by Phil Rickman
‘Where?’ Merrily said, spinning. ‘Where is she now?’
Looking wildly in different directions from the rim of the parking area, where the tarmac crumbled into dirt and weeds and signs indicated two separate footpaths.
‘She doesn’t know exactly,’ Lol said. ‘Don’t panic. She had to drive up the hill to find a signal. Down by the church, mobiles don’t work. None of them, apparently.’
Merrily remembered putting 999 into the screen, entering Mrs Morningwood’s house after the attack. It wouldn’t have worked. They might both have been dead.
‘But she thinks she can find her way back to The Turning,’ Lol said.
‘On her own.’
‘Apart from the dog, apparently. We’ll wait for her there.’
Lol bleeped open the truck, Merrily jumped in.
That bloody woman.
They parked in the church entrance, the truck taking up most of it, and walked to the top of the lane where it met the slightly wider country lane which served as Garway’s main highway. Merrily had suggested that maybe Lol could drive up and down, looking for Jane, but he wouldn’t leave her. He told her what Bliss had said about Felix’s killer.
No great shock. Not really.
‘What’s Bliss doing about this?’
‘Probably nothing,’ Lol said. ‘They have a result … likely to stand up at an inquest … the cops are overstretched …’
‘Clean-up rate.’
‘Target figures. What counts. There’s no evidence, anyway. No more than a feeling backed up by Bliss’s professional experience of what kind of murders women do and don’t do.’
‘Why did he call, then?’
‘He wants you to be aware of it. Just in case you …’
‘Stir something up in my fumbling way.’ Merrily stepped into the roadway. ‘Where the hell is she, Lol?’
‘Driving very, very slowly. Just have to hope the traffic cops are too overstretched to be patrolling Garway.’
‘Please God.’
Merrily stood there in the middle of the road, the mist torn into rags by a wet breeze, the tarmac shining.
Work it out.
Freemasonry. Sycharth. And Stourport — who couldn’t finger a fellow Mason but said this is his voice.
Wished she’d heard him in church. Praying and preaching, mens’ voices changed. Actors. The Church is a faded but still fabulous costume drama. Mick Hunter had said that, her first ambitious, duplicitous, womanizing bishop.
Teddy Murray wasn’t like Hunter, not a flamboyant stage presence. Teddy was an actor in a long-running drama, playing a man who liked a quiet life. The countryside calms and strengthens. One of the functions of a parish priest is to remain centred and … essentially placid.
Which Beverley had translated as passive.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
‘What did you learn in there?’ Lol said.
‘I’m just trying to put it all together. Just … give me a minute, and I’ll tell you.’
Fuchsia.
He had, of course, met Fuchsia, when she came running into his church after whatever happened to her in the Master House. Fuchsia looking so like her mother. Disturbingly like her mother. Disturbing for some.
Strong guy. Strong enough to carry a body across a field in the dark, to the railway? Oh yeah, he could do that. He was good in fields. He was excellent in fields.
‘There you go,’ Lol said.
He drew Merrily back, out of the road, as headlights streaked a cottage wall.
With an expulsion of relief, she slumped against him, watching the Volvo crawling round the corner and pulling in at The Turning, a dog barking inside.
Almost like a real family, all the angst, all the tension. Merrily drove, Lol beside her, Jane in the back, arms around the dog, voice swollen-up.
‘Mum, there was nothing I could—’
‘Recriminations later.’ Merrily swung into the track that led to Ty Gwyn and all the empty holiday homes. ‘How long since you left Mrs Morningwood?’
‘I don’t know. Twenty minutes, half an hour? When did I get through to you, Lol?’
‘At least half an hour.’
Merrily pulled up in front of Ty Gwyn and they got out, all of them.
No lights in the house. The chicken houses shut down. Took a couple of minutes to find the house was all locked up, including the back door.
Lol shone the torch at the carport. No Jeep.
Roscoe sniffed around the porch, showing no great desire to go in. Merrily stepped back.
