The Wine of Angels

27 High Flier

SIX A.M AND fully light, if overcast and cool. A thin, sharp breeze blew apple blossom over the churchyard wall from which the church noticeboard projected.

On it, a printed poster for the festival opening – the old, prosaic title, Ledwardine Summer Festival having pushed out Dermot’s Old Cider suggestion precisely because most of the posters had already been printed. But over this poster another smaller one, A4 size, had been drawing-pinned, giving notice of a

Special midnight service

THE REVEREND MERRILY WATKINS

will be holding a

BLACK MASS

(Bring your own sickbags)

Merrily stared at it for several seconds, quite shocked, before understanding dawned. Being sick in church was allegedly one way of identifying yourself as a Satanist.

This was probably one of the high-school kids with a computer. Things could be difficult for Jane on Monday, with the story all round the school. She tore down the notice and crumpled it up, forcing a smile, even though there was no one to observe it. If you didn’t smile you would go completely out of your mind. If anyone could handle this it was Jane.

But the smile wandered when she thought about the funeral card with Wil Williams, the Devil’s Minister on it. Could be the same person, couldn’t it? In which case, a schoolkid was less likely; it would be another move in the campaign, if such it was, to persuade her to keep the Coffey play out of church.

Which, of course, disinclined to feed Stefan’s obsession, she’d already decided to do, with a formal, public announcement of her decision at the buffet reception following her installation.

But that was yesterday. Before something she was insisting to herself was beyond her control had prevented her making her vows and established her as a weak, unstable woman entirely unfit to replace the stolid, long-serving Alfred Hayden.

Perhaps the parish really didn’t want her. Were ministers of the Church supposed to have regard to omens, or was that only for anthropologists and social historians, just as hauntings were the preserve of psychologists?

Something else not dealt with at theological college.

She was shivering inside the fake Barbour, feeling starved. She hadn’t really slept. It was well after two a.m. when she’d heard Jane come in, using her front-door key. Merrily lying on her bed, fully clothed, for over an hour in case the kid should drift into the drawing room and stumble over the refugee in his sleeping bag. In the event, Jane had come directly up to the third-floor bedroom next to the sitting room/study with its decidedly non-Mondrian walls.

About which Lol Robinson – rich coming from a manifest paranoiac – had told her not to worry too much. Something, possibly, that Miss Devenish would be able to explain.

She thought angrily that if she did leave this village it would not be because of her own humiliation but because of what Ledwardine – or something, or even Miss Devenish – was doing to Jane.

She dug her hands into her coat pockets and walked, head down, into the market place. It didn’t feel like a spring morning. The glorious, false summer was in suspension, the blossom on the churchyard apple trees looking grey, like ice.

A few cars were still parked on the square, and she saw that one was a police car. Some damage during or after the party? Vandalism? A break-in?

A compact figure in a flat cap and muffler waved at her and crossed over from Church Street. ‘Cold mornin’, Vicar.’

‘It sure is.’

He came and stood companionably beside her, unlit cigarette stub between his teeth. Had he been in last night’s congregation? She couldn’t remember. Either way, she felt absurdly pleased that Gomer Parry was still speaking to her.

‘En’t found her yet then, Vicar.’

‘Sorry?’

Gomer dipped his cigarette towards the mews enclosing Cassidy’s Country Kitchen. ‘Could be anywhere, see, flighty piece like that.’

Merrily looked from Gomer to the police car and back. ‘Colette Cassidy?’

‘You en’t yeard? Missing, she is.’

‘My God. Since the party? Jane didn’t say anything.’

‘Ah well,’ Gomer said, ‘mabbe ‘er’d left, see, ‘fore they knowed this girl wasn’t around n’more. Far’s I can make out, what happened, she’d brought in a few undesirables, and this din’t go down too well with that SAS bloke runs the restaurant, and there’s a bit of a row like and the next thing she’s walked out an’ they’ve all followed her and everybody’s dancin’ about the square an’ raisin’ Cain, half of ’em doped up to the eyeballs, an’ then the law rolls up and they’re off like buggery an’ ...’

‘Merrily!’

An urgent clacking of heels on the cobbles and Caroline Cassidy appeared in the entrance to the mews. Caroline as Merrily – and probably Ledwardine – had never seen her before, her eyes hot and glowing like small torchbulbs out of a Hallowe’en mask of ruined make-up.

Gomer Parry took one look and stepped hurriedly aside.

‘Oh, Merrily, I was going to send the police to you. Where’s Jane? Did Jane come home?’

‘Jane’s still in bed. I hope. Caroline, I’ve just heard.’

‘We should never, never, never have let it happen, but Terrence said, in Ledwardine, what could possibly go wrong? What has ever happened in Ledwardine? Merrily, I’m frantic. I keep thinking of that girl over in Kingsland who just disappeared, fourteen years old.’

‘I’m sure there’s nothing like that to worry about. Probably a bunch of them went off in a car to some club in Hereford and she’s just a bit sheepish about coming home. Colette’s very ... mature.’

‘She’s a child! Caroline’s mouth slack with fear. ‘You don’t know her. Everybody thinks she’s so precocious, but it’s all an act.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Merrily put an arm around her. ‘But I know that, with so many other people about, she’ll be OK. What actually happened?’

Caroline sniffed. ‘Come in and have ... have some coffee?’

Merrily thought of Jane back at the vicarage. She was still there, wasn’t she? And Lol Robinson, to whom she was giving sanctuary. A priest’s job was to help people in trouble.

‘OK.’

Lol awoke on the drawing-room rug to a dead fire and Ethel peering down at him from the sofa. He knew at once where he was and conflicting emotions crowded in on him, scaring him at first, like hungry fans after a gig.

The vicarage. Church property. His old enemy, the Church. This big, damp house: soulless. Why did all church buildings seem cold and forbidding and soulless?

Ethel nuzzled him and purred. It wasn’t the pain-purr this time. Cats could always put the past behind them, no matter how bad the past was.

He stroked Ethel and thought about Merrily Watkins, who was nothing like the Church, and felt a strange sense of lightness. In one night, he’d lost everything, his last hope of Alison coming back and then his house. He lay and almost luxuriated in the simplicity of it, knowing that as soon as he climbed out of this sleeping bag, responsibilities would tighten around him.

You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins and you are clothed in the heavens and crowned with the stars.

Wild.

He was filling the kettle when Jane appeared, in jeans and an orange cotton top. The skin around her dark eyes looked pink and swollen. She peered at Lol, recollecting slowly.

‘Oh, hell, she knows, right? I thought she was going to be like out cold for the entire night.’

Lol told her sincerely that her mother had been incredible. He told her about Ethel. ‘Lost a tooth, but she’s not vain.’

Jane smiled, but her eyes had a distant, haunted look. ‘Where is Mum?’

‘I think she went out.’ Lol adjusted the rubber band around his ponytail. He’d washed at the sink, but obviously couldn’t shave. ‘When she comes back, I’ll clear off. Sort things out.’

Jane sat down at the kitchen table. ‘This was the best thing. You can’t reason with people like that.’

‘No.’ He sat down opposite her. ‘It was the pathetic thing.’

Jane shook her head slowly. ‘Where did you sleep?’

‘In the parlour. On the rug. In a sleeping bag.’

‘Right,’ Jane said. And then he saw her face tense. ‘Where did you get the sleeping bag?’

‘From the room ... next to your bedroom.’

There was a moment of stillness in the kitchen before the kettle started to whistle.

‘Oh, great,’ Jane said tonelessly. ‘Oh, terrific’

Once inside the Country Kitchen, Merrily realized there must be at least one more police car on the square, but unmarked. Terrence Cassidy was at a central table with a man and a woman, the man taking notes, the woman asking questions.

‘Just try and calm down and think, Mr Cassidy. Think if there’s anyone you’ve missed out.’

Terrence, unshaven, raised a hand to Merrily. Caroline went across.

‘Anything?’

‘What we’re trying to do, Mrs Cassidy,’ the woman said, ‘is to compile a list of everyone who was at the party, invited or uninvited, and check, first of all, if anyone else is missing. That’s going to take time.’

‘What about the actual search?’ Caroline’s voice was frayed and jagged. ‘The woods ... the orchard. The orchard’s huge.’

‘We’ve still got some people out there, but it begins to look as if we need to extend the area of operation.’ The woman looked enquiringly at Merrily.

‘This is Merrily Watkins, our Priest-in-Charge,’ Terrence said. ‘Also the mother of a close friend of Colette’s.’

‘Ah.’ The woman stood up. ‘Good morning. I’m Detective Inspector Annie Howe, this is DC Mumford. Take a seat, Ms Watkins.’

DI Howe had a surgical look. Tall. Fine, light hair, thin lips. If she’d worn glasses they would have been rimless, Merrily thought. But she wasn’t a surgeon; she had a law degree. It had been in the Hereford Times. Annie Howe was new to the Division, a high-flier, thirty-one years old.

‘So your daughter was at the party? And her name would be ...?’

‘Jane. She’s fifteen.’

DC Mumford wrote it down. He was thickset and older than his boss by a good ten years.

‘And although she was a close friend of Colette,’ Howe said, ‘she clearly didn’t spend the whole evening with her.’

‘Don’t say was like that!’ Caroline shrieked.

‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Cassidy. Nothing negative was implied. Just that by the end of the evening, they weren’t quite so close, as they appear to have gone off in different directions. What time did your daughter get home, Ms Watkins?’

‘I don’t remember exactly. Perhaps around two ... two-thirty.’

‘Were you worried?’

Merrily smiled stiffly. ‘You’re always a bit worried, aren’t you? Even though you know they’re not far away.’

‘Were you aware of the disturbance on the square?’

‘Not really. There are several big trees between the vicarage and the road. Plus, I might have fallen asleep in front of the fire.’

‘Well, I’ll need to talk to your daughter. Unless Colette turns up soon, of course. Which she probably will’ Howe produced a narrow smile, which Caroline Cassidy must have found as comforting as a shot of morphine. ‘I don’t suppose Jane’s up and about yet.’

‘I don’t suppose she is,’ Merrily said.

‘Although you are.’

‘In my job, you find it hard to sleep after six. Holy Communion and all that.’

DI Howe nodded.

‘Ma’am.’ A uniformed constable had come in. ‘Got a minute?’

Howe and the PC moved over to the door. Merrily couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the constable was pointing through the window to where another policeman was waiting, with a radio. Howe was looking interested, raising her eyebrows.

‘Oh, my God,’ Caroline said. ‘Oh ... my ... God.’

28 Our Kind of Record

NOTHING TO WORRY about, DI Annie Howe had said, almost convincingly. And because Caroline Cassidy was clearly petrified by the possibility that the police had found a body, Howe revealed that it was simply a suspected burglary. At an isolated cottage in Blackberry Lane. Probably no connection at all.

To Merrily, this last statement sounded even less convincing.

Howe and Mumford had both left. Out on the square, a car was starting up. They were off to Lol Robinson’s cottage.

It had to be. The police would have routinely knocked on the door to ask if anyone had seen or heard anything in the neighbouring orchard last night. They would perhaps have found the place empty, this Windling gone, but obvious signs of a break-in.

She stayed with the Cassidys, and when Caroline got up to fumble at the coffee machine, she said quietly to Terrence, ‘If some of those kids were looking for somewhere to get drunk or smoke a little cannabis, and they found an empty house ... you know?’

‘Yes.’ He looked, for a moment, more hopeful. ‘She’s easily led, you know, whatever anyone says. Just a child.’

Merrily said nothing. She needed to get back and tell Jane and Lol Robinson what had happened. Sooner or later, he was going to have to explain to the police what this was all about, and she hoped his story would sound more plausible than it had last night.

The phone rang on the wall behind the counter. Caroline stumbled across, snatched it down.

‘Colette ...? Oh.’ She sagged. ‘Hello, Michelle. No ... No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Mother of one of Colette’s schoolfriends,’ Terrence said to Merrily. ‘We phoned as many as we could. Even though we’d seen some of them just an hour or two earlier when they came to collect their children.’

Merrily said, ‘Did they all go with Colette into the orchard?’

‘Some of them were too sensible,’ Terrence said bitterly. ‘Most of the others seem to have come back fairly quickly. Who wants to tramp around a place like that without torches or anything? Unless, as you say, they were looking for somewhere to experiment with drugs. I suppose you’ve seen some of that. You were in urban areas, weren’t you?’

She nodded but didn’t elaborate. The last thing he needed was to hear where some of these chemical experiments led.

Caroline said, ‘Yes. All right. Thank you, Michelle.’ Hung up the phone. ‘She says Cressida thinks we ought to talk to the DJ person, because Colette had gone off with his ghetto-blaster thing.’

‘They found it,’ Terrence said bleakly. ‘The police found it in the orchard, batteries flat.’

Caroline’s face crumpled like a wash leather.

‘As for the DJ – Jeff Mooney – he stayed behind just about long enough to present me with his ridiculous bill.’

‘Look.’ Merrily stood up. ‘I really think I ought to go back and talk to Jane. There’s always the possibility she knows something that might help. I’d like to give her a thorough grilling before the police get round to it.’

‘Would you?’ Caroline dabbed at her face with a tissue and went back to the coffee machine. She pulled two cups from a shelf. ‘Would you come back and tell us? If there was something. Anything at all?’

‘Of course.’

Terrence suddenly moaned. ‘The festival! I’d forgotten. We’ve got the ceremony this afternoon. To launch the festival. Crowds of people. We might even have the Press here.’

Oh yes, Merrily thought, you can certainly count on having the Press here this time.

‘Fuck the festival!’ Caroline slammed down both cups. ‘How can you even think of that at a time like this?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Terrence’s shoulders shook. His unshaven cheeks were wet.

At the entrance to the mews, Merrily almost bumped into a woman distractedly coming down from the market place.

‘Oh.’ Alison Kinnersley stepped impatiently to one side. She wore a genuine Barbour, one of the very long, expensive ones, like a highwayman’s coat. ‘Vicar. I’m so sorry. Excuse me.’

She hurried past Merrily into Church Street then stopped, called back.

‘Lucy Devenish – the cottage with the red door?’

‘I think so.’ It was not yet seven-thirty, early for a social call. ‘Brass knocker in the shape of an elf or something.’

‘Thank you,’ Alison said. It had begun to rain. It was clear she was in no mood for a conversation. She didn’t seem to have heard about Colette’s disappearance or noticed any police activity.

Alison strode off down the street in her highwayman’s coat, and didn’t look back. Merrily tried to imagine what she could want with Lucy Devenish. Tried to imagine her with the less-than-flamboyant Lol Robinson – living with him, chatting with him over breakfast, sleeping with him. And couldn’t.

She turned back towards the vicarage, almost running, because her legs felt too short and everything in her life seemed to be moving too fast for her and it was raining harder.

Jane had the door open before she could even get out her key. The kid’s hair was uncombed, her eyes swollen. She looked very young and forlorn, like a battered child.

‘Mum?’

‘Could you make some tea, flower?’ Merrily stepped inside, unzipped her coat. ‘The sanctuary man still here?’

‘You haven’t had anything to eat again, have you?’

‘What’s eating? Remind me. Can you make some halfway-edible toast?’

She tossed her coat on to the hall table and went through to the kitchen.

‘Mrs Watkins ...’ Lol Robinson was on his feet. ‘It’s OK, I’m going. I just wanted to say thanks for what you did.’

‘Sit down, Lol,’ Merrily said. ‘You too, Jane.’

‘I’m making the toast.’ Jane walked across the stone flags, gathering up a half-wrapped loaf. She tossed three slices of bread into the toaster, plucked a butter knife from the drainer.

‘Listen. Colette Cassidy didn’t come home last night. The village is full of police.’

Jane dropped the butter knife.

‘They’ve searched the village and the orchard. They’re now starting to question her friends.’

Jane had gone pale.

‘Which includes you, flower.’

‘The stupid ...’ Jane picked up the knife and dug it into a slab of hard, cold butter.

‘So if you know anything,’ Merrily said, ‘maybe you should tell me first.’

Lol said, ‘This isn’t any of my business. I should go.’

‘You really don’t have to go,’ Merrily said. ‘But you should know the police are at your house. They found it had been broken into. In the course of their inquiries.’

Lol didn’t get up.

‘They probably think it was a bunch of stoned tearaways,’ she said, ‘from the party. So perhaps you need to tell them about your unpleasant musician friend.’

But she found herself wondering if this guy really existed. And what else she didn’t know about Lol Robinson, friend of Jane.

Lol was slowly interlacing his fingers. Jane pulled out the knife with a slab of yellow butter on the end, and looked at it. ‘What do they think happened to her?’

‘They don’t know, flower. Do they? What do you think happened to her?’

The kid pulled a smoking slice from the toaster, oblivious to the heat, laid it carefully on a Willow-pattern plate and began buttering it.

Lol Robinson turned his head towards her. Merrily turned her back on the Aga but hung on to its rail.

The knife was scraping backwards and forwards across the same crisp slice. Scritch, scratch, over and over.

‘Do they think she’s dead?’

‘Why do you say that?’ Merrily’s voice rose, like the voice of the single tone-deaf parishioner you regularly heard at the end of a hymn.

‘Somebody will be.’ Jane stopped buttering, picked up the plate and carried it across to her mother. Her hands shook.

‘You’re not making sense, Jane.’

‘I thought it might be you. Came in last night and I ... prayed for ... for a long time. I was going to go to the church this morning, do it properly, but then I thought you’d be there, so it ...’

‘Prayed? You?’

‘Only that you wouldn’t die,’ Jane said miserably. ‘I always have. I’ve never prayed for anything else in my whole life except that you wouldn’t bloody die on me.’

‘Flower,’ Merrily said gently, ‘why did you think I was going to die?’

‘When you see fruit and blossom on an apple tree at the same time, it means someone close to you—’

‘We haven’t got an apple tree.’

‘It was in the orchard! That used to be the church’s. The apple dropped off and rolled at my feet. My feet. Couldn’t have been more obvious if it was that big finger in the sky from the national lottery.’

‘That bloody Lucy Devenish!’

‘No! You bloody Christians!’ Jane said wildly. ‘You’ll believe any old shit if it’s in the Bible. Anything else—’ She sat down opposite Lol. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s dead or not. But somebody must be. These things don’t just happen.’

Lol said, ‘What happened with Colette?’

Merrily took a seat. All three of them around the table, like some screwed-up, dysfunctional family in a suitably dim and draughty kitchen. She told them everything that had happened this morning. Except for seeing Alison. And except for the poster about Merrily Watkins’s black mass.

‘Could she have gone off with some bloke?’

‘Maybe,’ Jane said moodily. ‘I think she did want to get laid at her party. Although being sixteen and able to do it legally seems to have taken the magic out of it.’

‘You think she wanted to go into the orchard to have sex with someone? Anyone in particular?’

‘The mood she was in, anyone other than Dean Wall. And in the orchard, maybe because ... because the orchard’s a taboo place. Colette loves, you know, breaking taboos.’

‘A taboo place? This is because of Edgar Powell’s suicide?’

‘Partly. And because things happen to you in the orchard, but they never happened to her. And—’

‘Excuse me,’ Merrily said. ‘Stop. Just stop there a minute. Things happen to you in the orchard? What things? And to who?’

‘Whom,’ Jane said.

‘Don’t push it, flower. Because sooner or later I’m going to have to talk to you about your sitting room. Plus, I’ve had next to no sleep. Plus a lot of other ... What things?’

Jane looked down at the table. There came a clipped, authoritative knocking on the front door.

‘Oh.’ Merrily found a narrow smile. ‘I didn’t expect you so soon.’

‘Well, something was brought to my attention.’ Annie Howe wore a loose, white raincoat over her dark business suit. ‘Which rather puts Jane at the top of our list.’

‘Oh?’ Merrily held open the door, not daring to think what it might be. DC Mumford followed his boss into the hall.

Merrily shut the door. ‘Er ... before you talk to Jane ...’

Howe tilted her head impatiently. Police officers always seemed to think only they were entitled to ask questions.

‘How seriously are you, the police, taking all this? I mean, Colette’s ... how can I put it?’

‘A bit of a trollop,’ Mumford said. ‘We know.’

‘Or at least,’ Annie Howe added, ‘that seems to be what she’d like people to think. Times change, don’t they, Ms Watkins?’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘Not really.’

Howe smiled. It was glacial.

‘You ask how seriously we’re taking this matter. In view of the circumstances, more seriously than we would if she’d simply left home. You can appreciate that.’

‘Yes. Right. Sure.’

She looked at Annie Howe and thought how clean-cut and purposefully single-minded she seemed. Merrily felt much older and yet younger. She felt vulnerable, somehow, for Jane and for herself too. Which was stupid. Wasn’t it?

‘We’ll do everything we can to help,’ she said lamely.

They followed her into the kitchen. Jane was at the sink, washing up. There was no sign of Lol. Merrily introduced the police, realizing that Jane was washing up to remove the cups – three of them – from the table, so Howe wouldn’t suspect they had company. She’d even pushed the third chair under the table. Co-conspirators, Jane and Lol, in something else she didn’t know about.

Merrily said, ‘I’ll stay. If you don’t mind.’

‘It’s important that you do, Ms Watkins.’

‘Merrily,’ she said. ‘I’m Merrily.’

Howe didn’t say that she was Annie. What did I expect, Merrily thought sourly, instant bonding of two youngish professional women together in a man’s world?

‘Tea? Coffee?’

‘Thank you, Ms Watkins, but we had more of both than we can handle at Cassidy’s Country Kitchen.’

There was going to be no softening Annie Howe. She pulled out one of the chairs, like this was an interview room at police headquarters.

‘Right, sit down, Jane, we won’t keep you long. What time did you get home last night?’

‘Not too sure.’ Jane went around to the opposite side of the table and pulled out a chair of her own. ‘After one.’

