MW 12 - The Magus of Hay

by Phil Rickman

  ‘I don’t bloody know!’ Huw threw up his hands like the white lady. ‘I don’t bloody know, Merrily. Is it all a sham? I don’t know.’

  But clearly cared. Blimey. She took a step back. How often these days did Huw express this kind of emotion?

  ‘Truth is,’ he said, ‘this place has been obsessing me, on and off, for years.’

  ‘You’ve never talked about it.’

  Huw let his arms fall.

  ‘We all need a private hobby. I were still a kid in Sheffield when I first read about this, in one of me mam’s old books. Haunted me, at first – I’d’ve been about eight. Scared the life out of me. But it stayed with me. I suppose it were one of the reasons I came back – the fact that I’d been born within half an hour of… a mystery. A big mystery.’

  He told her a story dating back to 1873 when Ignatius and his followers had been helping to build the monastery. Part of the work had involved lifting huge crates of stones, by means of pulleys, sixteen feet above the ground. One of the crates had unbalanced, tossing all the stones on top of one man, crushing him to death. When the body was pulled out it had been described by a witness as a distorted mass of pulp.

  ‘So Father Iggy gets summoned,’ Huw said. ‘And an Inner Voice which apparently spoke to him several times in his life instructs him to fetch a bottle of Lourdes water. There’s a circle of folks around the body which parted when Father Iggy returned… and he found himself face to face with the Silence which is unlike all others for it embodies the suspended breath of two separate worlds.’

  ‘Are you quoting, Huw?’

  ‘Face to face with silence? Would I come out wi’ that? If you must know, it’s from a great slab of overwritten hagiography, The Life of Father Ignatius, by his fan club secretary, one Beatrice de Bertouch. I’ve read all six hundred-plus pages twice and some bits seven or eight times. Which is why I know some of these excruciating slabs of hyperbole off by heart.’

  He sounded angry that all this had not been documented by someone more reliably objective.

  ‘Sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘The Monk had come to act,’ Beatrice says, not to pray. He was, at that crucial moment, God’s active and irresponsible instrument.’

  ‘Irresponsible?’

  ‘Happen closer to the truth than Beatrice intended. She’s a bit short on irony. She explains how Iggy kneels down by the corpse, sprinkles it with the water from Lourdes and then – speaking slowly and emphatically – he gives it the full Lazarus. After which, Beatrice says miracle was accomplished. One single and mighty thrill seemed to sweep through every fibre of the shattered frame. And the next instant he’s back on his pins.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Merrily starting to see what he meant. ‘If this guy had been a distorted mass of pulp, this is even bigger than Lazarus. I’m guessing the full story only emerged when he’d been back on his feet for some time and all the bloodstained stones had been removed from the scene.’

  ‘This job’s making you a cynical little bugger, isn’t it?’

  ‘Under the tutelage of a master.’

  ‘Aye. Anyroad, there’s a few more stories like that, from when he were on tour. Fair bit of newspaper coverage at the time. If it was a scam, it were well handled.’

  ‘Surely too sensational to be widely believed,’ Merrily said. ‘Even at a time when spiritualists were manifesting ectoplasm behind lace curtains. Which I suppose brings us to the big one.’

  Feeling regretful, Merrily bent and touched the chalky robe. The statue of the white lady was gazing beyond her, through lidded eyes. The sky looked full of rain.

  ‘If you follow her eyes,’ Huw said, ‘I think you’ll get a rough idea where it appeared. The Welsh Lourdes.’

  ‘You hear about it,’ Merrily said. ‘But not often.’

  ‘Four known sightings back in Father Iggy’s day.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Eighteen eighty. One of the monks saw it.’ Huw lowered his voice. ‘Like a blue mist forming.’

  Then he talked about the thirtieth of August, 1880. Eight o’clock in the evening. Some boys from the chapel choir playing cricket with a stick as a bat. A dazzling figure crossing the field: a veiled woman inside an oval halo, hands raised in blessing.

  ‘Being little lads, weren’t exactly filled with the holy spirit,’ Huw said. ‘One of ’em says, I don’t like that. If it comes near me I’ll hit it with me stick.’

