Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘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 cafetière, 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?’

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 Siân, 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.’

Van der Post, Laurens: white South African who bonded with the bushmen of the Kalahari studying so-called primitive belief systems and showing what Western societies might learn from them, while drawing public attention to the horrors of apartheid.

A war hero. But known primarily, in later years, as a close friend of the Prince of Wales. A seminal influence.

‘The Church wasn’t happy,’ Merrily recalled, ‘when Charles decided he should be William’s godfather. On account of van der Post’s own belief system being not strictly C of E. Correct?’

‘He believed that all religions were, essentially, one,’ Sophie said.

‘Which possibly accounts for Charles’s declared intention of becoming Defender of Faiths , when he becomes king?’

‘Which almost certainly does account for it. The extent of van der Post’s influence can never be overstated. He was extremely mystical in a way that I suspect your … daughter would understand.’

‘Pagan?’

‘That would be too simplistic. He died in’ 96, at the age of ninety, having been far closer to the Prince in his crucial formative years than, I would guess, anyone in the Church of England. You’ll find details in the cuttings about the time they went together into the wilderness of Kenya and van der Post imparted his knowledge of … I suppose the word “shamanism” would not be inappropriate.’

‘It’s coming back to me. Closeness to the land, anyway.’

‘And the alleged … spirits of nature. Evidently a very powerful experience for a young man. They were camping out in a very remote area, without guards or detectives. And there, if you want to look for it, lies the basis of this much publicized – and possibly much misrepresented – communication with plants. It might have sown the seeds of the Prince’s passion for conservation and green issues generally.’

‘Interesting.’

What was also interesting was the way Sophie – who worked for the cathedral – talked about it, with no hint of condemnation. As if even the fringe-pagan became less obnoxious, for her, if it happened to be championed by royalty. If it ever came to a stand-off between the Church and the Crown, whose side would Sophie be on?

‘But where’s it leading, Sophie?’

‘It leads,’ Sophie said, ‘directly to Canon Dobbs. When he first came over here in, I think, the late 1920s, van der Post became a farmer in Gloucestershire for some years. Canon Dobbs grew up near Cirencester. My information is that he might even have worked on the van der Post farm as a boy, during holidays.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘I’ve been speaking to a retired clergyman – nobody you would know, so don’t ask – who knew Dobbs years ago. He said Dobbs would often talk about a South African farmer he’d known before the war who had helped to awaken his spiritual faculties.’