The Fabric of Sin

stumbling once. Jane thought that Roscoe had whimpered, realizing a moment later that the small noise of distress had been in her own throat. She took in a deep breath, started the car, drove to the entrance of the track, just out of sight of the house and stopped, keeping the engine running.

Up ahead, the mist had closed in again, pale and shiny in the headlights like the doors of a big fridge.

Jane got out the mobile to call Mum, because there really was no alternative now to a confession. But there was no signal.

58 Excellent in Fields

Beverley went to answer the door, and Merrily stared into the dregs in the coffee cup, and there was no question of disbelief. For a proportion of priests, being a good and altruistic person was always going to be the price you had to pay to maintain the buzz.

Merrily remembering, as usual, the first time she’d felt it: period of personal crisis, stumbling into a tiny, unexpected Celtic church, watching the light on the walls, the blue and the gold and the lamplit path. A safety in stone, but also transcendence. The path opening up from there.

But there were different paths and different kinds of light.

Staring into the brown dregs, thinking about the Roman Catholic priest, Alphonse Louis Constant, who had made friends with a teenage girl and become Eliphas Levi, conjurer of spirits, fan of Baphomet … while still, if she was remembering this correctly, stressing the importance of God in magic and the magic in God.

And the spark of it that some of them fed and nurtured within themselves. Gnostic fire. The growing of the god inside.

She felt Teddy Murray at her shoulder under the gaze of Garway Church. I suppose, seen from above, it does look rather as though its neck has been broken. Like a chicken’s.

When Beverley came back into the dairy, Lol was with her, looking worried, saying to Beverley, whom he’d never met before, ‘The Turning? What would she mean by The Turning?’

‘Where?’ Merrily said, spinning. ‘Where is she now? ’

Looking wildly in different directions from the rim of the parking area, where the tarmac crumbled into dirt and weeds and signs indicated two separate footpaths.

‘She doesn’t know exactly,’ Lol said. ‘Don’t panic. She had to drive up the hill to find a signal. Down by the church, mobiles don’t work. None of them, apparently.’

Merrily remembered putting 999 into the screen, entering Mrs Morningwood’s house after the attack. It wouldn’t have worked. They might both have been dead.

‘But she thinks she can find her way back to The Turning,’ Lol said.

‘On her own.’

‘Apart from the dog, apparently. We’ll wait for her there.’

Lol bleeped open the truck, Merrily jumped in.

That bloody woman.

They parked in the church entrance, the truck taking up most of it, and walked to the top of the lane where it met the slightly wider country lane which served as Garway’s main highway. Merrily had suggested that maybe Lol could drive up and down, looking for Jane, but he wouldn’t leave her. He told her what Bliss had said about Felix’s killer.

No great shock. Not really.

‘What’s Bliss doing about this?’

‘Probably nothing,’ Lol said. ‘They have a result … likely to stand up at an inquest … the cops are overstretched …’

‘Clean-up rate.’

‘Target figures. What counts. There’s no evidence, anyway. No more than a feeling backed up by Bliss’s professional experience of what kind of murders women do and don’t do.’

‘Why did he call, then?’

‘He wants you to be aware of it. Just in case you …’

‘Stir something up in my fumbling way.’ Merrily stepped into the roadway. ‘Where the hell is she, Lol?’

‘Driving very, very slowly. Just have to hope the traffic cops are too overstretched to be patrolling Garway.’

‘Please God.’

Merrily stood there in the middle of the road, the mist torn into rags by a wet breeze, the tarmac shining.

Work it out.

Freemasonry. Sycharth. And Stourport — who couldn’t finger a fellow Mason but said this is his voice.

Wished she’d heard him in church. Praying and preaching, mens’ voices changed. Actors. The Church is a faded but still fabulous costume drama. Mick Hunter had said that, her first ambitious, duplicitous, womanizing bishop.

Teddy Murray wasn’t like Hunter, not a flamboyant stage presence. Teddy was an actor in a long-running drama, playing a man who liked a quiet life. The countryside calms and strengthens. One of the functions of a parish priest is to remain centred and … essentially placid.

Which Beverley had translated as passive.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

‘What did you learn in there?’ Lol said.

‘I’m just trying to put it all together. Just … give me a minute, and I’ll tell you.’

Fuchsia.

He had, of course, met Fuchsia, when she came running into his church after whatever happened to her in the Master House. Fuchsia looking so like her mother. Disturbingly like her mother. Disturbing for some.

Strong guy. Strong enough to carry a body across a field in the dark, to the railway? Oh yeah, he could do that. He was good in fields. He was excellent in fields.

‘There you go,’ Lol said.

He drew Merrily back, out of the road, as headlights streaked a cottage wall.

With an expulsion of relief, she slumped against him, watching the Volvo crawling round the corner and pulling in at The Turning, a dog barking inside.

Almost like a real family, all the angst, all the tension. Merrily drove, Lol beside her, Jane in the back, arms around the dog, voice swollen-up.

‘Mum, there was nothing I could—’

‘Recriminations later.’ Merrily swung into the track that led to Ty Gwyn and all the empty holiday homes. ‘How long since you left Mrs Morningwood?’

‘I don’t know. Twenty minutes, half an hour? When did I get through to you, Lol?’

‘At least half an hour.’

Merrily pulled up in front of Ty Gwyn and they got out, all of them.

No lights in the house. The chicken houses shut down. Took a couple of minutes to find the house was all locked up, including the back door.

Lol shone the torch at the carport. No Jeep.

Roscoe sniffed around the porch, showing no great desire to go in. Merrily stepped back.

‘She’s not here. Jane, I’m not getting this … what did she say she was going to do?’

‘Throw out the herbs and mixtures and stuff. Like they’d been contaminated? That doesn’t sound convincing, does it?’