  ‘Bless him,’ Merrily said.

  The field was still lit up for a short time before the figure had melded with a bush and the hedge and vanished. The monks had kept watch, and the following Saturday the bush had lit up.

  Merrily said, ‘You believe it?’

  ‘It’s the little lads does it for me. Hit it with me stick. I like that. Rings true.’ Huw shook his head. ‘The put-downs started soon after it came out. There’s another contemporary account in a book called Nunnery Life in the Church of England, by one Sister Marry Agnes. Sister Marry were a nun in the Anglican community here. Had a bad time at the hands of a bitch of a prioress who, she says, deprived her of food, thumped her round the head and made her lie in front of the church door for every bugger to walk over her into the services. She reckons Iggy did nowt to stop it.’

  ‘That true?’

  ‘Don’t know. But she takes him apart in her book, and then, not surprisingly, puts the knife in for the apparitions. Not that she were there at the time, you understand, but she puts forward the theory that the figure was somehow projected on to the mist or whatever by one of them new-fangled magic lanterns.’

  ‘A projector?’

  ‘Balls. They’d be hard pressed to do it now, wi’ a hologram machine.’

  Merrily smiled.

  ‘You want to believe in it, don’t you?’

  Huw scowled.

  ‘No, come on,’ Merrily said. ‘You do.’

  ‘Put it this way,’ Huw said. ‘If this were in Ireland, there’d be a load of tatty giftshops all down the bank. Lady of Llanthony key rings, luminous crucifixes, BVM T-shirts. It’s as valid as Lourdes and Fatima and Knock. But the BVM belongs to the Catholics, and that’s a good enough reason for it to get rubbished. Another reason is that all the other chapels round here were Baptist, and them buggers were hardly going to be in sympathy with a bloke who thought Rome had no exclusive rights over the Benedictine order.’

  ‘I see,’ Merrily said. ‘One of ours.’

  She looked around through a fine mist that wasn’t quite rain. Thought about Father Ignatius performing his Lazarus routine with Lourdes water. As if he knew what the next stage was.

  Perfect for Peter Rector, Huw said.

  Perfect for what Rector did next.

  On the way up to the monastery, she’d given him a précis of what Athena White had told her.

  ‘Up here,’ Huw said, ‘you can do owt you like.’

  38

  Take the money

  ‘ONE OF THEIR OWN,’ Kapoor said. ‘One of their own goes missing, they go a bit crazy.’

  He’d been waiting for them in Back Fold, one of several shopkeepers standing outside their doors in the intermittent rain. All the atmosphere of a dark carnival.

  ‘But why were they hitting on me?’ Robin couldn’t stand still. British cops – this hurt. ‘Some kinda institutionalized xenophobia? Look at me – I’m still shaking. I thought the bastards were gonna cuff me, toss me in one of those cages, back of a van.’

  Robin looked at Betty, but Betty was just staring out the window. They were still not talking much. She’d sold the damn bungalow for good money; should’ve been a great day. Did she think there was something in this? That he’d done something crazy last night?

  Well, OK, he had.

  And paid for it. A cold psychic rebuke for his presumption. But how could be tell her what he didn’t understand himself? How could he come out with this stuff in front of Kapoor?

  ‘You fink they know somefing?’ Kapoor said. ‘That she was here before she
disappeared?’

  ‘Well, of course they know. They found her car.’ Robin wiped the air with both hands. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just…’

  ‘Nah, mate, not last night. I mean when she was in town asking questions about the old geezer in the pool.’

  ‘When was this?’ Betty said.

  ‘Wednesday? Yeah, Wednesday night. It was her, no question. Recognized her picture this morning on News 24. Seen her round town a few times, though not in uniform. Wasn’t in uniform when she was asking about the pool guy.’

  ‘Where was this, Jeeter?’

  ‘Gwenda’s. Where everybody goes if they wanna find out anyfing. Reckon I should tell the cops, case nobody else has? Maybe somebody was like stalking her?’

