Fabric of Sin (54 page)

‘And this is one?’

‘The only one we’ll know in our lifetime. We have to … do the right thing. Exactly the right thing. Just to survive.’

‘We?’

‘The Templars.’

‘That’s a state of mind, is it?’

‘It’s a state of being. Seven centuries ago, they were the greatest combination of spiritual and physical power the Western world has ever known. It’s probably hard for a woman to understand.’

‘Probably, yes.’

‘A mocking tone, Merrily?’

‘Hell, no. I believe it. I believe if you immerse yourself in something, it creates within you enough of an illusion of power to … to
be
power. It’s likely to be a destructive power, of course, but that’s what the Templars did, isn’t it? They destroyed. Violent guys. Killed the infidel.’

‘And were sanctioned to do so by St Bernard of Clairvaux. As a result
of whose influence they were also granted independence of all other ecclesiastical powers, except the Pope himself.
The Templar is a fearless knight
, St Bernard said,
who, as the body is covered with iron, so the soul is the defence of the faith, Without doubt, fortified by both arms, he fears neither man nor demon
.’

Teddy folded his arms over his reddened surplice, smiling.

‘Defence of the faith,’ Merrily said.

‘To defend faith the Templar needed knowledge. Only knowledge cancels doubt.’

‘And who’s the demon? Baphomet?’

‘He’s just a symbol, you know that. An aspect of the green man. Ubiquitous. The life-force in nature.’

Also, Merrily thought, the
sex
-force in nature.

Thinking of the night before the rape, at dinner at The Ridge: nut roast and gossip. Had it occurred to Teddy then, over that meal, that if Mrs Morningwood was the victim of a sex crime the list of possible suspects from her client book would direct police attention, from the start, far away from the Master House? He
must
have known about her. All his walks, his coffee stops at farms along the way.

Or had he simply fallen in lust with the idea? Just like old times. Watching Muriel from the hill, fantasizing about how he’d do it? Mild, cheerful Teddy Murray lacing his hiking books, pocketing his condoms. Already out there, probably, when Merrily was taking that dispiriting early call from the Bishop. Circling Ty Gwyn like a hawk, in complete command of his landscape.

Baphomet. Mat Phobe.

And now, at last, in the unsteady glow, she could see him with long hair, reddish, tangled around his face, an eager, mid-twenties face, bum-fluff on the jawline. Enthusiastic. Full of a raging fire, blown up by the bellows of testosterone and whatever other chemicals Jimmy Hayter had obtained that week.

‘So who’s the infidel now, Teddy?’

‘Today, Merrily, I’m very much afraid that term would have to include most people.’

She didn’t know if there were any anti-Islamic implications here, didn’t
want to. He came further into the room, pushing the lantern with the toe of a walking boot, propping the crowbar against the side of the inglenook.

‘Are you getting what you wanted? To make your historic connections?’

‘More or less.’

‘I admire you, Merrily. You’ve taken on something that is, transparently, not for women, and you’re sticking in there. That’s really rather courageous.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Look, if you want to get off, I’ll carry on here for a while. Clear up some more of the mess.’ He dug into a trouser pocket, pulled out something white, balled-up, snapping it apart. ‘Got to take precautions, all these dead rodents. Sure you don’t want to see the priest’s hole? In fact …’

Surgical gloves.

Putting them on as he stepped into the inglenook, dragged a yellow feed sack, thick plastic, out into the room, and then a second one.

‘Can’t say they didn’t come prepared. Obviously collecting some of the rubble in these, to clear it out of the way, give themselves more space. If you step under here. Merrily, and look up the chimney, you can actually see into the priest’s … oh.’

Teddy glanced back, in mild annoyance, to where one of the feed sacks had fallen on to its side and some of the contents spilled out over the edge of the hearth. The contents included what looked like a clavicle, part of a ribcage. Finally, the top half of a skull, no lower jaw, with rubbery fragments of skin and black hair, rolling gently, with a
clink
, into the lamp.

Merrily screaming the scream as Teddy Murray casually stepped out. Choked off with heart-in-mouth shock, the scream wasn’t much of a scream at all, in the end.

And by then Teddy had her by the hair with one hand, the other half-clawed in her face, twisting. His mouth up close, whispering some words, but the only ones she heard, as he was forcing her to her knees in the dirt, were ‘
… joy you
.’

T
HE IMAGE HAD
formed in a hollow of powdery yellow light, while Lol was fighting for consciousness.

But with consciousness had come this unendurable pain and his senses had let go for a moment, storing the one frozen tableau: a man piling bones into a sack.

He must have passed out a third time, if only momentarily, because, the next thing, the yellow scene had gone and so had all the light.

Lol didn’t move, working out where he was, what had happened, the blackness resolving at one stage into the velvety coffin of the broken Boswell guitar.

