by Phil Rickman
‘He says it’s therefore in his interests that elements of his past should never be revealed,’ Hayter said, ‘and he’s sure it’s the same for us, too. Well, it was certainly the same for Sycharth. Me, less so, but the thought of being implicated in a bad death, that whole Michael Barrymore scene, only worse … because the body was still there …’
‘Nightmare?’
‘Yeah. He said it was quite safe, unlikely to be found.’
‘He thought that? Did you even know where he’d put it?’
‘Wouldn’t tell us that. If he was the only one that knew, we’d go on needing him. He said one day he was going back there. Like it was his destiny. Great things to be discovered. Maybe he was still talking about the map, maybe something else, I don’t know. But he knew Gwilym wanted the place back in his family because of the Glyndwr thing, and when it happened, he said, he’d dispose of the body.’
‘There’s incentive,’ Lol said.
‘Meanwhile we needed to stick together. Mat had a proposition that he said would formally bind us together, in secrecy.’
‘Oh …’ Lol almost smiled ‘… like brothers?’
‘For the record, I had no particular wish to become a Freemason. Standing there, stripped to the waist, some old fart prodding you with a sword, you feel like a dick.’
‘You have to be invited to join, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, well, he fixed all that. He was already in. He’d wanted to get in for the Masonic secrets, wherein great Templar secrets were preserved. I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now, but some guys, this search for secret knowledge, they’ll do anything. And Masonry, it frees you up in other areas of your life. Find you don’t have to worry about money. Or support.’
‘So you did it.’
‘Yeah, I did it. And they were pleased to have me, a young businessman with a title in the pipeline. ’Course, it’s heavier than you think it’s gonna be, and, no, you don’t go back on the oath, trust me.’
‘Not even if you know a brother’s done a murder?’
Hayter ignored that.
‘The extraordinary thing … Mat said, Next time we meet, you’ll both be on the pathway to a material success you’d never dreamt of. And that was true.’
‘Are there Masonic contacts,’ Lol asked him, ‘in the music business?’
‘Not many, but I have been successful, in unexpected ways. Saved the old homestead, the way the old man never managed. And Sycharth, he’s gone more Masonic than I ever did, and he’s into big contacts and big money. You look at the prime new developments around Hereford, you’ll keep coming across the name Gwilym in the small print. Struggling farmer to Master of the fucking Universe.’
‘He wasn’t hugely successful, though, was he — Mat?’
‘Got what he wanted. Made it back into Garway, to pursue his dream of inheriting the great Templar legacy. De Molay, Glyndwr … Murray. When a suitable property came available he got the signal from Sycharth and Sycharth greased the wheels. Mat buys The Ridge, having found a woman with the readies. He could always find a woman, whatever kind he needed at any particular time. This case, one with money to spare, poor bitch.’
‘So he’s camped up here, walking the hills and waiting for Gwilym to buy back the house?’
‘Gwilym told me Murray said the time was coming. It would happen around the anniversary of the 1307 inquisition. He’d seen the signs, all this shit. Points out the significance of people by the name of Gray … you know about that? OK, well, then this guy Gray develops MS.’
‘He wasn’t claiming …?’
Hayter shrugged.
‘Bad prayers, Robinson. The power of bad prayers.’
‘This gets sicker, Jimmy.’
In the bedroom next to the chimney, the light was the purple of bruises, the smell of decay was worse and the two bed-frames looked, Merrily thought, like medieval appliances for obtaining confessions.
The holy water glittered mauve.
Merrily said, ‘Heavenly Father who never sleeps. Bless this room and guard with your continued watchfulness all who take rest within … within these walls.’
Muriel Morningwood picked a cobweb from Merrily’s alb. With hindsight, the alb had not been a good idea.
In a corner of the room, the floorboards had been removed, stones and cement hacked out, revealing the priest’s hole. From an oblique angle, you could see down into the hearth, where Murray had removed more stones so that the bones could be tipped directly down into the waiting sacks.
