The Wine of Angels

And then there was Alison. Alison was a friend of one of the nurses at the hospital, who’d become a friend of Lol’s and kept in touch. Alison was the first girlfriend he’d had in a long, long time who was younger than him. So Alison was progress. She also made Lol realize he wasn’t such a young person any more, and where had it gone, his youth?

Missing years. You never make up for missing years. But he’d made it through to the other side of something. Unlike Nick Drake and Robert Johnson, he had not died, although there’d been a period when the thought of it hadn’t frightened him too much.

Listen, Alison had said – this beautiful creature, too beautiful to entirely believe in – listen, why don’t we get out of here?

They’d found the cottage the very next day. Like it was meant, Lol said, and something about the way he said it made Merrily wonder. She found herself thinking of Alison. On the square at night with an upper-class drunk calling her a whore, a slinky, slinky, whore. And that morning in the church. James is full of shit, I thought I should tell you that.

What are you full of, Alison?

She stood up. ‘Let’s have some more tea, Lol’

He looked at her. He nodded. He didn’t ask her if she believed him, and because of that she found she did.

On the square, a TV cameraman was unpacking his video gear. The local radio woman snorted. ‘Bollocks.’

‘Bella ...’

The radio woman turned towards a man leaning out of the window of a chunky, blue four-wheel-drive thing. He beckoned her over. Jane followed, not sure why.

‘You know where King’s Oak Corner is, Bella?’ the man in the four-wheel-drive asked.

‘Maybe. What for?’

‘Developments,’ the man in the four-wheel-drive said.

‘Oh yeah?’ The radio woman hugged her recording kit, looked unconvinced.

The man held up a mobile phone. ‘I know a man with a police scanner. He reckons there’s some interest in King’s Oak Corner. Just if you’re going that way, Bella, my darling, we could follow you, and don’t say I never do you any favours.’

‘Yeah, all right.’ Bella nodded towards the cameraman, who’d met up with this sassy-looking girl in a long, black mac. ‘Be casual. Don’t want the circus, do we?’

He nodded, and the four-wheel-drive crawled to the edge of the cobbles. Bella made a play of standing around and looking at her watch before making her way to the radio car.

Where Jane was waiting for her.

‘OK, if I come with you?’

‘Certainly not,’ Bella said.

‘She’s my best friend. Colette.’

‘Sounded like it. I bet you don’t even know what she looks like.’

Jane stepped out of the way of a troupe of jingling morris dancers alighting from a minibus. Several of them were laughing at something, evidently unaware of anything going on apart from the launch of the Ledwardine Festival.

‘Please,’ Jane said.

‘We’re not supposed to take members of the public in this.’ Bella unlocked the radio car with a bleeper. ‘BBC regulations. Sorry.’

‘Oh, well, that’s OK.’ Jane sighed. ‘I suppose I could ask those TV people.’

The morris dancers headed up the steps to the Black Swan. There was a muted cheer from inside.

‘All right, you evil little bitch,’ said Bella. ‘Get in. But if they’ve found a body, you keep well out of the way or we’ll both be stuffed.’

31 Accessory

OF THE THREE roads close to Ledwardine, the B road, in the west, was the quietest. It was an old road which had been rerouted, straightened and widened, taking a strip off the great orchard and dividing two farmhouses, including the Powells’, from the village. A mile out of Ledwardine, spectacular views opened up, across the lush, quilted Wye Valley to the Black Mountains on the Welsh border.

‘It’s beautiful, sure,’ Bella said, ‘but not so terrific as a news area. Well, not usually anyway.’

It was clear that Bella was secretly hoping Colette was dead. Jane thought you must really hate yourself for that, if you were a reporter or an ambitious detective – wishing for something really awful to happen to somebody while you just happened to be on the spot.

‘I don’t really work here,’ Bella said. ‘I’m on what they call an attachment. I was in Manchester for two years, then London for a bit, but I was a naughty girl and it was either this or back into researching or out. Six months, then they’ll review my position, as we say. So how far’s this King’s Oak Corner?’

‘Hang on,’ said Jane, ‘I thought you knew.’

‘Do I hell. I did bloody well to make it here from Hereford. If I’d said I didn’t know where it was, Chris might’ve clammed up.’

‘So how would you have found it if I hadn’t been with you?’

‘Stopped and asked somebody, I expect. But you do know, don’t you, chuck?’

‘There’s a pub called the King’s Oak about two miles on, where you turn left. We go past it on the school bus.’

‘Sounds good to me.’ Bella speeded up.

King’s Oak Corner. It was a long way from the orchard, wasn’t it? Perhaps the message the guy had picked up on his police scanner related to something else entirely. Because it was a long way from the orchard.

In Jane’s mind, an old, withered apple rolled along the snowy-petalled orchard floor to her feet.

She gave her head a brisk shake. ‘What do you think they might have found ... if not ... you know?’

‘Search me. Chris’s mate could’ve got it wrong, but at least it gets me out of bloody Ledwardine for the big opening ceremony. If there are no developments on the missing girl or she gets found alive, I’m supposed to put together a package on the festival as well, yawn yawn. What I want is just to tie it into the main story ... festival goes ahead despite missing girl drama. Rather than have to interview the little fat guy about his choral work, et cetera. What’s she really like, bit of a sod?’

‘Colette? She’s OK.’

‘Oh, so you do know her?’

‘Yeah.’

‘She got a boyfriend?’

‘Nobody regular.’

‘What about you, Jane? Gonna stick around and shack up with a farmer or get out soon as you can?’

‘I don’t know.’ Bella was pretty direct; Jane could relate to that. ‘I don’t really know what I want to do. What’s your job like?’

‘Job’s fine. It’s some of the people you have to work for. What’s your old man do?’

‘He was a lawyer. He’s dead.’

‘Oh. Sorry, chuck.’

‘And my mother’s a priest.’

‘Really?’ Bella glanced sideways at Jane. ‘Hey, hold on ... bloody hell, Merrily—’

‘Watkins.’

‘Well, well. How d’you feel about that?’

‘Mixed.’

‘I’ve only seen her picture in the paper, but she looked like an otherwise normal person. Attractive. Why’d