Authors: Phil Rickman
‘How did they come together, Gwyn?’ she said. ‘After all these years. Had they been continually in touch?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘And are they as toxic together,’ Bliss said, ‘as Brace and Mephista? What, after all, have we got? Encouraged by
Mephista, Brace kills Cherry Banks and disposes of her God knows where. Do we have any evidence of Jerry’s son doing it again? And why?’
‘Hey, just say that—’ Robin was on his feet. ‘You said Cherry? Cherry was the dead woman?’
‘We think,’ Bliss said.
‘Holy shit, listen, I don’t know if this helps, but when I was here last night, letting myself into the bookstore, there’s this old lady – the weird whistling old lady, Mrs Villiers, and she’s babbling at me, the way she does, and amongst it all she says – lemme get this right –
Cherry don’t… Cherry don’t do it no more.’
‘Where was this?’
‘Outside the door.’
‘That’s all she said?’
‘No, there was other stuff. She said – this makes some kinda sense now – she said… it was like she’d warned this Cherry not to come.’
‘To the bookshop?’
‘I guess. And she said she’d put her up at her place. One night. Something like that.’
Gwyn Arthur said, ‘You’re absolutely sure about this? You were drunk, were you not?’
‘Not so drunk I’d get that wrong.’
‘This indicates Mrs Villiers knew there was something wrong. Back when she was compos mentis. If Cherry was a prostitute… woman of the night…?’
‘If she knew something,’ Bliss said, ‘how come she didn’t come forward at the time?’
‘If you’d known Mrs Villiers then and now,’ Gwyn said, ‘you would probably not ask that question. But we do need to talk to her.
Try
and talk to her.’
‘Dead right, Gwyn. Meanwhile, anything any of you
hasn’t
told me, you need to bring it out. Gore – why Gore? How did George become Gore?’
‘Sigil,’ Robin said.
Merrily looked at him.
‘Turning words and phrases into magical symbols?’
Bliss closed his eyes wearily.
‘No, see,’ Robin said, ‘if you’re making a sigil, you start by like condensing a word to its essence. If a letter’s repeated, you take one out. George has two Gs and two Es. You remove the extras, you’re left with Gore. Might be just a coincidence.’
‘Interesting.’ Merrily looked at Bliss. ‘Claudia would explain it a lot better than me, but it gives… George… a certain focus.’
‘A sigil’s a symbol of intent,’ Robin said. ‘You write down something you wanna happen and then reduce the letters, then make what’s left into a symbol you can focus on.’
‘Suggesting that Gore was a symbol of someone’s intent,’ Merrily said. ‘Blood and gore.’
‘Then you put it at the centre of a ritual… and you make something happen.’
‘Like a killing?’ Bliss said. Then he shook his head. ‘It’s not good enough, is it?’
63
The case for atheism
G
ETTING ON FOR
midnight when Robin moved stiffly into Gwenda’s Bar. How welcoming it looked, like a softly lit hollow tree. More like a real home than either of his half-homes, all mellow light, a little smoke and comfortable, companionable people.
He ordered a pint of shandy. He was sweating.
‘Parched,’ he said.
Gwenda placed a cool hand on his moist cheek.
‘You can do better than a shandy, Robin, surely.’
‘Uh?’ Robin put his hands up, shaking his head in mock horror. ‘After last night?’
Gwenda laughed. He looked into her eyes and saw how pale they were for a woman with such dark hair. Not eyes you could easily connect with. All the small things you noticed when your cherished world view had fragmented like a smashed mirror.
Gareth Nunne regarded Robin with faint distaste, sucking the froth from his half of Guinness.
‘You been running, boy?’
‘Shovelling, Gary. Shovelling and scraping till we’re knee-deep in rubble.’
‘Alterations, refurbishing, I don’t do any of that. Anything don’t look right I just cover it up with books.’
‘Get any of you guys a drink?’ Robin said.
