‘He was well into the Templar stuff by then, and we knew nothing. Very excited when he found out that the place we were actually living in had connections. He had us doing excavations, digging up the floors, taking stones out of the walls. We kept moving furniture around to cover up the current hole in case the owners came in. Like the PoWs at Colditz. He always thought there was a tunnel to the church.’
‘Find anything?’
‘Nah. Mat also had this idea that when Jacques de Molay came, he brought something with him to hide at Garway because it was so remote. He was thinking the Mappa Mundi, or a prototype – nobody really knows where that came from or how it wound up in Hereford, but it was evidently made around the end of the thirteenth century, which fits. He kept going into Hereford to look at it in the cathedral. Dragging us along, or one of the girls. Never seemed much to me. Not exactly great art, not much of a map.’
‘So, what—?’
‘It’s a very Templar creation. Shows Jerusalem as the centre of the world. No, I’ve got it wrong, actually … he didn’t think there was a prototype of the Mappa Mundi at Garway, he thought the Mappa Mundi was the prototype. All those symbols and strange creatures around it, but they’re quite roughly drawn. He was convinced there was a finished version hidden somewhere, a perfect magical map, connecting the world to the universe. A total concept. He thought they’d created it as a kind of magical control thing. And that … that was gonna be Teddy Murray’s Holy Grail.’
‘And he thought it was still hidden at Garway?’
Lol looked around and saw an intimate, enclosed landscape, small mellow fields, encrusted with autumn woodland, dipping to the sandstone church. Warmth, shelter. Despite last night, he liked it here.
‘Maybe a cave under the hill … or even under the Master House,’ Hayter said. ‘He was ingesting a lot of stuff, and it got crazy. He thought he’d find out by asking spirits and demons. Walking the hill, tripping out. We’d do these invocations, and he’d get messages. We wouldn’t. Just him. And Gwilym, once.’
‘The Glyndwr link.’
‘Mat said Glyndwr was a magician, a Templar and a prince and he would have learned the whereabouts of this secret … chamber … temple … whatever. A magical link had to be made between Gwilym and his ancestor. This took weeks, making the poor bastard fast and bathe daily in the Monnow and wash his balls or whatever in the holy well. All kinds of mystical shit.’
‘And that about Gwilym speaking Welsh, did that actually happen?’
‘Couldn’t tell you, cocker, none of us could understand a bleeding word. It’s a mug’s game. You don’t get anything you can see or touch or put in the bank. Nothing except the feeling of something out there playing with you. End of the day you just come out with your health ruined, your humanity eroded and fuck-all else.’
‘And yet he wanted to come back?’
‘Well, I say fuck all. I think he did find something. Something he didn’t want to share.’
‘How do you know about it, then?’
Lol sat down under a hawthorn tree, resting his left arm on his knee. At Nevill Hall Hospital, outside Abergavenny, they’d found a very deep bruise but no fracture. Still hurt quite a bit, though, right across the shoulder, and it was scary because he couldn’t hold a guitar and something hurt when he formed chords. His best guitar smashed, his chord arm … was he being told something?
‘This was in the last days,’ Hayter said. ‘He wanted us out of the way. He wanted to be alone there. I told you how I had to go to London, see my old man?’
‘Seemed very convenient,’ Lol said. ‘Also he wasn’t quite alone, was he?’
‘The girl.’
‘Mary.’
‘Yeah. This Mary turns up again and says she’s had a baby and she wants it to grow up with a father.’
‘Which of you would that be?’
‘Dunno. Dunno to this day. Anyway, she didn’t mean she wanted a father, she meant she wanted money. A packet. For starters. Well, I’d spent up on the lease on this place and a surfeit of substances to abuse, and my old man wasn’t exactly flush. And Gwilym, he had a Triumph Spitfire to support and a dad with no need of a spare granddaughter. That was when Mat said, take a weekend away, I’ll deal with it.’
‘Just like that.’
‘Look … it was cowardly and irresponsible, but … we were cowards and we were irresponsible. And we were young. And we came back, Mary was gone, and a day or so later we were raided by the police, and that was an end of it and I was very glad to get away. Only I didn’t, and neither did Gwilym. He’d got us where he wanted us.’
‘You didn’t even have proof she had a baby.’
‘She had photos. We kept staring at them, see which one of us she looked like. Kid looked like all of us, with darker skin. Mary said she was living in this place where there were a lot of hard guys who’d come and get heavy with us. End of the day, it was blackmail. Extortion.’
‘And blackmailers get what they deserve?’
‘Robinson, look, we didn’t think he’d killed her.’
‘What did you think he’d done? He had no money.’
‘I don’t …’ gritted teeth ‘… know. We weren’t there, we didn’t care.’
Lol said nothing, thinking of the magical, chemical hell of the girl’s last days. Hayter leaned against the tree-trunk.
‘Few years later, when I’m getting into some good money through music-promo, he’s back in touch. Somewhat reluctantly, we have a meeting, him and me and Sycharth, on neutral ground – in Evesham, I think it was. He looks different. Short hair, suit. He tells us that Mary died in the course of “a ritual”.’
‘I can’t believe this, Jimmy.’
‘Yeah, well, if you’d been there, you would have. Mat tells us he’s been to theological college and he’s a curate now – that was the bit we couldn’t believe. Reckons it’s going to be a breeze. Not great money, but a free house. Couple of days a week mouthing simplistic platitudes at old people and the rest of the time you can do what you like, and you never get fired.’
Lol thought of Merrily, shook his head slowly. She’d told him what Murray may have done to his last church, in 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.’