Authors: Phil Rickman
49
Superstition
U
PSTAIRS
, K
APOOR BENT
to examine the derelict fireplace.
Robin said, ‘You see it?’
Kapoor straightened up. ‘It was an Indian sun symbol, you know that? My gran was always pissed off at Hitler nicking it off us.’
‘You notice this one is going backwards? That a negative thing?’
‘Dunno, mate. Never heard of a satanic swastika. Coulda phoned my gran, she’d know. If she wasn’t dead. Tell you what, put the plate back, forget it.’
‘And the fact that a guy obsessed with Nazi black magic was living here? And that it sounds like nobody ever made a success of a business here ever since?’
‘That,’ Kapoor said, ‘is just superstition.’
‘Well, yeah. Of course it is. Holy shit, Kapoor, I’m a
pagan
. I’m a superstitious
person
. Superstition is
good
. Superstition is opening yourself to hidden messages. Recognizing what the world’s telling you and reacting accordingly. Taking precautionary measures.’
‘No, mate.’ Kapoor’s eyes narrowing. ‘That’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.’
‘You know what? Your gran would not like how you turned out.’
Robin looked at Betty who’d followed them up and was standing near the top of the stairs, face clouded with uncertainty in a place once a magnet for razored racists and
disaffected street scum. A room that once had shelves packed with
tracts full of hatred
, according to Gareth Nunne – a guy entitled to a degree of contempt by virtue of being about as far removed as you could imagine from the Aryan ideal of superfit manhood.
After a while, Betty said, ‘I probably told you about my brief encounter with neo-Nazism.’
Robin blinked.
‘Bets, for some reason I have no recollection of that.’
‘It was before we met. I went out with one, once. Kind of.’
‘And you told me about this?’ Robin was blinking. ‘I don’t think you did.’
‘Once
, OK? All right, maybe it’s not the kind of thing you boast about.’
‘Take a seat,’ Robin said.
‘I was about seventeen.’ Betty dropped into a cane chair. ‘I was with a mate, and we got talking to these two guys in a second-hand record shop in Llandod – Llandrindod Wells,’ she said for Kapoor’s benefit, ‘where we moved when I was a kid. They asked us if we wanted to go to a festival up on the border, towards Shropshire. They seemed quite normal in the shop, but when they picked us up they were in a black van and wearing what I thought at first was just standard goth kit. I was a bit suspicious, but, you know, there were two of us, and I didn’t see the swastikas till we got out at the festival. Which, of course, was right in the middle of nowhere and not exactly Glastonbury.’
Robin said, ‘You never told me
any
of this.’
‘Maybe you weren’t listening. Anyway, it wasn’t one of my favourite nights, and I’ve not thought about it much since. We kept away from them, wondering how to play it. They got stoned and came looking for us, and we’d realized by then that we were supposed to camp out with them for the night. So we just took off for the nearest farm and asked if we could use their phone. Spent just about every last penny we’d got on a taxi. But not
before we’d listened to all this shit, in the van and then round the fire on the site.’
‘Like what?’
‘How their generation – our generation – was going to see the birth of a new aeon of Aryan supremacy of which Hitler was only the prequel. How the spirit of Hitler was still out there to initiate the… I don’t know, the warrior replacing the wimp-culture. Make war, not love. How the weak should be culled. And the work-shy scroungers.’
‘Was everybody there that way inclined?’
‘Probably no more than a dozen. It was an acoustic festival run by local beardies, and I think they were a bit pissed off by these guys who were kind of jeering at the music. But nobody wanted to cause any trouble.’
‘I’d’ve caused some trouble,’ Robin said. ‘Back then.’
‘I ran into a few later, on the pagan scene. Always hanging around the fringes of Wicca and Druidry. Lowest kind of goth – heavy metal, death metal, grandiose, sexist. It’s mainly a man-thing.’
Robin thought of his paintings for Lord Madoc, the intergalactic Celt. A lot of violence there. Not that he’d written the stuff.
‘You never told me,’ he said sadly. ‘Not all this.’
