The Fabric of Sin: A Merrily Watkins Mystery Read online

  You could, apparently, still see the foundations of the original circular nave which the Templars had created in imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – the extent of Merrily’s knowledge of Templar architecture. She took a step back, looking up. The tower was square and unadorned, stonework like oatmeal biscuit, the lower half darker as if it had been dunked in tea. Two vertical slits near the top on each of the four sides were disconcertingly like all-round eyes. Watchful and mildly amused.

  ‘I suppose, seen from above, it does look rather as though its neck has been broken. Like a chicken’s.’

  Merrily half-turned. He was standing alongside her, in walking boots and fishing hat, a two-tone nylon hiking jacket over his faded blue shirt and clerical collar.

  ‘You see, the tower originally was entirely separate from the body of the church, which is why it’s set at such an angle. The gap was bridged at a later date, as you can see. The arrangement would have looked less odd, one imagines, in the days when the nave was circular. I’m so sorry …’ He bowed his head. ‘Didn’t mean to sneak up. It is Mrs Merrily Watkins, I hope. Walking home from the pub when I saw the car, and you did look rather purposeful behind the wheel.’

  ‘Mr Murray.’

  ‘Teddy.’ He bent down to her, putting out a hand. ‘So glad. I realize this must be a terrible bind for you, but … heavens, the gossip this sort of thing engenders. Usually among people who enter a church no more than twice in their lifetimes, carried in and out both times. Not really what one looks for in retirement.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  Actually, the Reverend Murray didn’t look old enough, or unfit enough, to be retired. Handshake firm, eyes vividly blue, and skin tanned to the colour of Garway’s lower tower around the stiff white beard and the high bland dome of his forehead.

  ‘Never been a particularly pastoral sort of chap, Merrily. When the girl turned up here asking for protection … sanctuary … I confess I was completely thrown.’

  ‘You mean … Fuchsia?’

  ‘Fuchsia. Indeed, yes.’

  ‘She came here to the church? To ask for sanctuary?’

  Merrily remembered now. The bloke at Garway, he was no help at all.

  ‘Sanctuary is perhaps too emotive a word. The builder chap was waiting in the entrance in his truck. The girl was rather vague, disoriented. I thought she was … Anyway, I brought her in and said a short prayer. You know the routine.’

  ‘What did you think she was?’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘You said when you first saw her you thought she was …’

  ‘Ah.’ Murray straightened up, hands behind his back, looking up at the tower. ‘I thought – I’m afraid – that she was probably on drugs. A small percentage of the visitors here do tend to be what we used to call potheads. Found a chap the other week completely out of it, lying with his head under the holy spring. Harmless enough, I suppose, but not what one expects to see in a country churchyard.’

  ‘Where’s the holy spring?’

  ‘My, we are getting down to business, aren’t we? I’ll show you, if you like. I can show you everything.’ Teddy Murray extended an arm to steer Merrily towards the church entrance. ‘It appears to be my principal role in this community: guide and interpreter. Much more my sort of thing – I have to say, with no little shame – than dispensing spiritual succour. Historian by inclination, I’m afraid. And the walks.’

  ‘The walks?’

  ‘For the guests. My wife’s guest house tends to cater for people who like to tramp the hills in all weathers. I compile the handy route-maps. And I’m available to go along and point things out, when required. This …’ The Rev. Murray turned and flung out an arm towards the guardian hills ‘… is God’s own weekend retreat. I always say that. In fact it’s in Beverley’s brochure. God’s Own Weekend Retreat.’

  ‘Very, erm …’

  ‘Presumptuous, I suppose. But there had to be some reason for the Templars to favour it, remote spot like this. Was it divine guidance? Sorry!’ He put up his hands. ‘One gets carried away. Do you want to know all this? I only ask because, as someone’s bound to tell you, the Master House does seem to be contemporaneous with the Templars’ occupation of Garway – although, despite the title, it does not appear to have been the home of the preceptor, or master.’

