Authors: Phil Rickman
61
Look what you made me do
B
LISS WAS ON
his feet, hanging his jacket over a vacant chair, his left eye weeping down his cheek.
‘I
can’t
go to Brent with this. This is about… what was that word you used about Rector?’
‘Frannie—’
‘Atonement. I need this bastard.’
‘At the cost of sacrificing your career?’
‘What’s a career?’
Look, Frannie, without sounding like a bereavement counsellor, whatever the poor kid did—’
‘Whatever she did, Merrily, she did so she could put something useful on me desk. So I’d remember her name. Me. The battered friggin’ hero.’
‘There’s a flaw in that.’ She’d been ready for this, knowing it would come at some point. ‘Suppose you’d said, “Don’t count on any help from me, Tamsin. Stick to chasing drink-drivers and shoplifters.” You know what she’d have said to herself, Tamsin being Tamsin? She’d have said,
I’ll show this bastard who should be chasing shoplifters…’
‘Nice argument, Merrily. Almost convincing.’
Gwyn Arthur said, ‘This
is…
the same as Tamsin? Thirty years on?
‘Except he didn’t finish the swastika.’
Bliss telling Gwyn Arthur about the photograph inside the
book in Rector’s library. Probably Polaroid. Instant picture. Muddied up in a photocopier to obscure the identity even more.
‘Why would he do that? Why would he send it to Rector?’
‘Because he’s trying to shift the blame?’ Merrily said. ‘Maybe not so much
what will you do next
? as…
Look what you made me do.’
‘That could be right.’ Bliss sat down again. ‘Like a peevish kid. And then he dismembers her body in his bath. I’d guess the reason they stopped recording is it went on for two or three hours. You realize what’s involved there? How many bin sacks you’d fill? It’s not just arms and legs, is it? It’s sordid and messy and disgusting, not like…’
‘Not like a magical ceremony,’ Merrily said.
Jerrold Brace’s tribute to his forefather, his liberating performance of something hideously at odds with civilized behaviour, his self-initiation. The electric charge, the magical high dissipating into the hot, greasy grind of pulling a human being apart and packing away the bits, prime cuts and offal.
‘There’s something else.’ Gwyn Arthur went over to the tape player, switched it back on. ‘Think I can work this thing. Would both of you mind listening to this bit again?’
He sat close to the screen, rewinding.
‘You’re listening for the woman’s voice in the background. Tell me what you think she’s saying.’
Merrily closed her eyes. The thin voices in the cans suggested a climber clinging to a cliff-face in high wind.
‘There,’ Gwyn Arthur said. ‘What are the words?’
Clear enough this time. She took off the cans.
‘She’s saying…
say it
. Quite urgently. ‘
Say it, say it, say it.’
‘That’s what I thought. Thank you.’
‘What’s that signify?’ Bliss said. ‘What’s that about?’
In the real world, a phone rang, sending him over to his jacket.
‘Assuming this is a copy,’ Gwyn Arthur said to Merrily, ‘what happened to the original tape, do you think? Would it have been mailed, perhaps, to Mr Loftus at the Order?’
Bliss stood with his phone at his cheek. He stiffened.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t. Where was this?’
Merrily watching him, alarmed. Watching his already disfigured face become an emotional car crash.
‘A dilemma for Mr Loftus if that arrived in the post,’ Gwyn Arthur said. ‘The young master, at the time, of right-wing rhetoric. You can imagine him writing his inflammatory books, self-published under false names, inspired by the early work of Peter Rector. Brace’s shop a valued outlet in the days before the Internet, but suddenly here’s Brace himself presenting this horror. Saying also to Loftus,
Look what
you
made me do.’
Silence. Bliss still on the phone, listening, expressionless now. It didn’t look like good news.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks, Karen.’
‘Perhaps we need to talk to Mr Loftus again,’ Gwyn Arthur said. ‘Perhaps
I
need to talk to him this time. Or you, Francis?’
‘Let’s keep Loftus on ice for a bit.’ Bliss’s voice was dull and beaten as he shut the phone. ‘Looks like all hell’s about to break loose out there. They’ve found Tamsin.’
Gwyn Arthur shut off the player.
‘
How
did they find her?’
‘Anonymous phone call to the Incident Room. Brent’s on his way in. Looks like all the key people have had individual phone calls.’
‘That was yours?’ Merrily said.
‘No. Looks like I’m not gerrin one. That was Karen. Me mate.’
‘Maybe they didn’t tell you,’ she said forlornly, ‘because they could see how knackered you were when you left.’
‘Possible. Not likely.’
