The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  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 pr
esence 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.