  ‘So you didn’t go back to the Master House? With Fuchsia?’

  ‘Well … no.’ Murray looked bewildered. ‘She didn’t ask me to. Hardly my property to intrude upon. Anyway, my impression was that you couldn’t have dragged her back and, in the absence of a full-time minister here, I wasn’t sure who it would be best to inform. And then events overtook me, and so— Paul. How are you?’

  A man in jeans and a heavy work-shirt had come out of the church, leaning on a stick. There was a motorized wheelchair on the path outside; he stood looking at it with no great love. Teddy Murray took a step forward, and the man raised his stick.

  ‘Bugger off, eh, Teddy?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not ready for him yet, boy. Gonner have another bit of a walk round. Come back for the thing.’

  Teddy nodded. They watched the man making his way up the path. He couldn’t be more than mid-thirties, thick brown hair.

  ‘MS,’ Teddy murmured. ‘What kind of luck is that for a farmer?’ He opened the church door, stood aside for Merrily. ‘You been in here before?’

  ‘Never.’

  No sooner were they inside than he’d closed the door, blew out a breath.

  ‘Didn’t want to introduce you, Merrily. Difficult. That’s Paul Gray – he and his wife …’ Teddy lowered his voice ‘… sold the Master House to the Duchy.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Long story. Bad feeling. Not for me to … Still a bit of a newcomer. As, of course, is Paul, which is one of the problems.’ He laughed. ‘You can be here for three generations and they’ll still call you a newcomer. Couple of families go back to the Norman Conquest. So …’ Extending an arm. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s … unusual.’

  ‘More than you know.’

  Merrily nodded, taking it in. It was quite small but lofty and airy and filled with rosy light. The chancel was framed by a classic zigzagged and serrated Norman arch, wide and theatrical. Red velvet curtains were drawn across it, as if what lay beyond them was not for the unprepared. Something rare and sacred, Grail-like.

  Or perhaps a body in a coffin?

  Merrily shook herself. Too much M. R. James.

  Teddy Murray nodded towards a banner with a crusader kind of cross, red and gold on white, hanging from the pulpit.

  ‘Still a major presence, then?’ Merrily said.

  ‘The Templars? Yes, I suppose they are. Do you know much about them, Merrily?’

  ‘Erm …’ She looked up at the dark brown wooden ceiling, curved like the bottom of a boat and decorated with a small and regular galaxy of white stars. In a pocket of her jeans, the mobile phone began to vibrate against her left thigh. ‘Maybe not as much as I ought to.’

  Merrily placed a hand over the phone, and Teddy Murray leaned back against a pew end, looking down at her with what you could only describe as a beneficent smile, evidently all too ready to do what he was better at than dispensing spiritual succour.

  ‘It’s sometimes difficult to separate the truth from the lurid speculation,’ she told him. ‘Never a problem for my daughter.’

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that few of us like to countenance the idea that the Templars guarded the secret of the bloodline of Christ through his supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene.’

  ‘Oh, she’s happy enough with that idea. I suppose what bothers me most is the idea of the Templars – or someone – guarding the secret resting place of his bones.’

  ‘Let’s not talk of heresy.’

  ‘Let’s not.’

  ‘None of it, however, makes the Knights Templar less interesting,’ Teddy Murray said. ‘Follow me, Mrs Watkins.’

  9

  Funnies

  WHEN MERRILY CLIMBED back into the car, the weather had changed; the sky had the deep grey lustre of tinfoil and a single slow raindrop rolled down the windscreen like a cartoon tear, and she just wanted to be home and lighting a fire.

  She pulled out her phone. Lol would be on the way to his gig in Newtown, Powys, so it was more likely to be Jane.

  It was neither, just a short text.

  CALL ME.

  MOB PLEASE

  FB

  A text from Frannie Bliss? If it was him, this was a first. Mobile would mean he didn’t want to take the call in the CID room. She found his number in the index, but the signal was on the blink, so she reversed out of the church entrance and drove away from the village, uphill, pulling into a passing place, winding up the window against a rising wind.

