The Wine of Angels

innocent. In the end he looked much more like one than Mum, but then Mum never really had.

Before they left for Coffey’s place, Mum had told her the whole story about Lol and Karl Windling and the young girls in the hotel – which she’d found so awful and so barely credible that she wanted to go and find these girls and their smug parents and tell them just what they’d done. As for that bastard Windling ...

On the CD, Lol was singing, the low, breathy voice solo with acoustic guitar, about being alone in the city in a cold January rain but not wanting to go home.

It made such horrifying sense. It made her want to cry. It made her wish she was old enough to marry him or something.

A police car rolled out of Church Street. The awful Howe would be hoping now, like Bella, that Colette was dead, turning it into a big case for an area like this. Dreaming of picking up Lol and shoving him into a little grey- walled room, like on The Bill, her and that Mumford asking him kind of nonchalantly what he’d done with the body. Telling him they just wanted to help him. That was what the police always did, they told you they just wanted to help you. But they were just in it for themselves. Like everybody was.

Except Mum.

‘Suppose they’ve got him?’ she said as they pulled into the vicarage drive.

‘If they’d got him,’ Mum said calmly, switching off the engine and the stereo, ‘I think they’d be waiting for us, too. I don’t see anybody, do you?’

‘Lol wouldn’t finger us.’

‘No,’ Mum said. ‘I don’t think he would.’

Inside the vicarage, she seemed to collapse. No sleep, not much food for over a day. Running on empty for too long. She was trying to open a can of sardines for Ethel, but the metal key thing snapped, and she just stood there in the kitchen and started to weep.

Somehow, the vicarage did this to her. The vastness of it, the emptiness, was far worse for Mum than it was for Jane, who still thought a big house was cool. Not as if it was haunted or anything. It just seemed to do Mum’s brain in. She’d been dynamite at the Upper Hall Lodge, pushing even the scary Coffey into a corner, getting what she wanted. And now, here she was, sobbing her heart out in her own kitchen, and Jane just knew she was thinking about Dad and what a balls they’d made of their marriage and everything and how stupid she’d been to think she could manage a parish and all the other stuff that came down on you when were exhausted in a place you hated.

‘Go to bed, Mum. Please go to bed. I’ll look after everything.’

‘I can’t. What about Lol?’

‘I’ll wait up for him. Please go to bed.’

Mum wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her jumper. ‘Sorry.’

‘You’re overtired.’ Jane eased the sardine can out of her hands.

‘I gave him a key,’ Mum said. ‘Didn’t I?’

‘I think you did. Don’t worry. Sleep.’

Mum looked at her, just about finding the energy for suspicion.

‘I’ll go up too,’ Jane assured her. ‘I won’t go out again, I promise.’

Not tonight, anyway. Got to prepare. Got to get it right.

There was a lounge, for residents only, with a TV set tuned to a film about surfing, with the sound down. A waitress served cocoa to two elderly couples at a window table.

Lol took a seat by the door. One of the elderly ladies smiled at him, and Lol said, ‘Good evening,’ in his soft but resonant vicar’s voice and sat, composed, his fingers loosely entwined.

She would come. She’d directed him here. Smiling and nodding pleasantly for the thirty seconds she’d been speaking to the Rev. Locke, smiling for the benefit of James Bull-Davies, who’d been getting drinks at the time. An actress. Every move she made powered by this low-burning, high-octane fury.

He saw that now. The Rev. Sandy Locke, one step removed from it all, seemed able to see so many things concealed from screwed-up, introverted Lol Robinson.

‘Two eggs,’ one of the elderly men said. ‘Bacon, sausage, liver, onions, black pudding, chips. Nine ninety- five.’ He sat back, triumphant. ‘Inclusive of sweet.’

‘The toilets weren’t clean, though,’ his wife said. ‘At least the toilets are clean here. And what’s more, what I always think is important in a hotel—’

She broke off as Alison glided in, both elderly ladies looking rather shocked when this blonde in the revealing dress went to sit next to the clergyman, the old men looking pleased.

‘Hi.’ Lol smiled. ‘Where did you tell him you were going?’

‘Powder my nose. Evidently, I bumped into someone I knew in the Ladies’, you know what women are like.’

‘I’m kind of learning,’ Lol said. ‘At last.’

‘He’ll find someone’s ear to bend. Won’t notice I’m missing for a while. As to that’ – Alison gestured at his dog collar – ‘I’m not going to ask.’

‘A drink?’

‘No time.’

‘So you talk,’ Lol said. ‘And I’ll listen. I won’t interrupt.’ He felt like he was hovering, very steadily. Everything delicately balanced but, for the first time in his adult life, he was keeping the balance.

Alison shook her hair back. ‘I suppose Devenish told you, God rest her heathen soul’

‘No, it was insight.’

‘From you?’

He grinned. She couldn’t touch him tonight. He lowered his voice. He took this great leap in the dark.

‘I can’t help wondering what James would say, if he knew he’d been fucking his ... what? Half-sister?’

She remained entirely calm. ‘You going to tell him?’

Jesus. It’s right.

‘Probably not,’ he said.

In the darkness of her too-big bedroom, Merrily knelt to pray by her too-big bed.

‘I, er ... I don’t know what I’m asking for. Strength, certainly. Yeah. I’m not strong. But You know that.’

She went quiet. Receptive. Opening up a space in her heart. Wanting very much to receive something, if it was only an upsurge of blessed scepticism. She didn’t want to believe in bloody ghosts and fairies.

In the silence, there was no sense of blue or gold. Was that itself a sign? Was the lack of response, the sense of praying into a black void, an indication that she should harden herself against phoney mysticism, spurious superstition? She felt distantly angry at God for never giving it to you straight.

Of course, it was Lol himself who’d pointed her at Lucy.

Mentioning, when Alison had talked about the Bull-Davies tradition of keeping horses, that James’s old man seemed to have carried on the equine tradition purely for a steady supply of stable girls.

The first chance she had this morning, Alison had been off to pursue this angle with Lucy Devenish, good friend of Patricia Young who’d slaved in the Bull stables in the early sixties.

‘And came home pregnant to Swindon,’ Alison said. ‘Steadfastly refusing to name the father. My gran was very supportive, although God knows she had enough on her plate at the time, with Grandfather failing fast. He died, in fact, the night after I was born, so we came back to a house of mourning, Mother and I.’

The waitress returned and, evidently thinking the minister was a hotel guest, asked if they would like anything. Lol ordered coffee, figuring this was going to take longer than Alison imagined.

‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that Lucy mentioned anything to me about her friend being pregnant. I don’t think she knew. She said she’d warned her to get out of Upper Hall and she’d taken the advice.’

‘You’re right, Devenish didn’t know about the pregnancy. She said this morning that that was what she was afraid of. My mother would come to her in tears, asking what could she do when she needed the job and the money. In the end, Devenish gave her some to get away. Which was kind. But too late. No, she didn’t know about a baby. How did you?’

Lol explained, without mentioning Merrily, about the book in the box. The word Young and then Alison. How he’d kept looking at it and puzzling and then remembered the name, Patricia Young. All those weeks of agonizing over why she left him, and then this moment of blinding certainty. Intuition.