No overnight messages on the machine and no early calls. Local people had come to accept that Monday was a vicar’s day off, usually the only one. By the time Merrily had read Mrs Leather’s account of the watch after death, the computer’s in-box was showing what looked like an actual email amongst the spam.
Dear Jane,
Thanks for your mail. Garway is certainly the most mysterious and intriguing place I’ve ever visited in my quest for MRJ. I’m afraid I can’t throw any particular light on the dovecote mystery apart from pointing out, as you probably already know, that, before the suppression of the order, the Knights Templar were accused of denying Christ, rejecting the Mass and the sacrament and spitting on the cross. These charges may have been fabricated, but the possibility of the order becoming corrupt in later years cannot be ruled out.
The dovecote, as it stands today, seems to have been largely rebuilt by the Knights Hospitaller, who succeeded the Templars at Garway, but I don’t know of any satanic scandal attaching to them.
Re. your question about ‘Whistle’, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you. Whatever happened to MRJ at Garway seems to have occurred in 1917, a good thirteen years after the publication of the story (it was probably written in 1903). He may have visited Garway before Ghost Stories of an Antiquary came out in 1904, but there is no record of it that I know of. He doesn’t seem to have found any reason to come to Herefordshire until the widow of his friend James McBryde moved there with her young daughter in 1906.
So that was that. Merrily sat back, unsure if she was disappointed or relieved that, despite the Templar connection and the Globe Inn coincidence, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ could hardly have been inspired by whatever happened to M. R. James at Garway Church nearly fourteen years later.
Remiss of her not to have checked those dates herself.
And Fuchsia, the face of crumpled linen, it had all turned around again: more evidence that whatever had happened to Fuchsia had happened inside Fuchsia’s head, whether creatively or otherwise. It was not unlikely that Fuchsia had even made those same connections with ‘Whistle’.
Time to talk to Huw Owen again. As she glanced at the big black phone, it rang.
‘You in, Merrily?’ Bliss said.
‘What’s it sound like?’
‘You’re not still ratty …’
‘Make that confused and upset.’
‘Will you still be in in half an hour or so?’
‘Have you found her?’
‘I’ll have another bloke with me,’ Bliss said.
Background buzz suggesting the CID room rather than the car park. His tone – and the fact that he was ringing on the landline – suggesting she might need to exercise caution.
‘Who?’
‘You’ll like him,’ Bliss said. ‘He’ll make you laugh.’
‘You still haven’t told me whether—’
The line went dead. Merrily sat holding the empty phone, staring blankly at the rest of the message on the screen.
Incidentally, if you didn’t know this, Gwendolen McBryde’s daughter was also called Jane, and MRJ was very fond of her. This may well have been because Jane, something of an artist like both her parents, was fascinated by the supernatural and creepy things generally. So when MRJ says ‘we’ caused offence at Garway, he may well be referring to the, by then, teenage Jane and possibly her mother as well as himself. It occurs to me that you might like to read Michael Cox’s biography of MRJ, relevant pages of which I’ve attached.
Good luck with your investigations; do let me know how you get on!
Rosemary Pardoe
Merrily sat up, clicked on the attachment, bringing up two scanned pages from M. R. James, An Informal Portrait. The first began by examining the possibility that the lively and affectionate young widow Gwendolen McBryde had been rather attracted to her late husband’s best friend, a man who had helped her through difficult times and been conscientious about his role as Jane’s guardian.
Monty had been entirely relaxed at the house, Woodlands, in south Herefordshire, treated with ‘affectionate and admiring indulgence’ by his host. Gwendolen had recalled him doing impersonations, putting on funny accents and once reading aloud from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a background of nightjars.
He’d also once read the lessons at nearby Abbeydore. According to Gwendolen, he had a beautiful voice which, when he read aloud, lent you his understanding. At Abbeydore, it gave me an unreal feeling as if some saint held forth to lesser creatures and birds.
As for Gwen’s daughter … well, it seemed she was very much Monty’s kind of kid, producing lots of delightful drawings of unspeakable entities emerging from gaping tombs.
So Rosemary Pardoe’s suggestion that it was the daughter who’d been with Monty James in Garway seemed to be on the money.
Oh God. When in Herefordshire, M. R. James had stayed with a widowed single mother with a teenage daughter who was into creepy things and was called … Jane.
Into the bleak morning, after the night of cruel tragedy, came the brittle sound of cosmic laughter.
She thought of Bliss. He’ll make you laugh.
And what he’d said on the phone when she was in the car on Garway Hill.
What they used to call the funnies.
Oh hell.
‘This is Jonathan Long.’ Bliss hooked out a chair at the refectory table. ‘One of my colleagues.’
All the time she was making them coffee, Merrily kept glancing at Bliss, but there was no eye response; he didn’t look happy. She felt the tension rolling in her stomach, hard as a golf ball.
Jonathan Long – rank unspecified – looked several years younger than Bliss, perhaps very early thirties. He didn’t look like a cop, maybe a young academic, a lecturer in something dry and exact like law or economics. His body was thickening, and he wore a dark grey threespiece suit. A cop with a waistcoat was rare these days, a young cop with a waistcoat entirely outside Merrily’s experience.
‘I gather you’ve known Francis for some time,’ Long said.
‘Way back. Since he had a full head of hair.’
Tension throwing out flippancy like feeble sparks. Long didn’t smile. Neither did Bliss. Long had spiky black hair, and a light tan; Bliss needed to avoid the sun in case his freckles turned malignant.
‘We were hoping, Mrs Watkins, that you might share some of your impressions.’
Long’s accent was educated and still fairly refined; seemed unlikely that he’d spent much of his career confiscating crack pipes and bundling binge drinkers into blue vans. It also seemed unlikely that he was going to identify himself as Special Branch.
‘About what, Mr Long?’ She sat down opposite them. ‘Theology? Contemporary music?’
‘Specifically, Fuchsia Mary Linden.’ Long examined his coffee. ‘Do you have cream, by any chance?’
‘Erm … no, sorry.’ All right, playtime over. ‘You’ve found her, right?’
‘Yeh,’ Bliss said. ‘We’ve found her. We think we’ve found her.’
His usually foxy eyes were dull as pennies. Sudden sunlight dropped from the highest kitchen window like a splash of cold milk.
‘We’re still waiting for the dental report,’ Jonathan Long said. ‘But it’s unlikely to be anyone else.’
22
Collecting Beads
HAD SHE, ON some level, expected it? Had she looked down on Felix’s body last night, dumped like a heap of building rubble on his own doorstep, and somehow known she was seeing only half a tragedy?