The Fabric of Sin mw-9

by Phil Rickman

  Long minutes, then, of people continuously fading in and out of cottages and unseen farms, like a video rewinding. Atmosphere of nearmute horror. Merrily trying several times to talk to Mrs Morningwood and failing. Only getting close when the emergency services arrived and Mrs Morningwood was leaning against a wall, head in her hands, rocking backwards and forwards like a child on a fairground ride, blood and tears oozing between her fingers.

  The back of the ambulance yawning and the most senior paramedic telling Mrs Morningwood that she had to come with them and getting reminded that while it might be a police state it wasn’t yet an NHS state.

  ‘Look at you,’ the woman paramedic said calmly. ‘Look at your face … your neck … look at your eyes. Please, my dear, these are serious injuries. At least let us check you out in the—’

  ‘It’s what I do. It’s what I do, you idiot!’

  ‘What’s she talking about?’ the paramedic said. ‘Does anybody know?’

  ‘She’s a herbalist,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Oh, well, that’s a big help, then, isn’t it, if she’s got a fractured skull. That is blood in her hair, you know.’

  ‘I do think you’d better go with them,’ one of the police said. ‘We can take your statement later.’

  ‘You can take my statement now.’

  Mrs Morningwood peeling herself from the wall. Merrily saw a cop carrying ROAD CLOSED signs from a blue van. The wind was dying and the mist was coming back, swirling down from the hill. Mrs Morningwood limped into the road towards the Jeep, and a police-woman held her back, and she started to weep again.

  ‘Can’t you get him out?’

  ‘Don’t look, madam, that’s my advice.’

  ‘Do you think I’m some sort of innocent? You think I don’t know what I’ve done? I’ve killed the poor fucking vicar!’

  A policeman said to Merrily, ‘Is that your car, madam, the Volvo?’ and she nodded and the copper said, ‘Did you see what happened?’ and Lol came over, and Merrily thought this was going to be the best time to get him into the ambulance.

  ‘I saw it,’ Lol said quietly. ‘You couldn’t miss him, all in white. He just ran out into the road. Wasn’t even walking, he was running. I don’t think there’s anything she could’ve done.’

  Merrily stared at him. He looked past her.

  ‘We’ll need to take a proper statement, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘What happened to your arm?’

  Lol explained that his friend had had to brake hard to avoid running into the Jeep and he mustn’t have had his seat belt on properly. Went into the windscreen with his head. The arm … he wasn’t sure.

  ‘Right, if you give your name to my colleague and then let’s get you into the ambulance.’

  ‘It’ll be OK. Honestly.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but all injuries at the scene of an accident …’

  ‘No problem.’ Lol tried to put both hands up, managed one. ‘Anything I can do.’ He looked over at Mrs Morningwood. ‘She’s going to be traumatized for life. He just … just came out.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Jane said from behind Merrily. ‘There’s no way she could’ve avoided him.’

  Merrily glanced back at Jane; it sent a pain into her neck, from when Teddy’s hand had slammed into her face, twisting her head round. Different person. Like the Templars, sometimes pastoral, peacefully monastic, then the sword out, red to the hilt. Merrily stared at Jane and Jane stared back, defiant.

  ‘She didn’t have a chance,’ Jane said.

  Another cop was asking Mrs Morningwood where she’d been going at the time of the accident and Mrs Morningwood was saying, ‘I was looking for my dog. My dog’s escaped. You haven’t seen a dog anywhere, have you?’

  Merrily looked at Teddy’s body, no need to cover it because the surplice was up over his face, moulded to it by the blood and tissue and brain matter. Crumpled linen.

  Cleansing

  SATURDAY EVENING

  Merrily’s alb, an appeal for purity and simplicity, now had dirt-stains on both arms and across one shoulder, as if emblematic of the kind of soiled priest who concealed rape, murder …

  Or was just a doormat.

  Pray for doormat.

  On the back door, she drew a cross in holy water and asked that, by the holy and cleansing power of God, this entrance might be blessed.

  Muriel Morningwood took off her dark glasses. Her eyes were black and red and still glaring with tears. A lot of tears these past two days.

  ‘How’s his wife taken it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to say.’ Merrily looked around. ‘I think we need to do every room.’

  Her alb had a cord at the waist, like the Templars used to wear, under the cross.

  ‘You’ve seen her, though, I assume.’

  ‘Her son was coming over today to pick her up. Unsurprisingly, she’ll be putting the place on the market.’

  Beverley Murray, face of scrubbed stone, looking at Merrily as if convinced she, or God, or both, were in some way behind this. Merrily had told her nothing. Beverley had said she’d have left Teddy, eventually, but Merrily didn’t think she would have. They tended not to, clergy wives. Or not for a long time.