‘After two,’ Merrily said automatically. ‘I heard you come in.’

Howe raised a hand. ‘Let Jane answer, please, Ms Watkins.’ She sat down. ‘Colette Cassidy’s a good friend of yours, isn’t she?’

‘Well, we’ve only known each other a few weeks. But ... yeah. We get along OK.’

‘Do you remember where you last saw her?’

‘Yeah, it was ... on the square. I mean, you know about what happened inside, with Barry?’

‘Yes. Perhaps we can come back to that later. What happened on the square?’

Merrily went to lean against the stove, which put her behind Howe and facing Jane, while the kid, with – surely – transparent honesty, related what had happened when Colette Cassidy had decided to take the party outside after the row with Barry Bloom. How Colette had bullied Dr Samedi, the DJ, into setting up his boom-box outside and then, when people came out to protest and it looked like her parents were on the way, had run off with it towards the orchard.

Howe leaned towards Jane across the pine table.

‘What exactly did Colette say when she invited everyone to go to the orchard?’

‘Well, she just ... I don’t know. I don’t remember.’

‘Let me remind you then, Jane. We have several witnesses who say Colette shouted something like, “Follow me. Or Janey. Follow Janey. She knows.” Would that be you she was talking about, Jane? Is that what she called you?’

‘Yeah.’ Jane blinked. The first sign of nerves. Merrily gripped the Aga rail. What was this about?

Annie Howe said, ‘Yeah, that’s what she called you, or yeah, it was you she meant?’

‘Both, I suppose.’

‘Good. All right.’ Howe leaned back. ‘Why would Colette have suggested they follow you? Why would she have said, “she knows”?’

Jane didn’t hesitate. ‘Because we got a bit pissed the other weekend and some boys were chasing us and that’s where we wound up. In the orchard.’

‘With the boys?’

‘No, we’d shaken them off.’

‘Did you and Colette often get pissed?’

‘Just that once. It was only cider. I mean, I thought it was only cider. I’d never had it before. It was stupid.’

Annie Howe smiled. ‘It’s all right, we aren’t going to charge you with under-age drinking.’

‘Thanks.’

Howe frowned. ‘But you didn’t go with her into the orchard last night, did you?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because ...’ Jane looked at Merrily. ‘Because my mum wasn’t very well, and I didn’t want to stay out too late.’

‘You didn’t think two a.m. was already a little bit late?’

Jane shrugged, looked at Merrily again. Annie Howe, obviously suspecting eye signals, said, ‘Ms Watkins, why don’t you come and sit at the table with us?’ And Merrily, not wanting to give the icy bitch any reason to suspect anything, reluctantly left the meagre comfort of the stove and went to sit down next to Jane.

‘So,’ Howe said, ‘you watched her go off into the orchard, and then what did you do?’

‘Just sort of wandered around.’

‘You didn’t talk to anyone?’

‘No.’

‘You’re sure about that, Jane?’

‘Yeah. Oh ... Well, I did talk to Lloyd Powell’ Jane sighed. ‘I asked him to go and get them out of the orchard. He owns it. His family.’

‘Mr Powell seems to think you were worried about Colette.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Because you thought she might be attacked?’

‘No. I mean—’

‘Then why?’

‘Because ... Colette’s kind of headstrong. She gets like carried away.’

‘You’re saying you were more worried about what she might do than what might happen to her?’

‘Yeah. I suppose I was.’

‘What did you think she might do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘All right, let’s go back to the party. Did you know there were drugs about?’

‘I think so.’

‘You knew the people who were supplying them?’

Jane didn’t reply. Oh no, Merrily thought. Oh, surely not. I’d have known. Wouldn’t I?

‘Do you know Mark Putley?’

‘Not really. We go to the same school, that’s all. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him.’

‘What about Colette?’

‘I don’t think she knew him at all. She’d have no reason to. She goes to a different school.’

‘Then why was he at her party?’

‘Gatecrashed, I suppose. Him and a couple of others.’

‘As far as you know, Colette hadn’t invited them.’

‘No. I mean ... No.’

‘Were you going to say something else there, Jane?’

Jane trailed her finger through some spilled tea on the tabletop. ‘I suppose I was going to say not officially.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I ...’ Jane hesitated. ‘Oh hell ... She thought the kids her parents approved of – because they knew the kids’ parents and everything – she thought they were all going to be a bit like safe. She wanted to kind of spice things up a bit. So like, yeah, she might have made it easier for the local guys to get in. Like that’s the sort of thing she does. I mean, you never really know what she’s going to do.’

‘Or who with?’ Annie Howe stood up. ‘Thank you, Jane. You won’t be going out, will you? We may want to talk to you again. Thank you, Ms Watkins.’

Merrily saw Jane blow out her cheeks in some kind of relief, and in the middle of it, Howe suddenly turned back to her.

‘Oh ... one last thing, Jane ... Did you see anyone else around after the party? Anyone you didn’t know. Or perhaps someone you knew hadn’t been invited?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

Annie Howe said, ‘How well do you know Laurence Robinson?’

Jane was caught out. She looked startled. Even Merrily thought she looked startled.

‘I ... I’ve met him a couple of times,’ Jane said. ‘He sometimes helps out at Ledwardine Lore. I’ve seen him there.’

‘Have you ever been to his house?’

‘No. Not really. I’ve been ... sort oipast his house.’

‘And Colette. Does she know Mr Robinson?’

‘I suppose so. I mean, yes. We all kind of know him, because he used to be a kind of rock star. Sort of.’

‘When you say we all know him, who do you mean? Other girls?’

‘No, just Colette and me. And Lucy Devenish.’

‘When did you last see Mr Robinson, Jane?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You can’t remember all the way back to last night? When you were seen talking to Mr Robinson in Church Street?’

‘Was I? Oh. Yes. I think I met him on my way to the party. Yes, I did.’

‘But he didn’t go to the party. Or did he?’

‘No, he didn’t.’

Howe smiled her ice-maiden’s smile. ‘Well, thank you again. As I say, we may come back. Or if there’s anything you or your mother want to tell us, there’ll always be someone at the Country Kitchen. Until we find Colette.’

Merrily followed them numbly to the door, where Annie Howe said, ‘Do you know Laurence Robinson, Ms Watkins?’

Merrily said, ‘I may have met him. I don’t really know him.’

‘He lives alone, doesn’t he?’

‘So I believe. He had a girlfriend. She left, I’m told.’

‘And you felt ... all right ... about Jane seeing him. A man twenty years older, living on his own.’

Merrily said softly, ‘Is there a problem?’

‘He’s just someone we need to eliminate from our inquiries. I suppose I can tell you. As a clergyperson. I know it’ll go no further.’

‘You have my word,’ Merrily said.

‘Mr Robinson isn’t at home, but his cottage is in rather a mess. It may be a break-in, it may be a burglary – because there certainly isn’t much furniture in there. But there are signs of what might have been a struggle. The stereo left on. A damaged vinyl record on the turntable. There’s no sign of the owner or anybody else. And Mr Robinson – this is the confidential part, at this stage – has a history. A record.’

‘He made records,’ Merrily heard herself saying, ridiculously.

‘Our type of record, Ms Watkins. We believe he likes young girls.’

‘What?’

‘Laurence Robinson was convicted of having sex with a minor. Girl. Under-age.’ Howe’s smile was steely and barbed, like a safety pin opening up.

29 Cogs

BY NINE O’CLOCK, they were putting up the last of the bunting and the fancy lights, Gomer Parry lifting Lloyd Powell in the bucket of his pet digger, Gwynneth, and not happy about this – a bit dangerous, it was, see, with no insurance to cover it and all these coppers around.

For once, though, the police never even noticed Gomer. Too busy trying to find the Cassidys’ promiscuous daughter. Or was it precocious? No, this time Gomer reckoned he had it about right.

Got to feel sorry for them, though, the Cassidys. Moved out here to get away from the big bad city. Wound up somewhere little and bad.

Gomer watched Lloyd Powell up in the bucket, attaching a string of wooden lanterns to a wrought-iron hook on the right-hand gable of the Black Swan. No coloured lights, this wasn’t Christmas; these were Middle Ages-style lamps, handmade by this blacksmith bloke, from Croydon, had a workshop bottom of Old Barn Lane. Feller provided the lanterns free in the hope of picking up a few orders.

Take more than a few wooden lanterns to light up this place, though.

Little and bad.

Now why did he think that? It was a decent village, in many ways. Friendly, on the whole, nobody complaining about the newcomers. Not as it would make much difference if they did, mind, seeing as how the newcomers were now well in the majority, or maybe it just felt like that, on account of they ran everything, with their superior knowledge of marketing and public relations, fancy stuff like that.

Course, Gomer, he was a newcomer too. Not so much of one, like, on account of he only moved about twenty miles and he talked near enough the same, and he’d done a lot of work in these parts, over the years, so knew quite a few people before he moved in. Like Bull-Davies, whose fields he’d drained. Like Rod Powell, whose new cesspit he’d dug when Lloyd was no more than a babby and ole Mrs Powell, Edgar’s missus, had been alive to terrorize Rod’s wife. Drove her away in the end. Fearsome woman, Meggie Powell.

Aye, it was a hard place all round, was Ledwardine, when Gomer first come here. Lucy Devenish’d been right about that. Them days, some poor bloke with a Mr Cassidy accent ventured into the Black Swan, there’d be a red-cheeked, stone-eyed young farm-labourer, pissed-up on cheap scrumpy and just itching to punch his lights out for the fun of it. And for resentment’s sake. Nobody hereabouts was rich, see, save for the Bulls, and they always punched back. Except when they punched first.

Sawdust on the floor of the Black Swan, them days, to make it easier cleaning up the blood and the puke.

There was an exhibition of posh watercolours opening in the Swan this evening, with a recital by a string quartet.

At the new tourist information office (once a butcher’s shop, with slaughterhouse behind, blood and offal running down Church Street on Fridays) there was a display of local crafts, crafted by folk from London and Birmingham. On Monday evening, a poetry reading.

Gomer looked up at a movement. Out of Church Street strode the Bull-Davies floozy, a little smile on her mouth. Now that was a funny business, the big Bull penned up by a woman came out of nowhere. Who was she, what had she got in mind for James, and where had she been this not-so-fine morning?

‘OK, Gomer?’

The chubby face of Child, the organist, up at the window.

‘Aye,’ Gomer said. ‘Have him all dressed up by eleven, the ole square, sure t’be. Some o’ the little flags got pulled down last night, see, but we put ’em back, no problem.’

‘Good man,’ said Child. ‘By the way, for my sins, I’ve been coopted as festival coordinator for the duration of the present crisis. Poor old Terrence being hardly in the mood for public conviviality, as you can imagine.’

‘Aye,’ Gomer said. ‘Wondered if they might call it off, under the circumstances.’

‘We did think about it, but we’ve all put a lot of work in, and as it’s going to go on for the whole season, postponing the opening ceremony would hardly seem like a good precedent. Besides, people coming from miles away, no way of letting them know. Anyway, it’s not as if she’s dead. She’ll be on somebody’s settee in Hereford, sleeping it off with her mouth open and her knickers round her ankles, what d’you say, Gomer?’

‘Mabbe,’ Gomer said, noting the relish in Child’s voice. ‘And mabbe not. ‘Scuse me a sec’

Lloyd Powell having given him the thumbs-down sign from the bucket, Gomer set about bringing him to the ground. Got to do it smoothly; one jerk and he’d be pitching the boy through the window of the public bar, and it was a good few years since anybody done that. Harry Morgan, the feed supplier, had probably been the last, slammed through the glass by John Bull-Davies, James’s ole feller, for putting it around as the Bulls never paid their bills.

Hard men, the Bulls, always had been, and now here was James being led around the square and back again by the blonde floozie like there was a ring through his nose. Power of sex, eh?

‘Leave you to it, Gomer.’ Dermot Child busied off towards the Tourist Info. Lloyd clambered out of the bucket. Gomer leaned out.

‘All finished then, is it? Good boy.’

‘What did Child want?’

‘Oh, he’s in charge now, boy, is Mr Dermot Child. Cotter do what he says, see.’

‘All we need,’ said Lloyd. ‘Got me in his choral thing, he has. Auld cider. Plus, we gotter do this barbershop kind of thing at the opening. Followed by a Cider Tasting.’

‘That’d be for folk as dunno what cider tastes like, would it?’

‘Kind of thing,’ Lloyd said. ‘Good stuff, mind.’

‘The Wine of Angels?’

‘Sharp, though. Dry. Take the hairs outer your nose.’

‘Your dad done it all by isself then?’

‘Old recipe, Gomer.’ Lloyd tapped his nose. ‘Cassidy, he wanted to make a thing out of it, let the visitors in, get a carthorse workin’ the ole mill. Bugger that, Dad says, that’s for the museums. So we done it all ourselves, the millin’ and the pressin’. Served up the casks to Barry Bloom – least you can get some sense out of ‘im – and he organized the bottles. It goes all right, we’ll do it next year. Be a good crop. Plus we won’t have to buy no apples in next time, looks of things.’

‘Aye,’ Gomer said and left it at that. Boy was right; never seen that much blossom in the Powell orchard, not in his lifetime anyway. Caused a fair bit of comment, too, grizzly farmers in the Ox mumbling about how it was Edgar’s brains must’ve fertilized them twisted ole trees.

‘Looks like that’s it, then, Gomer.’ Lloyd looking up at the bunting and lanterns. ‘May’s well take ‘im home.’ He grinned. ‘If Minnie’ll let you bring ‘im through the gate.’

Gomer growled. Boy was more right than he knew. Minnie, she’d got this plan for a proper garden now, with rocks and a bloody fountain – cherub having a pee, no doubt. Which would require space, see. And what was taking up more space than a certain collection of near-vintage plant-hire equipment? Things was getting tense.

He pulled in the bucket, nice and tidy, and gently trundled Gwynneth to the edge of the square. By God, he loved this ole thing. The way she answered to every little flick of the levers. You could do anything with Gwynneth, with both eyes shut. Responsive, see, like a good sheepdog.

Waiting to get her into Church Street, Gomer saw two people. First was Lucy Devenish in her woolly cape-thing, striding out determined behind her moped. The ole warrior out for somebody’s scalp this morning, sure t’be.

Second was that little Jane, the vicar’s daughter. Not so bright and smiley today as she come out the vicarage gateway. A friend of that Colette Cassidy’s. Lucky she hadn’t gone with her last night to wherever it was. And Gomer was frankly a bit dubious about Dermot Child’s theory that Colette’d been whisked off by some young stud with pleasure in mind. He did not like the feel of this, the way she’d disappeared into the orchard, no more than he liked the feel of the orchard itself, for all its explosion of blossom.

Too much blossom. They used to say that orchard’d been no good since it was cursed, back in the seventeenth century, by this Wil Williams, the vicar who done his bit of wizarding on the side and hung hisself when he was rumbled. Well, Gomer had no fixed opinions on cursing, and there was some as said the orchard was just let go on account of the crippling new tax on cider imposed by King Charles II – fifteen pence on a hogshead. But there was nobody could deny that if he’d hung hisself where they said he’d done it, the last thing this Wil Williams would’ve seen as he was swinging there ... was that orchard.

He’d have stopped Lucy, got her opinion on a few things, except she looked so purposeful you’d have to block the way with ole Gwynneth to get her to pull up.

Unless you was young Jane, just as determined it looked like.

‘Lucy!’ The youngster running after the ole woman down Church Street.

Gomer saw Lucy stop in the middle of climbing on to her moped, and then they was talking something furious, arms waving and such. What he wouldn’t’ve given to know what they was jabbering on about this gloomy ole morning.

‘No, listen, Jane,’ Lucy said. ‘Please listen.’

Under her hat, her face was very red and her eyes were burning. She looked like an old-fashioned stove, this like huge, massive heat building up inside her.

‘You know, don’t you?’ Jane said. ‘You know where she is.’

‘No.’ Lucy took hold of both Jane’s shoulders, propelled her backwards into the alley by the side of the Ox, where she and Colette had escaped from Dean Wall and Danny Gittoes. ‘I don’t know. But Jane, you must stay well away from it. Listen to me. What you must do is stay with your mother. Talk to her. Make her understand something.’

‘Till the apple appeared on the ground, I thought, you know, I thought the worst that could happen was she’d get like ... taken away. Like me. And maybe she wouldn’t be able to handle that because of the kind of person she is, and—’

Lucy’s grip tightened on her shoulders. Her hands were terrifically strong, and there was so much heat there that Jane was scared into silence. She’d never seen Lucy like this before.

‘Jane. Are you listening now?’

‘Yes.’ Jane felt very small. It was quite dim in the alley on a dull day like this. She could detect the thin, acid odour of urine from the Gents’ toilet. It reminded her, in some awful way, of cider.

‘Something happened to your mother last night,’ Lucy said. ‘In the church.’

‘She was ill. Dean Wall and those creeps were making a big joke about it at the party and saying she was like possessed by a demon or something.’

‘And they won’t be the only ones,’ Lucy said. ‘Others may be subtler. There’ll be pressure on her. Much of it from inside. Self-doubt. Do you know what I mean?’

Jane wasn’t sure she did. ‘She gets a bit overtired sometimes. She’s not as certain about things as she used to be, but, like, she doesn’t talk much about it. She just asks me questions I can’t answer.’

‘Yes, I know you can’t. But what I mean, Jane, is that it will have occurred to her, consciously or not, that she became ill at the moment of taking her vows because she was not meant to take those vows. Not meant to commit herself to this parish. At some point, if it hasn’t happened already, she’ll be telling herself it was all wrong and that she really knew this all the time. That she made a mistake.’

‘What, becoming a vicar? Going into the Church?’

‘Possibly that. Or coming here. I know that must have been a shock for you, too, having a mother who suddenly decides to commit herself to God.’

‘I’m not really jealous of the Old Guy.’

‘I know.’ Lucy’s grip softened. ‘But perhaps you haven’t been as supportive as you might have been.’

‘I’ve tried, really. I mean, we always talked the same language basically, if we stayed off religion. And like, after what’s been happening I thought maybe there’s some chance we could connect there as well, but we’re coming at it from different directions, aren’t we? I mean, sometimes I feel really ... alight with it. But I can’t tell her, she’s like so blocked ... yeah? With all the dogma and stuff. I mean, I left the Traherne book lying around, but she’s always so busy.’

‘Jane.’ Lucy looked very serious. ‘This is not the time to sit up on your superior teenager’s perch ... And don’t look at me like that, you little snot. Your mother may have a restricted viewpoint professionally, but there’s a thinking, feeling, responsive person under that cassock.’

‘She doesn’t wear that thing any more, thank goodness. Except, like, on the shop floor.’

‘Yes. A sign, perhaps, that the person’s re-emerging. She’ll come to it in her own way, perhaps, and while you might have had a crash course, her knowledge is still a hundred times greater than yours. But you have to help her. If she won’t come to me, and I can understand why she won’t, then she needs you to tell her that coming here was not the mistake she’s fearing it may have been. That she’s very much needed here. She needs assurance from you, not from the bishop, not from the Cassidys, not from that pompous old fool, Ted Clowes.’

‘She just asks me questions!’

‘Then answer them as best you can, and pray for help.’

‘Pray?’ Jane turned away from the toilet smell, avoiding Lucy’s hawk-like eyes. ‘Who to?’

‘You’ll know,’ Lucy said. ‘And there’s another thing. Last night, your mother indicated to me that she was going to refuse to allow Richard Coffey to put on his dreadful play in the church.’

‘Yeah. We had a bit of a row about it. She talked to Stefan Alder and she thought he’d got this unhealthy obsession. This kind of gay thing, you know? But that’s not why she’s against it. It’s because he’s in love with someone who’s dead and it’s like, you know, spiritual necrophilia and all that yuk stuff she doesn’t think I know about. Like she doesn’t want him to satisfy his weird lusts or whatever in church. I said I thought it was cool and kind of beautiful and she was being stupid.’

‘You were right,’ Lucy said. ‘But for the wrong reasons. Jane, she must change her mind. She has to let Wil’s spirit speak. She must be convinced. You’ll have to be subtle.’

Jane was confused. ‘But you said it was a dreadful play ...’

‘It’s not the play, it’s the machinery of it. The cogs it turns. The play may not be the play Coffey envisages. Not if Merrily stays. I thought she’d be a catalyst, but I thought it might take years, but it isn’t, it’s happening very, very quickly.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Lucy was looking feverish again, burning up inside. ‘Jane, I have to go.’

‘Where?’

‘Perhaps I shall come and see you and your mother. It’s too much for one person to carry, especially someone old and creaky like myself.’

‘What is?’

Lucy lowered her arms, stepped away from Jane, looking about as old and creaky as a jumbo jet on the verge of take-off. Jane didn’t think she’d ever seen anyone as powered-up. She thought she ought to tell Lucy about Lol and his problems, why he’d spent the night at the vicarage, how he’d inadvertently let Mum in to see the painted walls, leading to one of those questions Lucy said she’d have to try and answer.

‘Go home, Jane. Remember what I said.’

‘OK.’ They walked out of the alley into Church Street, where Lucy climbed on to her moped.

A police car went past. ‘I didn’t tell them anything,’ Jane said.

‘The police? The police questioned you?’

‘Inspector Howe. She was horrible. She looks like a sadistic dentist. She’s coming back if they don’t find Colette. She seems to think I know something.’

Lucy smiled briefly. ‘Jane, if you told her what you know I think it would be safe to say she would never bother you again.’

‘She’d think I was bonkers? She told Mum something I couldn’t hear, when they were leaving, and Mum was a bit funny afterwards.’

Lucy stopped. ‘Funny in what way?’

