The Fabric of Sin

‘Where?’

Merrily looked around. Six candles were burning on a tiered stand in front of the renovated shrine of St Thomas Cantilupe. Back in the Middle Ages, there’d been long queues — scores of pilgrims, sick people and relatives of the sick. Tommy Canty had been Beckett-class in his day.

There was a container of candles you could buy to light and ask for the saint’s help. Huw fitted his candle into one of the holders.

‘Bishop’s in one of the chantries. Trying to reach an arrangement with his Governor.’

‘That’s why you’ve got me here? To face up to the Bishop?’

She was feeling very much on edge. Lol had driven her down to Broad Street, dropped her on the corner by the Cathedral Green and then, against all her pleas, driven off back towards Westgate and Roman Road to find the man who’d destroyed the most beautiful guitar in the world.

‘Dunmore wants to talk to you,’ Huw said.

‘About what?’

‘About what he’s just trying to clear with his God.’

‘Bernie’s who you came to see? He was your appointment?’

‘And every bit as knackering as I’d figured. You forget how shit-scared they are. Bowed under the gross weight of centuries of solemn, dark ceremonial.’

‘Not as many centuries as the Church has. Not by a long way.’

‘Only the Church doesn’t threaten to rip your tongue out by the roots if you finger a brother or shout out Jahbulon on the bus.’

‘Fair enough. What’s he going to tell me?’

‘I’d say whatever you want to ask. So have a think about it before you go in.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Unless he chickens out.’

‘What did you say to him?’

‘Mr Gwilym helpful, was he?’

‘Didn’t intend to be, but I rather think he was. What did you say to the Bishop?’

‘I’d better be off, lass.’

‘You’re going?’

‘Nowt else I can do here.’ He looked over the candles to the shrine. ‘See you, then, Tommy.’

Nodding to the tomb in which there hadn’t, for many years, been anything of Tommy.

‘Huw, I think I’d rather you stayed.’

‘Lass …’ Huw bent to her. ‘It’s part of the deal. Just you and him.’

‘Oh.’

‘I won’t pray for you.’ He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Already done that bit.’

He pointed to the seventh candle.

‘What did you say to him, Huw?’

‘Didn’t need to say much. Callaghan-Clarke’d already been in.’

‘Oh.’

‘Just get on with it, eh?’

Looking slightly irritable, Huw left Merrily in the cold light of the North Transept, the handful of candles a small and lonely glow.

52 Male Thing

Lol was standing next to Jimmy Hayter’s champagne Jaguar, the formula fantasy flashing past: he hot-wires the Jag, takes it away, calls Hayter on his mobile with directions.

And then what?

As he didn’t know Hayter’s mobile number or how to hot-wire a car, there wasn’t much point in taking it further. He just stood there, leaning against the front of the Jag, in full view of the picture window identified by Merrily as the window of Sycharth Gwilym’s office.

The sky had gloomed over again and it began to rain. Lol didn’t move. The mobile in his pocket was switched on. Until he had a call from the cathedral, there was nowhere to go.

After twenty minutes, his grey Alien sweatshirt dark with rain, he still hadn’t moved.

He was very cold.

After twenty-five minutes, it stopped raining and Lord Stourport came out.

The walls and ceiling of the fifteenth-century Chantry Chapel of Bishop John Stanbury were of richly foliate stone. It was like being under a copse of low, weeping trees in winter.

‘I’m going to retire, Merrily,’ the Bishop said.

It wasn’t warm in here but he’d taken off his jacket. There was a small green stain on a shoulder of his purple shirt.

‘You always say that,’ Merrily said.

She was sitting next to him, facing the golden-haloed Virgin and Child in the triptych, Gothic-spired, over an altar the size of a boxed radiator.

Bernie Dunmore had lost some weight in the past year and his tonsure had expanded.

‘It is possible, you know,’ he said, ‘to be a Freemason and a priest, without compromise.’

‘But hard, I’d’ve thought.’

‘Hard, yes. My father and two uncles were Masons. When I joined, I was barely out of theological college. For a while it seemed almost compatible. The lodge included two canons and the Dean. Several bishops were still active Masons, then. Not now, of course.’

‘You could’ve left.’

‘Yes, of course you can leave. But they consider that the vows, once made, cannot be revoked.

‘But you never actually did.’

‘Haven’t been to a lodge meeting or a social event for well over twenty years. But it always seemed to me that to publicly renounce the Craft would’ve caused more fuss than it was worth. I’ve never courted controversy, as you know.’

‘Why did you stop going, in the end?’

‘They … they tell you it can’t be incompatible because it isn’t a religion. And then you find yourself asking, but is it an anti-religion?’

‘Anti-faith, anyway.’ Merrily kept her eyes on the Virgin. ‘Gnostic. The search for some kind of God within yourself.’

‘Yes. In a way.’

‘And is it?’

‘Anti-religion? I still can’t decide. We even have Masonic services, as you know, at the cathedral. All I know is that at some stage, I prayed for help. The answer was: get out.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘It wasn’t a problem, Merrily. Not until …’

‘Last week?’

Dunmore was silent for what must have been close to half a minute. It had become darker in the chantry, the stained glass in the window dulled. Merrily sensed that it was raining outside.

‘You were approached,’ she said.

‘Nothing so formal. I was advised that well-intentioned, well-regarded men might be damaged by … your inquiries.’

‘Well-intentioned, well-regarded Masons.’