The Fabric of Sin: A Merrily Watkins Mystery Page 5

  ‘Can’t you stall him? Frankly …’ Merrily poured tea ‘… it’s hard to imagine Bernie Dunmore being so far – excuse me – up the Duchy’s bum. Maybe I should talk to him.’

  ‘He’s in London, I’m afraid, until Tuesday. House of Lords.’

  ‘Would be, wouldn’t he? Still gives us three days. If you can copy some of this stuff, we’ll present him with a full and careful report which he can safely dangle in front of the Duchy, the Prince of Wales, the Archbishop of— Are you sure he was talking to Canterbury about this?’

  ‘I’m his confidential secretary, Merrily. Supposed to be.’

  ‘So what are your personal feelings?’

  Sophie was looking down at her desk. Sophie Hill, who worked for the cathedral. There was a pause in the traffic on Broad Street.

  ‘Mmm.’ Merrily nodded. ‘You’re probably right. The Church has always relied on the silence of its employees. No disruptive questions asked. Knowing your place. As you say.’

  Sophie looked up, letting her chained glasses fall to her chest. Merrily avoided her gaze.

  ‘I think,’ Sophie said very quietly, ‘that a lot would depend on whether the Prince of Wales knows about this.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He has, after all, been known to express an interest in such matters.’

  ‘Such matters?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Well, he’s talked publicly about spiritual healing, organic farming, relationships with the land … and plants. If that’s what you mean.’

  ‘I think you’ll find that it goes deeper,’ Sophie said.

  Merrily stood up, walked across to the door, opened it and looked down the stone steps.

  ‘I don’t think they’ve got around to bugging us yet, Sophie. We’re quite alone.’ She closed the door, came back and sat down. ‘What?’

  7

  The Naked Cross

  THE STEEPLES OF the two city-centre churches, St Peter’s and All Saints, were far more visible in Hereford than the tower of the cathedral, which was in a corner, backed up against the river, not central.

  It didn’t hide, exactly, it just didn’t show off.

  It didn’t have secrets, as such, just didn’t go out of its way …

  Like Sophie.

  ‘This relates to your late predecessor,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Dobbs?’

  You could see him standing silently in the corner, face like an eroded cliff face. The man who had refused to be called a Deliverance minister. Who, until his last collapse, in the cathedral itself, had been the Hereford Diocesan Exorcist. Canon Thomas Dobbs, who wouldn’t even open his front door to Merrily but had left a message for her in its letter box, succinctly conveying his thoughts on being replaced by a woman.

  The first exorcist was Jesus Christ.

  Interesting how rapidly the situation had changed since then. First Merrily, then Siân Callaghan-Clarke, canon of this cathedral, getting herself appointed Deliverance Coordinator, with plans to subtly secularise the service. Hadn’t worked, and now Siân’s ambitions were, allegedly, focused on the impending vacancy for Archdeacon.

  ‘Sorting through Canon Dobbs’s files after his death,’ Sophie said, ‘I came across a box file of press cuttings – I didn’t bother you with any of this at the time; it seemed hardly relevant and you had enough problems. But he’d accumulated a substantial collection of newspaper and magazine articles about the Prince of Wales.’

  ‘Dobbs?’ Merrily rocked back in her chair. ‘Dobbs collected stories about Prince Charles?’

  ‘I don’t mean photo spreads from Hello. These all have specific references to the Prince’s spiritual life. For some reason, I filed them away in a storeroom in the cloisters.’

  ‘Why would Dobbs be especially interested in Charles? I mean, this was presumably before the Duchy got into Herefordshire?’

  ‘Certainly before they bought the Guy’s Estate from the Prudential.’

  ‘Is there any possibility that Dobbs knew him personally?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have no reason to think he did. I mean, he may have … I really don’t know, Merrily, it just brought it back to me, with all this …’

  ‘Could I have a look at the cuttings?’

  ‘I’ve brought them up. You can take them with you when you leave.’

