The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Would it be OK if I slept downstairs?’

  ‘Wherever you like.’ She waited for him on the upper landing. Glad he’d said that, she didn’t quite like the idea of a stranger up here with Jane.

  The sleeping bags weren’t in the kid’s bedroom. Which left the sitting room/study, into which Merrily had been forbidden to go until the completion of the famous Mondrian walls. Well, this was an emergency, and it was Jane’s fault, so she’d have to slip in there, grab one of the bags and just not look at the walls.

  But the door was locked. ‘Damn. The kid is so exasperating sometimes. I like to think I’ve never been the kind of mother who spies, you know?’

  Lol said tentatively, ‘I think there was a key on the bedside table. In Jane’s room.’

  ‘Makes sense. She’d hardly take it to Colette’s party.’

  Feeling a need to explain, she said, ‘Jane’s had this long-term plan to paint the plaster squares and rectangles between the wall-beams in different colours, so it’d be like sitting inside this huge Mondrian painting. You know Mondrian. Dutch painter? We had a couple of days in London last year and we went to this exhibition of his stuff, and when we came here she got this ambitious idea. It probably looks terrible.’

  The key fitted. The sleeping bags were rolled up behind the door. Merrily could have gathered one up, brought it out with barely a glance at the Mondrian walls. Maybe she’d have done that. If they’d been Mondrian walls, nice plain squares of colour.

  ‘What ...?’ She froze in the doorway.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘No.’ Merrily put on the lights.

  The walls had been painted all one colour. Blue. Midnight blue, divided by the timber-framing. But the timbers were part of it. Painted branches were made to protrude from them, thicker ones closer to the floor, becoming more plentiful as they neared the ceiling where they all joined together in a mesh.

  As though she’d tried to bring the timbers in the wall alive, turn them back into trees.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Merrily fought to keep her voice level.

  ‘Must have taken her a long time,’ Lol said.

  ‘Must have taken her whole nights. Why? What does it mean?’

  He didn’t reply. He was looking at the ceiling. Among the beams and the intertwining branches were many small orbs of yellow and white, meticulously painted. Lights in the trees.

  ‘Little golden lanterns,’ Lol said. ‘Hanging in the night.’

  She thought he must be quoting some line of half-remembered poetry.

  The police left their car on the square and walked towards the church gates. Jane followed them, about thirty yards behind.

  ‘Some back-up, you reckon, Kirk?’ one said.

  ‘In bloody Ledwardine, in the early hours? Let’s take a look around first. It turns out they’ve just gone in there for a smoke and a shag, we’re gonner look like prats.’

  The first two people to come out of the orchard walked straight into the two policemen. They were Danny Gittoes and Dean Wall. They were both drunk.

  ‘Aw shit.’ Dean put up his hands. ‘I never done it, officer.’

  ‘Over by the wall, lads. Let’s have your names.’

  Dean and Danny were having their pockets turned out when Jane slipped behind a row of graves and past them into the orchard. Moving not stealthily but with great care, excusing herself as she passed between the trees. Respect is the important thing, Lucy Devenish said. Individual trees can be trimmed and pruned and chopped down when they are dying, but you must always show respect for the orchard as an entity. Never take an apple after the harvest. Never touch the trees in spring. Never take the blossom. Never ever bring any into the house.

  Spending hours with Lucy and Lucy’s books, there wasn’t much she didn’t know now about apples and orchards. Knowledge was the best defence, Lucy said. Knowledge or felicity. Thomas Traherne had learned felicity. Had discovered, against all the odds, the secret of happiness through oneness with nature, with the orb.

  Sometimes over the past week, usually in the daytime, Jane’s worldly self had told her other self that this was all absolute, total bollocks.

  But now, with the white-clothed apple trees all around her, the blossom hanging from them like robes, it was Lucy’s world that seemed like the real world.

  The moon had come out, and its milky light bathed the Powell orchard, and Jane felt she was on the threshold of a great mystery.

  If Dean Walls and Danny Gittoes were refusing to come quietly, Jane wasn’t aware of it. If the bassy music was still booming from Dr Samedi’s black box, she could no longer hear it. If the guests at Colette’s party were making their stoned, confused way among the tangle of trees, she couldn’t see them.

  Although there were figures here, she was sure. Pale and glistening, moonbeam shapes interweaving amid the blossom branches, as though each blanched petal had a ghost, and all these spirit petals had coalesced into translucent, dancing figurines.

  And you wanted to join them in the dance, far finer and more fluid than the grossness on the square. The further into the orchard you went, the lighter you felt. As though you too were made of petals and could be fragmented and blown away by a breeze, dissolving and separating, a snow of molecules, until you were absorbed into the moonbeams, disappearing from the mortal sight.

  A bump. A bump stopped her.

  A bump and a bouncing.

  Jane bent down as it rolled almost to her feet. She picked it up. It was small and its skin was soft and puckered and withered like the cheeks of a very old woman.

  She held it in the palm of her hand. It was no bigger than a billiard ball, though only a fraction as heavy. It must have been up on the tree all winter. Perhaps the only one. All winter through, and the birds had left it alone.

  In most parts of Britain, according to Lucy’s books, a single apple that remained on a tree all winter was a harbinger of death.

  A bloom on the tree when the apples are ripe

  is a sure termination of somebody’s life.

  (The fact that it didn’t really rhyme, Lucy said, was a sure sign of the truth in it.)

  What did it mean when an overripe apple survived the winter to tumble from a tree in full blossom?

  Jane thought back over everything that had happened tonight. The images stammering through her mind like a videotape in fast-reverse. The tape stopped at a moment in the church, Mum on her knees, bent over, then looking up, threads of vomit on her lips.

  Looking up.

  Jane’s arm jerked back in a spasm and she threw the mummified apple so far into the orchard she didn’t hear it land, and she turned and ran all the way to the vicarage.

  Part Three

  Airy things thy soul beguile ...

  Thomas Traherne,

  ‘The Instruction’

  27

  High Flier

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

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

  Special midnight service

  THE REVEREND MERRILY WATKINS

  will be holding a

  BLACK MASS

  (Bring your own sickbags)

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Something else not dealt with at theological college.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘It sure is.’

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

  ‘En’t found her yet then, Vicar.’

  ‘Sorry?’

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

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

  ‘You en’t yeard? Missing, she is.’

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

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

  ‘Merrily!’

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

  Gomer Parry took one look and stepped hurriedly aside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘OK.’

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

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

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

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

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

  Wild.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Anything?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Jane. She’s fifteen.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Were you worried?’

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

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

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

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