‘Kind of shocked. And when I felt I had to come out of there and think about things on my own and I said maybe I’d go for a walk and kind of cool off, she seemed glad and she almost pushed me out, you know? I think that woman told her they thought Colette had been attacked or raped or something so bad she couldn’t face talking to me about it. I mean, you don’t think ...?’

‘I shall be honest with you, Jane,’ Lucy said. ‘I fear your inspector maybe right’

‘No!’ Jane stared at her, filled with a horrid, stark dismay. ‘I wanted you to tell me I was wrong! Tell me that old apple was just ... just like some stupid coincidence.’

Realizing as she said it that this was a stupid, make-it-all-right-mummy, little-girl reaction.

‘Help your mother,’ Lucy said. ‘Be there, as they say, for her. I shall come and talk to you both.’

‘You’re not going to the orchard, are you, Lucy?’ Lucy’s smile was somehow less ... brave.

‘Not exactly. Go to your mother.’

The vicarage looked at its biggest and drabbest when approached uphill from Church Street. Its timbers needed a few coats of paint or preservative, or whatever they used, its white bits were grey, its windows black, except ...

Jane froze on the pavement, looking up. There was a light in the third storey. In the Apartment. A single, white light.

It was the sun, surely, the sun must have come out. She turned, looked all over the sky for the sun, catching a sliver of light between two bunches of cloud, but it wasn’t enough. Something in that room was alive.

Wrong word, Jane thought, in terror. Wrong word.

30 Affliction

IT WAS THE way she looked at him.

Lol came in from the scullery.

She was waiting for him in the kitchen. Merrily. Little and dark and not girlish. This quietness around her.

The way she looked at him made him feel sick. The black-eyed dog was with her, like a shadow.

He’d listened to the detective dealing out the questions in a clipped and unsympathetic way that was surely all wrong for getting information out of a kid like Jane. Maybe, wherever the detective had come from, the teenagers she was used to questioning were hard and sullen, you had to be heavy with them. Lol thought Jane had been incredible, the way she’d handled it. So young, so much together.

And then the heavy one.

How well do you know Laurence Robinson? The question coming over like a missile, making him cringe into the corner of the doorway, a greasy, steel hinge biting into his forehead.

‘OK,’ Merrily said coldly, ‘sit down, Mr Robinson.’

He went and sat in the chair vacated by Jane and then wished he hadn’t; she was looking at him like he was caressing some item of the girl’s underwear.

‘She told you, right?’ Asking the question, but he couldn’t look at her. ‘The policewoman.’

‘Told me what?’

‘About Tracy Cooke.’

Merrily sat down opposite him, in a self-conscious way which showed she was forcing herself to do this, as an ordained church-person, a licensed member of the soul-police. He remembered the way his parents’ minister had spoken to him, youngish guy called Gregory Wallace, meeting him at the door of the family home, informing him, on their behalf, that he was no longer welcome here. Suggesting he might care to join a church. Some other church, in some other town. Ask for God’s help with his affliction.

‘See, the way you’re looking at me, Mrs Watkins, it’s like you really ought to be handing me over to the police. Only, because you’re a priest, you’re going to give me a chance to unburden myself to you first. And then you’ll persuade me to do the right thing and give myself up. That about it?’

‘Whatever you think is appropriate. For a priest.’

‘I don’t think any of it’s appropriate. But you don’t ever get away from it.’ He met her eyes again. ‘Now you’re thinking, would he have had time to sneak out of his sleeping bag, go and do whatever he did to Colette Cassidy and slink back before it got light?’

‘I thought that about twenty minutes ago. It seemed unlikely.’

‘But possible.’

‘Yes.’

He blinked it away. Weeping would be like confirmation. The sex-offender breaks down.

‘OK, then.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll leave and you call the police. Or I’ll just go back to the cottage and wait for them, and I’ve never been here. I won’t tell them I’ve been here. If I could ask you one last favour ... Is it possible you could look after Ethel? Not for ever, obviously. If you could tell Lucy, she’ll take her. Or sort something out. That’s if they ... you know ... if they take me away’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ Merrily closed her eyes in utter weariness. ‘Can’t you say anything without going round in circles? Tell me about this ... Tracy.’

‘Cooke,’ Lol said. ‘Tracy Cooke.’

The rain had stopped, but left a wind behind. Jane turned away from the vicarage, all of a dither. The bright light in the top window had gone out. The window was quite black now. It had not been a real light, had it?

No more real than the little lights in the orchard.

She had to think about all this, decide what was real.

The market square was full of strange vehicles, including two police cars and a red car with an aerial on top – local radio, and they weren’t here for the opening of the Ledwardine Festival. Was Colette news? A girl who disappears during her sixteenth birthday party. Yes, it was, wasn’t it?

And the festival was happening all around it. People rushing about: Dermot Child and Lloyd Powell and Uncle Ted – serious-faced people who should be smiling, making jokes, under the bunting and the fancy new lanterns. In front of the market hall, a little stage was going up, with a van like Dr Samedi’s, only with permanent loud speakers on top.

Welcome to de carn-i-val.

The whole atmosphere was so weird. Like Ledwardine was inside one of those round glass ornaments and somebody was shaking it hard and everything was swirling around and when the village was eventually put down, when it all came to rest, nothing was going to be the same.

In the little globes, it was always snow that was swirled. Here it was apple blossom: specks of it everywhere, carried in on the wind, very white under the summerless, grey sky.

The orb had been shaken and the orchard was back in the village.

The thought made Jane quiver. She felt she had to cling to one of the pillars of the market hall or she’d be blown away in the blossom. Again.

Above her a new poster had gone up for Dermot Child’s choral work.

Old Cider ... feel the red earth move.

Lol talked. It seemed very hard for him, but if it was an act, he was bloody good. If it was an act then everything else about him was false. He talked like he himself was hearing all this aloud for the first time.

And Merrily, willing Jane not to come back until this was over, found herself constructing a story around the faltering fragments, filling in what was unsaid.

This Tracy Cooke was nearly fifteen at the time. She had a friend called Kath Hurley, who was sixteen, though you wouldn’t have known. You’d have guessed Kath was about twenty-five, and Tracy would have worn a lot of make-up trying to keep up. Merrily tried not to cast Jane and Colette in the roles; it was not appropriate.

Tracy and Kath were rock fans from Banbury in Oxfordshire. They went to a lot of gigs. Afterwards, they – Kath particularly – liked to talk to the musicians, if they were accessible. One night they went into Oxford, to one of the colleges, to see a band called Hazey Jane play this quite gentle, mostly acoustic music that wasn’t all that fashionable at the time, and the audience wasn’t very big, so it was easy for Kath and Tracy to get talking to the guys in the band.

Karl, who played bass and piano, was very extrovert and generous, and he said, would the girls like to come back to their hotel, have dinner? Dinner was what he said. Very sophisticated. That would have been the clincher for Tracy and Kath.

Turned out that only two of them were staying at the hotel – Karl himself and the singer, Lol – who was the one Kath really fancied, though he looked very young.

But Karl, who was in charge of this situation, he fancied Kath, who was the best looking, and so he made sure that Lol was sitting next to Tracy in the hotel, which was really just a pub with spare rooms. And when Karl and Kath went to the bar, Karl nudged her and laughed a lot as he got the barman to put vodka, lots of it, in Lol and Tracy’s drinks. Karl, at some stage, said they would have dinner ‘sent up’, and Kath thought, yeah, fair enough, and so they went into their separate rooms and fucked, natch.

Which would have been OK. Which would have been fine ... if Karl hadn’t said after a while to Kath that maybe they should invite Tracy and Lol to join them, bring a little variation into the proceedings. And Kath, who – as Karl told him later, by way of consolation – had fancied Lol in the first place, said, yeah, why not?

And so Karl pulls on his briefs and strolls along to Lol’s room. Not locked, of course, hotel rooms often weren’t in those days, particularly a place this economical. Karl finds Lol and Tracy sleeping like the babies they were, and, being the considerate guy he is, he doesn’t like to wake them up, he just squeezes himself in on Tracy’s side.

‘You were asleep all this time?’ Merrily said. ‘He didn’t wake you up?’

‘I was ... drunk,’ Lol admitted. ‘Not used to it. You know what that’s like.’

‘Yeah,’ Merrily said. ‘So does Jane.’ He worried her again then, the way he winced. But she said, ‘Go on.’

Karl, of course, is not sleepy, and one thing leads to another, and about five minutes later little Tracy wakes up almost suffocating, with her nose in this big, hairy chest and these big, sweaty hands easing her thighs apart.

Tracy goes berserk. Tracy has, presumably, just made love with gentle, hesitant Lol. Tracy is hysterical with shock and terror.

Guests in neighbouring rooms are awakened. One marches down to reception and demands that the licensee calls the police, and when they arrive they find a tearful Tracy over by the window, wrapped in one of the curtains, and the defendant-to-be, Laurence Robinson, 20, drunkenly fumbling some clothes on.

There is no one else in the room.

Questioned by police, Kathleen Hurley, 16, of Riverdale Drive, Banbury, insists that Karl Windling spent the entire night with her, and no, they didn’t get much sleep which is how she knows he didn’t slip away.

In the face of blanket denials, further investigation simply isn’t worth the manpower. The police go with what they’ve got, which is Laurence Iain Robinson. The parents of Tracy Cooke insisting the prosecution should go ahead, as their daughter’s reputation as a decent, modest person is on the line and these bloody pop people think they can get away with anything. Tracy tries to speak up for Lol; nobody listens.

Jane wandered into the mews. Cassidy’s Country Kitchen was open as usual, and doing good business, although, not surprisingly, there was no sign of the proprietors.

Ledwardine Lore, however, was shut. Jane watched three obvious tourists walk up to the door and push and shake the handle and then walk away, shrugging. Business-wise, this could have been Lucy’s best day for ages. Wherever she’d gone on her moped, it was obviously terribly important. Even the lights were out behind the Closed sign. Only a pale glimmering of fairy wings in the window.

Fairies. Yes, Lucy had said, people saw fairies with gossamer wings, fairies very much like these. It was how they were traditionally perceived, and how people liked to think of them. Like very tiny angels. Which was what they were. Tiny angels. But neither fairies nor angels were, in reality, like these images. And yet they were. It was complicated, Lucy said, and yet very, very simple. Simple as blossom, as lights in an apple tree.

‘Excuse me.’ At the mouth of the mews, a plump, twenty-something woman stepped out in front of Jane. ‘I’m with BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester. I don’t suppose you know Colette Cassidy, do you?’

She looked a bit harassed. She wore a black velvet hat and had a small recorder with a microphone.

‘Sure,’ Jane said.

‘Thank God. Could I ask you a few things about her?’

‘OK.’

‘Terrific’ The microphone had a blobby thing on the end. ‘Be with you in a couple of seconds. Sorry, your name is?’

‘Jane W— Wilkins.’ It was OK talking about Colette, but she didn’t fancy any vicar’s daughter stuff.

‘OK, Jane ... So, were you at the party?’

‘Yeah.’ The microphone about six inches from her nose.

‘I gather it was fairly lively.’

‘No,’ Jane said. ‘Not really.’

‘No?’

‘It was quite dull, actually. People were just dancing and stuff. And drinking Coke.’

‘Why did they all come outside?’

‘Fresh air, I suppose.’

‘Oh. I understood there was some dancing going on out here.’

‘No, not really. People were just kind of wandering off. It was no big deal’

‘Wasn’t Colette trying to ... you know ... get them going?’

‘No, she’s not like that. She’s very quiet. I don’t think she really wanted a party. It was just kind of expected. Normally, she liked, er, reading. And going for walks. Very interested in wildlife and, er, flowers. That sort of thing.’

‘So what do you think’s happened to her?’

‘Well, knowing Colette, she probably went off somewhere with a friend to get away from it all. For cocoa or something. Stayed the night.’

‘Oh.’ The reporter switched off her machine. ‘Well. Thanks, Jane.’ Turned and walked off towards the radio car on the square. ‘Thanks a fucking bunch,’ Jane heard.

Merrily tried to remember if she’d read about it at the time, but as Hazey Jane were hardly famous, it probably hadn’t been widely reported.

‘They said I was very lucky,’ Lol said. ‘It could easily have been rape.’

‘It was rape, surely?’ Merrily said. ‘And how on earth did he persuade that girl not to give evidence, if this was her friend?’

Lol was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know. I imagine he threw her around a bit and gave her some money. Karl thinks on his feet, even when he’s stoned.’

‘So you were alone in the dock. What did you get?’

‘Probation.’ He was looking down at the table.

She could see him fighting the tears. Eighteen years ago, and the wound was still wide open and oozing. Did she believe this? If it was true, it was hardly shocking when you considered that the alleged victim was not so much younger than the alleged criminal and probably emotionally more mature.

‘I mean, I did it,’ Lol said. ‘I pleaded guilty. I had sex with an under-age girl. It was enough. In the eyes of God ... as they say’

‘Who say?’

‘My parents. Well, they’re dead now. It was what they said at the time. Well, they didn’t actually say it because neither of them ever spoke to me again. Only their minister. He spoke for them. And for God. As you priests do.’

‘What denomination was this?’

‘I can’t remember. Big pink building, with posters outside.’

Merrily smiled.

‘They’d caught religion in middle age. It just pushed everything else out. I was like a lodger by then. The old pictures of me as a kid all gone. Replaced by pictures of Jesus.’

‘Only child?’

He nodded. ‘But I’d stopped being their son in any real sense when I wouldn’t go to their church. After they threw me out, they had my room ... cleansed.’

Merrily said, ‘Lucy Devenish know about this?’

‘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.’

‘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, ‘I’ll 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.

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 Reverend 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.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Not formally identified yet. Look, I have to go. I suggest that unless she has something specific to tell us, you keep the child out of our hair.’

‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘if one of my parishioners has been hurt in a car accident, I want to know about it.’

Annie Howe, walking away, told her who they understood it was and that she was dead.

Merrily thought Lol was going to collapse. She made him sit down. He sat at the kitchen table and stared at a white wall. He didn’t move. Around him, the kitchen was black and white and grey. Jane’s eyes were smudges. She was standing in the middle of the room, pulling at her hair.

‘Stop it, flower. Please.’

‘That apple!’ Jane sobbed. ‘The apple was Lucy. Why didn’t I realize that?’

‘Sit down, Jane. This is—’

‘She didn’t want to know.’ Jane’s eyes were hot and flashing. ‘It was, Get traffic out here, Mumford, we don’t want the damned road blocked all afternoon. I said, Do you know who this is? For Christ’s sake, do you know who this is?’

‘It was just another accident to her, Jane. And she’s CID. Not her problem.’

‘They wouldn’t let me stay. I wanted to stay with her. I wanted somebody she knew to be there when she woke up.’

‘But she wasn’t going to wake up,’ Merrily said gently. ‘Was she? Look ... it was one of those freak accidents. A sheep seems to have run out into the road and she hit it and came off her bike and hit her head on the road. It must have been instantaneous. She wouldn’t have known a thing about it.’

‘She was the apple,’ Jane said bleakly. ‘It was an old and withered apple. I even told her about the apple. I told her. I told her about her own death!’

She started to pull her hair again.

Merrily walked over and pulled her hands down. They stood there facing each other, Merrily clutching both Jane’s hands.

‘This is no time,’ Merrily said, ‘for that superstitious crap.’

And knew as soon as it was out, Jane’s expression curdling, that this was about the worst thing she could have said.

34 Demarcation

MERRILY WAS ON her knees with a plastic dustpan over the rubble of mugs Jane had swept from the drainer.

She was very, very sorry about Lucy. She’d really liked Lucy for her independence, her forthright attitude, her wonderful eccentricity. But – she could hear Jane’s feet on the stairs, big, childish clomps – the fact remained that the old woman had caused the kid to reinvent her life as a fairy tale.

The phone started ringing. Lol took over the dustpan. Ted Clowes’s lawyer-voice on the line. The it’s-my-job-to-protect-your-interests-but-you-aren’t-making-it-easy-for-me voice. The sound of another gulf fast widening.

‘You say you’re well, but you clearly aren’t. Far from it. Have to say, Merrily, that what I’d very strongly advise, as your churchwarden, is that you permit me to revert to my original plan. Bring in Norman Gemmell to conduct tomorrow’s services.’

‘Ted. No. Wait.’ Everything spinning away from her, like the fragments of the mugs. ‘If you’re talking about the opening ceremony just now – the police brought Jane back. She’d just seen the accident ... Miss Devenish? She was distressed. You see your daughter brought back in a police car, in tears—’

‘Very tragic,’ Ted said – his measured, will-reading voice. ‘But everyone said it was going to happen one day, the way she’d ride that thing in the middle of the road, too old for it, refused to wear a crash helmet, and the local police too tolerant – or scared of her, more like – to enforce the law. Ridiculous situation. An accident—’

‘—waiting to happen. Sure.’

Didn’t some people just love it when an accident-in-waiting finally came through? She remembered Ted, in his quick guide to village characters, telling her how you’d find the famous moped on its side on some grassy verge and you’d slam on your brakes, only to discover Miss Devenish lying in a field on her back, smiling contentedly at the sky, a straw in her mouth.

‘And the way Jane’s been hanging around her ... I did warn you about that. Don’t get too close, I think were my words.’

‘Yes. Thank you, Ted.’ She felt like clubbing him with the phone. ‘I need to ask you, are there any relatives in the parish?’

‘None left alive I know of. McCready’s her solicitor, he’ll deal with all that.’

‘No, I meant— Oh, forget it.’

‘I’m trying to be down to earth, Merrily. Trying to rescue a runaway situation. Somebody has to.’

‘Situation...?’

‘You should never have gone out on that platform this afternoon. Here was I, telling people you’d contracted a stomach bug, and now it starts to look like, shall we say a nervous complaint?’

‘Oh, a nervous complaint. I see.’

‘Merrily, I don’t know what your personal problems are, as you haven’t seen fit to come and talk to me about them, but I do know that people are beginning to see you as a little too ... too ...’

He broke off. The line throbbed with the unspoken: he’d seen the posters and God knew what else. And one did have to think of one’s own position in the community.

‘Lucy Devenish,’ Lol said, ‘can’t die like this.’

‘Lucy Devenish just did,’ Merrily said gently. ‘And there’s nothing you or Jane, with due regard to superstitions and omens, can do to alter that.’

He stopped pacing. From the market square came the merry wail and thump of an accordion band, for the morris dancing.

‘Not Christian, I suppose. Omens.’

Merrily shook out a cigarette. ‘You smoke, Lol? I can’t remember.’

‘Used to.’ He took one, his fingers twitching. ‘Thanks. There’ve been shocks, but this ... She could make you believe you weren’t abnormal, you know? Everything has a rational explanation, she’d say. Just that most people’s idea of what’s rational is severely limited.’

‘Especially the Church’s?’

‘Maybe. She’s dead, I’m alive. Where’s the divine logic there?’

‘I’m supposed to know that? Being a priest?’

‘I can’t see you as a priest,’ Lol said. ‘I don’t know why someone like you would want to be a priest.’

‘Lol.’ She put her lighter to his cigarette. ‘Is there something happening that it’s not been considered suitable for me to know about? Because of me being a priest?’

‘I don’t ...’He looked apprehensive. ‘Maybe.’

‘There have certainly been things I don’t understand.’ She took a lungful of smoke, breathed it out hard. ‘And that the Church doesn’t want to.’

‘Like?’

‘Like, the house haunts me. I hate it. Nothing’s been right since we moved in. I have bad dreams. The kind that make you wonder if they really are dreams. What would poor Lucy have said about that, do you think, if I hadn’t been a priest?’

He took a small, self-conscious puff on the cigarette. ‘She once said to me that I was living too near the orchard.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Well, this was the Village in the Orchard. The orchard was its life-force. Now that’s all gone, maybe the orchard isn’t such a good place.’

‘Resentful. They grows resentful.’ Merrily put the cigarette in the ashtray, pushed it a couple of inches away. ‘I’m having too many of these.’

‘If an apple had rolled right up to my feet from a tree full of blossom,’ Lol said, ‘I’d probably feel much like Jane.’ He looked at his cigarette as though it represented some aspect of his past he didn’t really want to remember. He put it out in the ashtray. ‘Sorry. Wasteful.’

‘You always been superstitious?’

‘Or paranoid? Is that the same thing? Like I was always influenced by this guy, Nick Drake. Called the band after one of his songs.’

‘Hazey Jane.’ Merrily started to sing it, went wrong and gave up. ‘Never quite figured what that song was about, but she was obviously maladjusted. Cursing where she came from, swearing at the night. My step-brother had his albums. He was very appealing, was Nick Drake. But probably ill.’

‘Probably was,’ Lol said. ‘For a long time, I was convinced I was going to die when I was twenty-six, like him. And then I was twenty-eight and I hadn’t died, and so I felt guilty. And let down, somehow. That was when I went in for the second time.’

‘The hospital?’

‘Sounds’ – he smiled – ‘insane. But these things get inside you and they get mixed up with everything else that’s wrong, and it’s like ... Is it illness, or is there something else? Alison thought it’d be good for me, moving out here, fresh air, simple life. Only Lucy saw the problems. Everywhere has its own bag of superstition. Wherever I go, it all seems to connect. I remembered Nick’s song “Fruit Tree”, which more or less says you don’t make it till you die. Sometimes, I had the feeling that Nick and Robert Johnson and these guys were out there, among the apple trees. That make sense? Does it hell.’

‘Yes, it does. I’ll tell you what happened to make me do it, if you like. I mean join the clergy.’

She undid her dog collar, placed it on the table so that it surrounded the ashtray and the smoking cigarette.

The past unclouding. The days when it all fell into place. Sean away in London for a week of meetings, and on the second day, there was this tentative visit from his anxious clerk, with a briefcase full of grief, and it was all laid out before her, all the corrupting entrails.

