The Wine of Angels

44 Pink Moon

STEFAN ALDER WAS waiting for her under the lych-gate just before eight. She’d expected some smart, stately late-Stuart gentleman, but he was no more in period costume than he had been this morning. The neutral black trousers and white shirt, a little crumpled now, a smudge of green mould on the arm where it reached a muddied open cuff. A deep, red scratch dividing the back of one hand.

‘I don’t want ...’ Stefan stepped away from her scrutiny as though it were a court summons. ‘I don’t want a twee little costume drama. I don’t want a pantomime. They understand this, don’t they?’

‘It’s all right.’ Merrily backed off, putting up her hands. ‘Nobody wants that, Stefan.’

‘Sorry.’ He smiled palely. ‘First-night nerves.’ He laughed, as if this was a private joke.

‘You eaten?’

‘An apple.’

Symbolic, but insufficient calories. He looked lonely and he looked frail. Merrily suspected he’d been given a bad time at the lodge. She imagined the patchwork face sneering, but inwardly Richard Coffey would be eaten up with unquenchable jealousy because his beautiful Steffie was in love with a ghost.

The sun was going down behind the church, which had faded from red to brown and would soon be black.

Merrily wasn’t in costume either. Not period, nor clerical. She wore a long black skirt and a black, high-necked cashmere sweater – another relic, like the Volvo, of Sean’s boomtime. There would only be room in there for one minister tonight.

‘Stefan,’ she said. ‘What’s in this for you?’

He looked frightened of the question. The moon was rising over his shoulder. An unusually distinct moon, already yellow.

‘Redemption,’ Stefan said bleakly. ‘Isn’t that what we all want?’

‘I suppose. But for whom?’

He didn’t answer that. He looked out across the empty market place, where the first lights were coming on. ‘Which way will they come? Where shall we stand?’

She led him to a tree. An apple tree, as it happened, which in the evening was absorbed into the big shadow of the church. He stood rigidly, a bag of nerves. Bloody Coffey. He might have helped; he could have been here for moral and artistic support, he could have enlisted the aid of his technical friends. Or did Coffey, perhaps, want this to fail, so that the whole project – not his idea, anyway – might be discreetly dumped? Had she actually been playing into Coffey’s hands?

Stefan was watching her now. The evening was quite warm, and ashen hair hung damply over his ears. He pushed some back. ‘And what’s in it for you, Merrily?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said truthfully. ‘I really don’t know. Answers, perhaps, to the things I don’t know.’

‘Anyone can ask questions. That’s the point, isn’t it? There’s nothing I won’t be able to answer. I’ve read all Richard’s research, but I’ve thrown away the script.’

Merrily walked into the empty church and sensed at once a disturbance.

There’d been a temporary estrangement between her and the church, but when you preached and prayed in a building, it began to send messages to you in the atmosphere and the echo.

Tonight, the church was agitated, and it wasn’t with anticipation. Something had happened. She walked out past the font and into the nave. In the north-west corner, the door to the tower and steeple was closed and padlocked. The vibration was not like the shiver of bells, but it did seem to be on this side of the church.

She stood by the tower door and looked along the northern aisle towards the organ pipes. The curtain screening the organ was drawn. She thought of malevolent goblins, strode up the aisle and swept it aside.

The organ loft was curiously like the cockpit of a very old-fashioned aircraft. Merrily switched on the curling brass lamps which lit the keyboards and the panels of knobs. Nothing seemed disturbed, but she lingered, allowing herself to consider what, until today, had been unthinkable: that Dermot Child might be connected with the disappearance of Colette Cassidy.

He might have been giggling when he exposed himself on the tombstone this morning, but it was in fact an act of rage, of violence. She’d made Dermot lose his temper, and he’d brandished his cock like a knife. A peevish child grown into a bitter, screwed-up, middle-aged man who thought he was entitled to more. Arrogant enough to believe younger women could fancy him. Remorselessly devious enough to lie in wait for a sixteen-year-old girl who everyone said was asking for it?

She backed out, snapped off the lights, drew back the curtain. Perhaps she should play Dermot’s own game and send an anonymous note to Annie Howe. Perhaps she should swallow her pride and go to see Annie Howe.

Still unsettled, she moved up the steps and under the rood screen into the chancel. The altar shone down at her in white and gold. Nothing wrong there.

She entered the side chapel which began a few yards behind the organ and ran parallel to the chancel. The Bull chapel. Its high east window was dulled now, but the bigger, north-facing, leaded panes cast a hard and coarsening light on the face of Thomas Bull, on its trim beard, its bulbous lips, its scarily wide-open eyes.

In the bleak, northern light, this was a dour and creepy place. But there was nothing here but the unsleeping Bull in his frugal sandstone clothing, the dull blade of his naked stone sword quiescent at his side. It irked her that this chapel should be next to the chancel, so that you couldn’t approach the altar without getting a glimpse of him.

Her shoe crunched something. She bent down. Cement or sandstone dust on the flags near the foot of the tomb and directly below the place where it seemed to have been repaired at some stage, where, she remembered thinking, it looked as though Tom Bull had stretched out his legs and kicked out a couple of bricks.

She sprang back in horror. It looked as though he had.

Merrily took a long breath, gritty with still-floating cement dust. The eyes of Tom Bull sneered at her as she pulled up her skirt and then, lowering herself beyond his field of vision, knelt on the flags by his stone-booted feet on their stone cushion.

She saw that all the cement had been chipped out around two bricks.

She put hands either side of one and lifted it. It was old and parched and not very heavy, and it came out easily and she laid it on the floor.

Removed the second brick, revealing a hole like a large letterbox.

It was black in there, and she had no torch. With a rising dread, she slipped a hand in. He’s bones. Unless you touch him, and then he’s dust.

She didn’t touch him. A small draught caressed her fingers. She snatched her hand back, shaking.

‘You’ll be OK, Lol?’

Jane seemed quite anxious to get away. ‘Sure,’ he said.

‘She’s not here, you know. In case you were worried.’

‘I wasn’t.’

He was sitting at Lucy’s desk, with the two lamps on and the velvet curtains drawn. The windows faced the street, but Jane had been outside and said no chinks of lights were visible. Unless they wandered round the back and into the garden, no one would have reason to think the house was occupied.

‘I thought she would be here,’ Jane said gloomily. ‘I really didn’t think she’d left us for ever.’

‘Well, maybe she’s ... gone on, as they say. To something better.’

‘But her work here isn’t finished!’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Perhaps it isn’t. What are you going to do now?’

‘Just muddle on, I suppose.’

‘No, I meant now as in ... now.’

‘Oh. I’m going to the church. I’m supposed to be in charge of lights. Wow. It means I get to switch on one spotlight just before it goes dark.’

‘That’s it?’

‘She just wants me there to keep an eye on me.’

‘So suspicious,’ he said, ‘mothers.’

Jane turned in the doorway. ‘She does like you. I can tell. I think, on reflection, the way things turned out, you probably did the best thing not actually sleeping with her.’

‘That’s what you think.’

‘It will stand you in good stead,’ Jane said solemnly.

When she’d gone, he thought about Lucy and he thought about Merrily.

He looked around the tidy little room. Jane was right. Lucy’s spirit was not here. Perhaps it never had been. You could look around this room and you would not know her. You’d know what she’d looked like from the photos on the walls, what she’d eaten from the food in the kitchen, what she’d worn from the clothes in the wardrobe, but you would not know Lucy. If there was a shrine, it would be the shop with its fruit and its fairies.

It seemed to Lol, though, that the spirit was too small to be confined in one small space. It would have to hover over Ledwardine, its guardian hills and its apple trees. The spirit would want to light up the orb.

But it was too late to help Lucy in any practical way. Lol opened the annotated copy of Ella Leather’s Folklore.

The living light tonight was in Merrily Watkins, and he was scared because it was flickering.

‘Let me help you. Please.’ Outside the porch, Stefan was bending over Mrs Goddard in her wheelchair, a rug over her knees. The stress lines had vanished from his handsome face, concern glowed out, the setting sun colouring his hair.

Stefan was acting. Or something.

‘Thank you,’ Mrs Goddard said, ‘Mr ...?’

‘Williams,’ he said simply.

The daughter pushing the wheelchair frowned, Merrily noticed, but Mrs Goddard smiled. ‘They didn’t want me to come, but I insisted.’ She patted his hand resting on the arm of the chair. ‘I believe in you.’

‘I am glad,’ Stefan said.

‘And, you know, I believe what poor Miss Devenish often used to say, that until we face up to our history and uncover the truth, we shall never be a real village again, merely a tourist museum. A sort of black and white theme park.’

Stefan listened and nodded. Merrily marvelled at the old girl, although she’d noticed this before, the way disabled people often became clearer sighted, more focused and certainly more outspoken.

Most of the others had been less forthcoming. A couple of men had uncomfortably declined to shake the hand Stefan offered them, as though they might contract HIV or something. A retired headmaster called Carrington had pushed past him into the church, grunting, ‘Don’t take us for fools, Mr Alder.’ But most of the women had seemed charmed, if, in some cases, reluctantly. They’d all seen him on television, many had been scandalized and titillated by the news that he was living in Ledwardine with an older man who was also a controversial playwright. But he was young and good-looking, magnetic, charismatic ... and he was performing exclusively for them, and they were part of that performance.

‘Boy knows what he’s doing.’ Big Jim Prosser, from the shop, had come to stand with Merrily, on the grass to the left of the porch. ‘Look at ’em all. Nearest they’ll ever get to being extras in Pride and Prejudice. I know that’s a century or so out, but what do they care?’

‘Yes.’ There was an unfortunate number of rather showy dresses drifting along the path from the lych-gate. Jim himself, in a striped apron over a collarless shirt, was rather more than a century out, but he didn’t seem to care either.

‘What’s the feeling in the village about this, Jim?’

‘Caused a bit of a flurry, Vicar. Nothing else got talked about in the shop this afternoon, that’s for sure.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Aye. Mabbe I do.’

Ted Clowes walked in on his own. He was wearing his dark churchwarden’s suit. He did not look at Merrily.

‘And?’

Jim grinned. ‘You know as well as I do that most folk yere tonight don’t give a toss about Wil Williams. Never even heard of the feller until all this fuss started. But the old timers and the WI ladies and the ones who’ve been around a while are all of a flutter ‘cause they seen the effect it’s having on some folk. They wanner be able to say, I was there, all dressed up, the night of the fireworks.’

‘Fireworks,’ said Merrily.

‘Some folk gonner be real disappointed if there en’t, Vicar.’

‘You haven’t seen James Bull-Davies around by any chance?’

‘Not yet.’ Big Jim twinkling with anticipation.

‘Good evening, Ms Watkins.’

Merrily turned to find Detective Inspector Annie Howe stepping on to the grass. She was not in costume.

‘Hello,’ Merrily said, ‘Annie.’

Howe stood quietly, watching the villagers gather in the churchyard. She wore jeans. She carried her white mac over her arm.

‘Night off?’ Merrily said.

‘What do you think?’

‘Depends how close you are to finding Colette Cassidy, I suppose.’

‘You think we might be close?’

Tell her about Dermot. Tell her about the desecration of the tomb.

‘I pray that you are,’ she said.

Thinking this was precisely what Alf Hayden would have said, a platitude.

All right. Be practical, Lol told himself. Be objective for the first time in your life. She’s out there. She’s presiding over something she doesn’t understand. There are people there who want to stop her. There are people who want to destroy her. And people who want to watch.

At the centre of all this is a secret involving the death of a man more than three centuries ago.

Merrily doesn’t know the secret. Ignorance is dangerous.

If you want to help her you have just a short time to discover the secret.

‘Help me, Lucy,’ Lol said.

He didn’t know where to start. He switched off the lamps and drew back the curtains. Church Street, draped in dusk, was deserted. Above the house across the street, the moon rose. It was almost full.

It was pink.

No other way to describe it. This was a pink moon.

Nick Drake’s bleak last album was called Pink Moon.

The title track was this short song with very few words. One verse, repeated. It didn’t have to explain all the folklore about a pink moon, that a pink moon meant death, violence, was tinted by blood.

The song just said, in Nick’s flattest, coldest, most aridly refined upper-middle-class tone, that the pink moon was going to get ye all.

‘I’m over that,’ Lol howled, wrenching at the curtains, his legs feeling heavy, his arms numb, his heart like the leaden pendulum of some old clock. ‘I’m over it ...’

45 The Eternal Bull

‘AND LET US pray,’ Stefan said, ‘for Tom Bull.’

It was as though the red stone of the church had trapped the sunset, as it had on the night of Merrily’s non-installation as priest-in-charge. The remains of the evening travelled through all the apples in the windows – the Pharisees Red in the hand of Eve, the cluster of green and orange fruit around the nucleus of the big circular window above the pulpit, where Stefan stood, collecting the last light in his hair and face and shirt.

‘The man,’ Stefan said, more loudly. ‘And the Bull’

The pulpit steps creaked as he came down, the nave echoed back the rapid crackling of his shoes on the stone flags.

‘Bull of Ages!’ Stefan cried, mock-heroically.

He stopped in front of the organ, half-turned towards the screen which hid the chapel.

‘The Eternal Bull’ An edge of desperation. ‘Will you be joining us, Thomas? Will you pray with us before you take me? I’m your priest, Thomas. Still your priest, when all is said. Tom? Tom Bull? Will you come and pray?’

There was an almost audible apprehension in the church, faces lifting to the organ pipes and the wooden panel which sheltered them from the eyes which were open for eternity.

Merrily watched from the rearmost pew of the northern aisle, where the women sat. Stefan, it seemed, had had no difficulty at all in persuading the women away from their husbands, and they all clustered in the Satan sector in their variety of costumes, Minnie Parry at the front in dark brown wool, the velvet wives, mostly incomers, conspicuously in the middle, like visitors from Restoration London.

Silence apart from some shuffling, a few coughs. Stefan wiped his brow with an arm. He sniffed. He looked beyond the burnished walls and pillars into the blackness of the rafters.

‘It goes dark,’ he said sadly. ‘We have so little time.’

He was at the front of the northern aisle now, close to Minnie. Merrily could see Gomer Parry, sitting just across from her in the central nave, squeezed into his inquest suit. He looked in need of a cigarette; she could sympathize. In the otherwise empty pew behind Gomer sat the only woman who, unsurprisingly, had resisted attempts to put her in the northern aisle, but Annie Howe looked curiously uncomfortable.

‘Bessie!’ Stefan called out suddenly. ‘Where are you, Bessie Cross?’ Advancing down the aisle, looking this way and that over the heads; wherever he went he seemed to take the light with him. ‘Bessie Cross! Nay, don’t deny me now, woman!’

He stopped three pews from the bottom of the aisle. He waited.

‘Bessie?’

Two rows in front of Merrily, a woman moved: Teresa Roberts, a farmer’s widow in her late sixties, a friendly, decent soul and a regular churchgoer. Earlier, she’d been one of several people Stefan had asked Merrily to point out to him.

Teresa said hesitantly, ‘Bessie Cross ... she was my grand-moth—’ But Stefan was leaning over the pew end, reaching for her hands to pull her to her feet.

‘Bessie! How is the girl now? How is Janet? For I myself have prayed for her many times. Bessie, don’t be affeared, he’s not here. The Bull’s not here yet, we have time for this. How does she lie now, Bessie, is Janet Cross at peace?’

The woman next to Teresa looked up quickly and Merrily saw, with widening eyes, that it was Caroline Cassidy in a dark brown cape. She must have come in alone, after the others.

Still holding Teresa’s hand, Stefan turned to the wider congregation, raised his voice.

‘You all know about this. All of you know what happened to Bessie Cross’s girl, who went into the Bull’s meadow to look for her cockerel at close of day, fearing the attentions of the fox, and was caught and branded for a poacher.’

A murmuring. Merrily remembered what Stefan had said, before Coffey could shut him up, about hiring a researcher to gather memories and old stories from the village. But, if this was about Teresa Roberts’s grandmother, it was Victorian – for Wil Williams, a couple of hundred years in the future.

It didn’t seem to matter. Stefan was clearly invoking memories of a figure which bestrode the centuries: the Eternal Bull.

‘And the Bull said to the child, did he not, “Now, Janet, would you appear in court and bring shame down upon your family or have me deal with you now?” ’

Stefan paused.

‘Deal with you now,’ he repeated quietly, with low menace. ‘Bessie, my poor, dear woman, is what I say true in every detail?’

Teresa Roberts, entirely in shadow, said, ‘Well, my mother, she used to tell me—’

‘How old was she, Bessie? How old was Janet when she was brought before the Bull?’

The church had gone very quiet. Some had turned to look at the dim tableau of Stefan and Teresa. Others gazed stoically in front of them as if they were afraid to respond, afraid of repercussions. Merrily marvelled at the willingness of a group of disparate people in an enclosed space to relinquish their world for another ... indeed, their inability not to. The power of theatre. Power. She’d never had, nor wanted, power, but this was what being a successful minister was still all about.

Twenty minutes, and he’s got them in his hands. They’ve never given me half this much attention.

Teresa said, ‘Twelve. Twelve year old.’

‘Has she stopped crying now?’ Stefan asked gently. ‘Has the poor child stopped crying in the night?’

‘She ... she never stopped. Hardly a week went by they wouldn’t hear her crying in her bed. Hardly a week, my mother used to say.’

‘Deal ... with ... her ... now. A whipping? Was that not what you were told by the gamekeeper, when he brought the child home?’

‘It was.’

‘A whipping? Does a whipping do that to a girl? A farm girl, a big, hardy, raw-boned girl, a scamp? Does a whipping do that?’

Teresa Roberts said, pain coming through, ‘Please ...’

‘Don’t worry,’ Stefan whispered, just loud enough for Merrily to hear. ‘This should be heard.’

The air inside the church was thicker and darker now, the walls like dull earth, but a heart of pure red fire in the circular window. All that was visible of Stefan was the white of his shirt. He moved around the pew like a restless ghost.

‘Does a whipping do that, Bessie? I’ll bet she’d been whipped a time or two at home.’

‘Aye.’ Teresa Roberts was a talking shadow. ‘We all were, back then.’

‘How long did she cry at night?’

‘They say she was never at peace and she couldn’t look no man in the face from that day till—’

‘Where did the Bull take her, Bessie? Don’t be afraid. Let it be told, in this holy place, for this haunts your family still’

‘The cider house! He took her in the ole cider house, where they say he took all his women. Because the air itself in there, they used to say, the smell of it could make you drunk. So’s you wouldn’t notice. The cider house. It was always the ole cider house. It made you drunk, to be in there. And ... wanton.’

Merrily froze up in the darkness. Images came alive in her head, the dream she’d had in the afternoon in the Black Swan, the dream of Dermot Child in the foetid, sweating cell.

‘The cider house,’ Stefan said with satisfaction. ‘The old Bull cider house. God bless you, Bessie, for your courage! God have mercy on the Bull! And God bless the child who cries in the night!’

‘No!’ The voice of Teresa Roberts was ragged. ‘She don’t cry n’more, Reverend. Don’t cry n’more ...’

‘How old was she?’ Stefan’s voice gentle but full and round and relishing his punchline. ‘How old was she the day she hanged herself in the barn?’

‘Sixteen,’ Teresa whispered. ‘Sixteen that day, sir.’

