The Fabric of Sin mw-9

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Sexual?’

  ‘Jesus, Huw!’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘The so-called green man …’ Merrily stifled the shudder, leaning back hard ‘… carries a lot of associations, some of them fertilityoriented, therefore—’

  ‘Therefore it’s all subjective. Jesus wept! You go in with that kind of namby-pamby academic attitude, you’re stuffed before you start. You’re a priest. You either treat it as a level of reality, or you back off. Which is what, as your spiritual director, I’m formally suggesting that you do.’

  ‘You’re spending too much time in your hellfire chapel, Huw.’

  She listened to him breathing. Shut her eyes, bit her lip.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Let’s lay it out,’ Huw said. ‘A woman kills her lover and then tops herself, and you’re worried it’s because of something she picked up at this house. That correct?’

  ‘I think … that it’s a question that needs an answer. And a question that neither the police nor the coroner are ever likely to ask.’

  ‘Even though the only experience in that farmhouse she told you about was a not-even-thinly-disguised scene from a famous ghost story by Monty James?’

  ‘I can’t explain that. Doesn’t help, either, that the story predates James’s visit to Garway by about fifteen years.’

  ‘And bears no relation to your own perceived experience.’

  ‘No.’

  Frannie Bliss’s face had appeared at the kitchen window, peering in, hands binoculared against the glass. Merrily pointed in the direction of the door, making turning motions to indicate that it was open.

  ‘Ever think summat’s playing with you?’ Huw said. ‘The way a cat plays with a bird?’

  ‘You trying to scare me or something?’

  She’d noticed he’d said bird. Unlike mice sometimes, she thought, birds don’t escape.

  Bliss said, ‘I’m not here, all right?’

  ‘You’re asking me to lie for you again?’

  Merrily filled the kettle. Bliss sat down and stretched out his legs under the table, hands behind his head.

  ‘He really bothers me, that bastard. They all do.’

  ‘Jonathan?’

  ‘If that’s his name.’

  ‘I thought you knew him.’ Merrily sat down. ‘I thought he worked out of a little office at headquarters.’

  ‘No, Merrily, that’s Bill Boyd. We’ve learned to put up with Bill. Jonathan came up from the capital last week, apparently to look into a certain issue. One of the less-publicized aspects of nine-eleven and seven-seven and the rest is that we get to see a lot more of his sort. Lofty, superior gits in expensive suits.’

  ‘What issue?’

  ‘You’re not the first to ask.’

  ‘You’re expected to work with him, and you don’t know what he’s investigating?’

  Bliss glanced at Merrily, an eyebrow raised.

  ‘I didn’t like to ask him directly, Frannie, if he was Special Branch, in case he realized we’d been discussing it.’

  ‘I’m grateful, Merrily.’

  ‘So …’ She half-extracted a cigarette and then pushed it back. ‘He’s not investigating a haunting, is he?’

  ‘I think it’s reasonable to assume,’ Bliss said, ‘that he’s looking into a perceived threat against the Heir to the Throne.’

  ‘I don’t think I understand.’

  ‘Applying my renowned deductive skills, I’m working on the assumption that they — the Duchy of Cornwall — have received certain communications. Could be anonymous letters, untraceable emails, text messages — lot of options in the technological age.’

  ‘Locally?’

  ‘Or at their head office, wherever that is. But relating to here, that’s clear enough.’

  ‘Posing a direct threat to the Man?’

  ‘Maybe suggesting — if I’m reading between the right lines — that the Duchy is acquiring too much property in this part of the world.’

  ‘But who would that be likely to bother? And what can they do about it anyway? It’s probably just a crank.’

  ‘Merrily, Al-Qaeda might just be five towel-heads in a cave with a computer, a video camera and a mobile phone.’

  ‘It’s crazy.’

  ‘It’s the world we’re trying to go on living in.’

  ‘All right …’ Merrily let her chin sink into her cupped hands. ‘Long did ask a particularly odd question, didn’t he, when we were talking about Fuchsia and Tepee City? He said isn’t that a Welsh-speaking area full of Welsh nationalists?’

  ‘Old-fashioned Welsh nationalists, was the term he actually used.’

