Authors: Phil Rickman
59
Poltergeists
T
HEY WALKED AWAY
from the cars, stood near the bottom of the Oxford Road car park, amongst the moonlit bins:
glass, plastic, cardboard, garden waste.
No more than twenty cars on here and four were police.
‘What a friggin’ awful mess,’ Bliss said. ‘For everybody.’
Car-hiss on Oxford Road. Otherwise silence. Merrily felt the sweat forming like cold dew on her forehead.
‘You have to tell them, don’t you? Now.’
Bliss stared at the foothills of the Black Mountains, embossed on the pale night sky.
‘Claudia and me, we’d rather someone else made the discovery. I’ve been trying to think about how that’s achievable. If it is.’
‘Think about Tamsin’s family. Sitting there, drinking too much tea, waiting for the phone to ring. Reassuring each other over and over. Telling them now isn’t going to shorten the suffering, but it’ll at least end the crippling anxiety.’
Bliss turned to Claudia.
‘You go home, eh?’
‘No.’ Claudia backed away. ‘You’re not going to be able to keep me out of this. I told you and I told Merrily that I’d rather my private interests didn’t become public knowledge, but… after seeing what we all saw… that doesn’t matter. Think about it.’
‘What I’m thinking about is you spending several long days beating your head against a wall trying to initiate acting-DCI
Iain Brent, PhD into stuff he thinks wouldn’t motivate even the most irrational killer.
You
know how this goes.’
‘Yes, I do. And I’m a barrister. I can handle it.’
Merrily’s phone chimed. She moved out into the car park.
‘Merrily.’
‘
Gwyn Jones, Merrily. Where are you?’
‘Back in Hay.’
‘
Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m all right.’
‘
Francis Bliss… is he with you, now?’
‘Not far away.’
‘
All right, listen to me, Merrily. Can you ask him to meet me? Just him, nobody else. Next shop along from the Thorogoods. Mr Kapoor’s cricket shop.’
‘Gwyn, I’m not sure he’s going to want to right now.’
‘
Merrily, look, this is going to be too big for me now. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s taken a turn for the serious.’
A soft drumming, and she turned to see Claudia Cornwell quietly hammering the soft undersides of her fists against the bottle bank’s rusting flank.
‘… the enormity of it,’ Claudia was saying. ‘None of our careers are worth this.’
‘Tell him it’s important, Merrily. Tell him it’s more important than anything in my long career in the police.’
‘Gwyn, what I suggest is you come here. We’re at the bottom of the car park, near the bins. Can you do that?’
‘Three minutes.’
‘All right,’ Claudia said to Bliss. ‘I will go home. I’ll go home and drink black coffee and wait for the knock on the door. It’s not going away. We don’t get rid of a night like this.’
They watched her walking to her car. Merrily saw that the left side of Bliss’s face was sagging. He needed sleep, but how much sleep was he going to get when he went to Brent and told him what they’d found? This was awful. Everything tonight was awful.
‘Frannie, that was Gwyn Jones. He wants to talk to you.’
‘Stall him.’
‘I can’t. He’s on his way down. He says to tell you it’s more important than anything in his time as a cop.’
Bliss sighed.
‘Gwyn Arthur Jones. One of your bloody poltergeists that doesn’t know it’s dead. I’ll be just like him when they kick me out.’
He leaned back beside a wide metal mouth choking on cardboard.
‘All right, tell me quick. What did Claudia say before I arrived. What did she tell you?’
God.
Merrily lit a cigarette.
‘Some people called Rector the Magus of Hay.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Priest in the pre-Christian sense. Someone who works magic. And we’re not talking end-of-the-pier. Claudia’s a barrister, you don’t get to be a barrister overnight. She aspires to work magic and she knows that’s going to take her a lot longer. It’s psychology, only deeper. It’s religion for people who aren’t into faith. It demands massive self-discipline.’
‘Yeh, we’ve been here before. Does it work?’
‘Works for them. For people who take it seriously, this stuff’s bigger than life and bigger than death. You know what I’m saying?’
‘And I can just hear meself repeating it to Claudia’s mates in the CPS. Now tell me what it means in terms of crime and motive.’
‘I can tell you what it means in human terms. Some of it. For Rector, it was about conscience and atonement. He’d written a book explaining how a belief in magic had inspired the most evil regime in history, and he did it so persuasively he was seen as one of the major voices of New Right mysticism. When they found out he wasn’t, some people felt betrayed.’
‘Enough to kill him?’
