‘Sure. I just want Tamsin found and all this over with.’
‘Try and sleep,’ Annie said.
‘You’re going back to Malvern?’
‘I can stay at your place, if you like.’
‘You’re better going back to Malvern. Keep your head down. Sorry about the weekend.’
‘You’re not talking to Kirsty here, Francis.’
Bliss smiled, eyes closed, reminded of why, even if it was strongly discouraged, a relationship with another serving officer could work well. Whenever he’d buggered up a weekend for Kirsty she wouldn’t speak to him till the next one was looming.
Another twenty minutes to the house at Marden, to pick up his car. The BMW growled quietly.
The countryside around them was dark and loaded. Nobody phoned to say Tamsin Winterson was OK.
Part Four
… artists, poets and visionaries
have found this place a place
where ‘Prayer is valid’… where
the veil between the visible
world and the invisible has worn
diaphanously thin.
Fr. RICHARD WILLIAMS,
Parish priest, Hay-on-Wye
on Capel-y-ffin
33
The N-word
MERRILY WAS THINKING that if she hadn’t been expecting Martin Longbeach, she wouldn’t have recognized him, when he arrived around eight a.m.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I’m fine, I really am.’ He handed her an oil bill and a subscription copy of Private Eye. ‘Postwoman gave me your mail at the gate. Saw the dog collar, I suppose. Safe pair of hands.’
His laugh was like a knife scraping a plate.
‘Of course they are,’ Merrily said at the vicarage door.
Hoping the unease didn’t show. Even his hands looked pale. She remembered when he was tubby and camp in an innocent comedy-vicar way, screening shrewdness. He must have lost two stones, maybe more. His monkish face had acquired lines, his eyes looked like bruises as she led him into the vicarage kitchen, Ethel watching from her spare basket.
‘Not allergic to cats are you, Martin? She’ll be wandering over here when I’m out. Likes to hang out with people.’
Martin Longbeach shook his head, bent to scratch Ethel under the jaw. Ethel craned her neck into his finger.
‘If you think this is not going to work,’ Martin said to the cat, not looking up, ‘I’ll go quietly. I really don’t deserve friends like you.’
‘Now don’t start that,’ Merrily said. ‘Please.’
Well, they weren’t exactly friends. Met him perhaps four times, knew more about what he’d done since his breakdown than anything from his earlier life.
‘Took a holiday last week,’ Martin said. ‘Except it wasn’t.’
‘I know quite a bit about holidays that aren’t. Still, not been great weather, has it?’
‘Perfect for my needs. I took a cottage for a week, in Mid Wales. A mile from Pennant Melangell, the shrine of St Melangell. Every day, I walked to the church.’
‘Always useful, remote churches,’ Merrily said, remembering. ‘That primitive, Celtic… thing.’
‘Barefoot.’
‘Oh.’
‘Every day.’ The scrapy laugh again. ‘Fasted for five of them. Nothing except spring water.’
God…
‘Do you think that was, erm, a good thing, Martin, on your own? That is, presumably…’
‘Oh, quite alone, yes. That was the idea. Giving Him an opportunity to make away with me. See? In the end, I was forced to realize it was all self-pity, Merrily.’
‘Were you?’
‘The great revelation, by the grace of God and a dozen big bottles of Aqua Pura. You can’t die of self-pity, I don’t think. Rage is something different, but equally despicable.’
Don’t. Just don’t, Martin.
‘Why don’t I show you your room?’ Merrily said.
She’d prepared one on the western side, from which the church was not visible, only the bottom end of Church Street where it sloped to the river bridge. A small room. Jane had painted the walls pale blue, the ceiling midnight blue. A copper oil lamp, electrified, stood on an upturned painted chest by the bedside, and the wardrobe was light pine.
‘Calms the fevered brow just to be here, Merrily.’
‘Bathroom next door. I’ll show you how things work in the kitchen later. And there’s an iMac in the scullery. You’re OK with that?’
‘Perfectly.’ He looked down at the duvet cover, an old one, much-washed, but the only alternative was pink. ‘We didn’t even live together, you know.’
‘Look, Martin, you don’t—’
‘It was a celibate relationship. Technically celibate. Not so much because Daniel had HIV, but because the spiritual side of it had become more important for both of us. Or so I told myself. We prayed together every day. And because it’s no longer an automatic death sentence, his death was… it knocked me bloody sideways, Merrily. I felt we’d been unjustly punished… for trying. You know? Trying to be good Christians – in everyone’s eyes. This is quite a conservative area in some ways. Well… most ways, really.’