In the long, hollow silence that followed, Merrily was aware of Gomer Parry edging out of his pew and then Stefan Alder was leaning over her, his lips against her ear. She could smell his sweat.

‘The light, please, Merrily. The spot. Five minutes?’

He was so screwed up he couldn’t think. He kept walking around the room, pulling books from the shelves. He didn’t know where to start. He had so little time and no idea where the hell to start.

He made himself sit down.

Traherne. Start with Traherne. How did Traherne come to know Wil Williams? Help me, Lucy. Just remind me.

Thinking back to when Lucy had first introduced him to Traherne, who had a link with Ledwardine through Wil Williams and ...

Hopton.

Susannah Hopton. The patroness.

It took Lol nearly twenty minutes to discover, from the various histories of Herefordshire, that Susannah Hopton had been the wife of a judge on the Welsh circuit who lived right on the border at Kington and was a devout high Anglican with some kind of circle of disciples. During the puritan Cromwellian years, Mrs Hopton had moved towards Roman Catholicism but returned after the Restoration of the monarchy. She had a strict and punishing regime of daily worship, which began before dawn. She was very fond of clergymen and her best-known protege was Thomas Traherne.

But Wil Williams, Lucy said, had become virtually a part of her household.

His background had equipped him to meet her schedules without difficulty.

‘I was born,’ Stefan said, ‘on a grey and wind-soured hill farm at Glascwm in Radnorshire.’

He looked down at his fingernails, as if remembering a time when they were black and ragged.

‘My father held seventy acres of rocky, boggy, clay-heavy, God-deserted earth. My father had little faith. No hope. And no conception of charity ...’

Stefan moved around the church; you could hear the crackling of his footsteps, the only sound, and wherever he would stop light would flare.

Candles.

All around the church, faces were lit by little, oval spears, and in this timeless light, the centuries dissolved, and you saw that essentially nothing had changed, farming faces no less rough and reddened than ever they were, than the stones themselves. And no face more severely stony than Garrod Powell’s. An axe to grind ... Merrily recalled the councillor’s fist striking the table in the village hall ... Let him grind it somewhere else, sir. Not in our church. And would he say a word tonight? Probably not. No muscle would twitch in Rod’s puritan face, no eyebrow rise.

There were no stray breezes in the church tonight, and the flames were vertical, sending up wispy tapers of smoke and that faintly bitter, singeing aroma.

Faces. She saw the moon-bland countenance of Dermot Child. He had not looked at her. She saw the pert, urban features of Caroline Cassidy made gaunt and austere by the wan and waxy light and the anxiety that many a mother knew in the seventeenth century when so many children would expire in infancy. Caroline had not noticed her.

Then she saw Alison Kinnersley. Who had slipped into the back central pew occupied, at the other end, by Annie Howe.

Behind them, Jane hovered. Merrily walked over, made a little signal with a forefinger to tell her to put on the left-hand spot. She could easily have done the lights herself, but it was an excuse to have the kid safely in the building. Jane nodded.

By the time the spot came on, a dusty yellow tunnel from the rafters to the area below the pulpit, Stefan was there, sitting on the second step, half in the beam, half in shadow. He began to speak conversationally, as though to friends, about his adoption by a rich and pious woman who recognized in him an intelligence, a longing and a purity of spirit so rare it required special nurturing.

He had everyone’s attention. The world of Wil Williams. But he spoke boastfully, and that wouldn’t go down well. Herefordshire people were generally laid-back and self-effacing.

All around her, Merrily felt a cloudy, ancient atmosphere, but when she looked at Stefan she saw ... an actor.

Why? She rubbed her eyes. Was it jealousy, because they were never so silent, so attentive to her? She went and stood against the back wall of the nave, next to the heavy curtain covering the entrance to the vestry, and listened to Stefan telling of his introduction to Traherne. How Traherne, with, perhaps, financial assistance from Hopton, had secured Wil’s acceptance to his old Oxford College, Brasenose.

Merrily felt very strange. She felt a tightness in her chest. She leaned against the wall, took deep breaths until it subsided.

Stefan was saying something about him and Traherne being two halves of the same apple. Traherne was a poet and a mystic, Wil was deeply sensitive, a natural psychic, a visionary in the most direct sense. When Wil walked out on the hills or into the oak woods, the spirits came to him like the birds and animals to St Francis. He was a wild child, possessed of a raw, exciting beauty.

Where was this leading? Traherne’s rough trade, or what?

Merrily felt that alarming tightening in the chest and this time she couldn’t make it go away. She held on to the curtain to the vestry to prevent herself falling to her knees. When she began to wheeze, heads turned.

Oh no, not again. Not again, no way.

Merrily walked out.

‘Mum?’

Jane stood in the porch, watching her anxiously.

Merrily took gulps of air. All around her, the graves were washed amber-pink by the moon.

‘You’re not ill again, are you?’

‘Sorry, flower, I think it’s the fumes from all those candles. You go back. Stefan’ll think we don’t like it.’

‘I don’t. Do you?’

‘I’ll tell you when it’s finished. Just go back, Jane, OK? There’s nothing to worry about. I’m just going to have a cigarette, OK?’

‘God,’ said Jane. ‘You can’t go an hour without one, can you?’

She gave her mother one final disapproving glance before disappearing into the porch.

Merrily turned away and leaned her arms over a tall gravestone as a red speck came up from behind another stone.

‘Sorry, Vicar, went and hid, I did. Thought it was gonner be my Minnie.’

His cigarette end made a glowing triangle with the twin moons in his glasses.

‘Hello, Gomer.’

‘Lost track of time in there. En’t allowed to wear my watch tonight. Digital, see, gives a bit of a bleep on the hour. Minnie says, What’s that gonner sound like in the seventeenth century, eh? Had to sit at the back, too, on account of not havin’ a proper fancy-dress costume.’

‘Still. You came. I’m glad.’ Out here, the pain in her chest had dulled to a throb.

Gomer took a pull on his cigarette. ‘En’t workin’, is it?’

‘What en’t? Sorry.’

‘Thought ‘e was gonner hit the spot, that young feller, when he got on to cider, but it went by, see.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The cider house. Got me thinkin’, that did, so I come out to think sumore. Does a lot o’ thinkin’ these days. Too much time.’

‘The cider house?’

‘Where the Bulls took their women. Not their wives, like, you know. Their women. Them as was old enough to qualify as women.’

‘Their mistresses?’

‘Not even their mistresses, Vicar. The ones they used for their sport, you might say. The ones as didn’t count for shit, ‘scuse my language.’

‘There were more like this ... Janet?’

‘I should say. God bless you, Vicar, it were cheaper than fox ‘untin’, and no hounds to feed.’ Gomer shook his head sadly. ‘You looks in need of a ciggy. I got a few yere, ready rolled.’

‘Thanks, but ... Oh, sod it ... if you can spare one.’

Gomer produced a skinny roll-up and lit it for her.

‘When you’re retired, see, God damn it, you gets to hangin’ around and dwellin’ on things and all the folk you ever worked for or had a pint or two with, and they all gets jumbled up in your memory, and then a coupler things rolls out when you en’t expectin’ it, and you thinks, well bugger me. Why’d ole Edgar Powell shoot ‘isself ... accidently, like? Why en’t the cider the real stuff?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ll tell you, you got time. I’m sick of keepin’ it all up yere. ‘Cause I don’t understand, neither, and I reckons it’s time we did.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, you start with the ole cider house. That’s the Powell cider house now, see. The Bulls originally, but the Powells, they had it off ’em, way back when the Bulls got rid of all that ground. Interestin’, when you works out just how much Bull ground’s now Powell ground. I reckon it’s gotter be ...’

Gomer stopped talking. Merrily followed his gaze towards the lych-gate, through which they could see car lights.

‘You notice when you come in, Vicar, them cars parked on the edge of the square just across from the church.’

‘So many these days. Why?’

‘Miserable Andy Mumford in one, coupler young fellers in the other usually wears uniforms, but plain clothes tonight. Mind if we just ...?’

Gomer set off towards the lych-gate, Merrily following.

‘They’re on to somefhin’, I reckon. Don’t waste manpower on that scale, less they got somefhin’ in mind. And that lady copper in the church? They’re lookin’ for somebody. Or they got somebody in mind. Where’s your friend Mr Robinson tonight?’

As they approached, one of the parked cars had put on its lights and pulled out to make way for another vehicle which took over its space just left of the lych-gate. The new vehicle was a battered blue Land Rover with a torn canvas. The driver’s door opened as the wheels gritted to a halt.

Gomer put a hand under Merrily’s arm and pulled her into the trees beside the gate, as James Bull-Davies stepped down and ducked quickly under the lych-gate, slamming the Land Rover door behind him.

Both front doors of the parked police car opened. Mumford and another man followed Bull-Davies at a distance.

Gomer looked at Merrily.

‘Not my place to ask, mabbe, but they clear this with you, the police? Stakin’ out your church and whatnot?’

She could hear Bull-Davies’s voice crackling into the answering machine. I shall personally take action to put a stop to this homosexual farce. You may consider this an ultimatum.

‘No,’ she said. ‘They bloody didn’t.’

‘You better get back in there. Wouldn’t be anythin’ I could do, would there?’

‘I think there would.’

From the apple trees next to the porch, Jane watched James Bull-Davies go in, followed by the two detectives.

The Eternal Bull. It could start to get interesting at last. Sadly, she couldn’t stay for it. She waited for Mum to come back – on her own and looking pretty fired up – before she slipped away.

46 Pretty Foul

‘THE ORCHARD WAS mine,’ Stefan Alder said.

The spotlight hugging him like a sunbeam from a high window as he knelt at the pulpit steps, looking up towards the rood-screen, where a hundred apples were carved.

‘Oh, yes, it belonged to the church, the whole forty acres, but it also belonged to me. It was where I found my peace. And my God. God was always in the orchard.’

He turned full into the light, his hands held out in supplication, half an apple in each. His face was creamed with sweat. Even from the back, Merrily could see the film of desperation over his eyes.

He was losing it. He’d gone on too long. Without Coffey’s cohesion, his performance had become shapeless and over-emotional. The dramatic edge was blunt. The audience shuffled and coughed, older Ledwardine folk beginning to see the holes.

And there were holes, despite the research. Richard Coffey had not wanted this because he was not ready, but Stefan had been lured here by Merrily and when the evening was discredited as a piece of faintly tedious, overdramatized, gay propaganda the remaining fragments of her own credibility would go with it.

By the light of a cluster of candles, she could see a satisfied smile on the face of Dermot Child. Occasionally he would glance towards one or other of the police.

He would have told them Lol could well be here. Knowing that the vicarage was now unsafe, where else would she hide him? One of the few pieces of information to escape Dermot’s intelligence net, perhaps, would be Merrily’s appointment as Lucy’s executor, her receipt of the keys to Lucy’s house. Although you could rely on nothing in a village this size.

But where – much as he would enjoy the sight of Lol being taken away with Merrily as an accessory – did Bull-Davies come into this?

She’d followed them into the church prepared to battle this out; now she felt drained again. Get it over. Whatever it is, just get it over.

‘For God was inside every apple.’ Stefan held up the halves. ‘And here had left his mark, the five-pointed star of wisdom.’

‘That’s not God,’ a woman called out scornfully from the middle of the Northern aisle. ‘I’ve seen that. We all know that. That’s a pentacle. It’s satanic. It’s the mark of the serpent! That’s why you’re supposed to cut the apple the other way.’

Stefan reeled for a moment, as if struck in the face and then, in a graceful piece of theatre-craft, came back.

‘There!’ Dropping the apple halves, he arose, pointing, straight-armed, at the woman. ‘This is how it starts. What upon a tree is more beautiful, more wholesome, more sacred than an apple? The whole world is in an apple. The apple was God’s most precious gift to Hereford. The apple heals! And yet ...’

His arm and voice dropped together. He backed against the pulpit, glanced from side to side, hunted.

‘... in the wrong hands, even an apple can be poisonous. And this is how it began. This is where the hounding began.’

In front of Merrily, Annie Howe leaned forward, revealing the fine, light hair cut close to the nape of the neck, the ears exposed, no earrings. Raised a forefinger to someone.

Towards the front, a hand went up. Merrily saw that it belonged to James Bull-Davies, sprawled now in the Bull family pew, an arm stretched along its back. Although every eye was focused on him, he seemed entirely relaxed.

Stefan had left the spotlight, was walking from candle to candle in a circle round the church, showing how the net had gathered around Wil Williams. Who was alone now in Ledwardine, the much-respected Thomas Traherne, although still nominally the vicar of Credenhill, having gone to London as chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman. Now Wil had no champion, no defender. No lover was the implication.

‘And one enemy,’ Stefan said, arriving back at the pulpit.

A buzz. With those words he had his audience back. They didn’t want to hear about his sensitivity, his affinity with nature, his perception of the whole world in an apple. They wanted the full, unexpurgated chronicle of hate.

‘We were friends, Tom Bull and I,’ Stefan Alder mused. ‘He was not a well-schooled man, but he had some small understanding of Latin and of the Welsh language and was always eager for news of advances in the physical sciences. He would dine at the vicarage and sometimes I would spend an evening at the Hall and talk of letters we had received from Oxford and London. So what went amiss?’

It was clear that Stefan had not yet noticed James.

‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘The Bull discovered – or rediscovered – an aspect of himself that he could not bear to confront.’

Stefan rose up several inches in the pulpit, as though jagged lightning was working through his body. Abruptly, he turned away and vanished into the darkness, reappearing at the foot of the pulpit, sitting on a step, full in the spotlight.

‘What do you think?’ he said. And laughed. ‘Tom Bull had fallen in love.’

A tapping on the window this time.

Lol stood in the dark, with his back to the kitchen door. The front doorbell had rung twice, the back door had been knocked on.

‘Mr Robinson? Lol Robinson? Gomer Parry, it is, see.’

Well, everybody knew Gomer Parry, even Lol. Genial, harmless Gomer.

It was the name you’d announce yourself by if you didn’t want to scare someone away, if you wanted them to open the door, nice and quiet ...

‘You listenin’, Lol?’ the voice said. “Cause this is what the vicar told me t’say, see? ‘Er says – you ready for this? – ’er says, have you noticed ... the Dick Drake Moon? Hope I got that right.’

Lol let him in anyway.

Now that the blossom had dropped from neighbouring trees, and because it was lighter tonight than the last time, you could see that the Apple Tree Man was actually very sad. Half-dead. Covered with scabs and sores and his branches stuck up like an umbrella with its fabric torn away, some of the prongs bent.

The more Jane drank, the more bent they would seem against the brown sky and the brick-coloured moon.

She lay with her back to the tree, roughly where she’d lain the night Colette had brought her here. It had been easy to find the Man, in his small clearing, but now she was here nothing was quite as she remembered it. It was a different kind of night.

And a different kind of cider.

She’d come in over the wall from the vicarage, tossing the strong, heavy, dark green bottles before her. The idea she’d had from Lucy, of this traditional Ledwardine drink, made from the legendary Pharisees Red, was that this was the booze endorsed by the fairies, who were the little angels of the orchard, and so it would be like nectar, right? The cider itself would have mystical properties.

She’d eased out the champagne-style cork, expecting an emphatic pop, like a magical starting pistol. This is where it begins. But the cork had merely fallen out and rolled away and, although the bottles must have been shaken up getting here, there was no exciting frothy rush either, just this joyless dribble.

Oh well. Jane had leaned back against the trunk, trying not to think of Edgar Powell with his grizzled old head blown off – that episode was a complete irrelevance – and had gripped the lips of the bottle with her own and thrown her head back.

And then came the real shock.

The Wine of Angels was actually pretty foul.

To begin with, it was dry. Horribly dry. The cider she and Colette had drunk that night in the Ox was cheap and sweet and went down very easily and made you happy and bubbly. But the Wine had this cloying taste that was more like soil than apples. She recalled the first time she’d had real champagne, at a wedding Mum had conducted up in Liverpool, and what a bitter disappointment that had been, especially out of such a brilliant bottle. This was worse.

And this was The Wine of Angels, named by Lucy Devenish.

She sat in the toffee-coloured night and felt like crying. What it was – she was bloody useless on her own. She was just a kid and a townie kid as well. She’d tried to imagine Lucy walking alongside her into the orchard, but Lucy was cold in the mortuary, Lucy was never coming back to the orchard.

Upset and furious and frustrated, Jane had another drink. It couldn’t really be so yuk. Must be another sign of how immature she was that she couldn’t appreciate the quality of a fine cider made to an ancient recipe, fermented in the bottle.

But she wasn’t bloody well going back now. She had to go all the way with this, so that nobody could say she hadn’t tried. She’d even put on the same old blue Pulp T-shirt she’d been wearing when Colette had first brought her in here. All for Colette.

Do it. Be there for her. Use your contact.

What she needed was to get into the same mood, to find the same state of mind. She went over all the events leading up to the golden lights moment, getting the sequence of it, starting with the outstanding time they’d had in the pub, laughing at people like James Bull-Davies, realizing they had this repartee going between them, that they could be good mates, if not exactly soulmates. Then that sweating boil, Dean Wall, and his cronies eyeing them up and coming after them, the smell of urine from the Gents’ toilets, the flight past the old bowling green to the church porch, the afterhours social club, Colette’s delight at Jane throwing up all over ...

Her stomach lurched at the thought of that and she pressed her hands down on it and belched. This cider was so much gassier. And it wasn’t working. She’d drunk masses of the stuff, or it felt like it, and yet she didn’t seem to be particularly drunk. Certainly didn’t feel at all happy. All the optimism was long gone, the feeling that Ledwardine was her real, preordained home, that she could really function here, help Mum make a go of it, have some laughs with Colette – maybe find some cool guys together – help Lol get himself straightened out and organized and recording again, work with Lucy on re-establishing the natural way of things, become more aware of the orb.

The orchard smelled damp and mouldy. She was sure it hadn’t been like this before. She tried to remember the moment they’d both flopped down under the Apple Tree Man, but she couldn’t. Her only memory was of saying she was dying and then Colette’s voice, so cool, so smokey, so sassy, coiling out of the ground beside her.

You ain’t felt nothin’yet, honeychile.

Those really prophetic words. Like she really knew the score. But it was just some scam to scare Jane. Colette hadn’t known a thing. Not then. And afterwards was far too cool to think she had anything to learn from a weird old bat like Lucy Devenish. But she’d hated to feel she’d been left behind by anybody. She had to be the leader, and on the night of her party she’d impulsively led some kind of raiding party on the orchard, determined to break through to whatever it was Jane had accessed. Bust into what Lucy called the orb, find the contact.

And had vanished.

Search was made for her and she appeared to her friends from time to time, but when they spoke to her she immediately disappeared.

Jane took another swig of the awful Wine of Angels and slumped back with her hair against the knobbly bark of the Apple Tree Man, still clutching the big bottle by its neck. She closed her eyes, lay very still and tried again. She imagined Colette in a land of lights, separated from the orchard by a billowing night mist. The point being that Colette was nobody special in this place; she was learning that there were higher forces and inner structures and that most of the things she thought were really cool were actually quite trivial and insignificant.

It was time for her to return, chastened.

‘Colette,’ Jane whispered. ‘You hear me, you dumb slag? It’s me. I’ve come back. I’ve come to fetch you.’