  ‘Why would he think Welsh nationalists are concerned about the Prince of Wales buying property in Herefordshire, England?’

  ‘Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it, Merrily?’

  ‘And anyway, the days of Welsh nationalist terrorism, such as it was, are long over.’

  ‘If he really thought there was anything in it, he certainly wouldn’t’ve mentioned it in front of you. Oh, Merrily …’ Bliss bounced his heels alternately off the stone flags, like a kid ‘… you don’t know how much it pisses me off when there’s something high-level going down in my manor that I don’t know about.’

  ‘You think I can help, or you’re just here for sympathy?’

  Bliss smiled. Merrily leaned back, folding her arms, thinking it out.

  ‘OK … if someone is suggesting that the Master House — for reasons we can’t fathom — is one acquisition too many, was this before or after Felix Barlow told Adam Eastgate that this was a house that didn’t want to be restored?’

  ‘After would be my guess.’ Bliss nodded at the overnight bag in the corner. ‘What’s with the luggage?’

  ‘Going to Garway.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Need to.’

  Merrily pulled over the padded folder containing Adam Eastgate’s plans for the Master House. When she upended it, a plastic bag fell out, resealed like a police evidence bag. She pulled it open and shook out the key onto the table.

  ‘You don’t find too many like this nowadays, do you, outside of churches?’

  ‘And prisons,’ Bliss said. ‘You’re not staying there, are you?’

  ‘Too scary. And the central heating’s not working.’

  ‘Come on, Merrily, the truth.’

  ‘Why I’m going back? Apart from, every time I close my eyes, seeing Fuchsia Mary Linden swimming towards me, asking to be blessed in the old-fashioned way?’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘And all the things we might have found out if I hadn’t been so smug and sceptical. Things that would never come out at an inquest. I’m assuming an inquest is going to be where this ends.’

  ‘The media have indeed been told we’re not looking for a third party,’ Bliss said. ‘And, frankly, if it was so much as suggested that the third party might turn out to be the kind of third party I suspect you’re looking at then I think we’ve made a sound decision.’

  ‘Assuming the forensics support the obvious conclusion that Fuchsia killed Felix and then herself … how important is it to you to find a motive?’

  ‘It’s obviously tidier, for us, Merrily, if we can find evidence of domestic strife and/or mental imbalance.’

  ‘You tried to find the mother, by any chance? Mary Linden.’

  ‘We’ve got the birth certificate, and the name tallies. As does Tepee Valley. But the mother’s name is less poetic than “Linden”. Mary Roberts.’

  ‘What about the adoptive parents?’

  ‘Moved on, some years ago. We’re trying to pin them down, but bloody hippies, they could be anywhere. We’re continuing inquiries, but we don’t have the manpower to make too much of it.’

  ‘If you get anywhere … would there be stuff you’re able to share? Sometimes it’s easier for the police to get information than somebody like me with no obvious reason to inquire.’

  ‘Equally,’ Bliss said, ‘there are situa
tions where it’s easier for a harmless cleric to learn things than a copper.’

  ‘Does that mean we’re looking at an arrangement? You tell me what you’ve learned from relatives or anyone else, I tell you … what I can.’

  ‘What you can?’

  ‘Look at it this way, Frannie — most of the stuff I wouldn’t feel right divulging is going to be stuff that would embarrass you anyway. And the coroner.’

  ‘You’re so cute, Merrily,’ Bliss said.

  ‘I’m a professional. It’s odd how people seem to forget that.’

  Bliss smiled, shaking his head.

  ‘Particularly me,’ Merrily said.

  After a lunch of soup and a cheese sandwich, she rang Uncle Ted, the senior churchwarden, to explain that she might be away for a few days. He was out, so she laid it gratefully on his machine. Uncle Ted was still resentful of Deliverance, although he must know that without it she’d probably wind up with another four parishes and Ledwardine would see even less of her.

  She rang Lol, but he must have already left for tonight’s gig, somewhere in South Wales. She’d try his mobile later. She ought to go and lie on the bed, try and recharge, but there was too much to do in a very short time.

  Looking up Morningwood in the phone book, she found just one entry and called it on the mobile.