  ‘Just don’t say you know me,’ Robin said. ‘The guy who parked in the wrong place for too long. And this was supposed to be our first real trading day. How’dya like that?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Betty said. ‘Because we’re not opening today. Not now.’

  ‘I’m afraid this isn’t going to take very long,’ Brent told the midday briefing at Hay Community Centre. ‘We’re really not much further. We know a lot more places where Tamsin Winterson might have been since yesterday evening but wasn’t. I think what that tells us is that whatever happened to her happened very soon after she received that call from Kelly James. DI Bliss?’

  Bliss, sitting next to Brent at the table opposite the bar, didn’t consult his notes. Every time he’d looked down he’d seen double rows of scrawl, and holding up the pad would look ridiculous.

  ‘DS Dowell and me, we’ve spent most of the morning in Cusop, basically doing house-to-house with PCs Conway and Trickett. Mrs Claire Loudon, who runs a guest house near the entrance to the lane that curves up from the dingle to the church, thinks she saw a small green car, sometime between six-forty and six-fifty last night. Thought it was a Peugeot, but it might have been a Clio. She didn’t see it return.’

  ‘So it’s important,’ Brent said, ‘that we concentrate on the car. How it got to the Hay car park, where it was coming from, who was driving it. We’ve traced the driver of a blue Nissan Navara truck which had been parked all night about twenty metres away from where Tamsin’s car was found this morning and… well, there could be more to learn from him.’

  He turned to Rich Ford who reported that neither the uniforms on the ground nor the helicopter had found anything in the hills, but all the farmers within a five-mile radius had been alerted. Bliss was thinking of the full statement he and Karen had taken down from Kelly James, who’d been too upset to go into work. And the personal asides: he now knew Tamsin had wanted to be a cop since she was a kid, watching The Bill on the box and trying to train one of the sheepdogs to find drugs – a lump of her grandad’s pipe tobacco standing in for cannabis resin. This was getting to him, now.

  Though not conspicuously to Brent.

  Facing Bliss, when the briefing was done, over folded arms, a smugness coming off him like aftershave. Brent had probably never met Tamsin Winterson.

  ‘Francis, we need to deal with this business of the drowned man, Peter Rector. You need to explain to me exactly why you found it necessary to involve Winterson in what seems like a very unpromising inquiry?’

  This was a time-waster.

  ‘Iain… as I’ve stated several times, it was Tamsin who approached me. She lives in the area, she has friends in Cusop, she suspected there might be more to it.’

  ‘Why were you there in the first place?’

  ‘As I explained in my report, I had an hour to spare. A body in a small pool sounded worth a quick look in view of another recent suspicious death we both know about and…’ No way round this, now ‘… the docs – while confirming that I’m quite fit to work – say that exposure for long periods to artificial light might delay complete recovery from my… temporary head injury. So I took a break, which included my lunchbreak, drove out here.’

  If Brent ever checked with the docs, he could be stuffed here, but the chance were he wouldn’t. Not in the short term, anyway.

  ‘Also, I think it’s important,’ Bliss said, ‘to encourage young coppers to come forward with their suspicions. Don’t you?’

  ‘She told you about the cannabis in Rector’s house.’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘And she also showed you Rector’s extensive collection of occult-related literature, indicating he might be part of some… cult?’

  ‘Nothing so exciting. It seems to be no more than a study group, which includes the barrister I spoke to last night. Who Tamsin thought might have been the last person to see Rector alive.’

  ‘Rector who was known in Cusop as David Hambling.’

  ‘Having changed his name in search of a quiet life. A bestselling book he wrote forty years ago had brought him… unwanted followers. He was ninety-three years old. After talking to Claudia Cornwell, I’ve concluded that this very small circle of followers had become more of a support group. Fetching his groceries, his laundry, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Was Winterson convinced?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I think we can assume she didn’t meet Cornwell yesterday.’

  ‘So nothing obvious here to explain her disappearance.’

  Bliss shrugged. Brent leaned back, fingering his chin.

  ‘She seems to have been quite excited at working with you. Hero of the Plascarreg.’

  Mother of God.

