Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘If you get anywhere … would there be stuff you’re able to share? Sometimes it’s easier for the police to get information than somebody like me with no obvious reason to inquire.’

‘Equally,’ Bliss said, ‘there are situations where it’s easier for a harmless cleric to learn things than a copper.’

‘Does that mean we’re looking at an arrangement? You tell me what you’ve learned from relatives or anyone else, I tell you … what I can.’

‘What you can ?’

‘Look at it this way, Frannie – most of the stuff I wouldn’t feel right divulging is going to be stuff that would embarrass you anyway. And the coroner.’

‘You’re so cute, Merrily,’ Bliss said.

‘I’m a professional. It’s odd how people seem to forget that.’

Bliss smiled, shaking his head.

‘Particularly me,’ Merrily said.

After a lunch of soup and a cheese sandwich, she rang Uncle Ted, the senior churchwarden, to explain that she might be away for a few days. He was out, so she laid it gratefully on his machine. Uncle Ted was still resentful of Deliverance, although he must know that without it she’d probably wind up with another four parishes and Ledwardine would see even less of her.

She rang Lol, but he must have already left for tonight’s gig, somewhere in South Wales. She’d try his mobile later. She ought to go and lie on the bed, try and recharge, but there was too much to do in a very short time.

Looking up Morningwood in the phone book, she found just one entry and called it on the mobile.

‘Poor girl,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

Nothing about Felix. Just ‘ Poor girl .’

‘I’m … coming over. Either tonight or early tomorrow. Will you be around, Mrs Morningwood?’

‘In and out, darling. Never far away. Always there around nightfall to shut the chicks away.’

‘And you’re … where?’

‘Coming in from the Hereford side, past The Turning – know where that is?’

‘No.’

‘Ask. Three hundred yards, sign on the right, Ty Gwyn . Short track.’

‘OK. If you’re not in, I’ll keep trying.’

There was an uncertain pause. Mrs Morningwood cleared her throat.

‘Reason I called earlier … Spoke about you with a friend, Sally, in the Frome Valley.’

A momentary fog; you ran into too many people in this job.

‘You met, it seems, under difficult circumstances, relating to gypsies,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

‘Oh … Sally Boswell?’

At the hop museum. Her husband, Al, had made Lol’s most precious guitar. Mandolin soundbox and about a dozen different types of wood. Lol revered Al. Al revered Sally.

‘Known her for quite some years, darling. She confirmed what I’d sensed when we met. That you are rescourceful and trustworthy.’

‘That was very kind of her. Mrs Morningwood, can I—’

‘No, come and see me. I’m wary of phones.’

And she’d gone. Suddenly nobody was trusting phones. It was getting like the old Soviet Union.

Merrily dropped the mobile in the in-tray, picked up Dobbs’s Charles file and read an unidentified cutting – looked from the typeface and the length of the paragraphs like one of the quality broadsheets – about the Prince’s diet. How, aged around thirty, after seeing how some pigs were treated, he’d vowed to become vegetarian. Dropped red meat, taken up raw vegetables, lost weight and developed a rather ascetic appearance.

He’d still gone shooting, though. Some family traditions must’ve been hard to shed, especially with a father like his. But the interest in organic farming had grown out of it, with impressive results.

How relevant was any of this stuff? If there’d been anything immediately pertinent in the Dobbs file, Sophie would have spotted it. Merrily slid the papers back into the file as the phone quivered before it rang.

Sophie herself.

‘You have … a locum.’

Her voice was not so much dry as arid.

‘That was quick.’

‘Merrily, I’m afraid that it isn’t going to be Ruth Wisdom.’

‘Oh.’

‘Ruth has unexpected domestic ties,’ Sophie said. ‘Consequently, I had to put out a round-robin email. Which, I’m afraid, was answered within … a very short time.’

‘I did point out, didn’t I, that Jane will still be here? I mean, she’s got her own apartment in the attic, but— it’s not a bloke, is it?’

‘I’m very sorry, Merrily,’ Sophie said. ‘You really won’t like this, but it was out of my hands.’

WHEN JANE GOT off the school bus, there was a silver-grey car she didn’t recognize outside the vicarage.

She walked over. It looked like one of those hybrid jobs that ran partly on urine or something, cost an arm and a leg but the driver was guaranteed a martyr’s welcome in eco-paradise. Very tidy inside, a pair of women’s leather gloves on the dash.

Jane went back to the market square, wishing whoever it was would just sod off. Needing some time, undisturbed, with Mum, because what she had in her airline bag was likely to be of serious and sobering significance.

Normally, if you had a free period in the afternoon, you spent it wiping out any outstanding homework essays. Jane had had two free periods and had spent them both, plus most of the lunch hour, on one of the common-room computers. Feeling she had something to prove. To Mum and … maybe to Coops, who she hadn’t seen for a few days. But she intended to, soon.

She looked around the square for Lol’s cool truck. Not there. He must’ve left for his gig. Jane felt a kind of dismay. While it was good that Lol had gigs, better still that he’d found the balls to do gigs, inevitably it was pulling him and Mum in different directions. And although they did their best neither of them, in all honesty, was what you could call a strong and decisive person.

Outside the Eight Till Late, a news bill for the only evening paper that reached Ledwardine, the Star , read:

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 cliché on a billboard – Death Riddle – tapped onto a screen by some cynical hack in a town where the air was always singing with sirens.