The Magus of Hay (26 page)

47

Blinded to the rest

B
ETTY FIDDLED WITH
the phone until the picture appeared then she pushed it to the middle of the table, folded her arms and became very still.

Merrily remembered this about her, an ability to withdraw into herself as if she was watching the scene on some inner monitor. They’d met twice since the Radnor Valley witch-hunt, but not in the past year. Her face was firmer than before. Not that much older, but certainly stronger. Her blond hair was back off her face, held by an old-fashioned Alice band, her eyes startlingly clear and focused even in the dim light.

‘Where
was it, darling?’

‘Gwenda Protheroe,’ Gwyn Arthur whispered. ‘Proprietor.’

Long wings of thick dark hair. Leaning over the bar, displaying an impressive cleavage.

‘Set into the back of the fireplace, upstairs,’ Betty said. ‘Probably hidden for years.’

‘We’re just looking for a little help here,’ Robin said, ‘if it’s only to eliminate the possibility of Mr Oliver being Adolf Hitler’s long lost grandson.’

The photo in the phone was a close-up, just discernible in the dimness, from where Merrily and Gwyn Arthur were sitting, way back in the shadows. She glanced at Gwyn Arthur, half alarmed; it was like he’d plugged her into some circuit that edited reality, cut to the chase.

‘It is though, isn’t it? Sort of a swastika.’ Gwenda snatched up
the phone, hair swinging, then called out, ‘Anybody know about any Nazi stuff in Hay, back in the war? Come
on…’

Holding up the phone displaying the soot-rimed swastika.

‘Wossisname,’ the man with the wine stain said. ‘Hitler’s Number Two. Rudolph Wossisname… I got no memory these days.’

‘Rudolph Wossisname,’ Gwenda said. ‘Parachuted down to try and wind up the war, something like that. Wasn’t he incarcerated somewhere round here for a while, or was that just a story?’

‘Rudolf
Hess
. Abergavenny, that was. Taken there for interrogation. It’s only half an hour away. How would that work, then, Gwennie, with the carving on the chimney?’

‘Er… no idea.’

Somebody laughed. Merrily recognized Wine-stain now: Gareth Nunne, a name that looked good over a bookshop. A dealer who somehow acquired cheap remaindered copies of books before they even went into paperback.

Betty said, ‘What are you guys not telling me?’

Robin said, ‘
Bets…’

‘
Die, Englisher pig!’
Betty said.

All eyes on her, including Robin’s, bagged now. His hair was still long, but less sleek than it had been. He looked like a man from whom something was slipping away. You hoped it wasn’t Betty.

‘Anybody remember Tom Armitage?’ Betty said. ‘Antiques?’

Gwenda shook her head. Gareth Nunne grunted.

‘Cocky bugger.’

‘Only I was talking to him on the phone, because I was interested in people who’d had the shop before, and he was telling me about how they used to find bits of war comics around the place. There was a guy there once who sold them, including rare German comics. Nazi stuff, I assume he meant. He said the guy OD’d on drugs.’

Gwyn Arthur was nodding.

‘But you guys,’ Betty said, ‘when I show you this, you just go rambling on about Rudolph bloody Hess.’

Gareth Nunne looked at her, mock-startled. Gwenda laughed.

‘You tell them, girlie.’

A woman said wearily, ‘Jab.’

Gwenda said, ‘What?’

‘Jerrold Adrian Brace. Gorgeous, pouting Jerry Brace. Used to sign his initials, JAB. He’s the guy sold the war books and comics.’

‘Connie…’
Gareth Nunne putting on a warning tone. ‘You remember what we…?’

‘Oh Gawd, Gary, what’s the point? It was a long time ago.’

Merrily saw she was quite elderly and sloppy, about six necklaces, and smoking what looked like a slim panatella. Betty turned her wooden chair.

‘Sorry, is it Mrs Wilby? Look, we’re not having a great day, and I know there’s something so much worse going on all around us, right, but it would be helpful to deal with this. That shop’s important to us, and it doesn’t seem to have a good history. Just helps to know these things.’

‘So, like, anything you can tell us,’ Robin said, ‘be helpful if you didn’t hold back.’

