Fabric of Sin (33 page)

The only one of them, though, with any signs of life: the smoke like a curl of wispy hair above the chimney stack, the clutter of free-range chickens.

But if Morningwoods had been on this hill as long as the badger shit on the White Rocks, it hadn’t always been here at Ty Gwyn. This row couldn’t be more than a century and a half old, its angles too sharp, doors and windows too regular, too uniform for real age.

The rain had stopped, but dirty pink clouds were still bunched like muscles over the hills. Not a promising day. The car window was halfway down, Roscoe’s snout halfway out, his head up against Merrily’s hair. She could hear the chickens from the sloping land behind as she
drew up in front of the two end houses. Blocking the lane, but it was a dead end; apart from Mrs Morningwood, it seemed unlikely that anyone else would be here until next spring.

‘Roscoe, I’m going to leave you in the car, in case she’s out looking for you or something. OK?’

Maybe this visit was meant. She thought about the Prince of Wales, his attention to coincidences and
signposts
.

It was just gone seven-thirty. At the front door, she looked around for a bell or a knocker. Sense of déjà vu – at this stage yesterday, she’d been ill and the door had been opened for her. Lifting a fist to beat on the panels, she thought she could hear movement from the back of the house … or one of the others, the holiday homes?

She glanced along the terraced frontage of emptied hanging baskets, smokeless chimneys. At Mrs Morningwood’s end of the block, there was a long fence reinforced with chicken wire, lining an unmade drive leading to a carport with a roof of galvanized sheets.

Under the carport was the back end of an old black Jeep Cherokee. Merrily glimpsed a figure moving along the side of the garage towards a barn or a stable.

‘Mrs Morningwood?’

She stopped, up against the house wall. The figure kept on moving, looking back just once, on the edge of the barn.

It didn’t look like Mrs Morningwood. It didn’t look like a woman. It didn’t seem to have a face, only a darkness.

Come on, this didn’t mean a thing. It didn’t mean a thing that the back door was ajar, like another door had been last summer, or that curtains were drawn across two downstairs windows, like on the days of funerals when she’d been a kid.

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.

There are many symbols that are not
individual but collective in their nature
and origin. These are chiefly religious
images, their origin so far buried in the
past that they seem to have no human
source.

Carl Jung

I don’t think a man who has watched
the sun going down could walk away
and commit a murder.

Laurens van der Post

S
IÂN SAID, ‘
Y
OU’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.

So calming, these domestic chores.

The car was at the side of the track, engine running. Merrily sitting, quite numb, looking directly in front of her at the rain-greyed hills and thanking Siân for looking after things, saying how very grateful she was.

Playing a part.

Now would be the time for Siân to point out that she was still, if only nominally, the deliverance coordinator for this diocese and therefore entitled to the facts. But Siân said nothing for several seconds.

‘So you want me to leave, Merrily.’

‘Obviously, had we known it was only going to be a couple of days, there wouldn’t have been any need to bother you. Or anybody. I’m really sorry.’

Siân was smart, would pick up any stray nuance, any hint of the
spiralling descent into madness represented by the woman sitting stiffly beside Merrily.

Like a badly wrapped parcel: outsize sunglasses, the scarf around her discoloured, swollen face, the cracked Barbour storm-flapped over the pink silk scarf covering the lesions on her throat.

‘Ah … there will probably be issues for us to discuss,’ Siân said, ‘after you talk to Jane.’

‘Oh.’ Merrily laughed lightly. ‘I won’t ask.’

The other, still-visible damage: two black eyes from the fists, two deep cuts just above the hairline from falling against the piano stool, a split lip, a broken tooth. It was what they did: first, they beat you into semi-consciousness. It was about violence, more than sex, most experts agreed on that.

Siân said, ‘If you’d like to talk about the Bishop’s attitude, I can wait.’

‘I am so pissed off about this,’ Merrily said, ‘I don’t think I want to talk to anybody for quite a long time.’

She’d phoned The Ridge, not tarting it up for them either. The best lies were always the bald truth: the Bishop had told her to come back at once. She was bewildered and resentful and trying to conceal it. She’d have to return sometime for her things.
Sorry, sorry, sorry
. And Teddy was like, I really don’t think I could cope with your job, Merrily.

‘So Garway … that’s over,’ Siân said.

‘Yes, it’s over.’

‘Against your advice.’

‘I wasn’t asked for my advice.’

‘All right,’ Siân said. ‘I think I’m getting the message. I shall leave.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Merrily released the clutch and nosed the Volvo slowly out into the road which led past the area known as The Turning, above the church. Beside her, Mrs Morningwood mumbled something.

‘Mmm?’

‘Over. You said it was over.’

‘Yes, well, the lies have been coming so much easier since I was ordained.’

Which was cynical and untrue and she didn’t know why she’d said it. A sidelong glance showed her Mrs Morningwood trying to release a laugh through lips liked diced tomato. It seemed to be getting harder for her to speak.

‘Stronger woman than you look, Watkins.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Have I thanked you?’

‘What for?’

Mrs Morningwood laughed. The fear and the pain glittering in her eyes. along with the fury. Fury, almost certainly, at herself, for letting someone do this to her, Merrily feeling much the same.

‘Just don’t …’ Squeezing the wheel. ‘I must’ve been temporarily insane to go along with this, and it’s done now. But there is no way I’m going to forget that you have been—’

‘In a car accident,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

She’d shut herself in the downstairs bathroom, showering in water so hot that Merrily, scrubbing the floor, had heard her screams, all the rage that would find no other form of expression.

‘How long do you intend to keep this up?’

‘You want to hear me sob? You think there’s something wrong with me, something unnatural, that I’m not sobbing my heart out? You think I’m … unwomanly?’