Fabric of Sin (8 page)

‘It’s sometimes difficult to separate the truth from the lurid speculation,’ she told him. ‘Never a problem for my daughter.’

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that few of us like to countenance the idea that the Templars guarded the secret of the bloodline of Christ through his supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene.’

‘Oh, she’s happy enough with that idea. I suppose what bothers
me
most is the idea of the Templars – or someone – guarding the secret resting place of his bones.’

‘Let’s not talk of heresy.’

‘Let’s not.’

‘None of it, however, makes the Knights Templar less interesting,’ Teddy Murray said. ‘Follow me, Mrs Watkins.’

W
HEN MERRILY CLIMBED
back into the car, the weather had changed; the sky had the deep grey lustre of tinfoil and a single slow raindrop rolled down the windscreen like a cartoon tear, and she just wanted to be home and lighting a fire.

She pulled out her phone. Lol would be on the way to his gig in Newtown, Powys, so it was more likely to be Jane.

It was neither, just a short text.

CALL ME.

MOB PLEASE

FB

A text from Frannie Bliss? If it
was
him, this was a first. Mobile would mean he didn’t want to take the call in the CID room. She found his number in the index, but the signal was on the blink, so she reversed out of the church entrance and drove away from the village, uphill, pulling into a passing place, winding up the window against a rising wind.

‘Nicely timed, Reverend,’ Bliss said. ‘You’ve caught up with me in the gents.’

‘I totally refuse to picture the scene.’

‘Not good enough, anyway. Too much of an echo. I’ll call you back. Just give me a couple of minutes to … finish up in here.’

Echo?

Merrily sat watching the sloping landscape losing its colours in the gathering rain, compiling a mental inventory of all the curios that Teddy Murray had revealed in Garway Church.

Beginning with the green man, the familiar stone face with entwined foliage, inexplicably found in churches. This one was in the chancel arch and, with those stubby horns, he wasn’t typical. There was also a cord or vine with tassels resembling fingers, so it looked like he was making a funny face at you, waggling his fingers at either side of his head.

What the green man had to do with the Templars Teddy couldn’t explain, but this was a Templar church so it must have had some significance.

Everything
in a Templar church was significant. They’d moved on to the matching long stones set into the chancel steps, the altar steps and one window ledge – these identified by Teddy as the lids of Templar stone coffins, now part of the fabric of the church. Teddy laughing, in his element now, the historian, the tour guide.

‘Someone said you can throw the Templars out of the building, but you’ll never get the building back from the Templars.’

Giving her the primary-school version, for which she’d been quite grateful.

The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon: founded in the early twelfth century, the time of the crusades, ostensibly to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem. The King of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, had allowed them to establish their headquarters at the al-Aqsa mosque, believed to be the site of the original Temple.

They’d begun, it was said, with only nine members, led by one Hugh de Payens. Monastic soldiers, red crosses on their surcoats, growing over the next century into something internationally powerful, influential and
very
wealthy.

Too wealthy and too powerful, by the thirteenth century, for the King of France, Philip IV, and the pet pope he’d acquired, Clement V, accommodated at the time in Avignon. The French Templars had all been arrested in a series of simultaneous dawn raids on Friday, 13 October 1307, accused of a black catalogue of heresies.

‘Hang on …’ It hadn’t taken much calculation. ‘Doesn’t that mean it’s exactly—’

‘I’m afraid it does. Seven hundred years ago next Saturday. I was hoping we’d have a permanent minister in place by then, but it was not
to be. It therefore falls to me to conduct some sort of memorial service for the poor chaps.’

‘You don’t sound totally enthused.’

‘It is so obvious?’

‘And the problem is … what?’

‘Fanatics, Merrily. The known facts about the Templars are relatively few – the amount of wild speculation has been quite monumental in recent years.’

‘
The Da Vinci Code
?’

‘And its source,
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
. All the preposterous theories undermining the central tenets of Christianity as we know it.’

‘Mmm.’

Everybody knew about it now: the alleged bloodline of Jesus from his alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene, the female disciple whose crucial role was supposedly written out of the scriptures by the Roman Catholic Church. Jane had been quite taken with the idea that the real reason for the suppression of the Knights Templar had been their guardianship of this secret knowledge … and the whereabouts of the tomb of Christ, unrisen.

Whether or not you accepted this, Teddy Murray had said, the charges against the Templars were surely made up.

‘Like many of those levelled at various abbots by Henry VIII’s people during the Reformation. What kings tended to covet most in religious organizations was their money.’

The last Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay, had been burned alive in Paris, but the persecution had been less extreme in Britain, where most Templars had been allowed to join other monastic orders – except, apparently, the order of Hospitallers of St John to which the properties of Garway had been transferred.

De Molay was now seen as a martyr and Friday the Thirteenth … ‘Because of this? That’s the reason for the whole superstition and a bunch of slightly distasteful movies?’

‘Such is the received wisdom, Merrily. What rather bothers me is that the church promises to be packed. I’ve had letters from all
kinds of organizations wanting to be represented – from Templar re-enactment groups to more … shall we say more sinistersounding societies.’

‘Like what?’

Teddy had said there seemed to be a number of occult-sounding groups whose rituals were supposed to be based on Templar practices. He said he didn’t know much about them. Merrily knew a little more, from Huw Owen’s reading list. Supposedly ancient formulae handed down through Renaissance magical orders and then developed by the fashionable fraternities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mainly bollocks.

‘Lucky the anniversary is going to be a Saturday, then,’ Merrily said.