‘Yeah, go on, Con,’ Gwenda said. ‘Somebody tell them. Tell
me
. We’re all grown-ups here.’

‘Nobody remembers now, anyway,’ Gareth Nunne said. ‘He wasn’t yere that long. And when he
was
yere he wasn’t yere half the time.’

‘Gareth likes you,’ Connie said to Betty. ‘Gareth thinks we have far too many ugly old booksellers and you would help redress the balance. Gareth’s sexist, ageist and everything else ending in ist. And I’ve been charmed by your insanely dashing, disabled husband, and we knew from the papers what had happened to you, so we wanted you to be happy here. And, as we said, it’s a very long time ago.’

‘Don’t stop there,’ Betty said.

‘Well, he died, you see,’ Gareth Nunne said. ‘In the end, that was what most people remembered about Jerry Brace. The way he died.’

‘He OD’d,’ Betty said. ‘That
is
right, is it?’

‘Yes, but not quite so many people did in those days, my dear. Not in places like Hay. Not
heroin
, anyway. Bit of a nine-day wonder. Not that there weren’t many of
those
, mind – oh, the glamour. The lovely Marianne Faithfull here for a while. April Ashley, Britain’s first ever sex-change sailor. Not that poor bloody Jerry was famous.’

‘Except for the way he died,’ Connie said.

‘Flaming Nora!’ Gwenda threw a bag of crisps in the air. ‘Get to the
point
. I don’t know any of this, and I’m furious.’

‘Well, of course you don’t, dear,’ Connie Wilby said. ‘It was over thirty years ago. He was an ex public-school boy. Wealthy, titled father with strong fascist leanings. Sir Charles. His Mosleyite mate was Lord Brocket, who lived at Kinnersley Castle, end of the war. And he’d infected his son with his political views. Jerry had this awful obsession with what you might call the dark side of the last war.’

Gareth Nunne grunted.

‘Ostensibly. In the shop you’d have books on Churchill and the Battle of Britain and piles of war comics. But upstairs, up past the sign that said “Staff Only”… was the other stuff.’

‘We used to think it was just pornography,’ Connie Wilby said. ‘Sort of stuff you’d sell on the Internet these days. You knew people were going to that shop who never went anywhere else. Men usually, sometimes in pairs, in those short denim jackets. It was only when he died that we found out that it was wall-to-wall heavy-duty Hitler and the SS and satanism.’

‘Some of those books,’ Gareth Nunne said, ‘were actually plain-cover stuff. Interminable tracts full of hatred. Privately published by the neo-Nazi fraternity in the UK. He also – this was the early days of video – would put together old films of the
rise of Hitler and those Berlin Olympics, the Aryan fitness dream. And footage from Himmler’s magic castle at Wewelsburg. He had a video copier, churning out all this stuff.’

‘You’d hear him talking about Hitler when he was pissed,’ Connie said, ‘like the Fuhrer was some bloody dark angel, and he—’

‘Was that his phrase?’ Betty’s head had snapped up. ‘Or yours?’

‘Oh, his, I ’spect. He was a bit of a… they’d say he was a Goth now.’

‘There was a stage,’ Gareth Nunne said, ‘where we’d have all these bloody skinheads in town, all filing into his shop. I hadn’t got a shop then, see, I was working for the King, and I don’t reckon
he
was too happy, but it wasn’t like he owned the place.’

Gareth Nunne scowled, remembering, his facial skin flaw shining like beetroot. Gareth Nunne and Connie Wilby… Merrily had been in both their shops once or twice, over the years. She remembered Connie specializing in local history and old maps.

‘With hindsight,’ Connie said, ‘I think Jerry only opened that shop to feed his obsession. His opening hours were ludicrously irregular. Sometimes he’d close for a week and bugger orf somewhere – back to his parents’ house – or with some woman, we thought. He was very fond of women. But, as I say, he was terribly handsome. Blond hair.’ She looked up at the bar, wistfully. ‘
Terribly
handsome. Which rather blinded you to the rest.’

Merrily saw Gwenda raising an eyebrow.

‘And so
fit
,’ Connie said. ‘As if he worked out at the gym, which was hardly fashionably in those days. I don’t think there
were
any gyms in this part of the world. Not outside schools anyway.’