There was an answering rustle of leaves from somewhere beyond the edge of the clearing. It was probably a fox or a badger, but in her mind Jane turned it into Colette.

She had a clear picture of Colette strolling through the orchard. She could see the nose stud and the red plastic windcheater open over the daring black dress.

The rustling came closer. If she opened her eyes now, she would see ... She was getting shivery vibrations at the back of her neck, remembered Dr Samedi:’... and de drummin’ begin, feel de drummin’ inside, fingers dancin’, dancin’, dancin’up an’ downyo spine...’

Colette. Colette was coming. She was coming back. The urge to open her eyes was overpowering.

But she didn’t. She mustn’t. The moment must be absolutely right.

She must be very quickly seized, without speaking, or she would never come back.

She heard breathing. It wasn’t a fox or a badger, it was her old friend Colette Cassidy, and she’d stop in the clearing, the cynical cow, and she’d go, Aw, Janey, you’re not still here? This is just so sad. And then they’d both crease up laughing.

Come on, lady.

She concentrated on keeping her eyes squeezed tight, tight shut and holding her breath, and putting everything she had into the image of Colette, summoning this incredible detail: a light sheen of sweat on the forehead overhung by a wing of hair, a blob of mascara on the end of an eyelash, the weird red moon glinting in the nose-stud, a slick of crimson lipstick on her avaricious little teeth when she smiled.

She heard Colette’s voice calling to her across the nights.

Look up. For me. Just look up, once. And then we’ll go.

Jane looked up.

47 False Lover

GOMER SAID, ‘DON’T suppose Lucy kept the odd bottle about the place? Helps you think better, it do, my experience. Well, not better, mabbe, but a bit wilder, like. You gotter think wild to get your brain round this kinder business.’

He certainly looked wild tonight. Lol recalled them watching the little guy troop past the shop one afternoon and Lucy saying Gomer Parry was an object lesson on the dangers of retirement. Not the man he used to be. Not the man he was a year ago.

Tonight though, Gomer’s springy white hair was on end like a lavatory brush and his eyes looked hot enough to melt the wire frames of his glasses.

‘No accident?’ Lol said, going through to the kitchen. ‘You sure of that?’

‘Course I en’t,’ Gomer snapped. ‘All I’m sayin’, see, is I’ve used bloody hedge trimmers with more power than that little bike. And it never got much stick from Lucy Devenish. You know Lucy, it makes no sense.’

‘They’re calling it a freak accident.’

‘Freak accident my arse,’ said Gomer. ‘Lucy seen a ewe amblin’ out the hedge, she’d just pull over and wait for the ole thing to get across. This is a country woman, born, bred and what you like, through and through. That woman could sense a sheep from fifty yards. But you try tellin’ that to one o’ these bloody inquests. It’ll be Edgar Powell all over again. Accidental bloody death!’

‘If it wasn’t an accident, what was it?’

‘Suspicious is what it was.’

‘You think somebody killed Lucy?’

‘That’s a wild question,’ Gomer said. ‘But it’s gotter be asked, see. Gotter be asked. En’t nobody else gonner ask it, are they? All right then, it’s n’more than a feelin’. En’t never gonner be no evidence now, coppers’ve made up their minds. Open and shut. Shut for ever, like a lot o’ stuff in this village. But when the wind’s in the right direction ...’

Pulling his tobacco tin from his jacket pocket, Gomer got going furiously on a roll-up.

‘Put it this way, boy. You don’t dig out two thousand cesspits in thirty years without learnin’ what shit smells like. I know the vicar’s taken a few shovel-loads she en’t deservin’ of, and we had a bit of a chat about tonight and ’er says, do me a favour, you go round and talk to Mister Lol Robinson about this and anythin’ else that’s on your mind, give him summat to think about ‘stead o’ worryin’ about the colour of the moon, like.’

‘She said that?’

‘Give or take. So yere I am.’

‘Well,’ Lol brought the presentation case of The Wine of Angels into the living room. ‘I’m glad to see you, Gomer. I’ve been sitting here getting nowhere fast.’

‘We can pool what we got, mabbe. I told you that about Lucy, see, ‘cause I know you and ’er was friends ...’

Lol nodded. Point taken. Resolve strengthened. He put down The Wine of Angels box, the only bottles he could find in the house. Gomer sniffed.

‘No thank you, boy. Once was enough.’

‘Looks like a present to Lucy from the festival committee.’

‘Er was mabbe keepin’ it to donate to the Christmas raffle.’

Lol observed that two bottles appeared to have been drunk already.

‘Impossible,’ Gomer said. ‘Nobody’d ever drink a second. Wine of Angels? Balls. Must be fifteen year back, Rod Powell, he calls me in to dig out a couple hundred yards o’ drainage ditch. Well, Edgar’d made a few barrels of Pharisees Red cider, strictly for their own consumption, like, and it was a hot day, see, and they gives me a jugful and, by God, that weren’t the kind o’ cider you forgets. And this’ – Gomer brandished a bottle with some contempt – ‘en’t it.’

‘What is it?’

‘Supermarket cider, boy. Pop. Not quite cheap muck, not far off. This never come out o’ the ole Powell cider house, the Bull cider house as was, I’d stake my JCB on it. They bought this in, knowing poor bloody Cassidy and his flash friends wouldn’t know the difference if it come out of a fancy bottle. Now why they done that?’

‘That’s a mystery,’ Lol said dubiously.

‘Aye.’ Gomer’s glasses gleamed. ‘Another bloody mystery, boy. You might reckon that en’t got nothin’ to do with nothin’. But cider, as Lucy used to say, was the lifeblood of Ledwardine. This is central, boy. Central’

‘I know I’m not thinking too well tonight,’ Lol said, ‘but I don’t see where this is going.’

‘Nor me,’ said Gomer. ‘Not yet. But it all smells off. We looks at things and we draws conclusions and sometimes they’re wrong – like the vicar sees all these coppers movin’ in on the church and she reckons they’re after you. I think there’s summat else afoot, but we’ll have to wait and see, isn’t it?’

‘Except we don’t have time to wait,’ Lol said. ‘Merrily’s playing it by ear in there, Bull-Davies is planning to get it stopped and drive her out of the village for good, and a lot of things are ... closing in, you know?’

‘Ar,’ Gomer said.

They stood there in Lucy’s living room, two little guys in glasses who wanted to help and didn’t know how. Eventually Lol said, ‘You know anything about Wil Williams, Gomer?’

‘Not a lot.’

‘Thomas Traherne?’

‘Know Lucy was keen on the feller. That’s about it.’

Lol looked across at the framed photograph of Lucy and a young, blonde woman feeding a pony from a bucket.

‘Patricia Young?’

Gomer thought for a moment. ‘No.’

‘Susannah Hopton?’

Gomer shook his head.

Lol picked up Mrs Leather, opened it to the handwritten notes on the inside back cover. ‘Hannah Snell?’

‘Ar.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Hannah Snell,’ Gomer said. ‘I know who she is, all right.’ He cleared his throat and began to sing in a tuneless tenor.

‘All ye noble British spirits

That midst dangers glory sought

Let it lessen not your merit

That a woman bravely fought ...’

Gomer beamed. ‘Thought you was some sort o’ folk singer, Lol. You en’t never yeard that? My ole gran used to sing me that as a nipper. Hannah Snell. Bugger me, that takes me back.’

‘Tell me,’ Lol said. ‘Tell me.’

When Gomer had finished, he said, ‘Tell Merrily.’ And ‘Christ.’

James Bull-Davies came almost languidly to his feet.

‘So.’ He leaned forward, both hands on the rim of the prayer-book rack. ‘You’re suggesting my ancestor was, ah ... gay.’

Stefan Alder stood defiantly in front of the pulpit.

‘He was in love with me.’

‘Gord’s sake, man, do we have to have this bloody playacting?’ His voice filled the church. ‘You make accusations about my family, you don’t hide behind bloody Wil Williams. You, Stefan Alder, are saying Thomas Bull was a poofter. Correct?’

‘That’s not a word I would use.’

‘I’m sorry. A homosexual. This man with four children.’

‘It doesn’t make any difference. You must know that.’

‘But that’s what you’re alleging. Come on, man, you can’t libel the dead, spit it out.’

‘All right. I believe that Tom Bull had a physical relationship with the Priest of Ledwardine and when there was a danger that it would become a matter of general knowledge in the village, in his family, in the courts where he presided, he sought to have Wil condemned as a witch. He had a neighbouring farmer accuse Wil of diminishing the productivity of his orchard. He had a local artisan who was dependent on his patronage invent a story about him dancing with sprites, or even ...’

Stefan glanced around his silent congregation.

‘Don’t stop, Alder,’ Bull-Davies said. ‘We’re all agog.’

‘... or even paid some of the local youths to disport themselves naked in the orchard to torment poor Wil beyond his powers of endurance.’

Murmurs of disbelief and disapproval, mostly from the northern aisle.

Bull-Davies sighed. ‘Went to an awful lot of trouble, didn’t he?’

Stefan had been too long in the light. His hair was damp and darkened, his shirt hung limp and grey with sweat.

‘What I find most objectionable, is your slur on the integrity of the man.’

‘You don’t understand.’ Stefan’s face streamed. He refused to move out of the light. ‘I do think Tom believed in what he was doing. He convinced himself that Wil Williams had occult powers. How else could he, a Bull, possibly fall in love with a man? Unless that man had bewitched him.’

A hush. Merrily saw James’s hands tighten on the prayerbook shelf of the Bull family pew. Very slowly, James straightened up and walked out of the pew and into the well below the pulpit, stopping two yards from Stefan Alder.

‘And on what,’ he said, with a clear menace, ‘do you base your evidence?’

Stefan didn’t move. ‘He kept a journal, did he not?’

‘And you, of course, have seen this journal?’

‘You know I cannot possibly have seen it, as your family keeps it in a bank vault in Hereford.’

Murmurs in the pews.

‘And unless and until you are prepared to produce this journal, you’re in no position even to pretend to refute any of what I’ve said. Are you?’

James said confidently, ‘There is no journal relating to your spurious allegations in any bank vault, to my knowledge, in Hereford or anywhere else.’

They faced one another at the end of the tunnel of light, James heavy in tweeds making Stefan look even more pale and fragile. Somebody should stop the fight, Merrily thought absurdly.

‘So you’ve taken it out of the bank, have you?’

Stefan stared into James’s eyes, his body arching towards the big soldier, his hands weaving in the light in an almost womanly distress. When he spoke again it was in a soft, imploring voice.

‘Please tell us the truth, James ... Please don’t hold back any more ... You know that Tom, before he died, made a confession to the then priest, together with an enormous donation to the church in order that his body might lie where it lies now – behind me – in the area between the altar and the orchard where his beloved Wil lay, in unhallowed ground; a man who took his own life rather than face conviction for the crime of being gay. Conviction – and betrayal – at the hands of a dishonest man and a false lover, who—’

‘You ... little ... shit ...’ With a roar James was on him and the church exploded into light. Some women on the left screamed, men in the centre were on their feet.

Blinded by the glare, Merrily threw both hands up to her eyes and through the fingers saw figures converging on the threshing bodies below the rood screen. She stumbled down the aisle towards them, aware of Annie Howe striding in front of her. Scrambling up the steps under the chancel arch she saw policemen holding back Bull-Davies and Stefan Alder, and she filled her lungs and screamed out, ‘In the name of God, stop this!’

And for a moment, there was quiet.

Annie Howe looked up at Merrily and smiled pleasantly. ‘Thank you, Ms Watkins.’

The two detectives holding James Bull-Davies let him go and James stepped away from them, brushed down his jacket and straightened up and stood quite stiffly, looking directly across the nave at nobody.

The detective holding Stefan did not let him go. It was Mumford. Stefan sullenly tossed his head back against Mumford’s shoulder. Mumford went rigid. Annie Howe said, ‘Bernard Stephen Alderson, I’m arresting you for the murder of Richard Coffey. You don’t have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention —’

The rest was lost in the tumult.

Merrily closed her eyes.

48 Thank You, Lord

FULL OF BREATHLESS excitement and bad, gassy cider, Jane looked up.

Looked up in hope and then began to scream. The figure rearing up in the clearing, the shape hiding the moon was not Colette. Was far too big to be Colette.

She shrank back against the Apple Tree Man, let go of the neck of The Wine of Angels, the bottle rolling away, sloshing cider over her jeans. Her lips went soggy and a whimper began in her throat. Please, she was trying to say. Please, I’m drunk.

The figure didn’t move. If it was the police, there’d have been a powerful torchbeam in her face. She was pushing herself back so hard that a spiky piece of bark was stabbing into the top of her head, the pain brutally assuring her that this was not a dream.

‘Jane Watkins.’ The voice was sorrowful. And male. And local.

‘Oh God,’ Jane said. Her head was all fogged up. She knew the voice, couldn’t identify it.

‘What you doing yere, Jane Watkins?’

Whoever it was, he knew the orchard too well to need a torch.

‘This is not in the best of taste, I’d say.’

‘Oh God!’ Jane sat up. ‘It’s you.’ The last time they’d met, she’d rushed up to him in a panic in the market place, and he’d put his big hands on her shoulders and said yes, all right, he’d go into the orchard after Colette and see what he could do, and his eyes had looked sort of rangy and fearless under his Paul Weller fringe, but even then she hadn’t held out any great hopes of everything being all right.

‘Two things,’ Lloyd Powell said. ‘One, you’re too young to be drinking that ole pop. Two, this is where my grandfather died and if he’s looking down now he’s gonner be disgusted, he is.’

‘Sorry, Lloyd. I really didn’t mean to be disrespectful’

‘I thought better of you, I really did, young lady. But you en’t such a lady, after all, are you? Look at you ... You stink of it. Disgraceful’

‘I let the bottle go and it all came out.’

She struggled to her feet, stumbling about a bit, which she hadn’t expected; The Wine of Angels had been so foul she hadn’t really thought it would have any effect.

‘I dunno at all,’ Lloyd said. ‘Just look at the state of you.’

Jane gritted her teeth. He might look cool and hunky, but he was just like his dad, all strait-laced and backbone of the community and no sense of humour at all.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I don’t hear an explanation.’

Oh sure. Well, actually, Lloyd I was conducting a mystical experiment, on the lines indicated by Mrs Leather, to try and bring Colette back from the Land of Faerie, which isn’t as stupid as it sounds, if people like you had ever taken the trouble to listen to Miss Devenish, we’re simply talking about a parallel dimension, and I know it exists because I think I’ve been there, although I don’t remember a thing, it was a kind of trance state, and all right, it was a long shot, but ...

Oh, sure.

‘Come on, Jane. We better get you back to your mother before something happens to you.’

Jane stood up straight. Well, almost. She pushed her hair back behind her ears, bits of bark and stuff dropping out.

‘I can get myself back, thank you.’

‘Oh aye? And how am I gonner feel, something happens to you or you goes off like your friend? Though heaven only knows why a decent girl would want a friend like that. Looking at you now, mind, I’m not sure you’re a decent girl after all.’

Jane dragged an angry breath between her closed teeth. You could only stand so much of this. ‘Look. I’m sorry for trespassing in your precious orchard. I’m sorry for resting under your grandad’s tree. And, most of all, I’m sorry for drinking your disgusting cider. I shall go.’

‘And I said ...’ Lloyd stood up right in front of her, about a foot taller and nearly twice as heavy, ‘that I will take you home, miss. Come on. Pick up that bottle – litter, that is.’

‘I wasn’t going to leave it. I care for the countryside.’

‘Oh aye,’ Lloyd said. ‘All you incomers care for the country.’

‘And all you farmers are just so smug. You always think that whatever you do’s got to be right because you’ve been doing it for centuries or whatever.’

Jane bent and picked up the bottle. There was another one somewhere, but what would he think if he saw she’d brought two of the things? Probably that she was expecting a bloke. She stuck the empty bottle under her arm and turned back towards the church. But Lloyd was in front of her again, spreading out his long arms like an official police barrier.

‘No, you don’t. Not that way, Miss Watkins. Got my truck over the other side, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, that’s stupid! It’s only a few minutes’ walk back to the churchyard.’

‘You’re going back in the truck and that’s final. I wanner keep my eye on you, make sure you goes in the right door.’

She was furious. But she was also a bit drunk. Damn Lloyd Powell. Damn Lloyd and damn Rod and damn bloody old Edgar who was too gaga to point his gun in the right direction.

Feeling really sullen, sickeningly bloody teenage, she let Lloyd steer her out of the clearing in the opposite direction to the way she’d come in, towards the farm entrance to the orchard which was out near the ‘new’ road. She noticed he never touched her, just put out his arms like barriers. The Powells were such puritans. Or could it even be that it was like with Lol, and Lloyd was afraid of teenage girls? Guys could be so strange.

‘I didn’t think there’d be anybody around tonight,’ she said when they picked up the rough path through the apple trees, still floury with yellowing blossom against the treacly sky. ‘I thought you’d be in church with everybody else.’

Lloyd snorted. With an unexpected venom, he said, ‘Why’d I wanner to listen to the ramblings of some poncy, posing little queer who thinks he can rewrite other people’s history?’

It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about Stefan or Richard Coffey. Nothing was too clear, actually. She’d deliberately drunk too much, hoping to disconnect her mind, and she’d succeeded. Hazey Jane again.

‘We supposed to sit around and allow that?’

‘It’s only a play, Lloyd. Nobody’s saying it’s true.’

‘En’t they?’

‘No.’

‘All you know, miss. All you know.’

As they emerged, quite suddenly, at the roadside, Jane said, resentfully, ‘You’d be surprised what I know.’

Lloyd stopped. His famous white truck was parked by the kerb without lights. He got out his keys, unlocked the passenger door. ‘All right.’ There was a kind of resignation in his voice. He held open the door. ‘You better get in.’

Standing on the footplate, hauling herself up, she got dizzy, stumbled again and clutched at the side-panel to stop herself falling off.

In the back of the truck, the pink moon shone out of dead eyes.

Mumford and his colleague took Stefan away. Nobody in the church attempted to follow them except for Annie Howe. Merrily caught her arm as she walked down from the chancel.

‘Excuse me, Inspector. Do I have to disturb the bishop and ask him to disturb the Chief Constable or do I get to hear an explanation?’

Annie Howe half-turned in irritation. And then – the woman of the hour who could afford to be magnanimous – she relaxed, comfortably resigned.

‘Ms Watkins ... I really am very, very sorry. But it did seem inappropriate at the time to tell you what we were doing. Besides which, we didn’t, at that stage, have what I would have considered sufficient evidence, so I actually hadn’t yet decided precisely how I wanted to handle it. It was what you might call an ongoing situation. Sorry.’

‘Just go on talking,’ Merrily said. ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve heard enough.’

Oh God, but it made terrible sense. It’s sorted, Stefan had said. Richard won’t be having anything to do with this.

Because Richard had died a bloody but not protracted death in the living room of Upper Hall lodge, under repeated blows from a blunt instrument. Merrily pictured some statuette of a nude biblical male spattered with blood and brain.

It will be the performance of my life. Perhaps there won’t be another.