Confusion. Panic. Need to get up. He planted a hand on the floor. His shoulder screamed, his head pulsed, his memory rewound.

One blow was all he could remember, and the whistling of the air before it came.

Below the shoulder he’d already damaged getting in. The oak door had jammed and he’d thought someone had locked it from inside and he’d taken a wild run at it, gone crashing through to meet the steel bar swinging out of near-darkness, sending him spinning around, his head ramming the door.

Ah
. Old oak: the hardest.

Lol cried out into the darkess in his head.

Hands cool on his face now, the soft voice from the meditation in the candlelit church. Black jeans and sweatshirt, hair tied back.

‘Can you speak? Oh, God, please …’

The night air made it real.

Up on the rise, the wolfhound was going crazy in the Volvo, as if
someone had gone past, someone he wanted to kill. And Jane, hearing him, was going, ‘Where’s Mrs Morningwood?’ and wouldn’t stop until they’d all gone back into the earth-smelling house, where Lol couldn’t do the stairs.

Jane had kept asking him if his shoulder was broken and he didn’t know – how were you supposed to tell? He waited at the bottom of the half-spiral, tense and sweating, almost sick with the headache and the pain in his upper arm, until they came back, the mother and the daughter, having found nothing up there, nobody.

At some stage, he realized that Jane was doing all the talking.

When they were outside again, he got close to Merrily, was able to say, ‘He touch you?’

‘Kind of,’ she said. ‘Once. After I screamed. It’s all right.’

‘Didn’t hear it,’ Lol said, horrified. ‘I didn’t hear the scream.’

‘Walls are two feet thick. We never thought.’

It came back to him how they couldn’t stand it any longer, he and Jane, not either of them. Making a joint decision that Lol should go in.

‘Look,’ he said to Merrily. ‘Never … never
do
that …’

‘Again. No.’

‘You knew it might be him, didn’t you?’

‘Never again,’ she said and clung to his good arm all the slow way back to the car. ‘Hospital,’ she said. ‘Where’s the nearest? Abergavenny?’

‘Call Bliss. Drive till we find a signal and call Bliss.’

‘Ambulance first. Please, Lol.’

‘Can’t let him get away. Have to find the bones.’

Moving sluggishly through the rutted field, Merrily at the wheel, Lol recalled his dreamlike memory of the bones and the yellow sack, the scene for ever vivid with shock. Bones? Sack?

‘Two sacks,’ Merrily said. ‘A whole body. A skeleton. In pieces. He took it away. In the sacks. Must have got out the back way. Jane and me – upstairs, just now – we saw the priest’s hole. It must have been in there, all these years.’

‘Where anybody could have found it?’ Lol said.

‘No. Somebody, I think it was Roxanne Gray, told me about the
priest’s hole, which the family had blocked up many years before. Fifty years? Maybe the commune people had rediscovered it and blocked it up again. With something inside. Someone.’

‘Mary,’ Lol said.

‘Mary Roberts. Mary Linden.’

‘Need to get Bliss.’

‘Don’t move,’ Merrily said. ‘Please don’t move more than …’

‘Need to find him. Before the bastard dumps the bones in the river or something. Or he’ll walk away from it.’

He saw Merrily clench the wheel.

‘
Enjoy you
,’ she said. ‘
Going to enjoy you
. That was what he said.’

She looked at him and he felt the scream that was going on inside her.

Jane said, ‘He’s got to be insane. Not just psychotic.’

‘I don’t think he’s insane at all,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s the trouble. Just driven towards something we can’t really understand. The only hope we have is that if they find that body maybe they can match the DNA against Fuchsia.’

‘He
is
insane,’ Jane said, leaning over from the back seat. ‘Because if he thought he could …’ putting her arms around Merrily from behind, and her arms were quivering ‘… if he thought he could just kill you and leave you …’

‘He was wearing surgical gloves.’ Merrily turned to Jane. ‘And he wouldn’t have just left me. When we were upstairs, just now, and we looked down into the priest’s hole? Struck me then that it was vacant. It had a vacancy.’

As they reached the top road at The Turning, she started to laugh, dangerously close to hysteria, and then she said, not even sounding surprised, ‘He’s there.’

Lol saw a flash. Out in the road, lit up in headlights, the surplice billowing.

Lit up in headlights, but not from the Volvo.

Merrily braked hard and the Volvo stalled, as was its habit. An engine roar and he flew up like a swan, this great, white flapping thing.

Merrily was out of the car before Teddy Murray hit the tarmac. She saw a wheel of the Jeep rolling easily over his head and she heard – one of those sounds you knew you were never going to forget for the rest of your life – the crunching of his shiny skull like an egg in the road.

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.