Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

‘Told you, I’m good at the boring stuff. But it bores me. Where did he go first?’

Adam found the first receipt. ‘He stopped to get petrol at a garage in Suffield-cum-Everley. At 3.20 p.m., July twenty-third.’

‘Suffield-cum what?’

Adam found the fat paperback roadmap in the glove box and scanned the page. ‘It’s here, near Whitby. In the North York Moors.’

‘OK. Now check the book — I brought it along. The Templars in Europe. See what’s near Whitby.’

Adam reached behind once more. And saw with a rush of poignancy the book on the scruffy backseat, under Nina’s snow-damped anorak, a big impressive authoritative hardback: A Guide to Templar Sites in Western Europe.

By Archibald McLintock.

Inside there was a neat and beautiful handwritten inscription: To my beloved daughter Nina. Dad.

He saw Nina glance at it, quickly, then look away. A choking silence filled the car. Adam paged through the book. It was an exhaustive gazetteer of Templar sites. He swiftly found the entry.

‘Westerdale Preceptory. “Every other preceptory in Yorkshire was built on the very highest ground. Westerdale Preceptory, uniquely, is not,”’ he quoted. ‘“Scant traces remain of this once-extensive Templar possession, but we know that it stood at the base of a small green hill, behind the present-day Westerdale Hall.”’

‘So that’s where we go. Westerdale.’ She checked the car clock in the bleakening gloom. ‘But we’re never going to make it tonight.’

They chose a cheap roadside hotel: a Travelodge. Two non-smoking rooms on the same gloomy corridor. When it came to eating — a couple of steak sandwiches in a garish pub by the hotel, a pub which smelled entirely of vinegar — they had their first moment of awkwardness. The intimacy, a young man and a young woman eating dinner alone, and together, was too much, too soon.

Nina seemed very sad, and trying to hide it, talking bravely and pointlessly about football. So they hurried through the meal, and retired to their separate rooms, where Adam watched TV and fell asleep half-dressed, and dreamed of Alicia smiling in a chair in a room, quite naked and pale, watching a movie about astronauts, floating in space.

He opened the tatty curtains of the morning to another snowfall. They flung their bags in the boot. Breakfast was a brace of snatched coffees and Danish pastries bought from the Take a Break service station and consumed in the car. This time Adam drove. His driving was faster than hers; they talked about the past as he took the curves at speed.

‘So. Banking?’ He changed gear to come off the motorway. Listening to her story.

‘I enjoyed it, at first. Moving south, living in London: it’s a great city. And bankers and brokers are much maligned, I like them, they are honest. Authentic. They’re just greedy. Like sharks. There’s no agenda, nothing hidden.’

‘What happened then? You left because…?’

‘Got bored. And… the lifestyle was… hard partying. Champagne and coke. I got… I had…’ Her face was blank but pained. ‘I had a wee bit of a breakdown. Year ago. Anyhow, that’s when I came back to Scotland. Trying to think of what to do with my life. Something worthwhile. If there is such a thing. That’s my life. Nutshell! Tell me about you, Ad? Why the fuck would anyone leave sunny Oz to come to shivering Britain?’

He shrugged, overtaking a tractor in the slush. ‘Because it’s the mother ship, isn’t it? For any writer, for any English speaker. London, England, home of the English language. Walk to work where Shakespeare worked! You don’t get that in Sydney.’

She gazed at him. ‘So there was no other reason, then?’

He drove in silence for a minute. Had Nina worked him out? Had he given some clue? He struggled with the dilemma; the urge to be honest was as great as his desire for reticence. And Nina had been straight with him, so maybe he should reciprocate.

‘OK, there was something else. I was running away. Doing a geographical, as drug addicts say.’

They skidded through a junction; a melting snowman stared at them, sadly, from a farmhouse garden.

‘Running away from what?’

‘Death. My girlfriend-’ The words were cold in his mouth, cold and tasteless. ‘I was in love with a girl, Alicia Hagen, and — and — we were about to move in together…’ He swerved, taking a sharp and icy left. ‘And she was… she was run over, crushed, on a bicycle. She was just twenty-four, riding at night.’

‘That’s horrible.’

‘It was worse than horrible. The police said she had been drinking, like it was her fault a fucking truck driver didn’t see her. And… we’d had a row that night, she went off, she was… she was a little neurotic but I loved her, the only girl I’ve loved and then suddenly she was dead and… and I just couldn’t stay there, not in Sydney, not in Oz. So I ran away from my guilt. From the sadness. Coward that I am. I think the last thing I ever said to her was angry. Angry words.’

Nina was staring ahead, and saying nothing. Adam switched the radio on. Then he switched it off.

‘That’s not cowardice,’ she said. ‘That’s just human.’

‘Maybe. Can we talk about something else?’

They talked about her lack of ambition; about the time he almost got scurvy working on a sheep ranch; about her sister’s rich boyfriend. The conversation brought them the whole way, to the snowy, undulant hills of the North York Moors.

Wrapping themselves in jackets and scarves, they scrunched through the frost-hardened, overnight snow. The wooded path led to a bleak hillside, where rooks cawed in black alarm at their approach. Adam got the book out, and they looked around: at the snow and the grey-black dead leaves, and the crows, and the nothingness.

And then they headed back for the car. There was indeed nothing to see in Westerdale. Adam checked the book. Archibald McLintock was quite right. ‘Scant traces remain…’

So why did he come here?

Adam drove them across Yorkshire. A revived sense of futility gripped him as they made their way cross country, over motorways, under bridges, through the winter landscapes of city and moorland. He resisted the darker thoughts, and watched the whitened bleak landscape, the crowbound trees.

Penhill Preceptory is located at the high point of a ridge in the Yorkshire Dales.

‘This is it.’

The map in the book showed them where to go. Uphill a hundred yards.

‘Here.’

‘Is that all there is?’

There was almost as much nothing in Penhill Preceptory as in Westerdale. It was just a low ruin of stones, on a freezing cold slope, deep in high and bony Yorkshire countryside. Nina stood shivering in the cold by the scattered remnants as Adam read from her father’s book, his hands numbed by the wind.

‘“The main objects of interest are the curious graves.”’

Nina pointed. ‘He means those?’

They walked halfway along the largest ruin of wall, and looked down. The curious graves turned out to be odd slots of hollowed-out stone: like small stone coffins embedded in the frozen soil. The coffins were shaped like silhouettes of human corpses, with a narrowing at the neck and a larger space for the head. The effect was sinister.

Again Adam consulted the book. ‘“These bizarre coffins are almost unique in the British Isles; the only other place where something comparable can be found is in Heysham churchyard, Lancashire, which likewise boasts rock-cut graves, dating to the Dark Ages.”’ Adam paused, and thought, and then read on. ‘“Other than this, Penhill Preceptory is largely ruinous and lacking in great interest, though its spectacular position makes it a delightful place for an historical picnic.”’

‘Picnic?’ Nina shook her head. ‘This is just a few wee graves! Just a bunch of nothing. Let’s go. Give me the keys.’