The Fabric of Sin mw-9

by Phil Rickman

  ‘No reason not to. Or so I thought.’

  ‘And he knew that people in my line of work sometimes get raped and murdered. And he enjoyed it. Without remorse. He was never a Christian.’

  ‘Did you intend to kill him, Muriel? I need to know. Had you been waiting? Being patient and watchful, the way he was?’

  ‘You don’t want to be an accessory, darling. Or your lovely boyfriend. Or your extraordinary daughter. So don’t ask me stupid questions. Because I’ve gone through a kind of purgatory, and I’d go through it again. Now give me the bloody crowbar … Thank you.’ Mrs Morningwood prised away a lump of cement. ‘As I thought …’

  ‘What happened to the bones?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Back off, or you’ll get dust in your eyes.’

  ‘Is it conceivable you saw where Murray put the bones?’

  ‘How would that be possible?’

  ‘Let me take you through it. There’s a narrow public footpath just along from The Turning. Goes between two cottages down to the church, then links to the path leading here. If somebody happened to be parked nearby, watching Teddy Murray dragging two sacks up the field, this person might notice where he’d put them. Temporarily. Before using that footpath to make his way back to the road and The Turning. Giving the watcher time to get back to his or her car, switch on the engine and wait for him to appear on the road with — metaphorically-speaking — a big red cross in the centre of his surplice.’

  ‘I suppose a vivid imagination is sometimes quite useful in your job.’

  ‘We looked everywhere, Lol and Jane and me. Most of the morning. He wasn’t carrying them when he walked — sorry, ran — into the road. We thought he must have hidden them somewhere, but evidently they’d been picked up by then.’

  ‘You’re wasting your time and mine.’

  ‘Not that you’d be the first person anyone would suspect. What with all the injuries you received in the accident — the eyes, the lip, the neck, the head? Don’t think the terrible poetry of all this has been entirely lost on me.’

  ‘Shine the torch up here, would you?’

  ‘Why did you get me to bless your garden this morning, Muriel?’

  ‘Do you want to know what’s here, or not?’

  ‘They could connect Mary’s DNA with Fuchsia. Find out the truth.’

  ‘Truth …’ Both hands inside the stone, Muriel began to ease something slowly towards what passed for light under here. ‘Truth is not what’s settled in courts or reported in the papers. Truth simply … exists.’

  ‘Muriel, this makes no sense.’

  ‘Darling, it makes Garway sense. Hold out your hands.’

  Requiem

  The first of them to come in was Adam Eastgate. Hooded eyes, military scrutiny. Looking around at the drabness and the pitted plaster, the floor that was half-flags and half-linoleum, shrivelled and long-embedded like mummified skin, and he sighed.

  ‘We don’t often make mistakes.’

  Maybe it was one of his sayings.

  ‘Well,’ Merrily said, ‘if you’re thinking of selling it on, I’d urge you to vet any potential purchaser extremely carefully. But I expect you do that anyway.’

  ‘I don’t recall mentioning selling it,’ Eastgate said. ‘That would be a bit defeatist.’

  ‘Adam … sorry, this is Mrs Morningwood.’

  ‘Aye, I know,’ he said.

  Which was unexpected.

  She’d been thinking that, if Muriel hadn’t been here, now might have been the best time to ask Adam Eastgate again about those threatening communications the Duchy had received. The ones possibly containing Welsh phrases, perhaps suggesting that the Prince of Wales’s purchase of Templar properties on the Welsh Border had been … noted. Probably with disfavour.

  Letters which, if you were looking for an author, might point towards a Welshman fanatically proud of his family’s links with the greatest national hero of all time. Or, less obviously, but more likely in Merrily’s view, to someone who had no cause to love this Welshman … and a personal need, which could no longer be suppressed, to let light into dark places.

  Some of us do know our Welsh pronunciations but can’t resist taking the piss.

  ‘Merrily,’ Eastgate said, ‘you look, if you don’t mind me saying so, like you’ve been doing a spot of cleaning.’

  ‘Yes, well …’ She pushed hair back from her face. ‘Women in the clergy … not afraid to get our hands dirty. And, erm, everything else.’

  He smiled; he still looked less than comfortable.