‘Robin, I was never very interested. I’ve always followed the Celtic tradition. I knew they were into some of the same things as us – earth energies, green politics. Just in a different way. They reject the matriarchal element in Celtic paganism, the Mother Goddess. And they say we got the back-to-the-land thing wrong. You can’t just get by with apple orchards and growing your own veg, you need to kill. Kill the wildlife, cull the population. Get rid of the weak.’
‘That’s religion?’
‘Oh, and democracy can never work. And the name of the God-like Hitler was blackened by us inventing the Holocaust. And all non-whites are a result of our ancestors having sex with monkeys, but you knew that.’
Robin’s hand closed on the ram’s head knob on his stick, aware of something rising within Betty that didn’t occur too often. She’d been the one to suggest they show the picture of the swastika around town, which translated as Gwenda’s. Betty had gone in meaning business, Gwenda backing her up, two strong women, both outsiders.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Whadda we do?’
‘If he’s left anything here, we need to get rid of it. Starting, I suppose, with the purely practical stuff.’
‘The easy bits, huh?’ Robin knelt down, ran his fingers over the contours of the crooked cross in the chimney. ‘You wouldn’t have a stone chisel, Kapoor? I got one back at the bungalow, but we should do this now. Now it’s exposed to the air.’
‘Well, yeah,’ Kapoor said. ‘Suppose I can find summink. But if you bring the whole wall down, it ain’t my fault.’
‘Accepted.’
‘Fair enough. Don’t go away.’
When he’d gone, Robin was aware of the cold, metallic weight of the air in the room. Maybe imagination, but the ambient calm around Betty wasn’t. He knew that calm, like a vulcanologist knew volcanos.
‘You’re quiet.’
‘For too long.’
She went over to the window, looking down into Back Fold, the town slowing down for the evening like some old crustacean settling into its shell.
‘They should’ve told us.’
‘Maybe it was just we didn’t ask.’
‘Crap.’
‘Bets, we’re—’
‘You’re right. Nobody’s had much luck here, have they? From a back-street antiques dump with a phone number in the window to a failed literary bookshop. And Jeeter’s right, people cover up things they don’t like. It’s like this guy Tom Armitage – “Oh, life’s too short for what you can’t explain.” Wrong!’ Betty
banged the flat of a fist on the window sill, turned round, glaring at him. ‘You explain it, then you
fix it.
Meanwhile… yes, get rid of the obvious. Knock the bloody wall down, if you have to.’
He nodded. Stood up, and the pain went up and down his back like a file. He felt his face go grey. He didn’t care.
Bliss was halfway to Ross-on-Wye, the back road to Annie’s flat in Malvern to avoid Hereford peak-hour traffic, when the mobile went.
By the time he’d found somewhere to pull in, with the warning lights on, the phone had already stopped, as if it had been a wrong number or a change of mind by the caller. Didn’t recognize the number, not one he’d stored, but he called it back anyway.
‘Oh. Bliss.’
‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s… Claudia Cornwell in Talgarth.’
It registered at once with Bliss that she sounded edgy and not in a barrister way. He kept quiet. He could see what looked like the full length of the Black Mountains from the English side. Against the late sun, they did look unusually black.
‘Bliss, I’m not sure how to handle this. I’ve just seen something on Wales Today. The Welsh news? Well, for a start, I saw you.’
‘In Hay, yeh. Apologies for not wearing me suit. Long night.’
‘It was just a parting shot in a long report on the missing policewoman. About a false alarm that had the police rushing down to the river.’
‘The King of Hay.’
‘Yes.’
‘Something you want to tell me, Claudia?’
‘There is, but I have another call waiting that might have a bearing on it. You going to be around tonight? I mean you, not the police, generally.’
‘I could be.’
‘You know what I’m saying. There are some things that have to remain confidential. As you must know yourself.’
‘And some things where privacy has to take second place.’
‘I just need a little more time to think, Francis, and perhaps an assurance that if I tell you something I’m not going to be making what amounts to a formal statement to West Mercia Police.’
