Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘Looking into the face of someone he’d murdered.’

Murray had said, When the girl turned up here asking for protection … sanctuary … I confess I was completely thrown .

‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘He’d have to know, wouldn’t he? He’d want to see her again. What about last Saturday? She almost certainly came back here last Saturday, on her own, because I spoke to Felix on the phone and he was very uptight, convinced she’d been back. Taken the van, key to the Master House missing …’

‘Why would she do that, though?’

‘Maybe deciding she’d have to deal with it or it was going to torment her for ever. I don’t know. We’re unlikely ever to know, but is it possible she saw Teddy Murray then? And is it possible she told Teddy Murray what you ’d told her about mother?’

‘And perhaps he followed her home,’ Mrs Morningwood said. ‘Just as he followed Jane and me yesterday.’

‘ What ?’

‘Back here, from your vicarage. He obviously recognized the dog. He would’ve waited on the square in his Land Rover. He had patience, that man.’

‘Yes.’

And then, if he’d followed Fuchsia home, returned to Monkland the following evening. The lonely caravan, a blunt instrument – like a crowbar – and an element of surprise. There was no way of knowing which of them he’d killed first or how he’d gone about it. Whether Felix had been a target, or collateral damage. Or, as Fuchsia’s body had been loaded into the Land Rover, part of a murder–suicide scenario.

Had he enjoyed it, all of it, the way the Knights Templar had evidently delighted in killing for their cause? The two sides of the Templars, pastoral and monastic and then the gleeful savagery. The ecstasy of blood.

A Mercedes 4x4 drew up in front of the Master House.

Nobody got out.

‘Sycharth,’ Jimmy Hayter said. ‘He’ll wait till the last minute before he goes in. This is gonna be hard for him. Especially with Gray here.’

Lol said, ‘Your meeting with him yesterday …’

‘Robinson, watch my lips.’

Hayter’s lips were a flat line.

‘Murray wanted you both back for his service, though,’ Lol said. ‘Didn’t he?’

The memorial service which would have been held yesterday and wasn’t. Several men in suits, whom word hadn’t reached in time, had arrived to find a black-edged card on the door, informing would-be worshippers that, owing to the tragic and sudden death of the Rev. Edward Murray, all services should be considered cancelled until further notice. Some consternation, apparently.

‘Maybe the original plan was to do something here,’ Lol said. ‘Continue some process Murray had started thirty-odd years ago.’

‘Yeah. Maybe. He’d been studying all that time, been through degrees of Masonry I didn’t know existed.’

‘But then, despite Gray’s illness, Gwilym didn’t manage to get the house back and it was sold, very symbolically, to the Duchy of Cornwall, so you had to arrange it at the church.’

‘No, it was always going to be the church.’ Hayter said. ‘The church is all-Templar. He was going to bring something to the church that would reconnect the wires, as he put it.’

‘What?’

‘We weren’t privileged to know.’

‘You’re lying again, Jimmy.’

‘Robinson, you …’ Hayter dug his fingers into the grooves of the hawthorn. ‘Gwilym and me, we met to decide what to do about him. We’d had enough.’

‘What, like you broke the Boswell?’

‘That’s how I wanted to play it, yes. Frankly. And knew the right people.’

‘Like he claimed to have made Mr Gray ill? Think how that backfired, Jimmy.’

‘Look … Robinson … we didn’t do anything. Gwilym said, let me talk to him. And he did. And the agreement was, after the seven hundredth anniversary, that would be it. Murray’s side of it was to remove the body. If it turned up during restoration, we’d be well in the shit. Not Murray, because nobody ever suspects the vicar, do they, unless it’s choirboys or kiddie-porn?’

‘And what was your side of the deal?’

Hayter’s mouth flat-lined.

‘You know he took the bones away, don’t you?’ Lol said.

‘What?’

‘He took them away in a couple of plastic feed-sacks.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Only they’ve disappeared. They could be anywhere now.’

Hayter sprang off the tree, and you could almost see the sweat rising like sap.

Before they stepped inside the inglenook, Merrily did St Patrick’s Breastplate, Mrs Morningwood repeating every line. Whether she believed any of this was anybody’s guess, but she went along with it.

In the torchlight: Baphomet.

Mrs Morningwood felt around the coarse, sardonic sandstone contours of his ageless face.

‘You know, it’s actually quite old. I’d thought it would be some sort of replica, the kind of thing you get from garden centres.’

‘Why did you think that?’

‘Because, when Jane told me about it, I assumed it had been put here by Stourport’s rabble. I thought that was what you were picking up in here – I do accept these things. I may be cynical but that doesn’t make me a sceptic.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m supposed to be sceptical and analytical about this stuff, but I was affected and I can’t explain it. And I still don’t know why it made you encourage a learner driver to bring you over here.’

‘Oh lord, I didn’t know that , darling. Apologies. The reason I wanted to see it – and as things turned out it was damned prescient – was that Jane pointed out, quite rightly, that it was inside the inglenook and facing the back wall. Facing the priest’s hole, in fact, which I’d heard about – years ago, from Roxanne’s mother, as it happens.’

‘You wanted to come here and look if the hole had, at some stage, been unblocked.’

‘It made sense. I did think Mary was dead, I did think they’d killed her. And having the face of Baphomet gazing at the tomb – that seemed to me the disgusting kind of conceit that they’d have gone in for. I was half right … and half wrong. This is old. Could be as old as the one in the church. And yet …’

‘It’s not quite like the one in the church, as I remember it,’ Merrily said.

‘It has been removed, though, darling, look … that’s modern cement, isn’t it? Some of it’s already been chipped away. This is part of what Murray came for. You have a chisel?’

‘Crowbar be OK?’

‘Splendid.’

He’d left it in the hearth. If this wasn’t the instrument of Felix’s death, it could have been. Fuchsia, too. Whatever, it had been held by the same hands. Merrily held it across both of hers. Didn’t move, faced Mrs Morningwood over the iron firebasket.

‘ Did you kill him deliberately, Muriel?’

Muriel turned slowly from the stone, lifted her head, exposing her throat – the bloodied dents of thumbnails around the windpipe.

‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘I know.’

‘He’d learned from Fuchsia that I knew whose child she was. He knew that after Fuchsia’s death I wasn’t going to leave it alone. He knew – obviously from Sycharth – about my family history. He knew that I was talking to you because … you told him?’

‘No reason not to. Or so I thought.’

‘And he knew that people in my line of work sometimes get raped and murdered. And he enjoyed it. Without remorse. He was never a Christian.’

‘Did you intend to kill him, Muriel? I need to know. Had you been waiting? Being patient and watchful, the way he was?’

‘You don’t want to be an accessory, darling. Or your lovely boyfriend. Or your extraordinary daughter. So don’t ask me stupid questions. Because I’ve gone through a kind of purgatory, and I’d go through it again. Now give me the bloody crowbar … Thank you.’ Mrs Morningwood prised away a lump of cement. ‘As I thought …’