‘You’re playing this for all it’s worth, aren’t you, darling?’ Gwenda said. ‘And you do keep dwelling on his physical attributes. That mean you… knew him well?’

‘Not well,’ Connie said gruffly. ‘But – yes – I knew him. Once. Couldn’t take my drink in those days, that was the trouble.’

‘Bugger me.’ Gareth turned his chair round to peer at her. ‘I didn’t know about that, Connie.’

‘Thought I was going to be his older woman at first, but he never even looked at me again. Or he looked at me properly and thought, “Oh Christ, what have I done?”’

‘You were still in your thirties,’ Gareth said. ‘Just about. If I’d known you was up for—’

‘Oh please! They were heady days, even the King bringing girls back to his castle. Nearest Hay ever came to a summer of love. And
I
didn’t know he was a bloody Nazi, did I? It was just war books, then, far as we knew.’

Gwenda said. ‘Was this… you and the Aryan beauty… in the shop in Back Fold?’

‘Was, yes. I think Jerry was the last person to actually live there. He’d had the walls painted black, and there were posters and things. Joss sticks. Not bad for a man-pad. I remember he just had a bloody big mattress on the floor in the living area. And he’d light a fire in the small grate upstairs. Small burn marks all over the floorboards.’

Connie burst into throaty laughter.

Robin said, ‘What happened to all the books and tapes and stuff?’

‘Don’t know, dear. Somebody must’ve come to clean the place out, get rid of the stock. I doubt any of us would’ve wanted to take it on, even as a free gift. We didn’t know about his heroin habit. Wasn’t so ubiquitous, then, not like now, all those needle bins in the public lavs.’

‘A superfit heroin addict?’ Gwenda said.

‘Perhaps he was just wasted. I wouldn’t know, would I? I was a convent girl. Perhaps when he shut the shop and went away he was in some sort of rehab – they have rehab in those days? Can’t recall. Anyway, that’s why nobody noticed. When he… went.’

She looked at Gareth, who looked down into his beer.

‘He’d been dead for well over a week, see, when they found him. What was it, Connie, overdose or a bad batch of something?’

Connie shook her head. Betty didn’t react. Merrily wondered if she’d been expecting something worse.

‘All too common nowadays,’ Connie said, ‘but back then, in Hay…’

‘Where did they find him?’ Betty asked.

‘If it was me about to live there,’ Gwenda said softly, ‘I wouldn’t want to know. Don’t put yourself through it, darling, he’s gone. And you’re young. Sterner stuff, what?’

Connie laughed.

48

Messiah

M
ERRILY HAD DRAWN
it, from memory, on the back of a post office receipt – no room on a cigarette packet any more because of the horror photos which could surely only encourage more hard kids to smoke. She wanted to follow Robin and Betty out of the bar, but Gwyn Arthur had shaken his head: not yet.

He’d waited for a couple of minutes after they’d left before standing up.

‘Didn’t think you were still here, Gwyn,’ Gwenda said. ‘A little tryst, is it?’

‘This is my friend, Mrs Watkins, Gwenda. Person of the cloth.’

Merrily felt the gaze of the close-bearded man standing close to Gwenda, polishing a glass.

‘You must have hidden qualities, Gwyn,’ he said.

‘So well hidden my wife can barely remember them. I’ll see you, boy.’

‘That’s her son?’ Merrily said outside.

Gwyn Arthur laughed.

‘A customer who once said that was almost glassed. He’s… her boyfriend of some long standing. Gwenda has charms which are not so well hidden. As you may have noticed. Some men who’ve never read a book in their lives patronize that bar just to watch her move.’

Merrily followed him across to a bench near the spired clock
tower which she saw, for an instant, as a huge hypodermic syringe. Two cops were talking in its shadow. She took out the post office receipt.

‘Quite an unusual swastika. Less angular.’

He shook his head, didn’t seem to recognize it.

‘I was here when they found Mr Brace. About a year before I went home to West Wales in search of fame and fortune. Welsh-speaker, see, instant fast-track out there. But my wife had never learned, so we came back in the end.’