James Bull-Davies had discovered the body when he went to confront Coffey after learning about the proposed evening of drama cooked up by Stefan Alder and the vicar. The living-room curtains had been drawn, but on the front-door frame was a blatant and unavoidable handprint in blood. Bull-Davies had kicked the door in.

Stefan, it seemed, had made very little attempt to conceal the killing – a crime, very definitely, of passion, but the passion was for a man over three centuries dead. Perhaps, after tonight’s performance, he would have given himself up.

‘So why didn’t you just arrest the poor sod before the performance? Did the idea of an audience appeal to your—?’

‘Ms Watkins. I’m really not obliged to justify my choice of procedure to you, nor even to—’

‘It was James, wasn’t it? He wanted the entire village to know that the man attempting to defame his ancestry was not only a liar but a murderer. Or to conclude that, because he’s now revealed as a murderer, he must also be a liar.’

‘Inspector,’ Bull-Davies boomed from behind her, ‘as you so rightly say, you are under absolutely no obligation to defend your methods to this woman, who, in my view, is simply wasting police time. As she has wasted everyone else’s. She might also care to consider that had it not been for her irresponsible promotion of this impromptu fiasco, Richard Coffey would in all probability not have died.’

‘It’s not my place to say he’s right,’ Annie Howe said. ‘But I do have to go now. Nobody’s been permitted to leave yet, by the way, because we shall need the name and address of everyone here tonight. DC Thomas will stay and take them down.’

‘Why?’

‘Possible witnesses.’

‘To what? James’s assault on Stefan Alder?’

‘May I have a word in private, Ms Watkins?’

Merrily followed her down the central aisle, through a parted sea of appallingly excited faces, to the south porch.

‘Look,’ Howe said, ‘I’m still looking for Colette Cassidy. It’s possible that the death of Richard Coffey has absolutely no connection with that, but in a village this size it would be amazing if there wasn’t some kind of overlap, however peripheral. So that’s one reason I want to know precisely who is in this building.’

‘It’s a church.’

‘It’s just another public building to me.’

‘I thought you were looking for this ... Laurence Robinson.’

‘He’s one of the people we want to eliminate from our inquiries. Why, is he here?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Merrily said.

‘No? Well, I’m going back to Hereford now to talk to Mr Alder, but there will be other officers around should you wish to give them any information.’

‘A celebrity murder,’ Merrily said tonelessly. ‘Aren’t you lucky?’ It would sound grudging, mean-spirited. Distinctly unsaintly. ‘I need some air,’ she said.

Outside, she lit a cigarette and walked among the graves.

So that was it. All over.

Richard Coffey dead and his play stillborn. Stefan Alder destroyed. Wil Williams reburied in a deeper grave. The troublesome and ineffectual woman priest publicly discredited, last seen plucking feebly at the sleeve of the younger woman who took all the honours.

God and the Fates had conspired to make the world secure again for the Bulls of Ledwardine. Thank you, Lord.

And the pink moon shone down.

After a while, Merrily squeezed out the cigarette and went back into the church to find Jane and go home.

Wherever that was.

49 Badger Baiting

LLOYD LAUGHED. ‘JUST an ole ewe, Jane. Picked her up from the north field this afternoon, forgot she was still in the back. Second one just dropped dead in two days, you get weeks like that. No reason for it.’

A spent eye gazed past Jane, who shuddered, thinking of the ewe Lucy had run into, the one that killed her and itself. That was one of the Powells’, too, presumably.

The truck’s engine rattled into life. Lloyd threw it into gear, switched on his lights and pulled out.

The last time Jane had been on this road it was with Bella, the radio reporter, bound for King’s Oak Corner, where the police had found some of Colette’s clothing. She didn’t want to be on it again, heading for the spot where Lucy had died.

‘Why are we going up here?’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘The village is that way.’

‘Because the truck, he was pointing this way,’ Lloyd said, exasperated. ‘And it en’t a good road for doing a three-point turn in the dark. We got to carry on up yere a mile or so then reverse into Morgan’s yard, all right?’

‘Oh.’

Which meant they were going to pass the section where Lucy had hit the sheep. And then they’d have to pass it again, when Lloyd had turned round. He had no right to do this. Who was he anyway? Who did the Powells think they were? Generation after generation of boring councillors and self-righteous farmers who slagged off townies for never having shagged a sheep or whatever.

Sheep. She thought of the poor, lifeless ewe slung in the back of the truck and then, with a flush of anger, realized that if the Powells had been such brilliant farmers, Lucy would still be alive.

‘That was one of your sheep, wasn’t it, that Lucy Devenish hit?’

‘Like I said, two ewes gone in two days,’ Lloyd said.

It hadn’t been quite what he’d said, but Jane pressed on, not wanting to lose the impetus.

‘So where did it come from?’

‘I dunno. The field across from the orchard, presumably.’ He was driving with one hand on the wheel. His right elbow was resting on the ledge of his wound-down window. He looked pretty cool actually. One of the girls at school had said she’d tried to snog him once at a Young Farmers’ dance, but Lloyd had just kissed her limply and walked off like he had better fish to fry.

‘How did it get out?’

‘What you on about?’

‘The sheep.’

‘I got no idea, Jane.’

‘You would if you bothered to check your fences,’ Jane said tartly.

Lloyd eased off the accelerator. ‘What you mean by that?’

‘Next to a road like this, you should have decent fences and check them regularly. That way, sheep wouldn’t get out and run in front of people and cause accidents. It wasn’t the sheep’s fault, it was yours.’

She thought he’d be angry, and she didn’t care, but he seemed relieved, making a small sound that was almost a laugh.

‘You’re a cheeky little devil, Jane.’

‘And you’re just ... irresponsible,’ she said ineffectually.

The truck jolted to a standstill.

Jane looked out of the window for lights and saw none. ‘Why’ve you stopped?’

‘Morgan’s Yard. Morgan’s bloody yard, Jane.’

‘I can’t see anything.’

Lloyd sighed. ‘Morgan’s farm’s been derelict these past twenty years.’

He reversed quickly and carelessly, as though he’d done it a thousand times at night and then, with the car pointing at ninety degrees to the road, took his hands off the wheel.

‘Well, go on, then.’ Jane felt suddenly quite nervous of him. ‘Take me home.’

‘No,’ Lloyd said. ‘You got a bee in your bonnet about this Devenish business, I want it sorted.’

‘She was good to me. And if you’d seen her lying dead in the road—’

‘Well, I didn’t. But if I had, I’d still’ve thought she was a cranky, meddling old troublemaker, and this village better off with her gone.’

‘You rotten bastard,’ Jane blurted. ‘What did she ever do to you?’

‘Plus,’ Lloyd said pedantically, ‘she was a danger to herself and every other road-user. Two reasons – one, she never wore protective headgear.’

‘She liked her cowboy hat, and everybody knew it was her coming along, it was part of her im—’

‘Two, that ridiculous Mexican poncho thing. Get the wind under that, it blows up over your handlebars. Up over your head, if you’re unlucky. Which was exactly what happened, wannit?’

‘Yes,’ Jane whispered, shutting her eyes as if that would drive away the picture of Lucy’s face under the happy, summer poncho.

Lloyd revved hard and she was flung back into the passenger seat. ‘Silly bugger,’ Lloyd said and put both hands on the wheel, sending the truck bolting back in the direction of Ledwardine.

Thank God for that, Jane thought. Suddenly, the idea of being dumped back at the vicarage or outside the church with some snide little comment to Mum about keeping her daughter off the booze seemed almost cosy. She only hoped, the speed Lloyd was going, that no more sheep had strayed on to the road.

There was a cold explosion in her head.

Oh God.

Second one just dropped dead in two days, you get weeks like that. No reason for it, he’d said.

Not, And that makes it two with the one Lucy Devenish ran into. He was saying it had already dropped dead. How could he possibly know that?

Plus that poncho thing. Up over your head, if you’re unlucky. Which was exactly what happened, wannit?

How did he know that? How did he know Lucy had been lying dead with the poncho over her face, when he said he hadn’t seen her? Nobody had, except Jane and Bella and the police who’d immediately concealed the area.

Lloyd put his headlights on full beam, as the truck began jolting like all the tyres had gone flat or something.

‘What’s happening? Why’s it gone all bumpy?’

‘Short cut,’ Lloyd said tersely. In the green glow from the dashboard, he looked angry.

‘No, it’s not, where are we going?’

He rounded on her. ‘Shut up!’

‘What’s the matter? What have I done?’

‘This is all your bloody fault, you stupid little cow. I never bloody wanted this. I tried to be fair with you and you just kept pushin’ it and pushin’ it and pushin’ it. You couldn’t leave well alone.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. What have I said?’

‘It’s not what you said, it’s what you made me say. Leadin’ me on all the time, laying traps. You come yere, you all think you’re so smart. You and your university-educated parents and all I ever went to was the local agricultural college, all laughing behind your hands, bloody ole yokels, we’ll show ’em how to organize ’emselves, oh you think you’re so—’

‘We’re not ... My mother dropped out of university,’ Jane said. Desperately grabbing at a change of topic, anything not to do with sheep and road accidents. ‘She got pregnant. She’s worked really hard all her life. We’re not posh townies, Mum’s family came from—’

‘Shut your bloody clever little gob.’ The truck slithered to a greasy stop. ‘Let me think!’

‘Take me home.’ Jane discovered she was crying. She didn’t feel disgusted with herself, anybody would cry in this situation. ‘Please, Lloyd.’

‘You’ve had that, miss. You won’t get home now.’

‘Where are we?’ She made a grab for the door handle; he reared over her. She screamed. The scream floated away out of the window, into nowhere.

‘Don’t make me touch you,’ Lloyd said.

Jane got both hands to the door-pull, but it just kept clicking and the door didn’t open.

‘Don’t work from the inside n’more,’ Lloyd said. ‘I was gonner get him fixed, then I saw he had his uses.’

Gomer caught up with Merrily under the porch lantern.

‘Vicar. Hold on.’ He was out of breath.

She stepped outside again, although she didn’t think she could bring herself to explain what had happened.

‘Gomer—’

‘Seen ’em fetchin’ ’im out, Vicar. At least four people told me the story ‘tween Church Street and the market. Should be more’n halfway round the county by now. Forget that. That don’t matter, see. You gotter get back in there, ‘fore they all leaves.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You gotter tell ’em the truth.’

‘Dear Gomer.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know any truth any more. And if I did, nobody would want to hear it from me.’

‘I know the truth. Me and Lol, we figured it. If you’d just give me chance—’

‘Gomer, whatever it is, it’s too late.’

‘En’t,’ Gomer said obstinately.

She shook her head. ‘I’ve got to find Jane.’

He followed her back into the porch. ‘Vicar, you gotter listen. Lol, see, he’s been puttin’ me in the picture ‘bout a lot o’ things you been keepin’ to yourself too long.’

‘Then he shouldn’t have. It’s all been a waste of time and I should’ve known better.’

Inside the porch, sitting on the stone bench like a smug gnome, Dermot Child smirked at her. ‘Quite an interesting night, Reverend. In spite of everything. I’m sure the repercussions will be many and varied.’

‘Who’s that?’ Gomer peered sourly at him, ‘Ah, it’s you, Mr Child. Didn’t recognize you with your dick in your pants.’ He held open the church door for Merrily.

‘Gomer—’

‘Hear me out, Vicar.’

At the prayer-book table, just inside the door, Detective Constable Ken Thomas was sitting taking names. Ken was local, well known to most of the villagers and Merrily too. He was a nice man, overweight and approaching retirement age, therefore consigned by Howe to such menial, clerical tasks as this. He didn’t seem to mind.

‘You en’t gonner write my full name down, are you, Ken?’ Jim Prosser was saying. ‘Just put Jim, Shop, you’ll remember.’

‘But she won’t, and she’s the one matters.’

‘That girl?’

‘That girl could be divisional commander next year, way things are going. It’s called accelerated promotion. Tonight’s likely shoved her up two more rungs.’

‘Bugger me,’ Jim Prosser said. Behind him, Brenda, his wife, fussed with her inappropriate crinoline. Behind her Dr Kent Asprey looked impatient, Rod Powell dignified and unconcerned. James Bull-Davies, heritage vindicated, hung out by the pulpit, aloof, chin thrust out, gazing up at the opaque apple window, on the opposite side of the church to the Bull chapel where, Merrily was convinced, he’d earlier hacked his way into a seventeenth-century tomb. But who would ever learn about that now?

Nobody seemed to notice Merrily. There was no sign of Jane.

‘Probly gone home lookin’ for you,’ Gomer said. ‘We’ll find her, don’t you worry ‘bout that. Now, where’s quiet? Vestry?’

He held back the curtain and almost pushed her inside.

Jane wrapped her arms around herself, shrinking into the corner where the sunken passenger seat ended and the metal partition separated her and the dead sheep in the back of the truck.

This was the Powell farm, on the wrong side of the new road, the village a sparse and distant glimmering through the orchard.

‘I’m not getting out. I want to go home. You’ve got to take me home.’

‘Stop whining, bitch,’ Lloyd said. ‘I gotter think.’

He was clutching the steering wheel tightly with both hands as though he wanted to bang his head on it. The film of sweat on his forehead was lime-green in the dashlight. The engine was chunnering. A smell of petrol inside the cab, mixed with cattle feed and manure.

‘Then let me get out. I’ll walk home. I can see you’ve got a lot on your mind.’

‘I’ve told you to stop that.’

Lloyd looked up from the wheel, his face severe but kind of bland, like his dad’s. Like being moved by anything was a weakness genetically eradicated in the Powells centuries ago.

‘You think we’re stupid. You think you can soft-talk me and I’ll let you go and you’ll toddle off back to your mother and tell her all about what the bad Powells done to poor Miss Devenish.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Jane lied desperately. ‘I know you wouldn’t do anything to Lucy. Just let me go home, Lloyd. I’m a bit pissed and everything, and I probably won’t remember a thing in the morning. Just let me go back to the orchard and I’ll find my own way home, all right?’

‘Why’d you do that?’ He leaned back, curious now. ‘Why’d you take that bottle of cider into the orchard?’

‘Couldn’t very well drink it at home, could I? And that was where Colette and I came on—’

‘Why there? Why under that tree?’

‘I don’t know. Colette—’

‘Colette, Colette, Colette!’ He slammed a fist into the wheel. ‘That little slapper! You want me, don’t you? Don’t you, Lloydie? Piece of rubbish. Piercing her body, advertising herself. And they paid for that to go to the Cathedral School.’

Jane said, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

‘Right.’ Lloyd leaned on his door. A second later he was opening hers from the outside. ‘Out.’

She didn’t want to get out. She wondered if she could slide across and somehow start the truck and ...

Lloyd gripped her arm above the elbow and squeezed on the muscle until she screamed in pain.

‘Out’

Outside, there were hulking buildings without lights. Barns and sheds. The air smelled of working farm.

‘Go on then, Jane.’

She struggled out on legs that felt like foam rubber and stood shivering in a stiffened rut made by tractor wheels. The raspberry moon shone out of a bitter chocolate sky. She did want to heave now, but she wouldn’t, not in front of him. Not to order, like a prisoner.

I’m a prisoner.

‘You wanner be sick, be sick.’

‘It’s gone off.’ She looked around for somewhere to run, but they were in a kind of stockade, fencing topped by barbed wire.

‘You en’t leaving now, Jane. Don’t get ideas. And don’t try and fool me with any ole crap about you don’t understand. I’m gonner tell you, so you will understand. Only fair, that is. Lucy Devenish, see, she come up to talk to Father about Colonel Bull-Davies and his ole man, thinking as Father could help her clarify a few points.’

‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ Jane said hopelessly. ‘Honestly. Can’t you—’

‘No I bloody can’t! Too soft-hearted, that’s my trouble. I can feel sorry, see, but it don’t get you nowhere. The little fluffy lamb’s still gotter be killed, the ole sow’s still gonner wind up hanging by her back legs, it’s the way of the world. And some you en’t sorry for, like the fox. When the ole fox starts rootin’ around, he’s gotter go. Fast. Bang.’

Lloyd clapped his big hands.

‘And that was the way Lucy Devenish went. Clean and neat and efficient.’

‘No!’ Jane threw her hands over her ears. ‘I don’t want to know!’

‘Father driving the truck, he pulls in front of the little bike, I tumbles out the ole dead ewe ... smack. Happens in a twinkling. She don’t know a thing. Takes off like an owl from a branch. Dead before she hit the ground, wouldn’t surprise me. Their hearts en’t too strong, that age. Efficient, that was.’

‘Efficient? You’re completely insane!’

‘She wouldn’t’ve suffered anyway,’ Lloyd said reassuringly. ‘We’d just’ve banged her ole head one more time on the tarmac. We can be humane, see, when we need to be. Ole Lucy, she was a nuisance, no question, got these funny ideas and she couldn’t leave well alone and she got Father in a right state the stuff she was comin’ out with, but’ – he shrugged – ‘she was still one of us. So when she’s in the way, when she’s gotter go, then it’s done humanely.’

He nodded and smacked the side of the truck. His clean-cut face shining in the moonlight with pride at a job well done. He straightened up, stood with his hands on his hips and contemplated Jane.

‘And then there’s you,’ he said.

‘I suppose I’m in the way, too.’

Momentarily astonished at how calm her voice sounded now there was no need to pretend any more, now that there was nowhere to run and nobody to hear her screams. She looked up at the pink moon, and it occurred to her that this could be the last moon she would ever see. She felt full of hate and terror, but hazy too. Hazey Jane cursing the night. But remote from it all, somehow, because people like Lloyd just couldn’t be, not in the modern world.

‘I can’t make up my mind, see,’ Lloyd said, ‘what you are. A fox or a lamb. Or even a badger. You ever been on a badger-dig?’

‘No! That’s disgusting—’

‘Illegal now, mind. But it goes on. It has to go on, see, else how we gonner keep ’em down? Had him near enough wiped out in these parts once, ole brock, pesky ole bugger, but the conservationists, who know best, see, from their offices in London and them places, they lets the badger back to spread tuberculosis through our herds. Badgers coming back as fast as townies in their holiday cottages, and they said we couldn’t touch ’em.’

‘That was never proved,’ Jane said, clutching at another conversational straw. ‘Tuberculosis.’

‘Never proved. Arseholes, it wasn’t. All I’m saying, badger on my land, he goes down, and if I can have a bit of fun with him before he goes, where’s the harm there? He’s dead anyway at the end. What difference is half an hour gonner make?’

‘Not badger baiting?’ Jane said faintly.

‘Aye, if you wanner call it that. Feller from up north, he brings his terriers once in a while. Ole brock, he gets dug out, we throws him to the dogs. It’s a bit of fun. It’s cheap. Nobody gets harmed, ‘cept the badger and that’s his fault for being a badger. And the dogs sometimes, but we stitch ’em up, no problem.’

‘That’s despicable.’

‘Why?’ His face puckered slightly in genuine puzzlement. ‘You don’t look at things the right way round. A savage bastard, he is, the badger when he gets going. Or if it’s a female with young. Or any kind of female. Asking for it. Daring you to do it.’ Lloyd leaned against his white truck, arms folded. ‘Asking for it,’ he repeated. He looked up at the moon. In a parody of a wheedling, posh, female voice, he said, ‘You want me, don’t you, Lloydie?’

