Inevitably, what kept coming back was the last time she’d sat in that car in a rising wind, having planned to go and check out the Master House, thinking of how she’d been shafted and then Sod this, I’m going home.
No guarantee that, if she’d come here then, it would in any way have altered her opinion that Fuchsia had made the whole thing up.
But it might have.
And in any case that didn’t matter. What mattered was giving in to the resentment, after Bliss told her about the Special Branch. Stomping out into the rain to walk it off and then going home anyway to moan on the phone to Sophie.
Lessons learned. She pushed at the door and it yielded enough to be shouldered open, the damp-earth smell wafting out at her as if she was going outside, not in.
It was colder too, a kind of airless, stagnant cold. The floor felt hard and ridged where the decayed linoleum had been ground into it.
Time slowed.
She saw a thin light falling on the cage of the iron fire-basket in the inglenook. A light, somehow, from up the chimney and, as she watched, it went away.
Merrily stood for a moment, listening to her own breathing, her own heart and the footsteps on the stone spiral steps, and there was no time for a prayer before he was standing at the foot of the stairs, the wire of a hurricane lamp hanging from his fingers, its low, sallow flame bringing up the red stains on his surplice.
‘Great minds, eh?’ Teddy said.
He put the hurricane lamp on the floor, its wick turned down low.
‘God!’ Merrily laid a palm flat on her chest, feeling the ridge of the pectoral cross. ‘Bloody hell, Teddy, scared the life out of me.’
He didn’t say anything, just stood there, with the lamp at his feet fanning pale fronds of light over the scarred and lumpy walls. He looked … avuncular, with his easy, white-bearded smile, his large teeth, bright eyes, forehead like the top of a brown egg. Walking boots.
‘Just been up to the …’ Merrily put on a rueful smile. ‘Called at The Ridge, to pick up my stuff.’
‘Oh, Merrily … I dropped off the bags at your home a few hours ago.’
‘Yeah, I know. Sod’s Law, Teddy.’
‘Didn’t your daughter tell you?’
‘No, Beverley told me. I mean, just now. Haven’t seen Jane since breakfast – I’ve been in Hereford. Damn. Thank you. But I mean, you shouldn’t’ve bothered, anyway.’
‘Not a problem, I was going past. More or less.’
‘Anyway … Now, since I was here, I thought we ought to have a word, clear up a few things, but Beverley said she didn’t know where you’d gone, so I thought I’d just …’
‘Thought you’d drop in here instead, and get things ready for your Requiem?’
‘Well … yes. Always helps, doesn’t it? Always things on the day that you’d wished you’d thought of earlier, like … an altar? It’s amazing how often you turn up to do a Eucharist and there’s nothing to use as an altar, so I’ve got this folding—’
Talking too fast.
‘Anyway, you know all that stuff.’
‘Yes,’ Teddy said. ‘And I think it’s terribly brave of you to come to somewhere like this, on your own, after dark. It’s just that I thought you – or rather the Bishop – had called it all off.’
Bugger.
‘Well …’ Merrily stared into the lamp. ‘I thought it was time to stand up for what I believed, for a change, instead of bowing to politics, so I went to see him today, persuaded him to let me go ahead. I thought it was important, I mean, to do something. Get rid of all the years of bad feeling and rumour, let this place go into a new era, clean.’
‘Good for you, Merrily!’ Teddy said.
‘Of course, I thought I’d have a bit more time to make the arrangements because it wasn’t going to be until Saturday, but then Beverley said your memorial service was being held tomorrow, and I obviously wanted to tie in with that, that whole Templar thing, so …’
‘Well, you know, I didn’t want it to become a circus, Merrily.’
‘No. I can understand that.’
‘All these odd people who seem to turn up at anything to do with Templars.’
‘Yes … in fact, I did want to—’
‘It’s why I’m here,’ Teddy said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Someone in the village was telling me that some people had been seen around the church and the Master House with metal detectors. Treasure hunters, you know? We get them all the time, and they’ve been known to cause quite a lot of damage, but … well, nothing on this scale before.’
‘In … in here?’
‘If you come upstairs, I can show you. Hell of a mess.’
‘Oh.’
‘Why I’m wearing this.’ Teddy plucked at the surplice. ‘It’s an old one I keep in the Land Rover to use as a kind of overall. Cover up my clothes.’
‘Oh … yeah. I was wondering about that.’
What Merrily could see now was that the red marks on the surplice were not blood but stone dust. Surprising how many clergy did that, recycled old vestments.
He beamed at her and gestured at the stairs with one hand.
‘Interesting, really. There’s a … Well, I’d heard about it, of course, but it was blocked up over fifty years ago by the Newtons. It was apparently pretty inaccessible, not much use as a storage area, reduced the floor space upstairs, and so they bricked it up. Priest’s hole, Merrily.’
‘Oh.’
‘Quite a lot of Papists here after the Reformation. An independence of spirit remaining from the time when the Templars owed no money or allegiance to anyone but the Pope himself. Quite a bit of persecution.’
‘Yes. Actually, I was going to—’
‘Anyway, what happened, I saw these two guys coming up from here towards the church, just before dark, shouted to them … and, of course, they took off. Came down here to investigate, door was hanging open, dust everywhere. They’d ripped up the floorboards upstairs, prised away the bricks, exposed the cavity.’
‘It’s in the wall?’
‘Back of the fireplace. Come and look.’
Teddy stood back from the stairs.
A test.
Merrily remembered the room upstairs, the smell of decay, probably dead mice and rats. The skeletal remains of two beds.
How she’d thought of M. R. James and the room at the Globe Inn.
And if she didn’t go up with him now, she’d be revealing fear. Fear of a colleague in the clergy. If she did go up … what?
Problem was, it rang true, this story. More than hers did, anyway. The light falling into the inglenook had been an indication of something being knocked through, perhaps the wrong stones being taken out.
She said, ‘Why would they … I mean, what did they expect to find?’
What had Teddy expected to find?
Or was he going to put something in? Brick it up again.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve not been able to see. If you were to hold the lamp for me, perhaps we might …’
‘Well, maybe not now, Teddy, if you don’t mind. Best clothes?’
‘Oh, it’s not too bad, now the dust has settled. They must’ve left in quite a hurry. Left this behind.’
He bent down, came up holding a crowbar, a long one, heavy-duty. Held it in both hands.
‘Well … well-prepared, then,’ Merrily said. ‘Templar treasure – that what they were looking for, do you think?’
‘Templar treasure.’ He looked at her, head on one side, lamplight glazing his eyes. ‘What a joke.’
‘Is it?’
‘If there was treasure, it wasn’t their kind of treasure – gold and jewels.’