Sympathy for the Devil

by Howard Marks

  ‘Your answer service,’ she said. ‘Get any odd calls on it the last eight weeks?’

  The boy smiled. ‘There was one,’ he said.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Cardiff accent, asked me what times the box was filled up again.’

  ‘So what was odd about that?’

  ‘He sounded, well, weird like. Anxious, jumpy. He wanted me to call him back to a public box. Gave an exact time to call him.’

  She looked at Huw, a thin smile on her lips.

  ‘The box number he gave you, do you still have a record of it?’ she said.

  ‘That’d be the Dinas Island one,’ the boy said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because when I called, it was the pub phone. Seems it’s the only public phone that works for miles up there.’

  It was warmer back in the car. Huw shifted in his seat, turned towards Catrin.

  ‘Did you think the boy was on the level?’ he asked.

  ‘Difficult to know. But if someone wanted to have photos developed and stay out of sight, this would have been a very convenient way of doing it.’

  ‘You’re sure it was Rhys, though?’

  ‘Cardiff accent, sounded weird, anxious. Has to be worth a look.’

  She drove back slowly through the falling snow to the hotel. There was a single light in a dormer window at the top.

  Two shadows crossed the curtains. It appeared that the old man and his wife were turning in for the night. The sign and the lights along the short drive had been switched off. The two lower floors were in darkness.

  She told Huw to wait behind her in the hall, and took the keys to the empty rooms from the rack behind the desk. She found the switches for the drive lights there and switched them on, so they could see anyone approaching from the street. Then slowly she went from room to room, turning on the lights, checking behind the furniture. She knocked on the door at the top, told the couple she and Huw were back and they’d lock up.

  When she came downstairs Huw was already going down the passage to his room. He turned to her for a moment but said nothing, closed his door. Catrin still felt they were being watched. She switched off the light in the hall, then walked out, locking the door behind her. Nothing was moving except the stunted palmettos shaking in the wind. She got into the car, didn’t start the engine. She sat there in the dark cabin, watching the street.

  No vehicles passed, she saw no one out in the swirling confusion of the snow. The flakes were settling on the windscreen, she could barely see more than a few yards. Catrin felt herself begin to lose track of time: her eyelids closing. She began to wonder if she was wasting her time, whoever was following them was not showing themselves, not yet anyway. She got out, into the cold air, and opened the boot where earlier she’d noticed the car alarm hardware. The system was top-end Bosch, retro not factory-fitted, she noticed. She set the touch-sensitive function, then the sensors on the mirrors and wings. The system could still be bypassed by someone who knew what they were doing. She’d check it again in the morning before they set off.

  She went back into the hall, locked the door, then went up to her room. At the desk, she turned on her Mac, clicked into the aerial map of the national park. The boy in the shop had mentioned a small headland far to the north of the park. It appeared barely inhabited, connected to the mainland by a small causeway and like the surrounding areas was covered in deep woodland.

  Catrin remembered what the woman in the village had said about the group living out on one of the headlands. She zoomed in to maximum scale. There was a large house, but it was a care centre, a private clinic of some sort. The place has almost certainly changed hands several times since the group were there all those years ago, she thought.

  She ran a few searches on the name, Dinas Island. Little of interest came up. It was listed on a couple of ramblers’ sites as a stopover on routes across the park. But apart from that, almost nothing. There were no residents’ associations, no local forums that mentioned it. The place didn’t seem to have any presence at all on the web.

  Next she checked for historical links, but there wasn’t much there either. She found references to a small Augustinian abbey, founded in the twelfth century, but by the sixteenth century the place had already been abandoned. Clicking back to the map, she could see no trace of it. She knew that abbeys were sometimes built on sites sacred to the old religion. But there were no signs of standing stones or other features that marked any ancient site. Almost all the small, club-like contours of the island looked to be covered by steep crags and dense woodland.

  After a few more searches on local historical society sites the only links coming up were to a trial back in the early nineteenth century, and to the great storm of 1859. She glanced briefly at the link to the trial. It was to a site that judging by the graphics and lurid colouring was aimed at a younger audience, death metal fans and Goths. The material there had all been pasted from another source, a book by a pre-war American academic on historical witchcraft in West Wales. She clicked straight into an academic archive service she’d used before, and found the original book. The entry took up less than a page, and the details appeared rather sketchy. At the county assizes in 1837 a local landowner, Wyre Penrhyn, and his son Owen, had been accused of conjuration of evil spirits; there were no court records cited, only local newspapers. The account claimed other children in the same family and in the area had become possessed by spirits, and had disappeared into a cave which locals believed to be a mouth of hell. Both the men had escaped from prison prior to trial, so their trial had never been completed.

  In a final brief paragraph the historian stated only that sightings of the older man, Penrhyn, had continued in the area for many years afterwards, as had the disappearances of local children. No sources for these later incidents were given. The entry ended by saying that the sightings had persisted long after the man would have completed his natural life, leading some at the time to say he had entered into some form of demonic pact or congress.

