Authors: Phil Rickman
56
Vision and need
M
ERRILY
’
S ONE-PIECE
protective suit was too hot and far too big. She kept stumbling over its floppy folds.
Claudia Cornwell had stopped at the barn doors, was looking back towards the bungalow.
‘In case either of you doesn’t know, this was the site of a large farmhouse called Bryn-y-castell – Castle Hill. Reference to the castle mound. The house was left derelict then pulled down, I suppose about fifty or sixty years ago. Some of the stone went into the bungalow and also these outbuildings. But an important part of the old house remains. Important for us, anyway.’
The doors weren’t even locked. Bliss had a torch, which showed there was nothing here to steal. It had a layer of bales of straw, obviously old, more of them in the loft. But none of the expected smells of new hay and old manure.
‘You can see this place got no more than a cursory going-over from the search team,’ Bliss said. ‘But then, why should it? How many barns have cellars?’
A few bales had been thrown out of the loft to expose the corners. But nobody had bothered with the floor.
‘The barn was simply built over the entrance to the main cellars of the demolished house,’ Claudia said. ‘Root cellar for apples, wine cellar.’
Bliss said, ‘How many times you been here, Claudia?’
‘Here… many times. Down there… once. Yesterday. So my DNA’s going to be everywhere, isn’t it?’
Merrily said, ‘So the cellars conceal…’
‘The temple, yes. The temple was constructed over about a year. After what happened on the Bluff, Peter wasn’t going to take chances any more. Only he and his innermost circle ever came here. A sealed chamber. There was only a handful of them and most of them were over seventy. It’s a measure of how important he thought this was.’ Her voice faded, as though talk was only delaying the inevitable. ‘Could I…?’
Merrily took a step back. Claudia had pulled a bale to one side, pointed at three or four others.
‘The trapdoor’s under those. There’s a blue plastic sheet we need to take up. Peter showed me how to get in if there was an emergency. I was the nearest, at Talgarth. He knew I wouldn’t just go down there.’
‘But you did yesterday?’ Merrily said.
‘He was dead. The future was uncertain. As I say, most of his… people… are old. I was the youngest and still outside the core. I came back and wandered around. Shed a few tears, wondered how it could possibly go on without him, even if Athena White could gather a few more suitably qualified people together. I wondered, like you’re probably wondering now, if we hadn’t all just succumbed to his… his vision… and his need.’
There was the trapdoor, plain oak, sunk into the flags, an iron ring sunk into the oak. Bliss slipped his white-gloved hand under the ring.
‘There are electric lights,’ Claudia said. ‘On the wall on your right when you get to the bottom of the steps. Small narrow ante-room and a plain white door. Here’s the key.’
A plain Yale key. She gave it to Bliss. He stood looking down, the big numbers on his baseball sweater just visible through the plastic. He’d tied a white mask over his mouth and nose.
He said, ‘You want to go first, Claudia?’
‘I think it should be you.’
‘Yeh.’
Bliss pulled on the ring. The trapdoor came up easily, with a
low, hydraulic whine, Bliss’s torch downlighting a rough pine stairway, with a rail. He went down about three steps, looked back, pulled down the mask.
‘Just tell me briefly,’ Bliss said. ‘What will I see? What’s the layout?’
‘A ceiling of midnight blue.’ Claudia’s voice was firm, as if she was reciting poetry. ‘A black and white floor, like a chessboard. Circles, one inside the other. A triangle. An altar. The coat of arms of Hay above it. On the altar, a chalice of water from the confluence of the Dulas Brook and the River Wye. And a chair. A stiff-backed chair with arms, like a throne. Inside the circle where it would be protected.’
‘And that’s where the dummy would’ve been.’
‘Where the King sat. His crown askew. Baggy trousers tied at the waist with red and yellow binder twine. All the energy channelled through him, and he never knew. Never even thought of it. God…’
Merrily said, ‘Why did you go down there? When you were here on your own?
‘Because… because I’d walked all around and couldn’t sense Peter anywhere, I just… He’d gone, you see, and suddenly I couldn’t stand that. The man who’d had more impact on my life than anyone at Oxford, any head-of-chambers. I wanted to be with him, one more time. To get some guidance.’
‘And was he there?’
Claudia was sitting on a bail of straw, as if she’d felt suddenly weak.
‘Don’t know. Don’t know.’
Bliss looked irritated.
He went down.
Presently, the lights came on in the cellar. Sounds of Bliss unlocking a door, but there was a long period of hush before Merrily heard his moan.
57
English corruption
B
ETTY SAID
, ‘F
UNNY
how you don’t see things. Really obvious things.’
Robin held tight to his mug of tea. He’d been resistant to tea for so long; now, sometimes, he couldn’t get enough, and it couldn’t be too hot, couldn’t be too strong.
