Diminishing returns, EC on your back, quotas for this, quotas for that, a hundred forms to fill in, mad cow disease. Suicide figures are already ... Sorry. Bad memories.’
‘What? Oh.’
‘I seem to remember saying, “If you want an informal picture of village life, why not pop along to this wassailing thing?” Not quite what I had in mind. Awfully sorry, Merrily.’
She looked through the landing window, down into a small, square rose garden, where the pink and orange of the soil seemed more exotic than the flowers. Over a hedge lay the churchyard with its cosy, sandstone graves.
Oddly, that awful, public death hadn’t given her a single nightmare. In her memory it was all too surreal. As though violent death had been an optional climax to the wassailing and, as the oldest shooter in the pack, Edgar Powell had felt obliged to take it.
‘You know, standing in that orchard, covered with that poor old bloke’s blood, that was when I decided to go for it. I clearly remember thinking that nothing so immediate and so utterly shocking ever happened quite that close to me in Liverpool. That maybe, in some ways, this village could actually be the sharp end. I thought, am I going to wash off his blood and walk away?’
‘It always affects you more in the country.’ Ted came to stand beside her at the window. ‘Everything that happens. Because you know everybody.
‘That’s fair enough. Far as I’m concerned, belonging to the Church doesn’t have to involve coming to services.’
‘And you’ll find that hills and meadows are far more claustrophobic than housing estates. You see somebody coming across a twelve-acre field towards you, you can’t dodge into a bus shelter.’
‘Fine.’
Ted raised a dubious eyebrow. ‘And everybody gossips,’ he said. ‘For instance, they’ll all tell you Edgar Powell’d been handling that shotgun since for ever.’
‘Making it suicide?’
‘What it looks like, but they haven’t got a motive. Money worries? No more than the average farmer. Isolation? Hardly – not living on the edge of the village. Depression? Hard to say. Perhaps he’d just had enough. Or perhaps he simply wanted to ruin the Cassidys’ olde English soiree. Been a spiteful old bugger in his time.’
‘You
‘Anyway, Garrod Powell’s insisting it was an accident. Came to consult me about it. He’ll be telling the coroner the old chap was simply going soft in the head. Can’t blame him. Who wants a family suicide? I suggested he have a word with young Asprey, get something medical. But it could even be an open verdict.’
‘What’s that mean exactly, Uncle Ted?’
Merrily turned to find Jane sitting on the top stair, elbows on knees, chin cupped in her hands.
‘Means they can’t be entirely sure what happened, Jane,’ Ted said.
‘Wish I’d been there.’
Merrily rolled her eyes. Having made a point of leaving Jane at her mother’s when she’d come to do her bit of undercover surveillance prior to applying – or not – for the post. The kid would’ve given them away in no time.
‘Do you get many suicides in the village?’ Jane asked.
‘Not with audience-participation,’ Ted said dryly.
Merrily was thinking, half-guiltily, how she’d scrubbed and scrubbed at her face that night and had to throw away the old fake Barbour.
They stayed the night at the Black Swan, sharing a room. On the third floor, as it happened, but it was different in a hotel. The Black Swan, like all the major buildings in Ledwardine – with the obvious exception of the vicarage – had been sensitively modernized; the room was ancient but luxurious.
Jane was asleep about thirty seconds after sliding into her bed. Jane could slip into untroubled sleep anywhere. She’d accepted her father’s death with an equanimity that was almost worrying. A blip. Sean had lived in the fast lane and that was precisely where he died. Bang. Gone.
Sadder about the girl in the car with him. She could have been Jane in a few years’ time. Or Merrily herself, ten years or so earlier.
Too many thoughts crowding in, Merrily upended the pillow behind her, leaned into it and lit the last cigarette of the day. Through the deep, oak-sunk window, the crooked, picture-book roofs of the village snuggled into a soft and woolly pale night sky.
Perfect. Too perfect, perhaps. If you actually lived here, with roses round the door, what was there left to dream of?
‘How are things financially, now?’ Ted had asked in the lounge bar, after dinner.
Jane had mooched off into the untypically warm April evening to check out the village. And the local totty, she’d added provocatively.
‘Oh’ – Merrily drank some lager – ‘we get by. Sean’s debts weren’t as awesome as we’d been led to believe. And a few of the debtors seem less eager to collect than they were at first. I think it was meeting me. In the dog collar. It was like ... you know ... dangling a sprig of garlic in front of Dracula. I’m glad I met them. I don’t feel so bad about it now I know what kind of semi-criminal creeps they are. Jesus, what am I saying,
‘I won’t ask. But I did think he was being a little overambitious setting up on his own. Why didn’t you both come to me for some advice?’
‘You know Sean. Knew. Anyway, I blame myself. If I hadn’t got pregnant instead of a degree, it was going to be Super-lawyer and Lois-thing, defending the poor, serving the cause of real justice. Zap. Pow. But ... there you go. He was on his own, and with the responsibility of a kid and everything, he was floundering, and he got a little careless about the clients he took on. It’s a slippery slope. I wasn’t aware of the way things were going. Too busy being Mummy.’
‘You blame yourself for letting him get you pregnant?’ Ted raised helpless eyes to the ceiling. ‘Blame yourself for anything, won’t you, Merrily? Dangerous that, in a vicar.’
‘Priest-in-charge.’
‘Only a matter of time. Now Alf Hayden ... he never accepted the blame for anything. Act of God. Providence. His favourite words. Had us tearing our hair. But you can’t get rid of a vicar, can you? Once they’re in, they’re in and that’s that.’
‘Not any more. My contract’s for five years.’
‘Red tape,’ Ted said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Please, Uncle Ted. Don’t do anything ... anything else.’
‘You’re not feeling manipulated, are you?’
‘Of course not. Well ... maybe. A little.’
As if having a woman priest in the family wasn’t enough, her mother, from the safety of suburban Cheltenham, had been out of her mind when Merrily had gone as a curate to inner-city Liverpool, all concrete and drugs and domestic violence. Running youth clubs and refuges for prozzies and rent boys. Terrific, Jane had thought. Cathartic, Merrily had found.
While her mother was putting out feelers.
Good old Ted had come up with the goods inside a year. The vicar of Ledwardine was retiring. Beautiful Ledwardine, only an hour or so’s drive from Cheltenham. And Ted was not only senior church warden but used to be the bishop’s solicitor. No string-pulling, of course; she’d only get the job if she was considered up to it and the other candidates were weak ... which, at less than fifteen grand a year, they almost certainly would be.
‘You’ve had a stressful time,’ Ted said. He’d never asked her why she’d abandoned the law for the Church. It was evidently taken for granted that this was some kind of reaction against Sean going bent. ‘But you do feel right about this place now?’
‘I think so. And listen, don’t imagine I’ll be giving you an easy time.’
‘Ha. Alf was always far too apathetic to sustain a decent dispute. What did you have in mind?’
‘Well, you need toilets in that church for a start. I don’t care if it