  ‘So this’ll be for Felix, will it? And the woman?’

  ‘Going to be a bit non-specific, Adam. Straightforward Eucharist, quite short, relating to a number of people who had connections with this place. And, if I could just say this, what happened to Felix … that may not be quite what you think. It’s quite important we don’t blame Fuchsia. I’m telling everyone this.’

  She watched Mrs Morningwood approaching Eastgate, gripping his arm.

  ‘Ah … I know who you are, now. Recognise the Geordie accent. You’re the chap who left a message on my machine the other day. Been away, you see.’

  ‘Just a query, Mrs Mornington.’

  ‘Wood.’

  ‘Aye. Sorry. I was just given your number. Only, I gather you’re quite well known as a herbalist and a healer, kind of thing, and not the only one in this area.’

  ‘Quite a few in the general area, involved in different disciplines. Eight … nine, perhaps.’

  Merrily shot her a look.

  Eastgate said, ‘So if this place — and I’m talking off the record and in a very tentative way — were to become — assuming it could be done without damaging the character — a centre for alternative health … do you think that would have local support?’

  Mrs Morningwood wrinkled her nose.

  ‘There’s a good possibility.’

  Bloody hell. Merrily remembered Jane raising the idea, not entirely seriously.

  ‘This is a bit sudden, Adam.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It would’ve come down from …?’

  ‘The place things come down from,’ Eastgate said, as Jane herself came in, holding the door open for Roxanne Gray, pushing Paul in his wheelchair to within a few feet of the relic that Mrs Morningwood had found in the inglenook.

  John 20.

  A text often used during funeral services, with or without the Requiem Eucharist. She read it to the gathering.

  ‘On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early …’

  Except for Paul Gray in his wheelchair, the congregration was standing. Adam Eastgate at one end, Sycharth Gwilym at the other, tight-faced, uneasy, no sense of a man who’d come home. In the middle, Roxanne and Mrs Morningwood. Lord Stourport on his own by the door, hands in pockets, breathing down his nose. Next to him, Lol and Jane and, at their feet, lying down, nose between his front paws, the dog that Mrs Morningwood had said would refuse to come in here.

  It was the biggest congregation you’d get in Garway this particular weekend.

  It added up to nine people.

  ‘Peter then came out with the other disciple and they went toward the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first and, stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there …’

  On the portable altar, a simple white cloth, wine and actual bread to celebrate the Eucharist.

  A Requiem, then, for some people she could name, one she couldn’t. And one she was she was still agonizing about and would do, right up to the moment.

  In front of the altar, on a trestle they’d found in the barn, where a coffin might be at a funeral, was the sandstone urn, size of a small chalice, recovered from a recess half the size of a bread-oven behind the face of the Baphomet.

  They’d managed to remove the top, she and Mrs Morningwood. Some powder in the bottom … had to be ashes.

  Lol had told her what Stourport had said about Teddy Murray’s in
tention to bring something into the church for his gnostic, Masonic service. She’d asked his advice, and Lol had said, do it. If anybody needed it …

  Merrily let the ritual unwind at its own pace, still unsure.

  Listening.

  There was no name on the sandstone urn, no words at all. For all she knew, there could be dozens of these all over Europe; there would’ve been a lot of ashes. No clues when it had been walled up or who had first brought it here. But it made sense.

  Merrily took a breath, picked up the urn, kept her voice fairly low. She commended to God the souls of Fuchsia Mary Linden and Felix Barlow and, in her head, in a second of silence, Mary Roberts Linden, sleeping in the herb garden.

  She cleared her throat. The marks on her alb were like smuts on a spectator backing away from the flames into the shadow of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

  Or maybe the smears on a doormat.

  Do this.

  ‘We also commend to God’s keeping the soul of Jacques de Molay.’

  She looked up briefly and saw Jane’s eyes widening, didn’t look at other eyes.

  ‘… knowing he died in pain and persecution. We pray to God to … forgive him and bring him eternal light and peace. May the peace of God which passes all understanding be with him now and in this place.’

  At some point, the door blew open, the dog stirred and whimpered and the wind came in from the White Rocks.

