Fabric of Sin (3 page)

‘In which case I must be—’ Jane turned to her, moist-eyed, or was it the light? ‘I must be very seriously immature, then. Pushing eighteen and only the one real boyfriend? That’s not normal, Mum. That wasn’t even normal in your day. That’s, like, almost perverted?’

‘Well, actually, flower, I think it’s really quite—’ The phone rang then, offering her a timely get-out, which she felt compelled to ignore. ‘I’ll let the machine—’

‘No, you get it. Go on. You’ll only sit there worrying until you find an excuse to sneak off and play the message.’

Merrily nodded, got up.

‘It’s a doormat thing,’ Jane said sweetly to her back.

‘Thanks.’

She took the call in the scullery office, padding over the flags in the cold kitchen where no stove rumbled, scooping up the phone with one hand, switching on the desk lamp with the other.

‘Ledwardine Vic—’

‘Mrs Watkins, is it?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Adam Eastgate likely mentioned me.’

‘Oh … right. Mr …’

‘Barlow.’ Low-level local accent. ‘Felix.’

‘Right. I was going to call you tomorrow, actually, see if we could arrange to meet.’

‘Tomorrow would be all right for us, yes.’

‘At the house?’

Owls whooping it up in the orchard. Silence in the old black bakelite phone, the kind of phone that could really carry a silence.

‘The house at Garway?’ Merrily said.

‘No,’ Mr Barlow said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Any … particular reason?’

‘Well, see … person you need to talk to, more than me, is my plasterer. It’s my plasterer had the experience.’

‘Your plasterer.’

‘I call her that. We’re converting this barn at Monkland, see. We’re in a caravan on the site.’

‘That’s not far for me. It’s just I thought you might find it easier to explain the problem in situ,’ Merrily said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘You couldn’t spare the time?’

Another silence; no owls even. She waited.

‘I think you’re gonner have to come here,’ he said. ‘We don’t plan to go back, see.’

‘To the Master House.’

This was what he was ringing to tell her? That they weren’t, on any account, going back to the house?

‘That’s correct,’ he said.

She had the feeling that he was working to a script and whoever had written it was standing at his shoulder. She felt another question coming and hung on for it.

‘I was told you … you were the Hereford exorcist.’

‘More or less.’

‘And you’ll have the, um, full regalia, is it?’

‘Regalia?’

‘We’d like it if you came with all the regalia,’ Felix Barlow said. ‘The full bell, book and candle, kind of thing.’

‘Oh.’

‘If that’s all right with you,’ Barlow said.

S
HE WAS BEAUTIFUL
and shimmery in the mist. Like one of those exotic birds that weren’t supposed to migrate here. Greens and blues in her dark, tangly hair, skin like milky coffee. She stood by the long green caravan, in her pink-splashed overalls and her turquoise wellingtons, calling out when Merrily was close enough for the dog collar to show.

‘Will you bless me?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘In the old-fashioned way, please,’ she said. ‘That is, with all due ceremony?’

From the field gate, through the lingering mist – a keen hint of first frost – she’d looked as young as Jane. Close up, you guessed she was nearly thirty. Still not Merrily’s idea of a plasterer.

‘I’m serious.’

‘I can tell.’

Merrily looked into eyes which were startlingly big and round, like an owl’s, and widely separated.

‘It strengthens the aura,’ the woman said. ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘I’m sure it must be.’ Merrily parted her woollen cloak to expose the cassock, hemmed with mud now. The full regalia could be a pain. ‘But would it be all right if we talked first?’

‘I just wanted to ask you while Felix wasn’t here. He’s not religious.’ The woman turned away and moved back to the caravan. ‘Fuchsia,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Fuchsia Mary Linden.’

Which meant that her parents had been either gardeners or big fans of the
Gormenghast
trilogy. Following her into the caravan, Merrily’s money was on
Gormenghast
.

She felt tired again, had a lingering headache. She’d awoken a good hour before dawn, her body all curled up, tense with resentment.