The third day, trying to lose the bad smell, she took her shrieking headache on a long drive into the country in the ill-gotten Volvo. Ending up at the unknown church of some saint with an obscure Celtic name – you could see the tower from a couple of miles away, but it turned out to be a tiny little place reachable only by a track. How could you put into words what happened in that bare, little church? What happened inside you that chose to happen there.

‘See, for some time before this, I’d been helping our local vicar. Decent guy, but what a waste, this man being a vicar, collecting ten grand a year, whatever it was then – if you lived with Sean, everybody was rated according to their income: he’s a forty a year man, whatever. So ten grand a year and a regular congregation of nineteen. What a loser.’

Merrily watched the smoke rising out of the white circle.

‘It was funny – one of the things that occurred to me in that little church was ... nineteen, that’s a hell of a lot of lives. And that was when I saw the blue and the gold.’

Ah. The blue and the gold. An inner vision? Hey, watch it – warning finger raised by Dr David Campbell – you’re in danger of crossing the demarcation line.

Aw, come on, David, aren’t I allowed one mystical experience, if I don’t talk about it too much? The sense of a huge benevolence, the awesome moment of cosmic awareness, the dwindling of self in an exhilarating vastness of blue and gold?

‘Anyway, whatever it was,’ she wound up, with a half-desperate cynicism, ‘it got rid of the headache.’

‘You ever experience it again?’

’A trace. An essence. Whenever I knelt to pray, it would be there, like a backcloth. This velvet security blanket of deep blue and gold. It kept me going.’

And it isn’t there now?’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘It isn’t, now. I don’t quite remember when it stopped. These past couple of weeks have seemed like about ten years.’

‘You ever go back to that little church?’

‘I’d be scared to,’ she said frankly. ‘In case it was just a little, grey, empty building. Wow, you’re really getting everything here, Lol. The full crisis-of-faith bit.’

She pulled the cigarette out of the ashtray, out of the dog collar.

‘It’s ironic, because I thought, the way you do, that I was being guided here. Like you maybe? Did you feel that?’

‘No. Just Alison. Alison wanted to come here, and I was the guy who could afford to take on a mortgage. Nice place, no special sense of destiny.’

‘I thought there was. Then, in a matter of weeks, the whole edifice is developing cracks. I don’t know why that is. Something I did, something I didn’t do? Maybe women really aren’t strong enough for this job. Shit, wash my mouth out.’

‘Was that why you were ill in church?’

‘Because I was feeling like a fraud? That doesn’t matter any more, didn’t you know? There’s now a whole bunch of ministers within the Anglican Church ready to tell you the Virgin birth and the Christmas story and the resurrection are all myths and God as we know Him is just Father Christmas. No, I don’t know why I was sick.’

A lie. Because she couldn’t talk about the worst of it: that while her prayers had become flat and dead, while she was getting no comfort, no response, no sense of resonance, she was also becoming prey to cold visions from the other side of the demarcation line. Visions which began in dreams and finally made it. Finally got into the church.

Superstition. Mental illness.

‘You know what occurred to me ...’ Lol hesitated, playing with the sleeve of his alien sweatshirt, winding it like a tourniquet around his forefinger, ‘when you were on about the blue and gold?’

‘Go on.’

‘I thought of Jane’s room. The ceiling. See, the night we brought Jane out of the orchard she was rambling about little golden lanterns.’

‘She was drunk.’

‘I don’t think she was. I think she was ... heavy word coming up, Merrily. Can you handle this?’

‘Hit me.’

‘Enchanted. She was enchanted. Everything that word says to you. All the different meanings ... like, elated. Like, under a spell.’

‘You’re right,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s a big word.’

‘And what about you, when you were in the little church?’

‘That,’ she said mock-primly, ‘was what we like to call a religious experience.’

‘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.

35 The Little Golden Lights

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.’

‘Why couldn’t you tell me about it?’

‘You need to ask that?’

Merrily remembered her anger at the absence of headache, queasy tummy, morning-after contrition. Lucy Devenish’s explanation about the cider and the orchard, Like curing Like. Natural holistic medicine.

Crawl into the centre of the orb and curl up. Let nature do the rest. Wouldn’t work for everyone. The orchard’s a risky place, an entity in itself a sphere. And this is a very old orchard. So it tells you – or rather it tells me – something about your daughter.

‘All that evening,’ Jane said, ‘I’d had this kind of a sense of coming home. First it was Colette. She just like appeared in the Black Swan and we clicked, and that was great. But when I looked up in the orchard I was on my own again and it was like a different kind of bonding with ... I don’t know. I still don’t know.’

‘Something beyond everything,’ Merrily said clumsily.

‘She must have felt excluded,’ Jane said. ‘That was the problem.’

‘Colette?’

‘Yeah. She felt ... That was why she tried to lead them all into the orchard at the party. She wanted to ... I don’t know.’

‘Re-establish control. Inspector Howe said she was shouting ...’

‘Jane knows. Like it was a secret we had between us. But there wasn’t. It’s not something you can share. She didn’t know anything about it. She was going in mob-handed, trampling on everything. She was going to cause offence.’

‘What?’ Merrily stiffened.

Going to cause offence. Miss Devenish on the night of the wassailing, nose twitching in disdain. Can’t anyone see that? Deep offence.

Merrily said, ‘Offence to whom?’

‘The watchers,’ Jane said. ‘The watchers in ... in the little green orchard.’

Merrily tensed. ‘Who are the watchers, Jane?’

Jane’s mouth opened, but the words wouldn’t come. She saw Lol, standing shyly in the doorway.

‘Poor Karl Windling,’ she said. ‘But you must be awfully glad.’

It was all very strange and cathartic. Merrily and Jane sat on the old sofa, Lol walked around, and they talked about levels of existence and the life-force in nature. The Lucy Devenish Memorial Discussion.

‘So how does the Apple Tree Man come into this?’ Merrily said. ‘I thought he represented the spirit of the orchard.’

‘Oh no,’ said Jane. ‘You haven’t been listening. Lucy said that was wrong. That wasn’t local folklore. She said different places grew their own customs and beliefs according to what was needed. She said Wil Williams knew the reality of it because he was so psychic. And all that about him being seen dancing with sprites, that probably had a basis in fact, because when he was in the orchard the spirits would show themselves to him.’

She and Lol explained about the Pharisees Reds. How, when the old farmers found out they had an exceptional cider apple that was different to the ones growing anywhere else, they thought it was a gift from the spirits of the orchard.

‘Or the angels,’ Jane said. ‘Lucy said that in the seventeenth century if you said too much about fairies, you’d wind up ... well, like Wil Williams.’

‘Oh.’ Merrily sank into the old sofa. ‘I see. The Wine of Angels. Barry Bloom said that was Lucy’s idea.’

‘She wasn’t happy about it though, Mum. She wasn’t happy about the way the orchard had been let go and now it’s all started coming back after the wassailing and old Edgar shooting himself.’

‘Lucy thought things were coming to a head,’ Lol said. ‘And when Jane ... Oh shit, this is really difficult.’

Down in the house, the phone was ringing. Jane exchanged a glance with Lol. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said.

Lol said, ‘She was just there. One second there was blossom on the ground, lots of it, and the next Jane was there, kind of ... enshrouded in it. I don’t know where she came from. I don’t know how long she’d been there.’

‘And what had you taken?’ Merrily said coldly.

Lol sighed.

‘I’m sorry’ She spread her hands on her lap and looked down at them. ‘That was the scary thing, right? The thing you discussed with Miss Devenish. If there was anything calculated to scare you it would be the appearance of a fifteen-year-old girl lying on her back, wearing a school uniform and apple blossom. Could she have been there all the time and you just didn’t see her until you were close up?’

‘I don’t know. It’s possible. She had on this white school blouse. When she sat up, it was covered with petals. She sat up just like she’d been asleep, sunbathing. Except there was no sun. I took her right back to the cottage and phoned Lucy.’

‘She could have been there all day, that’s what you’re saying. Since she failed to get on the school bus.’

‘I don’t know. Lucy said it ... sometimes happened. Though not as often as you might imagine from all the folk tales. She said a day was nothing. Sometimes it could be a year before people came back, although it only felt like a few moments. And sometimes it felt like years but it was only a few moments. She showed me stuff in books.’ He looked sick. ‘You see why I was reluctant to tell you this. You imagine me telling the cops?’

‘Don’t even contemplate it.’ Merrily placed a cigarette on the arm of the sofa, searched around for her Zippo. ‘It’s like these alien abductions. Was it a dream, was it hallucination? You want me to believe that, in some way, the orchard took her. That Jane has – or thinks she has – in some way been possessed by the orchard, which is itself an entity, a sentient thing. And that it’s now taken Colette, maybe?’

Lol shook his head in defeat.

‘Which,’ Merrily said, ‘I suppose could hardly be dismissed as entirely incredible by someone whose profession implies she believes a dead man appeared to his mates, displaying his crucifixion scars. Right?’

Lol shrugged.

‘Except’ – Merrily located her lighter in a cuff of her sweater – ‘that this is paganism.’

‘I suppose it must be.’

‘It really is, Lol. It makes me want to reach for my big cross.’

‘Mum,’ Jane said from the doorway, ‘it’s some solicitor in Hereford called McGreedy.’

‘So you told her. You told her her daughter had been spirited away.’

‘Something like that.’

‘She scoff?’

‘No. But that doesn’t mean she believed it, though. You’re going to have to be patient with her. Supportive, as they say.’

‘That’s what Lucy said.’ Jane pulled the teddy bear on to her knees. ‘She said Mum was the catalyst. I’m not sure what that means.’

‘Means she’s the one who’s going to make things happen.’

‘She’s the one? We could wait for ever.’

‘What for? What do you expect to happen? What happened to you? Where did you go? Did you just fall asleep or what?’

‘It’s a blank. I mean, maybe there’s some part of my subconscious that remembers being prodded about by little green men or whatever, but it must be well buried. Suppose that’s what happened to Colette. What can we do about that? Suppose, because she wasn’t respectful, she’s been received ... less kindly.’

Lol was allowing himself to wonder whether they were really having this conversation or whether he himself had been abducted, slipped back into the hospital, back on to the medication, when Merrily returned, a little out of breath from all the stairs, her forehead furrowed.

‘This your doing, flower?’

Lol, relaxed for the first time in nearly two decades in the company of a teenage girl, let himself think how very pretty her mother was.

‘That was a lawyer called Harold McCready. He is Lucy Devenish’s lawyer. He says she went to his office a couple of days ago to add a codicil to her will, appointing an extra executor. As though she knew she hadn’t long to live, McCready said. A folksy, country lawyer. Seen it before, he said. People often know, even when they’re not ill.’

Jane sat up. ‘What’s an executor?’

‘Someone responsible for seeing that the wishes of the deceased are carried out to the letter. Normally, just a formality. Somehow, I suspect this is going to be more complicated.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s me, flower. Things get stranger. Why would she do that? Someone who’s had so little to do with her. It’s weird. I’m supposed to look over her possessions for any indications of her last wishes ... As vague as that. There’s a clerk from McCready’s office driving over with a key to her house. Have either of you ever been in there?’

‘Just the shop,’ Jane said. ‘Mum, you have to take this very, very seriously. She said you might get cold feet and want to leave. Because of what happened in the church and stuff. She said you mustn’t. She also said you should change your mind about not letting that play go on in the church. She said—’

‘Flower—’

‘I’m just a kid,’ Jane said. ‘Does executor mean the same as catalyst?’

36 Dancing Gates

‘DISASTROUS,’ DERMOT CHILD said into the early evening stillness. ‘Totally disastrous. By the end of the afternoon it was fairly conclusive. About three dozen genuine ones, the rest were rubberneckers hoping for a body bag. When the police cars dwindled to one, they took themselves off home.’

He stood on the corner of Church Street looking out to the square, where the last stallholder was packing up, spreading stains of armpit sweat on his polo shirt uncomfortably reminiscent, for Merrily, of the menacing dream-Dermot.

‘The bloody Press, too. Not an arts journalist among them. Ten people went into the exhibition, none of them bought a thing. Thirty tickets sold for the string quartet. Is it even worth it? Come and have a drink, Merrily. Do your understanding-vicar bit. Tell me you’ll offer a prayer for the festival.’

‘Priest-in-charge,’ Merrily said dully. Lack of sleep was already corroding her resolve. The last thing she needed was a cosy drink with Dermot Child. ‘Understanding-priest-in-charge. I’m sorry, I can’t, Dermot. I have an appointment. I’ll try and make it to the concert.’

‘Perhaps it’s telling us something. Controversy certainly attracts attention, but this was the wrong kind of controversy. Pulls in the wrong element.’

‘The gossiping classes, as distinct from the chattering classes.’

He smiled. ‘Clearly, the morris dancers were a mistake. Terrence’s idea. Falls between two stools. The cultured consider it quaint but a little simplistic, the working class find it more than a bit of a yawn. Terrence is all for harmless tradition. I think we need to be a touch more avant-garde.’

‘Like your Old Cider thing?’

‘Ah.’ His eyes went to sly slits and he tapped his nose. ‘You haven’t seen that yet, Merrily. And neither has Terrence, thank God. It might seem tame, but what you have is this very male celebration of fecundity.’

‘Fascinating,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m sorry, I do have to go.’

‘Approached it the wrong way at first, you see. I was looking for singers when I should’ve been seeking out untamed virility. Chaps who, with a little training, can learn to sing not from the throat, not from the stomach but from the, ah, loins.’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said. Dermot talking dirty only made her feel more exhausted. ‘Well, good luck with tonight – I’m sure you’ll get lots of people turning up on spec’

She walked across the street, but carried on down past Miss Devenish’s house, not wanting him to know where she was going. At the junction with Old Barn Lane, she turned, and he was gone. She walked back to Lucy’s terraced black and white, taking out the key. As she pushed it into the lock beside the goblin knocker, a gruff and loaded male chorus sang in her head. Auld ciderrrrrrrrrr.

Dermot’s choral work was going to be a kind of aural hard-on.

She shuddered.

She was several feet into Lucy’s living room when the door twitched shut behind her.

She started and turned her head, but no one was there. The silence, in fact, was almost companionable, and she understood that she was more afraid of Dermot Child having crept in behind her than she was of Lucy’s ghost. Would almost have welcomed the jolly, ponchoed apparition.

To advise her, for a start, on what the hell she was supposed to be doing in here.

The muted evening light was a soft presence in the single, small window, leaded and lace-curtained. But not in the room, which was well into its own dusk. Merrily went back to the door and found a light switch, an old metal one like a pewter pip.

It activated two Victorian bracket lamps over an ornate, ebony desk which sat under the window and dominated the room like an altar. The beams above it were stained as black as the exterior timbers. There was a rigid-looking armchair and a Victorian chaise longue. All four walls were half-panelled, to waist level, white-painted above, between glass-fronted bookcases. There was a single etching – two Victorian fairies, elegantly pool-peering – in a thin black frame. And some framed photographs.

Merrily stood, for a moment, hands by her sides. Trying for quietness inside, receptivity.

The solicitor’s clerk from McCready’s office had arrived on a red Honda motorbike just before six, handing her a brown envelope containing only the front-door key and a smaller one. No instructions, no advice.

Jane had wanted to come across with her, but she’d felt that would be wrong. This apparently was between Miss Devenish and her. Although it would have been useful having Lol in here, the person who’d known her best of late, but who dare not be seen on the streets.

She was still reluctant to touch anything without at least a sensation of having permission. It was all so tidy. As though Lucy Devenish had actually walked out of here this morning under a premonition that she might not be returning.

Merrily folded her arms. ‘What do you want me to do, Lucy?’

It didn’t seem foolish to ask aloud. She’d always had the slightly unorthodox idea that the dead were not fully gone until after the funeral service. Sometimes she’d look at the coffin in the church and sense a relief, a gratefulness, emanating from it. Occasionally, a sense of indignation.

‘What do you want me to know?’

Nothing happened. The lights did not go out. No bat-winged, hook-nosed spectre peeled itself from the panelling. Neither did she feel anything, nor hear any inner voice.

She went to look at the photographs on the walls. One, in blurry black and white, showed a much younger, bushy-haired Lucy in a summer dress sitting on a bench. A young, smiling man in cricketing clothes was leaning over the back of the bench, hands on her shoulders. Lucy wore a sad half-smile, as though she knew it wouldn’t come to anything. In another picture, a shorter haired, middle-aged Lucy, trousers rolled into riding boots, held out a feed bucket for a piebald pony, while a younger woman looked on. She looked curiously familiar. Sister? Close friend?

Merrily peered into the bookcases without opening the doors. There was a surprising number of volumes on English and Welsh history, from the old, popular favourites, like Arthur Mee, to modern classics, like John Davies’s History of Wales and, more specialist, Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. With the slump in congregations and the growth of New Age cults, somebody should have written one called Magic and the Decline of Religion. Someone like Lucy, perhaps.

She turned back to the desk.

There was a box on it. A Victorian writing box which should open out into a small, sloping desk-surface. Merrily saw that both bracket lamps had been angled to focus on it, pooling it in light.

‘Spooky,’ she said aloud, to show to herself that she wasn’t spooked by this. Not at all. Good heavens no.

From the pocket of her denim skirt, she brought out the second key. A little brass key. The box had a brass escutcheon over its keyhole.

The key fitted, of course. The lock glided open with a discreet pock.

Eerie.

She made no immediate move to lift the lid, remembering the story of Joanna Southcott’s box which could only be opened in the presence of about a dozen bishops and never had been because most bishops were too lofty or politically sensitive even to consider it.

She wondered if she should say a small prayer.

‘This was it?’ Lol picked up the hefty Lapridge Press paperback of Ella Mary Leather’s The Folklore of Herefordshire. ‘This was all there was inside?’

‘Lucy’s Bible. Careful, there are markers.’

Folded bits of paper had been placed between pages at intervals. Some had scrawled notes on them. When Lol put the book on the kitchen table it fell open at once to the section on wassailing the old girl had quoted on Twelfth Night.

‘I’m at a loss.’ Merrily sat down with a bump. ‘I liked her. I want to honour her last wishes. I’m trying to feel flattered that she chose me as the instrument. But ... you know ... what are we looking for? And in what context?’

Jane perched on a corner of the table. ‘It’s obvious that we have to work it out for ourselves. Because if she just wrote it down in black and white we – or you, especially – would be able to say like, Yeah, yeah, very interesting, but the old boot was completely out of it. But if you have to spend some time working it out, you’ll see the reasoning behind it.’

Merrily yawned. ‘Can we look at this tomorrow?’

‘Mum, it’s important. It’s vital!’

‘Sure, but vital how? Vital to what?’

‘Vital to Lucy?’ Jane dropped her feet to the flagstones. ‘Isn’t that enough for you? It’s enough for me. And Lol.’

Merrily smiled wearily. ‘OK. You’re right. We have a duty. I have a duty. No idea where to start, of course.’ She plucked out one of the paper bookmarks, keeping her thumb in the place. ‘Hannah Snell, 1745,’ she read from the paper. ‘That’s all it says. What’s that mean?’

‘Mum, we can find out. You can find out anything if you put your mind to it.’

‘Sure.’ She pushed both hands through her hair. ‘There’re a few more obvious references to cider and apples. And this looks like a photocopy of a page from some other book, stuffed in here, something about Oxford University. Can’t think what that connects to. There’s a page marked here, lots of heavy underlining. Fairies again.’

It seemed to be a story told to Mrs Leather by an unnamed woman who got it from her mother who said it had happened to her first cousin and she remembered it well.

The cousin, a girl about eighteen, was very fond of dancing; she insisted on going to all the balls for miles around; wherever there was dancing going on, there was she. Her people told her something would happen to her some day, and one night when she was coming home just by the ‘Dancing Gates’ near Kington, she heard beautiful music. It was the music of the fairies and she was caught into the ring. Search was made for her and she appeared to her friends from time to time, but when they spoke to her she immediately disappeared. Her mother was told (probably by the wise man or woman) 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?’

Merrily looked up at Jane, now leaning over her other shoulder. ‘I know what you’re going to say. This girl’s a nineteenth-century Colette. But I see no mention, in this curious precedent, of clothing found several miles away, do you?’

‘What’s this written inside the back cover? Young Alison. 1965. With a question mark.’

‘It’s not an uncommon name,’ Merrily said. ‘But Alison Kinnersley did go to see Lucy this morning.’

‘Alison did?’ Lol came over.

‘This morning. Early. Just after I’d left the Country Kitchen. She asked me which was Lucy’s house, and I directed her. I wondered at the time why she wanted to see her that early. Did they know each other?’

‘Not that I know of. Young Alison?’

‘It’s just a pencil scrawl.’

‘But, Mum, what if this was the last thing she wrote before she went out on her moped? The last thing she ever wrote?’

‘Well, we aren’t ever going to know that, are we, flower?’

The phone rang. Jane walked over to answer it. ‘You in, or what?’

‘Depends who it is. I’ll leave it to your judgement. I might be having a bath.’

‘Right.’

‘I’m very confused,’ Merrily said to Lol. ‘I’m not happy.’

‘And who’s that?’ Jane said into the phone. ‘Oh. Right. Well, no, actually I’m her daughter, but if you tell me what it’s about I might be able to find her.’

Jane listened, expressionless, for over a minute.

‘Really,’ she said flatly. ‘And who told you that?’ She smiled. ‘No, I didn’t think you would. Hang on, give me a couple of minutes, I’ll wander over the vicarage, see if she’s around.’

She inspected the receiver and then put it down on the window ledge and signalled to Merrily to follow her into the passage. ‘Guy from The Sunday Times in London. Apparently, somebody’s rung to tell them there’s a row developed over you refusing to let Coffey do his play in the church. Looks like your chance to back off before they crucify you as a Philistine.’

‘Damn.’

‘You want to buy some time? How about if I tell them you’re out at a string quartet recital and then you’re going on to a fashionable village cocktail party?’

