Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘Maybe a cave under the hill … or even under the Master House,’ Hayter said. ‘He was ingesting a lot of stuff, and it got crazy. He thought he’d find out by asking spirits and demons. Walking the hill, tripping out. We’d do these invocations, and he’d get messages. We wouldn’t. Just him. And Gwilym, once.’

‘The Glyndwr link.’

‘Mat said Glyndwr was a magician, a Templar and a prince and he would have learned the whereabouts of this secret … chamber … temple … whatever. A magical link had to be made between Gwilym and his ancestor. This took weeks, making the poor bastard fast and bathe daily in the Monnow and wash his balls or whatever in the holy well. All kinds of mystical shit.’

‘And that about Gwilym speaking Welsh, did that actually happen?’

‘Couldn’t tell you, cocker, none of us could understand a bleeding word. It’s a mug’s game. You don’t get anything you can see or touch or put in the bank. Nothing except the feeling of something out there playing with you. End of the day you just come out with your health ruined, your humanity eroded and fuck-all else.’

‘And yet he wanted to come back?’

‘Well, I say fuck all. I think he did find something. Something he didn’t want to share.’

‘How do you know about it, then?’

Lol sat down under a hawthorn tree, resting his left arm on his knee. At Nevill Hall Hospital, outside Abergavenny, they’d found a very deep bruise but no fracture. Still hurt quite a bit, though, right across the shoulder, and it was scary because he couldn’t hold a guitar and something hurt when he formed chords. His best guitar smashed, his chord arm … was he being told something?

‘This was in the last days,’ Hayter said. ‘He wanted us out of the way. He wanted to be alone there. I told you how I had to go to London, see my old man?’

‘Seemed very convenient,’ Lol said. ‘Also he wasn’t quite alone, was he?’

‘The girl.’

‘Mary.’

‘Yeah. This Mary turns up again and says she’s had a baby and she wants it to grow up with a father.’

‘Which of you would that be?’

‘Dunno. Dunno to this day. Anyway, she didn’t mean she wanted a father, she meant she wanted money. A packet. For starters. Well, I’d spent up on the lease on this place and a surfeit of substances to abuse, and my old man wasn’t exactly flush. And Gwilym, he had a Triumph Spitfire to support and a dad with no need of a spare granddaughter. That was when Mat said, take a weekend away, I’ll deal with it.’

‘Just like that.’

‘Look … it was cowardly and irresponsible, but … we were cowards and we were irresponsible. And we were young. And we came back, Mary was gone, and a day or so later we were raided by the police, and that was an end of it and I was very glad to get away. Only I didn’t, and neither did Gwilym. He’d got us where he wanted us.’

‘You didn’t even have proof she had a baby.’

‘She had photos. We kept staring at them, see which one of us she looked like. Kid looked like all of us, with darker skin. Mary said she was living in this place where there were a lot of hard guys who’d come and get heavy with us. End of the day, it was blackmail. Extortion.’

‘And blackmailers get what they deserve?’

‘Robinson, look, we didn’t think he’d killed her.’

‘What did you think he’d done? He had no money.’

‘I don’t …’ gritted teeth ‘… know. We weren’t there, we didn’t care.’

Lol said nothing, thinking of the magical, chemical hell of the girl’s last days. Hayter leaned against the tree-trunk.

‘Few years later, when I’m getting into some good money through music-promo, he’s back in touch. Somewhat reluctantly, we have a meeting, him and me and Sycharth, on neutral ground – in Evesham, I think it was. He looks different. Short hair, suit. He tells us that Mary died in the course of “a ritual”.’

‘I can’t believe this, Jimmy.’

‘Yeah, well, if you’d been there, you would have. Mat tells us he’s been to theological college and he’s a curate now – that was the bit we couldn’t believe. Reckons it’s going to be a breeze. Not great money, but a free house. Couple of days a week mouthing simplistic platitudes at old people and the rest of the time you can do what you like, and you never get fired.’

Lol thought of Merrily, shook his head slowly. She’d told him what Murray may have done to his last church, in Gloucestershire, to build a case for stress, early retirement.

‘He says it’s therefore in his interests that elements of his past should never be revealed,’ Hayter said, ‘and he’s sure it’s the same for us, too. Well, it was certainly the same for Sycharth. Me, less so, but the thought of being implicated in a bad death, that whole Michael Barrymore scene, only worse … because the body was still there …’

‘Nightmare?’

‘Yeah. He said it was quite safe, unlikely to be found.’

‘He thought that ? Did you even know where he’d put it?’

‘Wouldn’t tell us that. If he was the only one that knew, we’d go on needing him. He said one day he was going back there. Like it was his destiny. Great things to be discovered. Maybe he was still talking about the map, maybe something else, I don’t know. But he knew Gwilym wanted the place back in his family because of the Glyndwr thing, and when it happened, he said, he’d dispose of the body.’

‘There’s incentive,’ Lol said.

‘Meanwhile we needed to stick together. Mat had a proposition that he said would formally bind us together, in secrecy.’

‘Oh …’ Lol almost smiled ‘… like brothers?’

‘For the record, I had no particular wish to become a Freemason. Standing there, stripped to the waist, some old fart prodding you with a sword, you feel like a dick.’

‘You have to be invited to join, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, well, he fixed all that. He was already in. He’d wanted to get in for the Masonic secrets, wherein great Templar secrets were preserved. I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now, but some guys, this search for secret knowledge, they’ll do anything. And Masonry, it frees you up in other areas of your life. Find you don’t have to worry about money. Or support.’

‘So you did it.’

‘Yeah, I did it. And they were pleased to have me, a young businessman with a title in the pipeline. ’Course, it’s heavier than you think it’s gonna be, and, no, you don’t go back on the oath, trust me.’

‘Not even if you know a brother’s done a murder?’

Hayter ignored that.

‘The extraordinary thing … Mat said, Next time we meet, you’ll both be on the pathway to a material success you’d never dreamt of . And that was true.’

‘ Are there Masonic contacts,’ Lol asked him, ‘in the music business?’

‘Not many, but I have been successful, in unexpected ways. Saved the old homestead, the way the old man never managed. And Sycharth, he’s gone more Masonic than I ever did, and he’s into big contacts and big money. You look at the prime new developments around Hereford, you’ll keep coming across the name Gwilym in the small print. Struggling farmer to Master of the fucking Universe.’

‘ He wasn’t hugely successful, though, was he – Mat?’

‘Got what he wanted. Made it back into Garway, to pursue his dream of inheriting the great Templar legacy. De Molay, Glyndwr … Murray. When a suitable property came available he got the signal from Sycharth and Sycharth greased the wheels. Mat buys The Ridge, having found a woman with the readies. He could always find a woman, whatever kind he needed at any particular time. This case, one with money to spare, poor bitch.’