MW 12 - The Magus of Hay

by Phil Rickman

  ‘You know more than most people.’

  ‘I’ve read a lot of books about paranormal phenomena, mysticism, occultism. I’ve studied case histories. I’ve observed other people’s spiritual crises, but I still don’t know how much I can accept. I could be self-deluded. I could be a charlatan.’

  This was how you thought in the darkest hours.

  ‘Actually,’ Lol said, ‘there’s something I need to tell you…’

  She turned, the robe half on. Because it was still before dawn, the devil’s time, she felt queasy with trepidation.

  PART TWO

  JUNE, end of

  My Cabinet was picked in five minutes in the pub. Most were wearing jeans and there was a high proportion of lorry drivers.

  Richard Booth

  My Kingdom of Books

  (Y Lolfa, 1999)

  7

  Sad case

  THE NOISE OF the waterfall was like mass excitement, but not in a good way. Bliss was thinking of football frenzy before a grudge game. Wincing at a jagged memory from when he was a young copper in Liverpool, getting his wrist broken on a barricade at Goodison Park. He’d loved it then, the Job. Really hated how long that wrist had kept him off the streets.

  In retrospect, it was bugger all, a broken wrist. Fully fixable.

  Bliss could’ve wept.

  He was unsteady and locked an arm around one of the young trees growing out of the steepening bank just before the rushing water went into its lemming dive. On a warm day it might even be nice here, dappled sun through big trees, white splatter like a vanilla milkshake. Not today. Not with a dead man down in the pool.

  He saw one of the divers heaving himself up on to a rounded rock-shelf, mask on his forehead. Grinning up at Bliss.

  ‘Wanna stay put there for a bit, boss? Should we call for risk assessment?’

  ‘Piss off,’ Bliss said mildly enough. ‘Left me wellies in the car, that’s all.’

  How much did the diver know about his condition? How much did any of them know? He looked down into the pool and felt dizzy. The diver and his mate were at the water’s edge, below the fall. Apparently it was deeper than it looked, this pool.

  Bliss glanced back the way he’d come and saw two rapid streams, side by side. Shit. Hands linked around saplings either side, he leaned forwards, his neck inclined until the two streams coalesced into one, and he straightened up.

  ‘Just get him out, eh?’

  Back in Hereford, he’d seen Terry Stagg exchanging a look with Darth Vaynor – why would the DI want to drive all the way out to the rim of Wales for a body spotted in a pool, likely a routine drowning?

  Why had he? He could’ve just told them he was taking an early lunch, gone out and sat in his car till the numbness subsided.

  Terry Stagg had been smiling thinly, probably thinking Bliss was trying to put some ground between himself and acting DCI Twatface Brent, who’d been running the show while he was in hospital and Annie Howe still working out of Worcester. Well, fair enough, he wasn’t exactly best mates with Brent and better Staggie thought that than nurture any suspicions about the dangerous brightness of office lights.

  Bliss gripped the trees. The truth was that it went further. He couldn’t take the city at all any more. It came at you mob-handed. Sensory overload, bit like this frigging waterfall.

  He’d been thinking it’d be some peaceful stagnant pond in the middle of a field, but no, the pool was right next to the lane and filled up by a mini cataract shooting almost sheer from the tarmac’s edge, white foam harsher on the eye than a fluorescent tube and a noise like you were inside an espresso machine.

  The diver raised a hand to his mate, lowered his mask and slid into the pool. Bliss took a long breath and edged towards the falls, tree to tree. There was a crash barrier at the side of the road; to reach the falls in safety you had to cross a bridge, follow the stream through a field and then negotiate the bank. Worse and worse.

  After a while, the diver came up, in no apparent hurry.

  ‘Just an old man, boss.’

  You could hear the disappointment. Bliss inclined his head, reducing two pools to one. It seemed squalid down there now, like a broken stone lavatory in perma-flush. He even thought he could see the body, half under a projecting rock. It seemed to be moving. But then, in his state, everything bloody did.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ he said, ‘but how about we still bring him out, eh?’