‘And then they print it anyway and say I was unavailable for comment. Sod it.’ Merrily went back into the kitchen, snatched up the phone. ‘Hello. Merrily Watkins.’

‘Mrs Watkins, hi. So sorry to bother you in the evening. Craig Jamieson at The Sunday Times newspaper. I’m just checking—’

‘Sure. To be honest, I can’t imagine why anyone should want to cause mischief by telling you complete lies about an issue on which no decision’s yet been announced one way or the other.’

‘Really? That is puzzling, isn’t it, Mrs Watkins?’ Craig Jamieson sounded about seventeen, but Merrily supposed he must be at least a PhD to be a hack on The Sunday Times. ‘You see, I’ve spoken to Richard Coffey and he told me he wouldn’t be in the least surprised to find that you’d turned against the play. Because of all the pressure you’d been under.’

‘Pressure?’

Craig Jamieson chuckled. ‘I gather certain ... well-established families are feeling threatened.’

‘Look, I don’t want to be cagey, but whoever told you this is going way over the top. There’s been no row. Have you spoken to the member of the well-established family?’

‘I was going to see what you had to say first.’

‘Well, I’m sure that if you spoke to him he’d tell you he was right behind the play. Good heavens, when someone as distinguished as Richard Coffey wants to put your obscure little community on the literary map, you don’t throw it back in his face, do you?’

God forgive me.

There was a pause. Then Craig Jamieson said, ‘So you’re going to let them do the play in your church?’

‘I ... Look, I can’t just tell you that, can I? When nothing’s been officially decided yet. I mean, there’s ... you know what the Church is like ... there’s protocol. I haven’t even talked it over with the bishop yet.’

‘He has to give his permission, does he? That’s the Bishop of Hereford, right?’

‘It’s just ... it’s protocol. You know. I’m sorry, but there’s really no story. You know?’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Craig Jamieson blandly.

Coffey, Merrily thought. This is Coffey. He wants to force the issue.

Perhaps it was time to call his bluff.

Replacing the phone, she saw Lol’s fist connecting with the table. He was staring down at the scrawl in Mrs Leather’s book.

‘Young Alison,’ he said. ‘Young Alison.’

37 Wil’s Play

IN A CORNER of the bar at the Swan, Gomer Parry sniffed suspiciously into his poncy glass. Not that he was any kind of connoisseur, see, but there was something ...

‘Stop that,’ Minnie hissed down his ear. ‘It’s not French wine, you know. You’ll be showing us up.’

‘En’t right, somehow.’ Gomer shuffled uncomfortably inside what he’d always thought of as his laying-out suit. ‘Nothing wrong with it, like, but it en’t right.’

‘The rubbish you talk, Gomer. Can’t you just drink it?’

There was a free glass of the so-called Wine of Angels for everybody attending the string quartet concert – recital, Minnie kept stressing, I think it’s a recital, Gomer – served in thin champagne glasses. Bottles of the stuff, with the picture of the church on the label, were set out on a special table, Emrys, the wine waiter, doing the honours to make everybody think this was a real privilege, like. ‘Fermented in the bottle,’ he kept telling the arty buggers from Off, whose Land Rover Discoveries were clogging up the market place – not that there was many of them, but a few of that sort went a long way, in Gomer’s view.

On account of the tickets not going as well as they’d figured, Dermot Child’s festival flunkeys had been doing the rounds, offering half-price seats to locals and finally fetching up at Gomer and Minnie’s bungalow, the bastards. ‘Oughter be called off, I reckon, in respect of poor Lucy,’ Gomer had mumbled, but Minnie had shelled out for the tickets straight off, though neither of them’d know a string quartet from a dustcart crew.

There were other people you wouldn’t expect to see at this kind of do. Brenda Prosser, from the Eight till Late shop, and Bernard and Norma Putley, from the garage, putting a brave face on it ‘spite of their boy being grilled by the Law over drugs. Oh, and Bull-Davies with his blonde floozie.

No sign of the vicar, mind. Gomer was worried about that little lady. Needed friends, she did, and all that was happening was folk getting turned against her. Too many mischief-makers. Life was boring in the country now, for folk born and raised locally. No jobs worth getting up for, less they moved away, the telly always showing them what they were missing, the Sun telling them they ought to be having dynamite sex twice a night and different partners at weekends, drug dealers showing enterprising youngsters like Mark Putley how they could earn enough for a smart motorbike.

And no characters any more. Gomer fiddled in a pocket of his stiff, blue jacket for a cigarette he daren’t bring out. No characters, now poor Lucy was gone. All gloss and no soul. The string quartet was made up of professional musicians from London with weekend cottages hereabouts.

And the so-called Wine of Angels, even that had no character. All this talk about the Pharisees Red and it tasted like supermarket cider. Whatever the old recipe was, the Powells had lost it.

‘En’t right,’ Gomer mumbled, following Minnie into the big dining room, done out as a concert hall. ‘Artificial’ That was the word. Whole village was artificial nowadays, but the cider, that needed checking out.

‘Here for the concert, Reverend?’ asked the fifty-something man at the hand dryer. Bank-manager type.

‘Yes, I er ... I’m staying with friends in Hereford.’ Try and project your voice more. Always sound confident. ‘I gather the Queen’s Arms Quartet are building up quite a reputation.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ the bank manager said. ‘I believe they are. Well ... enjoy it’

As the toilet door wheezed into place, the face of Sandy Locke came up in the mirror. The Reverend Sandy Locke. Whose parish was in Hampshire, who was spending a couple of weeks with some old college friends in the cathedral city and who, this evening, was indulging his fondness for chamber music.

In the mirror, the Rev. Sandy Locke produced a surprisingly encouraging smile. It scared him how plausible he looked. How confident, how relaxed. He actually wouldn’t have recognized himself. A natural vicar’s face, Merrily had told him. Kind of fresh and innocent.

God forbid.

The ponytail had had to go. It was quite reasonable for a vicar to have long hair these days, Merrily said, but in Ledwardine it would make some people look again. Jane had cut his hair, finishing off with nail scissors so that it looked neat and groomed. Merrily had produced the black jacket and black cord jeans, the black T-shirt thing and the dog collar, all out of her own wardrobe. Everything was very tight. The jacket buttoned the wrong way, but it wouldn’t button anyway.

He froze momentarily when, on leaving the Gents’, he brushed against a woman who turned out to be Detective Inspector Annie Howe, severely youthful in her business suit. Howe glanced at him and they both smiled and he was terrified, but Howe moved on, and that was the clincher: the Rev. Sandy Locke bore no resemblance to the police picture of the young Lol Robinson, sex offender.

He went to the bar. He ordered a Perrier, carried it over to the window and stood there and watched the beautiful Alison Kinnersley, in a low-cut, wine-coloured velvet dress he didn’t recognize, flashing smiles across a table at her lover, and he felt no longing.

Where he’d thought he’d be feeling ridiculous, in fact he felt controlled. It was a strange and powerful sensation, everything now tightly wrapped around this deep and focused curiosity. Wild. Exhilarating. And, in the garb of a church minister, entirely and ironically unexpected.

He stood there, by the long, floral curtains, the opulent scene before him glimmering with artificial candlelight from the oak-pillared walls, and he looked at Alison Kinnersley, as though he was seeing her for the first time and saw that she was focused, too. Every smile she flung at Bull-Davies had a weight of history behind it. Or was he imagining that because of what he now knew?

He went on looking at Alison Kinnersley, whose name just happened to be the name of a straggling village in North Herefordshire which you might pick off a map and think how solid and convincing it would sound as a surname.

He went on looking at Alison Kinnersley but he thought about the Reverend Merrily Watkins.

Look. She’d held the dog collar to his throat. It’ll work. This is the only way. It’ll work.

She’d seemed exhilarated by it, fussing around, attending to details.

She was very lovely. He only wished she hadn’t seen Lol Robinson at his most pathetic.

Alison and Bull-Davies finished their drinks together and stood up together and walked together through a double doorway under a sign saying dining room.

In his strange, controlled way, the Rev. Sandy Locke followed them.

Where Lol Robinson would have hung around outside in the bar, hoping she’d need to go to the toilet, the Rev. Sandy Locke would take the seat right next to Alison.

Controlled?

Jesus, could it possibly last?

‘You are happy to discuss this in front of your little daughter?’ Richard Coffey said.

He wore a black leather waistcoat over a grandad vest. A rather good plaster facsimile of Michelangelo’s David flaunted itself on a plinth beside his chair. On the flock-papered walls were some artfully lit but fairly blatant black and white photos of naked men.

‘If there’s anything I don’t understand,’ Merrily said, ‘I’m sure she can explain it to me on the way home.’

Coffey didn’t smile. The truth was, she hadn’t been prepared to leave the kid alone in the vicarage. You might be able to lock Ethel the cat in the kitchen, but Jane disappeared too easily these days.

Jane sat on a cushion on a stone arm of the fireplace and gazed at Stefan Alder who shared the sofa with Coffey. Still young enough to think it just needed the right woman to come along to straighten him out. Merrily’s view, looking at Coffey’s bare, steely hawsered arms and his patchwork face, inclined more towards the right younger man. But to business.

‘Reason I wanted to see you, Mr Coffey, was the telephone call I had from The Sunday Times.’

‘Ah.’ Coffey leaned an arm along the back of the sofa, behind Stefan. ‘Dear Craig.’

‘I presumed he got his initial information from you.’

Coffey scowled. ‘He did not.’

The light in the lodge’s cubical sitting room was fading and dusty. The room was furnished with reproduction statuary and thousands of books. No TV, only a small, portable stereo. Nothing valuable because the house was left empty for long periods, Coffey had explained, and who wanted to steal books? Not that their despicable neighbour, Bull-Davies, would do anything to stop them.

‘If you’re looking for Craig’s informant,’ Coffey said, ‘I suggest you look no further than the festival committee. And I suspect that under the present circumstances one can rule out the unfortunate Cassidy.’

Merrily sat up even straighter than her pine Shaker-style chair demanded. ‘You mean Child?’

Controversy certainly attracts attention, Dermot had said, bemoaning the poor attendance, in real terms, on Day One. But this was the wrong kind of controversy.

Coffey pursed his thin lips and raised his tightly plucked eyebrows and said nothing.

‘For a quick blast of publicity for the festival?’ It made sense; if the festival flopped now that Dermot was in charge, after his frequent disparaging of Terrence Cassidy, there’d be enough egg on his face to whip up mayonnaise.

Coffey leaned his head on his arm. ‘Merrily, as I think I told you, I’m a thorough sort of chap, and I don’t do business with unknowns. I had them all checked out, with particular reference to precisely what they were doing before they came to Ledwardine ... or came back, in Child’s case. Cassidy? Small beer, a polytechnic poseur who inherited his father’s house and decided on a new start. Child. Hmm. Well. Stefan calls him the Goblin, don’t you, Steffie?’

‘Goblins being the entities that enter your house at night and mess up your possessions,’ Stefan said. He’d looked quite pleased to see them when he first opened the door. As though there was tension between Coffey and him.

‘He’s a failure, basically,’ Coffey said. ‘Started out as a music teacher at some comprehensive school, then decided his talents were worth more. Worked with an early-music ensemble and composed, in the loosest sense, the music for a television costume drama which was so awful they screened it around midnight. Been trading on it ever since, with diminishing returns. Child’s a loser.’

‘But a rather poor loser, I’m afraid,’ Stefan said.

‘A poisonous loser. Man’s so embittered he doesn’t care who goes down. So, if you’re looking for the designer, if not the actual distributor, of, for example, certain posters branding you a person of satanic bent, you might begin by checking out the equipment at the festival office.’

Merrily was shocked. ‘I can’t believe that.’

‘Of course you can’t, he’s a charming little man.’

Jane said, ‘Posters?’

‘Juvenile trivia, flower.’

‘Only, Dean Wall and Gittoes and those hairballs were coming out with all that Satanism stuff at Colette’s party.’

‘Who?’ said Coffey.

‘Just some yobs from Jane’s school’

‘Ah, well, schoolboys can be terribly useful,’ Coffey said, with a certain insouciance. ‘They always need money. And it doesn’t have to be a great deal.’

Stefan glared at him.

‘But why would he?’ Merrily said. ‘What have I ever done to him?’

‘I really wouldn’t know. Perhaps not enough. Who can say?’

‘Christ,’ Merrily said.

She couldn’t look at any of them and stared out of the window, across a few semi-wooded fields to the village. Between the lodge’s Victorian Gothic mullions, smudges of evening cloud had blunted the church steeple.

After no more than about seventy-five minutes, the Queen’s Arms Quartet were showing signs of strain, and the tubby, beaming guy – Dermot Child? – arose to lead a standing ovation. Seriously undeserved, Lol thought, having detected more than a few bum notes. Still, it was at this moment – when they all stood up, with an assortment of creaks from an assortment of chairs – that Alison glanced, for the first time, directly to her left and met the eyes of the Rev. Sandy Locke.

It was worth it. For a second, her face was frozen tight, before it imploded into a gasp. Another first. Maybe the gasp was even a tiny scream, but it was lost among the spurious applause, like a leaf in a gale.

Lol clapped harder so that he swayed against Alison. He put his cheek next to hers and in his jolly vicar voice he said, ‘Alison Young, as I live and breathe.’

Stefan Alder began to look excited, leaned eagerly towards Merrily. ‘So what are you proposing?’

It was quite dark now, but Coffey had not put on a lamp.

‘I don’t quite know,’ Merrily said. ‘It all seems to go deeper than I can say. Or you, I suspect.’

‘It couldn’t go any deeper with me,’ Stefan said, and Coffey frowned.

‘In the village, I meant.’ Merrily thought of her afternoon with Lucy, who’d said she wanted the play to go on in the church so that the truth would come out. When the ditch-waters are stirred, the turds often surface. ‘I think I want whatever’s bubbling under there to come to the surface. Is that what you want?’

‘It’s all I want,’ Stefan said humbly, without even a glance at Coffey.

‘What I don’t want, though,’ Merrily said, ‘and what I don’t think the village deserves, is for it to happen in the middle of a media circus. I don’t want’ – a sideways glance at Coffey – ‘to play Dermot’s game.’

Coffey said from the shadows, ‘Don’t try to be clever, Mrs Watkins. Spell it out.’

‘All right.’ She looked down to the village, where lights were coming on. ‘I heard Stefan and your friends Martin and Mira discussing the idea of involving the community in the drama by having a few local people virtually take on the roles of their ancestors. So you’d have Wil Williams defending himself from the pulpit, explaining his ... situation. And perhaps some reaction, whether it’s surprise or dismay or sympathy. Who’d play Thomas Bull?’

‘We’d have an actor,’ Coffey said guardedly. ‘I even considered doing it myself.’

Merrily said, before she could stop herself, ‘You do like to live dangerously, don’t you?’

A cold silence from Coffey’s corner.

‘We would hardly expect Bull-Davies to be there,’ Stefan said.

‘Don’t underestimate him.’

‘And don’t underestimate me, Mrs Watkins.’ Richard Coffey inclined his head to her. ‘Don’t push me too hard. There are other churches. There’s even a cathedral’

‘No!’ Stefan cried. Merrily raised a palm.

‘I’m not pushing anybody. I’m just suggesting that if you want the local people on your side and no embarrassing interruptions, then you might like to try a private run-through with a private, local audience. Unpublicized. Word of mouth. I can guarantee an audience.’

‘And Child would guarantee a television crew or two.’

‘I think not,’ Merrily said icily.

‘And when were you thinking we might do this?’

‘Tomorrow night?’

She heard Jane gasp. Two or three seconds of incredulous silence followed, before Coffey’s forced laughter and Merrily interrupting it.

‘Why not? It’s all written, isn’t it? Stefan’s well into the role.’

‘Mrs Watkins, your ignorance of the demands of a theatrical production I find—’

‘But we’re not talking about a theatrical production! We’re talking about ... I don’t know what we re talking about ... A confrontation. A dialogue. A dialogue with the past. The village facing up to its most shameful episode, seeking redemption. Looking into its own soul and groping for the truth after three centuries of ignorance. Trying to find the light.’

‘The beginnings of a pretty soliloquy,’ said Coffey. ‘Who would you play, Mrs Watkins?’

‘I understand what you’re worried about. You’re afraid of a shambles. Of word getting out that it was a disaster. Maybe Dermot Child shafting you. Well, all right, I can buy that. But this would be a village thing – the sort of thing churches were intended for.’

‘She might be right.’ Stefan Alder was on his feet, his back to the window, looking out over the lights of Ledwardine. ‘We know everything about the village,’ he said to Merrily. ‘We’ve a great, thick file of information. Richard paid a chap who used to work for the local paper to collect stories and memories from local people.’

‘Shut up, Steffie.’

‘This chap was marvellous. He hung out in the Ox and places, he talked to a meeting of the WI. They all thought he was collecting information for one of those local history books. Nobody knew it was for us. We can use all that. We’ll surprise everybody with how much we know, how much a part of this village we’ve become in such a short time. She’s right, Richard, we can bond with these people, we can win them over, prove beyond all doubt that we’re the right people to do this, to tell the truth.’

‘She might very well be right, Steffie, but what she’s suggesting is utterly impossible. Why tomorrow night anyway? Why not in a couple of months’ time, when we know where we’re going with this?’

‘Because I don’t know where I’m going with it, Mr Coffey. It keeps coming up in front of me. I keep telling myself it’s only a bloody play, but ...’

‘It isn’t,’ Stefan said. ‘It’s a public redemption.’

‘Yes. Whatever. Anyway, those are my terms. You want to do it somewhere else, you go ahead. You know my number.’ Merrily stood up. ‘Come on, Jane.’

‘All right.’ Stefan Alder turned towards them, a shadow, even his ash-blond hair black against the blue-grey window. ‘We’ll do it. We’ll do it tomorrow night. Bring who you want. Fill the church.’

‘Stefan, don’t be a bloody fool’ Coffey sprang up, his face pulsing. ‘Leave us, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Sure. Flower?’

Jane crept quietly away from the empty hearth. They let themselves out. In the dark room behind them, they heard Richard Coffey snarl, ‘You stupid little shit. It’s my play.’

‘I’ll see he’s there,’ Stefan called after them, his voice high and tremulously theatrical. ‘I’ll have him there.’

‘It’s my play!’

‘Not you,’ Stefan sang out, with stinging contempt. ‘Wil. It’s Wil’s play.’

38 Winding Sheet

MUM DROVE THEM slowly home in the Volvo with the Hazey Jane album playing quite loudly on the CD, a signal she didn’t want to talk. Maybe this was just as well, Jane was thinking. She’d only have said something really crass about Mum coming on, at last, like an actual catalyst.

It was like Lucy was in the back seat.

And what was so crazy about that? Jane looked out of the side window as they came into the village as if she might spot the lamp of the moped bobbing into the market place, a little golden light. What had they done with Lucy’s moped? Probably being examined by some police mechanical expert, who’d say the brakes were crap or something and the little bike was a death trap and why wasn’t she wearing a helmet?

Because it wouldn’t fit over her big hat, you cretins! You want Lucy Devenish to go out without her hat?

There was life after death. There had to be. Or there was no justice; no justice for good people like Lucy. Who nobody could replace; something had died with Lucy, a spirit. It was mega-depressing.

She glanced at Mum’s profile, the dark curls in need of a cut. Run with this, Vicar, don’t let her down. And then thought about Colette. Where was she tonight?

It’s like somebody cuts out a section of time and joins the ends together, second to second. Like with the dancing girl in Mrs Leather, maybe Colette will be visible occasionally in the little, green orchard.

The thought wasn’t scary; it was hopeful. It had been there on the back burner since she first read that story. If Colette was there, somebody should try and reach her.

The market place was still full of cars, but, at barely ten, people were already dribbling out of the Black Swan under the hanging lanterns. Not much of a gig, then. She wondered how Lol was getting on. It had just been so much fun making him look like a vicar, like traditional country vicars were supposed to look, kind of weedy and innocent. In the end he looked much more like one than Mum, but then Mum never really had.

Before they left for Coffey’s place, Mum had told her the whole story about Lol and Karl Windling and the young girls in the hotel – which she’d found so awful and so barely credible that she wanted to go and find these girls and their smug parents and tell them just what they’d done. As for that bastard Windling ...

On the CD, Lol was singing, the low, breathy voice solo with acoustic guitar, about being alone in the city in a cold January rain but not wanting to go home.

It made such horrifying sense. It made her want to cry. It made her wish she was old enough to marry him or something.

A police car rolled out of Church Street. The awful Howe would be hoping now, like Bella, that Colette was dead, turning it into a big case for an area like this. Dreaming of picking up Lol and shoving him into a little grey-walled room, like on The Bill, her and that Mumford asking him kind of nonchalantly what he’d done with the body. Telling him they just wanted to help him. That was what the police always did, they told you they just wanted to help you. But they were just in it for themselves. Like everybody was.

Except Mum.

‘Suppose they’ve got him?’ she said as they pulled into the vicarage drive.

‘If they’d got him,’ Mum said calmly, switching off the engine and the stereo, ‘I think they’d be waiting for us, too. I don’t see anybody, do you?’

‘Lol wouldn’t finger us.’

‘No,’ Mum said. ‘I don’t think he would.’

Inside the vicarage, she seemed to collapse. No sleep, not much food for over a day. Running on empty for too long. She was trying to open a can of sardines for Ethel, but the metal key thing snapped, and she just stood there in the kitchen and started to weep.

Somehow, the vicarage did this to her. The vastness of it, the emptiness, was far worse for Mum than it was for Jane, who still thought a big house was cool. Not as if it was haunted or anything. It just seemed to do Mum’s brain in. She’d been dynamite at the Upper Hall Lodge, pushing even the scary Coffey into a corner, getting what she wanted. And now, here she was, sobbing her heart out in her own kitchen, and Jane just knew she was thinking about Dad and what a balls they’d made of their marriage and everything and how stupid she’d been to think she could manage a parish and all the other stuff that came down on you when were exhausted in a place you hated.

