by Phil Rickman
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.’
‘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.
