Fabric of Sin (17 page)

‘Mouthful of leaves and stuff.’

‘Maybe an ancient fertility symbol. Several in Herefordshire. The one in Garway Church is moulded into the chancel arch, and … there’s also this one inside the oak lintel over the fireplace in the Master House. Almost identical, I’d guess, but I’d need to check. I just looked up, there it was.’

‘That’s what you thought was watching you?’

‘At the back, so only visible from
inside
the inglenook. You don’t see him unless you enter his …’

‘A secret green man.’

‘And not in a church. I don’t know of any ancient ones that aren’t in churches, though maybe there are. And hidden away. Why?’

‘This green man is what scared you? Why you’d turned white?’

‘I haven’t been feeling too great lately.’ She pulled away from the font, couldn’t deal with this now. ‘Let’s go.’

Outside, a wind had arisen, chattering amongst dead chrysanths in a grave-pot. Merrily pulled the church keys from her shoulder bag. The Master House key poked out, and she thrust it back.

Lol said, ‘You now think something actually happened to this Fuchsia at the house?’

‘I’d convinced myself she was pulling some kind of scam. The face of
crushed linen, all that. I was coming round to thinking there was some entirely prosaic reason for Felix changing his mind, wanting out of the job. I was ready to confront her about it.’

‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘Confront her. But maybe with a bit more … sensitivity. That is, I still think there’s a lot she hasn’t told me, but I’m no longer ruling out the possibility of something else.’

‘What are you going to tell Jane?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You sure you’ve told me everything?’

‘Lol, I’m going to ring them now, OK?’

Fumbling out the phone and putting the number in the frame.

They stood under the lych-gate, opposite the square, orange and green lights making lanterns of the leaded windows of the Black Swan.

Lol said, ‘Why don’t you call them in the morning?’

‘They might leave early.’ The ringing stopped. ‘Hold on, he’s—’

The voice in the phone said hello.

‘Felix,’ Merrily said. ‘I’ve been trying to get you all day. Listen, I
really
need to talk to you. Both of you. Tomorrow morning if possible. Even tonight, if you’re up for that. Take me about twenty minutes to get there.’

There was no reply, something quizzical about the silence.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s Merrily Watkins.’

‘Yeh. I thought it was.’

Oh
shit
.

‘Frannie, I’m sorry, I must’ve put the wrong number in. More haste, less—’

‘Who did you think you were calling, Merrily?’

‘Just … just a guy I’ve been trying to …’

‘Felix, you said,’ Bliss said. ‘That would be Felix Barlow.’

‘How did
you
…’ Something jerked inside her chest. ‘
Frannie
…?’

‘Twenty minutes, then,’ Bliss said. ‘I’ll be waiting.’

T
HERE WAS THE
usual small, sordid fairground under a frantic night sky, fallen leaves panic-dancing in the intersecting headlight beams from three cars and a dark blue van, all pointing at the caravan, engines growling. Flapping and crackling from the plastic screen they’d erected inside the tapes, to keep out the rising wind. A rich smell of churned mud.

The West Mercia Police travelling show.

‘Fuchsia.’ Merrily felt insubstantial, blown around like the leaves. ‘Where is she? Please, can
someone
—?’

Nearly a dozen men and women, cops and crime-scene technos like worker ants in the grass, none of them answering her, all of them hyper: never let anybody tell you these guys didn’t get a wild buzz from violent death.

‘This
is
the feller?’ Bliss was in a white coverall, what he liked to call a Durex suit. Flicking occasional questions at her like pellets. ‘You’re sure about that?’

All the motion only emphasizing the stillness of the big man in a heap, dumped like manure below the caravan’s open door.
Oh God, oh God, oh God
.

‘Yes.’

Was
she sure? Under the hardened mud and the congealed fluids, his head was a different shape. Mouth half-open, dried blood caked around his nose, both eyes soot-black. Merrily forcing herself to keep looking at him, aware of Bliss watching her closely.

‘This is the builder you were telling me about, right? Doing up the farmhouse for Charlie’s outfit?’

‘Yes.’