‘Go to bed, Mum. Please go to bed. I’ll look after everything.’

‘I can’t. What about Lol?’

‘I’ll wait up for him. Please go to bed.’

Mum wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her jumper. ‘Sorry.’

‘You’re overtired.’ Jane eased the sardine can out of her hands.

‘I gave him a key,’ Mum said. ‘Didn’t I?’

‘I think you did. Don’t worry. Sleep.’

Mum looked at her, just about finding the energy for suspicion.

‘I’ll go up too,’ Jane assured her. ‘I won’t go out again, I promise.’

Not tonight, anyway. Got to prepare. Got to get it right.

There was a lounge, for residents only, with a TV set tuned to a film about surfing, with the sound down. A waitress served cocoa to two elderly couples at a window table.

Lol took a seat by the door. One of the elderly ladies smiled at him, and Lol said, ‘Good evening,’ in his soft but resonant vicar’s voice and sat, composed, his fingers loosely entwined.

She would come. She’d directed him here. Smiling and nodding pleasantly for the thirty seconds she’d been speaking to the Rev. Locke, smiling for the benefit of James Bull-Davies, who’d been getting drinks at the time. An actress. Every move she made powered by this low-burning, high-octane fury.

He saw that now. The Rev. Sandy Locke, one step removed from it all, seemed able to see so many things concealed from screwed-up, introverted Lol Robinson.

‘Two eggs,’ one of the elderly men said. ‘Bacon, sausage, liver, onions, black pudding, chips. Nine ninety-five.’ He sat back, triumphant. ‘Inclusive of sweet.’

‘The toilets weren’t clean, though,’ his wife said. ‘At least the toilets are clean here. And what’s more, what I always think is important in a hotel—’

She broke off as Alison glided in, both elderly ladies looking rather shocked when this blonde in the revealing dress went to sit next to the clergyman, the old men looking pleased.

‘Hi.’ Lol smiled. ‘Where did you tell him you were going?’

‘Powder my nose. Evidently, I bumped into someone I knew in the Ladies’, you know what women are like.’

‘I’m kind of learning,’ Lol said. ‘At last.’

‘He’ll find someone’s ear to bend. Won’t notice I’m missing for a while. As to that’ – Alison gestured at his dog collar – ‘I’m not going to ask.’

‘A drink?’

‘No time.’

‘So you talk,’ Lol said. ‘And I’ll listen. I won’t interrupt.’ He felt like he was hovering, very steadily. Everything delicately balanced but, for the first time in his adult life, he was keeping the balance.

Alison shook her hair back. ‘I suppose Devenish told you, God rest her heathen soul’

‘No, it was insight.’

‘From you?’

He grinned. She couldn’t touch him tonight. He lowered his voice. He took this great leap in the dark.

‘I can’t help wondering what James would say, if he knew he’d been fucking his ... what? Half-sister?’

She remained entirely calm. ‘You going to tell him?’

Jesus. It’s right.

‘Probably not,’ he said.

In the darkness of her too-big bedroom, Merrily knelt to pray by her too-big bed.

‘I, er ... I don’t know what I’m asking for. Strength, certainly. Yeah. I’m not strong. But You know that.’

She went quiet. Receptive. Opening up a space in her heart. Wanting very much to receive something, if it was only an upsurge of blessed scepticism. She didn’t want to believe in bloody ghosts and fairies.

In the silence, there was no sense of blue or gold. Was that itself a sign? Was the lack of response, the sense of praying into a black void, an indication that she should harden herself against phoney mysticism, spurious superstition? She felt distantly angry at God for never giving it to you straight.

Of course, it was Lol himself who’d pointed her at Lucy.

Mentioning, when Alison had talked about the Bull-Davies tradition of keeping horses, that James’s old man seemed to have carried on the equine tradition purely for a steady supply of stable girls.

The first chance she had this morning, Alison had been off to pursue this angle with Lucy Devenish, good friend of Patricia Young who’d slaved in the Bull stables in the early sixties.

‘And came home pregnant to Swindon,’ Alison said. ‘Steadfastly refusing to name the father. My gran was very supportive, although God knows she had enough on her plate at the time, with Grandfather failing fast. He died, in fact, the night after I was born, so we came back to a house of mourning, Mother and I.’

The waitress returned and, evidently thinking the minister was a hotel guest, asked if they would like anything. Lol ordered coffee, figuring this was going to take longer than Alison imagined.

‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that Lucy mentioned anything to me about her friend being pregnant. I don’t think she knew. She said she’d warned her to get out of Upper Hall and she’d taken the advice.’

‘You’re right, Devenish didn’t know about the pregnancy. She said this morning that that was what she was afraid of. My mother would come to her in tears, asking what could she do when she needed the job and the money. In the end, Devenish gave her some to get away. Which was kind. But too late. No, she didn’t know about a baby. How did you?’

Lol explained, without mentioning Merrily, about the book in the box. The word Young and then Alison. How he’d kept looking at it and puzzling and then remembered the name, Patricia Young. All those weeks of agonizing over why she left him, and then this moment of blinding certainty. Intuition.

‘I had no choice, Lol’

‘No,’ he said neutrally.

‘You don’t believe that. Hell, you don’t owe me any generosity, I don’t expect any. I needed to live in a certain posh village, couldn’t afford a mortgage.’ She shrugged. ‘You were there. You needed help too. I’m sorry. But I’d do it again.’

Lol didn’t react. He understood now. He didn’t care.

‘So when did your mother eventually admit the old Bull was your father?’

‘Never. Never did. My gran said she’d sometimes imply it was one of the village boys. Unconvincingly.’

‘You must have asked her who your father was, as you got older.’

‘No, no you don’t understand.’ Shaking her head impatiently. ‘I don’t remember Patricia. I don’t remember my mother at all. That’s the whole point. One day, when I was about eighteen months old, she left me with my gran, said she was going back to Hereford to see some people. Get some money out of the father, that was always Gran’s theory, because they had money problems at the time, after the old man died. Bills. Debts. He was a farmer, too, of sorts, my grandad. So Gran didn’t try to stop my mother going. Died regretting that.’

‘Why?

‘Because she never came back, Lol. She returned to Ledwardine to face the father and she never bloody well came back. Gran reported it to the police and they made cursory, routine inquiries in Ledwardine and said nobody had seen her, and that was that.’

‘That was it?’ He thought of the way the police were turning over the village for Colette Cassidy.

‘Grown women, Lol, sometimes choose to disappear. The police were suggesting she’d only come back to Swindon to dump the baby, make sure I had a good home. Then off to join some man, with no inconvenient little kid in tow.’

‘They check with old Bull-Davies?’

‘Oh, sure. Squire John, county councillor and magistrate. Local constable deferential on the doorstep. Sorry to disturb you, sir, tug-tug on the forelock, but this silly girl you once kindly employed ... Just a formality, sir, if you’d be so good as to confirm you never saw her again, thank you very much, sir, sorry to have bothered you.’

Alison tossed back her hair.

‘People like you, Lol, into all this progressive sixties music, forget that it was still quite primitive then, in country areas. You didn’t ruffle the hawk’s feathers.’

‘What do you think happened to her?’

‘I used to think she was given money to go abroad. But now I know they hadn’t got that kind of money. No way. And this is the country. What do you do with nuisances in the country? What do you do with the dog that’s worrying your sheep? What do you do with the badgers you’re convinced are spreading tuberculosis to your cows, even though badgers are officially protected? What do you do with the woman who’s threatening to expose you to the county?’

‘Was she?’

‘No way. She probably just asked for a few thousand quid. Perhaps he was worried she’d be into him for money for the rest of his life, but I can’t imagine she’d have even thought of that. She just went to ask for a bit of help.’

‘Lucy said she was naive. Kind of innocent.’

‘Which would’ve made it even easier for him.’

‘Easier?’

‘To get rid of her. The way people always did in the countryside. With pests.’

‘That’s ...’

‘More difficult than it used to be. But not that much more difficult. I knew it as soon as I came here.’

‘With me?’

‘No ... years earlier. Ten years ago. With a couple of girl friends. Camping holiday. It had been gnawing at me more and more. The number of times I found this place on the maps, circled it and circled it until the biro went through the paper. Then, when Gran died ... I mean, she died hard. She was working well into her seventies, cleaning people’s houses so I could stay on at school, go to university. She died hard and she died full of regrets and remorse – with no reason, whatever, she was a saint, my gran. She died when I was in my final year and I dropped out at once and I got a job and I thought, those fucking rich, smug bastards, they killed my mother and they killed my grandmother, and I ... I just wanted ...’

She was hunched up now, gripping the sides of her chair with both hands. A side of her she’d never before let him see. She tossed back her hair again, getting herself together.

‘So we were on this camping holiday, Julie, Donna – mates from college. I made sure we came here, never told them why. Yeah, it would be twelve years ago, the year after I dropped out. It was a good summer, we hired mountain bikes. I had the route all marked out on the OS map, and when we came to Upper Hall, there he was, the good and great John Bull-Davies, overseeing the haymaking. Sitting on the edge of the bottom meadow in his linen jacket, with his fat bum on a shooting stick. John Bull-fucking-Davies.’

‘How did you know it was him?’

‘I didn’t. At first. I walked over on my own and asked for directions to Canon Pyon. It was very hot, and I was wearing shorts and a skimpy top and sweating profusely, and he said I looked awfully hot and I could probably do with something long and cool. Always remember that. Something long and cool. He leered. Must’ve been in his sixties. Then he saw the other two waiting for me down by the field gate. Too many. Too awkward. So he gave me the directions to Canon Pyon.’

‘You think he’d really have made a play for you, with all the blokes at work in the field?’

‘Absolutely. Probably wanted them to see. The old squire as potent as ever he was. They’ve always fucked who they liked. It was the way. Their right. Droit de seigneur. Before I went back to the bikes, I stood there and looked at him. Full in the face. Memorizing every little, poxy detail. Been a good-looking guy in his time. I stood and I kept on looking at him, until even he became uncomfortable and turned away. Then, that night, in a pub – in this pub, actually – I stared at myself in the mirror and I was nearly sick with disgust.’

The coffee came, and Lol paid for it. It was a different waitress, who clearly recognized Alison, so Lol said, ‘Oh, and Auntie Doris sends her love, by the way.’

Alison poured the coffee with a steady hand.

Cramp in her left leg awoke her.

She’d fallen asleep in the middle of her attempted prayer, head in a curled arm on the duvet. The arm was numb. She was cold. She needed to pee.

She struggled upright, rubbing at the cramped calf. There was no sound from above or from below. What time was it? She groped for the alarm clock, peered at its luminous hands.

Nearly half-twelve. Sunday. The Sabbath. The Working Day. Holy Communion. Morning service. An unusually full church. What would the vicar look like? How would she behave? Would she be pale and penitent? Would she have crimson eyes and drool? However the vicar looked, there’d be enough material for a whole week’s gossip.

The efficient Ted would have rung back while she and Jane were at the lodge, and, on getting no reply, gone ahead and summoned the trusty, retired minister from Pembridge. Making long-term plans, no doubt, to distance himself: a discreet word here, an expression of concern there. Did my best for her, but the traumas of the past, you know. My fault, should have realized her nerves were simply not up to it, parish this size ... all the pressure ...

Pressure on her bladder. Merrily slid her feet into her sandals, found the sweater at the bottom of the bed and pulled it on over her nightdress. Shuffled to the door, aching with weariness, feeling old and beaten, worn out, done in.

For several minutes after she’d finished, she sat there on the lavatory, bowed over, her face in her hands. Her nerves were shot. It made her ashamed. Dozens of people in the village had real, solid, frightening problems – serious illness, recent bereavement, job loss, the prospect of a house being repossessed because they couldn’t meet the mortgage, and, of course, the extreme and constant anxiety and fear when a daughter has disappeared. Compared with all of this, her own problems were meaningless, ephemeral, fatuous.

Merrily washed her hands and face in cold water.

Go back to bed, forget it. Don’t think about tomorrow night either, or how you’re going to organize it; if it’s meant to happen, it will; if it isn’t, let it go, let the original decision stand, no Wil Williams in the church, thank you. Thank you and, if necessary, goodbye. She pulled the bathroom door closed behind her.

Something rushed at her from the blackness. In a vivid instant, she had the clear impression of a hard nucleus of bitter cold, rolling along the lightless passage like a soiled, grey snowball, rapidly gathering momentum, frigidity.

She shrank away, flattened herself against the bathroom door, turned her head into the wall.

The cold hit her. It stank of misery. It wrapped itself around her, a frigid winding sheet. She couldn’t breathe.

She squirmed. Wake up. Lips pulled tight around a prayer: 0 God, yea, though I walk through the darkness of the soul, though my heart is weak ...

At the end of the passage, a light hung over the stairs.

Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake ...

The light was a lean, vertical smear. It wasn’t much, promised no warmth, but she reached out for it, her hands groping for the stair-rail on the landing.

Should she try to run downstairs? She looked down. She tried to call down to Lol, who might not even be there. There was no easier name to say, but she couldn’t say it. ‘L ... L ...’ Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and all that emerged was a sound like an owl-hoot, weak and lonely, and looking down the stairs was like looking down an endless, cold, black well.

The only way was up.

She looked up, just as the light flared over the stairs, like a small, contained area of sheet lightning behind cloud and she was briefly caught in its periphery, which sent a jagged shock into her still-tightened chest, and she stumbled in panic, fell forward on to the stairs into a clinging, damp vapour, dense with particles of fleeing light, and the wooden stairs under her were very rough and the air around her cold. Cold for January, desperately cold for May. She pulled herself up and was nearly pulled down again because her heart was so packed with pain.

Despair. A worm of liquid despair wriggling inside her. The light flared again for a moment, and she felt a penetrating agony in her chest as she toppled into the attic.

There was no sound but the whine of the night wind in the exposed roof timbers and her own breathing.

As she pulled herself up, the tightness fell away and she breathed odourless air. Stood, panting on the top floor of the vicarage, a place of dreams, where there were no doors. No bedroom, no sitting room/study.

No Jane.

Only a long empty space, with a sloping roof, where something cold and naked, wretchedly embracing an unending misery, metamorphosed for a wild, defiant instant into a spinning, swirling, silken vortex of silver-grey and then was gone.

39 Levels

DOWNSTAIRS IN THE drawing room of the vicarage, the lights were on. There were brown, smoking embers in the grate. She was wearing a shapeless, green polo-neck jumper over a white nightdress. It was still night. She’d lost a sandal. She felt cold and drained and heartbroken.

And didn’t know why.

‘She’s sleeping,’ Lol said. ‘I went back and stuck my head around the door. She’s fine. Everything’s normal.’

‘Except me.’ Merrily threw coal on the fire. She would never be warm again.

Lol contemplated her seriously through his glasses, round and brass-rimmed like some old, nautical telescope.

She said, ‘Where was I?’

‘At the top of the stairs. Swaying about. I thought you were going to fall’

‘What did you see? What was it like? Was it a kind of big, open space? Rough joists. Damp ...’ Her voice faded. She knew what he was going to say.

‘It was normal. Just like now.’

‘You didn’t go to the right place,’ she said.

‘Maybe not.’ He sat her down on the sofa and positioned himself at the other end, his back against the arm. Ethel jumped into his lap. ‘Maybe not, no.’

Seconds passed. He was thinking.

She said, ‘You’re still wearing your vicar’s gear.’

Absurd reversal of roles.

‘Mm.’ He was calmer than she’d seen him, or maybe that was merely relative to her own condition.

‘Time is it, Lol?’

‘About twenty past one.’

‘You been back long?’ His sleeping bag was on the rug in front of the fire, still rolled up.

‘Hour or so. I was wandering around the garden for a while. Thinking things out.’ He looked down at his black chest. ‘Scared to take these off, I suppose. This guy looks at things objectively.’

‘Let’s put some more coal on the fire,’ Merrily said.

She told him about all the times it had happened before, from that first night when she thought she’d followed Jane and she’d kept opening doors and wound up at the foot of the stairs, looking up to the third floor.

She shut her eyes and rolled her head slowly around, small bones creaking at the back of her neck.

‘And then Sean.’

‘Your husband?’

‘My dead husband. I know it wasn’t a dream, because ...’

She told him about the door handle which fell out again, proving she’d been in the empty bedroom when she saw him and not in her own bed, dreaming.

In the fireplace, cool yellow flames were swarming over the new coal. Lol pushed in the poker.

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. I did wake up in bed, and it was morning, and I thought it had been a dream. It was a hallucination, I suppose. I went into that room and I hallucinated Sean. A source of guilt, because I didn’t help him when he needed help. But he didn’t want me to. He had another woman.’

‘You’re the kind of person always feels responsible.’

‘Jane tell you that?’

‘No. I’ve actually started figuring things out for myself.’ He prodded at a cob of coal until it developed fissures and opened up and let more flames through.

‘If it’s not the house,’ Merrily said, ‘it has to be me.’

‘Could it be a combination of both? You and the house setting something off in each other? Or you and the house ... and Jane?’

‘Yeah, I know. Like adolescents cause poltergeist phenomena. I’ve heard all that. But this doesn’t happen to Jane. Nothing happens to Jane here.’

‘Only in the orchard.’

He looked into the fire for a while and then he said, ‘This question of different floors. When you’ve read lots of books on psychology like me ... That’s what I used to read in hospital. They had a library, for the doctors and the staff, with a resident librarian, and I got to know her, and that’s where I used to spend ... days. Whole days, I suppose. Reading books on psychology and psychiatric syndromes. Some of it made more sense than the patronizing crap I was getting from most of the staff.’

‘How did you stand it?’

‘Time passes,’ Lol said. ‘You don’t notice. But, anyway ... levels. The floor where you’re sleeping, that’s where you’re at. That’s your situation. Your husband’s there, your past, all your problems, your insecurities, your fears, your guilt. That’s where you keep opening doors and they lead nowhere, except into the past. That’s where you saw Sean. And when it gets too stifling, just when you feel there’s no escape, you wind up at the stairs leading to the third floor.’

Psychological claptrap. She needed a cigarette.

‘But, up there, Merrily, is the Unknown. It could be Enlightenment. But it could also be madness. You’re afraid of what you might learn.’

‘I didn’t learn anything. I’d fallen asleep in the praying position and woke up feeling really low and beaten and hopeless. But until I went up into that attic, I didn’t know what sorrow was. Or felt like, because I still don’t know what it was. Why I felt so bad.’

‘And it was different.’

‘I wasn’t frightened. I had this freedom up there. The freedom to cry for ever. And I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t make a sound. Mustn’t be heard.’

‘By Jane?’

‘Jane wasn’t there. Nobody else was there. It was a different time, Lol. It was a time of indescribable unhappiness.’

Merrily wept.

The sorrow she was giving off was so profound, he had to blink back his own tears.

He wanted to hold her.

He didn’t touch her.

He went to make tea.

Later, he lay on the sofa and watched her sleep in front of the fire, curled up in the sleeping bag there like a child, the orange coals and the wire fireguard making glowing, crisscross patterns on her face. The cigarettes and Zippo lighter on the rug, a few inches from her nose, Ethel by her feet.

Never had got around to telling her about Alison. He’d wanted to ask her, How will this end? What can we do about it? He’d asked Alison. She said she had no idea.

But it’ll be on my terms. When I tell him.

You still hate him?

How can I hate him? My own flesh and blood.

Alison had laughed.

Yesterday morning, she’d told most of this to Lucy and then Lucy had died, bequeathing the responsibility to Merrily Watkins.

Lol was back in the alien sweatshirt, the vicar’s clothes neatly on hangers behind the door. Merrily had not told him what had happened when she and Jane had gone to Richard Coffey’s place.

Lol looked at Merrily, sleeping. He thought of Lucy on her back on a mortuary table in Hereford, cold and hatless and awaiting her post-mortem. This made him anxious, too anxious to sleep.

Ethel, the cat, wasn’t sleeping either. She lay at the bottom of the sleeping bag, where Merrily’s ankles were, and she watched Lol, golden-eyed and purring gently.

Merrily’s face was flushed by the firelight. He couldn’t stop looking at it.

Twice in the night, he got up to put more coal on the fire to keep her warm.

40 Bad Year for Apples

‘OH, WOW,’ JANE said.

She was standing in the drawing-room doorway, fully dressed. Lol came up behind her from the kitchen, with tea things on a tray. Over Jane’s shoulder he could see Merrily, hurriedly propping herself up in the sleeping bag.

‘Flower, before you say a word—’

‘Well, well,’ Jane said. ‘So you got it together.’

It was nearly eight a.m. Substantial sunshine had collected in the bay window, coloured pale green by the trees.

‘You slept together,’ Jane said.

‘No!’ Merrily sat up in the sleeping bag. ‘I mean yes, but no.’

‘This’ – Jane ambled into the room, hands on hips – ‘is really quite seriously cool’ She turned, beamed at Lol. ‘And she looks so much better. Don’t you think she looks fantastic?’

‘Yes,’ Lol said honestly. ‘However—’

Merrily stood up. The sun shone through her white nightdress. Lol thought maybe he should close his eyes. Couldn’t quite manage that.

‘That’s it. That is just about enough.’ Merrily looked around for her sweater, failed to find it, covered herself with the sleeping bag. ‘Make some toast, child.’

‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Anything you say.’

The phone rang. ‘I’ll get that.’ Merrily gathered the sleeping bag around her. Jane giggled. Lol moved out of the doorway. Merrily passed him without a glance.

Lol shut the drawing-room door behind her, faced up to Jane.

‘Vicars don’t lie. Nothing happened.’

