There was a police van outside the church, near a porch-type arrangement which was garlanded with flowers and toys, and multicoloured scraps of paper, cut into shapes. Hearts and more flowers. Another van belonged to a third news crew, currently occupying the path leading to the church, which Shirley thought intrusive. On the other hand, she was turning up with a gun in her pocket. That too might seem a little uncalled for.
Now that she was here, she hoped it was.
She followed the loop round the church, found a space almost big enough for Ho’s car, and wedged it in. Engine off, she patted her pocket automatically – gun still there: where else would it be? – then studied the area. Beyond the church was a row of cottages, splashes of colour dripping from window boxes; elsewhere, bunches of flowers were tied to lamp posts, and there was something chalked on the road too, a child’s drawing it looked like: more colour. More flowers, in fact, Shirley realised, and then:
‘Why are you really doing this?’ she asked Coe.
Coe stared straight ahead for a while. ‘If they come for me, over Gimball?’ he said at last.
‘Which they will.’
‘It might be a good idea to have something my side of the ledger.’
She really didn’t think the one would cancel the other out.
‘What now?’
He said, ‘The front street’s pretty well covered.’
‘With unarmed policemen.’
‘At least three of them have guns.’ He pointed. ‘Two round that corner. One further down the road. We passed him first, just after the village sign.’
She’d thought he’d been asleep. ‘Rifles?’
‘One. Two machine guns.’
‘You’re good at this.’
He said, ‘Bit paranoid. It helps.’
She wondered if that were a joke, then decided it didn’t matter.
‘So what do you suggest?’
He shrugged. ‘Getting here’s used up all my ideas.’
‘I might go in the church.’
‘You might not want to carry that thing in your pocket.’
She’d jam it down the back of her jeans. The jacket would cover it.
That’s what she did once they were out of the car. Coe nodded, presumably agreeing she was now less noticeably tooled up, then gestured down the road.
‘I’m gonna take a look down there.’
And once he’d done that, she thought, he could take a look the other way, and then they’d be more or less done.
She crossed the road alone. There’d been bells ringing when they drove into the village, but they’d stopped now. The TV crew were moving their equipment from the church path onto the pavement. They regarded her for a moment, but evidently decided her unnewsworthy.
‘Full house?’ she asked, meaning the church.
One of them, thirtyish, in a T-shirt that read ON YOUR CASE, checked her out briefly, then said, ‘Yep.’
‘Much TV here?’
He considered. ‘Four crews?’
Seize the media, thought Shirley.
‘And a couple from the radio doing vox pops by the shop,’ someone chipped in. She said ‘radio’ like she meant ‘measles’; one of those things you’d have thought had been cured by now.
They left her there, on a crazy-paved path through the graveyard that led to the church porch. More flowers had been piled here: an untended mass of bouquets that made Shirley wonder what the point was; fifteen or twenty quid on a gesture nobody would notice, except as part of a large, undifferentiated orgy of sentiment. The only person left feeling better was the florist. But the scent met her as she passed: hit her like a swinging door. At that same moment, her phone rang.
Like an idiot, her first reaction was to reach for the gun.
Luckily, there was nobody to notice. From inside the church came a communal mutter of ritualised response, and then a shuffling that could have been anything, but was, in fact, a large congregation reaching for its hymn books. Shirley got to her phone on the third ring. ‘Yeah. What?’
‘Where are you?’ Louisa asked.
‘Why, where are you?’
‘I’m at the Abbey, Shirl. With River. Are you not here too? We haven’t seen you.’
‘Well, yeah, that’s because I’m not there,’ she said. ‘Simples.’
Louisa stifled an exasperated sigh. ‘So where are you, then?’
‘I’m at Abbotsfield.’
‘You’re
‘Me and Coe.’
‘What the hell are you doing there?’
Same as what Louisa and River were doing at the Abbey, Shirley thought. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Singing began. Something sacred, obviously, and freighted with sorrow. Shirley recognised the tune, but couldn’t think what it was.
‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘What’s happening there?’
She waited, but Louisa didn’t reply. She’d lost the signal, she realised. Hick place like this, the wonder was her phone had rung in the first place.