A cameraman from Sky TV was shooting the two cops against the clock while a reporter studied notes on a clipboard. There was a chilly feeling now that if you turned away you’d miss some development.

‘I tend to smell it, in my memory, every time I go past that shop, which is almost every day. The smell from when we broke in, and there was Jerrold Brace, mostly naked, decaying in the bath.’

‘Do you know why the Thorogoods have opened a bookshop when they’re closing down in all the high streets? Hard enough for a seasoned professional.’

‘If things weren’t as bad as they are, I don’t suppose they’d find a shop here at a rent they could afford. I’m guessing they never quite recovered from what happened to them. And they were welcomed here. The booksellers are glad to have another bookshop to strengthen the foundations. If they hadn’t taken that shop, it might’ve been a nail bar. Another one gone.’

‘And that’s why nobody wanted to tell them about the death in their bath?’

‘I expect it’s a different bath now. Wasn’t that gruesome, apart from the condition of the body – quite a warm autumn. Brace had apparently been off heroin for a while and then got hold of some particularly pure stuff and… gone. There was the syringe on the bathroom floor and the remains of the unadulterated smack.’

‘And he had links with the Convoy? And the missing girls?’

‘As Mrs Wilby said in there, he was a good-looking boy and he liked the ladies… No, that’s wrong. Almost certainly wrong. It wasn’t ladies he liked. He’d grown up with
them.
He liked… if he was a woman or a gay man we’d use the words
rough trade
. He appeared to like the sort of women you might find attached to the convoy. And when Gareth Nunne says he wasn’t at the shop for long periods, you might find that one of the long periods was during the magic mushroom season.’

‘He’d join the Convoy on the Bluff?’

‘He was certainly there when we were questioning them about the missing females. I recall asking him if the older one, Cherry Banks, had ever been seen in Hay. If he’d said he didn’t know what Cherry Banks looked like, my suspicions would have been aroused. But no, he admitted to having had sex with her. He said he came up to the Bluff to chill out, or however they put it back then. Chill out and get laid.’

‘What about the other girl, Mephista? Was she rough trade? At sixteen?’

‘She was… intelligent. But different. Her parents were old hippies. Her dad told me they’d tried to bring her up with their values – live frugally, be at one with nature. I remember thinking, she’s too young for all that. She’ll rebel. The way her parents rebelled against capitalism, consumerism, shiny suits.’

‘What did Brace have to say about her?’

‘Thought he knew which one she was. Well, yes, I’m quite sure he did. They were both to be found at Rector’s farm – Mephista dragged there by her parents, Brace helping out.’

‘With what?’

‘I don’t know. But, of all the people from the Convoy, he seems to have been the closest to Rector.’

Grainy clouds had slid across the sun, enough to bring out a breeze. Merrily zipped up her coat.

‘My information is Rector had a substantial neo-Nazi following from his first book – dealing with the occultism of Nazi Germany. He was distancing himself from it by then… but
some of them clearly found that hard to accept. If they even believed it. It was as if they thought he had some secret source that they could tap into. Did Rector know what Brace was?’

‘And who is
your
secret source, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Erm… I think that had better remain secret for the time being. Reliable, though.’

She wondered if his interest stemmed purely from his own involvement in a case that was still on the books. Did he feel the answer was here, in Hay?

‘Did
you
talk to Peter Rector, Gwyn?’

‘The Messiah? Not one-to-one, having gone there as bag-carrier to my DI.’

‘The Messiah? Who called him that – the Convoy?’

‘And others. He’d stride the bare hills looking like a prophet. Hair suspiciously black for a man well into his fifties. But when you spoke to him he was unexpectedly quiet. Almost – what’s the word? – diffident?’

‘You think working with the Convoy filled some need in him? Like to help the homeless? Or was it more cynical? People who wouldn’t tell. Or, if they did, wouldn’t be believed.’

‘He certainly used to hang around with that chap, the television playwright. Jeremy Sanders…?
Sandford
.’

‘Cathy Come Home
?’

‘You remember that?’

‘Yeah, seminal TV play about homelessness. We watched it at theological college in connection with something. Man with a strong social conscience. He was there?’

