The Fabric of Sin

DOUBLE DEATH RIDDLE OF BUILDER AND GIRLFRIEND

The girlfriend, too?

Jane froze. Literally froze, hard against one of the fat blackened oak pillars holding up the market hall.

She could remember, quite clearly, a time when shocking death had given her not a shiver but a frisson — subtly different, fizzing with a forbidden excitement. Back then, death had not, essentially, been about loss. Even — God forbid — the death of her own dad, because it had happened, when Jane was quite young, in a high-speed car crash with a woman next to him who had not been Mum.

Then they’d moved to the country, and death, in Ledwardine, had resonated. It was so much closer — as close as the churchyard just over the garden wall, where funerals were conducted by her own mother, before burial in a grave dug by Gomer Parry. Whose wife, Minnie, had gone, in the hospital in Hereford. His nephew, Nev, in a fire. And there was Colette, the friend Jane had first got drunk with, on cider, both of them paralytic under the tree in Powell’s Orchard where old Edgar Powell had blown his brains out at the wassailing. And, worst of all, Miss Lucy Devenish, Jane’s friend and mentor and inspiration … but not for very long before her moped had been on its side in the main road under Cole Hill.

The fragility of life. Random cosmic pruning. One snip of the big secateurs. And then what?

Sometimes, she wished she had Mum’s faith. Always assuming it really was faith. She pictured Mum standing at the landing window in her frayed robe, staring bleakly out into the drab, grey morning.

This guy, the builder. Obviously Jane hadn’t known him, or his girlfriend, but out here he was much more than a cheap cliche on a billboard — Death Riddle — tapped onto a screen by some cynical hack in a town where the air was always singing with sirens.

Out here, where it was quiet and death resonated, he’d been part of the fabric, working the sandstone and the timber and the Welsh slate.

And the girlfriend. Mum was not going to be easy to live with tonight.

Now the stuff in the airline bag, the printouts — from, admittedly, some fairly lurid websites — felt like some kind of porn. Not the kind that could get you banned from using the computer for the rest of term, more insidious than that.

Unnerved by the billboard, switching the bag from her left shoulder to her right, Jane crossed to the vicarage.

She’d seen the woman somewhere before, she was fairly sure of that. Fiftyish and elegant, heavy hair with a dull sheen like pewter, serious grey eyes, dark grey suit. Dog collar.

Mum said, ‘Jane, this is Sian.’

Mum was looking, to be honest, frazzled, her skin close to grey, standing at a corner of the refectory table, like the kitchen wasn’t her own. Which of course it wasn’t. The Church owned it. The Church owned everything. Owned Mum.

There was a case in the hall. A real leather traveller’s case, with stickers, next to Mum’s old overnight bags.

Sian? Jane stared at the woman. The woman smiled in this bland way. Perfect teeth.

Holy shit. It had to be Sian Callaghan-Clarke.

‘Sian’s going to be looking after things here for a few days,’ Mum said. ‘As you, erm, suspected this morning, I need to go over to Garway, sort some things out.’

This was the woman who, only a few months ago, had nearly destroyed Mum after getting herself made diocesan Deliverance coordinator. Callaghan-Clarke’s view of Deliverance seemed to be that it was totally about helping deluded people to seek treatment — bringing in this smooth shrink as part of the Deliverance Module. At least he’d gone, and the last time Mum had mentioned Callaghan-Clarke it was to say that she’d been keeping a low profile lately, not interfering, never going into the office.

But Mum was inclined to take her eye off the ball.

‘Jane is fairly self-sufficient, Sian. She has her own apartm— a big room on the second floor. And a lot of studying to do. So, with all the parish business, you probably won’t get to meet a lot. Anyway …’ Mum smiling inanely ‘… here she is.’

Jane just stood there, like struck dumb, Ethel doing a figure of eight around her ankles.

‘Hello, Jane,’ Callaghan-Clarke said. ‘I’ve heard such a lot about you.’ Black farce. Mum had collapsed into the old captain’s chair in the scullery. The door was shut, Jane with her back to it.

* * *

‘Have you gone insane?’

Callaghan-Clarke was upstairs in the guest room, unpacking her fancy case of Italian leather covered with stickers from international church synods, and it was a big house where voices didn’t travel … so, like why, in God’s name, were they whispering?

‘Nothing I could do,’ Mum said. ‘Fait accompli. Ruth Wisdom couldn’t make it, Sophie asked around by email, Sian offered.’

‘Sophie accepted that?’

‘If she’d said no, how suspicious would that have looked? Sian’s … highly placed in the Diocese. I wouldn’t want Sophie to get on the wrong side of her over something like this.’

‘I have to stay here with this monster?’

‘She’s not a monster, Jane. She’s just an ambitious, very smart, exbarrister with … some kind of calling.’

Mum started to laugh. One of those laughs where things really can’t get any worse.

‘Your builder guy,’ Jane said. ‘There’s a news bill outside Prosser’s. It says the girlfriend’s …’

‘Yes.’

It was worse than Jane had expected. Immediately, she was imagining doing it: one ear squashed into the cold steel track, the other exposed to the enormous saw-bench scream of the oncoming train. Did she lie facing it, watching the lights? Or was she turned away, feeling the vibration inside her brain, her whole body hunched and tensed, foetal? What could make a fairly young and apparently beautiful woman batter to death somebody she’d loved and then have herself demolished, her face ground into fragments of bone, shreds of tissue?

Jane pulled the plug on it. She dragged over the other chair and sat down.

‘Why does Callaghan-Clarke want to come here? Like, what’s the ulterior motive?’

‘Jane, there—’

‘I’m not a kid any more, Mum, I can keep my mouth shut and I’ve been around this situation long enough to get a feel for seedy C of E politics. Why?’

‘OK,’ Mum said, ‘to look at it charitably—’

‘Oh, yeah, sure, let’s all be terribly Christian about it—’

‘To look at it charitably, first … Maybe she just wanted to help out, knowing this was a job that the Bishop’s keen we deal with efficiently and it would need to be a woman.’

‘She wants to be the first woman bishop, right?’

‘Archdeacon, apparently. In the short term.’

‘What?’

‘The present Archdeacon’s coming up to retirement, possibly next year. Becoming Archdeacon would be a good stepping stone to a Bishop’s Palace, when that becomes a possibility for a woman.’

Jane thought about this. As she understood it, the Archdeacon was like the Bishop’s chief of staff, the Head of Human Resources in the Diocese. He — or she — organized priests.

‘The Archdeacon’s in charge of like not replacing vicars who retire or burn out, so the rest of you can all have seventeen parishes each? The Bishop’s axeman. Or woman.’

‘Something like that.’ Mum wasn’t laughing now. ‘The word is — according to Sophie — that Sian’s shadowing Archdeacon Neale for a month, using the time to put together a new game plan for rationalizing the Diocese. I’ve known for a while that I could be affected.’

‘But you can say no to more parishes, can’t you?’