MW 12 - The Magus of Hay

by Phil Rickman

  Robin grinned, first time today.

  ‘Tidy,’ Nunne said, like he was addressing a small kid, ‘looks like you know what you’re selling.’

  ‘We know exactly what we’re selling.’

  ‘Of course you do. I’m just telling you it en’t good to look like you know. If you’re wearing a suit and all your shelves are beautifully ordered and it looks like every book’s been assessed and valued, you’re buggered. What you need are subtle hints of chaos… confusion… incompetence. You don’t wanner blow it like Oliver, come over as clever, when what your customer wants is stupid. Some vague, booky type who don’t function in the real world. Your customer’s looking for a bargain. Wants to think he’s put one over on you.’

  Nunne pulled down Wells’s guide to the sacred magic of gemstones.

  ‘Say your punter’s bought this for peanuts and he’s real chuffed, and he tells you it’s a first edition. You go, “First edition? Is it really? Well, well. I never noticed that. Good heavens, you got a bargain there, all right.”’

  ‘And that works how?’

  ‘It’s a sacrifice. They’ve got you down as an idiot, and that means they’ll come back.’

  ‘Uh… right.’

  ‘However,’ Gareth said, ‘if you’re buying second-hand books different rules apply. You go, “Well, of course it’s a first edition – there only ever was one edition, and if people didn’t want it first time around, they’re not gonner want it now. Only way it’ll sell is as part of a set. Say fifteen quid the lot?”’

  ‘You tried to pull that one on me.’

  ‘Aye, and leased bloody Oliver’s shop for him. Jesus.’

  Nunne beamed at Robin. His port wine stain shone. Then he was serious.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. We’re not in competition, yere, like your Waterstones and your Smiths. It’s about getting people into the town. The town’s one big bookshop. All the rest, the fashion shops, the antique shops, the art shops, that’s just the support. When it ceases to be the support and starts to dominate the book trade… that’s when Hay will fall, boy.’

  He probably didn’t mean it to sound as portentous as it did.

  Outside the ice cream parlour, a man was crouching on the pavement, taking pictures of the castle, across the marketplace.

  ‘Not really what one would call a romantic ruin, is it?’ Hilary said.

  You couldn’t argue with that. Some medieval castles were beautifully stark, like sculptures made by the hand of God. This one looked like a ruin inside a ruin. Repeatedly smashed and burned, patched up, rebuilt, reformed, abandoned again. And now it just hung around, Betty thought, like some huge, shambling, schizophrenic psychiatric patient in the care of the community.

  Maybe Robin related to the castle as a fellow cripple.

  Cripple. He liked that word.

  ‘The keep,’ Hilary said, ‘is supposed to have been built by a huge woman. Matilda. Or Maud. Or something.’

  Betty had Googled it. The origins of the castle, as much as she could find. Matilda, or Maud, had been the wife of a Norman baron, William de Braose, who ran most of the southern Welsh border in the twelfth century, the reign of King John. William had been known as The Ogre after organizing the massacre of several Welsh leaders he’d invited to dinner at Abergavenny Castle, twenty-five miles or so from here.

  ‘Built it on her own, do you think?’ Betty said. ‘Or did she just brief the contractors?’

  ‘No idea. I suppose it’s partly legend. Matilda was eventually starved to death by King John, apparently. Not here. Somewhere. Perhaps I’m oversensitive, but I find none of that romantic.’

  Hilary Oliver turned away from the castle. As perhaps, Betty sensed, she always had.

  ‘’Scuse me.’ The man with the camera was on his feet, approaching Betty. ‘This is rather cheeky of me. Taking some shots for a tourist guide, and I need a figure to stand in front of the castle. Would you mind?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Only be middle-distance. To give the picture a sense of scale.’

  Never liked being photographed. Native Americans thought it captured your soul. But then she thought about Robin.

  ‘OK, then.’

  ‘Very kind. If you stand there in the centre of the square, away from the cars…’

  He took several in the end. Her looking at him, her looking up at the castle. She felt awkward, but he seemed professional and harmless enough – dumpy, bearded, middle-aged guy. And she knew that Robin would go, Hey, connection! You arrived. You’re part of the scene. You’re part of Hay.