  Catrin checked the next page, but there was only a small illustration. The drawing looked much older than the incidents described, from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. It showed a man wearing long black robes standing at the mouth of a cave. His arms were outstretched as in an act of supplication or worship. At the edge of the cave stood several young people, their faces distorted, as were their limbs, within a circle of what appeared to be black arrowheads or feathers. The man she thought must be intended to represent the witch, and those in the foreground the possessed children. The lines were crude and blurred, and Catrin suspected the author had included the picture because he’d been unable to find any later drawings to illustrate his material.

  The story as it stood was evidently far from complete and lacked many details. The material she felt seemed to hint at another story behind the story. But whatever form it had originally taken, it was likely no more than another tall country tale, not relevant to the case except in one possible way: there was a chance it had been known by the cult leader, the Manson figure who had gone out there in the Seventies. Possibly this had even been the reason he’d chosen to locate there. She remembered other examples of this among cult leaders from the period. A cult set up on an island once owned by Aleister Crowley, another in an old manor in the Marches where a coven had once met. Maybe the witchcraft story had been used by the leader to inspire interest or fear in his followers. Maybe he’d deliberately identified himself with the figure who was believed to have made the pact. She wondered how this might connect to Face, and what Rhys could have found out there after all this time.

  She clicked into the links to the storm of 1859. The official records showed that a twelfth-century church, St Brynach’s, along with fishing crafts and over twenty houses, had been destroyed at the time. None had been rebuilt and the small hamlet there had fallen into ruin. After that Catrin could find not a single further reference to the place. She turned off the lights, lay in the dark listening for f
ootsteps or the whine of an engine but hearing only the sound of the waves.

  Later when she couldn’t sleep she went along the passage and knocked on Huw’s door. The curtains hadn’t been drawn, the light from the street filling the cramped room. The double bed was more like a generous single, the chest of drawers taking up the rest of the space.

  She heard only the muted sound of the breakers outside. A large pipe with beads hanging off the bowl was sitting on the table, still smoking thinly, the close air heavy with its sweet aroma.

  She sensed rather than saw Huw as she turned around. He took her by the shoulders. As his face moved closer she shut her eyes, feeling that old, familiar sensation of falling, not downwards but back into some distant, hollow space where nothing touched her.

  There was a vague awareness of his hands running down her back, as she pulled his arms around her. She allowed him to continue, his movements slow, languorous. She kept her eyes closed, her flesh puckering in the cool air, her breasts swaying gently as she unhooked her bra, her nipples hard from the cold.

  She turned her back to him, but kept her head half towards him, their lips still just touching. Do I want to control him, or let him control me, she wondered. Perhaps neither, perhaps I just want to protect him, as Rhys once protected me. It’s the debt I carry in my soul. She felt him run his hands down her back and legs before kissing her shoulders, then his tongue across her nape, down her spine. She turned, pulled his head down between her legs.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘Show me if all those years of experience have taught you anything useful.’ The pleasure shuddered silently through her. She heard the waves breaking on the promenade outside, as she lay back almost still. He moved into her slowly while he stroked her, she felt herself being rocked like a child. She realised she was crying then, silently, and turned her head away so he wouldn’t sense her tears. Then she felt his lips on her cheeks, gently kissing away the tears.

  She felt him touch her hair, a vague, gentle movement, as if he was only half aware he was doing it. ‘No women in your life, Huw?’

  He didn’t reply, rolled over towards the wall, one hand still loose over her thigh. When she looked down, he was glancing back at her.

  ‘What about you, no men?’ he said.

  She didn’t answer. No live ones, she thought, only a ghost. Huw ran his hand over her neck.

  ‘You never said much about your mam,’ he said.

  ‘Not much to tell. She was a hippie, then an addict. Familiar story?’

  ‘Did she tell you any more about your father in the end?’

  Catrin took slow, deep breaths.

  ‘I don’t think she ever knew him that well. She was into free love and all that. A lot of men came in and out of her life.’

  She let her head slip down onto his chest. She lay very still for a few minutes, then as she heard his breathing easing, she got up off the bed. By the door to the bathroom she paused, picked up her phone. There were several more calls from Thomas’s number, but no messages. Huw lay face down, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and regular.

  She picked up the packet of cigarettes on the dressing table, shook one loose, lit it with the book of matches in the ashtray. Outside the window three lorries were moving slowly up the road.

  In the flickering pool of the headlights there was a sudden glimpse of yellow diggers, mounds of earth, tree roots and debris. Then all was darkness again, the shapes hidden by the outlines of the buildings and the high cliffs over the road north.

  4

  The fog closed in as they drove north along the narrow, cliff-top roads. Catrin had checked the car before they set out and found nothing. She kept the satnav off and they navigated with a map. At times they could see no further than a few yards ahead. It took several hours to cover only a few miles. There were no other cars on the road, no lights following. Several times she pulled over, waited, but no cars passed them.