  ‘Nicely timed, Reverend,’ Bliss said. ‘You’ve caught up with me in the gents.’

  ‘I totally refuse to picture the scene.’

  ‘Not good enough, anyway. Too much of an echo. I’ll call you back. Just give me a couple of minutes to … finish up in here.’

  Echo?

  Merrily sat watching the sloping landscape losing its colours in the gathering rain, compiling a mental inventory of all the curios that Teddy Murray had revealed in Garway Church.

  Beginning with the green man, the familiar stone face with entwined foliage, inexplicably found in churches. This one was in the chancel arch and, with those stubby horns, he wasn’t typical. There was also a cord or vine with tassels resembling fingers, so it looked like he was making a funny face at you, waggling his fingers at either side of his head.

  What the green man had to do with the Templars Teddy couldn’t explain, but this was a Templar church so it m
ust have had some significance.

  Everything in a Templar church was significant. They’d moved on to the matching long stones set into the chancel steps, the altar steps and one window ledge – these identified by Teddy as the lids of Templar stone coffins, now part of the fabric of the church. Teddy laughing, in his element now, the historian, the tour guide.

  ‘Someone said you can throw the Templars out of the building, but you’ll never get the building back from the Templars.’

  Giving her the primary-school version, for which she’d been quite grateful.

  The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon: founded in the early twelfth century, the time of the crusades, ostensibly to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem. The King of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, had allowed them to establish their headquarters at the al-Aqsa mosque, believed to be the site of the original Temple.

  They’d begun, it was said, with only nine members, led by one Hugh de Payens. Monastic soldiers, red crosses on their surcoats, growing over the next century into something internationally powerful, influential and very wealthy.

  Too wealthy and too powerful, by the thirteenth century, for the King of France, Philip IV, and the pet pope he’d acquired, Clement V, accommodated at the time in Avignon. The French Templars had all been arrested in a series of simultaneous dawn raids on Friday, 13 October 1307, accused of a black catalogue of heresies.

  ‘Hang on …’ It hadn’t taken much calculation. ‘Doesn’t that mean it’s exactly—’

  ‘I’m afraid it does. Seven hundred years ago next Saturday. I was hoping we’d have a permanent minister in place by then, but it was not to be. It therefore falls to me to conduct some sort of memorial service for the poor chaps.’

  ‘You don’t sound totally enthused.’

  ‘It is so obvious?’

  ‘And the problem is … what?’

  ‘Fanatics, Merrily. The known facts about the Templars are relatively few – the amount of wild speculation has been quite monumental in recent years.’

  ‘The Da Vinci Code?’

  ‘And its source, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. All the preposterous theories undermining the central tenets of Christianity as we know it.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Everybody knew about it now: the alleged bloodline of Jesus from his alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene, the female disciple whose crucial role was supposedly written out of the scriptures by the Roman Catholic Church. Jane had been quite taken with the idea that the real reason for the suppression of the Knights Templar had been their guardianship of this secret knowledge … and the whereabouts of the tomb of Christ, unrisen.

  Whether or not you accepted this, Teddy Murray had said, the charges against the Templars were surely made up.

  ‘Like many of those levelled at various abbots by Henry VIII’s people during the Reformation. What kings tended to covet most in religious organizations was their money.’

  The last Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay, had been burned alive in Paris, but the persecution had been less extreme in Britain, where most Templars had been allowed to join other monastic orders – except, apparently, the order of Hospitallers of St John to which the properties of Garway had been transferred.

  De Molay was now seen as a martyr and Friday the Thirteenth … ‘Because of this? That’s the reason for the whole superstition and a bunch of slightly distasteful movies?’