  ‘If you give me your address,’ the photographer said, ‘I’ll send you some copies of the brochure when it’s printed.’

  ‘It’s OK, honestly,’ Betty said. ‘Don’t worry about that. I’m sure it’ll be pointed out to me.’

  They always promised you copies, but they never arrived.

  And giving her address as Back Fold had an element of finality she was still unsure about.

  13

  Protocol and courtesy

  ‘DAVID HAMBLING,’ Bliss said.

  ‘So how are you, now, Frannie?’

  ‘Better than David Hambling.’

  Merrily thought about this.

  ‘He’s dead, right?’

  ‘All right, considerably better,’ Bliss said. ‘How did you know he was dead?’

  ‘I just… know the way you approach things.’

  She’d gone out without her mobile again, had to wait until she was home to call him back. Answering service. She could wait. She’d done some ironing and sketched out Sunday’s sermon on the general theme of bereavement. Sermon. Never a favourite word. One dictionary definition employed the verb harangue. How long would a haranguing vicar last these days? Little female pulpit punk screaming hellfire. They’d take you away.

  See… already talking to herself. And bloody well forgotten that, with Martin Longbeach in the pulpit, she didn’t even need a sermon. God, she was losing it. Stress. Quite glad when Bliss had called back just before seven p.m.

  ‘How much you know about Cusop, then, Merrily?’

  Sophie had been right, his speech was a little slurry, Mersey mud reclaiming its own.

  ‘I know where it is.’

  An insignificant left turn, just as you were about to cross the Welsh border into Hay-on-Wye.

  Bliss said, ‘Your patch?’

  ‘Certainly in the diocese.’

  ‘Separated from the Dyfed-Powys police area by two or three fields and the Dulas Brook,’ Bliss said. ‘Right on the rim. The brook actually marks the English border. Learned that today.’

  ‘New knowledge always makes a day worthwhile.’

  ‘Something wrong, Merrily?’

  ‘Nah, just a bit… Go on. tell me something else about Cusop Dingle.’

  ‘You can’t see Hay at all from there, close as it is. Too low. Can’t see much of anything, really. Funny kind of place. Secretive. Lorra trees. Would you like to see it?’

  ‘You’re asking me for a date?’

  Merrily sat down, put an elbow on the scullery desk to take the weight of the phone.

  Bliss said, ‘Have you heard of David Hambling?’

  ‘Not sure. Was he a priest?’

  Small laugh from Bliss.

  ‘If you can spare the time, I’d like you to take a look at Mr Hambling’s library. As a person with knowledge of what we might call the spiritual underside.’

  ‘Satanist?’

  ‘Half-eleven all right?’

  ‘Sure. Why not.’

  ‘I wouldn’t keep you long, it’s just— Sorry, did I get that right? you just agreed without an argument and having to clear it with the Bishop?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Well. If you know where the Cusop Dingle sign is, follow it and just keep driving till you see my car.’

  ‘Is it possible there’s something in Cusop I need to know about?’

  ‘Might be.’

  ‘Only it has a church and a mi
nister. Should I mention it, out of protocol… courtesy, even?’

  ‘Nah, I wouldn’t. Not at this stage.’

  ‘Frannie, you don’t know what protocol and courtesy mean.’

  ‘Yeh, well, had trouble with a lorra words since I had me head kicked in.’

  ‘I did wonder how that was going? In fact I even Googled brain-injury, which is something I don’t normally—’

  ‘Merrily.’ Bliss’s voice was suddenly wound tight. ‘Brain stem injury. Different. How’s Jane?’

  ‘Gone away for gap-year therapy. How did he die, this man?’

  ‘Found in a pool below a waterfall. Probably drowned. We don’t know for certain yet.’

  ‘Cusop has a waterfall?’

  ‘Several, apparently. Least, the brook does.’

  ‘Don’t have to inspect a body or anything, do I?’

  ‘Eleven-thirty, then,’ Bliss said. ‘Ta ra.’

  She sat staring at the phone. Would she have said yes with such alacrity if the Bishop – and even Sophie – hadn’t gone behind her back over Sylvia Merchant? Courtesy and protocol. A two-way street.