‘You knew, didn’t you?’ Betty said.
Looking at Gwyn Arthur Jones, an old golem in a drooping suit. A discontinued line in cops.
‘Actually, Betty, I didn’t. When you have a name like Jones, these conceits seem so far removed from your own kind of reality as to appear quite nonsensical.’
‘You think it was a conceit?’
‘Perhaps a genealogist would say otherwise, I don’t know. Anyone can prove anything. If I had the money and the patience I could demonstrate my own line of descent from the Princes of Dyfed. No, no—’ He lifted a hand. ‘I’m not serious.’
‘But
something
lit your lamp,’ Robin said.
‘Yes. Something did. Been on the back-burner for so long that I lacked the courage to approach it. What business was it of mine, an old copper with a long nose and too much time on his hands?’
It was actually Betty who’d seen it first, after Robin had come off the phone with Seymour Loftus.
‘Brace,’ she said. ‘
Is
Brace an English corruption of De Braose?’
* * *
‘Nobody knows that,’ Robin said now. ‘Coulda come from anyplace. And it isn’t always even spelt the same. There’s a block of new apartments down the street called De Breos Court, with an e.’
‘Always struck me as odd,’ Jones said, ‘that they should name luxury flats after one of our great historic villains. The man who massacres the Welsh aristocracy over Christmas dinner, then slaughters one of their sons, aged seven. Odd, too, that this forbidding grey apartment complex is – in size – the biggest development in Hay since… the castle, I suppose.’
‘But those apartments weren’t here when Jerry Brace arrived in Hay?’
‘Like’s Garage, it was, in those days. You’d never have a hope of filling all those flats back then.’
‘So, OK, Brace arrives, conceives the idea he’s a descendant of de Braose, the Ogre. Or is that something his old man had told him way back? Is that, in fact, why Jerry fetches up in Hay?’
‘Either is possible, boy. It’s entirely in keeping with the way these people like to think. And also explains his obsession with the castle. He convinces himself he’s the true heir. In essence, it belongs to him, not the interloper, Booth, who takes a fine military fortress and fills it – pah! – with books.’
‘Actually,’ Betty said. ‘If you’re looking for the last time this country was subject to a fascist dictatorship you could very well be looking at de Braose’s time. Even Hitler never managed what the Normans achieved. OK, not an Aryan invasion, if they came from France, but—’
‘No?’ Jones lifted a forefinger. ‘I may be wrong…’ He opened the laptop ‘… but I believe the Normans were a race apart from the French.’
‘Just don’t make it any more weird,’ Robin said.
‘Earlier on, Mrs Watkins was asking me why Brace had chosen to set up his business here, and I was forced to say I didn’t know. What I do recall from my reading is that William de Braose was, at
first, well regarded by King John and allowed to behave like a king himself in the borderland. They eventually fell out – probably over de Braose’s failure to disclose income to which John thought he was entitled. Anyway, he went on the run. Was finally killed and his wife and child starved to death. But, right up to the end, William was insisting he’d return one day to his beloved borders, and he— Ah, here we are. The Normans were descended from Nordic invaders who settled in France. Vikings, in fact. Or Germanic. So there’s a case for saying the Normans were Aryans… yes.’
‘Tradition,’ Betty said. ‘Heritage. Destiny.
Hell
.’
‘Bets, it’s just an elaborate fantasy they built around themselves.’
‘It’s a… septic obsession,’ Betty said.
Robin pulled open the door and walked out to see if there was any sign of Kapoor. It was night now, so no bastard wardens with a licence to kill; Kapoor would park right outside. Robin did not turn, as he usually did, to look up at the castle with an element of possession based on a desire to paint it. He was hearing Betty:
I just think that we might have some work to do. To make it ours. Rather than… someone else’s.
He took a few paces then came back, shut the door hard. The castle walls would be blackening.
‘There you go.’ Betty turned the laptop away from herself. ‘British neo-Nazi pagan factions tend to associate themselves with Anglo-Saxon and Nordic traditions.’
Jones produced his pipe.
‘All right if I…?’
‘Sure,’ Robin said. ‘Just don’t bring out a pork pie.’
‘You didn’t finish telling us, Robin. What, in the final analysis, was your opinion of our friend Loftus?’
‘He was lying. It all came too easy. He’s a local politician now. Green Party. Then again, he could be lying about that, too. I almost told him about the videotape.’
‘Perhaps you should have done,’ Jones said. ‘Time, I think, to start nudging the applecart. Perhaps beyond time.’
58
A dark symmetry
S
OMETIMES, WHEN THE
worst had happened, you were angry with yourself. You’d thought about it repeatedly, in vivid detail, convinced that self-torture could alter reality. Not only stop it happening but stop it
having
happened.
Worthless superstition.