‘In which case’ – Jane frowned – ‘you ought to be bloody well ashamed. She doesn’t attract you?’

‘Well ... ye-es ... yes, she does.’

‘God.’ Jane breathed hard through her teeth. ‘She’s not quite a nun. She needs somebody.’

‘But preferably somebody stable.’

‘Oh yeah, somebody really, really stable.’ She glared at him. ‘Come on. My dad was stable. My dad was this like utterly focused individual who knew exactly where he was going the whole time.’

‘I thought he was bent.’

‘And getting away with it! Because he knew he could. Because he was stable inside. Focused. Balanced. Never worried about anything, not really. My dad thought a neurosis was ... was ...’

‘Something you can grow in a window box, with care.’

‘Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, screw stable. Life’s too short. Look, I know you’ve had your problems. I listen at doors sometimes, I’m not afraid to admit that.’

‘You do, huh?’

‘Those back stairs are very useful. You could go through life really ignorant if you didn’t listen at doors. Like, Colette always saying you were scared of her, like it was really cool having somebody who’s scared of you, but it wasn’t her at all you were scared of, I know that now, and I’m glad. And I’m glad Karl Windling’s dead. I mean not glad he’s dead, like if there was some other way he could be completely out of your face ...’

‘Well, I haven’t figured out how I should feel about that either.’

‘You should feel free. Hey, I forgot ... Did you get to see Alison last night?’

‘I have a problem with free,’ Lol said.

‘Just that I keep seeing people, twice, three times, Jesus, four times as old as me, and they still haven’t done anything. And then they die.’ Jane slumped into the sofa. ‘I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Everything’s peculiar. I’ve decided if I don’t want to believe things, then I won’t. So I don’t believe you and Mum didn’t sleep together and I don’t believe Lucy’s dead, OK?’

‘OK.’

‘And they haven’t found Colette. I had the radio on at seven. It was the same stuff, more or less, as last night.’

‘That’s starting to not make sense.’

‘Depends on how you look at it, doesn’t it? Suppose I don’t want to believe Colette’s dead either? Or gone off with anybody. Anybody human.’

‘That’s even more dangerous ground.’

‘Everything’s dangerous to you, isn’t it, Lol? Even Mum. What’s the matter with you? All I cut off was your ponytail.’

Stefan Alder on the line.

‘It’s sorted.’ He sounded very calm, very purposeful. ‘It’s on. I’m going to make it happen, Merrily.’

‘Well, good. That’s wonderful. I’ll put the word around.’

But what if nobody came? What if the church was empty save for Stefan and Coffey and the sick priest?

‘Come and see you, shall I, Merrily, after your morning service?’

‘No, that would be— I’m not actually doing the services today. But if you want to ... rehearse or anything, the church should be empty by twelve.’

She was calmer this morning. At least the villagers, old and new, would be given the chance. If nobody came, then it suggested nobody, except James Bull-Davies, was bothered, so the play could go ahead, in the church, whenever Coffey and his team were ready. It all seemed so simple now.

‘I hope this hasn’t caused problems between Richard and you.’

‘No ...’ Stefan hesitated. ‘Perhaps it’s resolved them. You see, Richard ... he won’t be having anything to do with this. It’s going to be entirely down to me.’

Oh God, Merrily thought. Sulks.

‘This is how it should have been in the first place. It was my idea. I discovered him.’

‘Wil?’

‘It’s a one-man show, Merrily. It comes from the heart, not the page. Some of it was going to be improvised anyway. I’m a performer. A stage, an audience, you know? Give me one and a half hours. Or more.’

‘Shall we say seven p.m.? We don’t have an evening service any more, so that’s not a problem.’

‘Could you make it half-eight? Nine? I’d prefer it to get gradually darker.’

‘All right.’

They agreed to meet in the church at one.

‘I’m bringing him home, Merrily,’ Stefan said.

Merrily put down the phone and stood for a moment, thinking about last night. She’d slept easily between the fire and Lol Robinson. Daylight had cancelled the fear.

Although there wasn’t any at the end; only sorrow.

She wouldn’t forget that.

When she came back to the drawing room, Lol and Jane had one of the Sunday tabloids spread out on the coffee table. ‘Oh well,’ Lol was saying, ‘it had to happen at some stage.’ The page two headline was,

FEARS GROW FOR PARTY GIRL COLETTE

There was a picture of a rather younger, more innocent Colette, with no nose-stud and an unfamiliar smile. The fact that it was quite small was a strong indication this was not the picture the paper had wanted, given the comments gathered from ‘neighbours’.

‘Colette was a bit of a handful,’ one said. ‘A real wild child.’

Most of the story was an innuendo-laden account of

... the steamy sixteenth birthday party which brought midnight chaos to a sleepy village.

Music was provided by notorious Voodoo DJ Dr Samedi, who has been banned from several clubs following claims of blood sacrifices.

The 29-year-old DJ, real name Jeff Mooney, said last night, ‘Compared with some of the gigs I do, this seemed like a really tame venue. But as soon as I met this chick, I knew she was trouble.’

‘He’s actually OK,’ Jane said. ‘The blood sacrifice stuffs probably a bit exaggerated.’

‘Like, only small amounts of blood.’ Lol pointed to the end of the piece.

Police also want to talk to the owner of a cottage close to the orchard, songwriter Laurence Robinson.

‘We think he may have information that could help us with our inquiries,’ DI Howe said.

Mr Robinson, who has been working on new songs with seventies rock-hero Gary Kennedy, was still not at home last night.

‘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.’

‘Dermot Child,’ Jane said. ‘The Goblin.’

‘I’m going to deal with that.’ Merrily bit decisively into a slice of crisp toast.

From mid-morning, she hung around the churchyard, under apple trees, listening to the leaden, Victorian hymns, feeling redundant and rejected. She should be in there, today of all days, offering prayers for Colette Cassidy and her family, holding the community together, siphoning God’s comfort from the chancel to the nave.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Hadn’t thought of the implications of not being there today. But Ted presumably had, the machiavellian bastard. It had taken her rather too long to see Ted, not as an uncle, but as the worst kind of country solicitor, a man who’d spent his adult life smoothing over, glossing over, planing off rough edges. Female priest? A nice idea that failed. Too soon, my friends, too soon.

And there he was, as the main doors opened, fawningly attendant upon the imposing figure of the Rev. Norman Gemmell – tall, stooping, pointed beard, gravely patriarchal. Presiding in the porch, dispensing cordial clerical aftercare. Bowing over hands, tilting his head with concern, as though he’d known these rusticized city folk for many, many years, followed their family heartaches and triumphs through the generations. A true professional.

The worst moment came when the Cassidys emerged – the Cassidys, who rarely attended morning worship because of the Sunday lunch stampede. Norman Gemmell held Caroline’s fingers tenderly, led her a few yards away from the porch, bent his head to her pale, tight face. Spoke with earnest sincerity, and then patted Terrence on the shoulder as Caroline began to cry and two press photographers recorded the moment in a discreet chatter of motordrives.

Seemed like a good time, before the saintly Gemmell returned to the vestry to change into his civvies. Merrily crept from under her apple tree and made for the small rear door which led to the Bull chapel and the organ.

Pushed open the small, Gothic door and stopped.

There he stood, in his friar-like organist’s robe, pensive by the effigy of the Bull. Looking up – an initial shock at seeing her, plumped up in a second into the charming, old Dermot.

‘Why, Merrily, I thought ...’

‘We need to talk.’

‘Ah, if only I’d known, I should have rearranged my lunch appointment.’

‘You know now,’ Merrily said coldly.

‘Perhaps this evening? A table at the Swan?’

‘Dermot,’ Merrily said, ‘get your chubby little arse through that door before I rip my sweater and make allegations.’

‘Merrily!’

‘Calling as a witness, Mr Watts, the organ repair man ... among others.’

‘Merrily, what are you saying?’

She looked him steadily in the eyes and slowly lifted her sweater, exposing her midriff and the base of her bra.

Then she screamed.

‘All right!’ Dermot scowled and scurried after her out of the church, hitching up his robe.

41 Home Cooking

AT THE BOTTOM of the churchyard, where apple trees in bloom overhung the graves, Dermot Child sat, legs crossed, on a nineteenth-century tombstone, looking very affronted and – disturbingly – very much like a goblin. A poisonous loser. Man’s so embittered he doesn’t care who goes down.

And Merrily, gripping a gravestone, had cold feet. Supposing they were wrong about him? Suppose he was just a funny but basically harmless little man with a perfectly harmless, perfectly natural, perfectly healthy ...

... about a hundred buttons down the front, and you imagine yourself undoing them all, very slowly, one by one. Oh God. White collar, pink body, brown nipples ...

... lust for female clergy.

‘Let’s be frank with each other, shall we, Dermot?’

His button eyes arose to level on her. No smile, possibly the beginning of a sneer. ‘Let’s do that, Ms Priest-in-Charge. Oh yes, I’m all for that.’

Merrily thought she could see, behind the blossom on the apple trees, the first small swellings of the embryo Pharisees Reds.

‘What do you know about the posters scattered around the village? The ones we discussed yesterday.’

The eyes were still. ‘A poor joke, as I said. Not terribly funny.’

‘Except there wasn’t really time for subtlety?’

‘Wasn’t there?’

She took a chance. ‘I gather they were done on the festival office printer.’

The eyes flickered. ‘Really?’

‘You supervise that?’

‘The printer or the production of the posters? Yes to the printer. And the posters ... well, indirectly, who knows? Do you know, Merrily?’

‘And the Sunday Times. Did you, perhaps, speak to them?’

There was nothing prominent in today’s Sunday Times, as it happened. At least, not the edition she’d picked up on the way to the church. The story had evidently been judged insufficiently strong at this stage, which was fine.

‘Oh yes,’ Dermot said. ‘Of course. I’ve spoken to all the quality papers. I have to try to interest them in our lovely festival. Part of my function, in the absence of poor, dear, tragic Terrence.’

‘And told them about the storm-in-a-teacup over Coffey’s play?’

‘More than that, surely, Merrily. A storm, at least, in a hogshead of cider. Old cider. A dark storm fermenting for many years. Centuries. Let’s not make light of these things.’

‘And you told the Sunday Times about it.’

He shifted on the tomb, uncrossed his legs under the thin robe. ‘Did I?’

‘Did you?’

He giggled. ‘Did I?’

She gritted her teeth.

‘Did I?’ Dermot said gaily. ‘Did I? Did I? Did I? Oh, Merrily, my dear, you don’t know a thing, do you? You’re fishing in the dark with a twig and a bent safety-pin, and you don’t know a thing about our ways, any more than poor old Hayden did, but he, at least, was content with that and went his bumbling way, the very model of a genial, faintly tedious country cleric. Ghastly, though not everyone agreed. Oh Lord, how I wanted you as his replacement, a jolly little dolly of a clergyperson with nice legs and dinky titties, oh what fun.’

Merrily cut off a shocked breath. Don’t react. She stayed very still, tried not to look away from his eyes, although Dermot had certainly looked away from hers, blatantly lowering his sardonic gaze to her breasts.

‘What fun,’ he said coldly. ‘But don’t dare imagine that you, any more than Cassidy, any more than the obnoxious Coffey, could ever know the essence of our quaint little village ways.’

She bit her lip. He wasn’t supposed to behave like this. Back in the church, she was convinced she had the little bugger. She was going to threaten him, quite calmly, in an absolutely straightforward way – tell him about the projected Wil Williams event, a village affair, and warn him that if the merest whisper of it got out to the media, she’d know precisely who to blame.

She rallied. ‘And what do you know about the village ways, Dermot? About Ledwardine life as it’s been lived in the past two decades? Having spent over half your life away, trying to make it in the big cities.’

A plump cheek twitched.

‘With no conspicuous success,’ Merrily said.

He scowled. ‘And so feisty, aren’t we? The new woman, oh my. Well, as a matter of fact, Ms Watkins, being born and raised here and then separated from it for a while gives one a highly individual perspective. The incomers don’t see at all, the locals see but don’t notice. But someone like myself, with a foot in both camps, observes all. Knows all the pressure points. Knows where a tiny tweak may have maximum effect.’

‘And you do like to tweak, don’t you, Dermot?’

Dermot grinned. He leaned back on the tombstone, legs apart, hands behind his head. ‘I like to think,’ he said, ‘that I orchestrate. The parish organist. One takes great pleasure in that. The first, dramatic chords which stir the blood and energize the sleeping church. Like auld ciderrrrrr ... does to a man. Wonderful.’

He stretched and spread his legs, assisting the slippage of the dark, cotton robe from his fat, red, naked thighs.

‘Cassidy hates all that, as you know. To him, it’s an academic exercise, for purely commercial purposes. Like his phoney wassailing. I didn’t go to that. It was always going to be a silly charade, with his pompous speeches and Caroline fussing and tinkling. Mind, wasn’t a charade in the end, was it? Old reality burst on to the scene with a vengeance. Thank God for the Powells.’

Merrily realized she’d lost it. He couldn’t care less whether she knew about him or not. He felt completely secure in revealing the side of him that, when you thought about it, he’d never entirely hidden behind the civilized glaze of educated frivolity.

She said, ‘I suppose you’ll say old Edgar topped himself at the wassailing specifically to show up the superficiality of it all’

‘Shouldn’t think so.’ He smiled. ‘Can’t see Edgar throwing away a good old country death on the Cassidys. Salt of the earth, the Powells. A bloody good phrase, salt of the earth. Overused, devalued. But it’s a good one for the Powells. A good, dark, old family.’

‘Older than the Bull-Davieses?’ This was ridiculous, she was merely making conversation now. He’d insulted her to her face and she was just sidling away from it.

‘The Bulls?’ Dermot snorted. ‘Norman blood, there. Acquired the Davies adjunct a few generations ago to highlight a little Welsh strand amounting to nothing. The Bulls of Ledwardine. Sounds good, doesn’t amount to a lot. Always liked to think they had control, but they were still newcomers compared with the Powells. Something strong and tight and sturdy about the unassuming Powells. That’s where the real tradition lies.’

She was picturing Garrod Powell in his well-pressed slacks and his blazer.

‘Rod?’ He startled her, seeming to snatch the thought from her head.

‘Can’t see it in Rod, is it? Well, you can’t see anything, can you? You’re an outsider. Even if your grandfather did farm at Mansell Lacy, you’re way out of it now and you’ll never get back in. Let me tell you about Rod. Raised the old way. Ever hear talk of Edgar’s wife? Scabby old harpy, she was, but eyes like diamonds. I remember her on Pig Friday, marvellous great toothless grin and blood up to her elbows. And then home to teach young Rod a thing or two. If you know what I mean.’

‘What?’ Merrily’s legs felt suddenly weak.

‘Ha! Shocked you at last, have I, Reverend? What d’you think traditional country life’s about if not fecundity and potency? And making sure your eldest boy knows what a woman likes best on a dark night in front of the fire. Country life, Merrily: home cooking, home sex and plenty of auld cider, home milled with a dead rat or two thrown in, for flavour. The farmer’s wife hoisting up her skirts and pissing into the mix.’

‘I’m going.’ Merrily turned away. ‘Thank you for the anthropological lecture.’

‘Go on, give us a real blush, girlie. How’s this?’ He leaned right back on the tombstone, grinning into the sun, sliding the robe to the tops of his flabby thighs where the thin fabric rose up triumphantly. ‘Whoops,’ Dermot said.

‘Well, that’s that, isn’t it?’ Her voice distressingly shrill. ‘You’ve finally made sure we aren’t going to be able to work together again.’

‘Sad, isn’t it? We could have got on so well’

He pulled down his robe, the smile vanishing.

‘Where will you go, Merrily? Leave the clergy, perhaps? We all make mistakes, don’t we?’

‘I could have you arrested. Enough police about the place.’

Dermot sat up. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said soberly. ‘I’m glad you reminded me. I do have to see the police. Did you notice the prowler in your garden? In the vicarage garden? Last night? Latish?’

‘No.’ She began to walk away along the blossom-strewn path, the big sandstone church in front of her, the old country church with its erect steeple. She wanted to scream. The bloody goblin had been creeping about her garden?

‘Not a very big chap,’ he called after her. ‘Spectacles.’

She froze.

‘Just had a haircut, one couldn’t help noticing that. And dressed, bizarrely, as a clergyman. What happened, you see, I’d returned to the church to collect some music and couldn’t help noticing him going through your gates. I think the lady inspector would want to know about that, don’t you? What d’you think, Merrily? Or should one tell Ted Clowes first? Good old Uncle Ted. No, the police, I think. It might be important.’

His forced but merry laughter followed her all the way to the lych-gate. She slowed, evened up her pace, would not show him her panic.

He delivered Sunday papers, too, then.

‘Oh,’ Jane said, like this was an afterthought. ‘And a couple of bottles of that – what’s it called? – Wine of Angels.’

Jim Prosser, who always looked too big for the counter at the little Spar shop, reached up instinctively to the shelf and then paused.

‘How old are you again, Jane? Fourteen, is it?’

‘Fifteen!’

‘Old enough to know the rules, then.’

‘Oh, come on, Jim, it’s only cider.’

‘No such thing as only cider. Cider’s stronger than beer, and this stuffs stronger than your average cider.’

‘It’s not for me. It’s a present.’

‘That’s what they all say, my dear.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Jane, exasperated. ‘You’re always selling cans of Woodpecker and stuff to Dean Wall and his mates. This is sexism.’

‘Oh, come on now,’ said Jim. ‘Don’t give me a hard time. The place is crawling with coppers, and you are the vicar’s daughter.’

‘For my sins.’

Jane paid for the two bags of Doritos. This was going to be a problem. There was whisky in the house, a few bottles of wine. No cider.

‘You wouldn’t like it, anyway,’ Jim Prosser said. ‘It might be in a fancy bottle, but you can get better at half the price, I reckon.’

42 The North Side

MERRILY STOOD IN the Sunday morning square and prayed silently for guidance. Two parishioners discreetly crossed into Church Street, pretending they hadn’t seen her.

Or perhaps she’d become invisible now. A nine-day wonder and the nine days were over. Nobody special any more, just another single mother to be ignored, gossiped about, sniggered at, flashed at.

Stop it!

All right. So Dermot Child had recognized Lol Robinson, knew where he was hiding. Had gone to the trouble of delivering a late-edition Sunday tabloid to make sure Merrily knew the police had named Lol as someone they wanted to question. The devious Goblin planning ahead. Setting something up.

Blackmail? Would he have held on to the information and tried to blackmail her? Demanding what, in return for his continued silence? Precisely what? The mind boggled. The loins shrivelled. Her hand went to her mouth, stifling reaction.

‘Vicar ...’

Gomer Parry stood a few yards away, breathing heavily, cigarette waggling whitely in his teeth. He’d run after her.

‘A word, Vicar?’

‘Sure.’ She followed him between the oak pillars into the market hall.

‘Apologies for the state, Vicar. Cleanin’ out your boundary ditch, I was, see.’ Gomer held up both mud-red hands. ‘I know, I know ... the sabbath, it is, but there en’t gonner be a fine day for near-enough a week, ‘cordin’ to the farmin’ forecast, so I reckoned I’d get to grips with the bugger, do the manual ‘fore I brings in ole Gwynneth, see?’

‘I see. Well, just – you know – keep the lid on it. We have our zealots. You didn’t actually have to inform me.’

‘And wouldn’t ‘ave, Vicar, no way. If, that is, I hadn’t been down in this yere stinkin’ ditch, keepin’ a low profile, as it were, when our friend Mr Dermot Child happens to take up occupancy of the ole Probert family tomb just this side the hedge, followed by your good self.’

‘Oh.’

‘You want my personal stance on the issue, I reckon that feller oughter be strung up by the nuts, but that’s only my personal opinion, like.’

‘Gomer,’ Merrily said fervently. ‘It’s a very valid one.’

‘Tried to rope me in for this ole cider rubbish. I sez, Mr Child, I can’t sing worth a bag o’ cowshit. Don’t matter, he sez. Long’s you got it down there. I sez, whatever you got down there, I sez, is between you and your ole woman and you don’t bring it out in no church.’ Gomer coughed, embarrassed. ‘Or churchyard.’

‘No.’

‘If it’d gone any further, see, I’d’ve been up outer that ole ditch. But you was off. An’ Child, he just stays there, lyin’ on the stone, chucklin’ and schemin’. Anyhow, all I’m tryin’ to say ...’ Gomer looked down at his mud-caked boots, ‘is that’s a dangerous feller. An’ he en’t on ‘is own. So for what it’s worth, Vicar, you got my full support, whatever goes down. Like if you wants a witness ...’

‘No, I don’t think I’ll be taking it any further.’

‘What’s happenin’ yereabouts, see, it smells off. I were you, I wouldn’t trust nobody. I know that en’t in the spirit of your profession, like, but that’s my advice, see. It smells off. An’ that’s comin’ from a man who was once up to ‘is Adam’s apple in Billy Tudge’s cesspit.’

It was time, Merrily decided, to take Gomer Parry seriously.

‘I suppose,’ she said delicately, ‘that you heard the bit about the intruder.’

‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer confirmed, producing a soggy match, bending down to strike it on a cobble. ‘That would be Mr Robinson, mabbe?’

‘Oh dear,’ Merrily said.

Gomer stood up, his cigarette burning. ‘Vicar, there’s no problem, yere. Friend of poor ole Lucy’s, right? So no problem. See?’ He rubbed mud from his glasses and winked.

‘All right?’

‘Thank you,’ Merrily said.

‘En’t done nothin’, yet. Jus’ lettin’ you know I’m yere. Anythin’ I can do, say the word. ‘Cause, I never told Lucy Devenish, see. I never quite said that to Lucy, and now she en’t yere no more, which was a funny sort of accident, my way o’ thinkin’, and so the only other person I can say it to’s you, an’ I’m sayin’ it.’