‘She’s not here. Jane, I’m not getting this … what did she say she was going to do?’
‘Throw out the herbs and mixtures and stuff. Like they’d been contaminated? That doesn’t sound convincing, does it?’
‘Well, you can see that it might be, from her point of view. But no need for urgency, was there?’
Merrily looked back towards the Volvo.
‘Look,’ Jane said, ‘if I had to take a guess …’
‘Go on.’
‘The Master House. I’d told her … I told her what happened to you. In the inglenook?’
‘When?’
‘Before we left. I’m sorry, I thought you’d probably told her yourself.’
‘And how did she react?’
‘She was interested in the inglenook. The Baphomet. It was like it had helped her put something together. But she was in a bit of a state, anyway. This was after that guy you stayed with called in with your bags, and Roscoe—’
‘You saw him? You saw Teddy Murray?’
‘Well, he came to the door, didn’t he? He said you’d left the bags behind and he was just passing, so he … It was kind of embarrassing, because Roscoe just like … went for him?’
‘Went for him how?’
‘Shot through the doorway, snarling, teeth bared? Mum, I’m just thinking, if she’s gone to the Master House, she wouldn’t take the Jeep, she’d walk.’
‘No. I don’t think she would. Tell me about Roscoe. What happened?’
‘Me trying to drag him back. Didn’t actually get to him. I don’t think the guy wanted to hang around after that, though.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He was like, “Oh, I see you’ve got a guard dog.” Two women on their own, that kind of thing. Trying to make light of it, but I think he was shaken, as you would be. He’s not exactly a Jack Russell, Roscoe, is he?’
‘Did he see Mrs Morningwood?’
‘Didn’t leave the kitchen.’
‘Right.’ Merrily turned away from the house. ‘We should go. We need to find her, don’t we?’
Teddy: how much circumstantial evidence did you need?
‘OK,’ Lol said. ‘This Murray, the feeling I’m getting—’
‘This is all my fault, isn’t it?’ Jane said. ‘You think I shouldn’t’ve brought her. Only, the way she—’
Merrily said, ‘Jane, there are no circumstances I can, at this moment, imagine under which it would’ve been OK to bring Muriel Morningwood back to Garway. Let’s leave it at that, for now.’
Lol backed off into the darkness, shaking his head.
Jane said, ‘I’m sorry. Am I … I mean, when am I going to be allowed to know what happened to her?’
‘Yeah, well, that was my mistake, flower. I should’ve told you. Mrs Morningwood was raped. And she’s deeply traumatized. Either more than she knows or more than her pride will let anyone else know. And that … is the main reason we have to find her.’
It was too dark to see Jane’s face.
You should look for two white gateposts, one broken in half.
Straight in this time, no oblique approach.
There was still a lot of track, well overgrown, the Volvo whingeing and grinding in second gear. Feeling a wheel slip, Merrily pulled the car back from the rim of a ditch, as the central chimney stack of the Master House rose up palely in the headlights.
The wind rising now, the last flurries of mist passing like the slip-streams of
barn owls.
She dipped the lights, stopping the car against a wedge of impacted red mud, about fifty yards short of the hollow where the farmhouse lay, looking big and whole and intact and solid by night. Like it might have looked a century ago, in transit between Gwilym and Newton.
Merrily switched off the engine, put out all the lights, and the house vanished.
Except for a mustardy glow behind a window.
‘Oh God,’ Jane said. ‘I told you.’
Lol said, ‘I don’t see the Jeep.’
A landscape full of trees and hollows, ground mist, no moon; Merrily told him there could be half a dozen cars parked here and you wouldn’t see them.
She’d worked out that the light was upstairs, probably the bedroom over the room with the inglenook.
‘And obviously, we can’t all go in.’
‘I think we can,’ Lol said evenly.
‘Not if we want to learn anything. She’s already told Jane to go home, and she doesn’t yet know what a sensitive and discreet person you are, Lol, so …’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll go.’
‘No.’