‘Enough to want to spoil his party, certainly. Rector was
looking for a way to repair his karma. Persuade somebody to leave heaven’s gate off the latch. He wanted to devote his last years and all his learning to something essentially… positive.’
‘As symbolized by an old clothes shop dummy in a crown? And then replaced by a young copper who gets a swastika carved into her head?’
‘Just accept it. All that matters is that enough people believed— Oh.’
‘Good evening, Gwyn,’ Bliss said.
He was agitated. She could tell that by his breathing. In that, for the first time, she was aware that he
was
breathing. He nodded at Bliss, before turning to her, his voice unexpectedly sharp.
‘He knows about this?’
‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘Other things came up.’ She paused. Sod it. ‘Like… the discovery of a young copper in a cellar. With her throat cut.’ Heard Bliss pulling in a furious breath. ‘Frannie, for God’s sake, it’s bloody pointless holding anything back at this stage.’
‘You are saying…’ Gwyn Arthur Jones swung round to Bliss ‘… that Tamsin Winterson—?’
‘You say nothing about this, Gwyn,’ Bliss hissed. ‘That clear?’
‘And I’ll say, Francis, is that you need to come with me. You need to see something.’
‘Look, we’ve got—’
Gwyn Arthur was already walking away, long strides towards the top of the car park where car-beams intersected like shining blades under the castle wall. When they caught him up, he started talking about Jerry Brace and his obsession with the castle. Also a former fascist called Seymour Loftus who was perhaps all that remained of the Order of the Sun in Shadow.
And how none of that mattered after you saw the tape that Gwyn Arthur had already watched on the player borrowed in Brecon. Which he said would put everything into a hellish perspective.
60
Name of my father
T
HE
TV
SCREEN
vibrated to black.
Chairs and stools were set up in front of the monitor which shared a desk under a cricket bat hanging from a beam, a shadow against the low lights, like some antique punishment device.
Merrily said, ‘Where’s Betty?’
‘Back at the bookstore. Waiting for you.’ Robin sounded disconnected, hair sweated to his forehead. ‘She… didn’t wanna see it again. I’m just here to remind you ’bout what you planned. Tell you she’s waiting. When you’re through here.’ He nodded at a coffee machine. ‘Help yourself.’
‘Perhaps I’ll have one later, thanks.’
Her throat was like a sandpit, but this didn’t feel like a social occasion. She’d actually forgotten what she’d agreed with Betty, and there weren’t many distractions that made you forget about a proposed exorcism.
She heard the shop door closing, the rattle of a blind coming down.
‘This is Francis Bliss, boys,’ Gwyn Arthur said, flat-voiced. ‘Here to help us.’
Merrily sank down in front of the screen, between Gwyn Arthur and Bliss, who didn’t seem up to helping an old lady across the road. Her head ached.
Gwyn Arthur nodded to Kapoor and the screen acquired a shaky image, dark and oily like the inside of an old car engine.
Kapoor stepped away, as if he didn’t want it to be any clearer. Gwyn Arthur peered at Merrily.
‘You all right with this?’
‘Tonight I’m all right with anything.’ What the hell was coming? ‘Sorry, that’s not what I meant.’
Gwyn Arthur caught Kapoor’s eye, lifted a forefinger. Kapoor set the tape rolling. Robin reached for his stick.
‘I’m outa here. Don’t wanna leave Betty alone. OK?’
But she knew that wasn’t it, as Kapoor followed Robin to the door, held it open for him, and shut it behind him, letting out a staccato steam-train breath as he came back to the TV. On the screen, something glimmering in a shifting darkness.
‘Pre-digital,’ Kapoor said. ‘Very basic camera, I’d guess.’
A face was fading out of the darkness.
‘It’s night,’ Kapoor said. ‘The lights in the room are poor. Altogether… a bleedin’ mercy, really.’
A woman’s face. Grey and indistinct, but you could make out closed eyes. Bliss leaned into the screen.
‘Dead?’
Dear God, how much of this could anyone take in one night? But the camera had pulled back to throw the woman into shadow and reveal a second person. If that was a person.
Bliss said, ‘What’s he gorrover his head, Gwyn?’
‘Looks like the corner of a black bin liner. See the point at the top, with a kind of ridge and the way it’s pull back tight?
The eyeholes were no more than knife-slits, crudely scissored around the edges to widen them.
‘Wearing the rest of the bin liner, it looks like,’ Bliss said. ‘Underneath, covering his upper body. More wrapped round his arms. Look at the hands. Looks like friggin’ Homer Simpson. Homer Simpson’s hands.’