‘You know I can’t make promises with something this big on the go.’
‘I’ll call you back,’ she said.
Bliss called Annie to say he might be late.
‘She’s a barrister,’ Annie said. ‘Be bloody careful, Francis. You’ve had very little sleep, which didn’t used to matter.’
‘Yeh. Thanks.’
A mile or so further on, he found a gate left open to a field newly mowed for hay. Pulled in, tilted his seat back and slept.
When Kapoor hit the end of the chisel with the hammer, the chisel vanished up to its hilt.
‘Blimey. What’s happening here?’
‘A space?’ Robin said. ‘There’s a space behind the swastika?’
Kapoor dropped the chisel, cupping his hands to catch a little rubble. Concrete, Robin thought, not stone. Spider-cracks were appearing at the top of the swastika.
‘Gonna drop out in a bit, anyway,’ Kapoor said, ‘if I don’t help it along.’
‘Do it,’ Robin said.
Kapoor lifted the hammer and drove in the chisel one more time, Robin cupping his own hands underneath, letting the swastika fall into them in a puff of dust. Robin carried it away, a round of concrete a couple of inches thick, Kapoor scraping out the edge of the hole it had left.
‘Torch?’
Betty had the mini-Maglite ready, handed it to him and he shone it around in the hole then came away, turning the head to
switch it off, putting it down in the grate, wiping dust from his mouth.
‘Just a hole.’
‘Lemme see.’
Robin picked up the torch, bent carefully to peer in there, saw a shallow tunnel, like a handful of bricks had been removed. At the back of them, stone.
‘Don’t get it. It’s like another wall.’
‘Well, yeah, it is,’ Kapoor said. ‘It’s the castle wall, innit?’
‘Yeah.’ Robin came out, his hip grinding. ‘Gotta be.’
Betty said, ‘The castle wall? Can I just…?’ She picked up the chisel. ‘Jeeter, if you can shine the beam to the back… Thanks.’
She reached an arm into the space. Robin heard the blade scraping at the stones, and then Betty withdrew it and lay down on her stomach and put her face up to the gap in the back of the chimney. Emerging with her face and hair like she was wearing clown’s make-up.
Robin smiled; didn’t think he ever loved her more than when she was all messed up and didn’t care.
‘Basically, this room,’ Betty said, ‘has a little entry to the castle. Right into the wall.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Does that not ring your bell, Robin?’ You were so excited to be living so close to the castle. And you’re not even a Nazi.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You don’t get it, do you? This Brace… he had money, it sounds like. He was
from
money. He could’ve got a better shop than this. Why would he want this one? Maybe the same reason you wanted it, except you just like it because it’s old and the nearest thing in Hay to a romantic ruin. But for him… a military stronghold? Dedicated to violence?’
‘I don’t—’
‘It’s how they think.’
‘Right.’
He was recalling last night, though it seemed like another life. The way he’d seen the castle through the small, square window in the bathroom and felt no welcome there. Thinking how, even when the castle was in ruins, a tradition of blood-flow had continued under the walls.
This would mean nothing to most people. It was in the past. Over.
‘It doesn’t end there,’ Betty said. ‘The space. I don’t think it ends with the wall. I’m guessing some old stones at the end have been taken out and replaced.’
‘How d’you know that?’
‘It’s not mortared. It’s just rubble.’
Robin looked at Kapoor.
‘I can’t reach that far,’ Kapoor said. ‘Can’t get inside there with a hammer and chisel. You got a crowbar? You know? Like a big tyre iron?’
Robin shook his head.
‘Got a spade in the truck I keep for if we get stuck in the snow.’
It had been snowing until well into April, and he’d felt if he’d taken the spade out it would snow again.
‘Better than noffing, mate.’
‘I’ll go fetch it,’ Robin said. ‘Long as the cops don’t see me and think I’m using it to bury someone.’
Wasn’t a joke, and nobody laughed.
50
Spartan
‘S
HE WAS AT
Rector’s place when we went to talk to him about the girls,’ Gwyn Arthur said on the phone.