Merrily lowered herself into the space. It seized her like a trap. Rubble, dirt, a stench. She didn’t want to breathe. Her throat felt raw and constricted, and she remembered the lesions on Muriel’s neck.
It wouldn’t have taken much.
You wouldnt know me Muriel. Theres nothing of me no more I am so thin and my head feels like a rotten egg sometimes and what can you do with a rotten egg …
‘Oh God, bless this space where Mary lay …’
Croaking out the words, sprinkling out the water.
Hadn’t lain here at all. Had probably been arranged squatting, strangled, stripped of any residual dignity.
‘…may her spirit rest in peace and may the light of Christ rest upon her and in this place.’
When she finished, Mrs Morningwood had turned away.
‘Never said she was a saint. Probably trying to get money out of them. Needed to make a life for the child, didn’t want to be in a tepee for ever.’
‘Which I suppose brings us to Fuchsia,’ Merrily said. ‘Where all this began — for both of us, I suspect.’
Glasses in her hand, Mrs Morningwood stood at the top of the half-spiral, lit by a diagonal shaft from a cracked skylight. Merrily three steps below, on the curve.
‘I haven’t … been one hundred per cent truthful about Fuchsia.’
‘No kidding.’
‘When she first came to see me, with Barlow …’
‘And you recognized her …’
‘… I obviously had to see her again, on her own. Whispered it to her as they were leaving, and she was back the same afternoon. Sat her down on the chaise longue and made some herbal tea, for relaxation of the mind.’
Mrs Morningwood backed away along the landing, agitated.
‘I asked her how she’d got her name, Fuchsia, and she said she didn’t know. She said people had told her that Fuchsia was a character from Mervyn Peake and she’d read Titus, and said how much she liked that kind of book. And then I asked her if she liked M. R. James because he’d been here, and it turned out she’d read a few of his stories. And I told her the story I’d told Jane, that I’d got from my mother.’
‘Why?’
‘Told her several local stories. She loved them. She was eager for more. Me, I was simply putting off the moment. Wanting her to trust me. Eventually, we went for a walk on the hill, where Mary and I had walked all those years ago. That was when I told her.’
Mrs Morningwood shook her head in some sadness. She was wearing a cream cotton dress and a grey woollen cardigan and looked almost demure.
Merrily said, ‘And?’
‘And everything changed … I thought she was putting me on … thought it was joke, you know? But I can see her now, backing away into the sun. Arms out, warding me off. Didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to know about her mother. Had her own amorphous fantasy. Princess rather than prostitute.’
There’s this kind of tribal mysticism in Tepee City, Felix had said, and she had a period of building fires in a clearing in the wood and looking for Mary in the smoke.
‘What did you tell her had happened to Mary?’
‘Disappeared. Tried to downplay the seedy side, but the damage was done. Didn’t want to hear any more at all. Next thing, Barlow the builder comes banging on the door asking me what sort of rubbish I’ve been feeding her because Fuchsia can’t work in that house any more.’
‘So she passed on to Felix what you’d told her? Because if he knew that when I saw
him, he certainly wasn’t letting on.’
‘No, she came out with the M. R. James story, the dustsheets, the face of linen. She’d read that story.’
And she’d played it well, hadn’t she, in the church of St Cosmas and St Damien. ‘Who is this who is coming?’ And still Merrily’s feeling was that the desire for a blessing had been real. That Fuchsia had felt menaced by the house. By her mother’s ghost, then … just as Mary had felt an estrangement — not exactly unknown in the annals of mother/daughter psychology — from the infant Fuchsia.
The baby cries whenever shes WITH ME. Thats not how it should be!
And because of Felix’s feelings for Mary, she’d wanted him out of there, too. As if she thought Mary would come between them.
‘The coincidence of him bringing Fuchsia here, that terrified her,’ Muriel Morningwood said. ‘Maybe she thought he’d been here, too … that he was her father.’
‘And you wondered that, as well.’
