by Phil Rickman
‘Very convincing. Thank you for telling me. Do you know the man’s name? The man who died?’
‘No. Don’t think I ever did. Look, must call in on you next time I’m up there on a buying expedition.’
‘I’ll look forward to it.’
She shut down the phone. The old lady was stumping towards her, florid-faced.
‘He don’t believe nothing.’ Peered closer at Betty. ‘I bets you do. You got the look. You go there, just on dawn, you’ll see.’
Betty didn’t smile.
‘Where?’
‘I just said. Where the brook comes in. You go down where the brook comes in. But don’t bloody take him. Bloody Pakis.’
Betty said, ‘Can I just…? You asked Mr Oliver if he’d smelled something.’
‘What?’
‘In the shop.’ Betty pointed. ‘That shop.’
The old lady said, ‘You smelled him yet?’
‘The man who died?’
‘You smelled him yet?’
‘No, but—’
‘You will.’
And she was off, hands rammed into the pockets of her stockman’s coat, Kapoor watching her, trying to smile.
‘You get used to Tessie.’
‘Who is she, exactly?’
‘Exactly – I dunno. All I know is she’s got what you’d call a chequered reputation. Married a rich old bloke called Mr Villiers decades ago when she was a young fing. Landed one of them tall terraced houses, bottom of Castle Street. When he snuffed it, they reckon she drank his money away and now she lets out rooms. She also sees fings. She’s harmless.’
‘So who did she see… where the brook…?’
‘The Dulas Brook. Where it enters the Wye. Little beach down by the sewage works. Don’t ask.’
‘What about the smell?’ Betty said.
‘You brought that up.’
‘I know. Jeeter, might she be talking about the man who died here? Drug overdose? Not found for a week?’
‘Shit,’ Kapoor said. ‘Who told you that? We agreed not to say noffing.’
‘Who did?’
‘Few of us. Not till you was settled, anyway. Not that it means anyfing, but nobody wants to fink of a niffy corpse in the building. He was just a junkie, far’s I know, and it was years and years ago. So any smell…’
Betty said. ‘Do you know his name?’
‘Jerry. I fink. He’s one of those faces the old-timers mention in passing and glance at each other meaningfully and if there’s somebody like me around noffing else gets said. But the idea of some old hippy haunting the place… Or his pong. Do me a favour.’ Kapoor paused, looking at her. ‘You don’t feel uneasy here, do you?’
Well, yes, she did, and not only in the shop. Even in the town centre, now, she sometimes had the feeling of being watched, and not just as a pair of nice legs in a short skirt. Not stalked exactly, just watched. Carrying somebody’s lingering gaze around like a clammy miasma, the way it had happened years ago, before Robin, with the high priest of a coven she’d left pretty quickly.
‘Of course not,’ Betty said.
18
The word
WHEN SHE GOT in, the phone was ringing.
‘I nearly cried off, Merrily. Nearly rang you and said I couldn’t do it after all.’
Plump, comfy Martin Longbeach. As was.
Oh God.
‘What brought that on, Martin?’
‘Couldn’t sleep hardly at all last night. I was thinking I should get out altogether, move to another part of the country. East Anglia, Cornwall. Where nobody’s talking about me.’
Inevitable that, sooner or later, this was going to come up.
‘All they’re saying,’ she said, ‘is that you had a bereavement and a subsequent breakdown.’
Forgive me.
‘But then I thought, how often do you and Jane have a chance of some days out together?’
Might have been a good time to tell him about Jane not being here, how the situation had changed. She didn’t.
‘Anyway. Friday morning be all right to bring my stuff, Merrily?’
‘Or you can move in then. Whatever’s best for you.’
‘That would be good. You’ve been very kind to me, Merrily.’
‘Listen, I’m not coming on Sunday, Martin. You’re on your own.’
Better all round if she wasn’t there to listen to his sermon. If he was planning to unload something on the congregation, she’d rather be out of the village.