‘You knew I was her executor?’

‘Nope. That matter?’

Funny sort of accident?

‘Gomer, can we talk?’

‘We’re talking, innit?’

‘Not here. Back at the vicarage?’

‘Hell, I wouldn’t go in the vicarage in this state. Minnie’d never speak a civil word to me again. I’ll mabbe get a bath and catch you later, if that’s all right with you.’

‘No. Please. Gomer, listen, there is something you can do. You come into contact with quite a few people, and Minnie’s secretary of the WI.’

‘On account of nobody else’ll take it on. Aye.’

‘OK.’ She told him briefly about Stefan Alder’s private preview of the Wil Williams play. To be performed in about ten hours’ time. It didn’t sound remotely possible.

Gomer whistled. ‘Tonight? So this – let me get this right – this is like a play, but it’s ...’

‘It’s a partly improvised drama. Stefan Alder, as Wil Williams, presents a kind of sermon, telling his life story, how he came to be in the mess he’s in. His congregation, as I understand it, will be able to question him. And anyone else.’

‘But they’ll all know it’s just an act.’

‘Gomer, when half the nation’s watching a soap opera, everybody knows it’s an act, but does that stop them getting involved? Does that stop the tabloid papers printing stories about Coronation Street characters as though they’re real people? This guy’s an experienced actor, and this is a role he cares deeply about. They’re the congregation, this is their church. Within half an hour, they’ll have forgotten who Stefan Alder is.’

‘By golly,’ Gomer said. ‘You really are gonner throw the shit in the mincer.’

‘You can get the word around the village? You and Minnie?’

‘Bugger me, the ole phone’ll be burnin’ up. Anybody in partic’lar you don’t want?’

‘At the moment, I can only think of Dermot Child. Bull-Davies is an optional.’

‘Right then.’ Gomer nodded, stamped out his cigarette. ‘Consider it spread.’

‘Well, I suppose there comes a point in your life,’ Lol said, ‘when you start to accept that some people are just not good people and you can’t do anything about that. I know it’s your job to try and put them on the path of righteousness and all that, but that’s not always the wisest strategy. Sometimes.’

‘I suppose, tackling Coffey last night, I thought I was on a roll again. It was a mistake. I shouldn’t have gone to see him.’

‘Perhaps Child wanted you to. I think people like him quite like to be discovered. I’m really sorry. This means you can’t accuse him of indecent exposure. But then he’d know that.’

‘Friday I throw up at my installation service. Saturday, I go to pieces at the opening of the festival. Sunday, while admitting to sheltering a man the police want to question, I claim my organist flashed at me. I think we’re looking at a resignation situation here, at the very least.’

‘Don’t even think of it,’ Jane said. ‘Lucy said—’

‘Sure. The catalyst. Where do you go, Lol? Don’t say the cops, that’s not an option. Not with Child working against us.’

‘Why is he, Mum? Why’s he doing this?’

‘Because ... because he obviously has the most incredible ego. And no remorse.’

‘He’s a psychopath,’ Lol said. ‘Very few of them actually kill people, they just do damage.’

Merrily smiled in spite of it all. ‘Lol has read widely on psychology. Come on, we may not have much time. Where shall we put him, flower?’

‘Lucy’s house? Or Lucy’s shop?’

‘With the cops hanging round the Country Kitchen?’

‘The Reverend Locke again?’

‘Won’t work. Child’s sussed that. And we don’t know what else he knows. We don’t know if or when he’ll go to the police. It’s very unsettling. Look, I have to go and meet Stefan. I’m going to leave Lucy’s house key on the mantelpiece. If you can think of any way of getting across there without being seen, do it. Otherwise, sit tight.’

‘And pray, right?’ Jane said.

‘Tell me about these people,’ Stefan Alder called down from the pulpit. ‘These villagers. Who’ll be here? The older residents, particularly. The ones from the older families.’

‘I’ve no actual idea.’ Merrily sat alone, in a pew halfway down the nave. ‘We’re hardly issuing specific invitations. But, in my experience, anything mysterious, anything faintly bizarre happening in the church’ll still pack them in. They won’t come the following week, but in this case that doesn’t matter, does it?’

‘No. But who specifically?’ Strange, stained-glass colours blurred in Stefan’s thick, pale hair. ‘Who comes to all your services? I’ve been twice, if we include your ill-fated induction ceremony. I made a few mental notes on both occasions. For example, the old lady who arrives in a wheelchair but insists on leaving it in the doorway and have people help her into a pew? Looks terribly fragile. Who is she?’

‘That’s Mrs Goddard. Priscilla. Lives in the Stables House at the end of Old Barn Lane.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘Osteoporosis, quite advanced.’

‘Brittle bones, yes? I wonder what they called it in the seventeenth century. Is she in much pain?’

‘Much of it emotional. She used to be an enthusiastic horsewoman. Ran a riding school from her home. Now the stables are empty, she’s looking out on an empty field and she feels her life’s effectively over. Needs to be handled with great care.’

‘I understand.’ Stefan made a note in the stiff-backed book he’d brought with him. He asked about any other people who were chronically ill, or who’d been recently bereaved, or had sick and disabled children or grandchildren ... or conspicuous money worries, marital problems, difficulty conceiving a child.

All a little disturbing. Audience participation was one thing, meddling with a congregation something else. And what good would it do him if he made a mistake and insulted someone?

‘Stefan, you can’t hope to absorb all that information. Even I still have problems remembering everybody’s name.’

‘Not a problem for me, Merrily. Indeed, my notes are a formality. I don’t forget faces. I have a photographic memory. I’m not boasting, it’s a simple fact, I can learn a fifty-minute television script in a night. And today’ – he leaned over the pulpit – ‘today, I am concentrating.’

He was certainly a presence in the church. Although he wore tight black trousers and a billowy white shirt out of one of those old Douglas Fairbanks Jr movies, there was nothing effete about his movements or his speech today. He had, Merrily thought, stepped out of Richard Coffey’s shadow oozing intensity of purpose. No more toyboy.

‘You’re taking this very seriously, aren’t you?’ she said, without thinking, the echo emphasizing the stupidity of the question.

‘It will be the performance of my life.’ He said it simply, quite quietly, no histrionics, no camp melodrama. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘there won’t be another.’

‘Oh, I think there will. I think, somehow, you’re going to win a lot of support. It’s already quite a talking point. I suspect everyone’s going to rather enjoy it.’

‘Enjoy?’

‘Wrong word?’

He came down the pulpit’s wooden steps, stood behind the carved-oak eagle lectern. Oh my God, Merrily thought, he’s going for the full Messianic bit.

‘I should like one spotlight, if I may. Just ... here.’ He stood at the foot of the pulpit. ‘One of the high, rear ones, so that it’s quite wide. Is there someone who could operate that? Merely a question of switching it on shortly before dusk, say half an hour into the performance, so that everyone will have become accustomed to it by the time it takes effect.’

‘Jane could do that. As you can see, we’ve actually got several spots up there, which we could vary without too much difficulty. I mean, I don’t know much about theatrical lighting, but—’

‘Just the one will be sufficient. In the pulpit and elsewhere, I shall be using candles. Do you have candles?’

‘Few dozen.’

‘I’ll bring more. I want these people to believe totally that they are in the seventeenth century and that Wil Williams is their minister. If that doesn’t offend you.’

‘No, that’s ... that’s fine. In fact that may be easier than you think. You know the pageant thing the Women’s Institute are organizing for the festival – the working life of Ledwardine through the ages?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve paid scant attention to the other aspects of the festival’ Even his speech pattern had altered, become more formal, a touch archaic.

‘They’ve been making costumes,’ Merrily told him. ‘Authentic stuff. It’s not all seventeenth century, obviously, there’ll be Victorian and medieval ...’

Stefan said warily, ‘There won’t be Roman soldiers or anything, will there?’

‘No Roman soldiers. No Tudor doublets and ruffs. No Second World War fighter pilots. I’m not saying there won’t be anachronisms, but they’re unlikely to be glaring. Besides, working country clothes have always been very muted and they haven’t changed much – look at the Barbour.’

‘Yes.’ He considered. ‘Yes. That would be wonderful. It would add to that sense of otherness. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘Take them out of themselves.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I also thought ... Well, the seating pattern. It was different then. I mean, the arrangement of the pews, facing the chancel, facing the pulpit ... that was roughly the same. But in those days pews were allocated according to your social standing. Areas were set aside for the gentry and other areas, well away, for the servants, and the servants were packed in like sardines, while the nobs had room to lounge about. Now, obviously we can’t attempt to segregate people in that way. But ... well, men and women were also separated.’

‘Were they really?’

‘Women were generally relegated to the north side.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because women were naturally considered less important, and the north side of the church – any church – was supposed to be more exposed to the influence of the devil, I don’t quite know why. Certainly people didn’t want to be buried at the north end of the churchyard. Look at any church around here and you’ll find the more recent graves to the north, and not many of them.’

‘And would they do that? Will the men sit separately?’

‘They will if their wives tell them to. Times seem to have changed in that respect, at least.’

‘And the women will go to the north?’

‘I’ll organize it. What about the Bull-Davies pew? If he doesn’t come, which he probably won’t, it’s going to stand out as conspicuously vacant. Do you want—’

‘No. It must remain empty. I can use that.’

‘It’s your show,’ Merrily said.

‘Thank you. You’re a good person, Merrily. I ... Yes. I’ve studied the parish records and various histories. There are certain old families who I know have descendants in the village: the Monks, the Prossers, the Woods, the Cadwalladers ... Will you stand with me this evening, somewhere discreet – the Bull chapel, perhaps – and point out the various people as they come in?’

‘All right. And then disappear, huh?’

He smiled. ‘Once they enter the church, I want it to be my church again.’

‘You going to spend the afternoon here, rehearsing?’

‘I don’t need to rehearse. I shall walk among the apple trees. I want to meditate. Open myself to him.’

‘Right. I’ll leave you then.’ Merrily stood up, not entirely comfortable with this. ‘Good luck ... Wil.’

‘Merrily!’ She stopped. ‘Don’t ... don’t joke about this,’ Stefan said. ‘I beg you. The performance of my life, remember?’

‘Yes.’

43 Meant

GOMER’S LUNCH WAS on the table, Minnie’s potato pie, when the phone rang. ‘Tell them to call back,’ Minnie shouted through from the kitchen. ‘And if it’s that man about the septic tank, don’t forget – you’re retired.’

‘Ar,’ said Gomer non-committally.

‘If you can’t bring yourself to tell him, you put him on to me,’ Minnie went on. ‘I’ll give him septic tank!’

Gomer groped for the phone.

‘Jeff Harris, Gomer. You were right, boy. Wouldn’t use this stuff to unblock my sink.’

Gomer sat up.

‘Shirley was coming through Ledwardine this morning, so I asked her to call for a bottle. You had me worried, see. Got to protect the image of the product or we’re all done for. Uncorked it – not so much a pop as a fizzle. Poured half a glass, took it to the window, held it up to the light ...’

And?’ Gomer was on the edge of his seat now. If you couldn’t trust the word of a man who’d worked for Bulmer’s, Weston’s, Dunkerton’s and God knew who else during a forty-year career, you couldn’t trust nobody when it came to cider, but he did like to make a performance of it, did Jeff Harris.

‘Well, that about the sink ... exaggerated a bit there, I confess. It’s not absolute piss, but if that’s the original old Pharisees Red, I’ll drink six pints of Australian lager out of my old farm boots.’

‘Gomer!’ Minnie came in from the kitchen, all pink and homely and steaming angry. ‘If you don’t get back to that pie in thirty seconds, it’s going back in the oven. D’you realize how much I’ve got to do before tonight?’

Gomer raised a finger, pleading for one minute.

‘It’s bottle-fermented, all right,’ Jeff said, ‘but there’s a difference between fine champagne and two-quid fizz. All right, if the Powells want to take these daft Londoners for a ride, they might think that’s all right, and at six pound fifty a bottle they can be pretty sure none of us is ever going to taste it, but in my book you don’t misrepresent cider. The Wine of Angels, indeed. What you gonner do about it, Gomer?’

‘Well ... not my place, is it? Just wanted to know, like. Talkin’ to young Lloyd, I was, see, yesterday, and he reckoned they had to buy some apples in, not havin’ enough of the ole Pharisees to produce the kind o’ quantity Cassidy was after. That account for it?’

‘Bought the damn lot in, if you ask me. And got somebody to produce it for them.’

‘But why’d they wanner do that?’ Gomer asked, watching Minnie ceremoniously carrying his pie-dish through to the kitchen.

‘Didn’t want to lose face, I suppose,’ said Jeff Harris. ‘Hadn’t made cider in more than a generation, except perhaps a drop or two for themselves; now here’s Cassidy saying they must have the traditional stuff and talking about grants from the tourist board and all this. They came to an arrangement with Jeremy Selby or one of those boys, that’s my guess. Save a lot of work, make a few hundred quid each and that idiot Cassidy and his cronies, never having tasted cider in their lives, are none the wiser.’

‘Wouldn’t’ve thought it of Rod. His ole man, mabbe.’

‘Like father like son, my boy. Man’s a councillor, isn’t he? Most councillors are in it for what they can shovel into their back pockets. Fact of rural life. Let me know of any further developments.’

‘Sure to,’ Gomer said and hung up, puzzling hard.

Of course, Minnie brought his lunch back, and while he was eating it, she paraded before him in a long, dull-brown woollen dress with a wheaty-coloured shawl round her shoulders. Gomer didn’t think much to it.

‘We en’t short of a bob or two, Min. You don’t have to go as a peasant woman.’

‘This isn’t peasant’s clothes. Sunday best, this is, for an eighteenth-century farmer’s wife. Still pass for seventeenth century, though wouldn’t it?’

‘Give up trying to look nice once they got married, did they?’

Minnie snorted. ‘I only wish I had a veil, too, to hide my blushes. We all know what kind of play that Coffey’s likely to’ve written.’

‘Aye, well, that’s why we’re all gettin’ a chance to see it first, innit? You don’t like it, you think it treads on too many ole corns, you get your chance to say so out loud. Not that you will, you women, you’ll all just sit there all po-faced and then pull it to bits outside, and ‘ave another go at the vicar for good measure.’

‘I never said a word against that young woman.’

‘Aye, but you done your share of noddin’ and frownin’ and glancin’ sideways.’

‘You would say that – you’re a man. If she was fat and fifty, you’d be having second thoughts just like the rest of us. Especially when she’s letting something like this go on in the church.’

‘That don’t stop you goin’, though, do it?’

‘I like to make up my own mind.’

‘Oh aye. And you’ll all be gatherin’ round like them women round the ole guillotine, hopin’ she’s put both feet in the slurry again.’

‘That’s not fair. Anyway, when you’ve finished your pie, we’ll sort something out for you, my duck.’

‘Gerroff, woman. I en’t goin’. I done my bit. Me bein’ there en’t gonner help the vicar. Anyway, they didn’t ‘ave no plant hire in the seventeenth century.’

‘Never mind plant hire, you’re a retired businessman!’

Gomer closed his eyes in anguish.

It was simple really. Or so Jane said. Lucy’s house, like most of those on the vicarage side of Church Street, backed on to the old bowling green, which in turn was accessible from the orchard, which you could access from the bottom of the vicarage garden.

So if Jane were to let herself into Lucy’s by the front door and go round and leave the back door open for Lol ... geddit?

‘And while you’re in there, maybe you find out whatever Lucy was trying to tell us.’

‘If she was trying to tell us anything.’

‘I know she was,’ Jane said.

Soon after she’d gone, with Merrily still organizing Stefan Alder, the phone rang, the answering machine kicking in.

‘Merrily, it’s Ted. What the hell d’you think you’re doing? Don’t you think there should have been a meeting of the church council before you let these people take over the place at short notice, especially for something so politically and morally sensitive? I cannot believe you went over all our heads in this deplorable fashion, and I have to say that if this is an example of the kind of behaviour we can expect from you in the future, then I’m afraid you can no longer count on my support and I wish, herewith, to dissociate myself entirely from tonight’s outrage.’

That was the first.

The second one, just under ten minutes later, said sternly, ‘Councillor Powell, Mrs Watkins. I should be glad if you would telephone me immediately upon your return.’

Within two minutes, the third.

‘Ah, Merrily, my love. No wonder you don’t need a man. You’re obviously quite capable of fucking yourself. My condolences.’

Firmly and decisively, Jane shut the door of the house in Church Street and then was stopped, very scared, by the sight of the winter poncho draped over the post at the bottom of the stairs.

The poncho hung there, dark and sombre like a kid’s idea of a ghost. It was both frightening and awfully moving. It made her wish she hadn’t come because it brought home to her – more even than the sight of the body in the road – the cruel reality of Lucy’s death.

To banish the fright, she threw her arms around the poncho, buried her face in its folds. Burst at once into sobs, hugging the woollen thing tight, but the hardness, the deadness of the oaken post beneath only made it worse, its rigid, knurled point imprinting on her forehead the message that the wonderful Lucy Devenish really was never coming back.

When she pulled away, the poncho fell in a heap to the floor, as if the spirit had drifted away from under it. She gathered it up quickly and carried it up the narrow stairs, finding Lucy’s bedroom, putting the poncho on the bed and walking out without looking at anything because a bedroom was private.

She went into the bathroom and looked at her face in the mirror. She looked like a child, and the tear stains didn’t help. She washed her face, dried it on an Aztec-patterned bathtowel that reminded her of the summer poncho and was just so Lucy she nearly wept again.

Wipe your eyes, you little snot! Pull yourself together!

She tried to hear Lucy’s voice saying it, but it wasn’t there, was it?

She wasn’t here, and there was nobody else who knew the real truth about Ledwardine. The place was all tarted up and polished like the archaic tools and farm implements on the walls in the Swan that nobody quite knew the original purpose of anymore.

Downstairs, in the low-ceilinged living room, she felt a bit better. There were photos on the walls to look at, which was different to photos in some dusty album at the bottom of a wardrobe. And, of course, the bookshelves beckoned.

But first, Jane went into the little kitchen, which faced north – always the bleakest light – and overlooked the old bowling green, a few morose sheep nibbling out there now. Under the window was a Belfast sink beside a sturdy-looking cast-iron cooker, and there was a small fridge and a kind of sawn-off Welsh dresser with a cardboard box on it. A note was tucked into one of the box’s flaps.

Compliments of the Ledwardine Festival.

Thanks for your help,

Barry Bloom

The box contained six champagne bottles. She lifted one out. Its ornate label featured the familiar black line-drawing of the parish church, and, in archaic lettering,

The Wine of Angels.

Oh, Lucy. Oh, wow.

Jane went quickly to the back door, unbolted it, turned the key and then removed two bottles from the box.

It was like they’d been waiting for her.

She looked out of the window, giving Lucy’s hook-nosed ghost a chance to manifest among the sheep, its arms rising angrily from the dark poncho’s folds. Put those back at once, you tripehound!

But nothing appeared. The Wine of Angels lay heavy in her arms. Jane carried the bottles out of the back door and over the fence on to the path bordering the bowling green.

It was meant.

‘You duplicitous woman. Your hypocrisy defies belief. You lied to my face!

The machine, as Merrily came in, recording a message. Distorting badly.

‘To my face, Mrs Watkins.’

‘And good afternoon to you too, James.’ Merrily dumped her bag on the hallstand. When the shit hit the fan, an answering machine was mercifully absorbent. She saw Lol in the kitchen doorway and smiled weakly. ‘I get more popular all the time.’

‘It is clear to me now that you were, from the beginning, conspiring with certain subversive elements to undermine the stability of my village. I am a soldier. I cannot tolerate that!

Lol said, ‘Is he real?’

‘My information is that tonight you propose to allow this man to lay out his foul smears in public. I am giving you this opportunity to call it off. You may consider this an ultimatum.’

‘My God,’ Merrily said. ‘This is a prepared statement.’

The red light on the answering machine blinked and swelled like some warning vein in Bull-Davies’s forehead.

‘If I do not hear from you before four o’clock, I shall personally take action to put a stop to this homosexual farce. And to ensure that you never again have an opportunity to use Church of England property to defame and to destroy. If you are representative of women priests then, by God, I shall make it my business to ensure this village will never have another when you are gone. Good-day to you.’

Lol said, ‘And you thought Alison was playing with fire.’

‘Sometimes,’ Merrily said, ‘you do things without quite understanding why.’

‘You don’t know why you’re doing this?’

‘Well, I know how it started.’ She leaned against the hallstand with her back to the flashing red light. ‘It started with me feeling pressured by anonymous letters and veiled threats and people trying to use the media to get what they want and ...’

She sighed and dug in her bag for cigarettes.

‘And then we were sitting there in Coffey’s house, and this idea was suddenly taking shape and it all came pouring out almost like I was speaking someone else’s thoughts. I hadn’t reasoned it out, it just ... I don’t know, maybe my self-destruct mechanism came into play.’

‘Maybe, when it’s over,’ he said, ‘they’ll all wonder why they made such a fuss.’

She looked at him over her lighter, shaking her head. ‘You don’t think that.’

He didn’t know what to say.

‘I suppose I was kind of hoping Coffey would put the arm on Stefan and it would all fall through, and then I’d have done my bit, given them a chance. But of course Stefan got his way. And then this morning I mentioned it to Gomer Parry and now we have a whole bunch of people due to turn up in fancy dress. So it’s been generating its own momentum. Like it was meant. Preordained. Destiny. Fate. Something working me like a puppet. Out of control. Except of course it isn’t. I could stop it now.’

Lol turned to her and put out a hand and she took it.

‘What should I do?’ she said. ‘Looking at it objectively.’

He had no idea what to say. How could he be objective when he was falling in love with her?

‘Is it the right thing?’ Merrily said. ‘That’s the only question, isn’t it, when you think about it.’