'No?'

'It was quite dull, actually. People were just dancing and stuff. And drinking Coke.'

'Why did they all come outside?'

'Fresh air, I suppose.'

'Oh. I understood there was some dancing going on out here.'

'No, not really. People were just kind of wandering off. It was no big deal'

'Wasn't Colette trying to ... you know ... get them going?'

'No, she's not like that. She's very quiet. I don't think she really wanted a party. It was just kind of expected. Normally, she liked, er, reading. And going for walks. Very interested in wildlife and, er, flowers. That sort of thing.'

'So what do you think's happened to her?'

'Well, knowing Colette, she probably went off somewhere with a friend to get away from it all. For cocoa or something. Stayed the night.'

'Oh.' The reporter switched off her machine. 'Well. Thanks, Jane.' Turned and walked off towards the radio car on the square. 'Thanks a fucking bunch,' Jane heard.

Merrily tried to remember if she'd read about it at the time, but as Hazey Jane were hardly famous, it probably hadn't been widely reported.

'They said I was very lucky,' Lol said. 'It could easily have been rape.'

'It was rape, surely?' Merrily said. 'And how on earth did he persuade that girl not to give evidence, if this was her friend?'

Lol was silent for a moment. 'I don't know. I imagine he threw her around a bit and gave her some money. Karl thinks on his feet, even when he's stoned.'

'So you were alone in the dock. What did you get?'

'Probation.' He was looking down at the table.

She could see him fighting the tears. Eighteen years ago, and the wound was still wide open and oozing. Did she believe this? If it was true, it was hardly shocking when you considered that the alleged victim was not so much younger than the alleged criminal and probably emotionally more mature.

'I mean, I did it,' Lol said. 'I pleaded guilty. I had sex with an under-age girl. It was enough. In the eyes of God ... as they say'

'Who say?'

'My parents. Well, they're dead now. It was what they said at the time. Well, they didn't actually say it because neither of them ever spoke to me again. Only their minister. He spoke for them. And for God. As you priests do.'

'What denomination was this?'

'I can't remember. Big pink building, with posters outside.'

Merrily smiled.

'They'd caught religion in middle age. It just pushed everything else out. I was like a lodger by then. The old pictures of me as a kid all gone. Replaced by pictures of Jesus.'

'Only child?'

He nodded. 'But I'd stopped being their son in any real sense when I wouldn't go to their church. After they threw me out, they had my room ... cleansed.'

Merrily said, 'Lucy Devenish know about this?'

'Some. After that, I went a bit ...'

Gigging doesn't come easy when your last public appearance was in court. When your parents have thrown you out spawn of Satan and you're living in one room over a fish and chip shop in Swindon. And your music is stuck in a time warp and you keep dwelling on Nick Drake who was afraid of playing live and so never built up a following, so his records didn't sell and the black depression set in the 'Black-Eyed Dog' at the door, like the 'Hellhound on my Trail' of the 1930s blues singer Robert Johnson who was so shy they had to record him facing the wall and died at twenty-six, just like Nick Drake. And you're getting more and more confused and taking pills and you get it into your head that there's some dark virus in the music, passed from Johnson to Drake and maybe other people in between, and now it's in you.

The band fizzles out, as bands do. You're living alone in one room and a toilet. One day, Dennis Clarke, the drummer, comes to see you.

Suburban Dennis is appalled at the way you're living, the stuff you're taking, your hair unwashed, your eyes way back in your head where it's always night. And your current girlfriend, who picked you up in a pub, is nearly old enough to be your mother, almost certainly on the game, and she takes your money and brings you drugs. You're ill and she's making you worse.

The truth of it was blindingly obvious to Merrily.

'You were afraid of young girls, weren't you? You were probably even afraid of girls your own age in case they turned out to be younger than they said they were, right? You felt safe with this woman.'

Lol shrugged.

'Are you still afraid of them, Lol? Were you afraid of Jane? Even though you came into the house with her last night? Went up to her room?'

Lol's fist tightened.

It was this Dennis who realized Lol had had a breakdown. Dennis who got him into the hospital. Dennis and a mate of his who was a doctor. Voluntary, of course. Lol was a voluntary patient. No kicking and screaming, no straitjackets. On the other hand, no analysis. No therapy that you couldn't swallow with a glass of water. But he was glad of the rest.

And time passed.

'How long?'

'Yeah, I know, I know. It's very easy for people on the outside to say you should have got yourself out. But you get very ... grateful. It's to do with people helping you. Stopping people helping you, that's the hard bit. Saying, no, I don't want help, I don't need your help. I'm all right, piss off. It was like Karl he helped me get through the court thing.'

'How did he do that, Lol?'

Lol sighed. 'He gave me stuff to make it so that it didn't matter.'

'Or so you didn't have second thoughts about implicating him. Was that how you got started? Was it heroin?'

'No. I don't know what it was. Well, I do. But that doesn't matter. It wasn't addiction, just reliance. That's different. I think. But the more you took, the less it mattered, sure. In hospital, they call it your medication.'

'God.'

'Can we skip the hospital? I did get out eventually. People helped. Dennis again. Then this sound-engineer we once worked with, Prof Levin, who was an alcoholic, nice guy, he put me in touch with Gary Kennedy, who was looking for a lyricist. So things looked up, money came in, quite a lot. Things were better.'

