The Fabric of Sin

‘Well, you can see that it might be, from her point of view. But no need for urgency, was there?’

Merrily looked back towards the Volvo.

‘Look,’ Jane said, ‘if I had to take a guess …’

‘Go on.’

‘The Master House. I’d told her … I told her what happened to you. In the inglenook?’

‘When?’

‘Before we left. I’m sorry, I thought you’d probably told her yourself.’

‘And how did she react?’

‘She was interested in the inglenook. The Baphomet. It was like it had helped her put something together. But she was in a bit of a state, anyway. This was after that guy you stayed with called in with your bags, and Roscoe—’

‘You saw him? You saw Teddy Murray?’

‘Well, he came to the door, didn’t he? He said you’d left the bags behind and he was just passing, so he … It was kind of embarrassing, because Roscoe just like … went for him?’

‘Went for him how?’

‘Shot through the doorway, snarling, teeth bared? Mum, I’m just thinking, if she’s gone to the Master House, she wouldn’t take the Jeep, she’d walk.’

‘No. I don’t think she would. Tell me about Roscoe. What happened?’

‘Me trying to drag him back. Didn’t actually get to him. I don’t think the guy wanted to hang around after that, though.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He was like, “Oh, I see you’ve got a guard dog.” Two women on their own, that kind of thing. Trying to make light of it, but I think he was shaken, as you would be. He’s not exactly a Jack Russell, Roscoe, is he?’

‘Did he see Mrs Morningwood?’

‘Didn’t leave the kitchen.’

‘Right.’ Merrily turned away from the house. ‘We should go. We need to find her, don’t we?’

Teddy: how much circumstantial evidence did you need?

‘OK,’ Lol said. ‘This Murray, the feeling I’m getting—’

‘This is all my fault, isn’t it?’ Jane said. ‘You think I shouldn’t’ve brought her. Only, the way she—’

Merrily said, ‘Jane, there are no circumstances I can, at this moment, imagine under which it would’ve been OK to bring Muriel Morningwood back to Garway. Let’s leave it at that, for now.’

Lol backed off into the darkness, shaking his head.

Jane said, ‘I’m sorry. Am I … I mean, when am I going to be allowed to know what happened to her?’

‘Yeah, well, that was my mistake, flower. I should’ve told you. Mrs Morningwood was raped. And she’s deeply traumatized. Either more than she knows or more than her pride will let anyone else know. And that … is the main reason we have to find her.’

It was too dark to see Jane’s face.

You should look for two white gateposts, one broken in half.

Straight in this time, no oblique approach.

There was still a lot of track, well overgrown, the Volvo whingeing and grinding in second gear. Feeling a wheel slip, Merrily pulled the car back from the rim of a ditch, as the central chimney stack of the Master House rose up palely in the headlights.

The wind rising now, the last flurries of mist passing like the slip-streams of barn owls.

She dipped the lights, stopping the car against a wedge of impacted red mud, about fifty yards short of the hollow where the farmhouse lay, looking big and whole and intact and solid by night. Like it might have looked a century ago, in transit between Gwilym and Newton.

Merrily switched off the engine, put out all the lights, and the house vanished.

Except for a mustardy glow behind a window.

‘Oh God,’ Jane said. ‘I told you.’

Lol said, ‘I don’t see the Jeep.’

A landscape full of trees and hollows, ground mist, no moon; Merrily told him there could be half a dozen cars parked here and you wouldn’t see them.

She’d worked out that the light was upstairs, probably the bedroom over the room with the inglenook.

‘And obviously, we can’t all go in.’

‘I think we can,’ Lol said evenly.

‘Not if we want to learn anything. She’s already told Jane to go home, and she doesn’t yet know what a sensitive and discreet person you are, Lol, so …’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ll go.’

‘No.’

‘Look, you’re just out here — what — twenty yards from the house? You can … watch my back.’

‘Yeah, I can give you covering fire. Merrily, this is—’

‘The best and most direct way to expedite a difficult situation.’

‘You don’t know it’s her.’

‘Who else could it be?’

Lol turned his head towards Jane and back at Merrily.

‘He’s in Hereford,’ Merrily said. ‘At a lodge meeting. The service tomorrow night … seems to need planning.’

‘It’s not as if we can have phone contact down here.’

‘You checked?’

‘Yes.’ Lol snapped the phone shut. ‘Nothing.’

‘If you can bear to keep the windows down, you’ll be able to hear everything for miles.’

‘Not the way the wind’s getting up.’

‘You can always hear a scream,’ Merrily said. ‘Trust me. I can do a scream you’ll hear.’

59 Joy You

At the front door, under the overhanging skull-shaped broken lamp, Merrily waited and looked back and questioned the sense of what she was doing.

Inevitably, what kept coming back was the last time she’d sat in that car in a rising wind, having planned to go and check out the Master House, thinking of how she’d been shafted and then Sod this, I’m going home.

No guarantee that, if she’d come here then, it would in any way have altered her opinion that Fuchsia had made the whole thing up.

But it might have.

And in any case that didn’t matter. What mattered was giving in to the resentment, after Bliss told her about the Special Branch. Stomping out into the rain to walk it off and then going home anyway to moan on the phone to Sophie.

Lessons learned. She pushed at the door and it yielded enough to be shouldered open, the damp-earth smell wafting out at her as if she was going outside, not in.

It was colder too, a kind of airless, stagnant cold. The floor felt hard and ridged where the decayed linoleum had been ground into it.

Time slowed.

She saw a thin light falling on the cage of the iron fire-basket in the inglenook. A light, somehow, from up the chimney and, as she watched, it went away.

Merrily stood for a moment, listening to her own breathing, her own heart and the footsteps on the stone