‘You think that will change anything? I don’t. It’s their first opportunity in a century to commemorate the suppression – and a century ago few, if any, of these theories were in the public domain.’

‘Why here? There must lots of Templar churches all over the country. In fact—’

‘Actually, no,’ Teddy said. ‘Nothing so perfectly preserved. The London temple, for instance, was wrecked in the Blitz. There’s nowhere more authentic. Or more isolated and yet … get-at-able.’

He’d unlocked the tower, dark and starkly atmospheric with its funeral bier and a magnificent medieval oak chest hewn from a massive log.

‘Whose idea was it to have a memorial service?’

‘So many people wrote in, we couldn’t get out of it, Merrily. So I’m quite anxious that this business with the Master House should be dealt with before then. Do you think that will be possible?’

‘Before next weekend?’

‘Bad enough when the girl arrived. Wish I hadn’t been here.’

Merrily had been forced to say that she’d do her best to get it wrapped. And if Huw was right that might be on the cards. She’d asked Teddy where the Master House came into the picture. One of the Templar farms, he’d said, that was all. They farmed sheep, as did the Hospitallers after them.

As did the locals today. Not much had really changed in Garway,
Merrily was thinking as the mobile chimed to indicate that DI Bliss had left the building.

‘Raining hard in the police car park, is it, Frannie?’

‘It’s not raining at all, and I’m not in the police car-park. I’m off the premises entirely, and if it was known I was calling you I’d probably have a tail.’

‘Sorry?’

Merrily was still thinking about the Garway Green Man who, having small, stubby horns, might be expected also to have a tail.

‘All right, listen,’ Bliss said. ‘I may be touching upon something you already know about, but why would the gentlefolk that humble coppers like myself used to call the Funnies suddenly have become interested in you?’

‘The Funnies?’

‘I’m thinking specifically of a feller in an unmarked room at headquarters who very occasionally creeps around this division when it’s felt that national security might be at stake.’

Merrily rubbed vainly at the condensation on the windscreen. Without the engine running, it kept re-forming under her palm.

‘You’re talking about the Special Branch?’

‘I hope you’re on your own using language like that.’

‘Frannie, are you actually saying the Special Branch are making inquiries about
me
?’

‘I’m saying nothing, Merrily.’

She scrubbed furiously at the windscreen, starting to put it together, and it was … it was beyond ridiculous.

‘What are you doing, exactly?’ Bliss said.

‘Trying to see out of the bloody—’ She sank back in her seat. ‘I’m looking into something connected with the Duchy of Cornwall’s investments in Herefordshire. Would that explain anything?’

A short silence, except for a car engine somewhere and a clanging that became duller. What sounded like Bliss moving away from something to a place of greater safety.

‘That would
possibly
explain it, yes,’ he said.

‘It’s nothing particularly contentious.’

‘With respect, Merrily, how would you know?’ Bliss paused. ‘You want to explain? Being as we’re old mates and those smart-arsed cloak-and-dagger twats get right up my nasal passages?’

‘Well …’ She thought about it, could see no harm. ‘All right. The Duchy of Cornwall have paid good money out of the Prince’s piggy bank for an old farmhouse which their favourite conservation builder is refusing to work on because his girlfriend says it’s haunted.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Sorry to disappoint. Obviously I’d
like
to be able to tell you that the vengeful spirit of Princess Diana’s been seen around Highgrove in a—’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘But that’s it, Frannie. That’s the lot. As far as I know.’

‘I see.’

‘You don’t, though, do you? Where’s the threat to national security in that?’

‘Maybe there’s more to it than you know.’

‘I’ve already been thinking along those very lines. These inquiries about me … is that still going on?’

‘I don’t know, Merrily. I’ve been off for a couple of days. I got this from Karen Dowell – now promoted to DS, by the way. They wanted your background, potted biog, any political connections and … Oh, yeh, they wanted to know about little Jane and her widely reported altercation with the Herefordshire Council over the proposed development of Coleman’s Meadow.’

‘Wha—?’

It was like yobs had strolled up and starting rocking the car.

‘Calm down, Merrily, it’s not so unusual. And it would’ve been pointed out by somebody fairly quickly that the kid’s a force of nature, as distinct from a rural terrorist.’

‘It doesn’t matter, it’s just—’ Merrily sat up, dipping into her bag for the Silk Cut packet. ‘The bastards! I mean, you know what else they’ve done, don’t you? Someone’s leaned on the Bishop, so that he’s actually freed me up to … to devote all my attention to a minor issue which, the way it’s shaping up, may not even be Deliverance business.’

‘The Bishop’s told you this himself?’

‘Bishop Dunmore is conveniently away in London until Tuesday.’ She lit a cigarette, opened the window to let out the smoke, which blew back in a blast of wind from Garway Hill, wherever
that
was from here. ‘Sod this, I’m going home.’

‘You’re on this now?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Where?’

‘Garway Hill.’

‘Be a spectral sheep-shagger, then, would it, Merrily? All right, just remember we haven’t spoken and you know nothing of this. If you need to speak to me, call the mobile. Using
your
mobile. As distinct from the vicarage landline.’

‘You actually think—?’

‘I’m just being careful.’

‘Bloody
hell
, Frannie.’

‘Stay cool, Merrily.’

Switching off the phone, she felt hunted, exposed, focused-on … and just tired, brain-dead.
Sod it
. She took two angry drags on the cigarette and then put it out. Pulled her waterproof jacket from the back seat and walked out into the rain.

A lumpy grey mattress of cloud meant that she couldn’t see the village or the church tower or anything much apart from the wind-combed coarse grass on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. Supposed to be going back to check out the Master House, but what was the point?