  ‘She isn’t daft, Iain, and she’s ambitious, which is no bad thing, is it? She’s very solid for her age. Promising. And she isn’t gonna believe everything she reads in the papers.’

  ‘Well,’ Brent sat up, stacking his notes together. ‘Don’t want to keep you too long under artificial lights, Francis. Do you need fresh air?’

  * * *

  Maybe Kapoor had put it around about what had happened on the parking lot. Whatever, it seemed to Robin it was like the town was determined to put things right. Before one, people had started to come in, the few people he knew, to wish them luck on the opening day that wasn’t going to happen. Beginning with Gwenda and Gareth Nunne, Gwenda handing Betty a bottle of the Welsh vineyard white, which Robin thought was a nice gesture, but after last night he was glad she’d presented it to Betty.

  Suddenly there was like a party atmosphere – yeah, that was how confined the space was. They’d thought about some kind of launch party, but Robin realized that wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of the town, which was all about starting low-key and letting something build. And imagine if they’d done that today, crass-bastard pagans celebrating amidst all the tension.

  ‘Lord Madoc!’ Gwenda wore a leopard-print dress and a man’s hat with the brim turned up. She’d seized a paperback. ‘Now I remember. This is bloody staggering, Robin. I’m going to send Gore over to check these out.’

  But Gore didn’t come. At least, not before someone else did.

  ‘Listen,’ Robin said when he and Betty were alone at last. ‘I had an idea. How about we give it a week, let these people sign for the bungalow, and then get out there and spend. Build up stock. Pick up what we can from the charity stores and then I call in some favours with every pagan magazine I ever did free artwork for? I’m thinking big display ads in the Lammas editions. I’m thinking, how would the great Richard Booth handle this?’

  Betty just stared at him.

  ‘Well?’ Gingerly, he sat down. ‘Whaddaya think?’

  She wore the smock thing he liked, with that kind of Inca design. Her hair was held back by an Alice band. He so wanted her to be happy. In that moment, he believed they could be happy.

  Betty said calmly, ‘Either you tell me precisely what happened last night or I’m out of here and I won’t be coming back.’

  Jesus…

  ‘No…!’ Back on his feet, a log-splitter working on his lower spine. ‘What are you… what’s the matter with you, Betty? You really think me and this girl—’

  ‘No.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t.’

&nbs
p; ‘I’m sorry about last night, I truly am. I had too much to drink, I was so grateful to Gwenda and those guys for letting me in, I overindulged, I’m walking the streets in like a daze of… of illumination. And I thought I could top it off by squaring things here. Mentally. Emotionally. Too fast, too soon. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how much.’

  Her silence filled the room, breaking him, the way it always did.

  ‘The only female I saw on the streets was the whistling old lady, Mrs Villiers. Who spooked me. Thought I was someone else. The guy who stinks? You know the way she—?’

  Betty stiffened.

  ‘What else did she say?’

  ‘She said, “You came back”.’

  ‘She thought you were the guy who smelled?’

  ‘She was like…’ He had his hands either side of his head, trying to shake out the memory ‘… like I stunk of what I’d been doing. Something like that.’

  Betty said, ‘There was a man died here after a drug overdose.’

  ‘What? When?’

  ‘Long time ago. They didn’t find his body for days.’

  ‘And like, you found this out… when? From whom?’

  ‘Tom Armitage.’

  ‘And who the f—?’

  ‘He used to own this place. I spoke to him on the phone. I did tell you I was getting a vibe. Didn’t know what it was, didn’t want to make a thing out of it until I knew what it was. If it mattered.’

  ‘We’re not talking to each other, are we? It’s like this place is coming between us. Something doesn’t like us. It was, like, all over me last night.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘I dunno, I’m not sensitive. Small things. A light I’d switched off came on by itself. The light was weird. Nothing felt like it was how it should be. Maybe it was me, but being drunk out on the streets, down in the town, that felt good. More than good. Soon as I shut myself in here, bad. Sick. And now I’m thinking this whole thing was a wrong move. If the deal on the bungalow goes through, why’n’t we just pay Oliver off, load the books back in the truck, find someplace else… anyplace? Take the money and run.’