Fabric of Sin (22 page)

‘The media have indeed been told we’re not looking for a third party,’ Bliss said. ‘And, frankly, if it was so much as suggested that the third party might turn out to be the kind of third party I suspect
you
’re looking at then I think we’ve made a sound decision.’

‘Assuming the forensics support the obvious conclusion that Fuchsia killed Felix and then herself … how important is it to you to find a motive?’

‘It’s obviously
tidier
, for us, Merrily, if we can find evidence of domestic strife and/or mental imbalance.’

‘You tried to find the mother, by any chance? Mary Linden.’

‘We’ve got the birth certificate, and the name tallies. As does Tepee Valley. But the mother’s name is less poetic than “Linden”. Mary Roberts.’

‘What about the adoptive parents?’

‘Moved on, some years ago. We’re trying to pin them down, but bloody hippies, they could be anywhere. We’re continuing inquiries, but we don’t have the manpower to make too much of it.’

‘If you get anywhere … would there be stuff you’re able to share? Sometimes it’s easier for the police to get information than somebody like me with no obvious reason to inquire.’

‘Equally,’ Bliss said, ‘there are situations where it’s easier for a harmless cleric to learn things than a copper.’

‘Does that mean we’re looking at an arrangement? You tell me what you’ve learned from relatives or anyone else, I tell you … what I can.’

‘What you
can
?’

‘Look at it this way, Frannie – most of the stuff I wouldn’t feel right divulging is going to be stuff that would embarrass you anyway.
And
the coroner.’

‘You’re so cute, Merrily,’ Bliss said.

‘I’m a professional. It’s odd how people seem to forget that.’

Bliss smiled, shaking his head.

‘Particularly me,’ Merrily said.

After a lunch of soup and a cheese sandwich, she rang Uncle Ted, the senior churchwarden, to explain that she might be away for a few days.
He was out, so she laid it gratefully on his machine. Uncle Ted was still resentful of Deliverance, although he must know that without it she’d probably wind up with another four parishes and Ledwardine would see even less of her.

She rang Lol, but he must have already left for tonight’s gig, somewhere in South Wales. She’d try his mobile later. She ought to go and lie on the bed, try and recharge, but there was too much to do in a very short time.

Looking up
Morningwood
in the phone book, she found just one entry and called it on the mobile.

‘Poor girl,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

Nothing about Felix. Just ‘
Poor girl
.’

‘I’m … coming over. Either tonight or early tomorrow. Will you be around, Mrs Morningwood?’

‘In and out, darling. Never far away. Always there around nightfall to shut the chicks away.’

‘And you’re … where?’

‘Coming in from the Hereford side, past The Turning – know where that is?’

‘No.’

‘Ask. Three hundred yards, sign on the right,
Ty Gwyn
. Short track.’

‘OK. If you’re not in, I’ll keep trying.’

There was an uncertain pause. Mrs Morningwood cleared her throat.

‘Reason I called earlier … Spoke about you with a friend, Sally, in the Frome Valley.’

A momentary fog; you ran into too many people in this job.

‘You met, it seems, under difficult circumstances, relating to gypsies,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

‘Oh … Sally Boswell?’

At the hop museum. Her husband, Al, had made Lol’s most precious guitar. Mandolin soundbox and about a dozen different types of wood. Lol revered Al. Al revered Sally.

‘Known her for quite some years, darling. She confirmed what I’d sensed when we met. That you are rescourceful and trustworthy.’

‘That was very kind of her. Mrs Morningwood, can I—’

‘No, come and see me. I’m wary of phones.’

And she’d gone. Suddenly nobody was trusting phones. It was getting like the old Soviet Union.

Merrily dropped the mobile in the in-tray, picked up Dobbs’s Charles file and read an unidentified cutting – looked from the typeface and the length of the paragraphs like one of the quality broadsheets – about the Prince’s diet. How, aged around thirty, after seeing how some pigs were treated, he’d vowed to become vegetarian. Dropped red meat, taken up raw vegetables, lost weight and developed a rather ascetic appearance.