But
please God…
When they reached the bottom of the steps, Bliss was coming out, shutting the white door, putting his back against it, snatching off his face mask.
‘No point. Nothing to be done.’
Moving his arms, trying to sweep them back up the stairs, like crowd control.
‘No.’ Claudia Cornwell carried on down to the bottom of the steps until she was face to face with Bliss. ‘We need to see this.’
‘Claudia—’
‘This isn’t about the law, Francis, or regulations, this is about what I might be able to tell you that you wouldn’t get from anyone else. I need to see. Or else why am I here? Why’s Merrily here?’
Bliss tapped gloved fingers against a thigh, his left side, the side that went numb. He looked up at Merrily.
‘You all right with this?’
She just nodded, not all right with any of it. She wanted out of here. Wanted to go running back up the steps, tripping over her Durex suit until she could tear it off and keep running into the darkness. She wanted a cigarette.
‘All right then.’ Bliss stepped aside. ‘Remember, you don’t touch anything, even with the kit on. Don’t lean against any walls. And especially you don’t throw up. The first hint of nausea, you get out and into that field. Or, better still, your own car.’
He opened the door.
‘Take some deep breaths now. You won’t want to in a minute.’
A crypt, with adornments. Uplighting, shaded.
Tiled floor, earth-coloured walls, a low ceiling, a false ceiling.
A ceiling of midnight blue. A black and white floor, like a chess-board. Circles, one inside the other.
Cardinal points.
Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, the archangels through which magicians paid tribute to their Hebrew ancestors.
All there.
On the altar, a chalice.
Also fat candles with white wicks, brown-flecked.
And a chair. A stiff-backed chair with arms, like a throne. Inside the circle where it would be protected.
Yes.
Where the King sat.
If only. ‘She never left Cusop,’ Bliss said.
Stepping away so they could see her. If they wanted to. If they could bear it.
They were spared Tamsin’s face. Her head had fallen forward on to her chest, hair screening the wound which had produced all the blood, like waxwork blood now, dry and ridged, and the stink of it all, in this vacuum, was the worst you’d ever know. A sweetness under it, as if incense had been burned in here, the stench of death and evil.
You’ve gorra big future, PC Winterson
.
‘I need some information, Claudia,’ Bliss said through his mask. ‘From when you first arrived in Cusop yesterday.’
Jesus, Merrily thought.
Yesterday.
The hood was tight around her face, a white-gloved hand pressing the mask into her nose and mouth, but the smell got everywhere.
‘We’ve been through this, Francis,’ Claudia said.
Her eyes, unexpectedly, hot with panic. A barrister and a magician. A mother. With daughters?
‘No,’ Bliss said. ‘When we went through it, Tamsin was missing. So let’s start with the assumption that it wasn’t you who killed her.’
Claudia gasped. Bliss pulled down his mask, took a savage breath, did not choke.
‘Let’s assume somebody saw you come into the barn and uncover the entrance to the cellar. Could’ve been Tamsin herself, who saw you leaving and then went down. Maybe someone else followed her and then…’
‘Her throat’s cut?’ Claudia said. ‘Somebody cut her throat?’
‘Claudia, when you were there, in full daylight, did you see anybody else in the vicinity? In Cusop? Anywhere?’
‘Nobody. Although people evidently saw me.’
‘Kelly James. And – assuming pregnant Kelly has nothing to hide – someone else. There are several possibilities, and the one that seems most likely is that someone saw you go in and, when you’d left, came down here to take a look. What’s he find, Claudia. The King’s in his chair?’
Bliss was talking faster, battling his condition with an unnatural, forced, clipped authority.
‘The King’s always in his chair,’ Claudia said.
‘For Christ’s sake, Frannie,
stop it
!’ All the breath pumped out of Merrily and thank God it was only breath. ‘This is not an interview room, this is… this is…’
But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop.
‘The King’s robe was red, but not with blood. The King had already gone, right? Whoever it was didn’t want the effigy messed up?’
‘I don’t see why he wouldn’t.’ Claudia’s voice high and hoarse.
‘If his intention was to desecrate the temple. Blood, piss… anything. You know what they’re like.’
‘No, I don’t, necessarily. Who?’
‘People who’d do this.’
‘
Who?’
‘I don’t
know
!’
‘Frannie, can we get the… get out of here? Please?’
‘You didn’t have to come in, Merrily. It was your decision. All right, let’s say he – or even
they
– came in for a look around.’
‘So the intruder just takes the King –
planning
to throw him in the river? Is that what he’s come here for?’
‘Or in the brook,’ Claudia said. ‘More likely the brook.’
‘Why? Under your… rules. Quick, Claudia. Don’t stand there refining it, you’re not presenting a defence.’
‘All right!’ Claudia’s hands up in front of her face. ‘
One
– it was the brook where Peter died.
