Fabric of Sin (35 page)

Like the meaning of it. Like a basic feel for the spiritual validity of her job, her role in this black farce. Like any kind of self-worth.

She made herself look up Adam Eastgate’s number in the index. Maybe, if she hadn’t been so flattened by the Bishop’s early call, she’d have stood up to Mrs Morningwood, made her see some sense.

Stood up to a woman who’d been beaten up and raped? Made her ‘see sense’?

Merrily shook her head almost savagely, as if this could crumble the sludge in her brain so that the fragments might resettle into some random but interpretable pattern. Then she lit a cigarette, picked up the black bakelite phone, abruptly replaced it, reverted to the mobile and made the call.

‘No, the Bishop didn’t phone,’ Adam Eastgate said. ‘He came to see us, Merrily. At home.’

‘He came to your home?’

‘Said he was passing – I live over at Burghill, not the kind of place you just happen to pass. What he had to say made sense, I suppose. A pity, mind.’

‘He told you … what, exactly?’ She was aware of her stomach contracting.
Close to an ulcer
. ‘He suggested that it might be dangerous to be connected with a murder and suicide?’

‘More or less.’

‘For the Church or the Duchy?’

‘I think he meant for us, but that would be our problem, wouldn’t it?’

‘Maybe suggesting it would not look good if it got out that I’d administered a blessing for Fuchsia, in a disused church, just a short time before she killed her partner? Did he say that?’

‘Close.’

‘And if it got out that I’d been involved at the behest of the Duchy of Cornwall …’

‘He might have said something like that as well, aye.’

Merrily had expected a reluctance to answer her questions, but it wasn’t there. Eastgate wasn’t obviously eager, but he wasn’t erecting barriers.

‘Did the Bishop tell you I’d come to the conclusion that Fuchsia had made the whole thing up? So it had all been for nothing.’

‘My information is that the inquest will be told that the girl killed Felix and then took her own life while the balance of her mind was disturbed. I think that’s the official wording.’

‘So, erm … did you then tell the Bishop that you didn’t want us to take it any further?’

‘No. I didn’t say that.’

‘Oh.’

‘I liked Felix. I was wishing I could turn the clock back to the time we were first offered the property by the Grays. If I could unmake that deal, I’d be a happier man.’

She remembered him standing by the window in the Duchy’s barn.
We don’t often make mistakes
.

‘Adam, when you bought it, did you know about the feud with the Gwilyms? That is, did you know the Grays were offering it to you specifically because they wanted to keep it out of the hands of the Gwilyms? That they wanted it to go to someone richer, more remote … impregnable. Someone who couldn’t be leaned on to sell it. Did you know any of that?’

‘Not then, no. I learned some of it later, and I’ve since had a long chat
with Paul Gray. Yesterday, in fact. Mr Gray’s got his problems, as you may know.’

‘Yes.’

‘He told me he didn’t want them compounded by an old feud. He didn’t want – if anything should happen to him – for his wife to be left with it.’

‘The feud.’

‘Or the house. He wanted to apologize for unloading an unhappy place on us. He’d considered us as – like you just said – rich and remote. Hadn’t realized that local people would be involved.’

‘An unhappy place.’

‘Well, he’s not had much luck, has he? In that situation, mind, you can get a bit irrational. I told him we were taking steps. I was sorry for the man. Sorry for all of us.’

‘This was
before
the Bishop …?’

‘Obviously. It was … disappointing, the Bishop’s attitude.’ Eastgate spoke slowly, edging around something. ‘I wasn’t expecting that. Left us in a bit of a dilemma.’

‘Has it?’

‘As you know, I was in two minds, from the start, about involving the Church, but I’d told them I liked the look of you, and it couldn’t do any harm.’

‘Told who?’

‘You must’ve realized there’d be people I needed to keep informed. And when the Bishop backed off, I referred the whole thing up. That is, to my immediate boss in the Duchy.’

‘Right.’

‘And he referred it further up.’

‘How
much
further?’

‘I think you know what I’m saying.’

Blimey
.

‘When was this?’

‘First thing this morning. You should expect a call, Merrily.’

‘From …?’

‘I was asked to provide what information I could about you. I’m
telling you this in case someone mentions it. I wouldn’t like you to think we were going behind your back.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Somebody went on your website, found a lot about deliverance, not much about you personally.’

‘Low-key, Adam. Part of the brief.’

‘Your daughter’s been a bit of a feisty lass, mind.’

‘That isn’t on the website.’

‘No. It isn’t.’

‘If you’re talking about the stones in Coleman’s Meadow,’ Merrily said, ‘for what it’s worth, I’m behind Jane all the way. I’m sorry if—’

‘No, no, that’s good, Merrily. That was well received. Part of our heritage. I was going to say that, meanwhile, someone else was consulted. A senior person in the Church who knows you. Thinks a lot about you, as it turns out. Anyway … you should expect a call.’

‘Who was this you spoke to? In the Church.’

‘Merrily, I’m just the land agent.’

‘Expect a call, you said?’

‘Aye.’

‘Is this a call for which I need to wear my best cassock? As it were.’

‘No.’ Eastgate laughed. ‘That’s not how it works.’

When she stood up, it felt as if the scullery floor was tilting beneath her feet, and she had to get out of here, and the damn mobile was chiming again.

‘
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.

‘L
OL
R
OBINSON,
’ J
IMMY
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.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Your commune’s been mentioned, anyway.’

‘It was never a commune. Nothing so formal.’

‘Can you tell me about it?’

‘I can tell you what I remember, but what I remember might have very little to do with what actually happened.’

‘Like that, huh?’

‘Very much like that, cocker.’

On the sunlit square, Merrily felt like a tourist. The last couple of nights were probably as long as she’d spent away from here since they’d moved in. You came back, it made you blink – the black and
white houses and shops unexpectedly exotic in the Lucozade light of an autumn morning.