‘Ah … there will probably be issues for us to discuss,’ Siân said, ‘after you talk to Jane.’
‘Oh.’ Merrily laughed lightly. ‘I won’t ask.’
The other, still-visible damage: two black eyes from the fists, two deep cuts just above the hairline from falling against the piano stool, a split lip, a broken tooth. It was what they did: first, they beat you into semi-consciousness. It was about violence, more than sex, most experts agreed on that.
Siân said, ‘If you’d like to talk about the Bishop’s attitude, I can wait.’
‘I am so pissed off about this,’ Merrily said, ‘I don’t think I want to talk to anybody for quite a long time.’
She’d phoned The Ridge, not tarting it up for them either. The best lies were always the bald truth: the Bishop had told her to come back at once. She was bewildered and resentful and trying to conceal it. She’d have to return sometime for her things. Sorry, sorry, sorry. And Teddy was like, I really don’t think I could cope with your job, Merrily.
‘So Garway … that’s over,’ Siân said.
‘Yes, it’s over.’
‘Against your advice.’
‘I wasn’t asked for my advice.’
‘All right,’ Siân said. ‘I think I’m getting the message. I shall leave.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Merrily released the clutch and nosed the Volvo slowly out into the road which led past the area known as The Turning, above the church. Beside her, Mrs Morningwood mumbled something.
‘Mmm?’
‘Over. You said it was over.’
‘Yes, well, the lies have been coming so much easier since I was ordained.’
Which was cynical and untrue and she didn’t know why she’d said it. A sidelong glance showed her Mrs Morningwood trying to release a laugh through lips liked diced tomato. It seemed to be getting harder for her to speak.
‘Stronger woman than you look, Watkins.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Have I thanked you?’
‘What for?’
Mrs Morningwood laughed. The fear and the pain glittering in her eyes. along with the fury. Fury, almost certainly, at herself, for letting someone do this to her, Merrily feeling much the same.
‘Just don’t …’ Squeezing the wheel. ‘I must’ve been temporarily insane to go along with this, and it’s done now. But there is no way I’m going to forget that you have been—’
‘In a car accident,’ Mrs Morningwood said.
She’d shut herself in the downstairs bathroom, showering in water so hot that Merrily, scrubbing the floor, had heard her screams, all the rage that would find no other form of expression.
‘How long do you intend to keep this up?’
‘You want to hear me sob? You think there’s something wrong with me, something unnatural, that I’m not sobbing my heart out? You think I’m … unwomanly?’
On the back seat, the wolfhound whimpered. He’d been kicked, Mrs Morningwood said. Trapped in the door and then kicked. They’d examined him between them. No bleeding, nothing broken.
Merrily said, ‘I don’t understand you, that’s all. There’s something about you I don’t understand.’
‘And have no need to,’ Mrs Morningwood said.
Before the shower, before the scrubbing and the burning, she’d said, ‘If you report this I shall deny it.’
‘Oh sure.’ Merrily starting to lose it too, by then. ‘That’ll work. People just won’t look at you. They’re tactful like that, especially in the country. Pride themselves on minding their own business. Are you crazy?’
‘I shall simply go out and run the Jeep off the road and leave it sticking out of the hedge with my blood on the seat and the steering wheel. No-one will dispute it, and they won’t get close enough to be able to.’
‘Insane.’
‘I’ve done it before. Crashed the car, that is. Police find out, they’ll just think I was drunk. Police always like to think you were drunk.’
‘Why? Why are you doing this?
‘You have no need to know.’
‘I have an increasingly urgent need to know. In fact, seems to me that the only reason you could have for covering this up is because you recognized the man who attacked you and you don’t want him arrested, because … I don’t know. But you do.’
Rape, violence, it was usually the husband or partner. All those times when the police knew about it, urged the conspicuously injured party to give evidence, and the victim refused. It seemed unlikely that Mrs Morningwood had ever before been a victim.
She said, ‘You’re wrong. I do not know who it was.’
‘But you don’t think it was just a random thing, either, do you? Have you been followed? Stalked? Seen anybody hanging around the house?’
‘No.’
‘What are you not telling me?’
No reply.
‘What if I tell the police what I found?’
‘You wouldn’t do that. You’re implicated now. Cleaned up his mess.’
‘What if he does it to somebody else?’
‘He won’t.’
‘This man you don’t know. What if he comes back?’
Silence.
‘Either you tell me exactly what happened,’ Merrily had said, ‘or I ring my friend in the police, who knows me well enough by now to—’
‘All right. But you’ll be the first and last to hear this.’
Muriel Morningwood got up at first light, as usual, letting Roscoe and then the chickens out into the mist.
Her attacker had simply followed her back into the house, trapping the dog with the door, kicking him back out, slamming the door.
He wore camouflage clothing, no skin exposed, and what had been most frightening about him was not the hood with the eyeholes, but the flesh-coloured surgical gloves, one of them coming at her face as she turned and then there was an explosion in her left eye and she’d been thrown into the living room, punched repeatedly in the mouth, stomach, mouth again. Slammed to the floor, her scalp raked on a corner of the piano stool, hair filling up with blood, as he knelt astride her and put on the condom.
She was a strong woman, very fit. Self-sufficient. Prided herself on it, always thought she’d be able to defend herself. What you never accounted for was the effect of shock – the way the body, untrained, was shocked into a kind of inner collapse by sustained, unrelenting, extreme violence.
The sound of the car had stopped it. He’d lifted himself, listening and she’d managed to scream. He’d been kneeling over her, holding her down with both hands and when she opened her mouth, he’d slammed a hand across it, freeing one of her arms, and she’d punched him as hard as she could in the balls, and he’d uncoiled in agony, clutching himself with both hands, and she’d squirmed away, blinded by the blood, just as the footsteps had sounded on the path.
She’d thought he looked at her once, through his eyeholes, and then he wasn’t there, only the smell of his sweat, his fluids, her own blood.
It had been obvious to Merrily that if she hadn’t shown up when she did, Mrs Morningwood would, by now, have been waiting for Dr Grace, the pathologist. And something else was also clear.
‘You can’t stay here.’
‘Where would I go?’
‘I live in a big house.’
‘Oh, no.’
‘There’s no alternative, Mrs Morningwood.’
‘There’ll be other people.’
‘Only Jane. And, at the moment, a woman priest who’s standing in. I’ll need to tell her to go. Is there anyone who can look after things here?’
There was a couple, graphic artists from the village, reflexology patients who’d helped out once before when Mrs Morningwood had had to go away. She’d got Merrily to phone them, explain that she had to travel to see a patient urgently, in Devon. No problem, they’d come and look after the chickens and anything else, morning and night, until further notice.