The Fabric of Sin

‘What are you asking?’

Bliss didn’t reply.

‘You have got people out looking for her?’

‘We’ve gorra couple of people out there, yeh.’

‘You’re sure she’s not … somewhere close?’

An image of Fuchsia crouching, big eyed, between tree-roots in the woods.

‘Sure as we can be,’ Bliss said.

‘You actually think she did this, don’t you?’

‘Can’t deny that the domestic solution would save us a lorra graft.’

‘What was he hit with?’

‘Could be one of his own tools. I’m never one to pre-empt the slab, Merrily, but when the head’s swollen up like that, battered out of shape, you’re looking at multiple skull fractures. And, no, you wouldn’t generally get that falling off the steps into a field. The killer must’ve been … very, very angry.’

A fourth vehicle had appeared next to the dark blue van. A cop shouted across to Bliss.

‘Dr Grace, boss.’

‘Must be a bad telly night.’ Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘You ever think, on these occasions, that our fates might be entwined, Reverend?’

‘Every time there’s one of those occasions, Frannie, I just … Look, when you find Fuchsia, will you let me know?’

‘If I can,’ Bliss said. ‘And we’ll probably need to talk about this at length, maybe tomorrow. Thanks for dropping by, Merrily.’

‘Yeah.’

Walking back across the field, hands jammed into the pockets of her fleece, Merrily looked behind her once and saw, on the very edge of the headlights, the gaping maw of the bay in the barn that Felix had been renovating for Fuchsia. To bring her stability.

‘Shit.’ She wanted to scream it into the wind. ‘Shit, shit, shit …’

Jane’s mobile played the riff from Lol’s ‘Sunny Days’ and she tightened her lips and ignored it. Wouldn’t be Mum; she’d call the landline.

Ethel, the black cat, prowled the scullery desk. The mobile stopped. Jane clicked on the email address from the Ghosts and Scholars website, put in the message she’d drafted, read it through one last time.

Dear Ms Pardoe

Sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you might be able to help me. After reading on your website about M. R. James’s unexplained ‘strange experience’ at Garway Church, on the Welsh Border, I wondered if you could throw any more light on it.

I live in Herefordshire and went with my mother to Garway today and, to me, the mystical influence of the Knights Templar could still be felt very strongly there after all these centuries. M. R. James’s story ‘Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, my Lad’ has a Templar preceptory in it, and we were wondering if the story could have come out of whatever M. R. James experienced at Garway.

Like me, you were also intrigued by the medieval dovecote with 666 dove holes. Do have any ideas why this might have been?

Anything you can tell me would be very gratefully received.

Perhaps we might be able to help with your own researches too, one day.

Yours sincerely,

Jane Watkins

Seemed OK. Didn’t give too much away.

Jane sent it.

Feeling a lot less excited than she had when she’d composed it. Since then, Mum had been back with Lol — Mum looking totally like death, this time — and then they’d both gone out to this place at Monkland. Mum apologetic, as usual — could Jane get herself something to eat? Jesus, what about her? Like, when was she going to eat? Mum was clearly losing weight. She looked like a small bird after a long winter.

Jane picked up Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, one of two books she’d brought down from her apartment. She put it down again. ‘Oh, Whistle’ was actually quite a bleak story, full of solitude. The guy didn’t die or anything, but the effects of what he’d seen would be hanging over him for the rest of his life.

She saw — the image still as vivid in her head as if it had been on the computer screen — Mum walking out of that derelict farmhouse into the early dusk. Walking with her shoulders stiffened and her spine kind of pulled in, like she knew there was something very close behind her. Her face like yellowing paper.

Never seen her quite like that before. Never. And it was unnerving because, in one way, she needed Mum to be basically sceptical — as resistant to the paranormal, despite her job, as Jane was to the strictures of the Church.

Mum as a buffer against her wildest ideas. Giving Jane the freedom to explore because there was always that framework of stability. Maybe she was really afraid of growing up into a world where a mature and intelligent woman was visibly and seismically shaken by the irrational, trying to conceal her fear from a kid … who was no longer a kid.

Jane turned, with a reluctance she recognised as unusual, to the second book on the desk. Ella Leather’s The Folklore of Herefordshire. In the index, under Garway, she’d found the line about nine witches and also a page reference for The watch after death.

On page 120, Mrs Leather listed the places where:

It was customary, until a few years ago, for the household to sit up all night when a death had occurred. They did not sit in the same room as the corpse, but elsewhere, the idea being that the spirit of the dead person was still in and about the house, and the people said, ‘it was for the last time, it was the last night’; so no one went to bed. But at Orcop and Garway, the watch is still kept, so Martha S— who lived on Garway Hill, assured me. ‘Only if it was somebody you cared about,’ she added, ‘not for strangers.’

So, as for bringing comparative strangers into the same room as the body … The Newtons had obviously bent the rules in their own best interests, picking up on what came next. Maybe they’d even read this very account, published for the first time in 1912.

… Usually, among the country folk, a light is kept burning in the room where a corpse lies every night until burial; a pewter plate of salt is placed on the body; according to Martha S—, the candle should be stuck in the middle of the salt, heaped up in the centre of the plate.

Seriously creepy. Jane shut the book. It was too quiet in here. Picking up the mobile, she got up and walked to the scullery window, looking out at darkness and a wall, pressing one on the keypad.

You have three new messages. To listen to your messages …

She hesitated, staring into the little square of light, before pressing one again.

First new message, received at thirteen forty-three today.

‘Jane, it’s … Oh, shit, you know who it is. For God’s sake, I’ve left about seventeen messages …’

Five actually.

‘… I know there’s nothing wrong with the phone, which means something wrong with YOU. I even tried ringing the landline, thinking I’d ask your mum — yeah, yeah, I know how much you’d hate that, but I’m a bit beyond caring. Only it’s always the bloody answering machine.

‘I mean, have I done something? Have I done something I didn’t know about? Has somebody told you I’ve done something? Just— You don’t even have to ring me back. Just leave a message. I’ll close down the phone for the rest of the night so you don’t risk speaking to me. Just leave a message, Jane. I mean, Christ, we’ve been, like, together for two years? That’s longer than a lot of marr— Oh … fuck it!’