‘Rubber gloves. He’s dressed for…’
‘I can see what he’s dressed for,’ Bliss said tightly. ‘The woman… she’s gorra be well out of it. Nobody gonna sit still for this.’
‘We had a stack of pictures of Mephista,’ Gwyn Arthur said. ‘But this is not her. This, I think, has to be Cherry Banks. You can detect slight movements. I think she’s sedated. Whatever they used before Rohypnol. I used to know.’
‘Someone’s laughing,’ Merrily said.
A short burst – stifled, muffled. She thought of Jane. Jane laughed like that when she knew she shouldn’t be laughing at something. A squeak of instinctive, suppressed mirth.
‘Look at the camera shake,’ Kapoor said. ‘All over the place. Way the camera’s suddenly shooting the ceiling.’
Merrily jerked back.
‘What’s that in his hand?’
Glint above a yellow fist.
‘You really don’t have to watch this,’ Gwyn Arthur said, ‘but I’d be glad if you’d listen. Try and make out what he’s saying.’
‘Bloody hell, Gwyn—’
‘Listen. Please.’
She shut her eyes on it, plucking words out of white noise. And then opened them too soon.
‘Sound fluctuates,’ Kapoor said, his back to the screen. ‘Amateurs. Cheap kit.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Merrily said.
Kapoor froze the tape.
‘Reverse it, please,’ Gwyn Arthur said.
Bliss said, ‘What’d he say?
Sacrifice
? He say sacrifice?’
‘No – further back, boy. I want us to hear that laughter again.’
Merrily watched the crinkly, shiny blackness unfurling from the woman, rippling in the half-light, the blood –
dear God
– sucked back into the throat.
‘All right.’ Gwyn Arthur raising a hand. ‘Stop. Now run it again.’
She kept her eyes closed, this time, all the way through concentrating on prising the words from the hiss and the laughter.
Bliss recoiled.
‘What happened there?’
‘Blood-spatter, it is, on the lens. There, see, someone’s trying to wipe it away.’
Merrily’s gut knotted.
‘I ain’t watching this again, all right?’ Kapoor said. ‘Don’t wanna be remembering this forever.’
Out of the video, more laughter. Eruption of glee.
‘Definitely a woman’s laugh,’ Bliss said. ‘Where’s the woman?’
‘Behind the camera? Is the woman recording it?’
‘What’s this? Oh, Mother of God. This is thirty years ago?’
Merrily opened her eyes to the point of the knife, wiped clean of blood, quivering above the top of the lolling head. To the descent of the point. To the welling blood between the hair and the flesh and the bone.’
‘Merrily, is this the woman in the photo? Gorra be.’
Wavy lines, a buzz. Merrily let the breath come out, began to lever herself out of the chair. Saw Gwyn Arthur’s sorrowful smile.
‘Not over, I’m afraid. Break in filming. No actual editing here, just stop-start. But we should take a small break, too.’ He signalled to Kapoor to pause the machine. ‘You caught those words, either of you?’
‘I think,’ Merrily said, ‘that he was saying,
I sacrifice you…’
‘Yes.’
‘…
in the name of my father.’
‘I doubt even Sir Charles would thank the boy for that.’
‘I’d guess means his… forefather.’
‘The rest,’ Gwyn Arthur said, ‘takes place in the bathroom. Fortunately, not a long sequence.’
Immediately,
Thack, thack, thack.
The audio was perhaps worse than the visuals. From behind closed eyes you were imagining it in full light. Merrily opened her eyes to the camera zooming in and pulling back, like a crow
ripping at roadkill. White enamel, red enamel. Liquids jetting up at the lens, and the glee this evoked splintering through the static and this time nothing could wipe it away.
‘It’s inhuman,’ Merrily said.
Stupidly inadequate.
The last shot before the end of the tape was in perfect focus, the black plastic killer standing up, arms out, triumphant. Chest like a butcher’s display tray, a blade in a red hand, only spots of yellow. In the other hand, something like a small red squid.
‘Oh God,’ Bliss said.
‘All right.’ Gwyn Arthur Jones was out of his chair. ‘Shut it off. How many copies so far, Mr Kapoor?’
‘One DVD.’
‘You have a VHS recorder of your own, don’t you?’
‘For transferring match tapes to DVD. It’s at home. You want me to fetch it?’
‘Would you do that? This is important. We could use at least one copy on VHS. I want to do something.’
Kapoor shrugged.
‘I’ll go now. Could use some air.’
When he’d gone, Bliss leaned back against the closed door.
‘Let me ask this again. You’re saying that all this happened over thirty years ago and this bloke is long dead. Is it possible he isn’t?’