The Wine of Angels

she do a thing like that?’

‘Become a priest? God knows.’

‘Grief? Like medieval widows used to go into a nunnery?’

‘Definitely not. It started before he died, anyway. Like, I know she got pretty friendly with our local vicar and his wife – this was when my dad ... when they were going through a difficult patch over a few things. And she started helping this guy with his parish stuff, advising people with problems. She’s pretty smart. And then it just seemed she was reading the lessons in church and stuff like that, and it just sort of crept up, and one day it was like, Jane, we need to have a little chat, Mummy’s going to train for a special new job. I was about nine.’

‘Your dad was alive then?’

‘Yeah. He got killed in a car crash. But he was alive when she decided to go for it. Hey ... you’re not planning to use any of this, are you?’

‘Me? No way. How did your dad feel about it?’

‘He was seriously pissed off about it. But things weren’t good between them by then, anyway.’

She watched the countryside go past, views she’d seen a hundred times, fields of sheep and cows. But it all looked different today. Like it had a pulse.

It was really weird, Bella asking about Mum, why she’d done it. Because there had to be something, didn’t there? Or there would be with her. It wouldn’t be like, Oh, I like helping people but I couldn’t cut it as a nurse, so I’ll be a vicar, that’s cool. Like there was the problem with Dad, things he was doing that she thought maybe she ought to like atone for. But that’s not enough, is it?

Realizing she wouldn’t have thought, even a few weeks ago, that there would need to be anything else because the word spiritual didn’t mean much until she was having long talks with Lucy. Until after she got pissed on cider and fell asleep in Powell’s orchard and looked up.

‘This the turning?’ Bella said.

‘What? Oh ... Oh, yeah.’ The black and white pub was up ahead. Vehicles including a police car on its parking area. Not far around the corner, Bella had to pull up for a hurriedly erected sign saying, police, road closed.

‘Oh my God,’ Jane said. ‘There really is something.’

Suddenly, she didn’t want to get out of the car.

‘All right,’ Merrily said, taking control. ‘You can’t go back to Blackberry Lane. They’ll nick you. Annie Howe will not believe you. She’ll make your life unbearable. Until they find Colette or some ... some other direction, you should stay here. The church does this sort of thing. It’s called sanctuary.’

‘It’s called being an accessory,’ Lol said.

Merrily laughed. She didn’t know why.

‘Listen, you have enough problems,’ Lol said. ‘The longer I’m missing, the more the finger’s going to point my way. If they find out the vicar’s hiding me, what’s that going to look like?’

‘Priest-in-charge,’ Merrily said.

In charge? Five minutes ago, she’d taken a phone call from Uncle Ted who’d informed her that, in view of her illness, they’d organized a locum for Sunday, a retired rector from Pembridge, Canon Norman Gemmell. Only too glad to step into the breech, old Norman. Merrily, who had not been consulted, had suggested Ted telephone Norman immediately to say that it wouldn’t, after all, be necessary to iron his surplice. Like the fallen jockey needs to get back into the saddle, the crashed pilot back behind the joystick, she had to get up in that pulpit, show to the congregation of doubters a face washed clean of vomit.

‘If I quit, I quit,’ she told Lol. ‘But I’m not slinking out the back way. And nobody tells me who I accommodate in my vicarage.’

She saw he was looking at her with something verging on awe. She sat down, reached for cigarettes.

‘Lol, do you never feel you’ve been pushed around once too often?’

‘The problem is sorting out who’s pushing you around because it serves their purposes or it’s fun and who’s genuinely trying to help you.’

And he’s been pushed around by the best, she thought. Alison, this Windling guy, Lucy Devenish.

‘That’s too complicated for me,’ she said. ‘But if you ever think I’m pushing, you tell me, OK?’

The phone rang again in the hall. News travelled fast in Ledwardine. It was Dermot Child. He was delighted to hear she was so much better. He thought he just ought to mention – but, of course, everyone would understand if she still felt a little too frail – that she was to have said a few words at this afternoon’s opening ceremony. Poor old Terrence had had her down for two-thirty.

‘I’ll be there,’ Merrily said, not letting herself think.

It was that word frail that did it.

She put the phone down, went back into the kitchen, found Lol looking no less worried.

‘What if it was Karl?’ he said. ‘He was drunk, he was angry, and he’s not there any more.’

‘Oh.’ She sat down opposite him. ‘If Colette came to his door – your door – at two in the morning, how would he react?’

‘Like it was his birthday,’ Lol said.

Bella pulled the recording gear from the well by Jane’s feet. ‘If you come, you keep quiet, OK?’

‘I think I’ll stay here.’

Bella flashed her a look of concern. ‘She really is a good friend of yours, isn’t she?’

‘We go back,’ Jane said. They went back less than a month; it felt like half a lifetime.

‘Stay cool,’ Bella said. ‘It may not be.’

Jane sat and watched her stride boldly towards the police barrier, clutching the recording gear. The four- wheel-drive had pulled up behind them, and Bella was joined by the other reporter, Chris, and a photographer. A uniformed constable appeared, making these negative wiping gestures with his arms, but the photographer started taking pictures and Bella and Chris marched right up to the barrier.

Jane couldn’t see, from where the car was parked, what was happening the other side. She was thinking about that faraway night in the orchard. Colette saying, I often come here.

And Jane had said, Aren’t you scared?

And Colette had turned sly. You mean of the ghost of Edgar Powell? Hey, listen, he’s been seen. Old Edgar Powell, the headless farmer. All aglow and hovering about nine inches off the ground.

Colette hadn’t been scared of the ghost of Edgar Powell or anybody else. She thought it was all a joke. And yet – and this had occurred to Jane when she was giving Bella that spoof interview on tape – despite being a cool, city chick with a professed disdain for the countryside and wildlife and all that, Colette was secretly fascinated by the orchard. Compelled, kind of seduced. I often come here, she’d admitted, pissed. Before forcing Jane to look up into the branches. And then, when Jane’s reaction had been ... well, not what she’d expected, it must have hardened into a desire to really know about this. Giving Jane the third degree outside the chip shop, giving her the Hazey Jane album.

Colette must have gone again and again to that orchard, drawn by something she couldn’t explain, that the cool chick in her sneered at but something deeper in her perceived as being sexy as hell.

And when something happened, it happened to Jane.

Bella was coming back, with Chris and the photographer, Chris smacking a fist into a palm. There was something. Jane tensed as Bella got into the car, handed her the tape machine.

‘What?’ Jane said. ‘What.

Bella started the engine. ‘They won’t give us anything. They’re holding a Press conference at four, at Hereford Police Station. They’ve found something, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t a body. No sign of a meat wagon or anything. People in plastic suits, though. Chris is going to hang on here for half an hour, see if there’s anything. I’ll have to shoot back, grab some actuality of the opening of the festival in case the parents come out for it.’

‘What do you think it is?’

‘I don’t know. Bastards. I’ll have to put over a “mystery surrounds” piece, and then the telly’ll be on to it. Bastards.’

Bella reversed the car into the entrance to the King’s Oak car park and pointed it back towards Hereford and Ledwardine.

Jane said, ‘What have you got against the TV?’