The Fabric of Sin

spirit department.’

‘Maybe she’s changed. Or maybe she’s just seen another side of you.’

This kid was getting so smart she could scare you sometimes. Merrily sighed.

‘She has principles. Moral fibre.’ She tapped a teaspoon against an open palm. ‘Perhaps it’s time I got some.’

‘Along with five more parishes?’

‘Yeah, well … who knows? Jane, look, go and hang around in the hall, will you, in case Mrs Morningwood needs any help?’

At the door, Jane looked over her shoulder.

‘She wasn’t in a car crash, was she?’

‘I wasn’t there.’

‘Huh.’

‘Look, I need to make a phone call, and it might take a while. You’ll have to talk among yourselves. Numerology, Renaissance cosmology …’

In the scullery, the sermon pad was still open to the word B A P H O M E T. She tore off the page and screwed it up very tight. Looked at the mobile and then — why fry your brains for these bastards? — picked up the big black bakelite receiver.

‘I need some help,’ she told Huw Owen. ‘Badly.’

‘Sycharth.’ Mrs Morningwood smiled thinly. ‘I ought to have known.’

‘How would you?’ Merrily said. ‘He’d want to keep it very quiet that he’d been spending quality time at the old family home. Certainly wouldn’t want the Grays to know … or would he?’

‘Newtons. Still the Newtons, then.’

‘Sorry, yes, the Newtons.’

The fire was burning low. Jane had taken Roscoe for a walk, with a clothes line doubled up through his collar and a home-made poop-scoop. Dogshit watch, smoking watch. Ledwardine, heart of the New Cotswolds, had them all now, and they never slept.

‘Getting a foot inside the ancient portal.’ Mrs Morningwood had a cigarette and a glass of neat brandy. ‘That alone would make it worthwhile to Sycharth. Other obvious attractions, of course. Nubile young things bathing naked in the Monnow. Would’ve taken a youth with more will-power than Suckarse to look the other way.’

‘This would be the girlfriends, before they left?’

‘Would’ve been the time when Sycharth’s father, Gruffydd — keen as ever to shaft the Newtons — was apparently complaining to the parish council about Lord Stourport’s habit of biking around the lanes stark bollock naked except for a pair of Doc Martens.’

‘You ever meet Stourport?’

‘I’ve told you, I wasn’t there.’

‘You knew Sycharth, though. When you and he were young.’

‘He made a play for me once, at a barn dance. I was almost tempted to go out with him — he had an old Triumph Spitfire. Yellow. Passed his test on his seventeenth birthday. It used to roar sexily up and down the lanes. I always liked speed.’

A moist sadness came into Muriel Morningwood’s bruised eyes. Days of innocence? Yeah, sure.

‘Long time on the phone, Watkins.’

‘I was consulting a colleague. Didn’t want to miss anything out. Don’t look at me like that, it’s a priest. A proper priest. Nothing gets out.’

Mrs Morningwood drank some brandy.

‘Tell me, what were they doing, apart from taking drugs and shagging? Do hate the way another generation has appropriated the word shag as if they invented it. Why can’t they they come up with one of their own? Sorry, I’m rambling again. I don’t think I want to know what they did to Mary Roberts. Not in this state.’

‘Didn’t you ask any of the other girls who were involved?’

‘As far as I know there were only two. My mother wouldn’t have anything to do with them again. I tried to talk to one about it — she just walked away. Too well paid. They’ve both left the area now. I don’t think either of them was there at the end. You should get to Suckarse before he has time to fabricate a story.’

‘You ever hear of a man calling himself Mat Phobe?’

‘Never. Who’s he?’

‘It was all apparently stage-managed by this man. He seems to have decided there was some kind of Templar treasure hidden at the Master House.’

‘Never heard of that.’

‘Mat Phobe — it’s an anagram of Baphomet — the sacred head? Also the name adopted by the occultist Aleister Crowley as leader of a Templar-based outfit experimenting with the magical power of sex.’

‘That what the Knights Templar did, do you think?’

‘They were more less accused of it, weren’t they? Maybe riches led to decadence.’

‘I can certainly see Sycharth in ceremonial robes.’

‘They seem to have tried some kind of mediumistic thing, to put him in touch with his ancestors — the Welsh princes, he claimed, apparently.’

‘His ancestors were sheep-shaggers.’

‘People keep saying he doesn’t speak Welsh,’ Merrily said. ‘Is he likely to know any Welsh at all?’

‘Shouldn’t think so. Wasn’t compulsory at school when Sycharth was a boy, not in an Anglicized area like Monmouth. His son would have to learn it, I expect — Cynllaith.’

‘How old’s he?’

‘Fifteen or sixteen.’

‘Cynllaith? What’s that mean?’

‘Could be something to do with milk — llaith. Or — more sinister, according to my dictionary — battle or slaughter.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Pretentions to warrior status. These sex rituals — was that just an excuse?’

‘Was for Lord Stourport.’

‘But in the course of it …’ Mrs Morningwood’s voice hardening ‘… one of them seems to have impregnated Mary Roberts.’

‘That’s how it looks.’

‘And was, therefore, Fuchsia’s father.’

‘Yes.’ Merrily heard the phone ringing, let it ring. ‘I’ve thought of that.’

‘Suppose it’s Sycharth?’

‘We’re unlikely ever to know.’

‘But does he? And if that child was born as a result of some degenerate ritual, Watkins, what might the effects of that be? I’m asking you as a priest.’

‘As a priest, I don’t really have an answer.’ Merrily stared into the fire. ‘Looking at it psychologically, I would think that would depend on whether she knew about it, wouldn’t you?’

‘If she knew, might she think of herself as inherently soiled and corrupt because of the circumstances of her conception?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘And did she know, do you think?’

‘It would explain some things, wouldn’t it? But if she knew of her own connection with the Master House before Felix tendered for the job, why did she go along with it, then throw a wobbly? What was she like when you first met her?’

‘Inquisitive. Lots of questions.’

‘Not spooked at that stage?’

‘No suggestion of it. This would’ve been their first visit, and they were both fired up with the idea of restoring the house in a sympathetic way. She wanted to know what I could remember about it — the atmosphere, the colours of the walls. Hard for me to recall what she asked in much detail because, of course, I knew at once