‘Go on, then,’ Gareth Nunne drained his glass. ‘Just a half.’
‘You feeling generous tonight, Robin?’ Gwenda said. ‘Or just too tired to know what you’re saying?’
She was up on her high stool, low-cut, long-sleeved black top, black leggings. You could eat her.
Robin deliberately didn’t answer, accepting his shandy from one of the two women behind the bar. Extra staff on tonight. Good business with all the cops around, chilling out after a heavy day. Only one here now, though.
‘We do the right thing coming here, Gary?’ Robin fumbled out a ten pound note to pay for his and Gareth Nunne’s drinks. ‘I dunno. But it was all your fault.’
‘Not still bothered about Jerry Brace?’ Nunne accepted his beer. ‘Cheers, boy.’
‘Guy’s cast a pall,’ Robin admitted.
‘Junkie and a loony. Forget about him. You’ll come through. You’re young, you bastard.’
Robin carried his tankard to the end of the pitted farmhouse table under the bar. In some pain now as he sat down, his stick between his knees, opposite Connie Wilby, edge of the inglenook. He brushed at his jeans.
‘Guess this is unlikely, but would anybody here still have an old VCR?’
‘What’s that?’ Connie said.
‘Videotape player?’
‘Never had one, dear, not even when they were in vogue. I’m what they used to call… damn, can’t even remember the terminology.’
Gareth Nunne looked thoughtful.
‘A reader?’
‘Yes!’ Connie raised a finger. ‘Of course. That’s the word. Thank you, Gary.’
Robin smiled, brought the videotape out of his jacket.
‘That better not be a bloody Kindle,’ some guy said.
‘See?’ Robin said. ‘How soon everyone forgets.’
Gore Turrell was leaning elegantly over the bar on folded arms. He didn’t look happy. Or was that a mood you just projected on him? He nodded at the tape, making a soundless question.
‘I’m guessing The Best of Adolf Hitler,’ Robin said. ‘But who knows?’
Robin felt like a wrench was tightening his balls. He looked around at the shiny faces under the teardrop globes. He knew Gwyn Arthur Jones was in here somewhere and also the screwed-up cop in the baseball sweater, Bliss.
Bliss didn’t talk like any cop Robin had known. Telling him to stir the shit, flush it all out into the street.
Be loud. They make allowances. You’re coping with disability. It’s a bastard, isn’t it, being disabled? Makes you angry all the time. Makes you wanna deck people, just because you know you can’t. You know they’re gonna see the first punch coming before you’ve even made a fist.
But take your time, boy
, Jones had said.
Don’t make it look like you have a story to tell. Let it get teased out of you.
They had to be halfway out of their minds to trust a dysfunctional foreigner whose dream was exploding in his face.
It’s insane
, Bliss had said,
but it keeps screaming at me. We have two murders of young women, thirty years apart, in similar ritualistic circumstances. And one we know was committed by Gore’s father with the help of his mother. And we know that Tamsin was asking questions in their bar.
And then he’d looked at Gwyn Arthur Jones.
We’ve not gorra shred of evidence. And me and Brent… you don’t know the worst of it. And you’re retired, and I’m off duty.
And that was when Jones had said,
Let’s go and have a drink. Robin looks like he could use one.
‘What you looking for, Robin?’ Gwenda said.
Gwenda who’d watched a woman getting murdered and hacked up into joints. Fucked her son. And still you could eat her.
‘Just making sure Mr Oliver isn’t here,’ Robin said.
‘Oliver came in here
once
,’ Gwenda said with a luscious pout.
‘Unfortunately nobody knew how to make whichever sophisticated London cocktail he prefers.’
See, that was crap. Unless Jones had all this wrong, couldn’t be anything Gwenda didn’t know about sophisticated London cocktails.
‘And what, exactly, do you not want Mr Oliver to know?’ Gore said.
Thank you, Gore.
You kill a cop? A young girl? Did you do that?