Merrily stood up. Bliss’s face was like an envelope torn down one side.
‘Sounds like we were seen, doesn’t it, Merrily? It’s unlikely anyone just happened to stumble on that cellar so soon after we left. Sounds like we’re stuffed. Me, anyway.’
‘Or,’ Gwyn Arthur said, ‘your friend Miss Cornwell made the call.’
‘Trust me, she wouldn’t.’
‘Or the killer did. Listen, I think… I think if anyone needs to atone it’s probably me. Though until I saw the tape I had no real reason to think killing was involved. But it…’ He had his pipe between his hands, screwing and unscrewing the stem ‘… it’s pretty obvious to me who we’re looking at.’
62
Symbol of intent
M
ERRILY STOOD IN
the alley, looking at rooftops, as if there might be visible signs of distress rising through the curling streets, like oil up the wick of a lamp, until a desperate light would flare from a window of the empty castle.
Nothing to see, of course, nothing to hear. Nobody would know yet, except for senior police and the cops in the patrol car who’d followed up an anonymous call and gone down the steps with their flashlights and come out personally sickened and professionally thrilled, to make way for the Durex suits.
Robin came down from the shop next door, saying he and Betty had cleaned the place up. Put the stones back in the chimney, brushed up the dust. It was ready.
‘I’ll come soon,’ Merrily said. ‘Very soon.’
Thinking, why? What’s the point? What am I for? A walking anachronism. Who cares?
‘Sure.’ Robin raised a hand. ‘Thanks.’
He was looking lost, like somebody had taken an axe to his idyll. Did he really think she might achieve anything other than to make Betty feel a little more calm?
‘Hold on.’ Gwyn Arthur Jones was at the door. ‘Don’t go yet, Robin. I think I asked you about the laughter?’
Robin came wearily back into the cricket shop.
‘Jesus, Gwyn, what am I supposed to say? It’s a goddamn nightmare. Yeah, we both heard it. Yeah, we thought it was like a laugh we’d heard someplace else. I guess a laugh doesn’t alter
that much over time. You can change the pitch of your voice, go live in some other place and absorb a new accent, but…’
‘Laughter’s the result of an inner process too deep for control,’ Gwyn Arthur said. ‘Hard to fake. And who laughs at violent death, in such a gleeful, uninhibited way?’
‘Children,’ Merrily said. ‘Children who’ve only seen it in horror films. Who’ve never thought much about the reality of it. It was a young person’s laugh.’
Gwyn Arthur came from a different, maybe more reflective era of policing which perhaps had lasted longer in country towns. His aromatic tobacco calmed the air like the incense in St Mary’s church.
‘The father’s name,’ he said, ‘is Tim Wareham. Retired now, and no more an old hippy than any of us who were around in 1967. I really don’t think, but for his wife’s poor health, that he would have contacted me at all. I think, even then, he realized that whatever fate had befallen his daughter would be something they might be better off going to their graves without knowing about.’
‘You have to wonder,’ Merrily said, ‘why they called her Mephista. I mean, not everybody would see it as tempting fate, but…’
‘They didn’t. Her name was Melissa. Which, as a young child, she’d pronounce as
Meffissa
. And Tim, when she was naughty, would change it to Mephista. Which, being the free spirits they thought they were, they found funny and affectionate. And it stuck. Melissa Wareham, her name. And she was often naughty. They stopped keeping pets because of the way she would
have fun
with them. As she’d put it.’
‘He told you this?’
‘Makes me smile how, when some teenager is missing or dead, the parents appear on TV to tell the nation how you could not wish for a better son or daughter. A beautiful, thoughtful child. And the candles are lit and the shrines are
built. Doesn’t help. It’s what they
don’t
tell the nation that might have helped. I said to Mr Wareham that if I was to find her I’d need to know it
all
– the good and the bad. But mainly the bad. And mostly it was.’
‘Sorry, Gwyn, you said they were from London?’
‘Brighton. Where the girl was joining questionable gangs before she was twelve. Had a tattoo, when it was still an aggressive sign in a female.’
Robin said, ‘Where?’
‘Left armpit, Robin. Swastika, as it happens. Common enough in those days, though still very much a bad-taste symbol – a snigger against the parents and the grandparents. A wounding form of teenage protest. But then the Warehams were remembering their own protests. They remembered a peaceful rebellion – smoking cannabis, dropping a little acid. And picking magic mushrooms, once, in an area they recalled as a heaven on earth. You see where this is going?’
‘To the Convoy,’ Merrily said. ‘To becoming holiday hippies in the hope that Mephista would absorb the old ideals?’