Unload something on the…?
Oh, Jesus wept. Merrily clapped a hand over the mouthpiece of the Bakelite phone, took a deep, deep breath. In Martin’s particularly conservative part of Herefordshire, no matter how far this faded into history, it would never be a laughing matter. Nor here, except possibly in the saloon bar of the Ox. To which you could only hope the intelligence had not yet permeated.
One way or another, next week was not going to be easy.
She stayed in the scullery and rang Huw Owen.
No answer. She leaned back in her curved captain’s chair. Even Ethel was out. The silence in the vicarage was like earwax. She switched on the computer and Googled Cusop Dingle.
Wikipedia said it was a single track road once known as Millionaire’s Row because of all the big houses. It ran alongside the Dulas Brook, with its many waterfalls, into the foothills of the Black Mountains, and had been home to the notorious Hay poisoner Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the only English solicitor ever hanged for murder.
Which was a long time ago. To go back even further, she looked up Cusop in Jane’s much-thumbed copy of Ella Mary Leather’s Folklore of Herefordshire, first published in 1912. As always, more illuminating, if you were the kind of person who specialized in peculiar tangents.
Fairies have been seen dancing under foxgloves in Cusop Dingle within the memory of some now living there.
Not far from Hay Station on the Herefordshire side there are some rocks overhanging a brook which flows into the Wye. Fairies or ‘little people’ formerly lived in these rocks and in the haymaking time used to provide dinner for the haymakers in the adjoining fields. But once a haymaker took away a knife; after this the fairies never came again, although the man took the knife back.
The last line almost adding a nice touch of credibility. A Welsh Border farmworker would be well miffed with himself at ruining a source of free meals. Less cosy was a mention, four pages later, of Cusop as a place where people believed in the will-o’-the-wisp, Mrs Leather quoting a certain Parry, of Kington, in 1845.
The ignis fatuus or exhalation termed Will-o’-the-wisp or Jack with a lanthorn, which is sometimes seen in churchyards or marshy places in summer and autumn, was considered by many old inhabitants in this neighbourhood, when the author was in his infancy, to be a kind of device of the evil spirit to draw human beings from the road they were pursuing into some frightful abyss of misery; and there leave them without any hope of regaining the enjoyment of happiness in the land of the living.
Will-o’-the-wisp had more recently been explained as marsh gas, a phenomenon not, presumably, confined to marshes.
You just never heard about it, though, did you? Though someone drawn to peculiar tangents might well, on reading about a frightful abyss of misery, picture a deep waterfall pool with a dead man in it.
‘David Hambling,’ Huw said when he called back. ‘No. New one on me.’
She could almost see him in his chair in the stone rectory, sinking lower as more stuffing leaked out. Welsh born, brought up in Sheffield, returning as ordained minister. There might even be a low fire, as summer didn’t much like the Brecon Beacons and this was hardly an effective summer.
Merrily said, ‘How about Peter Rector?’
There was a pause.
‘He’ll be dead now.’
‘Yes. He is. That’s what I said.’
‘We’re happen at cross-purposes here,’ Huw said. ‘The Peter Rector known to me must’ve been dead years.’
‘Well
… the post-mortem results aren’t through yet, but this one, as I understand it… less than two days? Believed to be over ninety years old. Would that fit?’
‘Aye. It might, too.’
‘White hair and beard. Large collection of mainly esoteric books. Smoked cannabis.’
‘And living in… where did you say?’
‘Cusop Dingle. About a mile out of Hay-on-Wye, on the English side.’
‘And how long’s he been there?’
‘Don’t know exactly. Could be anything over twelve years. He lived very quietly, didn’t have a car. He had friends who did his shopping. His neighbours didn’t know much about him but seem to have respected his privacy. He was known as a healer, a bone-setter and possibly a dowser.’
Huw’s laugh carried a yelp of astonishment that was rare. You could hear his chair scraping on the flags as he stood up.
