Pity about the cassock; it was comfortable, like a kaftan, but it wasn’t coming back.
After her last, luxurious bath, Merrily lay down on the bed and tore open the letter. Looked like an invitation, a mixed blessing for vicars.
It was a card. A funeral card, with a black border. It said,
Merrily let it fall to the floor.
She should take it to the police. It was a threat, wasn’t it?
And what would the police do? Fingerprint it? Then fingerprint the entire village?
She sat up and looked again at the card. The message had been printed on a slip of paper, which had been pasted inside the black rectangle. Anyone with access to a computer could have done it. And anyone could have access to a computer; for a very small fee you could use the one in Marches Media.
Waste of time. Some crank. On impulse, she took the card to the window, set light to it with her Zippo and let the air take the ashes.
Crank, maybe, but someone had spent some time on it. Another indication that something in this Wil Williams business went very deep in Ledwardine. Alison Kinnersley and Lucy Devenish both thought Coffey’s play would open up the can of worms and that would be no bad thing. But here was proof that Bull-Davies was clearly not alone in wanting to keep the lid on.
She shut the window and went back and lay on the bed, her whole body shaking with anger and what she suspected, after last night, was nervous exhaustion.
16
Like Lace
THIS WAS A secret place, an old place.
To begin with, it existed only as warmth and a sense-sapping humidity. Then she was aware of lustrous, wet stone walls on every side, like some Middle Eastern dungeon. But the atmosphere was dense and dark and syrupy with a sour-sweet aroma, fruitier and earthier than wine: a heavy drenching of deepest rural England.
His face went in and out of focus, sweat rippling down his cheeks like wax down a candle. His eyes were sly, his hands were busy. The lower half of him was lost in steam but it was moving. Squirming.
She, however, was lying helplessly still in what felt like damp hay. She couldn’t move at all; her muscles were heavy and sagging, like balloons full of water. She kept trying to concentrate, make out details, but her vision was all fuzzy and her self-control just drifted away into the thick, cloying, musted air.
She didn’t know where this was; it might be underground, at England’s core, it was hot enough. Above her, no sun, only oaken rafters, pickled in centuries of juice.
Hot enough to be hell. And his face ...
His mad, moist face had split into a wide grin, the way a crisp apple splits. But it was rotten inside, oozing brown pulp, and the pips dropped from his stained teeth and, behind, she saw his fat buttocks rising out of the vapour, glossy orbs, rosy apples.
He took in a slow, wheezing breath. Eyes popping in his friar’s face as his buttocks tensed, and she realized, with terror tightening inside, that he was fully on top of her.
And she was wearing the tattered remnants of the black cassock, ripped down the front and stained with stinking apple pulp. And her collar was tightening like a shackle, like a stiff, white noose.
There was the squeak and grind of an ancient mechanism, the sense of an enormous, waiting weight, before a lunge and a squeezing and a second of silence like a crack in the universe until – accompanied by a long, liquid gush – Dermot Child snarled out, his enormous voice echoing through caverns of time as her own throat constricted.
‘
Bastards!
Merrily hurled clothes, unfolded, into the open suitcase. The cassock last, but the lid wouldn’t close, and in a rage she seized the cassock and tore it down the back and threw it into the bin liner with the rubbish.
Look at the time, look at the
Calm down.
She sat on a corner of the bed, settled her breathing, gave herself a good talking-to. Alf Hayden would have chuckled and let it all pass over him – Child, Bull-Davies and his mistress, the funeral card. Nothing would intrude into Alf’s placid dreams.
But would any of it have happened to Alf? Merrily didn’t somehow think it would.
When she’d awakened – the dream-Child’s ghastly orgasmic cry biting into her brain like an alarm clock – she’d stripped at once in front of the bathroom washbasin, throwing angry handfuls of cold tap water at herself and then drinking half a pint of tepid spring water from a plastic bottle and brushing her teeth with a violence that made her gums bleed.
Just calm down. Jane’ll be getting off the bus in about ten minutes; you can’t let her see you like this.
In the bedroom, she dressed in the quietly secular black jumper and skirt, slotted her clerical collar under her dark-brown curls.
Stop it!
Before the open window overlooking the mellowed, red-cobbled village square, she knelt to pray. Pressing her palms flat together, sandwiching the heat between them. Stilling her mind, entering the inner temple, before whispering into the Silence.
Stop. You’re sounding resentful. You’re whingeing.
She knelt in silence for several minutes, waiting for the right tone, the right level. Waiting for the calm. But, to her anguish, her senses began to fill up with the pulpy essence of the foetid cider cellar, the organist’s sweating face. Sweat and rotting apples; how was she ever going to bring herself to talk to that bloody man again?
Sure. Reluctantly, she stood up. The odd thing was, she’d never seen a cider mill at work, only the static exhibits at the Bulmer’s Museum in Hereford. She’d never smelt the powerful aroma, although she’d read about it. Never experienced the moment when the press came down on the cloth-rolled pulp and the first juice burst out like—
A bus juddered to a stop on the edge of the square; through the open window she heard chattering and laughter.
Jane’s bus.
Merrily stood the suitcase in the centre of the room together with the bin liner and three cardboard wine boxes from Sainsbury’s to put the rest of the stuff in. She dashed into the bathroom, started to drag a comb through her tangled hair, but it snagged and she gave up and ran out of the Woolhope Suite, down the stairs and into the square, to grab hold of Jane before she tramped back to an empty vicarage.
The kids on the square were separating slowly, school shirts and blouses pulled out of waistbands, gestures of slovenly cool. No sign of Jane. One of the older boys spotted Merrily and nudged his mate and they smiled slyly, and Merrily thought, Jesus, is there no end to this?