  That night, Merrily called Huw Owen, who took it all unexpectedly seriously. Listen, he said, you must never trust the buggers. Never. Any of them. Not at this level.

  Covering the phone, Merrily reached out a foot and prodded the scullery door shut. Jane, in a black mood, had Joanna Newsom on the stereo in the sitting room: California Gothic, cracked and witchy. Merrily lowered her voice.

  ‘Who are we talking about – the Duchy of Cornwall or the royals generally?’

  ‘It’s not so much the royals, lass, as the C of E. The Church and the Monarchy have been an item for nearly half a millennium. But change comes fast these days. Some of our masters, as you know, have become a bit wary about a certain individual.’

  ‘Let’s not walk all round this. Charles.’

  ‘Most of it dating back to his famous remark about the Monarchy – when he takes over – becoming Defender of the Faiths, plural. Muslims, Hindus … Catholics? My God. Is this a safe pair of hands for the sacred chalice? It’s backs to the cathedral walls, lass. Knives unsheathed in the deepest cloisters.’

  ‘I’ve always liked the way you underplay a drama, Huw.’

  Trying to psych out if there was even a hint of a smile on his cratered face as he sat by the racing flames in the inglenook of his eyrie in the Brecon Beacons. Smuggled out of his native Wales by his mother as a small child and brought up in Yorkshire, Huw was back in the land of his unknown father, supervising Deliverance courses for C of E clergy in a former Nonconformist chapel burned out by decades of hellfire preaching – the place where it had begun for Merrily, this weird ministry, not quite as long ago as it sometimes seemed.

  ‘All right, maybe I’m exaggerating,’ Huw said. ‘I’m just warning you to watch your back. Where the royals are concerned – the royals and Canterbury – the smallest rumour can cause a seismic shift, and little folks like you can get dropped down the nearest crevice.’

  ‘Thanks, Huw. I’ll sleep so much easier tonight.’

  ‘I’m just telling you.’

  ‘So …’ Merrily shifted the heavy bakelite phone from one ear to the other. ‘Having established that nobody in ermine or a dog collar is to be trusted, what’s your considered opinion of why Canterbury would need to be kept informed about a house owned by the Duchy of Cornwall that’s alleged to be haunted?’

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t, would they?’

  ‘Would they tell the Prince, or would they try to keep it from him in case he became too curious?’

  ‘I think if he is curious, he’s probably experienced enough now to keep it to himself. Happen what’s more important – like your feller at the Duchy said – is that the press don’t get wind of it. They’d hound the builder and then they’d hound you.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You ask me, this is just Bernie Dunmore covering his own back. Thinking how it might rebound on the Diocese if it all went pear-shaped.’

  And it did go pear-shaped sometimes, no denying that. An inexact science, deliverance. Well, not a science at all, obviously …

  ‘Everybody lives in fear nowadays,’ Huw said. ‘Way things are going, deliverance itself could be C of E history in a year or two.’

  ‘And what would you do, Huw, if we all got the elbow?’

  ‘I’d retire, lass. Take the pension, rent a little shack at the rough end of Sennybridge, with a back yard and a bog, and carry on with the job. No bureaucracy, no politics, no farcical PC synods. Just me and the naked cross.’

  ‘Talking of which … Canon Dobbs.’

  ‘Old bugger’s dead.’

  ‘Sophie’s given me a collection of news cuttings he kept about the Prince of Wales and the Church and other connections. Why would Dobbs keep a royal scrapbook?’

  ‘Traditionalist of the first order, Dobbs. Happen he’d started to notice the lad spreading his favours. I wouldn’t worry about it. Concentrate on covering your own arse.’

  ‘And your specific advice, as my spiritual director, would be …?’

  ‘Keep all your cards on the table, face up.’

  Merrily shook out a Silk Cut.

  ‘Explain?’

  ‘Stage one: find the former owners of this hovel and see what kind of recent history it’s got. Forget the White Lady and the Phantom Stagecoach. The home movies you can do without.’

  Home movies: Huw’s latest euphemism for place-memories and trapped events that repeated themselves.

