The Fabric of Sin

‘Jane isn’t returning your calls?’

‘See, I didn’t want to bother you with this, it’s not like she’s your daughter or anything, but I’m going crazy here, man.’

‘Well, you know … this is difficult, but the impression we were given was that, now you’re at university … your lives had kind of taken different paths?’

‘I’m at Cardiff! It’s less than an hour and a quarter away. I come back every weekend. I mean, you know, I could’ve gone to Oxford.’

‘You could have?’

‘They’d accepted me. It was a bit borderline, but they said yes.’

‘You turned down Oxford so you could be nearer to Jane?’

‘My old man’s still fuming. Weeks before he’d even talk to me.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Lol said.

‘No, you wouldn’t.’

‘Does Jane know?’

‘I told her … I said they’d turned me down.’

‘Eirion!’

‘Don’t say anything, will you?’

‘I don’t— How many calls have you made?’

‘To Jane? Bloody dozens. Her phones’s always switched off, and I leave messages and she doesn’t call back.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘She’s with someone else, right? It’s this bloody archaeologist, isn’t it?’

‘I … I don’t know.’

‘You know he’s married, don’t you? And he’s nearly thirty. I mean, he’s married. All right, Jane, she can be … you know … I mean, you know what she can be …’

‘Yeah.’

‘And yet … you know what I mean?’

‘Oh yes,’ Lol said.

‘Sorry, I shouldn’t be hanging this on you.’

‘I’ll talk to her, OK? I’ll find out something. Look, I’ll call you back … maybe tomorrow?’

The man in the leather coat was standing outside the lodge, beckoning, pointing to the gates. Telling Lol it was time.

The vicarage was immaculately tidy, and Sian had made a coal fire in the parlour and banked it up. This was thoughtful; Merrily rarely lit a fire before evening.

Upstairs, the guest room looked like Sian had never been there. It was at the rear of the house, overlooking the old Powell orchard. The sun had come out and ripe apples gleamed like baubles. Roscoe plodded around on the oak boards, and Merrily’s move to replace the duvet cover with a fresh one got a dismissive wave of the hand from Mrs Morningwood.

‘Don’t bother, it’ll only be stinking of this stuff by morning.’

Jars and bottles, some labelled, were set out on the pine dresser with a glass and a spoon. She’d accepted a cup of weak tea, declined food. Merrily sat on the edge of the bed.

‘At the risk of—’

‘No.’

‘I’m thinking, primarily, of the head injuries. The doctor here, he’s not exactly a fan of alternative remedies, but he could at least put your mind at rest.’

‘You mean your mind. It’s not necessary. I don’t have a skull fracture, and even if I did—’

‘He doesn’t need to know what happened to you.’

Knowing, as she said it, that she was wrong. Kent Asprey would need to know and, while Mrs Morningwood might get away with her story about the head injury, how many people emerged from car crashes with strangulation marks?

‘Sooner or later this is going to hit you, Muriel.’

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

‘No, I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry. You get some rest, I’ll pace around for a couple of hours.’

When she turned at the door, Mrs Morningwood was standing by the window, a wounded smile on damaged lips. Or maybe not a smile at all, just the wound. It just had to be someone she knew.

‘And no, you won’t wake up to find police at the bedside,’ Merrily said.

‘Thank you.’

‘You need anything, just—’

‘I won’t. Equally, if you need to go out to attend to your parish affairs, go ahead.’

‘Right.’

* * *

Merrily went unhappily downstairs and through the kitchen to the scullery. Sat down and stared at the blotter on the desk, trying to be impressed by Mrs Morningwood’s resilience, but becoming only more mystified, not to say horrified by the bloody woman’s ability to contain the rage and the pain which ought to be taking her apart.

Merrily felt useless, ineffectual and — Jane had been right — some kind of doormat. She’d … for God’s sake, she’d just cleaned up a crime scene. This monster was out there, and she’d mopped up his mess, destroyed any usable traces of his DNA, and she …

… needed to pray and couldn’t.

Her palms were moist with sweat and she couldn’t summon the will even to put them together. A kind of barren coldness in her chest. A sense of desertion, as if something had vanished from her life.

Like the meaning of it. Like a basic feel for the spiritual validity of her job, her role in this black farce. Like any kind of self-worth.

She made herself look up Adam Eastgate’s number in the index. Maybe, if she hadn’t been so flattened by the Bishop’s early call, she’d have stood up to Mrs Morningwood, made her see some sense.

Stood up to a woman who’d been beaten up and raped? Made her ‘see sense’?

Merrily shook her head almost savagely, as if this could crumble the sludge in her brain so that the fragments might resettle into some random but interpretable pattern. Then she lit a cigarette, picked up the black bakelite phone, abruptly replaced it, reverted to the mobile and made the call.

‘No, the Bishop didn’t phone,’ Adam Eastgate said. ‘He came to see us, Merrily. At home.’

‘He came to your home?’

‘Said he was passing — I live over at Burghill, not the kind of place you just happen to pass. What he had to say made sense, I suppose. A pity, mind.’

‘He told you … what, exactly?’ She was aware of her stomach contracting. Close to an ulcer. ‘He suggested that it might be dangerous to be connected with a murder and suicide?’

‘More or less.’

‘For the Church or the Duchy?’

‘I think he meant for us, but that would be our problem, wouldn’t it?’

‘Maybe suggesting it would not look good if it got out that I’d administered a blessing for Fuchsia, in a disused church, just a short time before she killed her partner? Did he say that?’

‘Close.’

‘And if it got out that I’d been involved at the behest of the Duchy of Cornwall …’

‘He might have said something like that as well, aye.’

Merrily had expected a reluctance to answer her questions, but it wasn’t there. Eastgate wasn’t obviously eager, but he wasn’t erecting barriers.