One of Felix’s feet was twisted into the gap between two of the metal steps. A hand clawed the mud, poor guy trying to seize the earth one last time.

‘A decent man, Frannie. Kind. Trying to do the best thing.’

‘Really,’ Bliss said.

‘Do you know where Fuchsia is?’

Bliss said, ‘Tell me again – why were you ringing him tonight, Merrily?’

‘I was trying to arrange a meeting.’

‘Sounded like an emergency to me,’ Bliss said. ‘Sunday night, very heavy day for the clergy, and there you were, prepared to drop everything and come rushing out here in the dark?’

‘Yes.’

‘What conclusions am I to draw from this?’

‘I was …’ Merrily sighed. ‘How long have you got?’

‘Till Billy Grace gets here.’

‘The pathologist.’

‘Which I hope is gonna be before flamin’ daylight.’

Two crime-scene women were moving around Felix’s body with evidence bags. Emotions uncoupled, not seeing a person, not looking for history much beyond the final act.

‘Who found him, Frannie?’

‘Dog-walker. Where would the police be without dog-walkers, eh?’

‘What do you think happened?’

‘That’s for Billy Grace to find out.’

‘Well, he didn’t …’ Merrily spun at him, furious ‘… just fall off the sodding step, did he?’

Segments of smoky cloud on fast-forward across the three-quarter moon. Bliss’s eyebrows going up.

‘My, we
are
fractious tonight, Merrily.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s interesting that you’re so emotionally involved.’

‘Interesting?’

‘Significant, even.’

Bliss had his head on one side, red hair shaved close to the skull these days, to disguise erosion. Merrily looked away, over towards the edge of
the field where Lol was parked, forbidden by some jobsworth copper even to get out of the truck.

‘You need …’ steadying her voice ‘… to find Fuchsia. The house I told you about …’ How trivial and foolish this was going to sound. ‘It was Fuchsia, who had the problem.’

‘This is Fuchsia Mary Linden. The assistant.’

‘And girlfriend. I keep asking if anyone’s looking for her, and nobody— At first, I thought she was being, you know, disingenuous. I’m now more inclined to believe there’s something to what she’s saying, and I wanted to tell them that. Talk it all over again.’

Bliss scratched his nose, obscuring a reluctant half-smile.

‘I’m loath, as ever, to go into the details of your frankly unenviable job, Merrily, but … you’re saying you were feeling a bit guilty?’

‘I … yeah.’

‘When did you last talk to Mr Barlow?’

‘Last night. On the phone.’

‘And the girl?’

‘Not since last week. When I met them here.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘She’s … unusual.’

‘Unusual. Yeh, that explains everything. I’ll be sure to put that in my report.’

‘Whimsical? Imaginative? In a childlike way. And beautiful, of course. And about twenty years younger than Felix. That what you were looking for?’

‘This word
whimsical
,’ Bliss said. ‘Would that translate, for the rest of us, as
three sheets to the wind
?’

‘What are you asking?’

Bliss didn’t reply.

‘You
have
got people out looking for her?’

‘We’ve gorra couple of people out there, yeh.’

‘You’re sure she’s not … somewhere close?’

An image of Fuchsia crouching, big eyed, between tree-roots in the woods.

‘Sure as we can be,’ Bliss said.

‘You actually think
she
did this, don’t you?’

‘Can’t deny that the domestic solution would save us a lorra graft.’

‘What was he hit with?’

‘Could be one of his own tools. I’m never one to pre-empt the slab, Merrily, but when the head’s swollen up like that, battered out of shape, you’re looking at multiple skull fractures. And, no, you wouldn’t generally get that falling off the steps into a field. The killer must’ve been … very, very angry.’

A fourth vehicle had appeared next to the dark blue van. A cop shouted across to Bliss.

‘Dr Grace, boss.’

‘Must be a bad telly night.’ Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘You ever think, on these occasions, that our fates might be entwined, Reverend?’

‘Every time there’s one of those occasions, Frannie, I just … Look, when you find Fuchsia, will you let me know?’

‘If I can,’ Bliss said. ‘And we’ll probably need to talk about this at length, maybe tomorrow. Thanks for dropping by, Merrily.’

‘Yeah.’

