Sympathy for the Devil

by Howard Marks

  She caught the man’s eye. ‘How is it out in the far west?’

  She could hear him chuckling under his breath, making the gurgling sound typical of a heavy smoker.

  ‘That area’s been cut off best part of a week already,’ he said.

  Next to the shop the door led through to a motel section, a recently built, no-frills Travelodge. Beside the empty reception desk, a swipe machine took her card details, then spat out a key into a plastic receptacle.

  The maroon theme that dominated the reception area had been continued in the rooms. The furnishings looked barely used, but old all the same.

  The lights along the walkway outside were tripping off automatically, the night closing in. All that was visible outside was a lone figure in a parka at the pumps filling an old van.

  Sitting on the bed she opened the bag she used to store her CDs, the top covered with stickers from Spillers Records in Cardiff, now faded and peeling.

  Though she’d never cared much for Seerland and Owen Face, she knew she still had some of their early stuff. Rhys had given to her the compilation way back in the mid-Nineties, the second year they’d been together.

  She switched on her Mac and settled back on the bed.

  The first track was one of Seerland’s early numbers. She closed her eyes as she listened to the opening bars. First came the strumming of the balalaika, then the bass notes that drove the track forward. Then Face’s cracked voice gradually filling the room like an ancient scent seeping from a broken bottle.

  It was a song to be listened to in the depths of the night when even the world’s insomniacs had drifted off to sleep. It’d been what Rhys liked to hear on night surveillance shifts, the trip-hop’s unearthliness drifting out of his car stereo. She’d gone with him sometimes, to allay the boredom, getting her first taste for police work.

  It had been the same routine every night, the same faces, every hour or so a runner bringing through the stones bagged up for sale by the boys on the corners. There wasn’t much to do to pass the time except listen to music, or talk, or not talk.

  She’d reach across and hold his hand, or lie with her face buried in his chest, nothing more than that, just lie there, forgetting herself in him, her shallow breathing merging with his until she could no longer hear her own breaths.

  Sometimes she’d sense him shrinking away from her, the first sign that there were parts of him she’d never reach, bowing his head over the box where he stored his chocolate bars, the sheets of paper he used to make his origami birds. Acting as if she wasn’t there at all.

  She went to the track which had made Seerland famous, one of the small collection they’d released after they had signed with their first label. Typical of their early sound, she knew it had been a favourite with that tight-knit group of fans who’d followed the band before Owen Face disappeared.

  The sound did not strike her as particularly original, there was something familiar, almost comforting in its trance-like beat. Over a finale of wailing feedback, the track ended with Face reading a poem. She could make out only one line – I want to walk in the snow and not leave a footprint – the rest was inaudible, lost in the feedback.

  She remembered the same words playing on the radio the night of Face’s disappearance. How she’d tried to shut them out of her mind by humming. Rhys had told her about Face’s state of mind towards the end, his fierce intelligence, his tendency to self-harm with knives and razor blades. She’d thought he presented with all the tells of the classic potential suicide. But she knew there were many people out there who still desperately wanted to believe Face was alive somewhere, that he’d just needed time out and would return one day like a lost Messiah.

  To his hardcore fans the Face had been more than just a rock star. He’d been their representative on earth, his anxieties and anorexia the outward signs of their own tortured souls. But his presumed death had forced them to move on and grow up. And looking back she could see now that his disappearance had coincided with the end of something in herself and the people around her at the time. Until then they’d all still nursed illusions of a successful career, a halfway decent marriage, a house in one of Cardiff’s better suburbs, a couple of kids, a dog – a few pints before Sunday lunch with their mates at the rugby club. They’d still believed they could return to normal lives. But after he had gone these illusions had seemed quietly to slip away, and had gradually been replaced by silence.

  Maybe a part of her still wanted to believe Face was out there too, that part of her that still remembered how to hope, that felt she owed something to all the missing ones. It was the oldest of human fantasies after all, healing time, bringing back the lost, the dead.

  Her cigarette was almost burning her fingers. She let it drop into the mug at her feet. The CD segued on to Seerland’s biggest hit. Over a backdrop of sitars and synthesised guitars the lyrics spoke of astral travel, the mind and the senses leaving the body to experience a world beyond the restrictions of the mundane. The sound reminded her of the Beatles in their psychedelic period – of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. It had a looping, slightly dazed beat, though as she continued to listen she had the sense there was some other more ancient ingredient that she was missing.

  Looking out she could see through the trees beyond the pumps the dim flicker of headlights. She stopped the track and took off the headphones. The wind was stronger now, the sleet almost horizontal.

  In the front pocket of her jeans she felt the vibration of her mobile. She looked at the screen: there was no caller’s number visible. She raised the handset to her ear.

  ‘Catrin?’

  A crackle of interference was breaking up the voice. She didn’t recognise it.

  ‘It’s me.’ The voice sounded cracked, as if the man hadn’t spoken for some time. ‘Huw Powell.’

  The static had gone, but the line was still poor. In the background she could hear what sounded like the crashing of waves.

  ‘Huw Powell. The film-maker.’