  Yeh, he got the inference. Old people would often wander out into the night. In winter, hypothermia would get them. In summer, they might fall into a pool. With drowned old people, the suspicious-death meter tended to drop below the police concern threshold. He’d take one look and leave them to it. Maybe drive into Hay and sit over a coffee in the ice cream parlour, deal with his blood sugar.

  The rattle of a vehicle made him turn his head, the sides of his vision squeezing in like an accordion. Billy Grace’s old Defender was reversing into the entrance of the nearest big house. This valley was full of big houses, mostly hidden away behind mature trees. Cusop Dingle. He’d never been here before and he probably wouldn’t need to come back, ever.

  ‘Try not to damage him, eh? We don’t know anything for certain yet. Bring him up to some level ground, for the doc.’

  Only seen one drowned person before, a child, again back when he was a young scally, not long before he did his wrist on the barricade. Little kid brought out of a grotty canal, laid on the bank next to the old bike frame his foot had been wedged in. Bliss had had to tell the parents. First time. That night he’d been ready to put his papers in.

  One of the three uniforms was waiting for him on the edge of the field, slim, freckly, red-haired girl.

  Bliss said, ‘The dog walker thought there was some blood, did I get that right?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that was what he thought. On one of those sticky-out shelves of rock? Long washed away though now, obviously, sir. But then, if the gentleman fell from the other side… that is, went over the barrier from the road…’

  ‘If the dog walker saw blood on the rocks, it suggests he was on the scene not long after the old feller went in.’

  ‘I suppose. This was not yet six, still pretty dark down here amongst the trees.’

  ‘Early risers,’ Bliss said. ‘The SOCO’s friend, your dog walker.’

  The numbness was in his forehead, travelling down the left side of his face. He started to sweat.

  ‘We have a possible name, sir. The chap recognized his hat. He wore a distinctive hat, with like a brim? It was wedged… down there. In like a crevice?’

  ‘Gorrit? The hat?’

  ‘Bagged, sir. Anyway, I’ve just been to his house. His back door’s unlocked, nobody home. He lived alone. His name’s David Hambling.’

  ‘He have a dog?’

  No, sir.’

  Bliss nodded. Sometimes people got themselves drowned going in after a pet.

  ‘No suggestion of dementia, sir, according to the neighbours. Even though they reckoned he must’ve been getting on for ninety. If not more. Could be a suicide?’

  ‘Worth the effort at ninety? Morning, Billy.’

  Dr Grace, maybe twenty years older than Bliss, was striding over in his blazer and his old-fashioned gumboots, neon teeth whiter than the water. Mother of God, when even Billy’s frigging teeth hurt your eyes…

  ‘Francis?’ Billy contemplating Bliss with his chin tucked into his collar, all faux puzzlement. ‘Something I haven’t been told?’

  ‘Been advised to get more fresh air, Billy.’ Bliss turned to the uniform. ‘What’s this river called, again… um…?’

  ‘PC Winterson, sir. Tamsin. It’s not actually a river, it’s the Dulas Brook. Just a bit swollen with all the rain. It’s supposed to mark the actual border between England and Wales. Another few metres, this’d be one for Dyfed-Powys. Sir—’

  ‘What are you—?’

  Bliss spinning round so fast he stumbled. Billy Grace was looking him up and down. Actu
ally up and down. Another frigging expert feeding him through quality control. He walked – carefully – right up to the doc, leaving PC Winterson, thanks to the water-roar, just out of earshot.

  ‘I’m not your patient, Billy,’ Bliss said tightly. ‘All right?’

  ‘By virtue of being still alive after a savage kicking?’ Billy beamed. ‘Just about?’

  ‘Piss off.’ Bliss backed away, raising his voice. ‘As it happens, doctor, this sad case is unlikely to interest me any further. Just an old feller. So, in the absence of anything iffy, I’ll probably be leaving you in the capable hands of Tammy here.’

  ‘Tamsin, sir. Sir, there’s one other thing. Something we found in his kitchen?’

  ‘Porno DVDs? Bomb-making kit?’

  ‘Cannabis, sir.’

  ‘Really.’ Bliss blinked. ‘A ninety-year-old dopehead?’

