by Phil Rickman
In the hall, she opened the door to a guy in a green hiking jacket. Clergy shirt and a dog collar underneath. Familiar-looking baggage at his feet.
‘Hullo.’ Dome head, big friendly smile through his white beard. ‘Would you be Jane, by any chance?’
‘Um, yeah. I’m afraid Mum’s out, though.’
‘Oh, well, look, I’m Teddy Murray. Odd-job man at Garway. Your mother was staying with us for a couple of nights and had to leave in a hurry. Said she’d come back for her stuff, but I know how busy she is and I happened to be passing through, en route to Hereford, so …’
He picked up the bags and beamed.
‘Oh, right,’ Jane said. ‘Great.’
‘Must say, this is a lovely village, Jane. You’re both very lucky.’
‘Yeah. I suppose we are.’
‘Well, I’ll just … leave them here, shall I?’
Teddy Murray dropped the overnight bags over the threshold, into the path of Roscoe who’d come trotting through from the kitchen.
And Roscoe just went totally crazy.
Snarling. Like all-snarl, huge jagged teeth exposed, like the ripper teeth on a circular saw. This Teddy Murray backing away into the drive.
‘Roscoe!’ Jane down behind the dog, desperately hauling on his collar through the hackles. She could be in trouble here. ‘Oh, God, sorry … sorry …’
Getting dragged through the doorway, Roscoe’s jaws opening and shutting like a gin trap on a spring.
‘Guard dog, eh?’ Teddy Murray trying to smile from a few metres back. ‘I suppose two girls on their own in a big house …’
‘Back to the …’ Jane’s knees grazed on the mat ‘… obedience classes.’
‘Tell your mum I’ll talk to her again,’ Teddy Murray said.
Jane got the door shut, the dog inside, the snarl reduced to a low rumble. Blowing out a lot of air in a whoosh, she went back into the kitchen where Mrs Morningwood was standing in the middle of the floor, face like hardening plaster.
‘My fault, darling.’ Her voice clearly on autopilot, somewhere different from her thoughts. ‘Should have shut him … somewhere.’
‘He hasn’t done it before, has he?’ Jane said. ‘I mean, like … tried to savage somebody?’
‘Oh.’ Mrs Morningwood was expressionless. ‘No. No, he hasn’t.’
Huw was in the North Transept with his old mate Tommy Canty, lighting a candle.
‘Dunmore’s here.’
‘Where?’
Merrily looked around. Six candles were burning on a tiered stand in front of the renovated shrine of St Thomas Cantilupe. Back in the Middle Ages, there’d been long queues — scores of pilgrims, sick people and relatives of the sick. Tommy Canty had been Beckett-class in his day.
There was a container of candles you could buy to light and ask for the saint’s help. Huw fitted his candle into one of the holders.
‘Bishop’s in one of the chantries. Trying to reach an arrangement with his Governor.’
‘That’s why you’ve got me here? To face up to the Bishop?’
She was feeling very much on edge. Lol had driven her down to Broad Street, dropped her on the corner by the Cathedral Green and then, against all her pleas, driven off back towards Westgate and Roman Road to find the man who’d destroyed the most beautiful guitar in the world.
‘Dunmore wants to talk to you,’ Huw said.
‘About what?’
‘About what he’s just trying to clear with his God.’
‘Bernie’s who you came to see? He was your appointment?’
‘And every bit as knackering as I’d figured. You forget how shit-scared they are. Bowed under the gross weight of centuries of solemn, dark ceremonial.’
‘Not as many centuries as the Church has. Not by a long way.’
‘Only the Church doesn’t threaten to rip your tongue out by the roots if you finger a brother or shout out Jahbulon on the bus.’
‘Fair enough. What’s he going to tell me?’
‘I’d say whatever you want to ask. So have a think about it before you go in.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Unless he chickens out.’
‘What did you say to him?’
‘Mr Gwilym helpful, was he?’
‘Didn’t intend to be, but I rather think he was. What did you say to the Bishop?’
‘I’d better be off, lass.’