  ‘And then … if it’s just what the girl claims she saw and there’s nowt blindingly obvious from the last few years, Stage Two would be to set up a low-key house-blessing for a specific date. Being careful, mind, to invite the local incumbent.’

  ‘There isn’t one. A retired guy’s holding the fort.’

  ‘He’ll do. Also, you want at least one member of the family – the folks who flogged the place off to the Duchy, plus, if possible, someone from the family as owned it before. For many generations, you said?’

  ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘That would help, then. And finally – this is important – you must formally request the presence of an official of the Duchy of Cornwall. The higher up the better.’

  ‘Wow.’ Merrily sat back, lit her cigarette. ‘Smart.’

  ‘That way, you’ve acquitted yourself in full view, and they’re all involved – all implicated.’

  ‘Flawless.’

  It wouldn’t be, of course. It was never that easy.

  ‘And what do you do after t
hat?’ Huw said.

  ‘I don’t know. What do I do after that, boss?’

  ‘You bugger off out of it just as fast as your cute little legs will carry you.’

  ‘What about the woman? Fuchsia. Aftercare?’

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  There was a lengthy, meditative silence. She imagined him staring down at his peeling slippers, their rubber soles smoking on the edge of the hearth.

  ‘You do need to separate it,’ he said eventually. ‘If there’s nowt particularly to support it at the house, you most likely are looking at a different problem. You said she was orphaned?’

  ‘Abandoned. She’s certainly had personal problems. Maybe the house brought something to a head?’

  ‘Possible. How was the blessing?’

  ‘Curious. There wasn’t the normal sense of relief afterwards. In fact, she looked up, as if something might have followed us into the church. Said something like, is something coming? Something like that. And laughed. I mean, it’s always a problem, isn’t it? You can never be quite sure when somebody’s winding you up.’

  ‘Happen include her in your prayers when you do the cleansing. Something moving around under the carpet, was that what you said?’

  ‘Dust sheets. I suppose a shrink would be talking about demons in her past that she’s covered up. Perhaps she just has a Gothic imagination: the wriggling under the sheets, the face of crumpled linen. She’s also obviously read a fair amount about healing and deliverance, because she knew exactly what she—’

  ‘Hang on … Gimme that again, lass.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Crumpled linen. A face of crumpled linen?’

  ‘That’s the image Fuchsia claims she saw when she turned around from the wall she was plastering. Poetic, in its macabre way. Although this would’ve been crumpled plastic.’

  ‘Aye. Very literary,’ Huw said. ‘But, then, not surprising, really. It’s a quote.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘M. R. James. Author of classic ghost stories in the 1900s?’

  ‘Yeah, I know who M. R. James is.’

  ‘I can even tell you which story it comes from. “Whistle”.’

  ‘What are you—?’

  ‘“Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is the one about the university professor haunted by a malevolent entity which … I’d get hold of a copy if I were you, without too much delay.’

  ‘You’re saying …’

  There’d been a book of James’s stories amongst Fuchsia’s collection in the caravan. Orange-coloured spine on the shelf by the wood stove. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

  ‘All right, lass?’

  ‘Let me get this totally right. You’re telling me it’s an actual phrase taken from one of M. R. James’s ghost stories?’

  Merrily dropped her cigarette in the ashtray and flopped forward, both hands around the old black phone.

  Oh, bugger.

  ‘Bit of a coincidence, eh? If you have any problems finding the story, give us a call and I’ll scan a few pages and email them across.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Huw.’

  Shit.

  Merrily tipped the phone very gently into its rest. Gazing at her reflection in the dark mirror of the scullery window and into a too-familiar void.

  8

  Heresy

  THIS JOB …

  People learned what you did, and envisaged desecrated graves, chalices of blood, night-long spiritual struggles with an indelibly black metaphysical evil, his satanic majesty, The Beast 666.

  Their disappointment, almost invariably, was palpable.

  So you’ve never really had to rescue anyone from actual demonic possession?

  To which you’d shrug and smile awkwardly and admit that, rather than the coils of the Old Serpent, it mostly came down to the spirals of the subconscious mind.

