Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

Couldn’t see. The grass was still knee-high on the verge, around the bumper. She had to lie down on the wet tarmac, edging between the front wheels and …

… Face it, there was unlikely to be more than one Irish wolfhound in this part of Garway.

‘ Roscoe? ’

With one wheel in the ditch, the other on the edge, the big car was tilted in the undergrowth, its belly hard into the muddy bank. Impossible to squeeze underneath; she just about managed to push her left arm under, feeling around in the soaking foliage.

‘Roscoe!’

Nothing moving under there, only … multiple stabbing pains in her left hand and up the inside of her wrist told her she’d grabbed a handful of nettles.

This was no use, basically; she’d have to get back in and try to shift the car. With extreme care.

Warm breath on the back of Merrily’s neck made her body retract, twisting over onto her side. Like they always did when you were on the ground, he thought she wanted to play; he was standing over her with his nose above her ear, poised and quivering.

‘Oh, Jesus, Roscoe—’

Collapsing into the road in a moment of wild relief, head in her arms, before pulling herself up. The dog waited, panting. His coat was messed up, matted, spiked and sodden, a thorny twig trapped in his collar. He’d been through hedges and perhaps a stream.

Merrily pulled herself up, clothes wet through, cold and clinging. There was no sign of Mrs Morningwood, and it seemed unlikely that she habitually turned her dog out in the mornings to take exercise in fields full of sheep.

Detaching the thorn twig, Merrily slipped a hand under Roscoe’s collar. He squeaked.

‘What’ve you done?’

She ran her hands down his flanks; at some point he squirmed away, as if in pain, but eventually let her lead him to the car. Tried twice to jump in; she had to help him into the back seat before dragging herself back through the passenger door.

The easy bit. She started the engine, one wheel spinning, another spurting mud and the old chassis creaking and moaning as she fought to wrench the Volvo out of the ditch.

Lol had set the alarm. Best to leave early; he had no knowledge of Warwickshire, only its awful motorways.

Prof Levin had called back just short of midnight, as the ashy-pink embers of last night’s hastily built fire had been quietly crumbling into the hearth.

‘Get a pad, Laurence, I’ll give you the directions.’

‘You … actually called him?’

‘I phoned his office, left a message and he was back within half an hour. Must be some call-referral system.’

‘I’m impressed,’ Lol said.

He’d always known Prof had some serious clout in this business, but even so …

‘Hayter and me – first time we’d spoken in some years. I knew he’d get back, if he was in the country, if only because he was always on at me to tell him what happened at the Abbey on the anniversary of Lennon’s murder.’

‘You told him that ?’

Lol knew two other people who’d been involved in this notorious, myth-soaked session. Neither of them, nor even Prof, had ever disclosed what had taken place, and it wasn’t something that had ever bothered Lol. The dark, narcotic side of the music business, like parts of the Old Testament, was best left alone if your faith was shaky. So this – telling Hayter – was above and beyond, and it spoke less of Prof’s friendship with Lol than his admiration for Merrily and what she did. The explicit nature of which, Prof would often say, was not something on which, as a recovering alcoholic, he ever wanted to dwell.

‘I told him some of it, Laurence. He won’t put it around, if only because everybody knows he wasn’t there.’

‘But he’ll see me?’

‘And you will see him, that’s the downside. Eleven-thirty in the morning. You get half an hour. You don’t get lunch. You owe me one, needless to say.’

‘I think I do.’

‘You also owe it to me to listen. I may have said this earlier – Hayter, if he’s doing business, prefers to deal with people in the flesh, rather than talk on the phone or exchange emails. This is because he needs to have them exposed to the full awesome glory of his repellent personality. But do not make the mistake of thinking this is all special effects, you know what I’m saying?’

Lol shook his head.

‘You still there, Laurence?’

‘I’m nodding,’ Lol said. ‘It’s because my mouth’s gone dry with fear.’

‘It’s not a joke. And be sure you call me afterwards. If you still have fingers to push the numbers.’

Now, memorizing his route from the map book, Lol looked at the clock on the desk. He needed to call Merrily, to find out exactly what she wanted to know from Hayter, but it was probably too early. He’d leave it an hour and, meanwhile, get on the road.

His stuff was still in the hall where he’d left it yesterday. The Guild acoustic amp, the Takamine jumbo, the exquisite lute-shaped Boswell, the harmonicas and the little drum machine. Loading and unloading the truck without injury to the kit was getting to be a serious chore. He just couldn’t imagine years of this.

He put Merrily’s number in the frame on his mobile.

Merrily had never really looked at the Morningwood house in the light of day, too fever-ridden yesterday morning to take it in. With its shambling pergola, its rampant chicken wire and its chaos of sheds, it was an almost comical contrast to the manicured holiday homes at the other end of the terraced row.

The only one of them, though, with any signs of life: the smoke like a curl of wispy hair above the chimney stack, the clutter of free-range chickens.

But if Morningwoods had been on this hill as long as the badger shit on the White Rocks, it hadn’t always been here at Ty Gwyn. This row couldn’t be more than a century and a half old, its angles too sharp, doors and windows too regular, too uniform for real age.

The rain had stopped, but dirty pink clouds were still bunched like muscles over the hills. Not a promising day. The car window was halfway down, Roscoe’s snout halfway out, his head up against Merrily’s hair. She could hear the chickens from the sloping land behind as she drew up in front of the two end houses. Blocking the lane, but it was a dead end; apart from Mrs Morningwood, it seemed unlikely that anyone else would be here until next spring.

‘Roscoe, I’m going to leave you in the car, in case she’s out looking for you or something. OK?’

Maybe this visit was meant. She thought about the Prince of Wales, his attention to coincidences and signposts .

It was just gone seven-thirty. At the front door, she looked around for a bell or a knocker. Sense of déjà vu – at this stage yesterday, she’d been ill and the door had been opened for her. Lifting a fist to beat on the panels, she thought she could hear movement from the back of the house … or one of the others, the holiday homes?

She glanced along the terraced frontage of emptied hanging baskets, smokeless chimneys. At Mrs Morningwood’s end of the block, there was a long fence reinforced with chicken wire, lining an unmade drive leading to a carport with a roof of galvanized sheets.

Under the carport was the back end of an old black Jeep Cherokee. Merrily glimpsed a figure moving along the side of the garage towards a barn or a stable.

‘Mrs Morningwood?’

She stopped, up against the house wall. The figure kept on moving, looking back just once, on the edge of the barn.

It didn’t look like Mrs Morningwood. It didn’t look like a woman. It didn’t seem to have a face, only a darkness.

Come on, this didn’t mean a thing. It didn’t mean a thing that the back door was ajar, like another door had been last summer, or that curtains were drawn across two downstairs windows, like on the days of funerals when she’d been a kid.