The Wine of Angels (48 page)

‘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?’

Bella laughed. Her side window was wound down and her elbow rested casually on the ledge. ‘What could I possibly have against people who get paid about twice as much as me for working less than half as hard? I love those guys.’

There was no other traffic in sight in either direction, and when they rounded a bend and came upon the carnage in the road, Bella was doing over seventy.

‘But where
is
he?’ Merrily said. ‘Where’s he gone? What evidence have you got that he was even here, that he even exists, that you didn’t make him up?’

‘Jane saw him,’ Lol said.

‘When?’ It was nearly lunchtime. Time Jane was making a reappearance. It no longer seemed an entirely good thing for Jane to be out there, despite the police on the streets.

‘She came into the shop this particular afternoon ... to ask about Wil Williams. I ... asked her to mind the shop while I ... went and hid.’

‘Hid.’

‘Upstairs.’

Nobody, Merrily thought, would make that up.

‘She could see I was scared and she was having fun with that. Like building him up as a drug dealer or something. She seems to have ... quite an active imagination.’

‘You’re not wrong.’

‘So I told her to forget all about him. I said he was just a guy it was hard to get out of your hair. And to tell Colette to keep out of his way too.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Merrily said. ‘You’re not big on child psychology, are you?’

‘Sorry.’

‘So here she is – hypothetically – on the cottage doorstep at two in the morning. This is a girl who’d really quite like to get laid tonight – Jane said that. What happens? He invites her in?’

‘Or he says, why don’t I give you a lift home? You shouldn’t be out on your own on a dark night like this. And – I know this guy – once he had her in the car, he’d just keep on driving.’

Merrily thought about this. ‘All right. We’ll wait till Jane comes back and we’ll talk it over with her. She’s had time to think about things. Several things, I hope. And then perhaps we’ll both go and see Howe.’

‘She’d only split us up, question us separately. That’s what they do.’

‘She couldn’t,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m not a suspect.’

‘You’re an accessory.’

Merrily lit a cigarette. She said, ‘It’s at times like these when I usually suggest we kneel down together and pray for guidance.’

‘You’re not serious,’ Lol said.

‘It’s what I do,’ Merrily said.

‘I’d forgotten.’

Outside, across on the square, a brass band began to play.

32

Bastard God

B
ELLA SPUN THE
wheel, hand over hand over hand, and the brakes and the tyres screamed and the hedge burst out at them from the wrong side of the road.

‘
Shiiiiiiiiit!
’

Bella shrieking as they were torn across a tangle of branches and thorns with a grating noise rising to a high, thin whine like a scythe on a sharpening wheel.

And ‘
Shiiiiiit!
’ again, and a wing mirror snipped away as Jane lurched against Bella, all the breath kicked out of her, and the windscreen was full of slapping branches before the radio car seemed to wrench itself out of the hedge, hit the tarmac again with a clanging jolt.

The engine coughed once and stalled.

Jane wasn’t aware of losing consciousness, but she seemed to awake into a deep, uncanny stillness, during which she could only think about that newspaper picture of her dad’s car, balled like paper, with him and his secretary and lover, Karen, all mashed up together inside.

She became aware of a distant voice: Bella saying, almost calmly, ‘Got to get out. We’ve got to get out of here.’

The voice repeating itself over and over again, but that was probably only in Jane’s head because Bella was saying now, ‘Are you all right? Are you all right, Jane?’

Jane’s mind was searching back through thirty seconds of snapshot memories for the horrific reason Bella had braked and swerved and they’d come off the road.

She sat up. The car was full of twigs and leaves. The recorder had fallen on to her trainers and she pulled one foot from underneath it, feeling for the door-pull. It still worked, but the door wouldn’t open.

‘Can’t get out my side,’ Bella said. Her velvet hat had come off and there were twigs in her hair and her face was raked with blood.

‘Hang on.’ Jane turned herself round, wedged both shoulders against the passenger door, her feet up against the handbrake. Heaved backwards, and the door sprang open and she slid out, clawing wildly at the air. Bella grabbed her hands before she could hit the tarmac. Let her sink down gently to the road.

Bella was easing herself out of the car as Jane struggled to her feet. She saw the car was side-on to the road, blocking one narrow carriageway and half of the other. The steeple of Ledwardine Church prodded out of some trees about half a mile away. Bella leaned back against the car, put a tentative hand to her face.

‘Oh, shit,’ Bella said. Jane remembered the window had been wound all the way down on the driver’s side, Bella leaning an elbow out, offering a bare face to the slashing twigs.

‘Jesus, my whole face is on fire. I’m gonna be disfigured for life. Still ...’ She smiled wanly at Jane through the streaks of blood. ‘You’re OK. And we’re not dead, are we?’ She pushed her hands through her hair, as though feeling for fractures. ‘And it’s not as if ... Oh no.’

She sagged against the car, and they looked at each other, remembering. There was a white, almost wintry sun now, in a sky like tinfoil. Jane didn’t seem to be hurt at all, no cuts, no scratches, no aches, except for an ankle where the recorder had fallen. But she felt sick with dread, remembering what had been in the road. What was now concealed by the radio car, side-on against the traffic, except there was none, no vehicles in sight, no sounds of traffic, the road clear in both directions. This was the straight stretch into Ledwardine from Madley and few people came this way on a Saturday.

Jane said softly, Til look.’

‘No.’ Bella stood up stiffly. ‘You stay there.’

But they knew they were both going. They went slowly around the car, taking different routes to show they weren’t scared, Jane round by the boot, Bella by the bonnet.

Somewhere in the car, a phone bleeped. Neither Bella nor Jane looked back.

Jane saw the dead eyes of the ewe first. The ewe lay in a lump at her feet, like you sometimes came upon them dead in fields, bloodlessly dead for no apparent reason. Sheep seemed able to leave life behind in an instant, without suffering, without a thought. Poor sheep. They should die in grass, not on tarmac because of stupid farmers too mean to put in proper stock-proof fences. ‘Poor sheep,’ Jane said aloud, as though, by focusing all her sorrow on the ewe, there would be nothing more.

‘Oh Christ,’ Bella said.

There was some blood where she stood. Though not much of it. The blood was over a yard from the sheep, where there was another hump, a black and white checked blanket thrown over something. The blood was seeping from underneath the blanket.

Jane stared at it, rejecting it. It was a blanket. There was nothing underneath it. It was a familiar pattern. It was just a blanket.

‘Please,’ she said, feeling her eyes bulge, her lips already stretching in pain and shock. ‘
Please ...
’

‘Don’t look,’ Bella said. ‘Let me.’

But Jane was already bending down and lifting the hem. Out of the corner of an eye, she could see a wheel in the hedge.

Jane looked down. Kept on looking.

Under the summer-fine wool, the old warrior’s head lay in profile on the road. The lips closed under the hooked nose, one eye wide open, as blank as the ewe’s. The face weathered and reddened by the many years of wind, and now by sticky blood.

When she’d come off her moped, the light, summer poncho had been thrown over her head.

Bella was back in the car. Jane could hear the tight little bleeps as her fingers stabbed at the mobile phone.

‘No,’ Jane said. ‘No.’

She pulled the poncho away, sank down to the tarmac. She didn’t know what to do. She was sure Lucy was breathing. She had to be breathing. She put her cheek against Lucy’s breast. That was a heartbeat, wasn’t it? She didn’t know what do.

She looked up.

The sky wore a remote, uncaring sheen.

Through the blurred screen of her tears, Jane screamed into the mindless, heartless, self-satisfied face of her mother’s bastard God.