  ‘Poor girl,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

  Nothing about Felix. Just ‘Poor girl.’

  ‘I’m … coming over. Either tonight or early tomorrow. Will you be around, Mrs Morningwood?’

  ‘In and out, darling. Never far away. Always there around nightfall to shut the chicks away.’

  ‘And you’re … where?’

  ‘Coming in from the Hereford side, past The Turning — know where that is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ask. Three hundred yards, sign on the right, Ty Gwyn. Short track.’

  ‘OK. If you’re not in, I’ll keep trying.’

  There was an uncertain pause. Mrs Morningwood cleared her throat.

  ‘Reason I called earlier … Spoke about you with a friend, Sally, in the Frome Valley.’

  A momentary fog; you ran into too many people in this job.

  ‘You met, it seems, under difficult circumstances, relating to gypsies,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

  ‘Oh … Sally Boswell?’

  At the hop museum. Her husband, Al, had made Lol’s most precious guitar. Mandolin soundbox and about a dozen different types of wood. Lol revered Al. Al revered Sally.

  ‘Known her for quite some years, darling. She confirmed what I’d sensed when we met. That you are rescourceful and trustworthy.’

  ‘That was very kind of her. Mrs Morningwood, can I—’

  ‘No, come and see me. I’m wary of phones.’

  And she’d gone. Suddenly nobody was trusting phones. It was getting like the old Soviet Union.

  Merrily dropped the mobile in the in-tray, picked up Dobbs’s Charles file and read an unidentified cutting — looked from the typeface and the length of the paragraphs like one of the quality broadsheets — about the Prince’s diet. How, aged around thirty, after seeing how some pigs were treated, he’d vowed to become vegetarian. Dropped red meat, taken up raw vegetables, lost weight and developed a rather ascetic appearance.

  He’d still gone shooting, though. Some family traditions must’ve been hard to shed, especially with a father like his. But the interest in organic farming had grown out of it, with impressive results.

  How relevant was any of this stuff? If there’d been anything immediately pertinent in the Dobbs file, Sophie would have spotted it. Merrily slid the papers back into the file as the phone quivered before it rang.

  Sophie herself.

  ‘You have … a locum.’

  Her voice was not so much dry as arid.

  ‘That was quick.’

  ‘Merrily, I’m afraid that it isn’t going to be Ruth Wisdom.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Ruth has unexpected domestic ties,’ Sophie said. ‘Consequently, I had to put out a round-robin email. Which, I’m afraid, was answered within … a very short time.’

  ‘I did point out, didn’t I, that Jane will still be here? I mean, she’s got her own apartment in the attic, but— it’s not a bloke, is it?’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Merrily,’ Sophie said. ‘You really won’t like this, but it was out of my hands.’

  25

  Monster

  When Jane got off the school bus, there was a silver-grey car she didn’t recognize outside the vicarage.

  She walked over. It looked like one of those hybrid jobs that ran partly on urine or something, cost an arm and a leg but the driver was guaranteed a martyr’s welcome in eco-paradise. Very tidy inside, a pair of women’s leather gloves on the dash.

  Jane went back to the market square, wishing whoever it was would just sod off. Needing some time, undisturbed, with Mum, because what she had in her airline bag was likely to be of serious and sobering significance.

  Normally, if you had a free period in the afternoon, you spent it wiping out any outstanding homework essays. Jane had had two free periods and had spent them both, plus most of the lunch hour, on one of the common-room computers. Feeling she had something to prove. To Mum and … maybe to Coops, who she hadn’t seen for a few days. But she intended to, soon.

  She looked around the square for Lol’s cool truck. Not there. He must’ve left for his gig. Jane felt a kind of dismay. While it was good that Lol had gigs, better still that he’d found the balls to do gigs, inevitably it was pulling him and Mum in different directions. And although they did their best neither of them, in all honesty, was what you could call a strong and decisive person.

  Outside the Eight Till Late, a news bill for the only evening paper that reached Ledwardine, the Star, read:

  DOUBLE DEATH RIDDLE OF BUILDER AND GIRLFRIEND

  The girlfriend, too?

  Jane froze. Literally froze, hard against one of the fat blackened oak pillars holding up the market hall.

