The Fabric of Sin

‘No problem.’ Lol tried to put both hands up, managed one. ‘Anything I can do.’ He looked over at Mrs Morningwood. ‘She’s going to be traumatized for life. He just … just came out.’

‘It’s true,’ Jane said from behind Merrily. ‘There’s no way she could’ve avoided him.’

Merrily glanced back at Jane; it sent a pain into her neck, from when Teddy’s hand had slammed into her face, twisting her head round. Different person. Like the Templars, sometimes pastoral, peacefully monastic, then the sword out, red to the hilt. Merrily stared at Jane and Jane stared back, defiant.

‘She didn’t have a chance,’ Jane said.

Another cop was asking Mrs Morningwood where she’d been going at the time of the accident and Mrs Morningwood was saying, ‘I was looking for my dog. My dog’s escaped. You haven’t seen a dog anywhere, have you?’

Merrily looked at Teddy’s body, no need to cover it because the surplice was up over his face, moulded to it by the blood and tissue and brain matter. Crumpled linen.

Cleansing SATURDAY EVENING

Merrily’s alb, an appeal for purity and simplicity, now had dirt-stains on both arms and across one shoulder, as if emblematic of the kind of soiled priest who concealed rape, murder …

Or was just a doormat.

Pray for doormat.

On the back door, she drew a cross in holy water and asked that, by the holy and cleansing power of God, this entrance might be blessed.

Muriel Morningwood took off her dark glasses. Her eyes were black and red and still glaring with tears. A lot of tears these past two days.

‘How’s his wife taken it?’

‘I wouldn’t like to say.’ Merrily looked around. ‘I think we need to do every room.’

Her alb had a cord at the waist, like the Templars used to wear, under the cross.

‘You’ve seen her, though, I assume.’

‘Her son was coming over today to pick her up. Unsurprisingly, she’ll be putting the place on the market.’

Beverley Murray, face of scrubbed stone, looking at Merrily as if convinced she, or God, or both, were in some way behind this. Merrily had told her nothing. Beverley had said she’d have left Teddy, eventually, but Merrily didn’t think she would have. They tended not to, clergy wives. Or not for a long time.

‘You think he beat her?’ Mrs Morningwood asked.

‘I think he was oblivious of her, much of the time. Focused on his own perceived role in some kind of … alternative history. And she just got on with it. One roof, two lives.’

In the washhouse or utility room or whatever — well, there were still pegs on the wall, where coats would have hung — Merrily put down the flask of holy water, a sense of everything moving past her, out of control. A sense of blur, all the rushing spirits, waves of panic. Please, God, calm. She straightened up.

‘At some stage, you might stop looking at me like that,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

‘Maybe.’

Or not. Despair soaked in again. Merrily picked up the flask of holy water, hugged it to her bosom. You never knew anybody quite well enough. Never sure who to trust, and yet you did have to trust. It’s a slippery slope, Merrily, Sian Callaghan-Clarke had said. Letting trust slip away.

And support. Support for the insupportable.

‘What have we done, Muriel?’

‘We?’ Mrs Morningwood put her glasses back on. ‘You’ve done nothing at all, darling. Except, perhaps, step over the edge of other people’s madness.’

Even though she knew he wouldn’t be back, Muriel would have new locks put on the doors. Life, she said, was a series of knee-jerks, stable doors banging in the night. She’d refused to come back to Ledwardine, had gone alone to the house at the end of the holiday cottages to sleep downstairs on the chaise longue with the dog.

Well … to lie there. No herbs would have produced restful sleep that night. Or the next. It had all finally come down on Mrs Morningwood. She’d brought it down, one big knee-jerk, connecting a foot with an accelerator pedal.

Eccentric, deranged, Beverley Murray had said. The way she drives around in that big Jeep, taking corners too fast.

‘Who is Muriel Morningwood?’ Frannie Bliss had asked yesterday, having looked at the report from Traffic. A heavily-loaded question, and Merrily had given him the Need to Know. Waiting for him to mention the discovery of bones, but he never had. It would come.

This morning, with arrangements for the Requiem finalized, she’d driven over to Ty Gwyn, finding it clean as a pharmacy. Sterile, something sucked out. Unexpectedly, Mrs Morningwood had asked her to bless the house. And the greenhouse and the garden, where herbs were grown and chickens pecked around.

‘Jane said he’d been inside again.’

‘Meddling with the herbs. Unscrewing jars. Sniffing, I expect.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t know. They’ve all gone, now.’

‘But you’ll get more …’

‘I expect so. I need the money. That wasn’t all. He’d been through the drawers. Found Mary’s letter. Took that. And some photos.’

‘Would he have known you had that letter?’

‘No way he could. Unless Fuchsia …’

‘You showed it to Fuchsia?’

Mrs Morningwood had nodded.

‘I don’t know about this, do I?’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t know the half of it.’

With the afternoon seeping damply away, Lord Stourport stood at the edge of a copse, wet leaves around his shoes.

‘They weren’t even there, then, these trees, I’m pretty sure. And I’m good at land. It’s like looking back at a different lifetime.’

Meaning, We were different people. But that was the easy way out, Lol thought.

Hayter said, ‘What’s she doing in there, your woman?’

‘Trying to make the place feel a bit calmer. Before the Requiem.’

‘And that draws a line under it, does it, the Requiem?’

‘Just starts the process, I think.’

‘I do not like this,’ Jimmy Hayter said. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’

He’d arrived over an hour early, while Merrily was still setting out the folding altar in front of the inglenook. Mrs Morningwood had walked over to join her, and Jane had taken Roscoe for a walk. It was an hour or so from sunset, Lol’s head still aching if he moved too fast or turned his back to the wind.

‘You could still go to the cops,’ Hayter said. ‘And I don’t yet believe you won’t.’

It was why he’d come and why Gwilym would come, too. Nervous, and with every reason. Not out of the woods yet, maybe never would be.

‘No cops so far,’ Lol said, ‘apart from traffic cops. Apparently, there’s, um … In Garway, there’s a long tradition of independence.’

They walked up to the top of the rise, and now you could see the skewed, sandy tower of Garway Church.