  CLOSING CREDITS

  The mysteries of Garway and Garway Hill are many. Not all of them made it into this book, and of the ones that did, not quite all, as you may have noticed, were solved. Which is the way of things. I couldn’t find anyone who could even suggest why the dovecote has 666 chambers … although there has to be a reason. And it is on private land, by the way, so you need permission to visit it. The church and its enigmas, however, are fully accessible.

  M. R. James’s line about causing offence at Garway is accurate. Many thanks to Rosemary Pardoe, editor of the indispensable Ghosts and Scholars website devoted to Jamesian matters, for being patient with Jane … and me.

  Sue Rice, local historian, and her mum, Doreen Ruck, natural dowser, introduced us to the magic of Garway, and Sue’s advice and help throughout has been invaluable. John and Sue Hughes showed us the tower and Church House which, although it served as the Templar commandery and has a priest’s hole in the region of the inglenook, is not the Master House. Thanks also to Elaine Goddard, Vicar of Garway and neighbouring parishes (see, I did leave the church alone) and Audrey Tapper, author of the definitive guide to Garway mysteries, Knights Templar and Hospitaller in Herefordshire (Logaston Press). Listening to John Ward, dowser and Egyptologist, in Garway Church was enlightening on possibilities relating to the Mappa Mundi, the Masons and hidden things. I gather he’s working on a book — look out for it.

  Owain Glyndwr: Everything about him in this book could well be true. Thanks to Alex Gibbon, author of the fascinating The Mystery of Jack of Kent and the Fate of Owain Glyndwr, and John Scudamore, of Kentchurch Court.

  The Duchy of Cornwall: like Merrily, I’ve never met the Man, but his land steward, David Curtis, was hugely helpful. Thanks also to Amanda Foster, of the Buckingham Palace press office and Mike Whitefield, Duchy-approved conservation builder, who described some of the problems facing Felix Barlow.

  Exorcism: Peter Brooks provided crucial eleventh-hour assistance to Merrily as well as background information on other aspects of the investigation. Liz Jump, now curing souls in M. R. James’s birthplace, also described first-hand experience.

  Hay-on-Wye bookseller and esotericist Tracy Thursfield came up with some crucial ideas and was always ready to talk them through, between customers, whenever I staggered disconsolately into Addyman Annex, and she and Ian Jardin lent me a couple of significant books.

  From the ever-obliging British Society of Dowsers, thanks again to Richard Bartholomew, Ced Jackson, Helen Lamb and John Moss.

  Watching the ingenious Gruff Rhys setting up his Candylion gig (the most wondrously whimsical album of 2007, by the way) showed me exactly what Lol was up against touring solo. This surely can’t go on.

  Thanks also to Prof. Bernard Knight (forensic pathology), Jodie Lewis (archaeology), Simon Small (spirituality), Mari Roberts (film awards), Mark Owen and Terry Smith (Templars), journalists Nicola Goodwin and Dave Howard (background and crucial contacts) and Mark Worthing (teeth).

  Oh … and not forgetting the Rennoldsons of Geordieland.

  Bibliography also includes: The Knights Templar by Helen Nicholson (Sutton), The Knights Templar Revealed by Butler and Dafoe, The Dragon and the Green Man by Paul Broadhurst (Mythos), M. R. James, an informal portrait by Michael Cox (Oxford), Herefordshire, the Welsh Connection, by Colin Lewis (Carreg Gwalch), National Redeemer: Owain Glyndwr in Welsh Tradition by Elissa R Henken (Cornell), The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln (Cape), Beyond the Brotherhood by Martin Short (Grafton), Historic Harewood by Heather Hurley (Ross-on-Wye civic society) and Darker than the Deepest Sea — the Search for Nick Drake by Trevor Dann (Portrait).

  Thanks, as ever, to Carol ‘I don’t buy this bit’ Rickman for intensive editing, inspiration in the darkest hours and making me get it right even at the expense of several eighteen-hour days, my agent Andrew Hewson, the almost paranormally laid-back Nic Cheetham for extending the deadline well beyond injury time, virtually feeding it page by page to ace copy-editor Nick Austin. And Krys and Geoff Boswell and Jack for maintaining the website www.philrickman.co.uk against all odds.

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