The Fabric of Sin

seem like a scare-story, cold air seizing her arms through the thin sweatshirt; she didn’t care.

She walked through into the churchyard, the way Lol had left at dawn, the sun now pulsing feebly in a loaded sky. Self-disgust oozing rancid fluid into her gut.

We have to think about what we mean by listening. Because, when you think about it, we hardly ever really do it.

She hadn’t. She hadn’t really listened to Fuchsia.

Smug, sanctimonious, hypocritical bitch.

‘He don’t look happy, do he?’ Gomer Parry said. ‘The ole sun.’

He was sitting, gnomelike, on the headstone of Minnie’s grave, his head on one side, as if he was listening for faint sounds from below the soil. When Minnie died, they’d both had new batteries in their watches and he’d buried them together in a small box under her coffin.

The watch after death.

‘You OK, Gomer?’

‘En’t too bad, vicar.’ He stood up. ‘Ole Min’ll be sayin’ I’m makin’ the place look untidy again.’ He peered at her. ‘’Ow’re you?’

‘Had better days.’

‘Felix Barlow, is it?’

‘How did you hear?’

‘Danny rung me. Hour or so ago.’

‘What are they saying?’

‘Usual. Never mess with a mad hippie, kind o’ thing.’

‘And Danny?’

‘Reckons there’s likely things we don’t know and en’t never gonner find out. ’Bout Barlow and that woman.’

‘He’d known her since she was born. Literally.’

‘Knowed her ma. When her moved in, some folks put it round he was the girl’s ole man.’ Gomer shook his head. ‘Feller starts doin’ well for hisself, always some bugger ready to pull him down the gutter. Don’t take it to heart, vicar, I reckon you done your best.’

Merrily stared at him. Didn’t recall telling Gomer anything about her dealings with Felix Barlow and Fuchsia.

‘The ole church, vicar.’ Gomer dipped a hand into his top pocket, pulled out his ciggy tin. ‘St Cosmo’s?’

‘Cosmas,’ Merrily said. ‘And St Damien.’

‘Ar, them’s the boys.’

‘Bloody hell, Gomer, it’s a disused church … remote.’

‘Exac’ly. You wasn’t exactly dressed for not gettin’ noticed, place like that. You like a nun, her like a bride. Word gets round.’

Like a bride. Fuchsia in the white dress. The candle and the bigger light from the window over the altar. The light in Fuchsia’s wide-apart owl eyes. No light now, no eyes, no head.

‘Go back in the warm, eh, vicar?’ Gomer said. ‘You’re shivering.’

‘I’m OK. I just …’ She stared at the dull sun. There was something else. ‘Gomer, you did a drainage job in Garway — for a Mrs Morningwood?’

Gomer stiffened, shut the ciggy tin with a snap.

‘Muriel?’

‘Sorry, I don’t know her first name.’

‘It’s Muriel,’ Gomer said.

‘Just that we met her, Jane and me, the other day.’

‘Oh ar?’

‘And when she heard we were from Ledwardine, she mentioned you.’

Gomer said nothing. He looked wary. Merrily blinked.

‘This is, erm … where you usually tell me something interesting. Some little anecdote.’

‘What’s to tell?’ Gomer sniffed. ‘Got her own smallholdin’. Keeps bees, chickens. Does this toe-twiddling treatment thing. And herbs.’

‘Yes, I knew some of that.’

‘And her’s popular with the farmers.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well … knows her way around, ennit? Lot o’ the ole farmers don’t. Don’t like computers, paperwork, London, Europe. Hell, don’t like Hereford much neither.’

‘No.’

‘Plus, add to the list the council and the Min of Ag, whatever they calls it now.’

‘She helps farmers deal with red tape?’

‘Knows how to talk to shiny-arsed buggers with clipboards, that’s the basic of it. Farmer’s got hisself a problem with some official, don’t know how to harticulate it, he calls Muriel. Officials’ll back down, write it off as a bad job, see, soon as deal with Muriel.’

‘And this is official, is it? I mean, does she do this kind of thing as … you know … some kind of agricultural consultant?’

Gomer laughed, started coughing and fitted a ciggy in his mouth, still laughing, still coughing.

‘I see,’ Merrily said.

‘Go and get warm, vicar. That’s the best thing.’

* * *

Robbie was complaining that his coffee would be ready. Couldn’t this wait? But Jane persisted; these guys were sometimes inclined to forget they were getting paid fairly decent money to feed young minds.

‘I suppose you’ve been reading some trashy novel,’ he said.

‘No, Mr Williams,’ Jane said. ‘I’ve been to Garway Church.’

Robbie sat down again, behind the history room desk.

‘Have you now?’

‘Seriously interesting place.’

‘Yes, it is,’ Robbie said. ‘Spent many a day there, fully absorbed.’

Morrell, the head, had introduced this system where sixth-formers got to call teachers by their first names, like they were your mates. It just led to awkwardness, in Jane’s view, and this was a view clearly shared by the head of history, who refused even to reveal his first name. It had always been R. Williams. So, obviously …

‘Right …’ Jane pulled up a chair. ‘So if anybody could answer my questions about Garway and the Templars …’

For you, Mr Williams, the mid-morning break is over.

‘Damn and blast,’ Robbie said mildly. ‘Dropped myself in it there, didn’t I?’

He had to be coming up to retirement. Sparse white hair, tweed jacket, comfortably overweight and, unlike most of his smoothie colleagues, so determinedly uncool that he almost was cool.

‘You see, it’s not exactly very big, that church,’ Jane said. ‘But so full of mysteries.’

She wasn’t going to tell him she hadn’t been into the actual church yet, due to them running into Mrs Morningwood and everything. Anyway, no problem, she’d been on the common-room computer, and there were two or three websites with stacks of pictures of the church’s unique features — the Templar coffin lids in the floor, the enigmatic carvings, the remains of the circular nave …

Robbie took off his brown-framed glasses, looked at the ceiling.

‘Thing is, Jane … there’s an awful lot of twaddle talked about the Knights Templar. Always has been. Supposed to be magicians and guardians of famous secrets, but in reality they were uneducated and illiterate, most of them. Weren’t even monks, in the true sense, simply a religious brotherhood who observed various disciplines and went out into the world to fight people.’

‘But they obviously knew about magic and astrological configurations and things.’

‘Not “obviously” at all, girl. Magic, in medieval times, was a high science, chronicled in Latin and Greek.