An odd silence intervened. Adam wondered how to begin; but at last the Scotsman said, ‘Afraid I don’t recall our meeting. So sorry.’ His expression melted into a distant smile. ‘Ah. Wait. Yes, yes. You interviewed me, about the Crusades? The Spear of Destiny?’
‘Yes. That’s right, a few years back. It was just a light-hearted article.’
‘Good good. And now you are writing about the Chapel of Rosslyn?’
‘Well, yes,’ Adam shrugged, mildly embarrassed. ‘We’re kind of doing another fun piece about all the … y’know … all the Dan Brown and Freemasons stuff. Templars hiding in the crypt. How Rosslyn has become so famous for its myths.’
‘And you want another quote from me?’
‘Do you mind?’ Adam flushed, painfully aware he was disturbing a serious academic with all this fatuous, astrological absurdity. ‘It’s just that you famously debunked all this rubbish. Didn’t you? What was that thing you said? “The Chapel of Rosslyn bears no more resemblance to the Temple of Solomon than my local farmer’s cowshed is modelled on the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu.”’
Another long silence. The tourists whispered and bustled. Adam waited for McLintock to answer. But he just smiled. And then he said, very quietly. ‘Did I write that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hm! A little piquant. But why not? Yes, I’ll give you a quote.’ Abruptly, Archibald McLintock stood up and Adam recalled with a start that the old man might be ageing but he was notably tall. Fully an inch taller than Adam, who was six foot two.
‘Here’s your quote, young man. I was wrong.’
‘Sorry?’ Adam was distracted: making sure his digicorder was switched on. ‘Wrong about … what?’
The historian smiled. ‘Remember what Umberto Eco said about the Templars?’
Adam struggled to recall. ‘Ah yes! “When a man talks about the Templars you know he is going mad,” You mean that one?’
‘No. Mr Blackwood. The other quote. “The Templars are connected to everything.”’
A pause. ‘You’re saying … you mean …?’
‘I was wrong. Wrong about the whole thing. There really is a connection. The pentagrams. The pillars. The Templar initiations. It’s all here, Mr Blackwood, it’s all true, it’s more strange than you could ever realize. Rosslyn Chapel really is the key.’ McLintock was laughing so loudly now that some tourists were nervously looking over. ‘Can you believe it? The stature of this irony? The key to everything was here all along!’
Adam was perplexed. Was McLintock drunk? ‘But you debunked all this – you said it was crap, you’re famous for it!’
McLintock waved a dismissive hand and began to make his way down the medieval aisle. ‘Just look around and you will see what I didn’t see. Goodbye.’
Adam watched as the historian walked to the door and disappeared into the drizzly light beyond. The journalist gazed for a full minute as the door shut, and the tourists thronged the nave and the aisles. And then he looked up, to the ancient roof of the Collegiate Chapel of St Michael in Roslin, where a hundred Green Men stared back at him, their faces carved by medieval stonemasons, into perpetual and sarcastic grins.
3
Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian
‘OK, I’m done. Got it all.’ Jason stood and stretched. ‘The upside-down angel thingy, Mary Magdalene by the fire extinguisher. And a cute Swedish girl bending over the tomb of the Earl of Orkney. Short skirt. Plaid. You all right?’
‘Yes …’
Jason theatrically slapped his own head. ‘Sorry. Ah. I didn’t get a shot of your old guy – what was his name?’
‘Archie McLintock. Professor McLintock.’
‘So,’ Jason capped his lens. ‘He give you any good quotes?’
Adam said nothing. He was wrapped in confusion.
The silence between the two men was a stark contrast to the hubbub of tourists coming into the building: yet another tour guide was escorting a dozen Japanese sightseers into the nave and pointing out the Templar sword on the grave of William Sinclair, ‘identical, they say, to the Templar swords inscribed on Templar tombs in the great Templar citadel of Tomar!’
‘Hey?’ said Jason, waving a hand in front of Adam as if testing his friend’s blindness. ‘What is it?’
‘Like I said. Just something … a remark of his.’
‘Okayyy. Tell me in monosyllables?’
Adam stared hard at the carving of the Norse serpents at the foot of the Prentice Pillar, and there, on the architrave joining the pillar the famous inscribed sentence. Forte est vinum fortior est rex fortiores sunt mulieres super omnia vincit veritas: ‘Wine is strong, a king is stronger, women are stronger still, but truth conquers all.’
Truth conquers all.
It was all true?
‘Well …’ Adam exhaled. ‘He admitted, or rather confessed, that he had been wrong all along. That it was all true. The Templar connections. Rosslyn really is the key, the key to everything. The key to history. That’s what he said.’
Zipping up his light meter in one of the many pockets of his jacket, Jason gazed laconically at Adam. ‘Finally gone gaga then. Doollally tap. Too much tainted porridge.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Yet he sounded sane I … I just don’t know.’
‘Mate. Let’s get a beer. What’s that shit they drink up here? Heavy. A pint of heavy.’
‘Just a half for me.’
Jason smiled. ‘Naturally.’
They walked with a mutual sense of relief out of the overcrowded, overwarmed confines of Rosslyn Chapel into the honestly dreary Scottish weather. For one last second Adam turned and looked at the church, landed in its green lawn, a greystone time machine. The gargoyles and the pinnacles disturbingly leered at him. A chime, an echoic buzz, a painful memory resonating.
Alicia. Of course. Alicia Hagen. His girlfriend. Buried in a Sydney suburb with the kookaburras in the trees and the sun burning down on the fake English Gothic church.
Anxiety pierced him. Now he had lost his job, would he go back to brooding? He needed to work, to take his mind off the past; he had emigrated from Australia to put distance between himself and the tragedy, and that had succeeded – to an extent – but he also needed to occupy himself. Or he would recall the girl he had truly loved, who died so pointlessly, so casually. And then he would feel the sadness, like a g-force, as if he was in a plummeting plane.
Adam paced quickly into the car park. The local pub
