The Wine of Angels

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