  The voice sounded weird, more mechanical than human. Like the voice of someone who didn’t get out much. That’s what these obsessives become like, she thought, they end up in their own worlds, cut off, barely able to communicate.

  On the other end of the line there was a sharp intake of breath, as if the man was taking a drag on something stronger than a cigarette.

  ‘Della called me last night, told me you might want to talk to me.’

  The voice still sounded croaky, barely human. There was a long rasping noise, then a series of clicks and the line went dead. She pressed the ‘logs’ section to check for the number, but there was nothing there.

  Then a text came through, just an address and a time.

  The sleet had almost stopped now. If she pressed her face to the window she thought she could just see, through the dark row of trees and the lamps that lined the road, the orange glow of the city in the distance.

  As Catrin rode through what remained of the western docks, she kept losing her way among the new buildings overlooking the quays. The area had once been a seedy but friendly enough cluster of reggae clubs, cheap guest houses and massage parlours. Now all this had been replaced by high-rise hotels and apartment blocks that seemed to have risen like a giant formation of shimmering crystals whole from the sea.

  The address she’d been texted turned out to be a gleaming steel and glass tower, a needle-shaped structure that dwarfed the blocks around it. The door was opened for her by a uniformed guard, her name was entered on a clipboard, and she was directed towards the lifts.

  In the transparent, climate-controlled pod, hidden speakers played Andean pipe music as it climbed the outside of the building. On her way up to the penthouse she took in the view of the city. Beyond a cluster of bars she could just make out the shopping streets of The Hayes and Queen Street, the turrets of the castle and the dim expanse of Pontcanna and the suburbs.

  As the lift opened, Catrin saw a man standing in a lobby panell
ed in light, rather beautiful wood. He looked like a classic executive type, was dressed in a dark tailored suit and tie. As though he’d left the office late and still hadn’t had time to change.

  ‘I’m here to see Huw Powell,’ she said.

  He smiled warmly, confidently.

  ‘That’s me,’ he said.

  Her first thought was that she’d just been the victim of some kind of practical joke. The voice on the phone had suggested a crazy, a bong-smoking recluse, a one-man party. But the man standing in front of her looked clean-cut, conventional even, every inch the CEO of a major media company. It was the same voice all right, but levelled out now, quietly commanding.

  He reached out his hand, but without moving. She had to come forward to shake it. That’s how the powerful do it, she thought, they make you come to them. She looked closer at him. Apart from a slight redness around the rims of his eyes, there was nothing to suggest he’d been partying hard. He straightens up fast, she thought.

  ‘You sounded as if you were having a good time earlier,’ she said.

  ‘I like to smoke temple balls after work,’ he said. ‘Helps me to unwind. They come from a little valley in the tribal regions. Best fucking dope in the world.’

  He’s not even denying it, Catrin thought. With money like that people soon stop worrying about what others think of them. He was an even six foot, somewhere in his late fifties, she reckoned. But looking well on it, broad shouldered and no sign of a gut. His black hair was shot through with silver, and there were fine crow’s feet around his green eyes. Otherwise time seemed to have left him well alone. His features were dark, powerful. He looked rather like a lion, a green-eyed lion carved out of Welsh rock.

  Powell was ushering her through a series of hallways, all panelled in the same rare teak, his hand placed very lightly on the small of her back. She felt a faint flutter in her stomach, and then it passed. She could see already she’d have to tread carefully with this man.

  He guided her into a giant open-plan living space. It reminded her of the reception area in some high-tech City office, appeared to have been designed more for visual impact than for comfort. It felt pristine, unlived-in. On the walls, the only colour was provided by giant framed Seerland posters, some featuring Owen Face, others more recent.

  He asked what she wanted to drink, then disappeared through a folding door. Through the gap Catrin could see the monitors of several large state-of-the-art editing suites, banks of screens flickering in the half-light.

  ‘You’ve done well for yourself,’ she called through.

  He returned with two screwdrivers in tall glasses.

  ‘The company runs itself,’ he said. ‘We know the formats that sell. We just give people what they want but are ashamed to admit they want.’

  ‘What shows do you make?’

  ‘The ones with big ratings. Reality shows, hidden camera shows. It’s just a question of editing the raw material, holding up a mirror to nature.’

  ‘It’s a business that must have needed plenty of seed money?’

  Powell was looking at her with a slightly disappointed expression. She couldn’t read it exactly, somewhere between quizzical and suspicious, his head tilted to one side as if considering an object that had fallen off its axis.

  ‘You’re referring to the old rumours, I suppose,’ he said, smiling now. ‘That I left the force all those years ago on some kind of corruption rap.’

  ‘These things get around,’ she said.

  ‘You’re thinking I had money stashed away from my time at the force to start the business.’

  ‘Did you?’

  He was smiling broadly, almost laughing, appeared completely relaxed.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I left the force because I had a good business idea, for no other reason. I may smoke a bit of weed, but I’m a straight shooter. You see what you get with me.’

  The silence hung between them.

  Then he motioned his glass towards hers in a wordless toast and gestured towards one of the sofas. Catrin took a swig of her drink. It tasted just right, as if it had been made by a professional barman. She wondered if an invisible army of staff waited just out of sight.

