The Fabric of Sin

Jane stared into the phone for a long time before switching it off.

The builder was dead, his girlfriend missing.

Most of this Lol had already put together out of fragments of chat heard from the open window of the truck, watching the shadowy scurryings around the screened-off caravan. Guessing what was coming when Merrily returned. Just not sure — as a failed psychotherapist and a derivative songwriter finding a little success a little too late — how best to handle it.

‘Maybe you need a good manager.’ She was rubbing her eyes wearily. ‘A tour-organizer. Whatever the word is.’

‘I really don’t think so.’

‘Or just a roadie to carry the spare guitar.’

‘You’re tired.’ Lol started the engine, flicked on the headlamps. ‘You haven’t eaten since lunch. Or, as it’s Sunday, knowing you, maybe even breakfast.’

‘It’s still Sunday?’ As they bumped into the lane Merrily loosened her seat belt, as if there was pressure in her chest. She hadn’t yet reached for a cigarette. ‘Couple of weeks ago … I lay awake counting up all the people who’ve suffered in some unnecessary way, or died — unnaturally — in spite of all my prayers and entreaties and …’

‘It’s supposed to be sheep, Merrily,’ Lol said gently. ‘I suppose counting corpses will eventually get you to sleep, but the dreams are going to be altogether less pastoral.’

‘She had the blessing, Lol. The full bit. Holy water. Oil.’

‘We could drive into Hereford now, and you could go round administering blessings at random to people in the street, but some of them would still get into a street fight, cause a road accident or something.’

‘So what’s the point? What’s the point of any of it?’

Lol was silent, pulling on to the main road, speeding up as Merrily stared out of the side window. On the way here, she’d told him about the ritual in the little, disused church, the girl suggesting something was coming — Merrily’s discussions with Huw Owen leading to her discovery of the fictional origins of that line.

This constant tension between her faith and an equally-necessary scepticism must drive her half-crazy at times. Like now. Her face was still turned away from him, watching the night.

‘You keep thinking, what if the Church is actually reaching the end of its useful life? And every day it gets harder to answer that persistent, nagging question: If there is a God, why does he allow so much suffering? Well, my children, the truth — the bottom-line, heartfelt truth — is, I’m buggered if I know.’

‘You’re thinking—’ Lol braked hard for a badger ambling across the road. ‘You’re thinking of that guy … Michael Taylor, that his name?’

The Yorkshireman who, back in the 1970s, told his local priest he was possessed by evil spirits and then, having been subjected to a night-long exorcism, went home and murdered his wife. In the most horrific way possible with bare hands.

Merrily shook her head, probably meaning she hadn’t been thinking about the guy for a whole half- minute

‘It was a blessing, not an exorcism,’ Lol said. ‘There was no question of possession, was there?’

‘I did at least two things wrong. One, I didn’t involve Felix.’

‘In the blessing? Would he have even wanted to be involved?’

‘Two, I had a chance to go to the house yesterday, and I didn’t. I decided it was probably bullshit.’

‘But you had every reason to think that. You talked to Huw Owen and he—’

‘I was careless. Cynical.’

Traffic was sparse, this area still managing to stay a decade or so behind the rest of the country. High in the cab, Lol saw, in a dip on the left, the lights of the perfectly-formed-around-the-green, black and white village of Dilwyn. He tried again.

‘Even if you’d gone to the house yesterday, there’s no certainty you’d have felt any reaction. That isn’t how it works, is it?’

‘I don’t know how it works. Nobody knows how it works.’

‘Maybe the woman didn’t kill him,’ Lol said. ‘They don’t know it was her, do they?’

‘They know something. I’m fairly sure there’s something Bliss wasn’t revealing. It’s how they operate. Never tell anybody anything unless it serves a purpose.’

‘When they find her, you need to talk to her. Bliss would arrange that, wouldn’t he?’

‘She didn’t want to talk last night. And why did she go back to Garway? Why did she go back after the blessing? Evidently, he didn’t want to tell me that.’

‘Merrily …’

‘Should’ve thought.’

‘Please,’ Lol said. ‘Just …’

He slowed for the sign that said LEDWARDINE 3, trying to shut out the whingey voice of the fundamentalist woman, Shirley West.

How do we know there isn’t somebody here who’s brought something evil in with them?

The road curved towards the village, the hump of Cole Hill forming under the half-clouded moon and the steeple rising out of nowhere like an ancient rocket petrified on its pad.

Crises of faith, Merrily would say, when she wasn’t in the middle of one, were part of the deal; they could only strengthen your faith, in the end.

Until, Lol thought, you had one too many.

He parked easily on the square. The diners had left and the lights of the Black Swan had dimmed. There was nobody about. He turned to Merrily, not touching her.

‘You, um … want me to come in with you?’

21 Lesser Creatures and Birds

In the early light, Merrily let Lol out by the vicarage back door, so that he could use the garden gate to slip, unseen, into the churchyard. Creeping between shadowed headstones and out the other side into the old orchard which had once enclosed the village like a nest around eggs.

The secret ways of Ledwardine.

Merrily, in her bathrobe, watching from the landing window as Lol emerged from the alley by the new bistro, onto the square. Vanishing into Jim Prosser’s shop — called Eight Till Late but usually open by seven — and coming out with a morning paper.

There was no real need for this game any more; everybody must know by now. Yet she had the feeling that it was expected, a matter of decorum, a village thing.

No sex, anyway, just needed warmth. Whatever gets you through the night and the recurrent images of wide-eyed, big-eyed Fuchsia: ‘Will you bless me?’

‘You look like the Lady of Shallot or something,’ Jane said.

Appearing at the top of the stairs, already dressed for school, face shining, hair brushed.

‘Wasn’t she last heard of lying in a barge or something?’ Merrily said. ‘Kind of … dead?’

‘Before that, she was a seriously messed-up person.’

Messed-up? Right.

‘Erm …’ Jane had waited up last night, knew the worst. She was leaning against the stair-rail with her blazer over an arm ‘… I’ve just been listening to the news on Hereford and Worcester. They said a man’s body had been