Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘ Yes .’

‘So what’s the weather like over there, Reverend? Bracing?’

‘Hello, Frannie.’

‘The way you snapped “ yes ”, just then … are my detective’s acute antennae picking up an element of stress, or—?’

‘What do you want?’

‘Just I hadn’t heard from you in a while. Wondered if you’d tripped over anything that might interest me – even mildly – in the impenetrable jungle that is Garway.’

‘You mean you’ve finally won the fight againt inner-city crime in Hereford and you’re at a loose end?’

‘You know, Merrily …’ Bliss paused. ‘Experience has taught me that these small displays of facetiousness on your part often conceal a profound anxiety.’

‘I’m a Christian. I don’t get profound anxiety.’

‘So nothing’s happened that you might need to tell me about.’

‘Nothing special at all,’ Merrily said, God forgive her.

‘LOL ROBINSON,’ JIMMY Hayter said. ‘Remind me, have we met?’

‘Um, very briefly at Glastonbury, way back. We only played there once. On a very small stage. You wouldn’t remember.’

‘Nah, I wouldn’t remember. I don’t like Glastonbury.’

Lol said nothing. He hadn’t imagined there was anybody who didn’t like Glastonbury.

What he was sure of was that he didn’t much like this room, with its lofty cathedral windows and an elaborately carved ceiling bulging with lumpen cherubs blowing trumpets. Victorian Gothic. Unsubtly different from the original soaring, arboreal Gothic, in Lol’s view. Built not so much to elevate as dominate.

Intimidate, even.

‘Levin – he back on the piss, Lol?’

‘Is somebody saying he is?’

Lol had a four-seater sofa to himself, about the size of his truck. He’d shuffled himself to one end, hunched forward so that his feet would actually reach the floor. Lord Stourport was in a well-worn leather armchair, close to the vast open fireplace, half a tree trunk sizzling there like a whole pig at a pig roast.

‘Just he wasn’t very lucid on the phone,’ Stourport said, ‘about what you wanted.’

‘He drinks coffee. It was probably a caffeine high. And maybe I hadn’t explained it very well.’

‘Let’s hope you can now, then, cocker.’

Hayter had a leg thrown over one of the arms of his chair, revealing a small split in the crotch of his jeans. He was squat and overweight, but not too much of it was fat. His hair was dense and white and wedged on his forehead, a weighty awning over his deep-set penetrating dark brown eyes.

‘This is not easy, Jimmy,’ Lol said.

Hayter’s eyebrow lifted at the familiarity, probably on account of this was not Jimmy’s drum, this was the seat of Lord Stourport.

Very Hayter, all the same, this Victorian fake. More powerful, in its heavy-duty way, than some authentic medieval castles rendered romantic by time and erosion. Very death-metal. Lol had counted four staff, including the guy in the leather coat and a gardener in a greenhouse, and he wondered if there was also a formal butler somewhere, in a butler suit, like the guy in the Celeb strip in Private Eye .

‘So you’ve come up from Herefordshire,’ Hayter said. ‘Where your girlfriend is the official exorcist. Working for the council or what?’

He wasn’t smiling. Hard to work out whether he was taking the piss or this was genuine ignorance. Best played down the line.

‘The Diocese. The Bishop. She’s an ordained priest.’

‘Right.’ Stourport nodded. ‘So if I rang the Bishop’s office …?’

‘You want the number?’

‘No, I’ll trust you. What’s she do, basically?’

Lol told him, patiently, about the cure of troubled souls and troubled premises. Like the Master House at Garway.

Lord Stourport leaned back, contemplating the cowboy boot on the end of the leg over the chair arm.

‘I’m a bit hazy. Would that be the tumbledown shit-hole a bunch of us rented for the summer, way back?’

As if Prof hadn’t told him and he hadn’t already done some hard thinking.

‘I heard it was you who paid the rent,’ Lol said. ‘And it was quite a bit longer than a summer.’

‘Summers could last for a couple of years, back then,’ Stourport said. ‘Back when we were young.’

‘I think this one got a bit autumnal. Quite quickly.’

Hayter’s eyes refocused.

‘You’re not here to try and blackmail me, are you?’

‘No,’ Lol said. ‘Sincerely I’m not. I’m just hoping you could give me some background. It’s like … people are saying it’s disturbed now, but is there any history? My friend, sometimes people ask her to clean up a place, and they’re making it up for some reason. Or there’s an element of delusion. Or they’re not telling her the whole story.’

‘How would I know the whole story?’

‘Maybe you wouldn’t. But you were an outsider living there. No local pressure to cover anything up.’

‘She goes to that kind of trouble?’ Stourport wore a grimace of disbelief. ‘A priest?’

‘Either you do the job properly …’

‘Because if you’re bullshitting me …’

‘Why would I?’

‘… Because if you are , I should just tell you, any hint of anything I say to you appears in the press, you are truly fucked, cocker. I’ll come after you. Well, not me personally , obviously, but someone.’

‘You’ve found that approach helps, generally?’ Lol said.

‘Sometimes it does.’ Stourport waved a languid hand. ‘Go on. Ask what you want.’

‘Did you get any feeling the place was – I have to say this – haunted?’

‘Could be.’

‘Really?’

‘It was old . I mean, this pile’s old, after a fashion – built on the site of the original Norman castle – and it’s haunted. Shapes seen out of the corner of an eye, on the stairs, in the long gallery. Nobody should give me that all-in-the-mind bullshit. But I would have to say this house isn’t haunted like that house was haunted. Or maybe the drugs were too new and lovely, then.’

Lol smiled. Stourport brought his leg down from the chair arm, inched the chair closer to the fire.

‘Doubt if I’d’ve got through it without the drugs, thinking back. Who’s living there now? Let me guess – couple of gay hairdressers from Islington, weekends only.’

‘Nobody’s living there at the moment. But it’s been bought by the Duchy of Cornwall.’

‘ Has it, by God?’

‘The plan is to restore it. Sensitively.’

‘ Right .’ Lord Stourport shifted in his chair. ‘Now you’re starting to make sense. They have weight, those guys. And money.’

‘And there are complications.’

Lol told him about the deaths. No reason to hold any of that back, not as if it hadn’t been in the papers. Stourport drew in his lips like he was about to whistle, but he didn’t comment.

‘So you’re just the boyfriend,’ he said when Lol sat back. ‘You don’t meddle yourself?’

‘Are you kidding?’

‘You mean this is all for … lerve ?’

Lol shrugged lightly.

‘We’ve been educated out of all that nonsense, the aristocracy. I tell you, Robinson, most of us were mightily relieved when punk came in and we no longer had to babble on about peace and lerve . Except for poor Charles, of course, who’s at least half-hippie. Never could stand the man, personally, but if he’s had the Master House unloaded on him one can only sympathize. What will she do, this woman of yours?’

‘She’ll say some prayers. Bless the premises. Or maybe organize a small service, a Requiem for the people who died, with people there who might still have problems with the house and people who had problems with it in the past. You could come if you wanted.’