  ‘Della said you might want to ask me some questions about those photos?’ He was looking faintly impatient now. He probably has far, far more interesting things to do than talk to me, Catrin thought. She knew she’d have to get in her questions quickly or she might not get another chance.

  ‘Della said you’d got them from an ex-copper, someone who’d just died.’

  He was nodding.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t tell Della who that was.’

  He smiled. ‘Well, she might not have taken the job if I had.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  She saw Powell wasn’t about to answer her. Maybe this was going to be just another dead end. She glanced at one of the huge framed Owen Face posters on the wall, his face gaunt, his floppy hair hopelessly dated. It looked like an exhibit in a museum, already a piece of history. Then she saw his eyes, large and sad. Watching her, watching her as the eyes of the missing on the hoardings and school gates had. Mute, reproachful, as if she owed him something, owed something to the missing and all the time they had been waiting patiently to collect.

  ‘I was thinking how Face’s disappearance coincided with something that happened to the people around me,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It was like when Face went they noticed a part of them had already disappeared. After that they knew they couldn’t be whole again, couldn’t be normal again.’

  He’d begun picking at his lapel, as if only half listening.

  ‘But no one’s life is normal, Catrin,’ he said after a pause. She noticed how he’d said her name slowly, slightly dismissively but letting the sound of it linger on his lips. A shape moved across the large window, a gull: it hovered there a moment. She watched it dive out of view.

  ‘You said if you told Della who the man was you’d got the photos from, she’d not have taken the job. Why?’

  ‘She disliked him, thought he was a loser, a liability.’

  Catrin thought about this for a moment. ‘As long as there was money in it, I don’t think Della would’ve have cared where the photos came from.’

  ‘Maybe. But I reckoned she wouldn’t risk her reputation getting mixed up in something that might turn out to be just bullshit. I thought it safer not to tell her where they came from.’

  ‘The photos came from Rhys Williams, didn’t they?’ Catrin said.

  He nodded. He seemed relaxed about admitting it now, didn’t hesitate for a moment. A straight shooter? Maybe he really was, she thought.

  ‘Why did you hire Rhys?’

  ‘I didn’t. More like he hired himself.’

  She caught his eye. He returned her glance unblinking.

  ‘I ran into him one day, down the quay.’ He jerked his head towards the window. ‘It felt like he’d been waiting for me, was going to hustle me a bit.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Rhys said he knew I was interested in the Owen Face mystery, did I want to hire him to do some research. I gave him four grand. Never thought I’d see him again.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No. About eight weeks later the photos of those men in robes arrived. Then two days later Rhys was dead.’

  Outside Catrin could hear the clink and whistle of the wind through the metal fastenings on the masts down in the marina. Powell had let his hand drop onto the leather of the sofa in the space between them.

  ‘Rhys send any message with the photos?’

  ‘Just that he’d got them from a very reliable source.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘And no indication I suppose who that source was?’

  ‘No, none at all.’

  He was gesturing vaguely out towards the water.

  ‘Sad what happened,’ he said.

  ‘You
don’t think the photos are connected in any way to how Rhys died then?’

  He didn’t seem to have heard at first. She saw he was looking at her lips, as if waiting for her to continue. Then he shook his head slowly.

  ‘They say it was just an accident,’ he said.

  She looked down at her glass.

  ‘You must have known Rhys from the old days?’

  ‘Not really. I left the year after he joined.’

  Powell was running his fingers slowly over the sofa. His fingers were not touching her, but the ripples from their movements she could sense along her thigh. He was looking at her, not at her eyes but at her mouth.

  ‘Perhaps we could see each other again,’ he said. This time his smile was so brief that it disappeared almost before she registered it.

  She wondered what this might lead to, what his interest might be. A man with his money could have almost any woman he wanted. What did he know about her personal life? She looked down at his hand moving steadily in a rhythm over the soft fabric. She remembered the slightly dismissive but lingering way he’d said her name and felt suddenly uncomfortable.

  She pointed at the reflections of the Owen Face posters. ‘You don’t really believe Face is still alive after all this time, do you?’ she asked softly.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘The odds are against it.’

  ‘Della said you’ve spent years on the mystery.’

  ‘She’s exaggerating a little. I’ve circled the case from every angle over the years, gone down a lot of blind alleys. And now I need to know what really happened before I can finish my film.’

  He stood up, walked slowly across the room to the window that overlooked the marina. He appeared to be enjoying the view, but Catrin couldn’t escape the feeling that he was turning his back on her in some more general way. He folded his arms and looked out again.

  ‘You’re not really that interested in Face, are you?’ he said. ‘Your main interest is in Rhys.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ She felt Face’s eyes watching her from every wall, waiting for her answer, that whole silent choir of Faces in the room watching her. She couldn’t bear to meet the eyes and what they seemed to foretell. An image came to her of Rhys: he was walking away from her, white summer blossom swirling around him in the darkness. He turned back to face her for a moment, but his features were no longer clear to her. He walked on until he disappeared from view.