Two
– lots of rain lately, the water would be high and rushing. Wouldn’t take long for it to get washed down to the Wye.’
‘Why?’
‘A kind of ritual drowning of… all our efforts? The project?
I
don’t know. I’m just talking off the top of my head, Francis, and I may be talking balls.’
‘Doesn’t matter. So Tamsin, having been alerted by Kelly James, turns up, looking for you. Sees the barn door’s open and the hatch. Comes down and confronts the intruder, the way she… the way she would. What’s
he
thinking, then? He hasn’t done anything? He hasn’t even broken in. He’s just a trespasser. He’s just curious. He’s like, “
Sorry
, officer, but… well… you gorra admit it’s a bit weird in here, isn’t it?” That’s what he’d say.’
‘If he was an ordinary trespasser.’
Claudia stood looking at Tamsin, making herself look, Merrily thought, in case any of this was her fault. Looking at the big cakes of dried blood encrusting the poor kid’s T-shirt.
‘How does that,’ Bliss said, ‘lead to
this
?’
Hardening his questions now, Merrily thought. Going for Claudia – almost certainly unconsciously, but it was there – the way so many defence barristers must have gone for
him
in the witness box. But the corpse, in all its pitiful horror, was never in court, where the only smell would be wood polish.
‘Do you know all the people in Rector’s coven or whatever you prefer to call it?’
‘I think so.’
‘How well?’
‘Christ, Francis!’ Claudia snatched away her white mask. ‘These are not bloody satanists! They’re people – mainly
elderly
people – of a gentle and spiritual disposition.
Learned
people. They don’t do… sacrifices. Not of anything
living
.’
‘Then who would? What about someone she knew? Say the trespasser is someone she’d talked to. In her spare-time inquiries into Rector’s death. Suppose she came face-to-face with someone she’d already had cause to be a bit suspicious of?’
‘Wouldn’t the killer be covered in blood?’
‘That would depend if… if he knew what he was doing?’ Bliss went to stand behind the chair. ‘I’m inclined to think she’d been disabled first. Maybe barely conscious when she was arranged in this chair like the effigy. If she was already disabled, he could’ve done it from behind, one slash, jump back, stand in the doorway, watch her…’ His breath catching in his throat ‘… bleeding out.’
Merrily heard Claudia’s indrawn breath, or maybe it was her own.
‘And then,’ Bliss said, ‘having hidden his or her own motor in any one of a few dozen places within walking distance, the killer – at some stage – drives Tamsin’s Clio back to Hay, with her phone in there, leaves it on the car park and goes back across the fields to Cusop for his vehicle. How long a walk – twenty minutes?’
‘Or,’ Merrily said, ‘if he was on foot in the first place…’
‘Someone local,’ Claudia said.
Bliss shrugged.
‘Can we get out of here now, Francis?’
‘Not quite yet.’
‘I need to go home tonight.’
‘Just be glad you can.’
Bliss was still standing behind Tamsin’s body. He had his torch out, directing the beam down to where her hair had fallen forward.
‘I won’t ask you to examine this, but her head’s been mutilated.’ Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘Remember the photograph you came across in Rector’s library?’
‘Like I’d forget?’
‘Hard to be sure, but two cuts…’ He was looking down into the circle of light. ‘Two deep cuts on Tamsin’s head… crossing over.’
‘Dear God.’
‘Claudia… thoughts. What are your thoughts?’
‘I’m thinking I just want to see my childre— All right, I’ll— There’s a dark… what I can only describe as a dark symmetry… to the removal of a power-object and its replacement by a dead body.’
‘So we’re looking at somebody who knows this stuff?’
‘I think that’s the most likely explanation.’
‘And what might he do next?’ Bliss said.
Merrily saw the woman’s shaven head in a grainy photocopy, the message beneath.
What will you do now?
Outside they stripped off their Durex suits, gave them back to Bliss who stowed them in the boot of his Honda.
He’d inspected the temple in case they’d left anything behind, switched out the lights, sealing the crime scene like some chamber at the bottom of a pyramid in the desert. The hatch had been replaced, the bales of straw moved back.
‘We drive out of here at a normal night speed. One of you leave about half a minute after the other. Drive into Hay and we’ll meet on the car park, down by the recycling bins. Go.’
Claudia nodded, went to her car. Merrily turned bitterly towards Bliss.
‘Why did you do that? Why did you keep us in there? What the hell was the point? As if it wasn’t bad
enough
.’
‘Needed answers. Before the shock-factor set in.’
His voice muffled because he was bent over, hands on his knees, shaking. As he came up, his face was lit briefly by the lights of Claudia’s car and his eyes were hot and pooled.
‘Just leave me alone, eh, Merrily.’
She nodded.
As she drove between the broken gateposts, hands cold on the wheel, there was one narrow, pale strip over Hay, like the light under a closed door.