Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘And were sanctioned to do so by St Bernard of Clairvaux. As a result of whose influence they were also granted independence of all other ecclesiastical powers, except the Pope himself. The Templar is a fearless knight , St Bernard said, who, as the body is covered with iron, so the soul is the defence of the faith, Without doubt, fortified by both arms, he fears neither man nor demon .’

Teddy folded his arms over his reddened surplice, smiling.

‘Defence of the faith,’ Merrily said.

‘To defend faith the Templar needed knowledge. Only knowledge cancels doubt.’

‘And who’s the demon? Baphomet?’

‘He’s just a symbol, you know that. An aspect of the green man. Ubiquitous. The life-force in nature.’

Also, Merrily thought, the sex -force in nature.

Thinking of the night before the rape, at dinner at The Ridge: nut roast and gossip. Had it occurred to Teddy then, over that meal, that if Mrs Morningwood was the victim of a sex crime the list of possible suspects from her client book would direct police attention, from the start, far away from the Master House? He must have known about her. All his walks, his coffee stops at farms along the way.

Or had he simply fallen in lust with the idea? Just like old times. Watching Muriel from the hill, fantasizing about how he’d do it? Mild, cheerful Teddy Murray lacing his hiking books, pocketing his condoms. Already out there, probably, when Merrily was taking that dispiriting early call from the Bishop. Circling Ty Gwyn like a hawk, in complete command of his landscape.

Baphomet. Mat Phobe.

And now, at last, in the unsteady glow, she could see him with long hair, reddish, tangled around his face, an eager, mid-twenties face, bum-fluff on the jawline. Enthusiastic. Full of a raging fire, blown up by the bellows of testosterone and whatever other chemicals Jimmy Hayter had obtained that week.

‘So who’s the infidel now, Teddy?’

‘Today, Merrily, I’m very much afraid that term would have to include most people.’

She didn’t know if there were any anti-Islamic implications here, didn’t want to. He came further into the room, pushing the lantern with the toe of a walking boot, propping the crowbar against the side of the inglenook.

‘Are you getting what you wanted? To make your historic connections?’

‘More or less.’

‘I admire you, Merrily. You’ve taken on something that is, transparently, not for women, and you’re sticking in there. That’s really rather courageous.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Look, if you want to get off, I’ll carry on here for a while. Clear up some more of the mess.’ He dug into a trouser pocket, pulled out something white, balled-up, snapping it apart. ‘Got to take precautions, all these dead rodents. Sure you don’t want to see the priest’s hole? In fact …’

Surgical gloves.

Putting them on as he stepped into the inglenook, dragged a yellow feed sack, thick plastic, out into the room, and then a second one.

‘Can’t say they didn’t come prepared. Obviously collecting some of the rubble in these, to clear it out of the way, give themselves more space. If you step under here. Merrily, and look up the chimney, you can actually see into the priest’s … oh.’

Teddy glanced back, in mild annoyance, to where one of the feed sacks had fallen on to its side and some of the contents spilled out over the edge of the hearth. The contents included what looked like a clavicle, part of a ribcage. Finally, the top half of a skull, no lower jaw, with rubbery fragments of skin and black hair, rolling gently, with a clink , into the lamp.

Merrily screaming the scream as Teddy Murray casually stepped out. Choked off with heart-in-mouth shock, the scream wasn’t much of a scream at all, in the end.

And by then Teddy had her by the hair with one hand, the other half-clawed in her face, twisting. His mouth up close, whispering some words, but the only ones she heard, as he was forcing her to her knees in the dirt, were ‘ … joy you .’

THE IMAGE HAD formed in a hollow of powdery yellow light, while Lol was fighting for consciousness.

But with consciousness had come this unendurable pain and his senses had let go for a moment, storing the one frozen tableau: a man piling bones into a sack.

He must have passed out a third time, if only momentarily, because, the next thing, the yellow scene had gone and so had all the light.

Lol didn’t move, working out where he was, what had happened, the blackness resolving at one stage into the velvety coffin of the broken Boswell guitar.

Confusion. Panic. Need to get up. He planted a hand on the floor. His shoulder screamed, his head pulsed, his memory rewound.

One blow was all he could remember, and the whistling of the air before it came.

Below the shoulder he’d already damaged getting in. The oak door had jammed and he’d thought someone had locked it from inside and he’d taken a wild run at it, gone crashing through to meet the steel bar swinging out of near-darkness, sending him spinning around, his head ramming the door.

Ah . Old oak: the hardest.

Lol cried out into the darkess in his head.

Hands cool on his face now, the soft voice from the meditation in the candlelit church. Black jeans and sweatshirt, hair tied back.

‘Can you speak? Oh, God, please …’

The night air made it real.

Up on the rise, the wolfhound was going crazy in the Volvo, as if someone had gone past, someone he wanted to kill. And Jane, hearing him, was going, ‘Where’s Mrs Morningwood?’ and wouldn’t stop until they’d all gone back into the earth-smelling house, where Lol couldn’t do the stairs.

Jane had kept asking him if his shoulder was broken and he didn’t know – how were you supposed to tell? He waited at the bottom of the half-spiral, tense and sweating, almost sick with the headache and the pain in his upper arm, until they came back, the mother and the daughter, having found nothing up there, nobody.

At some stage, he realized that Jane was doing all the talking.

When they were outside again, he got close to Merrily, was able to say, ‘He touch you?’

‘Kind of,’ she said. ‘Once. After I screamed. It’s all right.’

‘Didn’t hear it,’ Lol said, horrified. ‘I didn’t hear the scream.’

‘Walls are two feet thick. We never thought.’

It came back to him how they couldn’t stand it any longer, he and Jane, not either of them. Making a joint decision that Lol should go in.

‘Look,’ he said to Merrily. ‘Never … never do that …’

‘Again. No.’

‘You knew it might be him, didn’t you?’

‘Never again,’ she said and clung to his good arm all the slow way back to the car. ‘Hospital,’ she said. ‘Where’s the nearest? Abergavenny?’

‘Call Bliss. Drive till we find a signal and call Bliss.’

‘Ambulance first. Please, Lol.’

‘Can’t let him get away. Have to find the bones.’

Moving sluggishly through the rutted field, Merrily at the wheel, Lol recalled his dreamlike memory of the bones and the yellow sack, the scene for ever vivid with shock. Bones? Sack?

‘Two sacks,’ Merrily said. ‘A whole body. A skeleton. In pieces. He took it away. In the sacks. Must have got out the back way. Jane and me – upstairs, just now – we saw the priest’s hole. It must have been in there, all these years.’

‘Where anybody could have found it?’ Lol said.

‘No. Somebody, I think it was Roxanne Gray, told me about the priest’s hole, which the family had blocked up many years before. Fifty years? Maybe the commune people had rediscovered it and blocked it up again. With something inside. Someone.’