Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘At some stage, you might stop looking at me like that,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

‘Maybe.’

Or not. Despair soaked in again. Merrily picked up the flask of holy water, hugged it to her bosom. You never knew anybody quite well enough. Never sure who to trust, and yet you did have to trust. It’s a slippery slope, Merrily , Siân Callaghan-Clarke had said. Letting trust slip away .

And support. Support for the insupportable.

‘What have we done, Muriel?’

‘We?’ Mrs Morningwood put her glasses back on. ‘You’ve done nothing at all, darling. Except, perhaps, step over the edge of other people’s madness.’

Even though she knew he wouldn’t be back, Muriel would have new locks put on the doors. Life, she said, was a series of knee-jerks, stable doors banging in the night. She’d refused to come back to Ledwardine, had gone alone to the house at the end of the holiday cottages to sleep downstairs on the chaise longue with the dog.

Well … to lie there. No herbs would have produced restful sleep that night. Or the next. It had all finally come down on Mrs Morningwood. She’d brought it down, one big knee-jerk, connecting a foot with an accelerator pedal.

Eccentric, deranged , Beverley Murray had said. The way she drives around in that big Jeep, taking corners too fast .

‘Who is Muriel Morningwood?’ Frannie Bliss had asked yesterday, having looked at the report from Traffic. A heavily-loaded question, and Merrily had given him the Need to Know. Waiting for him to mention the discovery of bones, but he never had. It would come.

This morning, with arrangements for the Requiem finalized, she’d driven over to Ty Gwyn, finding it clean as a pharmacy. Sterile, something sucked out. Unexpectedly, Mrs Morningwood had asked her to bless the house. And the greenhouse and the garden, where herbs were grown and chickens pecked around.

‘Jane said he’d been inside again.’

‘Meddling with the herbs. Unscrewing jars. Sniffing, I expect.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t know. They’ve all gone, now.’

‘But you’ll get more …’

‘I expect so. I need the money. That wasn’t all. He’d been through the drawers. Found Mary’s letter. Took that. And some photos.’

‘Would he have known you had that letter?’

‘No way he could. Unless Fuchsia …’

‘You showed it to Fuchsia?’

Mrs Morningwood had nodded.

‘I don’t know about this, do I?’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t know the half of it.’

With the afternoon seeping damply away, Lord Stourport stood at the edge of a copse, wet leaves around his shoes.

‘They weren’t even there, then, these trees, I’m pretty sure. And I’m good at land. It’s like looking back at a different lifetime.’

Meaning, We were different people . But that was the easy way out, Lol thought.

Hayter said, ‘What’s she doing in there, your woman?’

‘Trying to make the place feel a bit calmer. Before the Requiem.’

‘And that draws a line under it, does it, the Requiem?’

‘Just starts the process, I think.’

‘I do not like this,’ Jimmy Hayter said. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’

He’d arrived over an hour early, while Merrily was still setting out the folding altar in front of the inglenook. Mrs Morningwood had walked over to join her, and Jane had taken Roscoe for a walk. It was an hour or so from sunset, Lol’s head still aching if he moved too fast or turned his back to the wind.

‘You could still go to the cops,’ Hayter said. ‘And I don’t yet believe you won’t.’

It was why he’d come and why Gwilym would come, too. Nervous, and with every reason. Not out of the woods yet, maybe never would be.

‘No cops so far,’ Lol said, ‘apart from traffic cops. Apparently, there’s, um … In Garway, there’s a long tradition of independence.’

They walked up to the top of the rise, and now you could see the skewed, sandy tower of Garway Church.

‘OK,’ Jimmy Hayter said. ‘I’ll tell you. We did know him before.’

‘Murray?’

‘We were at Cambridge together. There was a magic society, like you got at a lot of universities. Recreated the rituals of the Golden Dawn, then the heavier stuff. I was in it for a while, so was Pierre. Most of us, a bit of fun. Murray … it took over his life to the extent he shuffled off with a disappointing second – me saying I’d’ve thought he’d be able to magic up a better fucking degree than that. He didn’t care. This was his life’s path.’

‘So he wasn’t doing … theology, or …’

‘Nah. He was doing women. And drugs. All kinds. All this Carlos Castaneda stuff was fashionable then – mescaline, jimson weed, the Way of the Warrior. My guess is that’s what got him into the Templars – European spiritual warriors, monks in armour.’

‘The Templars did drugs?’

‘Maybe. He thought so. Apparently, they introduced a lot of herbs into Europe from North Africa. He’d try anything for a new experience. And women, like I say, he was good at women. Urbane, diffident most of the time. Then he’d just turn it on. Focus, you know? Like a laser. He’d focus on a woman and he’d make it happen, and then, when she was crazy for him, he’d lose interest, go cold on her. The making it happen was all.’

‘How did he wind up here with you, then?’

‘We had money, he didn’t. Scholarship boy, from a family of modest means. Unlike my merchant-banker friend, Pierre, who was into the back-to-nature bit – funny that, isn’t it? One bad experience of nature, red in tooth and fucking claw, and Pierre’s been in the City ever since.’

‘So who actually found this place?’

‘Teddy. Or Mat, as we were instructed to call him. Mat Phobe – we never worked that out, you know. Doing drugs, it can take you months to master word games. Like Woodstock. F … U … C … K – what’s that spell? Fuck knows.’

Hayter cackled and stood on a green mound, looking down at the Master House.

‘He was well into the Templar stuff by then, and we knew nothing. Very excited when he found out that the place we were actually living in had connections . He had us doing excavations, digging up the floors, taking stones out of the walls. We kept moving furniture around to cover up the current hole in case the owners came in. Like the PoWs at Colditz. He always thought there was a tunnel to the church.’

‘Find anything?’

‘Nah. Mat also had this idea that when Jacques de Molay came, he brought something with him to hide at Garway because it was so remote. He was thinking the Mappa Mundi, or a prototype – nobody really knows where that came from or how it wound up in Hereford, but it was evidently made around the end of the thirteenth century, which fits. He kept going into Hereford to look at it in the cathedral. Dragging us along, or one of the girls. Never seemed much to me. Not exactly great art, not much of a map.’

‘So, what—?’

‘It’s a very Templar creation. Shows Jerusalem as the centre of the world. No, I’ve got it wrong, actually … he didn’t think there was a prototype of the Mappa Mundi at Garway, he thought the Mappa Mundi was the prototype. All those symbols and strange creatures around it, but they’re quite roughly drawn. He was convinced there was a finished version hidden somewhere, a perfect magical map, connecting the world to the universe. A total concept. He thought they’d created it as a kind of magical control thing. And that … that was gonna be Teddy Murray’s Holy Grail.’

‘And he thought it was still hidden at Garway?’

Lol looked around and saw an intimate, enclosed landscape, small mellow fields, encrusted with autumn woodland, dipping to the sandstone church. Warmth, shelter. Despite last night, he liked it here.