Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘So you didn’t go back to the Master House? With Fuchsia?’

‘Well … no.’ Murray looked bewildered. ‘She didn’t ask me to. Hardly my property to intrude upon. Anyway, my impression was that you couldn’t have dragged her back and, in the absence of a full-time minister here, I wasn’t sure who it would be best to inform. And then events overtook me, and so— Paul. How are you?’

A man in jeans and a heavy work-shirt had come out of the church, leaning on a stick. There was a motorized wheelchair on the path outside; he stood looking at it with no great love. Teddy Murray took a step forward, and the man raised his stick.

‘Bugger off, eh, Teddy?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Not ready for him yet, boy. Gonner have another bit of a walk round. Come back for the thing.’

Teddy nodded. They watched the man making his way up the path. He couldn’t be more than mid-thirties, thick brown hair.

‘MS,’ Teddy murmured. ‘What kind of luck is that for a farmer?’ He opened the church door, stood aside for Merrily. ‘You been in here before?’

‘Never.’

No sooner were they inside than he’d closed the door, blew out a breath.

‘Didn’t want to introduce you, Merrily. Difficult. That’s Paul Gray – he and his wife …’ Teddy lowered his voice ‘… sold the Master House to the Duchy.’

‘Oh.’

‘Long story. Bad feeling. Not for me to … Still a bit of a newcomer. As, of course, is Paul, which is one of the problems.’ He laughed. ‘You can be here for three generations and they’ll still call you a newcomer. Couple of families go back to the Norman Conquest. So …’ Extending an arm. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s … unusual.’

‘More than you know.’

Merrily nodded, taking it in. It was quite small but lofty and airy and filled with rosy light. The chancel was framed by a classic zigzagged and serrated Norman arch, wide and theatrical. Red velvet curtains were drawn across it, as if what lay beyond them was not for the unprepared. Something rare and sacred, Grail-like.

Or perhaps a body in a coffin?

Merrily shook herself. Too much M. R. James.

Teddy Murray nodded towards a banner with a crusader kind of cross, red and gold on white, hanging from the pulpit.

‘Still a major presence, then?’ Merrily said.

‘The Templars? Yes, I suppose they are. Do you know much about them, Merrily?’

‘Erm …’ She looked up at the dark brown wooden ceiling, curved like the bottom of a boat and decorated with a small and regular galaxy of white stars. In a pocket of her jeans, the mobile phone began to vibrate against her left thigh. ‘Maybe not as much as I ought to.’

Merrily placed a hand over the phone, and Teddy Murray leaned back against a pew end, looking down at her with what you could only describe as a beneficent smile, evidently all too ready to do what he was better at than dispensing spiritual succour.

‘It’s sometimes difficult to separate the truth from the lurid speculation,’ she told him. ‘Never a problem for my daughter.’

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that few of us like to countenance the idea that the Templars guarded the secret of the bloodline of Christ through his supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene.’

‘Oh, she’s happy enough with that idea. I suppose what bothers me most is the idea of the Templars – or someone – guarding the secret resting place of his bones.’

‘Let’s not talk of heresy.’

‘Let’s not.’

‘None of it, however, makes the Knights Templar less interesting,’ Teddy Murray said. ‘Follow me, Mrs Watkins.’

WHEN MERRILY CLIMBED back into the car, the weather had changed; the sky had the deep grey lustre of tinfoil and a single slow raindrop rolled down the windscreen like a cartoon tear, and she just wanted to be home and lighting a fire.

She pulled out her phone. Lol would be on the way to his gig in Newtown, Powys, so it was more likely to be Jane.

It was neither, just a short text.

CALL ME.

MOB PLEASE

FB

A text from Frannie Bliss? If it was him, this was a first. Mobile would mean he didn’t want to take the call in the CID room. She found his number in the index, but the signal was on the blink, so she reversed out of the church entrance and drove away from the village, uphill, pulling into a passing place, winding up the window against a rising wind.

‘Nicely timed, Reverend,’ Bliss said. ‘You’ve caught up with me in the gents.’

‘I totally refuse to picture the scene.’

‘Not good enough, anyway. Too much of an echo. I’ll call you back. Just give me a couple of minutes to … finish up in here.’

Echo?

Merrily sat watching the sloping landscape losing its colours in the gathering rain, compiling a mental inventory of all the curios that Teddy Murray had revealed in Garway Church.

Beginning with the green man, the familiar stone face with entwined foliage, inexplicably found in churches. This one was in the chancel arch and, with those stubby horns, he wasn’t typical. There was also a cord or vine with tassels resembling fingers, so it looked like he was making a funny face at you, waggling his fingers at either side of his head.

What the green man had to do with the Templars Teddy couldn’t explain, but this was a Templar church so it must have had some significance.

Everything in a Templar church was significant. They’d moved on to the matching long stones set into the chancel steps, the altar steps and one window ledge – these identified by Teddy as the lids of Templar stone coffins, now part of the fabric of the church. Teddy laughing, in his element now, the historian, the tour guide.

‘Someone said you can throw the Templars out of the building, but you’ll never get the building back from the Templars.’

Giving her the primary-school version, for which she’d been quite grateful.

The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon: founded in the early twelfth century, the time of the crusades, ostensibly to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem. The King of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, had allowed them to establish their headquarters at the al-Aqsa mosque, believed to be the site of the original Temple.

They’d begun, it was said, with only nine members, led by one Hugh de Payens. Monastic soldiers, red crosses on their surcoats, growing over the next century into something internationally powerful, influential and very wealthy.

Too wealthy and too powerful, by the thirteenth century, for the King of France, Philip IV, and the pet pope he’d acquired, Clement V, accommodated at the time in Avignon. The French Templars had all been arrested in a series of simultaneous dawn raids on Friday, 13 October 1307, accused of a black catalogue of heresies.

‘Hang on …’ It hadn’t taken much calculation. ‘Doesn’t that mean it’s exactly—’

‘I’m afraid it does. Seven hundred years ago next Saturday. I was hoping we’d have a permanent minister in place by then, but it was not to be. It therefore falls to me to conduct some sort of memorial service for the poor chaps.’

‘You don’t sound totally enthused.’

‘It is so obvious?’

‘And the problem is … what?’

‘Fanatics, Merrily. The known facts about the Templars are relatively few – the amount of wild speculation has been quite monumental in recent years.’

‘ The Da Vinci Code ?’

‘And its source, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail . All the preposterous theories undermining the central tenets of Christianity as we know it.’

‘Mmm.’

Everybody knew about it now: the alleged bloodline of Jesus from his alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene, the female disciple whose crucial role was supposedly written out of the scriptures by the Roman Catholic Church. Jane had been quite taken with the idea that the real reason for the suppression of the Knights Templar had been their guardianship of this secret knowledge … and the whereabouts of the tomb of Christ, unrisen.