‘You’re going?’
‘Nowt else I can do here.’ He looked over the candles to the shrine. ‘See you, then, Tommy.’
Nodding to the tomb in which there hadn’t, for many years, been anything of Tommy.
‘Huw, I think I’d rather you stayed.’
‘Lass …’ Huw bent to her. ‘It’s part of the deal. Just you and him.’
‘Oh.’
‘I won’t pray for you.’ He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Already done that bit.’
He pointed to the seventh candle.
‘What did you say to him, Huw?’
‘Didn’t need to say much. Callaghan-Clarke’d already been in.’
‘Oh.’
‘Just get on with it, eh?’
Looking slightly irritable, Huw left Merrily in the cold light of the North Transept, the handful of candles a small and lonely glow.
52
Male Thing
Lol was standing next to Jimmy Hayter’s champagne Jaguar, the formula fantasy flashing past: he hot-wires the Jag, takes it away, calls Hayter on his mobile with directions.
And then what?
As he didn’t know Hayter’s mobile number or how to hot-wire a car, there wasn’t much point in taking it further. He just stood there, leaning against the front of the Jag, in full view of the picture window identified by Merrily as the window of Sycharth Gwilym’s office.
The sky had gloomed over again and it began to rain. Lol didn’t move. The mobile in his pocket was switched on. Until he had a call from the cathedral, there was nowhere to go.
After twenty minutes, his grey Alien sweatshirt dark with rain, he still hadn’t moved.
He was very cold.
After twenty-five minutes, it stopped raining and Lord Stourport came out.
The walls and ceiling of the fifteenth-century Chantry Chapel of Bishop John Stanbury were of richly foliate stone. It was like being under a copse of low, weeping trees in winter.
‘I’m going to retire, Merrily,’ the Bishop said.
It wasn’t warm in here but he’d taken off his jacket. There was a small green stain on a shoulder of his purple shirt.
‘You always say that,’ Merrily said.
She was sitting next to him, facing the golden-haloed Virgin and Child in the triptych, Gothic-spired, over an altar the size of a boxed radiator.
Bernie Dunmore had lost some weight in the past year and his tonsure had expanded.
‘It is possible, you know,’ he said, ‘to be a Freemason and a priest, without compromise.’
‘But hard, I’d’ve thought.’
‘Hard, yes. My father and two uncles were Masons. When I joined, I was barely out of theological college. For a while it seemed almost compatible. The lodge included two canons and the Dean. Several bishops were still active Masons, then. Not now, of course.’
‘You could’ve left.’
‘Yes, of course you can leave. But they consider that the vows, once made, cannot be revoked.
‘But you never actually did.’
‘Haven’t been to a lodge meeting or a social event for well over twenty years. But it always seemed to me that to publicly renounce the Craft would’ve caused more fuss than it was worth. I’ve never courted controversy, as you know.’
‘Why did you stop going, in the end?’
‘They … they tell you it can’t be incompatible because it isn’t a religion. And then you find yourself asking, but is it an anti-religion?’
‘Anti-faith, anyway.’ Merrily kept her eyes on the Virgin. ‘Gnostic. The search for some kind of God within y
ourself.’
‘Yes. In a way.’
‘And is it?’
‘Anti-religion? I still can’t decide. We even have Masonic services, as you know, at the cathedral. All I know is that at some stage, I prayed for help. The answer was: get out.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘It wasn’t a problem, Merrily. Not until …’
‘Last week?’
Dunmore was silent for what must have been close to half a minute. It had become darker in the chantry, the stained glass in the window dulled. Merrily sensed that it was raining outside.
‘You were approached,’ she said.
‘Nothing so formal. I was advised that well-intentioned, well-regarded men might be damaged by … your inquiries.’
‘Well-intentioned, well-regarded Masons.’
‘The word was never used.’
‘But the person who gave you the advice …’
‘Was someone who had given me good advice on many occasions, let’s not forget that.’
‘Archdeacon Neale.’
‘It was felt that you were going too far into areas that weren’t essential to what you were being asked to do.’