‘But it’s not always heaven, see. Tim Wareham remembers an early autumn of rain and fog. No proper heating in their old ambulance. Tim and his wife were excited by the discovery of Peter Rector in a farm nearby, offering enlightenment, for free. But the girl was at her worse. Frequently drunk on cheap cider. In a perpetual rage.’
‘This was when she found Jerry Brace? Or did he find her?’
‘Brace had dropped out of university. Avoided the military career his father had in mind for him. He was given, as a last chance, a sum of money to build himself a business. Ending up in Hay – like you, boy.’ A nod at Robin. ‘With a vanload of war books, many purloined from his family’s huge library, I’d guess. Including the only one that obsessed him, that he’d never sell. Which, of course, was Rector’s book on Nazi occultism – mystical racism and the Aryan Holy Grail.’
Merrily took out her cigarettes then put them away again.
They lacked the appeal of a pipe, and she didn’t want to stand in the doorway.
‘Was Rector’s father into the mysticism?’
‘Not so much, I don’t think. But the discovery of Nazi occultism was, I imagine, what finally made the rather indolent Jerrold Brace into his father’s son. Sending him in search of Peter Rector, the man they’d both come to believe was… a secret master – is that the term?’
‘Something like that.’
‘He once told his cousin, Roger – my Brace family contact – of his belief that he was receiving telepathic messages from Rector. Did I tell you that?’
‘No.’
‘Ah, there’s so much of this, Merrily. It was said Sir Charles himself once hired a medium to put him in touch with Hitler. Jerry Brace was picking up all kinds of nonsense from the skin-heads and extremists who haunted his shop, bringing their own self-published books and pamphlets for him to sell.’
‘I’m guessing,’ Merrily said, ‘that a lot of this was fantasy magic, only vaguely based on the wartime Nazi mysticism. Which, from what I’ve heard and seen on TV, was more grandiose and pompous and masonic. Dressing-up games. Were the wartime Nazis as openly satanic? I don’t think so.’
‘No. But if Jerrold Brace came here to follow Peter Rector and was disappointed, he may have turned to people like Seymour Loftus. Seymour in his more fanatical days, preaching illumination through violence in the approach to his new aeon.’
‘And Mephista?’
‘Apparently the kind of sixteen-year-old who, today, in Robin’s homeland, might be found in a primary school with an assault rifle. Intimate with a man taking too many drugs and fantasizing about being descended from a robber baron. Volatile cocktail, wasn’t it?’
* * *
Frannie Bliss was at the open door. You could feel his tension rising with the deepening growl of traffic on Oxford Road at a time when it might normally be dying back. Had he been seen at Cusop? Was Brent looking for him?
Gwyn Arthur Jones was retelling the history of his breakthrough at the funeral of Sir Charles Brace, most of the detective work already done for him by the nephew, Roger Brace, alienated from the rest of the family and attending the old man’s funeral for pretty much the same reasons as Gwyn.
Bliss shut the door and came back to hear about the pregnant girl Sir Charles had taken in and yet was careful to keep at arm’s length. Finding her and the child a home at a family-owned London hotel, where she was expected to earn her keep.
In the end, Gwyn said, she’d become a junior manager, with a talent for charming guests while ruthlessly culling superfluous staff. She might have been running the hotel by now, if she hadn’t begun an affair with the bar manager. Breaking up his marriage and then leaving with him to take over management of a Soho pub. Then marrying him.
‘Thus,’ Gwyn said, ‘becoming Mrs Turrell. The boy also taking the name, under which he was later sent to a prep school at Sir Charles’s expense.’
He waited. The name was vaguely familiar to Merrily, but Robin was the first to react. He looked shaken.
‘So, uh… what was the kid’s name?’
‘George.’ Gwyn Arthur opened his venerable tobacco pouch, excavating with a finger. ‘George Brace Turrell. You can imagine the Turrell part being casually discarded if he met his grandfather’s expectations.’
‘Shit,’ Robin said. ‘How bad’s this gonna get, Gwyn?’
‘Depends how much you want to stay for, boy. Shall I continue?’
His mother hadn’t seen much of him after that, for several years. He’d attended private school and spent his holidays at a farm
owned by associates of his grandfather, where he underwent fitness training and learned all the right skills. Learned, essentially, how not to be his father.
The stepfather, Mr Turrell, had died in a shooting incident a year after the marriage. Collateral damage in a gang war. Gwyn had made contact with two old colleagues who’d left Wales to join the Met, now also retired and happy to talk, like old cops always did to other cops. One of them had sent Gwyn a scan of an old newspaper story, which included a photo of the young widow.