  They stopped at a pub along the way to find out whether the one road onto Dinas Island was still passable. A farmer said it had been that morning so they decided to press on. As they started their descent through the winding high-hedged lanes, she pulled the car over onto the roadside. They got out to try to get a better sense of what lay ahead of them. As their eyes adjusted to the dimness the unusual geography of the place gradually revealed itself. The island was not an island in the strict sense but a club-shaped headland several miles across and bounded on each side by cliffs.

  The cliffs fell sheer to the churning breakers beneath them, this darkness broken only by the specks of foaming blowholes and a line of needle-shaped rocks rising to the north. The only link to the mainland appeared to be a lane running along a slender spit, a natural bridge between the opposing bluffs. It was visible as a thin black line rising towards a shelf cut into the cliffs that loomed out of the fog. Above on the thermals black-backed gulls and chough rode and through the screeching of the wind Catrin could hear the low, whining call of ravens.

  Returning to the car, they drove slowly across the narrow spit, then down towards the headland across a plain of frozen winter bracken. The place seemed more extensive than it had appeared from the mainland. The road narrowed and wound through woods of ancient oaks, the way wide enough for just a single vehicle. Among the trees the only sign of habitation was a pair of black wrought-iron gates behind which glimpses of gables appeared among the branches.

  From the gates the lane led through the woods until it came out at a cluster of cottages around a small, ruined chapel. There were no cars parked along the roadside. The cottages were empty, rotting shells, without windows and roofs. All the way down into the village the only sounds had been the cawing of the birds, and the crash of the breakers far below. But now there was a sudden stillness broken by the distant note of a foghorn from further down the shore.

  Nothing they had yet seen committed the area either to the twentieth or the twenty-first century. They drove on past a further warren of cottages, built close to the edge of the cliff. Catrin slowed beside a view through the fog to the same line of needle-shaped rocks they had seen from the mainland.

  ‘A lot of people out here used to survive off smuggling and wrecking,’ she said.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Off not much, by the looks of things.’

  Beyond the village, they saw ahead the lights of a larger building, and two smaller cabins at an unmarked junction. These looked as if they had once been craft shops, but now were closed, either for the winter or permanently. The shutters were partly down, the windows boarded-up. Through one they could just make out some dust-covered shelves of Celtic crosses and pentangles alongside pendants and earrings of the same elaborate designs.

  They carried on to the larger building, where the windows on the lower floor were dimly lit, a trail of grey smoke rising from the chimney. In front was a gravel clearing, an old-fashioned petrol pump set up beside a hut. Two rusting camper vans were parked on a square of poured concrete, a ragged fence separating it from the drop to the rocks below.

  ‘This must be the pub with the phone,’ Catrin said and pulled in.

  The high grass at the front obscured the path to the entrance. Under a weathered lintel the door was ajar, revealing a pub interior. Several men were standing at the bar, dressed in boots and fishermen’s sweaters, the type of foul-weather gear that marked them out as locals.

  It was dark inside. A bar counter stretched the length of the room. Behind it on the wall were photographs of different generations of a local lifeboat crew as its only decoration. There was a facial similarity between most of the lifeboat men, grandfathers, fathers and sons going down the years. Occasionally more than two generations appearing in the same shot. The barman had much the same features, was dressed the same way as the crews, but Catrin could not see his face in the pictures.

  She noticed they were already attracting glances from the men further down the bar. She saw the phone now, and why Rhys had chosen it. It was the old-fashioned sort, with
a long cord, so he could have backed into the passage behind to make his calls unheard. She went over to it, memorised the number. Later she’d try to get call lists from the service provider, see if any interesting numbers came up. But she didn’t hold out much hope.

  Rhys had probably not used it more than a few times. If he believed he was being tracked, in danger, she knew he wouldn’t have used any regular call points. One of the reasons he’d been such an effective undercover officer had been his unpredictability. Lay down patterns of behaviour, and you become predictable. Become predictable, you become vulnerable. It was probably one of the few rules Rhys had still lived by.

  She approached two men at the bar and pulled up a stool. One man was short, with curly black hair. His companion was taller, his beard and sandy hair fading to grey. Putting her bag up on the bar, she took out the picture of Rhys from her wallet, another of Face cut out from a CD cover. She put them both on the bar.

  ‘Seen either of these two recently?’ she asked quietly.

  The men looked over briefly and shook their heads. In the poor light she knew they could hardly see the photographs. But they made no effort to look more closely. She passed the pictures down to the men at the other end, who barely glanced at the shots and shook their heads.

  ‘Looking for someone?’ The voice was educated, probably English, definitely not local. She looked round. A young man in a long dark coat was standing behind her. She hadn’t noticed him as she’d gone over to the phone.

  He had thick fair hair, the even features of a romantic lead, somewhere on the borderline between handsome and bland. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes narrowed. Unlike the regulars at the bar he looked like a man with a purpose.

  The man asked her again if she was looking for someone. He was keeping his voice low, so the others couldn’t hear. His forehead, she noticed, was covered with a beading sweat. She nodded, showed him the two pictures. He passed quickly over the image of Rhys and looked more closely at the shot of Face.