The Fabric of Sin

of him, mainly — they’d met, briefly, maybe a couple of times.

‘I never realized,’ he said on the phone to Prof Levin. ‘Jimmy Hater.’

He’d called around nine p.m., when Prof habitually took a coffee break from whatever album he was mixing. Often, he would work through midnight, the cafetiere at his elbow. An addictive personality, but caffeine was safer than the booze of old.

Lol said, ‘I remember he always sounded kind of upper-class, in comparison with most of the others.’

‘Real name James Hayter-Hames,’ Prof said. ‘If you were rock ’n’ roll management in the punk era, that was not a good time to let it get out that your family was even posher than Joe Strummer’s. Hayter on its own, however — that was a strong and impressive name to have. Especially if you left out the “y”.’

‘I didn’t even know about the “y” for a long time.’ Lol recalled a stocky, strutting guy, Napoleonic. ‘I used to think it was a completely made-up name, like Sid Vicious. You ever produce anything for any of Hayter’s bands?’

‘Produced, no.’

‘Engineered?’

‘For my sins. Post-punk death-metal. Not my favourite period, Laurence. Bearable at the time, with three or four bottles of red wine, God forbid, on the mixing desk. That era, I like to draw a curtain across it. Death metal — mostly foul. Jimmy Hayter — a twat.’

‘Still?’

Prof said, ‘Once a twat …’

‘Where does he live? I mean, is he accessible?’

‘Yes and no. He inherited the pile eventually, of course. It’s a responsibility. Nobody wants to besmirch the coat of arms. On the other hand, the family seat gobbles wealth. And farming, even big-time farming, doesn’t pay half the bills any more. So the earl, whatever he is now, he keeps his hand in, and when the roof falls in on the orangery or something he puts on a festival. On the very fringe of his estate, naturally. The house a mere dot on the horizon.’

‘Where is the house?’

‘I dunno, someplace south of Brum. Stratford way, possibly. I could find out.’

‘Death metal,’ Lol said. ‘A lot of occult there?’

‘Generally pseudo. Guys on Harleys, with skull rings and slash-here neck tattoos. So … occult … this would be a Merrily inquiry, would it?’

‘Would he talk to her, do you think? Say, on the phone?’

‘On the phone, Laurence, he won’t say anything worth the price of a cheap-rate call. And, frankly, the last thing you want is to expose a woman as appealing as little Merrily, with or without the dog collar, to Jimmy Hayter. Especially with his lovely wife, her ladyship, living a lavishly subsidized life in France, her physical role in his life complete … and, from what I hear, bloody grateful for that.’

‘Would he speak to me, do you think?’

‘Why should he do that?’

‘Maybe in the interests of … I don’t know … keeping the past where it belongs?’

Lol had the map book open on the desk in the window, marking out the route to a village he didn’t know, outside Gloucester. Tomorrow night’s concert: a big pub with a folk club, the kind of intimate gig which, on the whole, he preferred. He pushed the page under the lamp. How far from Stratford? Forty miles, fifty?

‘The situation is, Prof, that in his youth Jimmy Hayter seems to have been part of a commune. In a farmhouse down on the Welsh Border. Some of what they might have got up to … it would help Merrily to know about that.’

‘Might have got up to?’ Prof said. ‘What’s that mean? Do I like the sound of that? I don’t. What does Merrily say?’

‘She says it gives her a bad feeling.’

‘Never dismiss a woman’s feelings, good or bad,’ Prof said, and Lol could hear the clink of the beloved and necessary cafetiere, the slurping of the brown elixir. Then a silence, then, ‘Jesus, Lol, you need to understand, you must not threaten this man.’

‘Don’t take the glasses off, then?’

‘Laurence, listen to me. Jimmy Hayter … stately home, dinner parties with the gentry, but the guys with the skull rings and the slash-here tattoos, they still dig his garden, you know what I’m saying?’

34 Shaman

Teddy was right, it had once been an accepted rural service, like blacksmithing, and there had been an opportunity for Muriel Morningwood to talk about it and she hadn’t.

My mother would awake in the morning to hear her throwing up. Coming to the obvious conclusion. Which she put to Mary.

Merrily lay on the bed, gazing up at the wardrobe. Just a wardrobe, mesh over its ventilation slits, nothing like Garway Church.

There was a different light, now, on Mrs Morningwood Senior’s motherly concern for Mary Linden. Finding out about Mary’s pregnancy, would she have offered to terminate it, or what? What had actually passed between them to cause Mary to leave the Morningwood house before morning?

Need to know. Did she need to know? Was this important? You kept turning over stones and uncovering other stones. At which point did you back off?

There were times when deliverance could seem like the most rewarding role in a declining Church, but it was also the most ill-defined.

It was not yet nine p.m. Needing to think about all this, Merrily had accepted Beverley’s assessment of her level of fatigue, taken herself upstairs. Had a shower, put on a clean T-shirt, lay down, her body instantly falling into relaxation … but her damn head just filling up with questions, anomalies …

Tomorrow she’d need to talk to Sycharth Gwilym. Might find him at his farm, or it might mean driving into Hereford.

Before or after facing up to Mrs Morningwood? This time, no flam, no bullshit.

She sat up. There was an electric kettle on the dressing table. She prised herself from the bed, filled the kettle in the shower room. And, of course, she needed to call Jane, perhaps talk to Sian, make sure everything was OK. Sitting on the side of the bed, she switched on the phone, and it throbbed in her hand.

Message.

‘Merrily, it’s Sophie. Could you ring me at home?’

Sounding strangely close to excited, Sophie said she might have solved the mystery of the cuttings.

‘Cuttings?’

‘Canon Dobbs, Merrily.’

‘Oh … sorry.’ Hell, the cuttings. On hands and knees on the carpet, Merrily pulled one of the overnight bags from under the bed, dug out the plastic folder. ‘I was just … going through them again.’

‘In which case, you’ve probably noticed several mentions of the late Sir Laurens van der Post.’

‘Yes.’ Scrabbling through the papers. ‘That’s, erm …’

Uncovering an article enclosing a picture of this benign-looking old guy with a grey comb-over, side-on to the camera: PRINCE’S GURU: SAGE OR CHARLATAN?

‘You haven’t read them, have you, Merrily?’

‘I …’ Merrily sighed. ‘I haven’t read them all. Things have been complicated. Just inconveniences, really. But time-consuming.’

‘Do you know anything about van der Post?’

‘This and that.’