‘Although, now I think Mary simply used him — soon as she’d learned Felix had some money in the background, pulling that stunt with the cord. Saying he must’ve been chosen by the baby as its godfather or guardian or what you will. Making provision for the child.’
‘Ah.’ A light coming on. ‘And you thought Fuchsia might’ve killed him because of what you’d told her. So not only had you failed to save the mother, you’d—’
‘Driven the daughter over the edge.’
‘You could have told me this the other night, Muriel.’
‘Told you enough, that night. Was feeling pretty shell-shocked generally.’
Merrily stared at the wall. Had there been some kind of psychic experience, perhaps while actually working in a room concealing the skeleton of her mother? If ever there was a situation crying out for the paranormal …
‘Anything else you’re not telling me, Muriel?’
‘Not intentionally, no. Well …’ Muriel raised her eyes towards the skylight. ‘Sycharth. Until you told me, I didn’t know for certain he’d been here in the Seventies, but … I suppose I wanted him to have been involved. I said he’d made a play for me. Truth is, I’d made a play for him a year or so earlier. No taste at that age and he did have a Triumph Spitfire. Bastard had me, then sneered. Called me a whore.’
‘Oh.’ That certainly explained the hostility. ‘Well … he’s a worried man now, Muriel.’
Merrily went back to the stairwell, brushing red stone-dust from the alb.
‘Look … before we go down to that room, I’d like to try and get the sequence right. Did Fuchsia go rushing into the church, finding Teddy there, before she first came to see you?’
‘My feeling now is she saw him at least twice. If he was as shocked as me the first time—’
‘He’d surely be a bloody sight more shocked. He might’ve been looking at his daughter. And more than that—’
‘Looking into the face of someone he’d murdered.’
Murray had said, When the girl turned up here asking for protection … sanctuary … I confess I was completely thrown.
‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘He’d have to know, wouldn’t he? He’d want to see her again. What about last Saturday? She almost certainly came back here last Saturday, on her own, because I spoke to Felix on the phone and he was very uptight, convinced she’d been back. Taken the van, key to the Master House missing …’
‘Why would she do that, though?’
‘Maybe deciding she’d have to deal with it or it was going to torment her for ever. I don’t know. We’re unlikely ever to know, but is it possible she saw Teddy Murray then? And is it possible she told Teddy Murray what you’d told her about mother?’
‘And perhaps he followed her home,’ Mrs Morningwood said. ‘Just as he followed Jane and me yesterday.’
‘What?’
‘Back here, from your vicarage. He obviously recognized the dog. He would’ve waited on the square in his Land Rover. He had patience, that man.’
‘Yes.’
And then, if he’d followed Fuchsia home, returned to Monkland the following evening. The lonely caravan, a blunt instrument — like a crowbar — and an element of surprise. There was no way of knowing which of them he’d killed first or how he’d gone about it. Whether Felix had been a target, or collateral damage. Or, as Fuchsia’s body had been loaded into the Land Rover, part of a murder — suicide scenario.
Had he enjoyed it, all of it, the way the Knights Templar had evidently delighted in killing for their cause? The two sides of the Templars, pastoral and monastic and then the gleeful savagery. The ecstasy of blood.
* * *
A Mercedes 4x4 drew up in front of the Master House.
Nobody got out.
‘Sycharth,’ Jimmy Hayter said. ‘He’ll wait till the last minute before he goes in. This is gonna be hard for him. Especially with Gray here.’
Lol said, ‘Your meeting with him yesterday …’
‘Robinson, watch my lips.’
Hayter’s lips were a flat line.
‘Murray wanted you both back for his service, though,’ Lol said. ‘Didn’t he?’
The memorial service which would have been held yesterday and wasn’t. Several men in suits, whom word hadn’t reached in time, had arrived to find a black-edged card on the door, informing would-be worshippers that, owing to the tragic and sudden death of the Rev. Edward Murray, all services should be considered cancelled until further notice. Some consternation, apparently.
‘Maybe the original plan was to do something here,’ Lol said. ‘Continue some process Murray had started thirty-odd years ago.’