  This was the void – the thought that there might, in the end, be nothing there that psychology would not be equipped to explain. That people like Siân Callaghan-Clarke might just be right about the relevance of what you were doing.

  The dark night of no-soul. What, in the end, you feared most, and a dampener on the spirit, as Merrily drove down into the Unknown Border, using a route she’d never travelled before: sunken lanes below the bare, abraded hillsides, wind-whipped, twisted trees.

  Still England. It had to be; there, below the road, was the River Monnow, which was the border, failing to be crossed by a smashed and collapsing footbridge, fenced off, with a sign that said: Danger.

  But if this wasn’t Wales, neither was it truly Herefordshire, not with names like Bagwllydiart on the signposts. Rural Wales – almost all of it, now – was designated tourist country, while Herefordshire’s own tourist country was Ledwardine and its neighbouring black and white villages in the north of the county and the lushness of the Wye Valley in the south.

  The Unknown Border was only about an hour from Ledwardine and, sooner or later, it would be joining the New Cotswolds.

  Not for a while, though.

  And it certainly had never been, nor ever would be, East Anglia.

  Jane had them all, natch. The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1862-1936).

  Sitting up in bed last night, under the blackened oak beams, with her dressing gown around her shoulders and the tawny owls fluting in the churchyard, Merrily had read ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, first published in 1904.

  She couldn’t possibly have read it before or even seen it on TV, because it really wasn’t something that would ever allow itself to be forgotten, this story of Parkins, an academic on a golfing holiday on the Suffolk coast, and what he discovers there, and what discovers him.

  Oh Parkins, says a colleague before he leaves, if you are going to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of the Templars’ preceptory and let me know if you think it would be any good to have a dig there in the summer.

  Templar preceptory. The only immediate connection with the village of Garway. Preceptory: the Templars’ term for one of their communities, a description apparently unique to this curious order of medieval warrior monks.

  But Burnstow, according to the author’s own foreword, was based on a seaside town the whole width of England away.

  Merrily had followed Parkins into the Globe Inn, where the only room available had two beds. Sure to be significant. As for the Templars’ preceptory, all Parkins had found there was a series of unpromising humps and mounds … Oh, and – in a cavity near the possible site of an altar – an old whistle.

  On one side of the whistle it said:

  QUIS EST ISTE QUIVENIT

  Who is this who is coming?

  If you weren’t aware of Garway Hill, it meant that you were either on or immediately below it. She couldn’t see a radio mast, only a row of houses like battered ornaments on a shelf, overlooking – a couple of fields away on the right – the Church of St Michael.

  Welcome to GARWAY. Please drive carefully.

  Like you had a choice in lanes like these.

  Sanded by the low October sun, the church was aloof, in its own shallow valley. Saturday afternoon, nobody about. The folder containing the directions and the key of The Master House lay on the old Volvo’s passenger seat. The house was supposed to be within sight of the church tower, but only just. You should look for two white gateposts, one broken in half.

  Later, maybe.

  If at all. Thanks to Huw Owen and M. R. James, the case was as good as closed. Fuchsia was making it up. Delusion was another possibility, but probably less likely, now.

  A right turning brought Merrily to the entrance of the churchyard. No concessions here to the advent of the motor vehicle. Parking tight into the hedge, she climbed out through the passenger door, walking up, in jeans and a Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt, into a curving and shaded path leading to a mellow enclosure. A haze of greens and ambers, an awning of birdsong.

  If you wanted to know about a place, always check out the church first. Feel its disposition: benevolence or disapproval or, more often nowadays, a mildewed resignation.

  This one, she thought, was … aware of her.

  She walked up into the bumpy churchyard, under the tower: plain stone, simple pyramidal hat. And yet …

  Its origins are almost certainly Celtic. The earliest record of a monastery on the site is in the seventh century. Sophie’s notes, from the internet. But it is not until the arrival of the Knights Templar in 1180 that the history of Garway Church opens out … and, at the same time, closes in.