Turned to Jane. ‘They all want you, see, women. Bit of a catch, a farmer, always was. You get stuck with the wrong one, mind, she’s hard to dislodge, so you gotter get it right. Drummed into me from early on, this was. You gotter get it right!

She didn’t know what he was saying.

‘Gotter get it ... right.’ He hacked a heel into one of the truck’s back tyres. ‘Meantimes,’ he said, ‘you does a bit of badger-baiting, kind of thing. Come along, Jane, I’ll show you the ole cider house.’

50 Deep Offence

AS EACH NAME was written down by DC Thomas, the person was allowed to go. Few had. There was, perhaps, a sense that this electric night was not yet over.

The laborious procedure at least had given Merrily time to assemble her thoughts. After Gomer had told her about Hannah Snell and the rest, they had gone back outside, Gomer to report back to Lol and find Jane.

While Merrily had made three slow circuits of the church, trembling with a fearful excitement. All the time, the thoughts assembling in her head like blocks falling together, compacting, until she found she was looking at a solid, stone staircase. Leading all the way to the top of the vicarage.

Now she was walking back into the church, where Ken Thomas was coming to the end of his list. She stopped by his table.

‘Merrily Watkins,’ she said. ‘The Vicarage, Ledwardine.’

I, Merrily Rose Watkins ...

The image, from the Installation service, of an empty church. Something crawling up the stone-flagged aisle, naked and pale and wracked and twisted.

Poor Wil. You came in the evening.

When the weight was too much to bear, you came in and you locked the door behind you and shed your hated clothing and went down on the cold stones and crawled, sobbing, on hands and knees, along the aisle and up the chancel steps until the altar was above you.

And there you showed yourself to God and you called out, ‘Is this right ...IS THIS RIGHT?

‘You all right, Vicar?’ Ken Thomas said.

‘Sorry. Miles away.’

‘Been a long night,’ Ken said. He lowered his voice. ‘Bloody disgrace, her not saying a word to you. Humiliating you like that. Should’ve told you. No excuse for it. Complain, I would.’

Merrily shook her head. ‘Thanks, anyway.’ She started to walk away then went back. ‘Ken, I don’t suppose you’ll be hanging around for a while?’

‘Well, I’m supposed to call in, but most times they’ve got a job remembering who I am these days. You rather I stayed until you locked up?’

‘I think I would. We had a bit of ... vandalism, earlier.’

‘What was that, then?’

‘Well, it’s kind of complicated. If you stick around, all will be clear. Possibly.’

She moved slowly towards the chancel, past James Bull-Davies, who was still standing on his own, while Alison watched him thoughtfully, leaning over the back pew of the northern aisle. Merrily didn’t look at James. She walked halfway along the chancel, past the choir stalls, to the spot where she’d imagined the twisted, naked thing that was Wil Williams asking, Is this right?

Is it the right thing? she’d said to Lol. That’s the only question, isn’t it, when you think about it.

And it had seemed right, to find the truth and lay it out. She could have become a lawyer, working the criminal and civil courts towards a similar end. The first courtrooms had surely been constructed in imitation of churches, down to the presence of the Bible. But in church there was only one judge; the preacher in the pulpit was merely an advocate, at worst a hell-and-damnation prosecutor ...

But is it the right thing to do?

Merrily walked up to the altar and knelt and prayed for guidance.

‘If this is wrong,’ she said aloud, ‘maybe you could just strike me down.’

Everyone else seemed to have.

Lol looked into the box of The Wine of Angels to confirm that two bottles were indeed missing. He showed Gomer the Dancing Gates story in Mrs Leather’s book.

‘It’s obvious. She thinks she can reach Colette. She thinks Lucy wants that.’

Gomer was dubious. ‘She’d go down there on her own? To the place where ole Edgar done isself in?’

Merrily had given him a key to the vicarage and he’d been in there to make sure there was no Jane. All the way to the top floor. Nothing, except for a little black cat watching him from the hallstand.

‘It’s where they both went once. Whether she fully believes it or not she’ll think she has to try it.’

‘Right then,’ Gomer said. ‘Let’s not waste no more time.’

With a long rubber torch they’d found in the kitchen, they went the back way, over Lucy’s fence, across the old bowling green towards the orchard.

‘I don’t know what to say about this kind o’ thing,’ Gomer said. ‘When I was a boy, people laughed. When my granny was a girl, nobody laughed. What’s that? Barely a century. For hundreds of years, folk never questions there’s more in an orchard, more in a cornfield. Few decades of computers and air-conditioned tractors, even the farmers thinks it’s all balls. Sad, en’t it? Computers and air-conditioned bloody tractors.’

‘Watch yourself,’ Lol said, ‘there’s brambles all over the place.’

‘Aye.’ Gomer chuckled wryly through his ciggy. ‘Some orchard, this is. Never could figure it. They gets bugger-all off it, but they keeps it tickin’ over. Plants a couple o’ new trees every year, chops down a dead ‘un for firewood. But they won’t plough him up, start again, do it proper – superstition, I used to reckon, disguised as concern for the village heritage. But you look at Rod Powell, do he look like a superstitious man?’

‘What’s a superstitious man look like?’

‘Superstitious man looks more like you, Lol, you want the truth.’

‘Thank you, Gomer.’

‘More like you than Powell is all.’

‘Why’d he go along with the wassailing, then?’

‘No way he could refuse. Cassidy says it’s in the interests of the village, Powell’s a councillor ... Bugger me!’

Gomer stopped in the clearing where the Apple Tree Man stood. Twin pink moons in his glasses gave him a nightmare quality.

‘I’ve fuckin’ got it, boy! Why The Wine of Angels tastes like it’s been through a horse! Listen. Cassidy, he wants to revive the ole cider industry, right? Well, that’s a tall order, given all the established firms. But if they does manage to get it off the ground, the first thing happens, see, is they get the experts in, and they looks at this lot and cracks up laughin’. Grub the bloody lot up, they’d say, not cost effective. Plough up the whole flamin’ orchard, plant some nice neat rows of dwarf trees—’

‘Could you have a dwarf Pharisees Red?’

‘Pharisees Red, Red Streak, where’s the difference? Orchardin’s moved on, it en’t what it was.’

‘So why don’t the Powells want it dug—’ Lol stared down at the base of the Apple Tree Man. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

Gomer’s grin was savage. ‘You’re thinkin’ wild at last, boy.’

When Merrily came down from the altar, Caroline Cassidy was waiting for her.

‘I don’t know why I’m still here. I don’t really know why I came. Terrence refused. He said he would prefer to wait by the phone. I almost walked out when poor Stefan made that woman tell the story about the girl who was raped and then hanged herself.’

With that story, Merrily realized now, poor Stefan was making more of a point than he imagined.

‘Knowing that these things have always happened to young girls doesn’t make it any better,’ Caroline said.

‘People got away with it then,’ Merrily said. ‘Now they seldom do.’ Perhaps, she thought, we’re here to bring peace to the spirits of old victims. Perhaps that’s the secret of restoring balance to a community.

‘They’ve been stopping motorists and showing them her photograph,’ Caroline said. ‘Now they’re even talking about some sort of reconstruction, though what use that would be in a village this size, I can’t imagine.’

‘Get it on television again.’

‘What’s the use of that? Colette’s dead. No ... No ...’ Caroline warded off Merrily’s protests with an impatient wave. ‘Don’t give me the obligatory platitudes. I only wish ... I only wish she’d been going through a nicer phase when she ...I mean, some people had a chance to grow up, to change for the better. And didn’t. Won’t be many mourners for Richard Coffey, will there, horrible man? It’s poor Stefan one feels sorry for. I would hate ... I’m sorry, don’t think I know what I’m saying.’

‘Stefan could be a free man in a few years and getting more acting jobs than ever,’ Merrily said. ‘It is, actually, Coffey I feel sorry for. Caroline, look, I’m going to start something in a minute, and if the other bit disturbed you, it could be fairly painful. So, if you want to leave, this might be a good time.’

‘It won’t be,’ Caroline said absently. ‘There won’t be any more good times for us here.’

Merrily stepped up to the pulpit and, for the first time ever, took out the microphone from the shelf underneath. She pushed in the jack-plug, switched on, tapped the mike, heard a thump from both sides of the rood screen. She needed this tonight; there were a lot of people, a lot of tension and she didn’t want to have to shout, to sound like a preacher.

Right.

‘Erm ... could I ... could I have your attention?’

The sound was far louder than she’d expected. Everyone stopped speaking, even Bull-Davies turned round. Merrily moved back from the mike.

‘Perhaps, when Ken’s finished taking the names, those of you who are interested in, er, the truth about Wil Williams and, er ... and other things ... might like to return to your pews. Thank you.’

Lol held up The Wine of Angels bottle in the beam of Gomer’s long, black torch.

‘Unopened.’

The Apple Tree Man was still heavily blossomed, despite the dead branches. Lol thought of Dickens’s Miss Havisham in her wedding dress. Grotesque. Wrong.

Gomer bent down to sniff the grass. ‘The other bottle got opened, my guess, and some got spilled. But where’s he gone, that bottle?’

Was it likely she’d wandered off, drinking out of the bottle? But that wasn’t what happened last time. She’d be trying to replicate that, to summon the little golden lights. And then Colette.

‘Maybe she cleared off when she heard us coming. She wouldn’t know who it was. Jane? Jane!’

No answer.

‘What do we do now, Gomer?’

Gomer was looking at the Apple Tree Man.

‘I was yere when ole Edgar blowed his head off. Accident? Balls if that were an accident, any more’n Lucy.’

‘What, somebody killed—’

‘No, you pillock, he killed hisself, all right. But it weren’t no accident. Bull-Davies fixed that inquest verdict, I reckon, just like the Bulls always fixed things for the Powells on account the Powells fixed other things for the Bulls.’

‘How do you know it was deliberate?’

‘Comin’ to it, en’t I? See, Edgar Powell, he was ninety year old, near enough, and quite a few bales short of a full barn by then. So Edgar’s standin’ yere with both barrels ready to go, and anybody can see the poor ole bugger can’t remember why the hell he’s come. Wassailin’? What the hell do Edgar know about wassailin’? ‘Specially not the foreign kind them Cassidys organized. All he’s pickin’ up is aggravation, Mrs Cassidy yellin’ at Lucy, Lucy yellin’ back, and it all boils up into a mush until it’s time to do the business and Rod gives the ole feller a nudge, and mabbe up until then he’s been asleep on his feet like an ole shire horse. And he comes round with a jerk ... I seen this. He’s standin’ ...’

Gomer walked about five yards back from the tree and dug a Doc Marten heel into the grass.

‘... yere. Just about. And he looks down, and I swear to God, the look come on his face, I thought the ole boy was gonner mess his britches. Not scared exactly, more ... hunted, like ... Hunted. Aye. Days later it come to me what Lucy Devenish said mabbe a split second ‘fore that. Can never remember the exact words, see, but it was about causin’ offence. To the tree and all that ... lives yere, lies yere ... Deep offence. Summat like that. And that was what put the shits up ole Edgar, I reckon. And then he done hisself.’

Gomer spat out the remains of his roll-up before it could burn the skin off his lips.

‘She meant the spirits,’ Lol said.

‘ Ar. But what did Edgar think she meant? You know what I’d like, Lol? I’d like to bring ole Gwynneth out yere and ‘ave a bit of a dig around this yere tree.’

‘But if there’s something buried here and the Powells know about it, why would they let them hold the wassailing here?’

‘Where else in this orchard you gonner ‘ave it? Nice clearin’, see, for the folk to gather in and so Mrs Cassidy don’t ladder her tights on no brambles. ‘Sides, it wouldn’t worry Rod. Rod wouldn’t turn a hair. It was just Edgar comin’ out of his stupor, realizin’ where he is and hearin’ the voice of doom.’

‘Lucy.’

‘Lucy. God rest her soul’

‘Meanwhile, there’s Jane.’

‘Ar. Let’s be realistic yere, Lol. Some bastard mighter took er.

Lol said, ‘You don’t like the Powells, do you?’

Important to get the voice right. Firm, but not preachy, not hectoring, not clever. After Stefan and James, they wouldn’t be sure who they could believe. And on the last occasion the Reverend Watkins stood before them in this church, she’d had to be helped out of it.

She looked around the congregation. There were about sixty people in church, though the men and women were not separated any more, except for Alison Kinnersley and the eternal Bull, sprawling in the Bull pew. Ted Clowes had gone. Dermot Child had gone. Possibly a good sign, who could tell?

‘OK.’ Pushing up the sleeves of her ill-gotten, black cashmere sweater. ‘Earlier tonight, someone went into the Bull Chapel and broke into the tomb of Thomas Bull.’

Fewer gasps than might have been expected, but understandably so, given the preceding drama. Ken Thomas appeared interested.

‘Anyone want to confess?’ she asked Jim Prosser, who couldn’t have appeared less guilty.

Not a murmur.

‘Anyone like to finger anyone else? Too public?’

Merrily looked directly at Alison Kinnersley. She was wearing a dark tweed suit with a cameo brooch. She didn’t look like a mistress.

‘I mean, it wasn’t desecration. It wasn’t black magic ... In that, as far as I could see, the body remained undisturbed. But something, I think, was removed. Whatever it was, there was a little space for it, just under the feet of the effigy of Tom Bull. My guess is a journal. Or part of one. Just the relevant pages.’

She paused. ‘Say, for instance, the record of a certain incident.’

She waited. She shifted her gaze from Alison, now a shadow, to the roof timbers. Clasped her hands loosely in front of her.

‘I know this sort of thing is often best kept ... in the family, in the loosest sense ...’

‘O ... K.’ Alison Kinnersley’s long sigh was audible the length of the nave. ‘What do you want me to say? You’ve been very astute, Vicar. He brought it into the Hall when he came back to phone the police about Coffey. Under the circumstances, he was less careful than he usually is. He slipped it into a drawer in his desk.’

Merrily risked a glance at Bull-Davies. He remained motionless, his arm along the back of the pew. There was enough light to show that his face had hardened, his mouth tightened; his eyes seemed to have retreated under the heavy brow.

‘I read it, of course,’ Alison said. ‘And you’re quite correct. It relates to Wil Williams and it looks pretty genuine. I suppose you want to know what it says.’

Bull-Davies stood at once and spun like a soldier on parade. He pointed, as he’d done earlier at Stefan, throwing out an arm as though it held a sword.

‘You,’ he said, ‘have no damned right.’

‘I have every right.’ A voice that wanted to shed some old burden. ‘As you implied, Vicar, I’m fam—’

‘Miss Kinnersley ...’ Merrily tapped on the microphone. Not the time, not yet. ‘I don’t want to cause any undue distress. Perhaps it would be better if you didn’t actually reveal the contents of those papers at this stage.’

There was a low but perceptible moan of disappointment from disabled Miss Goddard, sitting next to Minnie Parry, who still kept looking around for Gomer.

Merrily said into the microphone, ‘Perhaps I can save you the trouble, anyway. Does it, perhaps, offer an entirely new perspective on Wil himself?’

A hush.

‘I don’t actually know what you mean,’ Alison said.

‘Like that I am not actually the first woman priest of Ledwardine?’

51 Vision

THE CIDER HOUSE! He took her in the ole cider house, where they say he took all his women. Because the air itself in there, they used to say, the smell of it could make you drunk. So’s you wouldn’t notice. The cider house. It was always the ole cider house. It made you drunk, to be in there. And ... wanton.

The description, with its overtones of the erotic and the forbidden, had lodged in Jane’s mind.

But surely the woman whom Stefan had called Bessie couldn’t have been referring to this hellhole.

Jane was no longer in the least bit drunk. She was far from wanton.

She was frightened of what would happen. She was cold.

The cider house was damp, had no windows, was lit by a fluorescent strip set into the low roof of blackened timber which sent a wobbly, purplish, hospital sort of light up the thick walls of old, discoloured bricks. There was a putrid smell, like rotten potatoes.

The cider house was a nasty place. No one would ever buy a bottle of The Wine of Angels if they thought it had been produced in here. It couldn’t have been. Surely.

Yet all the equipment was here. There was a mill: a big stone-sided tub that you put the apples in so that they could be crushed to pulp by the great stone wheel. It was pulled round by a horse or, in this case, pushed by men leaning on a projecting pole of wood or metal – this one was so dirty it was difficult to tell which.

And there was a press, like a giant printing press: a wooden scaffold with an enormous wooden screw down the middle, to tighten a sandwich of slabs and squeeze the juice from the pulped apples.

Over the mill was a kind of hayloft full of black bin sacks. There was no sign of apples, even rotten ones, but why should there be? The harvest was five months away.

Still, it was all wrong. So filthy that the old, rustic machinery looked like engines of pain from some medieval torture chamber.

Jane sat huddled against a wall, describing the cidermaking process, as if to a party of visitors, going into all kinds of detail, most of which was probably wrong. You had to give your mind something to do, try and think of something normal and interesting. It was useless, in this atmosphere, closing your eyes and trying to put yourself on a beach in Tunisia or a fishing harbour in Greece or an exhibition of nice, clean paintings by Mondrian.

‘Of course, hygiene was never considered terribly important in cider-making in the old days,’ Jane said. ‘Indeed, it was frequently asserted that in some areas a dead rat would always be added to give it a certain piquancy.’

Which was one ingredient they wouldn’t go short of in this dump.

In trying to make herself laugh, Jane only succeeded in crying again and asking herself, between sobs, why a respectable councillor and his son should want to kill a lovable old lady on a moped.

... come up to talk to Father about Colonel Bull-Davies and his ole man, thinking as Father could help her clarify a few points. Got Father in a right state the stuff she was comin’ out with.

It was the way he was so matter of fact about it. Lucy must have gone to see Councillor Powell directly after talking to Jane in the street. What could she possibly have said to get Garrod Powell in ‘a state’? And how could you tell?

Jane started to laugh again. Was this what they called hysteria?

The lock scraped and the great, thick oak door cranked open and Lloyd was standing there, the big key dangling and night behind him.

‘He en’t back, Jane,’ Lloyd said grumpily. ‘Said he’d be back before ten.’ He stared at Jane, suspicious. ‘What you laughing at? What you done?’

Normally, she would have said, Wouldn’t you like to know? – something sarky. Not with Lloyd. Lloyd wouldn’t recognize even sarcasm. It wasn’t that he wasn’t intelligent. He probably was. That was what was so awful. You learned that you had to play everything dead straight. Like when she’d said – in sudden disgust at his sniffy, narrow-minded attitude towards Colette – that she was going to be sick, he’d taken it literally.

She was scared to mention Colette. Didn’t dare ask herself why.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got anything to laugh at, have I? I don’t understand why you’re doing this. You don’t think people aren’t looking for me by now, do you?’

Lloyd looked appalled, insulted. ‘Nobody ever looks yere! Father’s a magistrate. He used to be on the police committee. Grandfather was Chairman of Planning for many years. Great-grandfather was to have been Mayor of Hereford, but he died.’

Like a litany.

‘I expect you’ll be standing for the council, too, then,’ Jane said.

‘When I’m thirty-five.’

‘Jesus,’ said Jane.

‘Nice language from a vicar’s daughter.’

‘Oh, yeah!’ Jane lost it. ‘And how nice is it’ – she sprang to her feet – ‘to keep a vicar’s daughter in this disgusting pit?’