Gwyn found it on his laptop. She was leaving the inquest, wearing dark glasses, a slight figure in a black coat, black beret aslant on her long blond hair, white in the monochrome picture.
‘Doesn’t look like her,’ Robin said. ‘But then…’
Bliss bent to the screen.
‘Let’s just deal with this. How come nobody recognized her when she came back?’
‘Who’d recognize her anyway?’ Gwyn said. ‘After thirty years? Nobody in the town really knew Mephista. Even the man who was in the Convoy and settled here had no particular memories of her, except for the name. And a skinny blonde, now decades older, dark-haired, heavier?’
‘And why
did
she come back?’
‘I can speculate, but it’s no more than that. I’m not a policeman any more. Can’t take statements.’
‘Because in my experience,’ Bliss said, ‘all that about people returning to the scene of the crime is an exaggeration. Just as often, they put as much distance as they can. Especially if they’re only an accessory. You’re
sure
this is her?’
‘Oh, I’m sure of
that
, if little else. Even contriving, on a warm day, to see the remains of the tattoo. No longer a convincing swastika but not entirely removed.’
Nobody had noticed Jeeter Kapoor coming back with the VHS machine.
‘Didn’t like to say anyfing, but when you close your eyes… that laugh… it is, innit?’
Merrily was keeping out of it. She didn’t know these people, hadn’t seen them until today. Neither, she assumed, had Bliss.
Had she heard the laugh? Maybe.
You tell them, girlie.
A likeable woman. Sexy and fun. The laugh had come easily. It would be one of the regular sounds that fizzed over the barchat, just as it had over the tape-hiss.
‘Listen,’ Robin said. ‘Can we like spell this out? Two questions.
One
– is Gwenda really Gore Turrell’s mother? And
two—’
‘Yes,’ Gwyn Arthur said. ‘Thank you, boy. I think we all know what the second question is.’
No business of his. Not a policeman any more. And even if he were, it was hardly uncommon in the hills. Well, Merrily knew that. Brothers and sisters, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters – consider the famous Eric Gill at Capel-y-ffin. No one harmed, and if there was no under-age business involved, blind eyes might be turned.
‘Gwenda and Gore,’ Gwyn said, ‘they were accepted by the people frequenting the bar. Or at least she was – he was perhaps a bit aloof, but always obliging. A glamorous older woman and a fairly unassuming young man – not a partnership likely to incite much comment. And I had no reason, see, until now, to believe that incest might be far from the worst of their crimes.’
‘Somebody must’ve pointed you at them, Gwyn,’ Bliss said. ‘Not as if they look much alike, is it?’
‘Ah, you settle somewhere in retirement, it’s hard to turn off the old instincts. You get to know more people and their backgrounds. Especially the incomers. The white settlers, as we used to call them. Usually happy to talk, lay out their credentials for being here. Gwenda and Gore, now – very friendly, but revealing little. Gore’s a mystery. Spends a lot of time on recreational running – but not in an ostentatious way. Often turning out
before dawn, arriving back from the hills before the bar opens. Competes in marathons he never seems to win, though always well placed. Nothing to draw attention to himself.’
Merrily glanced at Bliss. Had that been sufficient reason for Gwyn Arthur Jones to investigate these people, delve into their history? Had to be more to this.
‘They have an extensive apartment,’ Gwyn said, ‘behind and above the bar to which few people have ever been invited. But the visiting builders and plumbers of my acquaintance report a quantity of sophisticated fitness equipment. And no books at all.
No books.
An economy founded on books, and their biggest customers are booksellers, but no books… what’s that saying?’
‘Suggests they aren’t particularly… in sympathy with the Hay ethos,’ Merrily said. ‘What else did you find out?’
‘There was a second marriage. And a profitable divorce. A Mr Carter, owner of a restaurant in Cardiff. And then Mr Protheroe, who I know nothing about, yet. Except that he’s no longer in the picture.’
On the hottest night of the year so far, Merrily felt physically cold. She saw Bliss’s discomfort, saw Robin’s pain translated into the paleness of his skin. Jeeter Kapoor just sitting there, blinking, chewing his lower lip, clearly wondering if he should say something.
‘All right,’ Bliss said, ‘the worst of their crimes. What
are
the worst of their crimes?’
His face was mottled with light and dark, slanting shadows around his eyes, like a panda’s. He shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be working. She didn’t know enough about his condition: was he in danger of collapse, a stroke? Was there any of the burden she could take?