  ‘Not exactly unheard of, Francis,’ Billy Grace said. ‘Occasionally prescribed by some of my more liberal colleagues for its analgesic qualities. And, of course, more often self-prescribed. Though I think if you’re suggesting the old boy might’ve toddled down here high as a bloody kite—’

  ‘You’d be able to tell?’

  Billy shrugged

  ‘Immersion cases are almost invariably problematical. Even simple drowning… ridiculously hard to prove.’ He walked down to the stream’s edge, where you could see the waterfall and most of the pool. ‘Might’ve died through the shock of hitting cold water, or natural causes, precipitating the fall into the pool.’

  ‘Only if he was sitting on the barrier at the time,’ Bliss said.

  ‘Or wandered in from this side, across the fields.’

  ‘Yeh, I suppose.’

  ‘And there’s some other things, actually sir,’ Tamsin said to Bliss. ‘Probably nothing to do with, you know, what’s happened… but a bit, you know…’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Funny things. Oh God—’

  Tamsin shook. Quite suddenly, the body had come up between the two divers, like an old inner tube, water sluicing through a jacket that might once have been white, froth like bubblegum around the mouth. Bliss winced, turned away and stumbled slightly in the mud.

  Billy Grace caught hold of his arm, frowning, then steered him along the stream’s edge, away from PC Winterson, the corpse and the waterfall roar, the old bastard diagnosing aloud.

  ‘Occasional apparent difficulties with balance…’

  ‘Piss off!’

  ‘… and a slight, residual slurring of the speech perhaps discernible only to those of us who’ve known you for some years. Still getting the double vision, are we, Francis?’

  ‘Just gerroff my friggin’ case.’ Bliss dragged his arm away. ‘How about you confine yourself, Dr Grace, to suggesting whether this looks like an accident, or suicide – or if there are complications. Other words, did he fall or was he dumped?’

  ‘You’re a fool to yourself, Francis.’

  ‘I’ve been cleared by the medics.’

  ‘And does one of them owe you a favour, perchance?’

  ‘Up yours, Billy.’

  Bliss steadied himself to walk back to PC Winterson. She seemed smaller. Sometimes his vision was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope.

  ‘You said funny. Funny how, Tamsin?’

  ‘Funny peculiar, sir. Seemed very peculiar to me. At least—’

  ‘Was it you who found out about this?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ve a friend who lives here, and the man with the dog… theirs was the first house he came to after he saw what he thought was a body in the pool. So she rang me, and I reported it and then came here with my friend and I realized there was nothing we could do, and she saw the hat and she was like, Oh God, it’s Mr Hambling. So I went up to his house, and the door was unlocked and—’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Bliss said in an urgent kind of despair. ‘Show me.’

  8

  No strings

  WHEN SHE PUT down the phone, an emphatic echo clanged in the air, as if something had shut her out.

  This phone was good at finality: 1950s black Bakelite, heavy as a small barbell. A present from Jane. Useful for keeping the bills down, the kid had said – you couldn’t wait to hang up.

  That was when she was a kid.

  In the scullery office, silvery early light was draped in the window overlooking the narrowest part of the garden and the churchyard wall. The scullery ceiling was supported by a sixteenth-century beam, gouged and pitted, the colour of old tobacco. Too big for the job now, it had probably been central to whatever the vicarage had been in its young days.

  She’d never thought about that before. Never had time.

  Guessed you’d be up, Jane had said just now, on the phone. I’m just, like, ringing to see if you’re OK?

  Merrily telling her she was every bit as OK as she was last night, when Jane had last rung. Asking what the weather was like down there in West Wales.

  Crap, but that’s all right. They can’t get started anyway. Still waiting for the geofizz.

  Merrily smiling to herself, knowing how long the kid had been waiting to talk like an archaeologist. Smiling to herself because there was nobody else to smile to. There’d been a change of plan. Jane had gone for the West Wales dig instead of Wiltshire because they’d agreed to take Eirion as well, for a month.

  The only difference was it had meant leaving a week earlier. Not a problem for Eirion, who was at university. Not a problem for Jane who’d missed her final two weeks at high school… and thus the appalling Prom.

  Slight problem for Merrily.

