Forthcoming Atrocities

8 The Chapel

Part One – The Rood Screen

The next morning I called the phone number on the college's online brochure and asked to speak to Sister Innocent. The person at the college said she was taking lessons and would I like her to phone me back or make an appointment? I said that I had to drive past later that morning and would it be OK if I dropped in then?

She would have to check the sister's diary. I'd like to have a look anyway as I wanted to check out the collage as an option for my daughter, if that was OK?

'I'll tell the Sister. Can I take a name?'

'Tell her it's Doctor Karalis. We met on Tuesday afternoon. I'm hoping to be with you around eleven.'

I doubted she'd see me but I wanted to examine the church. I was starting to believe that nothing had found its way into Charlie Fox's illustrations by accident. I kept my car in Jules' barn while I'd been on tour.

I drove through small towns and tiny villages, with tidy greens, cared for churches with the classic west-Essex pink shade adorning the bigger cottages and manors. I made good time, which was necessary as I had arranged to meet Declan Cooke, the journalist, in a pub at Hertford for lunch.

I was close to the college now and the sat-nav guided me through winding lanes between strung out houses and hedged fields equally split between crops and horses. 'You have arrived at your destination,' it intoned at an impressive entrance, a pair of tall wrought iron gates open either side of a lavish drive.

The sign on the wall read: 'Walden Abbey Hotel, part of the Vencer Hazard Group'.

It didn't mention a college but sat-navs are implacable, so I drove up the drive, between tall beech trees set back and manicured Portuguese laurel spaced at intervals. After three hundred metres the drive splits in two: the hotel signed in one direction, showing onto a circular well-populated car-park serving a three story building; and Our Church of the Reborn Martyr College, more discretely signed, in the other. Both signs carry a 'Vencer Hazard' logo.

I turn towards the college sign and snake through a couple more turns before pitching up in front of the building I recognise from the brochure. The car-park is humbler and emptier and two unused tennis courts sit to one side of it. A smaller spur of the drive travels off and behind the old college building, presumably to the small church.

Presenting myself at a reception desk and hitting the bell, brings a brisk tidy bespectacled woman to the desk to discover my name and requirements. 'Oh, yes, Doctor Karalis, the Sister would like to see you. She's about thirteen minutes away from finishing class.' I was handed a stiff colour brochure.

I asked if I could wander around the grounds and get a feel for the place. 'Please do,' I was told, 'but can I ask that you come back promptly at eleven as the Sister is fitting you in between classes.'

Not delaying, I left and marched round the spur of drive, up some low steps and there, slightly set back from the main house and among its copse of trees was the small church I'd seen online. It was probably more a chapel used by the household of the Stuart-era family that built the manor.

There was no graveyard, the trees were taller and wider than in the illustration for 'Of Sickness' and a small wooden lych-gate led to a narrow stone path that split a small meadow of tall grasses and wild flowers. In all other respects, from the squat tower that barely rose above the ridgeline of the main church, to the meagre porch that crouched on the side of that tower and the two long narrow windows slightly offset from each-other, it was the same church as in the illustration.

I pushed at the porch gates, their top halves filled with chicken wire to keep out nesting birds, and it opened. A moment later I'd opened the unlocked narrow doors and was in the stone and oak stillness of the church's interior. The light spilling through the thin windows barely lit a single mote of dust in the air, walking forward I passed through drifts of old incense.