Lloyd’s expression didn’t change.

‘Two things,’ he said. ‘One, my father was not in favour of the appointment of your mother but he was prepared to support her in the interests of local democracy. Two, you wouldn’t be yere if you hadn’t behaved like a little slut, would you?’

Jane pushed her knuckles into her eyes. He couldn’t be like this, really. Not cool, slim-but-muscular Lloyd Powell in his denims and his white truck, not hunky Lloyd, the Young Farmers’ News centrefold. How could genetics be so horribly linear? How could this not be a stupid nightmare?

Not going to cry this time.

She wrenched her fists away from her face and blinked. He was still there.

‘And to think we thought you looked like a young Paul Weller.’

‘Who’s Paul Weller?’ said Lloyd.

‘God.’

‘Anyway,’ Lloyd said. ‘I just come to say Father en’t back yet and when he is I’ll be bringing him in to you and let him decide.’

‘Decide what?’

‘You know,’ he said uncomfortably.

Don’t ask. She bit her lip hard.

‘I don’t know what you’re going on like that for,’ Lloyd said. ‘It’s all your fault. We got that much on now, see, with the festival and all’

‘What did ... what did Lucy tell your father to make him so upset?’

‘Business is that of yours?’ he said sternly.

‘I’m sure she didn’t mean to.’

‘Oh, you are, are you?’

‘It was probably all a mistake. It’s very easy to get things all wrong. If you let me go ...’

She let the sentence trail off because Lloyd had put his hands on his hips and his head to one side.

‘You really do think we’re stupid, don’t you?’

‘No, I ... I don’t’

‘Trying to soft-talk me now, is it, like I’m some mad psycho? Lord above, Jane, it en’t like that. We are ordinary people who serve the local community as best we can and have done for many generations.’

God, he was as much of a museum piece as the cider press.

‘And you always serve the Bull-Davieses, don’t you?’ she said. ‘The Bulls.’

‘Our families have had a close relationship for a number of years, yes. We don’t serve them. That time’s gone. We respect them and they respect us. It’s mutual respect that holds a rural community together in a way you don’t get in the cities, that’s why you got all this crime and drugs and street violence.’

‘What ...?’ She couldn’t hold it back. ‘You just confessed to a murder!’

‘Confessed?’

Lloyd stormed into the cider house, kicked the door shut with his heel.

‘You calling me a common criminal, miss? Like it was wrongto stop that woman spreadin’ her filth and lies and undermining a stable community built on respect? That’s what’s criminal, Jane.’

He towered over her, one foot half over both of hers. She cowered instinctively, which seemed to excite him.

‘Father en’t back soon,’ he said. ‘I en’t gonner wait.’

‘Why don’t you go and look for him?’

‘Shut your mouth, Jane, before I ...’

He stepped back and pulled something out of his jeans. Jane screamed.

‘Only my mobile, Jane.’ Lloyd opened the phone and moved closer to the fluorescent tube. ‘I phoned him twice, but he won’t take his phone into church, see. Not respectful’

He stabbed out the number and waited, with the phone at his ear. ‘Come on, Father, come on. Funny thing ...’ She saw his mouth twist in amusement over the lip of the mobile. ‘I thought you were a bit different at first. Even thought you might make a wife in a year or two. Funny how first impressions can be deceiving.’

‘It was Lucy Devenish who put us on to it,’ Merrily said. ‘Though I suspect it was me coming here that put Lucy on to the idea. I don’t think she could prove it, but she was expecting it to be proved. The arrival in Ledwardine of a female minister ... Well, she seems to have thought that would set something off, and perhaps it did. Certainly in the vicarage. But that’s ... I’ll come back to that, if I can.’

The amazing thing was not that everybody she’d looked at – including James Bull-Davies and Alison Kinnersley – had shown genuine surprise, but that nobody out there now looked sceptical. Most were clearly intrigued. Bull-Davies seemed confused and unhappy. Only Garrod Powell, as usual, was expressionless.

Merrily felt strangely and completely relaxed. All the pressure had lifted from her chest. She was not nervous. Her breathing was even.

‘There’s no reason to doubt that the person who became Wil Williams was indeed a protegee of Susannah Hopton, of Kington, having been introduced to her in the 1660s. It seems more likely to me that Mrs Hopton would have taken a girl into her house than a man. And a hard-up Radnorshire hill farmer would be rather more likely to spare his daughter than his son. Certainly Mrs Hopton would have been fascinated by someone so utterly committed to the Christian life that she was prepared to abandon her womanhood for it.’

‘Let me get this right, Mrs Watkins,’ Bull-Davies said. ‘You are suggesting that Williams managed to con his – or her – way through university and bamboozle the Church of England into accepting her as a man, and then went on to practise as a clergyman for several years without once—’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s ridiculous. No one would get away with it.’

‘Have you heard of Hannah Snell, James?’

‘Should I have?’

‘Hannah Snell was born in Worcester about a century after Wil Williams. She made a name for herself on the London stage, singing songs and telling tales of her bizarre life which began – the bizarre part – when her husband, a Dutch sailor, disappeared. Hannah went off to try and find him. Joined the army, later the Marines. Travelled as far as India. Was obliged, on occasion, to share abed with servicemen and was also, allegedly, stripped to the waist for a flogging. During all that time, nobody seems ever to have spotted she was a woman.’

‘That’s true,’ Jim Prosser shouted. ‘A fact, that is. And she wasn’t butch, neither, apparently.’

Merrily said, ‘And there was nothing about this in the Bull journal? They must have discovered the truth about Wil after death, at least.’

‘Nothing that I could see,’ Alison said. She’d left her seat at the back and moved to the choir stalls, possibly to observe James’s reaction. ‘It concerns the death itself more than anything.’

James looked sullen again.

‘We’ll come to that,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m just trying to show that if Hannah Snell could pass herself off as a front-line fighting man for over five years, then it would certainly be possible for a young woman to get through college and become ordained and serve as a priest. Especially if she had the support of people of the order of Susannah Hopton and Thomas Traherne.’

Merrily switched off the microphone, leaned over the pulpit.

‘Look, we know hardly anything about the real Wil Williams and I doubt we’re ever going to. We presume she went to Oxford as a man – perhaps there are records, I don’t know. We can only speculate. About many things. Like why the estimable Thomas Traherne, who so loved Hereford and delighted in the countryside, should have gone so readily to London. Perhaps he too was in love and knew better than anyone why it was doomed.’

‘That’s an enchanting thought,’ said Mrs Goddard, the crippled horsewoman. ‘He never married, you know. He died at thirty-seven.’

Bull-Davies snorted. Merrily wondered whether Lol Robinson, who was also thirty-seven, knew that Traherne had died at precisely that age. She was suddenly worried about Lol. And Jane. She would have to end this soon.

‘What must it’ve been like for her, though?’ Effie Prosser said. ‘A woman alone in that big vicarage, pretending to be a man.’

Merrily thought for a moment before responding.

‘I know exactly what it was like.’

‘You’re really a man, are you, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Mr Davies,’ said Mrs Goddard, ‘I’m getting rather tired of the sound of your voice. Please go on, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Well, she wouldn’t have been alone,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s the first point. Ministers in those days, I gather, were rather more up-market than they are today. So there would have been servants. Certainly other people in that house from whom she would have had to hide the truth. Can you imagine the problems that would cause? She’d have no privacy in her own house. Except ...’

Merrily no longer wanted to be in the pulpit. She wanted to be a woman, not just a minister. She came down and sat on the chancel steps, as Stefan, as Wil, had done.

‘... except in the attic. I ... feel ... that the attic was the only place where she felt free to be a woman. Even her bedchamber on the first floor would have been cleaned and tidied by a maid. So it would have to be a masculine room. When I’m on that floor, particularly, I sometimes sense a ... constriction. Perhaps I imagine that. Perhaps it’s psychological’

‘Or perhaps you are psychic,’ said Mrs Goddard brightly.

Merrily tried to look dubious.

‘I feel she went through quite a lot of pain, both emotional and physical, flattening her chest, deepening her voice, never daring to show herself in public without the bindings or corsets or whatever she wore. Unlike Traherne, she couldn’t go out in the countryside with any sense of freedom. She couldn’t even go into her beloved orchard and just be herself, without the risk of being seen.’

The images were coming to her as she spoke. She felt she was quivering with vision.

‘So she made a place for herself. A dark, secret place, where she could perhaps keep women’s clothes. Parade at night in the flimsiest, most frivolous of dresses. And weep. Silently, of course. Always silently. In the attic of the vicarage.’

I saw her. Oh my God, I saw her.

‘I ... It’s funny ...’ She looked up. ‘My daughter, Jane, was drawn to the attic from the moment she entered the house. I was thinking what a miserable, draughty-looking house it was, and Jane was dashing upstairs and claiming the attic for herself.’

She thought of the Mondrian walls which had become orchard walls. Had whoever became Wil Williams lain up there and closed her eyes and dreamed of walking out as a woman, smelling apple scents? Seeing those little golden lights among the branches and floating, like Jane on cheap cider? Had the presence – the spirit – of the orchard manifested there?

It was getting on for midnight. Gomer sat down at the base of the tree, where the moon couldn’t find his glasses.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you why I don’t like the Powells.’

Lol was getting restive. He didn’t know what to do but he wanted to be doing it. Could Gomer make it brief?

‘En’t a long story.’

Went back mainly to that day fifteen or so years ago, when Rod hired Gomer Parry Plant Hire to dig some drainage ditches. The hot day, when he’d had some of Edgar’s excellent cider, made from the Pharisees Reds. Except the cider wasn’t served up by Edgar or Rod, who were both at a cattle sale that day.

‘Jennifer, it was. Jennifer Powell. Jennifer Adair, who used to work in the kitchen at the Black Swan.’

‘Lloyd’s mother?’

‘And Rod’s missus, and a hell of a nice girl. ‘Er’d’ve been about thirty at the time and Lloyd was ten and Rod was forty and a bit more. They likes ’em younger, the Powells and they don’t marry till late.’

Cut a long story short, it was clear Jennifer Powell had been crying and if you knew her mother-in-law, Meggie Powell, it didn’t take long to work out she was the reason.

Tough wasn’t the word for Meggie Powell.

‘Built like a Hereford bull, face to match,’ said Gomer. ‘Bit less feminine, mabbe. When the 1959 flu epidemic took off half the fellers worked at the slaughterhouse there used to be, bottom of Ole Barn Lane, Meggie filled in for a fortnight. That kind o’ woman, you know? Good wife to Edgar, mind, all senses of the word. Good mother to Garrod, likewise. By which I means ... likewise.’

‘Aw, shit,’ said Lol.

‘Ar, sixty-seventh woman Edgar slept with, sure t’be. First one for Rod.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘It was normal enough then, boy, some families. Normal sex education, like. Well, not normal, but not uncommon. Teach ’em young. Teach ’em how it all works. Self-sufficiency, see. Look after your own, don’t make a mess, but if you do, make sure you clears up after yourself. And, above all, keep it quiet.’

What rural life was all about in the old days. Feller beat up his wife in the city all the neighbours knew about it. Same thing happened in the country ... well, all the neighbours knew about it too, but they kept quiet. Anybody got really out of hand, they got dealt with. One way or another.

The Powell women were chosen with care, Gomer said. There were traditions they had to observe. Had to be a special sort of woman, which was not always the prettiest ... Well, look at Meggie. By the time a Powell married, usually at thirty-five-plus, he’d sown his wild oats over a wide area and was ready to settle down and pass on his knowledge to the next generation. By Powell standards, however, Rod chose unwisely. Jennifer Adair was too prissy, too genteel and on the day, fifteen years ago, when Rod and his old man were at the cattle sale and Jennifer Powell learned, in a heart to heart with Meggie, what was going to be expected of her in relation to Lloyd in a couple of years’ time, Jennifer fled the premises and wound up weeping into the upholstery of Gomer’s Jeep.

‘What it come down to, ’er knowed Rod must’ve put it about, though he never said much and she never asked, like. But one thing she couldn’t cope with was the thought of spendin’ the rest of her life sleeping next a feller slept with Meggie.’

‘What happened?’

‘I seen her point and give her a lift to Hereford Station and a hundred quid and she en’t been back to this day, and not a word, Lol, boy, ‘cause if Rod ever finds out I’m a dead man, and that en’t a figure of speech, like. Behind that wooden mask, Garrod Powell’s the bitterest bastard you’ll ever meet. Never married again after Jennifer walked out, never a girlfriend – not seemly, like, not proper. Plus, he’s doubly suspicious of all women, he don’t like women. But you puts that together with a sex drive could light up half the county, you got a few big question marks, innit?’

‘This common knowledge, Gomer?’

‘Were never exactly common knowledge, except to the few of us working over a wide area of farms and such. And nowadays, when half the folk in Ledwardine was living other side of the country three year ago, ole Rod’s a councillor and a gentleman and Lloyd’s the decentest, politest boy you’d want your daughter to fetch back for Sunday tea.’

‘I’m confused.’ Lol massaged the back of his neck where the ponytail used to lie. He was thinking about Patricia Young. ‘I don’t know whether we’re looking at the Bulls or the Powells.’

‘There you hit it, boy. People’s always looked at the Bulls in the big house. Looks at the Bulls, don’t see the Powells. But them two families been linked up for years, centuries. Lives are entirely separate, o’ course. Bulls is walkin’ out with nice ladies, doin’ the hunt-ball circuit and what have you. The Powells is huntin’ on another level. When mammy done her bit, see, the old man’d take over their education. Take the boy into town – bit further away, Ledbury, Abergavenny mabbe, show him how to hunt and not get hunted. Powells liked to marry late, like I said, so there’d be plenty of huntin’ for a good few years. But there’s huntin’ ... and there’s baitin’.’

‘What the difference?’

‘Baitin’s where you brings ’em back,’ Gomer said grimly.

52 The Loft

IT WAS THE part she’d been worrying about. Merrily walked up the two steps to the chancel to whisper to Alison in the choir stalls.

‘I know,’ Alison said. ‘I know what you’re asking, and now I’m not so sure. I mean, for Christ’s sake, look at him.’

James sat with his head bent, as if in prayer, revealing a bald patch like a tonsure.

‘Sooner or later, somebody’s going to have to explain what’s in the Journal,’ Merrily said, ‘and it isn’t going to be James, is it?’

‘And if I don’t do it, you’ll tell him who I am, what I’m doing here, right?’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m never going to tell him. It’s not my place.’

Emotions crowded Alison’s starkly beautiful face. Merrily tried to see a resemblance there to James and couldn’t.

‘You see, it’s changed some things,’ Alison said. ‘Fundamental things. I haven’t taken in half this stuff tonight, I’ve just sat there going over and over it.’

‘Look,’ Merrily said. ‘Whatever’s in there, both you and James know exactly what it is, while everybody else is going to speculate for generations. It needs to come out. We’re exorcizing this village tonight; you must have sensed that.’

‘I don’t trust what I sense,’ Alison said. ‘Not any more.’

As Alison walked from the choir stalls to the chancel steps, James Bull-Davies came out into the aisle.

‘Alison. No. No.’

Alison walked down the steps. Merrily moved back against the pulpit.

‘It’s getting bloody late and I’m tired,’ James said. ‘I’m tired of defending my family against a load of pure fantasy. And I’m tired of you, Mrs Watkins. I’m tired of your smugness, your high-handedness, and I’m tired of your bloody voice.’

‘Mr Davies, sit down this instant!’ Mrs Goddard shook off her daughter’s hand and rose painfully from her pew. ‘I want to hear what Mrs Watkins and this young woman have to say and I want you to hear it too. You’re emerging as even more of an obnoxious man than we thought and a liar to boot. Don’t show yourself to be a coward as well. Sit down!’

He didn’t sit down, but he didn’t leave. He went to stand at the back, near the vestry curtain. DC Ken Thomas was watching him.

Alison stood just forward from the rood screen with its wooden apples. Her voice was muted but distinct.

‘What we learn from the Journal is that Wil Williams was buried on the wrong side of the ditch. He ... she ... did not commit suicide.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Goddard, as if she’d known all along.

‘Thomas Bull says nothing about having a physical infatuation with the minister, but he does say he came to believe he was bewitched. The implication is by Wil’

‘He doesn’t say that!’ Bull-Davies shouted in pain from the back of the church.

‘Of course not,’ Merrily said. ‘But he wouldn’t, would he? I think we can assume he was tortured in all kinds of ways. He was frightened of his own feelings, which were foreign to everything he’d always understood about himself. And perhaps he was worried about it coming out. I’m not qualified to comment on the level of anti-gay prejudice in the seventeenth century or whether Tom Bull was particularly homophobic. But he must have been pretty scared.’

Alison said, ‘What seems likely – and this is very strongly implied, Jamie, whatever you say – is that Tom, having built up this spurious witchcraft case against Wil, then became extremely paranoid about what might come out in court.’

Merrily came to stand next to Alison, to give her some support. ‘She wasn’t even hanged, was she?’

‘Oh, she was hanged, Merrily. She was hanged after death. They took the body out to the orchard and put a rope around its neck and hung it from the tallest apple tree.’

‘No!’ James howled.

‘She was probably strangled,’ Alison said.

Merrily said, ‘Tom Bull admits that she was murdered?’

‘Tom Bull agrees that Wil Williams was murdered. The extreme remorse he shows only really makes sense when you start to think of Wil as a woman.’

‘He was not a bad man,’ James said. ‘Not the brutal archvillain you’re making out. He overreacted.’

‘Ha,’ said Mrs Goddard.

‘James,’ Merrily said, ‘for God’s sake ... there’s a lot of things you could clear up. You took those papers out of the tomb, so obviously the family knew they were there. I don’t understand why, if the Bulls and Bull-Davieses were so embarrassed by all this, that journal wasn’t simply destroyed years ago.’

‘Because you’re not damn well supposed to understand. It’s no one’s business but ours.’

‘Oh, you pompous prick!’ Alison threw up her arms. ‘Can’t you ever see the virtues of opening out, hanging out the dirty washing? You’re so curled up and tight inside it’s a wonder you can breathe. Come on, James. For Christ’s sake, come out here.’

‘You don’t understand, you can’t understand ...’

‘But we need to,’ Merrily said. ‘Because we know that poor Wil Williams was only the start.’

Alison put out an elegant hand. ‘James ...’

For close to half a minute, James Bull-Davies remained motionless.

Then, slowly, he pushed himself from the back wall and moved into the central aisle.

Alison didn’t move.

Jim Prosser started to clap.

As James walked towards the chancel, other villagers joined in the applause, and Mrs Goddard banged her stick on the stones. When James Bull-Davies was halfway to the front, someone squeezed out of a pew, and he and James glanced at each other once. James carried on walking. The other figure moved silently towards the south porch, where Ken Thomas blocked his way.

‘I think it’s better nobody leaves just yet, if you don’t mind, sir ... Oh, sorry, Rod.’

‘Bit late this, Ken, for a farmer.’

‘Sorry, Rod,’ said Ken, moving aside at once.

Lloyd had gone out again to wait for his father. Periodically she would hear him tramp past the door or the beep-beep of his fingers on the phone as he tried to reach his father’s mobile.

Jane seethed. The idea of this brutal, humourless tosser sizing her up as a future bride blew through her fear. She would refuse to think what he might do to her. She’d think instead of what she might do to him.

