the square. But first,’ Dermot said, ‘we’d like to show off our very newest asset – our minister, our priest-in-charge, the, er ...’

  God almighty, Merrily thought, He’s going to say, The lovely ...

  ‘... the R
everend Merrily Watkins.’

  Behind the muted applause, as she stood up, Merrily distinctly heard a wolf whistle and at least two young male voices combining in a low, throaty, ritual ‘phwoaw ...’ As she moved towards the microphone, her calves felt weak. She saw the policewoman holding open the rear door of the police car.

  ‘Thank you, Dermot,’ Merrily said into the mike, the words slamming back from the twin speakers on the roof of a van parked in front of the Black Swan. ‘Bit early to call me an asset. My predecessor was here for over thirty years, so I

  A woman Merrily didn’t recognize climbed out of the police car with a heavy-looking black case under her arm. At the same time, DI Annie Howe was emerging from the plain car. Followed by Jane.

  ‘...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.’