The Fabric of Sin

‘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