  No call that night from Jane or Lol. None expected. Jane had already rung four times in just over a day – what did that say about both of them?

  She left it till after ten, when she knew he’d be in, and called Huw Owen in the Brecon Beacons. No answer. No answering machine. Didn’t try again. What did she really expect him to say about Sylvia Merchant? What could you really claim to do for these people when even the dictionaries had their doubts?

  Merrily went to bed too early, a last-light sheen on the landing window, a brown fog on the oaken stairs.

  On your own. In that vast old vicarage.

  Who knew how old the vicarage really was? Three centuries, four centuries, five… more? You’d need to carbon date every oak beam even to make an educated guess. She’d gone up and down these stairs tens of thousands of times, knowing the house was empty but also knowing that Jane would be home before nightfall. And also, in the past year or so, that Lol was in his cottage at the bottom of the cobbled square.

  Coming back from the bathroom, it was like being the only guest in a drab old hotel. One of the bulbs in the landing light had expired a couple of nights ago and now the walls were the colour of worn leather and she was unusually aware of her footsteps. It was oppressive in the way it had been when she and Jane had first moved in and she’d had recurrent dreams of the house being even bigger than it was, with a forbidden extra storey. Also vividly bloody dreams of her dead husband, Sean, Jane’s father, who had died in a motorway crash with his other woman.

  Did she actually like this vicarage? It was impressive. Lots of period features.

  No, not a lot, really. Amazing it had survived when the Church was flogging them off all over the country, putting the clergy into former council houses. She suspected the reason it hadn’t happened here was Uncle Ted, senior churchwarden, retired solicitor with an extensive portfolio of stocks and shares, who’d been known to bail the parish out more than once and thought a showpiece black and white village like Ledwardine deserved a seventeenth-century seven-bedroom mausoleum for its vicar to freeze in.

  Merrily spun round, shivering in her T-shirt and pants, gazing into the night-blue squares of the leaded window. A small black shadow flitted in front of her into the bedroom.

  Me and the cat.

  Some people said cats were drawn to negative energy. Ethel mewed. Merrily bent and picked her up, put her on the rug and climbed into bed.

  After a few minutes she got up again, went across to the window which overlooked the village lights, said a small, neutral prayer for Ms Merchant and the soul of Ms Nott and went back to bed.

  There was a small bump and squirmy movements between her feet.

  Ethel. Hopefully.

  14

  A hollow in time

  BLISS LOOKED SOMEHOW askew, walking uneasily like a soldier conscious of roadside bombs. A defensiveness behind the sloping smile.

  Not brain damage, brain stem damage. Different. Google said some functions impaired, but not mental capacity. Not for too long, anyway. Usually.

  ‘Frannie.’

  ‘Ta for this, Rev.’

  Mid-morning in Cusop Dingle might have been early evening somewhere else. Wet, white sunlight was strained through the canopy of heavy trees hanging over the black Freelander, Bliss’s Honda and a small police car in the opening of a track leading across the bridge to some hidden house.

  More people lived down here than you’d think. A few cottages edged the narrow lane but the bigger houses were set back on higher ground enclosed by dripping trees. Full of shady glades on a sunny day but in weather like this it was, Merrily thought, quite a dark place.

  She pointed up the track, which curved away into woodland.

  ‘It’s up there?’

  ‘No, this was just the only place for us all to park without blocking the road. If we shurrup, you can hear the falls.’

  Following the sound of water-rush, she peered down over a roadside rail. Jutting shelves of rock, foam. The clear pool below was bound to be deeper than it looked.

  ‘Another bloke was drowned there years ago,’ Bliss said. ‘And someone once drove a car through the fence above it, but narrowly escaped. So it’s got form.’

  ‘This is a suspicious death, Frannie?’

  ‘Well, I’m suspicious, but it’s like a disease with me.’

  Not suspicious enough on the night he’d stumbled into an illegal cockfight in a sweaty cellar below the Plascarreg estate in Hereford. Getting his head trampled into the sawdust.

  Bliss said, ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Yesterday he’d even snapped at Sophie – snapped at Sophie.

