The Fabric of Sin

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.