‘Look, you’re just out here — what — twenty yards from the house? You can … watch my back.’
‘Yeah, I can give you covering fire. Merrily, this is—’
‘The best and most direct way to expedite a difficult situation.’
‘You don’t know it’s her.’
‘Who else could it be?’
Lol turned his head towards Jane and back at Merrily.
‘He’s in Hereford,’ Merrily said. ‘At a lodge meeting. The service tomorrow night … seems to need planning.’
‘It’s not as if we can have phone contact down here.’
‘You checked?’
‘Yes.’ Lol snapped the phone shut. ‘Nothing.’
‘If you can bear to keep the windows down, you’ll be able to hear everything for miles.’
‘Not the way the wind’s getting up.’
‘You can always hear a scream,’ Merrily said. ‘Trust me. I can do a scream you’ll hear.’
59
Joy You
At the front door, under the overhanging skull-shaped broken lamp, Merrily waited and looked back and questioned the sense of what she was doing.
Inevitably, what kept coming back was the last time she’d sat in that car in a rising wind, having planned to go and check out the Master House, thinking of how she’d been shafted and then Sod this, I’m going home.
No guarantee that, if she’d come here then, it would in any way have altered her opinion that Fuchsia had made the whole thing up.
But it might have.
And in any case that didn’t matter. What mattered was giving in to the resentment, after Bliss told her about the Special Branch. Stomping out into the rain to walk it off and then going home anyway to moan on the phone to Sophie.
Lessons learned. She pushed at the door and it yielded enough to be shouldered open, the damp-earth smell wafting out at her as if she was going outside, not in.
It was colder too, a kind of airless, stagnant cold. The floor felt hard and ridged where the decayed linoleum had been ground into it.
Time slowed.
She saw a thin light falling on the cage of the iron fire-basket in the inglenook. A light, somehow, from up the chimney and, as she watched, it went away.
Merrily stood for a moment, listening to her own breathing, her own heart and the footsteps on the stone spiral steps, and there was no time for a prayer before he was standing at the foot of the stairs, the wire of a hurricane lamp hanging from his fingers, its low, sallow flame bringing up the red stains on his surplice.
* * *
‘Great minds, eh?’ Teddy said.
He put the hurricane lamp on the floor, its wick turned down low.
‘God!’ Merrily laid a palm flat on her chest, feeling the ridge of the pectoral cross. ‘Bloody hell, Teddy, scared the life out of me.’
He didn’t say anything, just stood there, with the lamp at his feet fanning pale fronds of light over the scarred and lumpy walls. He looked … avuncular, with his easy, white-bearded smile, his large teeth, bright eyes, forehead like the top of a brown egg. Walking boots.
‘Just been up to the …’ Merrily put on a rueful smile. ‘Called at The Ridge, to pick up my stuff.’
‘Oh, Merrily … I dropped off the bags at your home a few hours ago.’
‘Yeah, I know. Sod’s Law, Teddy.’
‘Didn’t your daughter tell you?’
‘No, Beverley told me. I mean, just now. Haven’t seen Jane since breakfast — I’ve been in Hereford. Damn. Thank you. But I mean, you shouldn’t’ve bothered, anyway.’
‘Not a problem, I was going past. More or less.’
‘Anyway … Now, since I was here, I thought we ought to have a word, clear up a few things, but Beverley said she didn’t know where you’d gone, so I thought I’d just …’
‘Thought you’d drop in here instead, and get things ready for your Requiem?’
‘Well … yes. Always helps, doesn’t it? Always things on the day that you’d wished you’d thought of earlier, like … an altar? It’s amazing how often you turn up to do a Eucharist and there’s nothing to use as an altar, so I’ve got this folding—’
Talking too fast.
‘Anyway, you know all that stuff.’
‘Yes,’ Teddy said. ‘And I think it’s terribly brave of you to come to somewhere like this, on your own, after dark. It’s just that I thought you — or rather the Bishop — had called it all off.’
Bugger.
