The Babylon rite

27

Temple, London

From Temple Station they walked briskly up a steep narrow street lined with venerable buildings, made somehow more scholarly — and picturesque — by their new, white, lawyerly wigs of snow.

They were at the Temple Church, an eight-hundred-year-old survivor. It looked impossibly beautiful and quaint, the arched windows and golden buttresses surrounded by Christmas Carolly scenes of snowbound gardens, and liveried beadles, and eighteenth-century doors decorated with green wreaths of berried holly.

Nina opened her rucksack with shivering hands and recited: ‘“The London Temple was one of the three administrative centres of the entire Order, along with the Paris Temple and their headquarters in Jerusalem. All the Templars’ British wealth was held here, in the London Preceptory, in a treasury so renowned for security that the English king stored the Crown Jewels herein.”’

Adam said nothing. A face was peering at him from behind a large sash window. The curtain fell.

Nina went on. ‘“At the time of the Templars’ fall from power, this reputation for hidden wealth gave rise to the rumour that the London Temple was the storehouse for the Templars’ “secret treasure”. Over the years this notorious treasure has been variously reckoned as the Ark of the Covenant, the True Cross, the Turin Shroud and the Holy Grail. In truth, there was no such secret treasure; these absurd rumours of secret wealth rose arose simply because the Templars were the first bankers of Europe, and their vaults were filled with noble loot, held as surety, or deposited for safekeeping.”’ She finished, and shrugged.

Adam sighed. ‘Your father was a sceptic. We know. The question is: how did he go from all that to believing that there really was a deep Templar secret?’

A secret that gets you killed? Adam baulked at saying it. Instead he looked at the exterior of the church. He had no need of a guidebook to tell him about this. From research on earlier articles, from simple sightseeing as a young Aussie in London, he knew that most of the exterior of the famous church was twentieth-century work, cleverly restored following the dreadful damage of the Blitz. Only the west porch remained from Templar days. So they could be pretty sure Archie McLintock didn’t come here to admire the exterior.

Which left one choice.

They entered the church, through the low side door. The building was empty and hushed. Slender candles twinkled; the blonde wooden pews were empty; winter daylight striated the floor. The old church was beautiful and sad, and vacuous. There was no sense of mystery here, no sepulchral clue, no air of intrigue that might imply what Professor McLintock had found. It was an echoey cenotaph, laid with effigies.

Frustrated, he strode around the circular nave with its grotesque gargoyles. Here was a man screaming, with his ear being bitten by a creature. Why?

Nina was crouching beside a gravestone, reading quietly from her father’s book. Adam took some photos: of the delicate black marble pillars, then the elegant circular colonnading, then the effigy of William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, laid out in full battle-kit, chainmailed, a sword in his hand. Ready to fight violently for Christ, even now.

‘This bit dates right back to 1200,’ said Nina, standing and gesturing at the clean golden arches, the chevrons of wood in the ceiling.

‘Still looks new,’ said Adam.

It did look new. Too new. As if it had been recently restored. Adam thought about the evil ambience of Temple Bruer. What linked these two places? Somewhere very old and dirty and pungent with atmosphere, and somewhere cleaned and spruce and empty.

Adam stepped to the side where there was a table stacked with helpful pamphlets, advertising opportunities for charity work in West Africa, and schedules of festive carols in the Wren Churches. He heard voices. Nina was talking to someone a gowned man, the verger, or the vicar maybe. Adam knew nothing about church hierarchies. The man had a fusty, middle-aged, churchly air and a black gown over his shoulders. Walking across, Adam extended a hand, just as Nina’s conversation with the man dwindled to silence.

‘Adam Blackwood. The Guardian.’ It was a lie, he’d been sacked; but he didn’t care. He wanted information, and saying you were a professional seeker of information just sped things up.

The man had strange eyes, as if he was wearing tinted contact lenses. A hint of livid blue. The word restored was a continuous bass organ note in Adam’s mind, waiting for the treble, the tune, the harmony, as the man swivelled.

‘Name’s Baldwin. I’m the churchwarden. I was explaining to your friend that I never met her father. The name doesn’t even ring a bell. Sorry.’ His accent was northern. Perhaps Yorkshire.

Restored?

‘She tells me he were a great expert on the Templars! But that he recently… passed beyond?’

Nina was trying again. ‘You’re sure you never met him ever? He came here last year, two days in a row.’ They knew this because of receipts from Caffe Nero, on Holborn.

The churchwarden gazed at Nina as if she was mad.

‘Miss McLintock, I don’t meet every tourist, even famous ones! We have so many visitors. Anyhow, I wasn’t here last summer: no one was. We were restoring.’

The lock yielded at last; Adam turned the mental key. ‘Do you mean the whole church was closed?’

‘Yes. Exactly.’ The man’s smile was sincere and bored. ‘The whole church were locked for, ooh, eighteen months. We allowed no visitors. Not a soul. It were the biggest restoration we’d had since the Blitz. Cost millions, but the Corporation were very generous, the large legal companies, and so forth…’

‘All visitors?’

‘Yes! We had an iron rule. Anyway, I must be getting on… Tempus bloody fugit. If you want to make donation, the offertory box is near t’exit.’

The gown swished and the churchwarden departed through an interior door. Nina looked with mystification at Adam.

‘I don’t understand. So Dad didn’t come here. Why come here, twice, if you can’t get inside? Did he go somewhere else?’

‘The exterior!’ Adam grabbed her hand. ‘It must be. We know he came to the Temple, but if he couldn’t get in — that means he must have been looking at the exterior. And there is only one bit of the exterior left-’

The excitement was mutual. Not pausing, they rushed outside to the West Porch: a large, dark door, filigreed with ironwork and iron studs; and surrounding it an intricate stone jamb, with a semicircular arch, semicircles within semicircles, like ripples of stone. Decorated with peculiar and significant sculptures.

The sculptures were all of Green Men. Dozens and dozens of Green Men, faces of the pagan past, wreathed in stone ivy and tendrils, grinning at him. Adam yelled with excitement. ‘This is it. Must be it. This is it! This is what he came to see. This. It’s our first real clue, Nina, this is it: Green Men, just like those at Rosslyn. So we know he was on to something, and we know it definitely is linked to Rosslyn. He wasn’t mad, he wasn’t joking; he really was unlocking a puzzle.’

She smiled — anxiously and worriedly — but she smiled. ‘Well done. Come on, let’s go see my sister. She’s been doing her own research; we need to compare.’

They ran through the alleys out on to High Holborn and Nina hailed a taxi. ‘Thank you,’ she nodded at the taxi driver, as they climbed in. ‘Thornhill Crescent. In Islington.’