Never her favourite negative emotion, resentment. Most times it came hissing like poison gas out of inflated self-esteem – they can’t treat
me
like this. Seldom objective, never exactly Christian and hardly (thank you, Jane) the Way of the Doormat.

At six a.m. she’d been hugging a pot of tea, Ethel the black cat on her knees, in the frigid kitchen. Watery sunlight eventually seeping into the windows before the mist had blotted it up.

The more she’d thought about the Duchy job, the more senseless it had seemed. She was expected to desert the parish – and Jane and Lol – for up to a week to address some
embarrassment
in an empty house?

An
empty
house. That was the other point. No family life disrupted there. Nobody’s sanity at risk. Was there, in fact, anything more on the line than the reputation of the Bishop of Hereford as a faithful servant of the monarchy, and the professional judgement of the Duke of Cornwall’s land-steward?

Merrily had put on her pectoral cross and knelt, in her bathrobe, on the cold stone flags and prayed. And listened.

The result had been inconclusive.

It was a substantial, professional caravan, with a living room and a good-sized kitchen area, copper pans on hooks conveying weight and a sense of permanence. Twin doors at the bottom of the living area suggesting a separate bedroom and bathroom.

The walls of the living room were lined with oriental rugs, and there was a wood-burning stove, lit, the sweet scent of apple logs mingling with the sweeter fumes of cannabis. Fuchsia kicked off her wellies, picked up a rubberized walkie-talkie.

‘I’ll call Felix. He’s over at the barn. Have a seat, please, Merrily.’

Shrugging off the black woollen cloak, Merrily made a space for herself between tumbled books on one of the fitted sofas. She could see the barn, its bay agape, through the window opposite and the goldenbrown
mist. The window behind her framed the church tower across the rutted field and the lane where she’d left her car. Monkland was a main-road village on the way to Leominster; this was the first time she’d penetrated its hinterland.

‘So the barn’s going to be …?’

‘Our home. It’s supposed to be finished by now.’ Fuchsia prodded at the walkie-talkie. ‘But that’s what it’s like with builders, Merrily, they fit in their own projects between jobs. If a builder’s home looks like some wretched hovel, that means he’s doing very well.’

The ephemeral beauty didn’t include her voice, which was quite slow. And loud, in an uncontrolled way, like a child’s.

Merrily folded the cloak over her knees, less puzzled now about why it, or the cassock, had been necessary. Why Felix Barlow, though not religious himself, had thought traditional priestly attire would be appropriate.

The walkie-talkie cackled and Fuchsia said, ‘She’s here, babes,’ and clicked it off. ‘He’ll come now, Merrily. He was getting a bit frazzled and he needed to work with his hands to calm himself down. Felix has problems talking about the non-physical. Which is very odd because he’s really perceptive, and buildings speak to him.’

‘How do they do that?

‘They send him information, communicating what they were and what they can be again. It’s like dowsing. He feels it in his muscles – the needs of the stone and the oak. Well, in some buildings, anyway.’

‘What about the farmhouse at Garway?’

‘The Master House had been left to rot.’ Fuchsia was wrapping her thin arms around herself as if to crush a shudder. ‘And it wasn’t complaining. Houses know when they’ve gone bad.’

‘And this is what it said to Felix?’

‘This one didn’t speak to Felix, Merrily,’ Fuchsia said. ‘It spoke to me.’

‘I see.’

‘And now my aura’s permeated with darkness.’ Fuchsia opened her arms. ‘
Can
you see?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Some priests can. Not the man at Garway, he was no help at all, but
there was a very good guy in the place I grew up. He’d packed it in, but it never goes away. It’s a calling, like they say. I believe that, Merrily. If you answer the call, you may receive gifts.’

‘It’s as well to be careful about gifts,’ Merrily said. ‘You can never be too sure who they’re from.’

Fuchsia crouched in front of the stove and opened up its vents, pale flames spurting in the glass square. On a shelf to the left of the stainless steel flue, Merrily read titles from a stack of paperbacks.
The Gap in the Curtain, The Secrets of Dr Taverner, The Flint Knife, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
.

