Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘Mary,’ Lol said.

‘Mary Roberts. Mary Linden.’

‘Need to get Bliss.’

‘Don’t move,’ Merrily said. ‘Please don’t move more than …’

‘Need to find him. Before the bastard dumps the bones in the river or something. Or he’ll walk away from it.’

He saw Merrily clench the wheel.

‘ Enjoy you ,’ she said. ‘ Going to enjoy you . That was what he said.’

She looked at him and he felt the scream that was going on inside her.

Jane said, ‘He’s got to be insane. Not just psychotic.’

‘I don’t think he’s insane at all,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s the trouble. Just driven towards something we can’t really understand. The only hope we have is that if they find that body maybe they can match the DNA against Fuchsia.’

‘He is insane,’ Jane said, leaning over from the back seat. ‘Because if he thought he could …’ putting her arms around Merrily from behind, and her arms were quivering ‘… if he thought he could just kill you and leave you …’

‘He was wearing surgical gloves.’ Merrily turned to Jane. ‘And he wouldn’t have just left me. When we were upstairs, just now, and we looked down into the priest’s hole? Struck me then that it was vacant. It had a vacancy.’

As they reached the top road at The Turning, she started to laugh, dangerously close to hysteria, and then she said, not even sounding surprised, ‘He’s there.’

Lol saw a flash. Out in the road, lit up in headlights, the surplice billowing.

Lit up in headlights, but not from the Volvo.

Merrily braked hard and the Volvo stalled, as was its habit. An engine roar and he flew up like a swan, this great, white flapping thing.

Merrily was out of the car before Teddy Murray hit the tarmac. She saw a wheel of the Jeep rolling easily over his head and she heard – one of those sounds you knew you were never going to forget for the rest of your life – the crunching of his shiny skull like an egg in the road.

Long minutes, then, of people continuously fading in and out of cottages and unseen farms, like a video rewinding. Atmosphere of nearmute horror. Merrily trying several times to talk to Mrs Morningwood and failing. Only getting close when the emergency services arrived and Mrs Morningwood was leaning against a wall, head in her hands, rocking backwards and forwards like a child on a fairground ride, blood and tears oozing between her fingers.

The back of the ambulance yawning and the most senior paramedic telling Mrs Morningwood that she had to come with them and getting reminded that while it might be a police state it wasn’t yet an NHS state.

‘Look at you,’ the woman paramedic said calmly. ‘Look at your face … your neck … look at your eyes. Please, my dear, these are serious injuries. At least let us check you out in the—’

‘It’s what I do . It’s what I do , you idiot!’

‘What’s she talking about?’ the paramedic said. ‘Does anybody know?’

‘She’s a herbalist,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh, well, that’s a big help, then, isn’t it, if she’s got a fractured skull. That is blood in her hair, you know.’

‘I do think you’d better go with them,’ one of the police said. ‘We can take your statement later.’

‘You can take my statement now.’

Mrs Morningwood peeling herself from the wall. Merrily saw a cop carrying ROAD CLOSED signs from a blue van. The wind was dying and the mist was coming back, swirling down from the hill. Mrs Morningwood limped into the road towards the Jeep, and a police-woman held her back, and she started to weep again.

‘Can’t you get him out ?’

‘Don’t look, madam, that’s my advice.’

‘Do you think I’m some sort of innocent ? You think I don’t know what I’ve done? I’ve killed the poor fucking vicar!’

A policeman said to Merrily, ‘Is that your car, madam, the Volvo?’ and she nodded and the copper said, ‘Did you see what happened?’ and Lol came over, and Merrily thought this was going to be the best time to get him into the ambulance.

‘I saw it,’ Lol said quietly. ‘You couldn’t miss him, all in white. He just ran out into the road. Wasn’t even walking, he was running. I don’t think there’s anything she could’ve done.’

Merrily stared at him. He looked past her.

‘We’ll need to take a proper statement, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘What happened to your arm?’

Lol explained that his friend had had to brake hard to avoid running into the Jeep and he mustn’t have had his seat belt on properly. Went into the windscreen with his head. The arm … he wasn’t sure.

‘Right, if you give your name to my colleague and then let’s get you into the ambulance.’

‘It’ll be OK. Honestly.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but all injuries at the scene of an accident …’

‘No problem.’ Lol tried to put both hands up, managed one. ‘Anything I can do.’ He looked over at Mrs Morningwood. ‘She’s going to be traumatized for life. He just … just came out.’

‘It’s true,’ Jane said from behind Merrily. ‘There’s no way she could’ve avoided him.’

Merrily glanced back at Jane; it sent a pain into her neck, from when Teddy’s hand had slammed into her face, twisting her head round. Different person. Like the Templars, sometimes pastoral, peacefully monastic, then the sword out, red to the hilt. Merrily stared at Jane and Jane stared back, defiant.

‘She didn’t have a chance,’ Jane said.

Another cop was asking Mrs Morningwood where she’d been going at the time of the accident and Mrs Morningwood was saying, ‘I was looking for my dog. My dog’s escaped. You haven’t seen a dog anywhere, have you?’

Merrily looked at Teddy’s body, no need to cover it because the surplice was up over his face, moulded to it by the blood and tissue and brain matter. Crumpled linen.

MERRILY’S ALB, AN appeal for purity and simplicity, now had dirt-stains on both arms and across one shoulder, as if emblematic of the kind of soiled priest who concealed rape, murder …

Or was just a doormat.

Pray for doormat .

On the back door, she drew a cross in holy water and asked that, by the holy and cleansing power of God, this entrance might be blessed.

Muriel Morningwood took off her dark glasses. Her eyes were black and red and still glaring with tears. A lot of tears these past two days.

‘How’s his wife taken it?’

‘I wouldn’t like to say.’ Merrily looked around. ‘I think we need to do every room.’

Her alb had a cord at the waist, like the Templars used to wear, under the cross.

‘You’ve seen her, though, I assume.’

‘Her son was coming over today to pick her up. Unsurprisingly, she’ll be putting the place on the market.’

Beverley Murray, face of scrubbed stone, looking at Merrily as if convinced she, or God, or both, were in some way behind this. Merrily had told her nothing. Beverley had said she’d have left Teddy, eventually, but Merrily didn’t think she would have. They tended not to, clergy wives. Or not for a long time.

‘You think he beat her?’ Mrs Morningwood asked.

‘I think he was oblivious of her, much of the time. Focused on his own perceived role in some kind of … alternative history. And she just got on with it. One roof, two lives.’

In the washhouse or utility room or whatever – well, there were still pegs on the wall, where coats would have hung – Merrily put down the flask of holy water, a sense of everything moving past her, out of control. A sense of blur , all the rushing spirits, waves of panic. Please, God, calm . She straightened up.