Fabric of Sin by Phil Rickman Page A

nine … I lose track. But I remember his wife. Oh, hell, aye, I remember her, all right.’
    It started to rain. Merrily leaned into the base of the tower.
    ‘You know Lizzie Nugent?’ Gomer said. ‘Widow, up by Bearswood?’
    ‘Don’t think so.’
    ‘Husband left her with two kids and a twenty-acre smallholdin’. I was over attendin’ to some ditchin’ one day, early March it’d be, when the gales blows the roof off Lizzie’s cowshed. Smashed to bits. So I calls a few people, see if we could get some galvanized, cheapish, and somebody puts me on to Felix Barlow. He comes round in his truck that same day, with these sheets off a shed he’s took down, and we fixed the ole roof between us. Took us n’ more’n a few hours, and when he found out Lizzie en’t got no insurance he was very reasonable about it, was Felix, no question ’bout that.’
    Gomer ignited his roll-up, hands cupped around it.
    ‘We’re havin’ a cuppa with Lizzie afterwards when up comes this bloody great white BMW. Woman inside leanin’ on the horn till Felix goes out. Givin’ him hell, we could all of us year it. Folks in the next village’d likely year it – all this, what you doin’ yere when you oughter be up at Lady So-and-So’s? What you think you are, bloody registered charity?’
    ‘This is Mrs Barlow?’
    ‘Good-lookin’ woman, mind. But it en’t everythin’, is it?’
    ‘Erm … no. I suppose not.’
    ‘Barlow goes around helpin’ too many poor widows, where’s the next BMW comin’ from?’
    ‘You met the woman he’s with now?’
    ‘The hippie? Never met her, no, vicar.’ Gomer waved his ciggy. ‘Feller’s a bit alternative hisself, mind. Builder as en’t into cheating his clients, that’s alternative for a start, ennit?’
    Merrily laughed.
    ‘Knows the job, too. Could be in an office, collar and tie, directin’operations. But he knows that money en’t everythin’, no more’n a goodlookin’ woman is.’
    ‘She
is
a good-looking woman, as it happens.’
    ‘The hippie?’
    ‘And not much more than half his age.’
    ‘Oh well.’ Gomer shrugged, teeth crushing the ciggy. ‘Just cause a feller spends all his time shorin’ up ole buildings, don’t mean all his tools is obsolete.’
    Merrily blinked.
    Merrily didn’t know what M. R. James had looked like. The only face she could see in her mind was Huw’s, framed by hair like dried-out straw, mounted on an age-dulled dog-collar and settling into a complacent conjuror’s smile.
We must have offended somebody or something at Garway, I think.
     
    ‘I
wondered
why you were so anxious,’ Jane said, ‘to borrow the M. R. James.’
    Always a danger with emails. She’d been on the computer in the scullery, researching some aspect of stone rows, when Huw’s mail had come through. She’d read it, looked up the references, been into the
Ghosts and Scholars
website.
    ‘You couldn’t make it up,’ Jane said, still sitting at the desk.
    Impressed, excited. Merrily walked to the window.
Oh hell
.
    ‘Mr James
could
make it up, though, couldn’t he? I mean, that was what he did.’
    ‘Oh, Mum. It was a letter to his friend. Someone who obviously knew exactly what he was on about. He doesn’t spell it out, does he? He knows she understands his point of reference.’
    ‘Mmm. Possibly.’
    Merrily read the rest of it.
Probably we took it too much for granted, in speaking of it, that we should be able to do exactly as we pleased. Next time we shall knowbetter. There is no doubt it is a very rum place and needs careful handling.
     
    No, the kid was right. You
couldn’t
make it up. She could see why Huw had insisted on emailing the whole page from the
Ghosts and Scholars
website. Something had happened to M. R. James at Garway. Either something faintly curious which James’s serpentine imagination had inflated into something disturbing. Or something
seriously
disturbing which James, in this otherwise routine letter to a female friend, was