  ‘You think he beat her?’ Mrs Morningwood asked.

  ‘I think he was oblivious of her, much of the time. Focused on his own perceived role in some kind of … alternative history. And she just got on with it. One roof, two lives.’

  In the washhouse or utility room or whatever — well, there were still pegs on the wall, where coats would have hung — Merrily put down the flask of holy water, a sense of everything moving past her, out of control. A sense of blur, all the rushing spirits, waves of panic. Please, God, calm. She straightened up.

  ‘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.

  ‘Maybe a cave under the hill … or even under the Master House,’ Hayter said. ‘He was ingesting a lot of stuff, and it got crazy. He thought he’d find out by asking spirits and demons. Walking the hill, tripping out. We’d do these invocations, and he’d get messages. We wouldn’t. Just him. And Gwilym, once.’

  ‘The Glyndwr link.’

  ‘Mat said Glyndwr was a magician, a Templar and a prince and he would have learned the whereabouts of this secret … chamber … temple … whatever. A magical link had to be made between Gwilym and his ancestor. This took weeks, making the poor bastard fast and bathe daily in the Monnow and wash his balls or whatever in the holy well. All kinds of mystical shit.’

  ‘And that about Gwilym speaking Welsh, did that actually happen?’

  ‘Couldn’t tell you, cocker, none of us could understand a bleeding word. It’s a mug’s game. You don’t get anything you can see or touch or put in the bank. Nothing except the feeling of something out there playing with you. End of the day you just come out with your health ruined, your humanity eroded and fuck-all else.’

  ‘And yet he wanted to come back?’

  ‘Well, I say fuck all. I think he did find something. Something he didn’t want to share.’

  ‘How do you know about it, then?’

  Lol sat down under a hawthorn tree, resting his left arm on his knee. At Nevill Hall Hospital, outside Abergavenny, they’d found a very deep bruise but no fracture. Still hurt quite a bit, though, right across the shoulder, and it was scary because he couldn’t hold a guitar and something hurt when he formed chords. His best guitar smashed, his chord arm … was he being told something?

  ‘This was in the last days,’ Hayter said. ‘He wanted us out of the way. He wanted to be alone there. I told you how I had to go to London, see my old man?’

  ‘Seemed very convenient,’ Lol said. ‘Also he wasn’t quite alone, was he?’

  ‘The girl.’

  ‘Mary.’

  ‘Yeah. This Mary turns up again and says she’s had a baby and she wants it to grow up with a father.’

  ‘Which of you would that be?’

  ‘Dunno. Dunno to this day. Anyway, she didn’t mean she wanted a father, she meant she wanted money. A packet. For starters. Well, I’d spent up on the lease on this place and a surfeit of substances to abuse, and my old man wasn’t exactly flush. And Gwilym, he had a Triumph Spitfire to support and a dad with no need of a spare granddaughter. That was when Mat said, take a weekend away, I’l
l deal with it.’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘Look … it was cowardly and irresponsible, but … we were cowards and we were irresponsible. And we were young. And we came back, Mary was gone, and a day or so later we were raided by the police, and that was an end of it and I was very glad to get away. Only I didn’t, and neither did Gwilym. He’d got us where he wanted us.’

  ‘You didn’t even have proof she had a baby.’

  ‘She had photos. We kept staring at them, see which one of us she looked like. Kid looked like all of us, with darker skin. Mary said she was living in this place where there were a lot of hard guys who’d come and get heavy with us. End of the day, it was blackmail. Extortion.’

  ‘And blackmailers get what they deserve?’

  ‘Robinson, look, we didn’t think he’d killed her.’

  ‘What did you think he’d done? He had no money.’

  ‘I don’t …’ gritted teeth ‘… know. We weren’t there, we didn’t care.’

  Lol said nothing, thinking of the magical, chemical hell of the girl’s last days. Hayter leaned against the tree-trunk.

  ‘Few years later, when I’m getting into some good money through music-promo, he’s back in touch. Somewhat reluctantly, we have a meeting, him and me and Sycharth, on neutral ground — in Evesham, I think it was. He looks different. Short hair, suit. He tells us that Mary died in the course of “a ritual”.’

  ‘I can’t believe this, Jimmy.’

  ‘Yeah, well, if you’d been there, you would have. Mat tells us he’s been to theological college and he’s a curate now — that was the bit we couldn’t believe. Reckons it’s going to be a breeze. Not great money, but a free house. Couple of days a week mouthing simplistic platitudes at old people and the rest of the time you can do what you like, and you never get fired.’

  Lol thought of Merrily, shook his head slowly. She’d told him what Murray may have done to his last church, in Gloucestershire, to build a case for stress, early retirement.