The Wine of Angels

He went to the bar. He ordered a Perrier, carried it over to the window and stood there and watched the beautiful Alison Kinnersley, in a low-cut, wine-coloured velvet dress he didn’t recognize, flashing smiles across a table at her lover, and he felt no longing.

Where he’d thought he’d be feeling ridiculous, in fact he felt controlled. It was a strange and powerful sensation, everything now tightly wrapped around this deep and focused curiosity. Wild. Exhilarating. And, in the garb of a church minister, entirely and ironically unexpected.

He stood there, by the long, floral curtains, the opulent scene before him glimmering with artificial candlelight from the oak-pillared walls, and he looked at Alison Kinnersley, as though he was seeing her for the first time and saw that she was focused, too. Every smile she flung at Bull-Davies had a weight of history behind it. Or was he imagining that because of what he now knew?

He went on looking at Alison Kinnersley, whose name just happened to be the name of a straggling village in North Herefordshire which you might pick off a map and think how solid and convincing it would sound as a surname.

He went on looking at Alison Kinnersley but he thought about the Reverend Merrily Watkins.

Look. She’d held the dog collar to his throat. It’ll work. This is the only way. It’ll work.

She’d seemed exhilarated by it, fussing around, attending to details.

She was very lovely. He only wished she hadn’t seen Lol Robinson at his most pathetic.

Alison and Bull-Davies finished their drinks together and stood up together and walked together through a double doorway under a sign saying dining room.

In his strange, controlled way, the Rev. Sandy Locke followed them.

Where Lol Robinson would have hung around outside in the bar, hoping she’d need to go to the toilet, the Rev. Sandy Locke would take the seat right next to Alison.

Controlled?

Jesus, could it possibly last?

‘You are happy to discuss this in front of your little daughter?’ Richard Coffey said.

He wore a black leather waistcoat over a grandad vest. A rather good plaster facsimile of Michelangelo’s David flaunted itself on a plinth beside his chair. On the flock-papered walls were some artfully lit but fairly blatant black and white photos of naked men.

‘If there’s anything I don’t understand,’ Merrily said, ‘I’m sure she can explain it to me on the way home.’

Coffey didn’t smile. The truth was, she hadn’t been prepared to leave the kid alone in the vicarage. You might be able to lock Ethel the cat in the kitchen, but Jane disappeared too easily these days.

Jane sat on a cushion on a stone arm of the fireplace and gazed at Stefan Alder who shared the sofa with Coffey. Still young enough to think it just needed the right woman to come along to straighten him out. Merrily’s view, looking at Coffey’s bare, steely hawsered arms and his patchwork face, inclined more towards the right younger man. But to business.

‘Reason I wanted to see you, Mr Coffey, was the telephone call I had from The Sunday Times.’

‘Ah.’ Coffey leaned an arm along the back of the sofa, behind Stefan. ‘Dear Craig.’

‘I presumed he got his initial information from you.’

Coffey scowled. ‘He did not.’

The light in the lodge’s cubical sitting room was fading and dusty. The room was furnished with reproduction statuary and thousands of books. No TV, only a small, portable stereo. Nothing valuable because the house was left empty for long periods, Coffey had explained, and who wanted to steal books? Not that their despicable neighbour, Bull-Davies, would do anything to stop them.

‘If you’re looking for Craig’s informant,’ Coffey said, ‘I suggest you look no further than the festival committee. And I suspect that under the present circumstances one can rule out the unfortunate Cassidy.’

Merrily sat up even straighter than her pine Shaker-style chair demanded. ‘You mean Child?’

Controversy certainly attracts attention, Dermot had said, bemoaning the poor attendance, in real terms, on Day One. But this was the wrong kind of controversy.

Coffey pursed his thin lips and raised his tightly plucked eyebrows and said nothing.

‘For a quick blast of publicity for the festival?’ It made sense; if the festival flopped now that Dermot was in charge, after his frequent disparaging of Terrence Cassidy, there’d be enough egg on his face to whip up mayonnaise.

Coffey leaned his head on his arm. ‘Merrily, as I think I told you, I’m a thorough sort of chap, and I don’t do business with unknowns. I had them all checked out, with particular reference to precisely what they were doing before they came to Ledwardine ... or came back, in Child’s case. Cassidy? Small beer, a polytechnic poseur who inherited his father’s house and decided on a new start. Child. Hmm. Well. Stefan calls him the Goblin, don’t you, Steffie?’

‘Goblins being the entities that enter your house at night and mess up your possessions,’ Stefan said. He’d looked quite pleased to see them when he first opened the door. As though there was tension between Coffey and him.

‘He’s a failure, basically,’ Coffey said. ‘Started out as a music teacher at some comprehensive school, then decided his talents were worth more. Worked with an early-music ensemble and composed, in the loosest sense, the music for a television costume drama which was so awful they screened it around midnight. Been trading on it ever since, with diminishing returns. Child’s a loser.’

‘But a rather poor loser, I’m afraid,’ Stefan said.

‘A poisonous loser. Man’s so embittered he doesn’t care who goes down. So, if you’re looking for the designer, if not the actual distributor, of, for example, certain posters branding you a person of satanic bent, you might begin by checking out the equipment at the festival office.’

Merrily was shocked. ‘I can’t believe that.’

‘Of course you can’t, he’s a charming little man.’

Jane said, ‘Posters?’

‘Juvenile trivia, flower.’

‘Only, Dean Wall and Gittoes and those hairballs were coming out with all that Satanism stuff at Colette’s party.’

‘Who?’ said Coffey.

‘Just some yobs from Jane’s school’

‘Ah, well, schoolboys can be terribly useful,’ Coffey said, with a certain insouciance. ‘They always need money. And it doesn’t have to be a great deal.’

Stefan glared at him.

‘But why would he?’ Merrily said. ‘What have I ever done to him?’

‘I really wouldn’t know. Perhaps not enough. Who can say?’

‘Christ,’ Merrily said.

She couldn’t look at any of them and stared out of the window, across a few semi-wooded fields to the village. Between the lodge’s Victorian Gothic mullions, smudges of evening cloud had blunted the church steeple.

After no more than about seventy-five minutes, the Queen’s Arms Quartet were showing signs of strain, and the tubby, beaming guy – Dermot Child? – arose to lead a standing ovation. Seriously undeserved, Lol thought, having detected more than a few bum notes. Still, it was at this moment – when they all stood up, with an assortment of creaks from an assortment of chairs – that Alison glanced, for the first time, directly to her left and met the eyes of the Rev. Sandy Locke.

It was worth it. For a second, her face was frozen tight, before it imploded into a gasp. Another first. Maybe the gasp was even a tiny scream, but it was lost among the spurious applause, like a leaf in a gale.

Lol clapped harder so that he swayed against Alison. He put his cheek next to hers and in his jolly vicar voice he said, ‘Alison Young, as I live and breathe.’

Stefan Alder began to look excited, leaned eagerly towards Merrily. ‘So what are you proposing?’