He’d still gone shooting, though. Some family traditions must’ve been hard to shed, especially with a father like his. But the interest in organic farming had grown out of it, with impressive results.

How relevant was any of this stuff? If there’d been anything immediately pertinent in the Dobbs file, Sophie would have spotted it. Merrily slid the papers back into the file as the phone quivered before it rang.

Sophie herself.

‘You have … a locum.’

Her voice was not so much dry as arid.

‘That was quick.’

‘Merrily, I’m afraid that it isn’t going to be Ruth Wisdom.’

‘Oh.’

‘Ruth has unexpected domestic ties,’ Sophie said. ‘Consequently, I had to put out a round-robin email. Which, I’m afraid, was answered within … a very short time.’

‘I did point out, didn’t I, that Jane will still be here? I mean, she’s got her own apartment in the attic, but— it’s not a bloke, is it?’

‘I’m very sorry, Merrily,’ Sophie said. ‘You really won’t like this, but it was out of my hands.’

W
HEN
J
ANE GOT
off the school bus, there was a silver-grey car she didn’t recognize outside the vicarage.

She walked over. It looked like one of those hybrid jobs that ran partly on urine or something, cost an arm and a leg but the driver was guaranteed a martyr’s welcome in eco-paradise. Very tidy inside, a pair of women’s leather gloves on the dash.

Jane went back to the market square, wishing whoever it was would just sod off. Needing some time, undisturbed, with Mum, because what she had in her airline bag was likely to be of serious and sobering significance.

Normally, if you had a free period in the afternoon, you spent it wiping out any outstanding homework essays. Jane had had two free periods and had spent them both, plus most of the lunch hour, on one of the common-room computers. Feeling she had something to prove. To Mum and … maybe to Coops, who she hadn’t seen for a few days. But she intended to, soon.

She looked around the square for Lol’s cool truck. Not there. He must’ve left for his gig. Jane felt a kind of dismay. While it was good that Lol
had
gigs, better still that he’d found the balls to
do
gigs, inevitably it was pulling him and Mum in different directions. And although they did their best neither of them, in all honesty, was what you could call a strong and decisive person.

Outside the Eight Till Late, a news bill for the only evening paper that reached Ledwardine, the
Star
, read:

DOUBLE DEATH RIDDLE OF BUILDER AND GIRLFRIEND

The girlfriend, too?

Jane froze. Literally froze, hard against one of the fat blackened oak pillars holding up the market hall.

She could remember, quite clearly, a time when shocking death had given her not a shiver but a
frisson
– subtly different, fizzing with a forbidden excitement. Back then, death had not, essentially, been about loss. Even – God forbid – the death of her own dad, because it had happened, when Jane was quite young, in a high-speed car crash with a woman next to him who had not been Mum.

Then they’d moved to the country, and death, in Ledwardine, had resonated. It was so much closer – as close as the churchyard just over the garden wall, where funerals were conducted by her own mother, before burial in a grave dug by Gomer Parry. Whose wife, Minnie, had gone, in the hospital in Hereford. His nephew, Nev, in a fire. And there was Colette, the friend Jane had first got drunk with, on cider, both of them paralytic under the tree in Powell’s Orchard where old Edgar Powell had blown his brains out at the wassailing. And, worst of all, Miss Lucy Devenish, Jane’s friend and mentor and inspiration … but not for very long before her moped had been on its side in the main road under Cole Hill.

The fragility of life. Random cosmic pruning. One snip of the big secateurs. And then what?

Sometimes, she wished she had Mum’s faith. Always assuming it really was faith. She pictured Mum standing at the landing window in her frayed robe, staring bleakly out into the drab, grey morning.

This guy, the builder. Obviously Jane hadn’t known him, or his girlfriend, but out here he was much more than a cheap cliché on a billboard –
Death Riddle
– tapped onto a screen by some cynical hack in a town where the air was always singing with sirens.