Beryl Bainbridge.’
‘
Dame
Beryl Bainbridge, I think,’ Merrily said. ‘Distinguished novelist.’ She looked at her cigarette. ‘Distinguished smoker.’
‘Rector liked writers, as you know,’ Gwyn Arthur said.
Merrily lit the cigarette. She’d been finishing her omelette in Lol’s kitchen when he’d called back.
‘This woman answered the door when we arrived,’ he said. ‘Quite… petite, long dark hair. Made us a cup of tea. “I’m Beryl,” she said. Very pleasant, she was, very nice to us. She said, “I suppose you want to talk to the Magus of Hay.”’
‘You didn’t, by any chance, ask her to explain why she called him that?’
‘It was said in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, and I was just a policeman, not a potential acolyte. Why is it important?’
‘Puts him in a different light, somehow. It’s all stayed with you, hasn’t it? Didn’t take much memory-jogging.’
He was silent. Time to push him?
‘I’m wondering… if there was something that, with hindsight, Gwyn, you feel you could have done that you didn’t.’
‘Isn’t there always? I wish I’d known then what I know now. I wish I’d been a more senior officer at the time. I wish I’d had someone like you with whom to exchange ideas.’
‘I’m not—’
‘By which I mean someone who can explain aspects of human behaviour by seeing them from a different perspective. Who talks to people who wouldn’t talk to me. Or not in the same way.’
She could hear his breath, slow, almost meditative.
‘Oh dear. I think I need,’ he said, ‘to take you into my confidence. Before something happens.’
She stared out of the window into the sandy light on Church Street. This had been a long time coming.
‘If it hasn’t already,’ he said.
He’d opened the shop, selling second-hand crime novels, with the help of an old friend, a long-established bookseller in Hay. Didn’t really know why. He liked books, but had no particular aptitude for selling them
‘However, the
Brecon and Radnor Express
thought it was worth a story.
Top Detective
– as they were generous enough to describe me –
Turns To Crime.
I get my picture taken between Inspector Wallander and Inspector Rebus on the book covers. After it appeared in the B & R, the story was picked up by a couple of the national papers. Not big, but it was there.’
Weeks later, he said, he’d had a phone call from an elderly man in North Wales, to whom he hadn’t spoken since the 1980s, when the man’s daughter had gone missing from an encampment on Hay Bluff.
‘Mephista’s dad?’
‘Sounding much the same. Still desperate to know if his daughter was alive or dead. Even more desperate, perhaps, because his wife, he said, was very seriously ill and perhaps there might not be so much time left for her to achieve peace of mind. It made me feel guilty over the quality-time we might have spent soon after the girl disappeared if we hadn’t been inclined to suspect it was all a scam to keep the Convoy on the Bluff for a few more weeks. I wondered if we
had
treated them like third-class citizens.’
‘Attitudes were different, back then.’
‘But… I was retired now. I said – without promising anything – that I’d go back and review the case. They wanted to pay me, but I thought it was the least I could do. And it also gave me a reason to… feel worthwhile again. Every couple of weeks, I’ve been giving him a ring and going over a few things. Even tracked down a couple of former members of the Convoy – one of whom liked the area so much he came back, to live, with his family. Has a plumbing business now. One thing I
was
able to harden up was the evidence of Mephista’s relationship with Brace, which I now know to have been a close one.’
‘How close?’
‘Extremely close. She had what used to be called a crush on him. Which developed. He’d bring her back to Hay in his vehicle.’
‘She couldn’t have been here when he died if he lay undiscovered for so long.’
‘Couldn’t she? What if she didn’t want to go back to her parents? Or be called to give evidence at the inquest?’
‘But if Brace was dead… where
could
she go? She was just a kid.’
‘Interesting, isn’t it?’
‘With the older girl, Cherry Banks?’
‘Cherry’s role in this… is uncertain. No mention of her again.’
Merrily watched the clouds breaking up over the vicarage chimneys. Going to be a clear night.