‘Small world then?’ Merrily said.
‘Smaller than I’d reckoned possible. You do know about his activities at Capel-y-ffin?’
‘In the Black Mountains?’
‘Aye.’
‘No, I don’t. Just that he was running educational courses.’
‘Long time ago. Over thirty years. You’d’ve been a kid. Everybody thought he’d gone abroad. And he were just a few miles away? Beggars belief. I’m looking at the map now. Cusop – got it. Nowhere else in the country, I reckon, where you’d get such a change of landscape, climate and culture in… six miles? As the crow flies. You know about his books?’
‘I saw them. A roomful. A big roomful.’
‘No, I mean, his books. Rector’s. The ones he wrote.’
‘He wrote books? I never even thought to look. Bookwise, it was all a bit overwhelming.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Huw said, ‘while I get my head round this, why don’t you look him up on the Internet? I’ll call you back.’
‘All right, but I’ll just tell you one more thing. He’s left his house and contents – which, depending on how much land goes with it, could be worth the best part of a million – to Anthea White.’ She paused. ‘Get your head round that.’
‘Athena?’
‘The Witch of Hardwicke. Frannie Bliss is trying to persuade me to talk to her with a view to finding out why. The kind of people he was mixing with. What was happening at Cusop. And yes, I have told him I’d prefer root-canal surgery without the anaesthetic.’
‘Intriguing, though, lass. Give us an hour, and I’ll try and equip you for the ordeal.’
Five minutes later, with Peter Rector entered into Google, Lol called.
He was in a motel outside Carlisle. He didn’t sound gloomy, exactly, but he did sound tired. He was expressing dismay at how much had changed since he was last on the road. Merrily was resisting the urge to ask if he was getting regular meals.
Regular meals – she should talk.
‘So much more music in pubs now,’ Lol was saying. ‘Bigger towns, where they get lots of gigs, they carry on talking and drinking. You’re just a distant soundtrack to their night out. It’s the more remote places where they actually listen. They’ve travelled further, so they listen.’
‘So you’re doing OK?’
‘More than OK, I suppose. Doesn’t seem right.’
Merrily said nothing. How could a man who’d been so comprehensively crapped on over the years be so pathetically grateful?
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m bored with me. Seeing too much of me. You and Jane, how’s, uh… how’s that going?’
‘Erm…’
Merrily transferred the phone from one hand to the other. She hadn’t wanted to but, under the circumstances, there was no way of avoiding spelling it out.
‘Not a problem, though, it really isn’t. I can try and beg some time off when you get back.’
‘Except that you’re on your own. On holiday in an empty house.’
‘Well, it’s never totally—’
‘How about you don’t mention the presence of God. It’ll just make me want to ask you to marry me, again, put the old bugger’s nose out of joint. Abandon the rest of the gigs, square things with Danny, hit the long road home.’
‘Through the darkness and the rain.’ She felt her voice floating away. ‘Like in some old movie.’
In the tradition of which, about twenty miles from home, in blinding rain, he’d be involved in a shattering collision with an exhausted lorry driver who didn’t know the road and…
Oh Christ, stop it. She gripped the phone with both hands. Rationalize.
‘OK, you’re right. It feels a bit odd. There is that rattling around feeling. Until Saturday. When Martin Longbeach arrives.’
Short silence.
‘Forgot about that. You and Martin.’
‘Who is…’
‘Gay. I realize that.’
‘And not in a good state, losing his partner. Everybody says it’s easily controlled these days, but that’s not always the case.’
‘Martin’s not got it, has he?’
‘Don’t think so. So why was he spared, all this self-laceration. And I…’ Hard to stop her voice speeding up ‘… don’t want him thinking he’s being supervised, or on suicide watch, so, bottom line, can I live in your house?’
‘What?’
‘Your cottage. Can I live in it?’
‘Blimey.’
‘Not if you don’t want me to.’
‘Drink out of my cups? Light my stove if it gets cold?’