‘Where
did
you grow up, Fuchsia?’

‘West Wales. Cardiganshire.’ Fuchsia watched the flames. ‘I was born there.’

No Welsh accent, though. Through the caravan window, Merrily saw a man in a hat coming out of the mist.

‘Felix was there, too,’ Fuchsia said.

‘In Cardiganshire?’

‘In the place where I was born. He was there when I entered the world.’ Fuchsia smiled, her face reflected, stretched and warped, in the shiny flue. ‘Felix cut my cord, Merrily.’

Merrily blinked.

‘Which makes for a lifelong connection,’ Fuchsia said.

Something you learned as a deliverance minister: whatever ghosts were, there were people who saw them and people who
wanted
to see them, and they were seldom the same people.

Put it this way: if whatever had happened at Garway had happened to Felix Merrily would have been more inclined to believe it.

He was a big, untamed-looking man in a leather waistcoat. Long red-grey hair in a rubberbanded ponytail, a wide smile through a stubble like sharp sand. He’d left his wellies at the bottom of the caravan steps, and she saw that his woollen socks had been darned. How often nowadays did socks get darned?

‘Didn’t really want this, Mrs Watkins.’ He lowered himself with a sigh into the sofa opposite her; he had to be a good twenty years older than
Fuchsia. ‘I just wanted off the job, and that would be an end to it, but Adam … he’s like a terrier, is Adam.’

‘He likes you. Trusts you to get it right.’

‘He should know better.’ Felix pulled out a dented cigarette tin and Rizlas. ‘All right if I …?’

‘Please do. In fact …’ Merrily reached gratefully down to her bag, bringing out the Silk Cut and the Zippo. ‘And he doesn’t want to see you lose the contract, if something can be … cleared up.’

‘I never asked for this. I want you to know that. I said to Adam, leave it. It’s just one of those things.’

‘But then he told me,’ Fuchsia said, ‘and I realized you must be meant, Merrily.’

‘Meant,’ Merrily said.

‘It’s a matter of metaphysics.’

Merrily looked at Felix, who said nothing, and back at Fuchsia whose wide-eyed gaze met hers full-on.

‘That house is diseased, you see. We need spiritual antibiotics.’

‘You know a bit about these things, then.’

‘I know that this is about good and evil, Merrily,’ Fuchsia said, ‘and I’ve experienced the evil.’

‘OK.’ Merrily lit a cigarette. ‘Do you want to tell me?’

D
UST SHEETS?

Mostly heavy-duty plastic, Felix explained. They’d laid them on the floor where the damp and sunken stone flags had been taken up. This was after the roof had been made safe. First things first. They’d spread the dust sheets on the floor, so they could make a start on the walls.

‘Lime-plaster,’ Fuchsia said. ‘I love it.’

‘You should see her,’ Felix said. ‘She moves like a dragonfly.’

‘Not
that
day.’ Fuchsia moved closer to the wood stove. ‘There was no air that day. It was close and heavy outside, but still damp inside the house. My wings …’ She giggled bleakly, a sound like pills rattling in a jar. ‘My wings were drooping.’

‘It was the first time she’d been there, see,’ Felix said. ‘I have three blokes in the regular team, they’d made a start on the roof.’

Fuchsia watched the flames.

‘I was looking forward to it. It seemed a lovely area. It has two personalities, Merrily. Long, light views on the English side, and then deep green and full of drama as it swoops down to the Monnow Valley and Wales.’ She gripped her knees. ‘All spoiled now.’

Felix looked at her, worried, then he turned to Merrily.

‘So … Ledwardine, eh? You know Gomer Parry?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She smiled. ‘Very well.’

‘Danny Thomas?’

‘Not quite as well. I didn’t meet him until he became Gomer’s partner in the plant-hire.’

‘I was in Danny’s band in the Seventies,’ Felix said. ‘Bass. Fingers always too messed up for anything more delicate than a bass guitar, and
a bit clumsy at that. I think we did one gig, and I wouldn’t say folks was actually walking out the door—’