  ‘And he’s a bit unusual, our man,’ Bliss said, ‘as you’ll see. Which makes his death by apparent drowning open to a little extra scrutiny. Humour me, Merrily.’

  He set off under tree canopies heavy as tarpaulin then crossed the lane to another track, leading uphill into more woodland.

  ‘Where we going, Frannie?’

  ‘Not far. Norrin these shoes.’

  ‘You in charge now, at Gaol Street?’

  ‘Not exactly. There’s Brent. Acting-DCI Dr Brent.’

  ‘You have coppers now with doctorates?’

  ‘My guess is he gorrit online. Sixty dollars from the University of Dry Gulch, Arizona.’

  The track curved round, the ground rising quite steeply out of the dingle. Bliss took a breath and started to walk again, faster, as if to prove he could. Merrily caught him up.

  ‘So do all more-senior officers have to be your adversary necessarily? Is it part of the job description? Because Annie Howe—’

  He stopped.

  ‘She’s back in Worcester.’

  ‘I mean I know you were never exactly best mates but, when you were hurt, she did seem… concerned to an unexpected degree.’

  ‘Probably concerned I might recover.’

  ‘Everybody changes, Frannie. That a castle tump?’

  ‘What?’

  She pointed towards the top of the track. It was over the hedge, a low, green mound, flat-topped.

  ‘No idea,’ Bliss said.

  ‘You don’t want anybody to think you’re unfit for frontline duty, right?’

  ‘Who’s saying that?’

  ‘Nobody’s saying it.’

  ‘I look unfit?’

  ‘You look… I dunno, really.’

  ‘Had the medicals. Passed with flying— Passed, anyway.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When what?’

  ‘When did you have the medicals?’

  ‘Last one a couple of weeks ago. More to come, but—’

  He stumbled slightly, hissed, walked on, his face taut, his thinning hair cut close.

  ‘I meant what time of day?’ Merrily said. ‘Only I was reading how people with your kind of injury feel tired more quickly, so if you were seen earlier in the
day—’

  ‘Mother of God! You gonna friggin’ stop this at some point, Merrily? Pray for me in your own time.’

  Bliss had stopped at a stone gatepost, a bit taller than he was. There had once been perhaps a lion or an eagle on top, but it was just a crooked projection now, like a broken thumb. Another post, about ten feet away, had been reduced to a stump. A track between the posts led down into thickets and a copse and, presumably, the brook. Merrily looked for gables, tall chimneys.

  ‘The house far away?’

  ‘No distance. The reason you can’t see it, it’s a bungalow.’

  ‘With pretensions?’

  ‘I’m told there used to be a big Victorian farmhouse on the site, demolished years ago. At a time when farmers got to preferring less maintenance and oil-fired heating.’

  ‘But I take it this David Hambling wasn’t a farmer.’

  Bliss said nothing, waved her between the gateposts.

  It was nice to feel wanted.

  In the clergy, you spent many hours in the homes of the recently dead. While drawn curtains, or any marks of mourning, were no longer exactly commonplace, there was an atmosphere you came to recognize: a sense of quiet, sober unreality, a hollow in time.

  But this wasn’t like that.

  A tidy fitted kitchen, pine units, bottle-green roller blinds, spotlamps on a lighting track. Light ochre walls that looked sunny even on a day like this. There was milk and sugar on the dresser with a packet of chocolate digestives, a bottle of red wine, a copy of the Radio Times opened to last Sunday’s TV. This was the room of someone who had… just popped out.

  She thought of that comforting homily, often read at funerals, about the dead person being only in the next room.

  There was a young policewoman waiting for them.

  ‘Merrily, this is PC Winterson. Tamsin, Mrs Watkins is here in a consultative capacity. So this is between us, right?’

  The girl was nodding quickly, evidently flattered at being included. Bliss was like that, oblivious of rank and pecking order. You were his mate till you let him down. He pulled out a chromium-framed stool and sat on it.

  ‘I think… we might help ourselves to a pot of Mr Hambling’s tea. Would you mind, Tamsin, if it’s norra terribly sexist request? Could mairder a cuppa.’