‘I’d bring my own logs.’
‘Bathe in my bathroom?’
‘Bring my own soap.’
‘Um… sleep in my bed?’
‘And eat your porridge, yeah.’
‘Well, that… that should be… that would be OK.’
‘Good.’
‘OK… well, you’ve got the key. Just one thing…’
She waited.
‘You have to promise not to wash the duvet cover afterwards,’ Lol said.
Emerging from the scullery, she felt feather-headed. Couldn’t be sure how he’d phrased the bit about asking her to marry him, convinced that even though he’d said again it was actually the first time the M word had ever passed between them.
She was still sporadically smiling, in an appallingly stupid, trembly, girly way, when she was sitting at the computer, clicking on links to Peter Rector, and the word Nazi came up.
19
Small obsession
HERE WAS A man who wanted to be in the Rolling Stones: long black hair with a few grey tufts, clean-shaven, generous Jaggeresque lips in a loose, amiable smile. A face deeply scored by experience but lit up by big, brown owl-like eyes – the eyes of somebody who was either preternaturally wise or doing a lot of drugs.
But this was the 1970s and Peter Rector must have been twenty years too old to be in the Stones, and there seemed to be no more recent images anywhere.
The biographical detail was scant, his age nowhere apparent. He appeared on several occult sites. His books were not available on Amazon but Abebooks had links to a few second-hand copies, mainly at eye-watering prices.
Notably A Negative Sun, a dense study of the mysticism at the core of Nazi Germany, published in 1969.
Which had changed his life, she learned as the phone rang.
Huw said it was about Himmler and the SS and the occult roots of the Aryan dream. Explained as never before… at the time.
‘As a young lad, Rector were in the war. Captured by the Germans at Tobruk. When he wound up in a prison camp in Poland, the camp security happened to seize a book on ritual magic that one of Rector’s girlfriends had posted to him from Cambridge.’
‘So his interest in this stuff goes back a long way,’ Merrily said.
‘Almost lifelong,’ Huw said. ‘Parents were Cambridge professors, father a theologian. Peter Rector grew up in a house full of religious tomes, and the ones that interested him most tended to be on the occult fringe.’
‘Where did you learn that?’
‘He
wrote occasional articles for magazines. Some of them are reproduced on the Internet. He said he was very keen to serve in the Middle East to get into Egypt… investigate the pyramids and the Sphinx and the birthplace of Hermetic Magic. Hadn’t counted on winding up in a German POW camp, but that were a blessing in disguise. The deputy commandant, one Kurt Scheffler, had SS links, strong esoteric leanings and nobody amongst his fellow officers genned up enough to hold a meaningful discussion with. So he has Lieutenant Rector brought in for questioning.’
Thus, Huw explained, had begun a friendship that was to transcend the armistice and lead, after Scheffler’s death, to Peter Rector’s seminal exploration of Nazi sorcery.
‘You had a lot of time on your hands in a prison camp. They’d sit up half the night, him and Scheffler, discussing the magical symbolism of King Arthur’s Camelot, Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophist movement. Most of it starts wi’ the Nazi interpretation of Blavatsky’s bonkers evolution theories suggesting fair-haired Aryans were the purest strain of humanity. Arising in the last days of Atlantis.’
‘I know. I think. All the rest of us came from polluted strains caused by, erm…?’
‘Having sex wi’ monkeys, aye. Scheffler had academic and SS contacts in Berlin, and he’d obtain books and documents which he showed to Rector. Who was jotting it all down from memory. If Berlin had found out, Scheffler would’ve been pulled out of Poland and shot before you could say Heil Hitler, but they got away with it. Happen Scheffler thought he were making a convert.’
‘Was he?’
‘Who knows?’
Merrily was remembering a TV documentary she and Jane had watched about Heinrich Himmler’s SS stronghold, the dramatic castle at Wewelsburg, organized around his Aryan take on Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table, the quest for the Holy Grail.