‘Well …’ Merrily stared into the lamp. ‘I thought it was time to stand up for what I believed, for a change, instead of bowing to politics, so I went to see him today, persuaded him to let me go ahead. I thought it was important, I mean, to do something. Get rid of all the years of bad feeling and rumour, let this place go into a new era, clean.’
‘Good for you, Merrily!’ Teddy said.
‘Of course, I thought I’d have a bit more time to make the arrangements because it wasn’t going to be until Saturday, but then Beverley said your memorial service was being held tomorrow, and I obviously wanted to tie in with that, that whole Templar thing, so …’
‘Well, you know, I didn’t want it to become a circus, Merrily.’
‘No. I can understand that.’
‘All these odd people who seem to turn up at anything to do with Templars.’
‘Yes … in fact, I did want to—’
‘It’s why I’m here,’ Teddy said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Someone in the village was telling me that some people had been seen around the church and the Master House with metal detectors. Treasure hunters, you know? We get them all the time, and they’ve been known to cause quite a lot of damage, but … well, nothing on this scale before.’
‘In … in here?’
‘If you come upstairs, I can show you. Hell of a mess.’
‘Oh.’
‘Why I’m wearing this.’ Teddy plucked at the surplice. ‘It’s an old one I keep in the Land Rover to use as a kind of overall. Cover up my clothes.’
‘Oh … yeah. I was wondering about that.’
What Merrily could see now was that the red marks on the surplice were not blood but stone dust. Surprising how many clergy did that, recycled old vestments.
He beamed at her and gestured at the stairs with one hand.
‘Interesting, really. There’s a … Well, I’d heard about it, of course, but it was blocked up over fifty years ago by the Newtons. It was apparently pretty inaccessible, not much use as a storage area, reduced the floor space upstairs, and so they bricked it up. Priest’s hole, Merrily.’
‘Oh.’
‘Quite a lot of Papists here after the Reformation. An independence of spirit remaining from the time when the Templars owed no money or allegiance to anyone but the Pope himself. Quite a bit of persecution.’
‘Yes. Actually, I was going to—’
‘Anyway, what happened, I saw these two guys coming up from here towards the church, just before dark, shouted to them … and, of course, they took off. Came down here to investigate, door was hanging open, dust everywhere. They’d ripped up the floorboards upstairs, prised away the bricks, exposed the cavity.’
‘It’s in the wall?’
‘Back of the fireplace. Come and look.’
Teddy stood back from the stairs.
A test.
Merrily remembered the room upstairs, the smell of decay, probably dead mice and rats. The skeletal remains of two beds.
How she’d thought of M. R. James and the room at the Globe Inn.
And if she didn’t go up with him now, she’d be revealing fear. Fear of a colleague in the clergy. If she did go up … what?
Problem was, it rang true, this story. More than hers did, anyway. The light falling into the inglenook had been an indication of something being knocked through, perhaps the wrong stones being taken out.
She said, ‘Why would they … I mean, what did they expect to find?’
What had Teddy expected to find?
Or was he going to put something in? Brick it up again.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve not been able to see. If you were to hold the lamp for me, perhaps we might …’
‘Well, maybe not now, Teddy, if you don’t mind. Best clothes?’
‘Oh, it’s not too bad, now the dust has settled. They must’ve left in quite a hurry. Left this behind.’
He bent down, came up holding a crowbar, a long one, heavy-duty. Held it in both hands.
‘Well … well-prepared, then,’ Merrily said. ‘Templar treasure — that what they were looking for, do you think?’
‘Templar treasure.’ He looked at her, head on one side, lamplight glazing his eyes. ‘What a joke.’
‘Is it?’
‘If there was treasure, it wasn’t their kind of treasure — gold and jewels.’
‘No?’
‘Perhaps something much more … abstract than that. The essence of an ethos.’
She was starting to feel very cold. Cold and scared enough to shiver. Mrs Morningwood. Where was she? Had she been in here tonight? And if she had …
It was crazy. No rape victim would deliberately expose herself again to the …