  Back to the kitchen and into the main hall, to the front door, past the framed print of Holman Hunt’s Light of the World. Housewarming present from Uncle Ted, the head churchwarden, to whom she’d been a disappointment, a neglecter of the parish. Here was Jesus Christ with his lantern, outside the kind of weathered old door you found here in Ledwardine, his eyes baggy with sorrow, compassion and a hint of – what – disillusion? Disappointment? Him too?

  Avoiding the eyes, she went out and stopped herself from locking the front door behind her. This was Ledwardine. Whoever locked their doors in Ledwardine?

  Everybody, now.

  A wave for Jim Prosser, cutting the string on the morning papers dumped outside the Eight Till Late – Jim, who kept announcing that he and Brenda were getting out, going back to Wales, somewhere bleak and stony where no incomers came in demanding lychees and fresh figs.

  On the edge of the market square, now, opposite the crab-like, oak-pillared market hall, mostly used these days as a bus shelter. Nobody sheltering there from today’s intermittent rain. The cobbles glistening muddily on the square, old guttering dribbling around the roofs of the black and whites.

  Ledwardine: an old slapper who could look after herself. She’d be there when they were all long dead, probably looking much the same despite the efforts of various developers and the whisper of money slid under council tables.

  Not yet eight a.m. Merrily crossing Church Street to Lol’s terraced cottage, letting herself in to an empty hush, no bleeps from the answering machine. When Lol was merely out, temporarily, you’d walk in here, and the draught when you shut the door would cause a shivering of strings from the Boswell.

  But the guitar stand was abandoned, an upturned V of black metal, empty padded rests. No vibration. No strings.

  Picking up the mail from the mat: all junk. Fuel-saving offers, insurance deals. Carried them through to the recycling bin, which had been made by a firm called SimpleHuman.

  Jesus, if only. She’d be doing this day after day. And next week, she was on holiday. A lonely holiday she couldn’t get out of.

  In front of the cold stove in the inglenook, she came close to weeping for a moment before scowling it away and opening a window to let in some street sounds. What she wasn’t going to do again was wander upstairs, lie on Lol’s bed and sob into his pillow.

  Jane would have told her how daft and pathetic she was being. B
ut Jane had driven off with Eirion Lewis, the two of them looking like a grown-up couple. Eirion, yeah – Jane on the phone to Neil Cooper, the archaeologist – my partner. Partner? Jesus wept, at which stage did Eirion become her partner? They were kids. Could never have called Lol her partner. A loose, casual, cowboy word, no real commitment involved.

  No strings.

  When she got back, Ethel was mewing in legitimate protest; if Jane had been here, she’d have been fed by now.

  ‘Sorry, Ethel… sorry, sorry, sorry…’

  She forked out half a tray of Sheba, the expensive stuff, the special treat food, and then made herself some breakfast, honey and toast. Tried to eat it sitting at the refectory table and suddenly had a picture of herself as if from above, CCTV from the ceiling: one small person at one end of a long, communal table.

  The vicarage was vast. It had seven bedrooms, two of them used as stockrooms for the gift shop in the vestry. Maybe she should start taking in battered wives, asylum seekers…

  She was stupidly relieved when the old phone jangled and she had to carry the plate through to the scullery office, half a slice of thick toast and honey clenched between her teeth.

  ‘You didn’t come in yesterday,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Oh…’

  Monday. Yesterday had been Monday. Traditionally a vicar’s day off, hers always sacrificed on the altar of Deliverance, the little extra job. Monday was the weekly meeting with Sophie at the gatehouse office to go through the Deliverance database, reply to any queries from parish priests, many of whom found this aspect of their role distasteful and couldn’t unload it fast enough. Also, to see who might require aftercare. What Uncle Ted called neglecting the parish. But if it wasn’t for the little extra job she’d probably have seven parishes by now and he’d be lucky to see her every other week.

  ‘Yes, well, something…’ Putting the plate on the desk, dropping the toast on it ‘… something came up. Sorry, Sophie. Could we possibly make it this afternoon?’

  Sophie would be arranging her chained glasses to consult the diary.

  ‘The Bishop should be on the train to London by then, so… yes, I suppose so.’