The Fabric of Sin

Cleansing SATURDAY EVENING

MERRILY’S ALB, AN appeal for purity and simplicity, now had dirt-stains on both arms and across one shoulder, as if emblematic of the kind of soiled priest who concealed rape, murder …

Or was just a doormat.

Pray for doormat.

On the back door, she drew a cross in holy water and asked that, by the holy and cleansing power of God, this entrance might be blessed.

Muriel Morningwood took off her dark glasses. Her eyes were black and red and still glaring with tears. A lot of tears these past two days.

‘How’s his wife taken it?’

‘I wouldn’t like to say.’ Merrily looked around. ‘I think we need to do every room.’

Her alb had a cord at the waist, like the Templars used to wear, under the cross.

‘You’ve seen her, though, I assume.’

‘Her son was coming over today to pick her up. Unsurprisingly, she’ll be putting the place on the market.’

Beverley Murray, face of scrubbed stone, looking at Merrily as if convinced she, or God, or both, were in some way behind this. Merrily had told her nothing. Beverley had said she’d have left Teddy, eventually, but Merrily didn’t think she would have. They tended not to, clergy wives. Or not for a long time.

‘You think he beat her?’ Mrs Morningwood asked.

‘I think he was oblivious of her, much of the time. Focused on his own perceived role in some kind of … alternative history. And she just got on with it. One roof, two lives.’

In the washhouse or utility room or whatever – well, there were still pegs on the wall, where coats would have hung – Merrily put down the flask of holy water, a sense of everything moving past her, out of control. A sense of blur, all the rushing spirits, waves of panic. Please, God, calm. She straightened up.

‘At some stage, you might stop looking at me like that,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

‘Maybe.’

Or not. Despair soaked in again. Merrily picked up the flask of holy water, hugged it to her bosom. You never knew anybody quite well enough. Never sure who to trust, and yet you did have to trust. It’s a slippery slope, Merrily, Siân Callaghan-Clarke had said. Letting trust slip away.

And support. Support for the insupportable.

‘What have we done, Muriel?’

‘We?’ Mrs Morningwood put her glasses back on. ‘You’ve done nothing at all, darling. Except, perhaps, step over the edge of other people’s madness.’

Even though she knew he wouldn’t be back, Muriel would have new locks put on the doors. Life, she said, was a series of knee-jerks, stable doors banging in the night. She’d refused to come back to Ledwardine, had gone alone to the house at the end of the holiday cottages to sleep downstairs on the chaise longue with the dog.

Well … to lie there. No herbs would have produced restful sleep that night. Or the next. It had all finally come down on Mrs Morningwood. She’d brought it down, one big knee-jerk, connecting a foot with an accelerator pedal.

Eccentric, deranged, Beverley Murray had said. The way she drives around in that big Jeep, taking corners too fast.

‘Who is Muriel Morningwood?’ Frannie Bliss had asked yesterday, having looked at the report from Traffic. A heavily-loaded question, and Merrily had given him the Need to Know. Waiting for him to mention the discovery of bones, but he never had. It would come.

This morning, with arrangements for the Requiem finalized, she’d driven over to Ty Gwyn, finding it clean as a pharmacy. Sterile, something sucked out. Unexpectedly, Mrs Morningwood had asked her to bless the house. And the greenhouse and the garden, where herbs were grown and chickens pecked around.

‘Jane said he’d been inside again.’

‘Meddling with the herbs. Unscrewing jars. Sniffing, I expect.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t know. They’ve all gone, now.’

‘But you’ll get more …’

‘I expect so. I need the money. That wasn’t all. He’d been through the drawers. Found Mary’s letter. Took that. And some photos.’

‘Would he have known you had that letter?’

‘No way he could. Unless Fuchsia …’

‘You showed it to Fuchsia?’

Mrs Morningwood had nodded.

‘I don’t know about this, do I?’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t know the half of it.’

With the afternoon seeping damply away, Lord Stourport stood at the edge of a copse, wet leaves around his shoes.

‘They weren’t even there, then, these trees, I’m pretty sure. And I’m good at land. It’s like looking back at a different lifetime.’

Meaning, We were different people. But that was the easy way out, Lol thought.

Hayter said, ‘What’s she doing in there, your woman?’