And then there was Alison. Alison was a friend of one of the nurses at the hospital, who'd become a friend of Lol's and kept in touch. Alison was the first girlfriend he'd had in a long, long time who was younger than him. So Alison was progress. She also made Lol realize he wasn't such a young person any more, and where had it gone, his youth?

Missing years. You never make up for missing years. But he'd made it through to the other side of something. Unlike Nick Drake and Robert Johnson, he had not died, although there'd been a period when the thought of it hadn't frightened him too much.

Listen, Alison had said this beautiful creature, too beautiful to entirely believe in listen, why don't we get out of here?

They'd found the cottage the very next day. Like it was meant, Lol said, and something about the way he said it made Merrily wonder. She found herself thinking of Alison. On the square at night with an upper-class drunk calling her a whore, a slinky, slinky, whore. And that morning in the church. James is full of shit, I thought I should tell you that.

What are you full of, Alison?

She stood up. 'Let's have some more tea, Lol'

He looked at her. He nodded. He didn't ask her if she believed him, and because of that she found she did.

On the square, a TV cameraman was unpacking his video gear. The local radio woman snorted. 'Bollocks.'

'Bella ...'

The radio woman turned towards a man leaning out of the window of a chunky, blue four-wheel-drive thing. He beckoned her over. Jane followed, not sure why.

'You know where King's Oak Corner is, Bella?' the man in the four-wheel-drive asked.

'Maybe. What for?'

'Developments,' the man in the four-wheel-drive said.

'Oh yeah?' The radio woman hugged her recording kit, looked unconvinced.

The man held up a mobile phone. 'I know a man with a police scanner. He reckons there's some interest in King's Oak Corner. Just if you're going that way, Bella, my darling, we could follow you, and don't say I never do you any favours.'

'Yeah, all right.' Bella nodded towards the cameraman, who'd met up with this sassy-looking girl in a long, black mac. 'Be casual. Don't want the circus, do we?'

He nodded, and the four-wheel-drive crawled to the edge of the cobbles. Bella made a play of standing around and looking at her watch before making her way to the radio car.

Where Jane was waiting for her.

'OK, if I come with you?'

'Certainly not,' Bella said.

'She's my best friend. Colette.'

'Sounded like it. I bet you don't even know what she looks like.'

Jane stepped out of the way of a troupe of jingling morris dancers alighting from a minibus. Several of them were laughing at something, evidently unaware of anything going on apart from the launch of the Ledwardine Festival.

'Please,' Jane said.

'We're not supposed to take members of the public in this.' Bella unlocked the radio car with a bleeper. 'BBC regulations. Sorry.'

'Oh, well, that's OK.' Jane sighed. 'I suppose I could ask those TV people.'

The morris dancers headed up the steps to the Black Swan. There was a muted cheer from inside.

'All right, you evil little bitch,' said Bella. 'Get in. But if they've found a body, you keep well out of the way or we'll both be stuffed.'

31.

Accessory OF THE THREE roads close to Ledwardine, the B road, in the west, was the quietest. It was an old road which had been rerouted, straightened and widened, taking a strip off the great orchard and dividing two farmhouses, including the Powells', from the village. A mile out of Ledwardine, spectacular views opened up, across the lush, quilted Wye Valley to the Black Mountains on the Welsh border.

'It's beautiful, sure,' Bella said, 'but not so terrific as a news area. Well, not usually anyway.'

It was clear that Bella was secretly hoping Colette was dead. Jane thought you must really hate yourself for that, if you were a reporter or an ambitious detective wishing for something really awful to happen to somebody while you just happened to be on the spot.

'I don't really work here,' Bella said. 'I'm on what they call an attachment. I was in Manchester for two years, then London for a bit, but I was a naughty girl and it was either this or back into researching or out. Six months, then they'll review my position, as we say. So how far's this King's Oak Corner?'

'Hang on,' said Jane, 'I thought you knew.'

'Do I hell. I did bloody well to make it here from Hereford. If I'd said I didn't know where it was, Chris might've clammed up.'

'So how would you have found it if I hadn't been with you?'

'Stopped and asked somebody, I expect. But you do know, don't you, chuck?'

'There's a pub called the King's Oak about two miles on, where you turn left. We go past it on the school bus.'

'Sounds good to me.' Bella speeded up.

King's Oak Corner. It was a long way from the orchard, wasn't it? Perhaps the message the guy had picked up on his police scanner related to something else entirely. Because it was a long way from the orchard.

In Jane's mind, an old, withered apple rolled along the snowy-petalled orchard floor to her feet.

She gave her head a brisk shake. 'What do you think they might have found ... if not ... you know?'

'Search me. Chris's mate could've got it wrong, but at least it gets me out of bloody Ledwardine for the big opening ceremony. If there are no developments on the missing girl or she gets found alive, I'm supposed to put together a package on the festival as well, yawn yawn. What I want is just to tie it into the main story ... festival goes ahead despite missing girl drama. Rather than have to interview the little fat guy about his choral work, et cetera. What's she really like, bit of a sod?'

'Colette? She's OK.'

'Oh, so you do know her?'

'Yeah.'

'She got a boyfriend?'

'Nobody regular.'

'What about you, Jane? Gonna stick around and shack up with a farmer or get out soon as you can?'

'I don't know.' Bella was pretty direct; Jane could relate to that. 'I don't really know what I want to do. What's your job like?'