The Wine of Angels (57 page)

‘OK.’

‘And they haven’t found Colette. I had the radio on at seven. It was the same stuff, more or less, as last night.’

‘That’s starting to not make sense.’

‘Depends on how you look at it, doesn’t it? Suppose I don’t want to believe Colette’s dead either? Or gone off with anybody. Anybody human.’

‘That’s even more dangerous ground.’

‘Everything’s
dangerous
to you, isn’t it, Lol? Even Mum. What’s the matter with you? All I cut
off was
your ponytail.’

Stefan Alder on the line.

‘It’s sorted.’ He sounded very calm, very purposeful. ‘It’s on. I’m going to make it happen, Merrily.’

‘Well, good. That’s wonderful. I’ll put the word around.’

But what if nobody came? What if the church was empty save for Stefan and Coffey and the sick priest?

‘Come and see you, shall I, Merrily, after your morning service?’

‘No, that would be— I’m not actually doing the services today. But if you want to ... rehearse or anything, the church should be empty by twelve.’

She was calmer this morning. At least the villagers, old and new, would be given the chance. If nobody came, then it suggested nobody, except James Bull-Davies, was bothered, so the play could go ahead, in the church, whenever Coffey and his team were ready. It all seemed so simple now.

‘I hope this hasn’t caused problems between Richard and you.’

‘No ...’ Stefan hesitated. ‘Perhaps it’s resolved them. You see, Richard ... he won’t be having anything to do with this. It’s going to be entirely down to me.’

Oh God, Merrily thought. Sulks.

‘This is how it should have been in the first place. It was my idea. I discovered him.’

‘Wil?’

‘It’s a one-man show, Merrily. It comes from the heart, not the page. Some of it was going to be improvised anyway. I’m a performer. A stage, an audience, you know? Give me one and a half hours. Or more.’

‘Shall we say seven p.m.? We don’t have an evening service any more, so that’s not a problem.’

‘Could you make it half-eight? Nine? I’d prefer it to get gradually darker.’

‘All right.’

They agreed to meet in the church at one.

‘I’m bringing him home, Merrily,’ Stefan said.

Merrily put down the phone and stood for a moment, thinking about last night. She’d slept easily between the fire and Lol Robinson. Daylight had cancelled the fear.

Although there wasn’t any at the end; only sorrow.

She wouldn’t forget that.

When she came back to the drawing room, Lol and Jane had one of the Sunday tabloids spread out on the coffee table. ‘Oh well,’ Lol was saying, ‘it had to happen at some stage.’ The page two headline was,

There was a picture of a rather younger, more innocent Colette, with no nose-stud and an unfamiliar smile. The fact that it was quite small was a strong indication this was not the picture the paper had wanted, given the comments gathered from ‘neighbours’.

Most of the story was an innuendo-laden account of

‘He’s actually OK,’ Jane said. ‘The blood sacrifice stuffs probably a bit exaggerated.’

‘Like, only small amounts of blood.’ Lol pointed to the end of the piece.

‘Speaks for itself, doesn’t it? I’ll go and see her. I’ll explain about Karl. I’ll spell it all out.’

‘Are you completely crazy?’ Jane snatched up the paper, waved it in his face. ‘She’ll nail you to the wall. How are you going to explain where you’ve been?’

‘She could be right, Lol,’ Merrily said. ‘With hindsight, it would’ve been better if you’d been sitting there when she came to talk to Jane yesterday. You’re still the best they’ve got. There’s at least enough circumstantial evidence to hang on to you for a few days. Which would be ... a strain.’

Thinking that if Howe’s team found a body Lol would be signing a confession before the week was out, just to get them off his back.

‘Give it another day,’ she said. ‘None of us needs to have seen a paper. Perhaps they’ll find her.’

‘Every day drops me further in it.’

‘Why? They carefully haven’t named you as a suspect.’

‘She cares, Lol.’ Jane smiled mischievously. ‘Don’t knock it.’

‘Don’t push it, flower.’

‘It was that good, huh?’

‘Make the breakfast.’ Merrily picked up the paper. ‘Where did this come from, anyway?’

‘It was on the mat,’ Lol said. ‘Is this the only Sunday paper you take?’

‘I don’t take it.’

‘I
told you
she didn’t,’ Jane said.

‘I normally collect the papers from the newsagent on the way back from Communion. This isn’t one of them.’

‘Well, it was on the mat,’ Lol said. ‘It must be a mistake.’

‘Laurence, in a village this size, you don’t mistakenly deliver papers to the vicarage. Somebody wanted us to see it.’

‘
Us?
Lol said.

‘Alison know you’re here?’

‘Yes.’

‘That wise?’

‘She’ll keep quiet; she’s on her own knife-edge. I’ll tell you about that.’

Jane blinked. ‘Young Alison? You cracked it?’

Merrily said, ‘Make the breakfast, Jane. All right?’

Jane found some eggs. Put the toaster on. It was infuriating, but maybe, after what she’d said to Lol, this was not the best time to listen at the door.

And also, Mrs Leather’s
The Folklore of Herefordshire
was still open on the kitchen table. It had fallen open at
that
page. Portentous, right?