‘Lived nor far away, in Herefordshire. Still interested in the homeless. And gypsies of all kinds – a member of the Gypsy Council. And he’d written a book about magic mushrooms. Someone said it was Sandford who encouraged Rector to involve the Convoy in his activities. And there was that other chap, Bruce Chatwin, the writer, he was staying with Rector when we talked to him. Used to stay with him while writing.’

‘Both dead now.’

‘There we are. Regular little arts festival up there.’

‘So why would Brace have a hidden swastika in his shop? Inside the chimney which was obviously still in use in his time and then was blocked up. By him?’

‘Don’t know
what
to make of it. Set in stone, or brick, like a family crest. His father, Sir Charles, died quite recently.’

‘I don’t think I’ve heard of him.’

‘Well connected in the City. Second home in Herefordshire, to which he eventually retired. Victorian Gothic monstrosity out near Bromyard which he enjoyed making even more medieval. As Mrs Wilby said, he was a friend of the Nazi-sympathizer Lord Brocket. Also, incidentally, of the fugitive Lord Lucan.’

‘He was right-wing?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Brace was one of the people mentioned as possibly sheltering Lucan when he was being sought for the murder of his children’s nanny. A lot of it going on, then, under the surface. Talk of a right-wing coup, being planned when it was suggested that the prime minister, Wilson, was being controlled by the Soviet Union. Very dark days, and the Welsh Border… little hotbed of prominent fascists. But… being a neo-Nazi was not an offence, except to the sensibilities of some of us.’

‘Are they still around? Frannie Bliss is a bit dismissive about their continued potential as a threat. My source… less so.’

‘It’s an interesting question.’ Gwyn Arthur had his pipe going. ‘Throughout the eighties and nineties, we were occasionally alerted to the existence of extreme right-wing cells in Mid Wales, Shropshire, Herefordshire. Often indistinguishable from the survivalists in their remote farms, with more weaponry than was legal. You’ll still find them on the Internet.’

‘You think Brace was actually a member of one?’

‘Not sure. Could be he was simply serving a gap in the market. Dealing in the kind of books he knew some of these people would pay enormous prices for. Using his father’s contacts.’

‘You think there was more, though, don’t you?’

He took his pipe from between his teeth.

‘Merrily, you dismiss these people as complete crackpots, see, and then something happens. But is there anything here to risk public humiliation by passing on to my former colleagues? I tend to think not. Still… it’s been very interesting talking to you. Let’s stay in touch.’

She noticed he’d called her Merrily, as if accepting her, at last, as some kind of colleague, a legitimate confidante. And yet…

She watched him walk away, thinking that, for events of more than thirty years ago, they all seemed very clearly defined in the mind of Gwyn Arthur Jones.

One side of the car park backed on to the grounds of Hay Primary School, a TV reporter was standing by the gate, recording a piece-to-camera as children came out, met by parents and minders.

Merrily unlocked the Freelander and got in, slammed the door, feeling tired and frustrated, that elusive moment of illumination at Hay Church far behind her now. Nothing quite added up, just became more complicated, more tangled. She rang Bliss’s mobile and filled up his answering service with an edited version of what she’d learn from Gwenda’s Bar and her discussion with Gwyn Arthur Jones, who she didn’t name.

On the way home, the mobile chimed, and she stopped on the edge of the village of Dorstone, where Tamsin lived, to pick up a text.

Gwyn Arthur:

I got it wrong. It was not Messiah
they called Rector. It was Magus.
The Magus of Hay.
For what that’s worth.

Magus.
An archaic term, applied to sundry sorcerers and the Three Wise Men of the New Testament.

Magus of
Hay
?

She texted back at once.

Who actually called him that?
Can you remember?

When she drove into Ledwardine twenty minutes later, her head was still so clogged with it that she turned into the vicarage drive, almost running into the back of Martin Longbeach’s Mini Cooper.
Bugger.
Slammed on, backed out and reversed all the way into Church Street.

Parking on the square, she gathered up her bag and her fleece and stumbled down to Lol’s cottage, where Ethel was waiting behind the door, slaloming around her ankles, as the mobile chimed.

The text from Gwyn Arthur Jones said,

I think it was the
novelist
Beryl Bainbridge.

She called him back, but there was no answer.