  She could remember, quite clearly, a time when shocking death had given her not a shiver but a frisson — subtly different, fizzing with a forbidden excitement. Back then, death had not, essentially, been about loss. Even — God forbid — the death of her own dad, because it had happened, when Jane was quite young, in a high-speed car crash with a woman next to him who had not been Mum.

  Then they’d moved to the country, and death, in Ledwardine, had resonated. It was so much closer — as close as the churchyard just over the garden wall, where funerals were conducted by her own mother, before burial in a grave dug by Gomer Parry. Whose wife, Minnie, had gone, in the hospital in Hereford. His nephew, Nev, in a fire. And there was Colette, the friend Jane had first got drunk with, on cider, both of them paralytic under the tree in Powell’s Orchard where old Edgar Powell had blown his brains out at the wassailing. And, worst of all, Miss Lucy Devenish, Jane’s friend and mentor and inspiration … but not for very long before her moped had been on its side in the main road under Cole Hill.

  The fragility of life. Random cosmic pruning. One snip of the big secateurs. And then what?

  Sometimes, she wished she had Mum’s faith. Always assuming it really was faith. She pictured Mum standing at the landing window in her frayed robe, staring bleakly out into the drab, grey morning.

  This guy, the builder. Obviously Jane hadn’t known him, or his girlfriend, but out here he was much more than a cheap cliché on a billboard — Death Riddle — tapped onto a screen by some cynical hack in a town where the air was always singing with sirens.

  Out here, where it was quiet and death resonated, he’d been part of the fabric, working the sandstone and the timber and the Welsh slate.

  And the girlfriend. Mum was not going to be easy to live with tonight.

  Now the stuff in the airline bag, the printouts — from, admittedly, some fairly lurid websites — felt like some kind of porn. Not the kind that could get you banned from using the computer for the rest
of term, more insidious than that.

  Unnerved by the billboard, switching the bag from her left shoulder to her right, Jane crossed to the vicarage.

  She’d seen the woman somewhere before, she was fairly sure of that. Fiftyish and elegant, heavy hair with a dull sheen like pewter, serious grey eyes, dark grey suit. Dog collar.

  Mum said, ‘Jane, this is Siân.’

  Mum was looking, to be honest, frazzled, her skin close to grey, standing at a corner of the refectory table, like the kitchen wasn’t her own. Which of course it wasn’t. The Church owned it. The Church owned everything. Owned Mum.

  There was a case in the hall. A real leather traveller’s case, with stickers, next to Mum’s old overnight bags.

  Siân? Jane stared at the woman. The woman smiled in this bland way. Perfect teeth.

  Holy shit. It had to be Siân Callaghan-Clarke.

  ‘Siân’s going to be looking after things here for a few days,’ Mum said. ‘As you, erm, suspected this morning, I need to go over to Garway, sort some things out.’

  This was the woman who, only a few months ago, had nearly destroyed Mum after getting herself made diocesan Deliverance coordinator. Callaghan-Clarke’s view of Deliverance seemed to be that it was totally about helping deluded people to seek treatment — bringing in this smooth shrink as part of the Deliverance Module. At least he’d gone, and the last time Mum had mentioned Callaghan-Clarke it was to say that she’d been keeping a low profile lately, not interfering, never going into the office.

  But Mum was inclined to take her eye off the ball.

  ‘Jane is fairly self-sufficient, Siân. She has her own apartm— a big room on the second floor. And a lot of studying to do. So, with all the parish business, you probably won’t get to meet a lot. Anyway …’ Mum smiling inanely ‘… here she is.’

  Jane just stood there, like struck dumb, Ethel doing a figure of eight around her ankles.

  ‘Hello, Jane,’ Callaghan-Clarke said. ‘I’ve heard such a lot about you.’ Black farce. Mum had collapsed into the old captain’s chair in the scullery. The door was shut, Jane with her back to it.

  * * *

  ‘Have you gone insane?’

  Callaghan-Clarke was upstairs in the guest room, unpacking her fancy case of Italian leather covered with stickers from international church synods, and it was a big house where voices didn’t travel … so, like why, in God’s name, were they whispering?