But suppose the friends had known the score? Suppose the friends had it totally sussed?

...
for whom read Lucy Devenish ...

Jane had this sudden, crazy image of grabbing hold of the shoulder of the freshly materialized Colette’s sexy black dress, and Colette rounding on her, shrieking, ‘What the fuck are you playing at Janey? This is
my
poxy party!’

Jane laughed.

But why not? Why the hell not? OK, if it was all airy-fairy nonsense, total cobblers, if Colette had actually gone off with some smooth crack dealer from Hereford, then what was lost? Who was hurt?

The plain fact is, nobody, but nobody, apart from me, is ever going to try it.

OK. Practicalities. She couldn’t simply keep taking walks through the orchard on the off chance Colette would show. There had to be method in this. She thought back to the night it all began. The apple tree, the little golden lights.

Another element, though, if you followed Lucy’s logic, was crucial.

Cider.

‘Does she know what she’s playing with here?’

Merrily had a clear picture of Alison in the church that morning. Black shirt, gold pendant, knowing smile.
James is full of shit.

Oh yes, Alison knew precisely what she was playing with.

And Lol, who’d been used and discarded, seemed to be able to live with that, now that he knew the circumstances, now that he understood. He was either a natural-born Christian or a natural-born sucker.

‘It’s good, at least, to have explanations,’ he said. ‘Looking back, my life’s been pretty short on explanations.’

‘It’s horrifying. What’s she want out of it? Half the hall? The farm? Half the debts?’

‘Goes deeper than money.’

‘Obviously. But this is a very old-fashioned guy. I really hate to imagine how he’s going to react when he finds out he’s been f—’

Merrily glanced at the door. They’d been whispering, but the kid had good ears and no scruples.

‘... and that his father may have killed someone. There’s certainly enough ground there to bury a body in.’

‘I don’t think,’ Lol said, ‘that Bull-Davies is under any illusions about his family. Last year, he apparently spent a lot of money on the only copy of some unpublished, handwritten addendum Mrs Leather had written to her folklore book. It was going to be auctioned; he got in first. It was all about apple orchards. With special reference to Wil Williams.’

‘Lucy know about it?’

‘Found out too late, presumably. Maybe she doesn’t have friends in auction houses. Alison came across it a few weeks ago. Not on the bookshelves. Rotting in the attic’

‘It shows the Bull family in a bad light?’

‘All it shows is how flimsy the evidence against Williams was. The farmer who accused him of bewitching his orchard ... according to Mrs Leather, all that amounted to was that it had been a very bad year for apples, except in the Ledwardine orchard, where the crop was very acceptable. The orchard, at that time, belonging entirely to the Church.’

‘So? God looks after his own. That was it? He bought the thing purely because it suggested his ancestor accepted iffy evidence of witchcraft in the year sixteen sixty-whatever?’

Lol shrugged. ‘Just, you know, an illustration of the level of James’s paranoia about his family. According to Alison.’

‘She’s got to be hard as nails.’

‘Hardened by circumstance.’

‘You are too generous, Lol. This is her brother.’

‘Half-brother.’

The sun had gone in. Another capricious spring day.

‘Lol, did she mention anything about another document? The Journal of Thomas Bull?’

‘There’re some volumes of it in a bank in Hereford.’

‘Which is where, I suppose, they’re destined to stay,’ Merrily said.

Breakfast was a muted meal.

Jane produced boiled eggs and toast. Nobody mentioned Alison or Bull-Davies or the deaths of Lucy and Karl Windling or little golden lights or the Nighthouse. They talked like ordinary people with ordinary lives and only ordinary undercurrents. Like a family, thought Lol, who’d forgotten what a family was like.

They discussed how Merrily was going to spread the word about the personal appearance in Ledwardine Parish Church that night of its former incumbent, the Reverend Wil Williams, without attracting unwelcome publicity.

‘It’s a village thing,’ Merrily said. ‘And it has to stay that way. That’s why I want it done quickly. Done, finished with, everybody gets their say. The issue decides itself. That’s the theory, anyway. It would be good to get the Women’s Institute out in force. They’ll all fall for Stefan in a big way, lots of tear-filled hankies.’

‘What about the Press?’ Lol said. ‘You can’t keep them out.’

‘The way I see it, the search for Colette will overshadow everything. I really don’t think the Press would be interested. Unless someone told them.’

‘Dermot Child,’ Jane said. ‘The Goblin.’

‘I’m going to deal with that.’ Merrily bit decisively into a slice of crisp toast.

From mid-morning, she hung around the churchyard, under apple trees, listening to the leaden, Victorian hymns, feeling redundant and rejected. She should be in there, today of all days, offering prayers for Colette Cassidy and her family, holding the community together, siphoning God’s comfort from the chancel to the nave.

Stupid.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Hadn’t thought of the implications of not being there today. But Ted presumably had, the machiavellian bastard. It had taken her rather too long to see Ted, not as an uncle, but as the worst kind of country solicitor, a man who’d spent his adult life smoothing over, glossing over, planing off rough edges. Female priest? A nice idea that failed. Too soon, my friends, too soon.