Out here, where it was quiet and death resonated, he’d been part of the fabric, working the sandstone and the timber and the Welsh slate.

And the girlfriend. Mum was not going to be easy to live with tonight.

Now the stuff in the airline bag, the printouts – from, admittedly, some fairly lurid websites – felt like some kind of porn. Not the kind that could get you banned from using the computer for the rest of term, more insidious than that.

Unnerved by the billboard, switching the bag from her left shoulder to her right, Jane crossed to the vicarage.

She’d seen the woman somewhere before, she was fairly sure of that. Fiftyish and elegant, heavy hair with a dull sheen like pewter, serious grey eyes, dark grey suit. Dog collar.

Mum said, ‘Jane, this is Siân.’

Mum was looking, to be honest, frazzled, her skin close to grey, standing at a corner of the refectory table, like the kitchen wasn’t her own. Which of course it
wasn’t
. The Church owned it. The Church owned everything. Owned Mum.

There was a case in the hall. A real leather traveller’s case, with stickers, next to Mum’s old overnight bags.

Siân?
Jane stared at the woman. The woman smiled in this bland way. Perfect teeth.

Holy shit
. It had to be Siân Callaghan-Clarke.

‘Siân’s going to be looking after things here for a few days,’ Mum said. ‘As you, erm, suspected this morning, I need to go over to Garway, sort some things out.’

This was the woman who, only a few months ago, had nearly destroyed Mum after getting herself made diocesan Deliverance
coordinator
. Callaghan-Clarke’s view of Deliverance seemed to be that it was totally about helping deluded people to seek treatment – bringing in this smooth shrink as part of the
Deliverance Module
. At least
he
’d gone, and the last time Mum had mentioned Callaghan-Clarke it was to say that she’d been keeping a low profile lately, not interfering, never going into the office.

But Mum was inclined to take her eye off the ball.

‘Jane is fairly self-sufficient, Siân. She has her own apartm— a big room on the second floor. And a lot of studying to do. So, with all the parish business, you probably won’t get to meet a lot. Anyway …’ Mum smiling inanely ‘… here she is.’

Jane just stood there, like struck dumb, Ethel doing a figure of eight around her ankles.

‘Hello, Jane,’ Callaghan-Clarke said. ‘I’ve heard
such
a lot about you.’
Black farce. Mum had collapsed into the old captain’s chair in the scullery. The door was shut, Jane with her back to it.

‘Have you gone insane?’

Callaghan-Clarke was upstairs in the guest room, unpacking her fancy case of Italian leather covered with stickers from international church synods, and it was a big house where voices didn’t travel … so, like why, in God’s name, were they
whispering
?

‘Nothing I could do,’ Mum said. ‘
Fait accompli
. Ruth Wisdom couldn’t make it, Sophie asked around by email, Siân offered.’

‘Sophie
accepted
that?’

‘If she’d said no, how suspicious would that have looked? Siân’s … highly placed in the Diocese.
I
wouldn’t want Sophie to get on the wrong side of her over something like this.’

‘I have to stay here with this monster?’

‘She’s not a
monster
, Jane. She’s just an ambitious, very smart, exbarrister with … some kind of calling.’

Mum started to laugh. One of those laughs where things really can’t get any worse.

‘Your builder guy,’ Jane said. ‘There’s a news bill outside Prosser’s. It says the girlfriend’s …’

‘Yes.’

It was worse than Jane had expected. Immediately, she was imagining doing it: one ear squashed into the cold steel track, the other exposed to the enormous saw-bench scream of the oncoming train. Did she lie facing it, watching the lights? Or was she turned away, feeling the vibration inside her brain, her whole body hunched and tensed, foetal? What could make a fairly young and apparently beautiful woman batter to death somebody she’d loved and then have herself demolished, her face ground into fragments of bone, shreds of tissue?

Jane pulled the plug on it. She dragged over the other chair and sat down.

‘Why does Callaghan-Clarke want to come here? Like, what’s the ulterior motive?’