‘You learn anything from Mephista’s father that you didn’t learn at the time?’
‘Not a great deal. The truth is that it was not possible to pick up Mephista’s trail without access to the Brace family.’
‘Sir Charles? The old Mosleyite? How does that work?’
Sir Charles is indeed central to this. I, ah, went to his funeral.’
‘Where?’
‘Hereford Cathedral. As any detective will tell you, funerals can be… revelatory. Who’s shedding tears, who isn’t. Who’s
shedding tears to an implausible extent. I finally struck pay-dirt, as they say, that evening, in discussion with a nephew of Sir Charles who, I think it’s safe to say, did not share his politics and was not expecting to receive anything in the will. He only came out of curiosity, to see who turned up.’
Merrily kept quiet. Gwyn Arthur evidently wasn’t taking her fully into his confidence. What had given him reason to think the Braces would know what had happened to Mephista?
He told her Sir Charles’s nephew had decided to skip the finale at the crematorium, to spend a couple of hours with him in the bar of the Castle House Hotel. Obviously some resentment here. Gwyn Arthur had learned how Sir Charles’s estate had been depleted by the arrival of a grandson.
‘Seems that not long after the death of their son, Sir Charles and Lady Brace were made aware of a young woman who insisted she was carrying Jerry’s child.’
‘Ah… And did he believe her?’
‘Might have been more resistant had she not been accompanied by someone he knew and trusted – and one can only assume this was in a political context. Perhaps someone who was a regular customer of Jerrold Brace and had got to know Mephista. Anyway – the upshot – he took her in.’
‘Adopted the child?’
‘This is where it gets interesting. My new friend, the nephew, believes both mother and child spent some time in London, at a hotel owned by friends of Sir Charles, who provided employment for the mother until what may have been her first marriage. The boy gets sent away to a series of famously tough boarding schools. Spending his holidays at one of the farms or communes we were discussing earlier. Where there’s a regime of fitness, self-sufficiency.’
‘But wasn’t Mephista resistant to all that?’
‘Hippy self-sufficiency is not the same, is it? This was not benign. It did not involve peace and love. And, anyway, it appears she didn’t go with him. Mephista seems to have spent
most of her time in London,
whoring around
, in the words of Sir Charles’s disgusted nephew. He
may
have exaggerated. But as far as Sir Charles was concerned, it seems, her role, essentially, was over.’
‘So Brace’s grandson is taken from his mother at an early age… brought up as…’
‘As a warrior, I suppose.’
‘Sounds almost Spartan. In the original sense.’
‘Oh, it was. I was directed to specific websites where I read of young people being turned out into the hills for whole days and nights to live on what they could find, what they could kill or steal. Discovering their inner resources.’
‘What the hell kind of man
was
Sir Charles?’
‘I’d say a man who was ashamed at his son failing to live up to the Aryan ideal. Deserting his fitness programme, descending into drug use, sexual adventures with unsuitable women of uncertain origins.’
‘No other children?’
‘Daughter in America. Another son who distanced himself from his father’s politics enough to become a radical journalist in Scotland.’
‘So Jerry must’ve been a real loss.’
‘One wonders, where did Sir Charles lay the blame for what happened?’
A pause. The clouds had dispersed. Swallows dived for insects, tiny, efficient acts of carnage.
Merrily said, ‘Rector, do you think? For betraying the cause?’
‘And who supplied Jerry Brace with the raw heroin?’
‘What, you think…?’
‘Happens in Hay at a time when more or less all the bookshops – all forty-plus of them – were flourishing. When the town was acquiring an international reputation. When the first festival was being planned. So you have a town trembling on the brink of affluence… and, close to its centre, a bookshop trading in the vilest form of political pornography.’
‘You think Brace’s death was…? That he was seen as damaging to the town’s image?’
‘Not something ever likely to be proved, one way or the other. Heroin, in the right situation, can be the most effective of murder weapons. But, yes, Sir Charles seems to have blamed what he thought of as the degenerate hippy element in Hay for the death of his… true heir? Rather contemptuous of Independent Hay.’