She got to her feet, her jeans feeling disgustingly damp from the straw, and crept silently around the cider house. Perhaps there was a wooden paddle or something they used to push the apples around in the mill. She imagined herself waiting behind the door with it raised and smashing it down on him when he next came in. It always worked in films.

But then, in films, there was always something handy. The only stave in the cider house was the one used to turn the screw mechanism on the press and this proved to be metal and bolted firmly into place, and the bolts were so rusty even a wrench wouldn’t dislodge them.

She kicked about in the hay, in case there was something underneath. Only flagstones.

Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

She flung herself at a wall, scratching at the bricks on the off chance one was loose and could be prised out and she could throw it at him.

Hopeless. Was she even strong enough to hurl a brick with any force? She still tried, going from wall to wall, even looking up at the roof to see if there was a loose slate (which she could send skimming at his throat, oh, sure ...) arriving finally at the hayloft over the mill. She’d forgotten all about that.

Worth a try. She might be able to hide up there and drop something on his head. Height was always an advantage, wasn’t it?

There was no ladder (which, anyway, she would have broken up for a hefty stick) but only a couple of feet separated the loft from the top of the stone millwheel.

No problem, probably. Jane tested the thick wooden axle stuck through a hole in the middle of the stone. It was all so crude, in a Stone Age kind of way, but the wood wasn’t rotten and she was able to get a foot on it to hoist herself to the top of the wheel.

She had an awful vision of the wheel suddenly rolling away, leaving her dangling from the rafters, but it was as solid as a rock, which she supposed it actually was, and she hauled herself up, quite easily in the end, into the loft, where she rolled over and flopped on her stomach between a couple of black bin liners. (She could wait behind the door with one and throw it over his head, then duck behind him to freedom; oh Jesus, this was getting ridiculous.) It seemed much brighter up here; the fluorescent tube was only about three feet away; and she felt exposed and pushed herself back from the edge until she felt her feet slot into the narrow area where the rafters met the sloping slates.

Now she was up here, the total seriousness of the situation clouded around her. Her bowels felt suddenly weak and she threw her arms over one of the bin sacks to stifle a sob. Oh, Mum, please be looking for me. Please, please, plea—.

The evil little smell from the bin sack had entered her nose like a thin needle.

Not a smell she knew, but one she had a horrid feeling she ought to.

Before she realized what she was doing, she’d drawn the plastic back.

Over the damp hair and the soft, white skin, purpled by the light. The open, bulging eyes and the big, squashy lips, and the tongue out like a dog’s.

The diamond nose-stud winking in the clinical light.

53 Watching

‘I’M A BLOODY madman, en’t I?’ Gomer said. ‘Even look like a bloody madman, so people tell me. I got a wife en’t gonner speak to me for a month as a result of what I already done tonight this far. So what do we do, boy? What we gonner do about this?’

‘The cider house?’

‘The cider house where the Bulls took their women until they give it to the Powells. Soon as Tess Roberts told that story tonight, it bothered me. Had to go out, have a ciggy. Whatever they’re doin’ in that cider house it en’t makin’ cider.’

‘Whereabouts is it?’

‘Top of a field, other side o’ the new road, as I recall. A barn, an ole sheep shed and the cider house. Used to be a tiny little shepherd’s cottage there at one time, but that got pulled down years back.’

‘You want to take a look?’ Lol said. ‘Put your mind at rest?’ Meaning put my mind at rest. If they’d found Jane he’d have said, Let’s call it a night, let’s go and find Merrily and talk about all of this, see how it looks in daylight.

But they hadn’t found Jane.

‘Unpredictable kid, though, Gomer. She comes and goes. Has her own ideas, her own apartment in the vicarage. She could be back there now, for all we know.’

‘All right, boy, I’ll tell you what we does.’

Gomer said he’d go back via the old bowling green, through into the churchyard, check on the situation there and whether the kiddie had been found, grab his Jeep off the square – always felt better on wheels, never much of a foot soldier, see. Lol, meanwhile, would torch-sweep as much of the orchard as he could before making his way to the gate opening on to the new road, where Gomer would pick him up in about half an hour.

‘That way, we covers both exits. If her’s in the orchard, one or other of us’ll mabbe stumble—’ Gomer coughed, shuffled. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean ...’

‘She’ll be OK,’ Lol said. ‘She’ll be OK.’ Like repeating it was going to make it so. ‘She’s always OK.’

But when Gomer had gone, the Garrod Powell in his head faded into Lloyd Powell and both of them merged into Karl Windling and the white-robed apple trees stood around like bent old druids at some woodland ceremony, and he didn’t think Jane was OK.

He was very fond of Jane. He could say that to himself now. It was OK to be fond of a fifteen-year-old girl. It was OK to fall in love with her mother. He walked away. The salmon moon was entangled in a cluster of spiky dead branches projecting from the blossom below. Gomer was right; the only way to make any kind of productive orchard here was to start again.

He walked quickly, pointing the torch at what remained of the path, sometimes apprehensively sweeping it from side to side, and finding patches of fungus pale as flesh and exposed roots like withered limbs.

She went as far away as she could get, squeezing herself into different corners, squatting in the straw. But wherever she was, she could still see the loft and the bin sack. Wherever she went, she thought she could see Colette’s eyes, popping out at her like marbles.

Even though she’d dragged the bin sack back over the face, she seemed to see the eyes making little round bulges in the plastic.

What a bummer, eh, Janey? Ain’t this just the pits?

But the cool, sassy voice she remembered no longer matched the face. Colette, dead, had a child’s face again, this was what was so awful. She looked so pitifully young. Younger than me.

And the smell. Colette’s sickly new perfume. Putrefying. A putrefying child. A little, swollen doll with a livid throat.

‘Pleeeeeease.’

The folds of the bin sack settled around Colette’s face with a crinkling sound.

‘Naaaaaw!’

In a frenzy, Jane scrambled back on to the stone mill wheel and balanced there, piling more and more empty bin sacks over the corpse, to lose the shape, lose the smell, a stink which would have so disgusted Colette. Her thoughts flitting fearfully into the forbidden unknown. How long had Colette been kept here before they killed her like a turkey? What had they done to her before they throttled her and took her clothes and dumped them in a ditch at King’s Oak Corner and dressed her in a crinkly black shroud? Hunky Lloyd Powell and his dignified father. What had they done to her?

She remembered what Lloyd had said about pests and badger-baiting. It’s a bit of fun. It’s cheap. Nobody gets harmed, ‘cept the badger and that’s his fault for being a badger.

Behind her, the door swung open. She didn’t even try to get down. What was the point?

‘Ah, you found her then, is it?’

Lloyd standing in the doorway with his legs apart. Lloyd sounding quite pleased, like Colette’s body was a birthday present they’d hidden.

‘Amazing what you find when you snoop around, girl. Still. It’s not very nice. Shouldn’t leave ’em unburied. Health risk, it is. I apologize.’

He sighed.

‘We got too much on, see, at present. And too many strangers about. We never wanted the slag, mind. We never done anything like that before. You don’t, not on your own doorstep, not on your own land. Stupid, that is. And then we couldn’t even bury her with all these police tramping around. Untidy. Hate that, I do.’

‘Stop it!’ she screeched, jumping down, putting the mill wheel between them. ‘I don’t want to know. You disgust me.’

Lloyd folded his arms, affronted. ‘Now, don’t you bloody come on like that with me, Jane. It was your fault. It was you sent me after the bitch. Oh, you gotter stop them, you gotter get them out, Lloyd, please, Lloyd, please, please, please ... You think I wanted that? Last thing we bloody wanted after that one Father brought back from Kingsland, did nothin’ but bloody cry, day and night ... But no, you had to keep on at me. Please, Lloyd, oh please, please—

‘Stop it!’ Jane shrieked and bent her head into her arms between her knees.

‘So I find the slag, and she’s looking at me like I’m God’s gift. Throwing herself all over me in the middle of our own orchard. Got rid of her mates fast enough, she had, and here she is, wandering around half naked all by herself. What was I supposed to do? You tell me that, Jane. Fetch her back to the restaurant, with her slobbering all over me, making up her lies? What would that do to my reputation. What would it do to Father?’

‘You didn’t have to bring her back here. Why couldn’t you just ... just make love to her ... whatever she wanted. You didn’t have to bring her back here!’

‘But we always fetches ’em back yere.’

Lloyd looked momentarily puzzled, like even he wasn’t quite sure why they always fetched them here. Just what he’d been brought up to do. A few stupid city people might think it was cruel, but it was a different way of life out here, wasn’t it?

Nobody gets harmed, ‘cept the badger and that’s his fault for being a badger.

Colette’s fault for being a slag.

Jane didn’t know how to talk to him any more. He wasn’t mad in the normal sense. He didn’t have the imagination to be mad. You couldn’t humour him; he had no humour.

Jane said, in a very low, faint voice, ‘I didn’t throw myself at anybody. I’m not going to spread any lies. Why can’t you just let me go?’

Lloyd shook his head in his brisk and businesslike way. ‘Not an option, Jane. You gotter see that. ‘Specially now.’

‘I’m sure your father’ll say to let me go. He’s a councillor, for God’s sake. My mother’s the—’

Lloyd sort of smiled. ‘You don’t really know Father, do you, Jane?’

And there, suddenly, was Mr Powell in her head, his council-chairman’s chain wound around his hands and tightened.

She braced herself to attack Lloyd. She would go for his balls.

Lloyd leaned back slightly on his heels and regarded her sorrowfully. ‘You try anything, Jane, on me, I got to tell you I’ll punch your face flat. Won’t offend Father. Won’t put Father off. Don’t look at the ole mantelpiece when you’re—’

She saw that Mr Powell wore no trousers and his shirt flap was sticking out. In Lloyd’s hip pocket, the mobile phone had begun to bleep.

‘And about time, too, Father,’ Lloyd said. ‘Excuse me.’

When he’d shut the door efficiently behind him and locked it again, Jane gave up, threw herself into the filthy straw. She was thirsty. She had no more tears left. Her chest hurt from sobbing. It was over. All she had left to hope for was that they would see her as a fox -fast, bang.

Please God, not a badger.

She thought back in horrified amazement to the side of herself which had persuaded her to go into the orchard with two full bottles of gassy cider. When you knew you were going to die quite soon, your body put into a clammy bin liner, the idea of being suspended in some parallel, ethereal, faerie universe was just the most awful, self-deluding crap imaginable. Lucy Devenish believed all this shit and they’d killed her too, and she hadn’t come back because all that afterlife stuff Mum preached was utter crap as well. What she’d had in the orchard that day had been some kind of black-out; she probably had a brain tumour and would have died anyway.

Jane lay there and sniffed the stinking straw because it was better than the piercing perfume of Colette. She, too, would start to smell like that, quite soon, when she was lying in her own bin sack, she and Colette decaying side by side, good mates turning bad. Jane sobbed and snuffled over this until, weak and exhausted – please God, not a badger – her body slackened into a thin sleep and Mr Powell was there, with his chain tight and his thing out, not smiling.

James lifted his chin, his eyes focused on the rafters. His tone was clipped.

‘Many times, I gather, the destruction of that document was mooted. But there was a sound reason for it being preserved. Eventually, about a hundred years ago, my great-grandfather suggested it should be entombed with its author. That’s all there is to it.’

‘James,’ said Merrily. ‘You can’t just tell us there was a sound reason without saying what it was.’

‘It’s a private—’

‘James, listen to me. About thirty years ago, a girl called Patricia Young went to work for your father in the stables. She got pregnant – never mind how I know, I know. She returned after the child was born, to try and persuade the father to face up to his responsibilities. He obviously did. He faced up to the responsibility he obviously felt to his family, and she was never seen again.’

Someone shouted out, ‘Patricia came back?

‘This is disgraceful,’ James snarled.

‘Bloody well come clean, Bull-Davies,’ a man yelled. Several people were on their feet. Ken Thomas had put on all the lights. Bull-Davies’s face was white, a vein throbbing in his forehead. He flung out his pointing arm at Merrily.

‘If there’s a bloody witch here, it’s you.’

‘Shame!’ Minnie Parry cried out and was echoed by at least a dozen people, some of them out in the aisle.

‘All right!’ James threw up his hands. ‘Reason we didn’t destroy that document is because it also vindicates Tom Bull. Didn’t kill Williams. Didn’t even order it done. Truth of it ... like Thomas a Becket all over again. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? One of his ... servants did it. And that’s all I’m saying. That’s it. Show’s over. I’m leaving. Goodnight.’

To a chorus of groans and protests from the pews, he strode away to the south porch, didn’t look at Ken Thomas, went out. Alison glanced at Merrily then followed him.

Merrily shrugged and followed Alison. Behind her, a score of conversations were detonated.

Garrod Powell had a Sunday car, a silver-grey Ford Escort. Whenever he came to church, he parked it in the same place on the square adjacent to the market hall where it reached out towards the mews where Cassidy’s Country Kitchen was and Ledwardine Lore. Rod’s space. Only tourists parked there when Rod wasn’t in town.

When Gomer spotted the car, Rod was in it, talking on the phone.

Gomer pulled his Jeep into the kerbside at the mouth of Church Street and waited.

Bull-Davies strode past towards his blue Land Rover, almost dragging the floozie behind him. He was unlocking the driver’s door when the little vicar caught them up.

Alison suddenly snatched her hand away and turned on James like a cornered cat.

‘Tell her, you bloody fool. Why don’t you just tell her everything you know? This has nothing to do with honour or tradition.’

‘If that were true ...’ He leaned back against his Land Rover and breathed in through his teeth. ‘If that were true, my darling mistress, this would not be a problem.’

‘The problem is,’ Merrily said, ‘that I think we’re talking about a tradition that’s far from honourable.’

‘You’re very clever, Mrs Watkins.’

‘No I’m not. I’ve not been very clever at all. I’ve got people killed.’

‘If you’re talking about Coffey—’

‘You didn’t kill Coffey, did you, James?’ It just came out.

‘What?’ James’s jaw fell open like a padlock. He blinked. ‘Good Lord. You saw Alder in there. Fellow as good as confessed. Didn’t say a word in denial, took it’ – he grunted – ‘took it like a man.’

‘He’s an actor,’ Merrily said. ‘His great performance was dying on its feet. I wondered if he was just grabbing the chance of getting out on a moment of high drama.’

‘Look. Mrs Watkins ... Mrs Watkins, no. I did not kill Coffey. Found the man and went to the police, cooperated fully. Even let them take my fingerprints. No. Did not kill Coffey. May have wanted to, but that’s not my way. Couldn’t. All right?’

‘Tell her, then,’ Alison said. ‘Tell her that the Bulls don’t kill. Tell her who—’

‘Stop. Please. All right. According to his own account, Thomas Bull got very drunk one night. Opened his heart to the only man he felt he could still trust. His bailiff, gamekeeper, head groom, land steward, his ...’

Merrily, shuddering, had a vision of big brown hands around a small, white throat.

‘His Powell,’ she said.

‘Now do you see?’ James bellowed. ‘Now do you bloody well see?’

‘The ... this Powell ... killed her.’ Merrily felt breathless, felt the sudden closeness of the woman who was Wil. ‘Strangled her.’

‘Robert Powell, his name. He was trying to help Tom Bull, and he did a terrible thing.’

‘Even more terrible,’ Alison said, ‘because he’d have soon realized he was killing a woman. It’s not so easy to strangle a man.’

‘He didn’t just strangle her,’ Merrily said. ‘He raped her first. He raped the minister. He went to kill a priest, and—’

‘Don’t make it worse, woman!’

‘But it is worse, James. It got worse. Because it didn’t stop. From then on, the Powells had a hold on the Bulls, and maybe it strengthened over the centuries because of the things the Powells would do without compunction. Things it wouldn’t have been proper or seemly or honourable ... Who killed Patricia Young?’

Bull-Davies reeled. ‘I don’t know that! Gord’s sake, don’t know anything. Don’t know if the damned woman was killed. I was a boy then, probably still away at school, nobody would have told me. I don’t know anything. Just inherited all this shit, been trying to keep the damned toilet lid down ever since.’

Merrily looked at Alison.

Alison gave a tiny nod, her face flushed with anticipation.

‘Who do you think killed her?’ Merrily said.

‘Do you never give up? Presumably the father of her child, whoever ...’ James swallowed. ‘Whoever that was. Certainly not my poor bloody father who for the last twenty years of his life was impotent through illness and drink and got his only pleasure from ...’

James clenched his teeth.

‘... watching.’

Alison gasped.

‘Watching who, James?’ Merrily’s voice was very faint.

He wouldn’t answer. He hardly needed to. An engine roared suddenly and the side of the Land Rover was blasted by headlights.

‘Vicar!’

‘Gomer?’

Merrily saw, with a spasm of panic, that he was alone behind the wheel of his jeep.

‘Where’s Jane?’

‘You en’t seen her?’

‘Oh Christ!’

Gomer reached over and threw open the passenger door.

‘Get in, Vicar.’

54 Way to Blue

LOL STUMBLED OUT into the road before he knew it, the tarmac unrolling to either side, a fence opposite with a ploughed field rising steeply behind it, pink moon on pink soil, to a bristle of trees.

No vehicles, no lights, no sign of Gomer.

He felt confused and upset, didn’t know how much time had passed, swinging the torch from tree to tree, tensely shining it under bushes and briars. Once, he’d lit up a rag and nearly thrown up with dread.

There was no pavement; he’d have to stand in the hedge if a vehicle came past. He stared down at his feet on the tarmac and found himself praying that Jane was alive and back at the vicarage, then stopped, scared it might do more harm than good, as if he was tapping into Merrily’s line to a God he wasn’t sure of and Jane often mocked. Omens and portents seemed to have soaked up all his spirituality. Pink moons and black-eyed dogs. Please, Jane.

He looked up then and saw her.

She was standing in the middle of the pink, ploughed field. She didn’t smile at him or come running towards him. She didn’t seem to notice him at all. She was standing very still, although a wind he couldn’t feel lifted her dark hair.

And then there was only the field and the distant trees with buildings behind, under the hardening moon, and Lol knew the curse, by way of Robert Johnson and Nick Drake, was reaching for him.

Merrily was struggling not to give way. She asked Gomer if he’d tried the vicarage. Had he been upstairs? Had he called out? Had he called out to the third storey?

Gomer told her no way was Jane in the vicarage, but Lol had spotted two cider bottles missing from a case in Lucy’s kitchen.

Merrily let out a long, serrated breath. ‘I know Lucy’s dead, I know she was your friend. But I wish to God Jane had never known her.’

‘Lol’s in the orchard now, searchin’. She’s there, he’ll find her.’

‘How is he?’

‘How d’you mean like?’ Gomer was watching a car on the other side of the square.

‘Lol is’ – she bit off the word unstable – ‘unsure of himself sometimes.’

‘He’s all right. Good boy, I reckon.’ Gomer pointed across the cobbles. ‘That’s Rod Powell’s car, see. Keepin’ an eye on him, I am. He’s on the phone. Now who’d Rod be callin’ this time o’ night, you reckon?’

Merrily was silent.

A second later, Rod was getting out of his car and walking, in his stately and confident way, across to the Black Swan, where a lemony light still burned in windows either side of the front door. Rod went up the steps and rapped on a window. Presently the door opened and he was admitted. A couple of minutes later, he came out with a bottle of whisky.

