The Fabric of Sin

‘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.