  ‘Such is the received wisdom, Merrily. What rather bothers me is that the church promises to be packed. I’ve had letters from all kinds of organizations wanting to be represented – from Templar re-enactment groups to more … shall we say more sinistersounding societies.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Teddy had said there seemed to be a number of occult-sounding groups whose rituals were supposed to be based on Templar practices. He said he didn’t know much about them. Merrily knew a little more, from Huw Owen’s reading list. Supposedly ancient formulae handed down through Renaissance magical orders and then developed by the fashionable fraternities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mainly bollocks.

  ‘Lucky the anniversary is going to be a Saturday, then,’ Merrily said.

  ‘You think that will change anything? I don’t. It’s their first opportunity in a century to commemorate the suppression – and a century ago few, if any, of these theories were in the public domain.’

  ‘Why here? There must lots of Templar churches all over the country. In fact—’

  ‘Actually, no,’ Teddy said. ‘Nothing so perfectly preserved. The London temple, for instance, was wrecked in the Blitz. There’s nowhere more authentic. Or more isolated and yet … get-at-able.’

  He’d unlocked the tower, dark and starkly atmospheric with its funeral bier and a magnificent medieval oak chest hewn from a massive log.

  ‘Whose idea was it to have a memorial service?’

  ‘So many people wrote in, we couldn’t get out of it, Merrily. So I’m quite anxious that this business with the Master House should be dealt with before then. Do you think that will be possible?’

  ‘Before next weekend?’

  ‘Bad enough when the girl arrived. Wish I hadn’t been here.’

  Merrily had been forced to say that she’d do her best to get it wrapped. And if Huw was right that might be on the cards. She’d asked Teddy where the Master House came into the picture. One of the Templar farms, he’d said, that was all. They farmed sheep, as did the Hospitallers after them.

  As did the locals today. Not much had really changed in Garway, Merrily was thinking as the mobile chimed to indicate that DI Bliss had left the building.

  ‘Raining hard in the police car park, is it, Frannie?’

  ‘It’s not raining at all, and I’m not in the police car-park. I’m off the premises entirely, and if it was known I was calling you I’d probably have a tail.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Merrily was still thinking about the Garway Green Man who, having small, stubby horns, might be expected also to have a tail.

  ‘All right, listen,’ Bliss said. ‘I may be touching upon something you already know about, but why would the gentlefolk that humble coppers like myself used to call the Funnies suddenly have become interested in you?’

  ‘The Funnies?’

  ‘I’m thinking specifically of a feller in an unmarked room at headquarters who very occasionally creeps around this division when it’s felt that national security might be at stake.’

  Merrily rubbed vainly at the condensation on the windscreen. Without the engine running, it kept re-forming under her palm.

  ‘You’re talking about the Special Branch?’

  ‘I hope you’re on your own using language like that.’

  ‘Frannie, are you actually saying the Special Branch are making inquiries about me?’

  ‘I’m saying nothing, Merrily.’

  She scrubbed furiously at the windscreen, starting to put it together, and it was … it was beyond ridiculous.

  ‘What are you doing, exactly?’ Bliss said.

  ‘Trying to see out of the bloody—’ She sank back in her seat. ‘I’m looking into something connected with the Duchy of Cornwall’s investments in Herefordshire. Would that explain anything?’

  A short silence, except for a car engine somewhere and a clanging that became duller. What sounded like Bliss moving away from something to a place of greater safety.

  ‘That would possibly explain it, yes,’ he said.

  ‘It’s nothing particularly contentious.’

  ‘With respect, Merrily, how would you know?’ Bliss paused. ‘You want to explain? Being as we’re old mates and those smart-arsed cloak-and-dagger twats get right up my nasal passages?’

  ‘Well …’ She thought about it, could see no harm. ‘All right. The Duchy of Cornwall have paid good money out of the Prince’s piggy bank for an old farmhouse which their favourite conservation builder is refusing to work on because his girlfriend says it’s haunted.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint. Obviously I’d like to be able to tell you that the vengeful spirit of Princess Diana’s been seen around Highgrove in a—’