‘Councillor Powell keeps his own licensin’ hours,’ Gomer said. ‘How about that? Man’s gonner have himself a drink in his car, I shouldn’t wonder. Coppers in and out, every hour on the hour lately, that’s how arrogant the feller is.’

‘Perhaps he needs some courage. Perhaps he could see a few things starting to ... ooze out of the woodwork.’

She told Gomer, very briefly, what she’d learned in the last hour and what she’d surmised. Everything, except for the very mixed implications for Alison.

‘Bugger me,’ said Gomer. ‘Wouldn’t it just suit the bastard to get his end away with the Bulls’ women? Where’d that happen, I wonder. No prizes.’

‘The cider house?’

‘Likely why John Bull-Davies give Rod that bit o’ land with the ole place on it.’

‘With a convenient hole in the wall?’

‘Hole in the loft prob’ly. That bloody ole John Bull-Davies. He weren’t never any good. You look at that whole situation, Vicar, you can see why James is the screwed-up bugger he is. Obvious, he’s backin’ off from the Powells. Tryin’ to.’

‘I think he perhaps wanted to do that on his own terms, but circumstances aren’t letting him.’

‘They comes over so loud and haughty-like, the Bulls, but they’re weak underneath, most of ’em. They’ll always come back to the Powells. It’s like some ole magnetism. They might think they got away, but they en’t.’

As the tail lights of Rod Powell’s car came on and the strings of medieval, electric lanterns across the square were extinguished by some timer mechanism, Merrily thought of James and Alison, free to resume their odd relationship.

James Bull-Davies and Alison Kinnersley. Or Powell, as she might have been. The Bulls and the Powells. She hoped there would never be a child.

Lol ran across the road. There was an iron gate on the other side, leading to the pink-washed field. For a moment, as he climbed over, he thought he saw her again, a flitting thing, a wisp, a trick of the light.

He turned and looked back across the road towards the orchard. He should wait here. He should wait for Gomer.

There was a flash, like magnesium, on the very periphery of his vision and he spun round and once more saw her, in total, absolute clarity, standing in the centre of the field with her arms by her sides. She was dressed in black.

This time, he saw, in a heart-freezing moment, that her feet were not quite touching the soil. A girl dressed in black, hovering under a pink moon.

He stood with his back to the gate, snatched off his glasses and rubbed his hands over his face, replaced the glasses, looked back at the road and then spun around again. But there was nothing now.

He wasn’t sure if it had been Jane.

Or Colette.

Both of them? Both of them out here?

His hands were trembling as he pushed himself away from the iron gate and began to walk across the churned-up field, soil the colour of raw meat, the pink moon above him, the black-eyed dog, he was sure, at his heels.

He knew where he was going. Among the farm buildings behind the trees was the cider house, where The Wine of Angels had not been made. The place where the Bulls had once taken their women.

Lol stopped and looked once over his shoulder before walking steadily towards the buildings.

The Escort had turned down Church Street for Old Barn Lane before Gomer started to follow. He’d pulled back into the shadows to avoid Minnie spotting the Jeep when she came out of the lych-gate, accompanied by Tess Roberts and the Prossers. ‘Never get to keep my ole Gwynneth after this,’ Gomer muttered.

Rod was turning into Old Barn Lane.

‘Never even signalled,’ Gomer observed. He sucked on his ciggy. ‘What you reckon a man like Powell does, he sees the blinds come down after three hundred years?’

‘Wondering that myself Merrily thought about the unmissable password she’d given Gomer to identify himself to Lol. Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’ was the song of his that seemed to get played more often than any other when she was a kid. She used to ask her step-brother, Jonathan, to put it on again because the idea sounded so pretty. It was years later before she found out the message was far from comforting, spoke of no escape. For anyone.

‘Magistrate like Rod,’ Gomer said soberly, ‘he feels it’s all over, last thing he wants is to sit the other side o’ the ole courtroom.’

Merrily fastened the webbing seat-belt. ‘I don’t know where this is going to end. I think we lost control a long time ago.’

‘Will of God.’ Gomer turned into Old Barn Lane. ‘En’t that the bottom line of it for you, Vicar?’

‘I’m a bit unsure about the strength of my faith, Gomer. If something happened to Jane I’d be swearing at the heavens and cursing in the night like nobody ever did.’

The sights and smells of the dream cider house swelled in her head. In the vaporous humidity, no longer the pulpy, sweating cheeks of the pumping Child but the emotionless, rhythmical rise and thrust of a piece of well-preserved, well-oiled farm machinery.

Gomer glanced at her and then turned back to the lane.

Lol had spoken to him only once before, when he and Alison had bought the apple wood for fragrant fires. But on another occasion, the week after Alison had left, he’d seen Lol buying cat food in the Spar shop and had laughed quietly.

‘What you doin’ yere?’ Lloyd Powell said now. Not a man who smiled, but he laughed sometimes.

Lol stood uncertainly on the edge of the field, where it gave way to a weed-spattered gravel forecourt.

‘I’m speaking to you, sunshine,’ Lloyd said. ‘Come over yere in the light.’

The only light was a dome-shaded bulb in a holder like a question mark over the door of what Lol took to be the cider house. He moved shyly to within six feet of it.

‘Hello,’ he said.

Lloyd was Marlboro County Man in denims but with no cigarette. Lol saw Karl Windling with no beard.

‘Ah.’ Lloyd put his hands on his hips. ‘I know who you are. You’re that bloke Alison Kinnersley left for James.’

Lol nodded. The pint-sized cuckold.

Lloyd’s expression was blank.

Pint-sized cuckold. With no bottle. Just phrases he’d overheard in the shop when they were laughing quietly, Lloyd and another bloke.

Lloyd examined him for a moment then seemed to lose interest. ‘Go away, little man,’ he said. ‘I’m busy.’

He turned his back on Lol, taking some keys out of his pocket.

‘No,’ Lol said. ‘I won’t, if you don’t mind.’

‘What was that?’ Lloyd didn’t turn round. Lol saw that his dashing white truck was parked a few yards away with its tailgate open. In the back was a dead sheep and something not much bigger wrapped in bin sacks.

‘Got it all loaded then, Lloyd?’

Lloyd still didn’t turn.

‘Give you a hand, maybe?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Lloyd said. ‘Don’t reckon you’d have the strength. Bugger off. Go’n look at your owls, your badgers, whatever you little fellers do at night.’

The pink moon shone surrealistically down on a pastoral dreamscape. Lol wasn’t quite sure if he was actually here. He glimpsed the past few days in a series of frozen incidents fanned out like playing cards – the vicarage days, his own mirror image bizarrely in a dog collar, Alison unmasked, the glow of firelight on Merrily’s eyelids – and then the fan was closed and he was standing back where it all began, in Blackberry Lane, in front of the invaded cottage, the torn-up pages of Traherne like petals on the lawn, Karl Windling in the window.

‘I thought as I was passing,’ Lol heard himself saying, as though from some distance, ‘that I would take Jane home.’

Lloyd turned slowly back from the door.

‘Come yere a minute.’

Lol heard Karl Windling say, Now you fucking stay there. You understand? You go anywhere, I’ll find you. You don’t move the rest of the night. I’m coming over.

He walked up to the door and stood there.

‘Right, then,’ Lloyd said.

The pink moon bulged as Lloyd half turned and hit him in the mouth. As he fell back, Lloyd hit him in the stomach. As he doubled up and his face came down, Lloyd’s fist was waiting to meet it, crunching his glasses into his eyes.

As he rolled over on the gravel, Lloyd kicked him in the head.

‘Tell me the truth,’ the vicar said as they came up to the junction of Old Barn Lane and the new road. Terrible stupid junction, this was, Gomer reckoned, right on a bad bend. ‘You don’t actually think Lol’s going to find her lying drunk in the orchard. Do you?’

‘Oh, Vicar ...’ Gomer slowed down, not wanting to come up to the junction right behind Rod, pretending that concentrating on his driving was the reason he hadn’t finished the sentence.

‘You think she’s in the cider house, don’t you?’

‘En’t my place to think nonsense like that,’ Gomer said gruffly.

‘What happens in the cider house?’

‘They makes cider. Used to.’

They passed into a tunnel of trees, blocking the moonlight.

‘I dreamt about it once.’ Her voice was very low. ‘I’ve never been in one, but I dreamt about it. It was Dermot Child in there.’

Gomer thought that Dermot Child, nasty little bugger though he was, wasn’t in the same evil league as the Powells, so inbred, deep-down evil they didn’t even know they was evil. He turned out on to the new road and had to brake sharply on account of Rod Powell’s Escort was dead in front of him, having slowed for a big lorry rumbling round the bend.

‘Strewth, you don’t expect heavy goods traffic this time o’ night.’

It was a low loader with a big stack of crates on the back. The driver cranked the gears and the lorry built up to a steady speed as they approached the spot where poor ole Lucy bought it, just before you hit the straight, Powells’ farm turning about half a mile off.

Too late. Before Rod, too, changed gear and speeded up, Gomer saw him look in his mirror to see who’d come up behind him. Not many folk in this village drove a US Army Jeep with a cigarette glowing in their gobs.

‘Bugger.’

He’d have seen the vicar, too. He’d know they were following him. He wouldn’t like that.

Gomer eased up, left some space between him and Rod. His view of it was that Rod was heading home fast to check everything was in order, mabbe throw some disinfectant around then figure out how he was going to play it. He wouldn’t want no company tonight.

But whatever he did to clean up the cider house, there wasn’t a thing he could do about the orchard. About this Patricia Young, who Gomer was convinced lay under the Apple Tree Man. He weren’t that old. Thirty years was a good age for an untended apple tree.

Bugger. Rod giving it some clog now, getting up behind the lorry so he could get past when they hit the straight. Gomer put his foot down.

What happened next happened so quick that he’d hardly registered it before the Jeep was up the bank and not-so-clean through the hedge.

‘Where are you? Where are you? Where you gone?’ Moving about in the bilious fluorescence, throwing hay around, old bin sacks. ‘Don’t mess me about, you bitch, you little scrubber. You come out now and mabbe I won’t give you to Father for his pleasure, mabbe I’ll just finish it quick, quick as a chicken, see, humane ... You want humane, you come out now. Father, he en’t humane, n’more. You come out now, you hear. I know you can’t’ve got out, had my eye on you the whole time I’m removin’ your friend, efficient, we are, you don’t get round the back of us ... Don’t mess me about, Jane, you listen to me, I en’t got time ... When I find you I’m gonner hurt you, gonner hurt you very bad, you hear me, Jane, you hear me, you little slut? You can’t’ve gone, you can’t’ve gone, you cannot’ve gone, Jane. Jane. Jane. JANE!’

He comes out, boiling with bewilderment.

‘Where is she?’

Advancing on Lol, tottering away from the truck, half blind, body burning.

‘Think I’m daft enough to leave the keys in, is it? Think you can drive off? Think I’m daft?’

Big, tough hands, farmer’s hands, bass player’s hands, picking him up and slamming him back against some wall.

And he can feel the freshly washed hair of a girl called Tracy Cooke in his eyes and mouth in a dingy hotel bedroom and he can see Karl Windling’s yellow grin as he pushes Tracy over onto Lol’s arm and goes down on her.

I’m gonner hurt you, gonner hurt you real bad, you hear me, Jane ...

Jane?

‘Where is she?’ Lloyd’s screaming, his hard face up close. ‘What you done with her? I’m gonner tear your other eye out, mister!’

Lol’s hand comes up with the bottle in it. The empty bottle he found rolling around in the back of the truck. The bottle coming up and striking Lloyd on the point of the chin with a small click.

Lloyd stumbling and spitting a little blood.

‘Right then.’ Rubbing his jaw once. ‘You done it now, boy.’

Lol swaying, hearing the words of Thomas Traherne.

...to love all persons in all ages, all angels, all worlds, is divine and heavenly ...To love all ...

Lloyd comes for Lol.

Karl Windling says, And you ... you’re just ... I mean, who’d notice? Who’d give a shit? Who’d put flowers on your grave.

Lol, with both hands smashing the bottle into the side of Lloyd’s head, whispers, ‘Jane?’

There is no reply. Lloyd is on his knees. The bottle falling to the gravel and rolling over, its label lit by the moon.

The Wine of Angels.

Tears are the wine of angels. Traherne sighs. The best to quench the devil’s fires.

You’d’ve thought it would be all over the road, but it was very neat. From the bank, Gomer was looking down on it, the moon so warm and bright you could see everything. Very neat indeed, the car looking like it had taken a bite out of the bed of the lorry, like the car roof was its upper lip, clamped down.

‘No, you don’t,’ Gomer said, putting out an arm to bar the vicar’s path. ‘Call me sexist, Vicar, but this is gonner be no sight for you. You stay in this yere field. I’ll go down and check this out first, see.’

He slithered down to the mangled wire fence, stepped over it and through the gap the Jeep had torn out of the hedge. Lit himself a ciggy then went to look under the deck of the lorry, where the bonnet of the Escort was barely visible. The end of the deck had gone through the wind-screen like a wide-bladed stone chisel.

Gomer bent his head, sniffed, then straightened up and wiped his hands on his trousers.

The lorry driver was down from his cab. He’d thrown up in the road. He wore a baseball cap and a big earring.

‘Well, well,’ Gomer said. ‘Jeremy Selby.’

‘Gomer?’

‘Bit late for a consignment o’ cider.’

‘Going down Southampton way. Bit of a rock festival’

‘Ar,’ Gomer said. ‘Best place for it. All be too stoned to taste the ole muck.’

‘It was so bloody quick, Gomer. Couldn’t believe it. He was right on my arse, then it just come running out the hedge, I didn’t know what it was at first, just slammed on, you know, instinctively, it was a really big one, all white.’

‘Hang on, get a hold, boy.’ Gomer extracted the ciggy. ‘What did? What exactly come runnin’ out the hedge?’

‘Bloody great sheep. White as a bloody polar bear.’

‘Ar.’ Gomer walked round to the front of the lorry. No sign of a sheep. Naturally. Gomer nodded, ambled back. ‘Where’d it go, then, Jeremy?’

‘Fuck knows. It was here one second, gone the next. I swear to God, Gomer, it—’

‘All right, boy.’ Gomer patted him on the shoulder. ‘If the coppers asks, I’ll say I seen it too. You rung ’em?’

‘On my mobile.’

They both stepped into the road. It was dead quiet.

‘Poor bugger,’ Jeremy said. ‘I suppose there really is no ...’

‘What, with half of him in the front, half in the back and his head—’

‘All right! Christ, I’m still shaking. Don’t suppose you recognize the car?’

‘Oh aye. Rod Powell, that is. Was.’

‘You what?’ Jeremy Selby snatched off his baseball cap in horror. ‘I just killed Councillor Powell?’

‘Ar.’ Gomer’s beam was a bright gash in the night as he stuck out his hand. ‘Put it there, pal.’

It was a cawing sound, like a nightbird, sporadic but coming closer.

‘... ane ...? ane ...’

Merrily stood in the pink ploughed field exactly where Gomer had left her, not looking where he’d told her not to look. It was as though all her muscles had seized up. She felt raw and frozen and unable to think clearly. She saw a large hole in her cashmere sweater, just below the elbow. She could throw it away now.

Something was standing about fifteen yards up the field. It cawed again.

‘J ... ane?’

Merrily looked up. ‘Lol? Is it Lol?’

‘...’errily? Sorry, I can’t ... glasses gone.’

He stumbled down a furrow. Before he fell into her arms she saw his face was full of blood and his mouth was up on one side. One eye was closed.

They crushed each other and Merrily began to cry. ‘Oh, Lol, what have they done to you?’ She felt his blood on her face. He looked like his cat had. She remembered waking up by the fire, seeing him looking down at her, closing her eyes again, content. She closed her eyes now and the night swirled around her, not pink but deep blue. She couldn’t understand that when everything told her it should be black, streaked with red.

‘Lol, boy!’

Merrily blinked. Gomer stood a few feet away.

‘Take it easy,’ Gomer said. ‘Everybody take it easy.’

The night became real and hard-edged. Memories battered Merrily. A flame of fear enveloped her. She stared into Gomer’s terrifying face, with the white spikes of hair and the core of fire in his teeth.

‘Bloody useless, you are, Lol, boy,’ Gomer said. ‘Wouldn’t find an elephant in your own backyard. ‘Er just comes walkin’ out the orchard, cool as you like, through the ole gate.’

Merrily swam upwards through the blue.

‘Flower?’

Next to tough, wiry old Gomer, she was looking very small and young and fragile. Her face was as white as bread. Her eyes were on the move, still travelling back.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Lol said.

Breaking away from Merrily to let Jane in, he looked up.

Through a single, watering, blood-blurred, short-sighted eye, he saw a curious cloud formation above the moon, a dark cloud hanging there making a curving V-shape. So that the moon, for a long, undying moment, was like a big, red apple.

He heard Jane saying,

‘Mum ... where have you been since yesterday?’

H.L. McCready and Partners,

Solicitors,

Apex House,

King Street,

Hereford

3 June

The Revd M. Watkins,

The Vicarage,

Ledwardine,

Herefordshire

Dear Mrs Watkins,

I shall be writing to you more formally about this matter in due course but felt I should give you informal advance warning of something which, until now, has been subject to a degree of secrecy. I am sure that, were she alive, the police would be more than interested to talk to Miss Devenish in the light of recent events! In the circumstances, one can only mutter about there being more things in heaven and earth ...

First, may I say how pleased I have been to learn that you and your daughter are fully recovered from what must have been a most disturbing night. I doubt if Ledwardine has weathered a more eventful period in its lengthy history.

But to business. Many people, no doubt, will be wondering who is to receive the bulk of Miss Devenish’s legacy, which will amount principally to the proceeds of the sale of her house and shop, both highly desirable properties in a much sought-after village. In January this year, Miss Devenish placed before me a proposal which I confess I greeted with some dismay. It was her intention that all the money should be left in trust to the Diocese of Hereford for the purchase of the orchard immediately adjacent to the Parish Church whenever it might come on the market, the land to remain as an orchard in perpetuity.

As the aforementioned orchard had, for several centuries, been in the ownership of the Powell family and there seemed little prospect of its being relinquished, I was at pains to discourage Miss Devenish from this course of action, but, as you know, she was a most determined person and was insistent that her wishes be adhered to.

Following the death, in the early hours of Monday morning, of Mr Garrod Powell, the property passed into the ownership of his son, Mr Lloyd Powell. However, with the death in hospital yesterday of Mr Lloyd Powell (which I am informed is unlikely, under the circumstances, to give rise to any criminal proceedings against his assailant) it seems not improbable that the orchard will indeed shortly become available for purchase.

Attempts are being made to contact Mrs Jennifer Powell, from whom, it may surprise you to learn, Mr Garrod Powell has never been legally separated and to whom it appears the Powell Orchard may now belong. In view of her long estrangement from Mr Powell, it seems likely that Mrs Powell will wish to dispense with the property, especially in view of the gruesome discoveries there over the past few days.

Be assured that I shall keep you fully informed of any future developments; meanwhile, please accept my very best wishes for your Installation Service next Friday.

Yours sincerely,

Harold L. McCready