‘Trying to make the place feel a bit calmer. Before the Requiem.’

‘And that draws a line under it, does it, the Requiem?’

‘Just starts the process, I think.’

‘I do not like this,’ Jimmy Hayter said. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’

He’d arrived over an hour early, while Merrily was still setting out the folding altar in front of the inglenook. Mrs Morningwood had walked over to join her, and Jane had taken Roscoe for a walk. It was an hour or so from sunset, Lol’s head still aching if he moved too fast or turned his back to the wind.

‘You could still go to the cops,’ Hayter said. ‘And I don’t yet believe you won’t.’

It was why he’d come and why Gwilym would come, too. Nervous, and with every reason. Not out of the woods yet, maybe never would be.

‘No cops so far,’ Lol said, ‘apart from traffic cops. Apparently, there’s, um … In Garway, there’s a long tradition of independence.’

They walked up to the top of the rise, and now you could see the skewed, sandy tower of Garway Church.

‘OK,’ Jimmy Hayter said. ‘I’ll tell you. We did know him before.’

‘Murray?’

‘We were at Cambridge together. There was a magic society, like you got at a lot of universities. Recreated the rituals of the Golden Dawn, then the heavier stuff. I was in it for a while, so was Pierre. Most of us, a bit of fun. Murray … it took over his life to the extent he shuffled off with a disappointing second – me saying I’d’ve thought he’d be able to magic up a better fucking degree than that. He didn’t care. This was his life’s path.’

‘So he wasn’t doing … theology, or …’

‘Nah. He was doing women. And drugs. All kinds. All this Carlos Castaneda stuff was fashionable then – mescaline, jimson weed, the Way of the Warrior. My guess is that’s what got him into the Templars – European spiritual warriors, monks in armour.’

‘The Templars did drugs?’

‘Maybe. He thought so. Apparently, they introduced a lot of herbs into Europe from North Africa. He’d try anything for a new experience. And women, like I say, he was good at women. Urbane, diffident most of the time. Then he’d just turn it on. Focus, you know? Like a laser. He’d focus on a woman and he’d make it happen, and then, when she was crazy for him, he’d lose interest, go cold on her. The making it happen was all.’

‘How did he wind up here with you, then?’

‘We had money, he didn’t. Scholarship boy, from a family of modest means. Unlike my merchant-banker friend, Pierre, who was into the back-to-nature bit – funny that, isn’t it? One bad experience of nature, red in tooth and fucking claw, and Pierre’s been in the City ever since.’

‘So who actually found this place?’

‘Teddy. Or Mat, as we were instructed to call him. Mat Phobe – we never worked that out, you know. Doing drugs, it can take you months to master word games. Like Woodstock. F … U … C … K – what’s that spell? Fuck knows.’

Hayter cackled and stood on a green mound, looking down at the Master House.

‘He was well into the Templar stuff by then, and we knew nothing. Very excited when he found out that the place we were actually living in had connections. He had us doing excavations, digging up the floors, taking stones out of the walls. We kept moving furniture around to cover up the current hole in case the owners came in. Like the PoWs at Colditz. He always thought there was a tunnel to the church.’

‘Find anything?’

‘Nah. Mat also had this idea that when Jacques de Molay came, he brought something with him to hide at Garway because it was so remote. He was thinking the Mappa Mundi, or a prototype – nobody really knows where that came from or how it wound up in Hereford, but it was evidently made around the end of the thirteenth century, which fits. He kept going into Hereford to look at it in the cathedral. Dragging us along, or one of the girls. Never seemed much to me. Not exactly great art, not much of a map.’

‘So, what—?’

‘It’s a very Templar creation. Shows Jerusalem as the centre of the world. No, I’ve got it wrong, actually … he didn’t think there was a prototype of the Mappa Mundi at Garway, he thought the Mappa Mundi was the prototype. All those symbols and strange creatures around it, but they’re quite roughly drawn. He was convinced there was a finished version hidden somewhere, a perfect magical map, connecting the world to the universe. A total concept. He thought they’d created it as a kind of magical control thing. And that … that was gonna be Teddy Murray’s Holy Grail.’

‘And he thought it was still hidden at Garway?’

