Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

But still Merrily drew a long breath, and still it came back out as Jesus, Jesus, Jesus , half oath, half prayer.

And, because she really didn’t want to, she went in.

Entering the kitchen to the smell of something overboiled and a rumbling, refrigerator or a Rayburn, overlaying a sound from deeper into the house, like a roll of carpet being dragged across the floor.

Call out? She opened her mouth to do it, but no sound came.

A door was half-open to the living room – the treatment room where she’d spent most of yesterday. Merrily stayed just short of the doorway. A dimness in there and a drifting smell, salty and sour. A smell that had not been apparent yesterday, a smell she half-recognised and …

OK, phone .

She pulled out her mobile, switched it on and then plunged it back into her hip pocket, cupping both hands over the bump. One day she’d figure out how to mute the electric piano chord that told you – and everybody else – that the phone was awakening.

Waiting. Mobiles these days, all this techno, they took for ever to boot up. In the living room there was a gap at the top of the drawn curtain which lit a triangle of blue-white across the room, like a flickering sail on dark water, and then it vanished. She took out the phone again, pressed the nine key three times, didn’t send it. Not yet.

The darkness pulsed and jittered. Someone was fumbling about in there. Merrily was feeling around for a light switch when something fell over with a bong , and then a sharp, tight shattering of glass jerked her back into the doorway.

Halfway down the wall, her hand found the metal nipple of the switch, and she flipped it down.

‘Come any closer …’ a voice high and cracked ‘… and I shall take out your—’

The light flickered on, a frosted bowl, flat to the ceiling, exposing a woman crouching in a corner.

Merrily said, ‘Oh dear God.’

‘—Take your throat out.’

Mrs Morningwood was a cramped detail from an engraving of hell, her hair crimson-rinsed, thick ribbons of dark red unrolling from her scalp, collecting in her eye sockets, blotching on her bared teeth.

Both her hands were bleeding freely around a shivering tube of jagged glass.

‘Mrs—’

‘Get back !’

The glass shuddered in her hand, and Merrily saw that it was the smashed chimney from the green-shaded oil lamp, its tip serrated but the whole thing cracked, cutting into the hands that gripped it.

She saw the brass body of the lamp on the carpet at the end of its flex. The darkwood piano stool on its side, blood-flecked. The log basket overturned, leaving the rug cobbled with logs. The bentwood rocking chair still in motion, as if someone had just stood up.

Mrs Morningwood was wearing a pale blue nightdress. She was squinting through the blood, trying to divert a river away from an eye and making a red delta across a cheek and over her chin, spatters sporadically blossoming, like wild roses, on the blue nightdress.

It seemed likely that she couldn’t see who was with her in the room because her eyes were full of blood.

‘It’s me,’ Merrily said. ‘Merrily Watkins.’

Mrs Morningwood held on to the lamp-glass.

‘He’s gone,’ Merrily said.

She crossed the room, watching the jagged lamp-funnel – now in Mrs Morningwood’s right hand.

‘I saw him running into the trees. I think he had a hood … black bag over his head, with eye holes. Just let me—’

‘No. Don’t touch me.’

Merrily said, ‘I’m getting an ambulance … all right?’ She opened up the phone. ‘Just …’

‘No!’ Mrs Morningwood edging crablike around the wall. ‘Go away. Forget you ever came here.’

‘Who was he?’

‘There was nobody.’

‘Mrs Morningwood, I saw him. I saw him running towards the barn.’

‘Forget it. What are you doing here, anyway?’

Reaching the chaise longue, Mrs Morningwood tried to heave herself up. Sudden, frightened pain came out in a compressed mouse-squeak from the back of her throat.

Dragging a handful of tissues from a Kleenex box on the desk, Merrily moved across, kneeling down beside her. Mrs Morningwood turned sharply away with a snort, tossing her head like a horse, blood bubbling in her nose and on her exposed and blueing throat you could also see red indents, which …

‘Jesus Christ, you’ve been—’

Mrs Morningwood felt at her throat and winced.

‘Did most of this myself.’

And she probably had, with her nails.

Trying to prise his fingers away.

‘Put that fucking thing—’ Bloodied hands clawing out; the phone dropped to the carpet. ‘ Leave it! ’

‘We need the police, Mrs Morningwood.’

‘ Shush! Was that …?’

‘It’s all right, he’s gone .’

But suppose he hadn’t?

They waited, listening. Merrily was aware of the clock ticking in another room. Out in the car, Roscoe barked once. Mrs Morningwood’s head jerked up.

‘The dog …’

‘In the car.’

‘Dog’s all right? I thought—’

‘He’s fine. I picked him up in the lane.’

‘Thank you.’ Mrs Morningwood’s bloodied head fell back into the pillows on the chaise. Big bruises on her thin arms were almost golden in the light. ‘Thank you, Watkins. Owe you … a whole course of bloody treatment.’

She started to laugh and sat up and went into a spasm of coughing and had to spit out some blood into the wad of tissues. Merrily pulled out some more from the box.

Could be internal bleeding.

‘You have got to let me get you some help.’

‘Help myself, darling. What I do. Get me a cigarette, would you? Mantelpiece.’

‘Just—’

‘Wouldn’t give the bloody doctors the satisfaction. One other thing you might do …’

‘Just listen. Please. We can’t put this off, he’s going to be miles away if we don’t—’

‘Lock the back door.’

‘All right, but—’

‘And then go into the bathroom and turn on the shower for me, would you?’

‘It’s a crime scene, Mrs Morningwood. You’ve been subjected to a … a savage bloody … We need an ambulance and we need the police. There’s no way you—’

‘You’re wasting your breath, darling. Not as if they’re ever likely to get the bastard. Take you in, strip you down, probe your bits, accuse you of lying …’

‘There’ll be DNA.’

‘He was masked . Wore surgical gloves and a fucking condom, he—’

Silence.

Merrily gasped. Mrs Morningwood began to laugh again, with no humour, the blood already drying in the deep lines in her face.

SIÂN SAID, ‘YOU’LL need to explain this again.’

‘Can’t. Sorry. Not my decision. Look – sorry – the signal’s not great. I’m sorry.’

‘You’re in the car?’

‘I’m coming back.’ Keep it short; less chance of voice-shake. ‘Bishop’s decision. I think he should be the one to explain. I’m baffled, frankly, Siân, but he makes the rules.’

If Merrily was quieter inside now, it was the result of an hour’s violent scrubbing of the floor, the walls and the legs of furniture. The painstaking removal of sticky blood from the fabric of the chaise longue. The careful and complete incineration of a blue nightdress in the range. A full hour of scrubbing and squeezing until her hands hurt and her knees were abraded from the flags.