Walking back across the field, hands jammed into the pockets of her fleece, Merrily looked behind her once and saw, on the very edge of the headlights, the gaping maw of the bay in the barn that Felix had been renovating for Fuchsia. To bring her stability.

‘Shit.’ She wanted to scream it into the wind. ‘
Shit, shit, shit
…’

Jane’s mobile played the riff from Lol’s ‘Sunny Days’ and she tightened her lips and ignored it. Wouldn’t be Mum; she’d call the landline.

Ethel, the black cat, prowled the scullery desk. The mobile stopped. Jane clicked on the email address from the
Ghosts and Scholars
website, put in the message she’d drafted, read it through one last time.

Dear Ms Pardoe

Sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you might be able to help me. After reading on your website about M. R. James’s unexplained ‘strange experience’ at Garway Church, on the Welsh Border, I wondered if you could throw any more light on it.

I live in Herefordshire and went with my mother to Garway today and, to me, the mystical influence of the Knights Templar could still be felt very strongly there after all these centuries. M. R. James’s story ‘Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, my Lad’ has a Templar preceptory in it, and we were wondering if the story could have come out of whatever M. R. James experienced at Garway.

Like me, you were also intrigued by the medieval dovecote with 666 dove holes. Do have any ideas why this might have been?

Anything you can tell me would be very gratefully received.

Perhaps we might be able to help with your own researches too, one day.

Yours sincerely,

Jane Watkins

Seemed OK. Didn’t give too much away.

Jane sent it.

Feeling a lot less excited than she had when she’d composed it. Since then, Mum had been back with Lol – Mum looking totally like death, this time – and then they’d both gone out to this place at Monkland. Mum apologetic, as usual – could Jane get herself something to eat? Jesus, what about
her
? Like, when was
she
going to eat? Mum was clearly losing weight. She looked like a small bird after a long winter.

Jane picked up
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
, one of two books she’d brought down from her apartment. She put it down again. ‘Oh, Whistle’ was actually quite a bleak story, full of solitude. The guy didn’t die or anything, but the effects of what he’d seen would be hanging over him for the rest of his life.

She saw – the image still as vivid in her head as if it had been on the computer screen – Mum walking out of that derelict farmhouse into the early dusk. Walking with her shoulders stiffened and her spine kind of pulled in, like she knew there was something very close behind her. Her face like yellowing paper.

Never seen her quite like that before. Never. And it was unnerving because, in one way, she needed Mum to be basically sceptical – as
resistant to the paranormal, despite her job, as Jane was to the strictures of the Church.

Mum as a buffer against her wildest ideas. Giving Jane the freedom to explore because there was always that framework of stability. Maybe she was really afraid of growing up into a world where a mature and intelligent woman was visibly and seismically shaken by the irrational, trying to conceal her fear from a kid … who was no longer a kid.

Jane turned, with a reluctance she recognised as unusual, to the second book on the desk. Ella Leather’s
The Folklore of Herefordshire
. In the index, under Garway, she’d found the line about nine witches and also a page reference for
The watch after death
.

On page 120, Mrs Leather listed the places where:

It was customary, until a few years ago, for the household to sit up all night when a death had occurred. They did not sit in the same room as the corpse, but elsewhere, the idea being that the spirit of the dead person was still in and about the house, and the people said, ‘it was for the last time, it was the last night’; so no one went to bed. But at Orcop and Garway, the watch is still kept, so Martha S— who lived on Garway Hill, assured me. ‘Only if it was somebody you cared about,’ she added, ‘not for strangers.’

So, as for bringing comparative strangers into the same room as the body … The Newtons had obviously bent the rules in their own best interests, picking up on what came next. Maybe they’d even read this very account, published for the first time in 1912.

… Usually, among the country folk, a light is kept burning in the room where a corpse lies every night until burial; a pewter plate of salt is placed on the body; according to Martha S—, the candle should be stuck in the middle of the salt, heaped up in the centre of the plate.

Seriously creepy. Jane shut the book. It was too quiet in here. Picking up the mobile, she got up and walked to the scullery window, looking out at darkness and a wall, pressing
one
on the keypad.