‘Uh… we had to wreck his chimney,’ Robin said. ‘The swastika stone… Betty hated it. We decided we were gonna rip it out and put it in the trash. Then we found a hole behind it. A cavity?’
He took a pull on his shandy, not reacting to all the eyes on him.
Gareth Nunne said, ‘And?’
‘Huh?’
‘What was in it? The hole. In the bloody
wall
?’
‘Oh. A box. A wooden box.’
‘Coffin?’
‘A
small
wooden box, Gary. Just big enough for…’ he waved the cassette in the air ‘… a medieval videotape. Only, like most people, we don’t have a VCR any more.’
Robin sat up, shook himself, took a drink then called across to Connie Wilby, who was hunched forward, letting the empty inglenook take her smoke.
‘This make any sense to you, Connie? What kind of movie might Jerry Brace’ve wanted to hide in his wall?’
‘No idea, lovie. Jerry didn’t do pillow-talk. Rocks orf, and I was history.’
‘VHS?’ Gareth Nunne said. ‘Kapoor has one, doesn’t he? Copies old test match tapes.’
‘Yeah, I, uh… I called him at home. No answer.’
By the time Robin had left the cricket shop, Kapoor had made two copies, one to DVD one to VHS.
‘Bugger,’ Gareth Nunne said. ‘Suppose that means I’ll have to fetch mine.’
Some people cheered. Robin lowered his gaze to Gore, who remained expressionless. The TV on the wall to the left of the bar was tuned to a news channel so customers could follow the search for the missing cop.
‘Oh, goody,’ Gwenda said. ‘That should be a fun way to end the night.’
She didn’t look at Gore. She just laughed.
Laughed the laugh.
Robin went cold to his spine.
Jeeter Kapoor, still running copies, said he’d leave his shop door open for Merrily, but she told him no.
‘Lock it. Don’t open it for anybody other than one of us.’
‘You fink somebody’s gonna try and get this stuff?’
‘Wouldn’t take any chances. I’d even hide a copy somewhere.
Not
in the wall.’
Jeeter laughed uncomfortably, and Merrily came out into unexpected heat, a moon heading for full, a sky manic with stars. She paused outside Thorogood Pagan Books, suddenly light-headed with dismay. The amorphous nature of this job sometimes made her feel flimsy, slightly ridiculous and, after all she’d seen and heard tonight, irrelevant. Faith seemed naive. As for belief… it wasn’t so much what you believed in as the nature of belief itself. What belief could make you do. Belief that killing could liberate the soul. The belief of the suicide bomber who mass-killed in expectation of a parade of willing virgins on the other side.
The case for atheism.
She peered through the window of Thorogood’s, where a lowwattage brownish light glimmered grimly. No sign of Betty. She tapped on the glass. No response. She tried the door.
Unlocked. She went in. No sense of forest glade any more, no starry night on the ceiling. You could barely see the ceiling in the smudgy brown light.
‘Betty?’
Nobody in the shop. She went between the bookshelves and opened the door to the tiny kitchen, scrabbling for lights but she couldn’t find a switch and there was no window.
‘Betty!’
She went in, putting out her hands, spinning round just to satisfy herself there was nobody in here, her foot kicking something that turned out to be the airline bag, the Deliverance kit. Wasn’t good to have left that in here. She picked it up and backed out, slamming the kitchen door, pausing at the foot of the stairs. She could see a feeble light up there. Were all the lights in this place feeble or was the power being drained?
Power being drained. That happened. Huw Owen said it actually happened, so it must be—
‘Betty!’
Some moments of silence, and then that hand-on-the-spine sensation of being watched from behind and she spun round and nearly screamed at the sight of a figure at the top of the stairs, white and wafery and vague as a ghost. Plain white dress, blond hair straggly, the Alice band gone.
‘Come up,’ Betty said.
Merrily hesitated. Betty walked back into the upstairs room, in a desultory way, head bowed.
