‘Can you cover your back and stick your neck out at the same time?’ Lol bent and kissed her, one hand pushing her face into his, the other hand…
‘Mmmmph…’ It suddenly struck her that there were no curtains in this room and one window overlooked Church Street.
‘You’ve gone stiff,’ Lol said.
She sat up. ‘You should talk.’
‘We could go upstairs, take some cushions. Merrily, people know…’
‘I need to get home. Jane’ll be back. Besides, if you’ve got to drive back to Knight’s Frome—’
‘I’m going to sleep here on my nice new sofa,’ Lol said. ‘There’s this guy from
‘He’s coming here?’
‘Prof didn’t want him poking round the studio. We’ve got Tom Storey in, mixing his album. Prof’s a very private producer, Tom hates the media. I won’t say a word about you, you know that.’
‘It shouldn’t be like this.’ Merrily stood up and straightened her sweater. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, there’s probably no real reason for…’
‘We’ll get there,’ Lol said.
Would they? Within a few weeks, when his intermittent tour was over, he was going to be living here permanently. She supposed that what the new-home cards on the window sill were saying was that it was time to stop being coy and covert.
‘Oh hell, Lol, let’s — I don’t know — put a notice in the window at the Eight till Late or something.’
‘Uh…’ Lol went over to the window where the cards were. ‘You should know about this.’
Handing her a folded paper. She took it to the hearth and opened it out. It wasn’t hard to read it by the firelight. Big letters.
FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK?
‘Oh.’ Not a universal welcome, then.
‘I’d have said it was somebody having a laugh,’ Lol said, ‘but I can’t think of anybody… I mean, it’s not that funny, is it?’
She refolded the paper, annoyed. ‘You might as well tell the guy from
‘Not in the context in which they’d run the story. It’d have to be from my side… the arrest, the loony bin. My Years of Hell. Now finding happiness at last, with a good woman in every sense, and letting it all come out in the music.’
‘God.’ Merrily shuddered. ‘Let me think about this.’
When she left, she went by the back door, reaching Church Street via the alley. Keeping to the shadows until she was approaching the square, where security lamps lit the front of the Black Swan and only two cars were still parked.
What was coming back was what Huw Owen had said.
He was right, of course. Deliverance was the Church’s secret service. Essentially low-level. Publicity was seldom helpful. No room at all for the cult of personality.
Maybe the Deliverance group/panel/circle/whatever was a good thing. Good for her. Prevent her becoming proprietorial. A question of sharing, Martin Longbeach had said.
Always painful lessons to be learned about yourself, your attitude.
So why was she deciding, as she padded quietly across the cobbled street to the vicarage, that she would not ring Nigel Saltash about tomorrow’s appointment with Mumford’s mother?
5
Saturday Sun
Nigel Saltash came to pick Merrily up at ten.
Jane spotted him from the landing window on her way down from her apartment in the attic, calling down the stairs.
‘He’s got one of those cool little BMW sports cars.’
Merrily widened her eyes. ‘Like… gosh.’
‘He’s getting out. He’s wearing jeans and a cream sports jacket that could be Armani. He looks a smooth old bastard, Mum.’
Merrily said nothing, stepping into her shoes at the bottom of the stairs, sliding her slippers under the hallstand. She was still feeling resentful, manipulated. What Saltash had done was phone Andy Mumford himself last night, saying he’d tried to call Merrily but she was out. Finding out the time of this morning’s proposed visit to Mumford’s mother and then leaving a message on Merrily’s machine suggesting he pick her up: no point in a convoy.
‘So how badly do you think he fancies you?’ Jane said.
‘He’s seventy-one, flower.’
‘The new dangerous age. They’re getting in as much sex as they can before it’s too late. Apparently, at that age they can only hold an erection for five minutes max, and it’s counting down all the time, did you know that?’
‘Oh, Jane…’
‘And, listen, you’ve got to stop calling me “flower”. You’ve been calling me “flower” since I was seven.’
‘I’ll try.’ Merrily pulled her coat from the peg. ‘What are you doing today?’
‘In the absence of his girlfriend, I’ll probably help Lol finish painting Lucy’s living room.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Jane peered down at her, hands on hips. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘The guy from
‘Oh, that is…’ Jane bounded downstairs. ‘That is like totally ridiculous. It was twenty years ago. He was a kid. And he was fitted up, and if the guy from
‘No smoke, flower. Just stay away until he’s gone, OK?’
‘Hah!’ Jane stopped, with an arm wrapped around the black oak post sunk between the flags like a tree stump at the foot of the stairs. ‘Now I understand. If the journalist sees me, Lol will have to explain whose daughter I am. And we can’t have that coming out, can we?’
Merrily sighed. ‘It’s a music magazine. They wouldn’t be interested anyway.’
‘Yeah, but doesn’t the same firm publish
‘Jane, please? Humour me?’
Feet crunched the gravel outside and the front door was rapped. Merrily unbolted the door, telling herself that some Deliverance teams worked like this all the time, in tandem with a bloody shrink.
At the Eight till Late, now the only worthwhile shop in Ledwardine, a partitioned strip along the side of the main window was full of handwritten notices.
PUPPIES. Border Collie/Lab cross. Good working strain. Parents can be seen. ?40… RESPECTABLE CLEANER NEEDED TWO DAYS A WEEK… MOUNTAIN BIKE, NEARLY NEW. EIGHTEEN GEARS.
That kind of stuff. Even the personal columns of the
This window was Jane’s last hope, anyway. She’d checked out the prayer board in the church. She’d even, for the first time ever, been through the parish register to see if, by chance, somebody had endorsed their marriage vows in the hand that had also scrawled VICERAGE.
She’d photocopied the poison-pen note before giving it back to Lol. OK, maybe it wasn’t that poisonous. It