‘Yeah. Maybe. He’d been studying all that time, been through degrees of Masonry I didn’t know existed.’
‘But then, despite Gray’s illness, Gwilym didn’t manage to get the house back and it was sold, very symbolically, to the Duchy of Cornwall, so you had to arrange it at the church.’
‘No, it was always going to be the church.’ Hayter said. ‘The church is all-Templar. He was going to bring something to the church that would reconnect the wires, as he put it.’
‘What?’
‘We weren’t privileged to know.’
‘You’re lying again, Jimmy.’
‘Robinson, you …’ Hayter dug his fingers into the grooves of the hawthorn. ‘Gwilym and me, we met to decide what to do about him. We’d had enough.’
‘What, like you broke the Boswell?’
‘That’s how I wanted to play it, yes. Frankly. And knew the right people.’
‘Like he claimed to have made Mr Gray ill? Think how that backfired, Jimmy.’
‘Look … Robinson … we didn’t do anything. Gwilym said, let me talk to him. And he did. And the agreement was, after the seven hundredth anniversary, that would be it. Murray’s side of it was to remove the body. If it turned up during restoration, we’d be well in the shit. Not Murray, because nobody ever suspects the vicar, do they, unless it’s choirboys or kiddie-porn?’
‘And what was your side of the deal?’
Hayter’s mouth flat-lined.
‘You know he took the bones away, don’t you?’ Lol said.
‘What?’
‘He took them away in a couple of plastic feed-sacks.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Only they’ve disappeared. They could be anywhere now.’
Hayter sprang off the tree, and you could almost see the sweat rising like sap.
Before they stepped inside the inglenook, Merrily did St Patrick’s Breastplate, Mrs Morningwood repeating every line. Whether she believed any of this was anybody’s guess, but she went along with it.
In the torchlight: Baphomet.
Mrs Morningwood felt around the coarse, sardonic sandstone contours of his ageless face.
‘You know, it’s actually quite old. I’d thought it would be some sort of replica, the kind of thing you get from garden centres.’
‘Why did you think that?’
‘Because, when Jane to
ld me about it, I assumed it had been put here by Stourport’s rabble. I thought that was what you were picking up in here — I do accept these things. I may be cynical but that doesn’t make me a sceptic.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m supposed to be sceptical and analytical about this stuff, but I was affected and I can’t explain it. And I still don’t know why it made you encourage a learner driver to bring you over here.’
‘Oh lord, I didn’t know that, darling. Apologies. The reason I wanted to see it — and as things turned out it was damned prescient — was that Jane pointed out, quite rightly, that it was inside the inglenook and facing the back wall. Facing the priest’s hole, in fact, which I’d heard about — years ago, from Roxanne’s mother, as it happens.’
‘You wanted to come here and look if the hole had, at some stage, been unblocked.’
‘It made sense. I did think Mary was dead, I did think they’d killed her. And having the face of Baphomet gazing at the tomb — that seemed to me the disgusting kind of conceit that they’d have gone in for. I was half right … and half wrong. This is old. Could be as old as the one in the church. And yet …’
‘It’s not quite like the one in the church, as I remember it,’ Merrily said.
‘It has been removed, though, darling, look … that’s modern cement, isn’t it? Some of it’s already been chipped away. This is part of what Murray came for. You have a chisel?’
‘Crowbar be OK?’
‘Splendid.’
He’d left it in the hearth. If this wasn’t the instrument of Felix’s death, it could have been. Fuchsia, too. Whatever, it had been held by the same hands. Merrily held it across both of hers. Didn’t move, faced Mrs Morningwood over the iron firebasket.
‘Did you kill him deliberately, Muriel?’
Muriel turned slowly from the stone, lifted her head, exposing her throat — the bloodied dents of thumbnails around the windpipe.
‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘I know.’
‘He’d learned from Fuchsia that I knew whose child she was. He knew that after Fuchsia’s death I wasn’t going to leave it alone. He knew — obviously from Sycharth — about my family history. He knew that I was talking to you because … you told him?’