‘What, you mean God’s work?’
‘It …’ Dunmore gritted his teeth. ‘You always go too bloody deep, Merrily. Anybody else, it would be in and out, a quick blessing, a Requiem. You had to ask questions, even getting Jane to …’
‘What?’
‘Ask questions. At school.’
‘How would you …?’ Merrily thought about it. ‘The history teacher? Robbie Williams?’
‘Richard Williams.’
‘On the square?’
Bernie sighed.
‘Knight Templar, perhaps?’
‘He’s a medieval historian, Merrily.’
‘Bloody hell, Bernie, this is worse than CCTV. Do you know Sycharth Gwilym?’
‘Not personally. I know he’s become a prime mover in this city, fingers in pies.’
‘But Mervyn Neale knows him, presumably.’
‘Yes.’
‘Knight Templar?’
‘Yes, yes, yes.’
‘Have you come across Lord Stourport?’
‘No. Lapsed. I believe. Look, Merrily, it doesn’t mean they’re all corrupt. It’s done a lot of good. Straightened out men whose whole lives might have been selfish and pointless.’
‘Well, not for me to judge. But, just to put you in the picture, Bernie, over thirty years ago Stourport and Gwilym were both involved in pseudo-Templar rites at the Master House in which women were abused. One of them has never been seen again. She was the mother of Fuchsia Mary Linden, found dead on the railway after her friend was murdered. Oh, and it seems likely that Stourport or Gwilym was the father.’
‘God …’
‘Or possibly a third man who called himself Mat Phobe, who Stourport says is dead. I’ve just been to talk to Sycharth Gwilym, who I’d say is suffering from a severe case of censored-memory syndrome.’
‘What would you expect?’
‘There’s also been … another incident. Someone very nearly killed.’
‘Who?’
‘You wouldn’t know her. And if one of them knew another had committed a murder, would he keep quiet?’
‘I …’
‘Bernie …’ Merrily looked at Bernie Dunmore hard, through the dense, sacred dimness of the chantry. ‘I can’t believe this — you’re sweating.’
‘Don’t … don’t ask me to explain, because I can’t. I cannot rationally explain it. I’m going to retire next year, and I shall leave Herefordshire.’ He had his hands clasped on his knees; he stared down at them. ‘The call I made to you yesterday morning. Forget it. It never happened. Do what you have to.’
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. I couldn’t prove anything — I don’t know the half of it. Not yet, anyway.’
‘If it’s a matter for the police, go to the police.’
‘Can’t. Not yet. Bernie, how important — say to the Masonic Knights Templar — would it be to uncover some long-hidden secret at Garway, connected to the original Templars? Big kudos there?’
‘That’s not a question I can answer. Probably be up to the individual.’
‘I’m told some Masons have got quite obsessed over the years about Garway.’
‘Some men, it rather takes them over, yes.’
‘Especially now? The day after tomorrow being the seven hundredth anniversary of the suppression of the Templars. Saturday the thirteenth.’
‘Friday.’
‘It was Friday, when it happened. Friday the thirteenth, which—’
‘I meant at Garway. The service at Garway’s tomorrow.’
‘Is it?’
‘Been … quite a problem for us, Merrily. For me. The C of E is obviously in two minds about the Templars. We have their churches, but we weren’t the ones who persecuted them.’
‘We probably would’ve done, though, if we’d existed at the time.’
‘You know the Vatican’s being asked to apologize?’
‘For the suppression? No, I didn’t.’
‘Some of the modern Knights Templar societies are calling for it. Doesn’t affect us, one way or another, but holding memorial services is a bit iffy, politically. Churches, as you know, have two different roles. Places of worship and historic buildings open for tourism.’
‘So we show the tourists the Templar coffin lids and the remains of the circular nave … but as for including the Templars — Baphomet and all — in a religious service …’
‘Dicey. Very dicey. And, officially, I should have said no.’
‘Teddy Murray doesn’t seem too enthusiastic either.’
The Bishop smiled through the dull sheen of sweat.
