The Wine of Angels

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.