Merrily went up. Followed her into the room where a trail of dust led to the hole in the back of the chimney as if it had been breathed out.
Robin had said they’d cleaned it all up.
‘Have you touched that again, Betty?’
‘I got it wrong,’ Betty said.
‘What have you done?’
‘Called them out,’ Betty said. ‘Both of them.’
Somehow he managed not to look at either Gwenda or Gore unless one of them spoke. Knowing that Gareth Nunne would be back soon with his VHS machine, he was struggling for
conversation, aware that people were watching him. People he knew, people he didn’t, place was near full tonight. He turned to the woman whose cigar smoke was curling into the inglenook.
‘Connie… Brace… I hate to keep coming back to him.’
‘Robin, one can only take so much humiliation.’
‘Only, he ever talk about some ancestral link with the guy whose big wife built the castle? De Braose?’
‘Not to me.’ Connie Wilby flaked some ash into the ingle. ‘Someone once mentioned it. My own feeling, having read fairly widely on the subject, is that de Braose wasn’t quite as black as painted. Killed those Welsh chaps in revenge for his uncle. Nothing to be proud of, but in those days…’
Robin heard the door getting scuffed open.
‘…
and
he atoned for it by building and repairing several churches,’ Connie said. ‘Certainly, the medieval historian Giraldus Cambrensis wrote highly of him.’
‘Always two sides to everybody. ’Cept maybe Hitler. Someone told me there are these creeps think he was some kind of avatar and he’s still out there? They, like, worship Hitler?’
‘Millions of people worshipped him,’ Gwenda said. ‘Not so long ago.’
‘Yeah, but, Gwenda, that was like mass-psychosis. See, maybe there’s something I’m missing here, but Hitler, he was into this fantasy about big, blond guys with six-packs, right? And he’s like this puny little bastard with flat, dark hair and a stupid moustache who stands on his podium to look big and screams at people, and they’re all like, “Hey, Adolf, you’re the man!”’
Robin took a big drink, rolled the cold glass tankard around on his forehead.
‘That’s mass psychosis, guys.’
Clunked his tankard on the farmhouse table. Blinked a little, like he was fishing something from his memory.
‘They say he has a son?’
‘Who?’ Gwenda said.
‘Brace. Brace and a girl quaintly called Mephista, they had a
son. And Brace’s old man, the rich fascist, he adopted the kid? Had him raised as a Nazi, goosestepping from age five. They say he came back here. Possibly to claim what his old man saw as their heritage. The de Braose legacy?’
Gwenda said, ‘Where on earth did you get that from?’
‘Ah, forget it.’ Robin wiped the air. ‘Probably crap. Urban myth. My natural romanticism tends to wane when it comes to fascism. I would honestly rather Jerrold Brace had neither lived nor died in the place where we’re trying to revive our fortunes. And if we have to exorcize his sorry, smack-addled ass, that’s what we’ll do.’
He realized he’d snarled at Gwenda, and he saw she’d realized it, too. He saw her expression change, darkening, and he was like,
Oh, shit, shit, shit…
as Gareth Nunne came in, his arms full of VCR. He laid it on the bar and Robin brought out the tape box and placed it on top, and Gareth Nunne stood collecting his breath, the wine stain hardly distinguishable from the rest of his face.
‘They’ve found her,’ he said. ‘Tamsin.’
The bar noise dwindled into a hush. Like on Armistice Day.
Then the silence was broken all at once, like a signal had been given, everybody moving, chairs getting pushed back. A crush began forming around the bar and the TV on the wall, tuned to the 24-hour news channel, but it was screening something involving sand and tanks. They didn’t know yet at the TV station. Only Hay knew.
Robin saw the yellow globes swinging on their wires, heard Nunne repeatedly saying
murdered
and
I don’t know, I don’t know
,
I don’t know.
He stumbled and felt his hip screaming, as he was pushed into the corner by several people heading up the book-lined passage for the door as there was a flash and then the lights went out.