Lol looked around and saw an intimate, enclosed landscape, small mellow fields, encrusted with autumn woodland, dipping to the sandstone church. Warmth, shelter. Despite last night, he liked it here.

‘Maybe a cave under the hill … or even under the Master House,’ Hayter said. ‘He was ingesting a lot of stuff, and it got crazy. He thought he’d find out by asking spirits and demons. Walking the hill, tripping out. We’d do these invocations, and he’d get messages. We wouldn’t. Just him. And Gwilym, once.’

‘The Glyndwr link.’

‘Mat said Glyndwr was a magician, a Templar and a prince and he would have learned the whereabouts of this secret … chamber … temple … whatever. A magical link had to be made between Gwilym and his ancestor. This took weeks, making the poor bastard fast and bathe daily in the Monnow and wash his balls or whatever in the holy well. All kinds of mystical shit.’

‘And that about Gwilym speaking Welsh, did that actually happen?’

‘Couldn’t tell you, cocker, none of us could understand a bleeding word. It’s a mug’s game. You don’t get anything you can see or touch or put in the bank. Nothing except the feeling of something out there playing with you. End of the day you just come out with your health ruined, your humanity eroded and fuck-all else.’

‘And yet he wanted to come back?’

‘Well, I say fuck all. I think he did find something. Something he didn’t want to share.’

‘How do you know about it, then?’

Lol sat down under a hawthorn tree, resting his left arm on his knee. At Nevill Hall Hospital, outside Abergavenny, they’d found a very deep bruise but no fracture. Still hurt quite a bit, though, right across the shoulder, and it was scary because he couldn’t hold a guitar and something hurt when he formed chords. His best guitar smashed, his chord arm … was he being told something?

‘This was in the last days,’ Hayter said. ‘He wanted us out of the way. He wanted to be alone there. I told you how I had to go to London, see my old man?’

‘Seemed very convenient,’ Lol said. ‘Also he wasn’t quite alone, was he?’

‘The girl.’

‘Mary.’

‘Yeah. This Mary turns up again and says she’s had a baby and she wants it to grow up with a father.’

‘Which of you would that be?’

‘Dunno. Dunno to this day. Anyway, she didn’t mean she wanted a father, she meant she wanted money. A packet. For starters. Well, I’d spent up on the lease on this place and a surfeit of substances to abuse, and my old man wasn’t exactly flush. And Gwilym, he had a Triumph Spitfire to support and a dad with no need of a spare granddaughter. That was when Mat said, take a weekend away, I’ll deal with it.’

‘Just like that.’

‘Look … it was cowardly and irresponsible, but … we were cowards and we were irresponsible. And we were young. And we came back, Mary was gone, and a day or so later we were raided by the police, and that was an end of it and I was very glad to get away. Only I didn’t, and neither did Gwilym. He’d got us where he wanted us.’

‘You didn’t even have proof she had a baby.’

‘She had photos. We kept staring at them, see which one of us she looked like. Kid looked like all of us, with darker skin. Mary said she was living in this place where there were a lot of hard guys who’d come and get heavy with us. End of the day, it was blackmail. Extortion.’

‘And blackmailers get what they deserve?’

‘Robinson, look, we didn’t think he’d killed her.’

‘What did you think he’d done? He had no money.’

‘I don’t …’ gritted teeth ‘… know. We weren’t there, we didn’t care.’

Lol said nothing, thinking of the magical, chemical hell of the girl’s last days. Hayter leaned against the tree-trunk.

‘Few years later, when I’m getting into some good money through music-promo, he’s back in touch. Somewhat reluctantly, we have a meeting, him and me and Sycharth, on neutral ground – in Evesham, I think it was. He looks different. Short hair, suit. He tells us that Mary died in the course of “a ritual”.’

‘I can’t believe this, Jimmy.’

‘Yeah, well, if you’d been there, you would have. Mat tells us he’s been to theological college and he’s a curate now – that was the bit we couldn’t believe. Reckons it’s going to be a breeze. Not great money, but a free house. Couple of days a week mouthing simplistic platitudes at old people and the rest of the time you can do what you like, and you never get fired.’

Lol thought of Merrily, shook his head slowly. She’d told him what Murray may have done to his last church, in Gloucestershire, to build a case for stress, early retirement.

‘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 told 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?’

‘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.’