‘But he must’ve been aware of it happening, Gwyn. If he saw Jerry as his true heir he must’ve stayed in touch with him. Why didn’t he take steps to get him out of there?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know why Jerrold Brace came to Hay in the first place. I’d guess he was no more a natural bookseller than I am.’
‘So are you any closer to finding Mephista?’
‘I…’ You could almost hear him wondering if he’d said too much. ‘The truth of it is, there may be a dilemma here. Would it be better, in many ways, for her father and her ailing mother to remain in ignorance of what became of their daughter?’
‘That doesn’t sound good.’
‘It probably isn’t.’
Ethel watched, golden-eyed, from her fleecy bed by the side of the unlit stove as the evening brightened. Merrily carried the empty mug back to the kitchen, which overlooked the remains of the orchard that once encircled the village. Maybe Lol would call tonight. She wished he’d just come home. Being alone was not about freedom.
She Googled Beryl Bainbridge, groaning softly at the result: nearly three quarters of a million mentions. She put in
Beryl Bainbridge, Peter Rector
: nothing to suggest a connection.
Beryl Bainbridge, Hay-on-Wye
: yes, she’d appeared a few times at the Hay Festival, she’d enjoyed it, she liked the place, its eccentricity. Her London home apparently looked like a Victorian museum of childhood, with ornate religious over-tones
and her funeral had been incense-soaked Anglo-Catholic.
Merrily didn’t remember falling asleep on the sofa, only the dream of a darkened church that stank of hash, lit by a single, hovering candle casting no light as she walked towards it along an aisle that went on forever.
A time-lapse, and then the candle was directly in front of her, blinding white, held aloft by a man far taller than her, whose face was a shoal of flitting shadows.
‘What will you do now?’
he said.
When the phone chimed she awoke with a throb, the way you did when the nightmare bucked and you were thrown to the ground, lying there and praying, like a child prayed: Please God, save me from the bad things in the dark.
‘Are you doing anything important tonight,’ Gwyn Arthur Jones asked, ‘or are you available for work?’
‘Work?’
‘Do you… keep a black bag or something, at the ready?’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Not everyone,’ Gwyn Arthur said, ‘is an old agnostic like myself.’
She stood next to the open window, hands flat on the sill. No breeze now, the evening becoming the warmest part of the day.
In the distance, the low growl of a tractor in a field south of the village, some farmer starting his haymaking early, remembering last year’s drowned summer. The possibility of climate change, and the farmers changing with it, ready to work through the night if necessary.
A now-familiar grey car appeared on the cobbled square where, it being Friday night, about a dozen others were parked, for the Black Swan.
No surprise. It was Sylvia Merchant’s car and probably Sylvia who got out. Certainly tall enough, but the woman wore a long,
light-green raincoat and, even though this was the warmest dry night in over a month, its hood was up, a hand holding it together over her face. Another woman emerged from the passenger side. She was more seasonally clad in a white linen jacket, and her black hair was uncovered.
They walked across the square and into the vicarage drive, and then the leaner, more serious Martin Longbeach was padding into Merrily’s mind.
I hope I’ve made it clear that it’s nothing for you to worry about. You’re on holiday and you can relax.
Sylvia wanting Martin to meet her medium. In the white linen jacket, for innocence. Not at all an unhealthy practice, spiritualism. Something the Church might as well accept, in these liberal times. Merrily was thinking, this should be me in there.
The whole thing becoming clearer now. Sylvia Merchant had wanted to put her on the back foot. To feel threatened and make concessions to prevent the humiliation of accusations about the misuse of deliverance, accusations of spiritual bullying.
A Christian woman, worshipper at the Cathedral, who wanted its blessing for communication with the dead.
Pick and mix. Where would it end? Merrily felt a rush of anger. Should go in there, sort this out, not leave it to Martin. He’d be her witness and she’d be his.
And how long would
that
take?
Oh
God.
Merrily pushed stiffened fingers through her hair, picked up her phone and her car keys and carried her airline bag out to the Freelander.