‘You really don’t know the half of it, do you?’
Mrs Morningwood was feeling her throat through the silk scarf. Her throat where the marks were.
Jane said, ‘You look like Mum looked … when she came out of that house.’
Roscoe looked up at Mrs Morningwood, whimpering. She clasped his head to her lower thigh.
‘I’m going to make some tea,’ Jane said. ‘Or can I get you a brandy?’
‘What house?’
‘Well, the Master House.’ Jane filled the kettle. ‘You remember … No, you don’t, you’d gone, you’d left us to it. You said Roscoe wouldn’t go in. You said you always trusted the dog.’
‘I do.’
Mrs Morningwood looked down at Roscoe; he was panting. It was like they were tuned to the same wavelength, the woman and the dog, picking up messages that nobody else could hear.
‘Jane, will you tell me about this?’
‘I’m sorry, I thought Mum must’ve told you. Maybe I should keep quiet.’
‘Up to you, Jane.’
Jane walked to the window, looking out at the orchard, at the last red apples near the tops of the highest trees.
‘She looked like death. Like she’d just seen … I dunno, Lol in a porno video or something.’ Jane turned to face Mrs Morningwood. ‘She always insists she’s not psychic, maybe because she doesn’t like to believe anyone else is.’
‘Did she tell you what happened?’
‘Oh yeah. It was when she found the green man. Which is actually Baphomet. But it’s the same thing — Baphomet, Pan, the green man … the male thing in nature.’
‘This is in the church?’
‘No, no …. in the house.’
‘That’s what I thought you meant.’
‘It’s in the fireplace. Behind the inglenook. Someone’s put a green man, or Baphomet, on the wall inside the inglenook where nobody would normally see it. You didn’t know about it?’
‘Is it old?’
‘Probably not. Could be something to do with whatever stuff was going on there back in the 1970s. But then it might be old — might be original Templar. Might’ve been brought from somewhere else at some stage. Dunno, really.’
‘And your mo
ther found it disturbing.’
‘You ask her now, she’ll probably deny it. Are you all right, Mrs Morningwood?’
‘No.’ Mrs Morningwood sat down. ‘No, I don’t think I am.’
‘You want me to call the doc or something?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ She looked up. ‘Do you think Merrily would mind if I borrowed her car? I’d bring it back tonight.’
‘I’d have to ask. You might not be insured.’
‘In that case … you can drive, can’t you Jane?’
‘Sure.’
‘You see, I came in your mother’s car. Mine’s at home. Your mother’s gone with …’
‘Lol. In his truck.’
‘Would it be possible to take me home? Just for a few minutes, so I can collect some medication.’
‘Herbs?’
‘Won’t take me long, darling, I know what I’m looking for. I suppose I could phone for a taxi …’
Herbs? No way.
‘No,’ Jane said. ‘No, it’s OK. I’ll get the keys.’
‘Good. I can pick up my Jeep.’
‘Oh.’
This would mean she’d have to drive back on her own, on her provisional licence.
‘OK,’ Jane said.
She’d need to get the L-plates off before Mrs Morningwood spotted them.
Because, whatever this was about, it was not about herbs.
53
Damage
‘Ten cover it?’ Jimmy Hayter said.
Lol stared at him. It had started to rain again. Big spots on Hayter’s buttermilk Armani.
‘I could go to twelve, Robinson. Cash, by tonight. Leave it in an envelope for you, at the desk in there.’
‘Twelve what?’
‘Twelve K.’
‘Perhaps you could explain what you’re talking about, Jimmy.’
‘I heard you had a guitar irreparably damaged.’
‘Wow,’ Lol said. ‘It’s amazing how quickly word gets out.’
‘I’ve always liked to help underprivileged musicians.’
‘So I’ve noticed.’
‘Twelve, and you and your priest leave me alone. And you don’t lean on my fucking Jag.’
Lol didn’t move.
‘Jimmy, you are … I think what our friends over the ocean would call a piece of work.’
‘All right,’ Hayter said. ‘You tell me what you want.’