by Phil Rickman
‘Who told you all this?’
‘Emrys. Who else? He’s a good man. He’d go up and chat to the Convoy now and again, see if they needed any help. They never told him to bugger off. He thought they were generally harmless, happy to be up there out of the way. It’s interesting, psilocybin, the mushroom drug, I were reading about that not long ago. Banned now, ranked alongside cocaine, but some experts reckon it’s up there wi’ Prozac as an antidepressant. A natural antidepressant. If you were a homeless hippy, happen it made you feel less like trash.’
‘These girls – neither was ever found?’
‘Nor came back. There was a police investigation, but where do you start? Especially if they don’t want to be found.’
‘If the older one was on the game…’
‘I imagine that worried the parents quite a lot over the years. That Mephista might be down in Swansea or Cardiff or Bristol, turning tricks, getting ravaged by hard men, hard drugs. They never stopped looking, the parents. They’d keep coming back – Emrys’d see them in the hills, as if it were at all likely their daughter would show up here again.’
‘And Rector?’
‘He’d’ve been checked out at the time by the police. Nothing happened to him. But it all ended soon afterwards, anyroad. Happen it were the missing girls. Anyroad, he went quiet.’
‘He had a breakdown, according to Athena White.’
‘Oh, a breakdown…’
Merrily shrugged. Huw’s lined face looked bitter, as if Rector had stolen his private vision and trashed it.
‘Farm went on the market and Emrys never saw Peter Rector from that day to this.’
‘Not knowing he was just a few miles away. Under a different name. With a beard.’
‘Ah, let’s go down to Hay, get summat to eat, eh?’
‘Wait.’ They’d reached the Freelander with its hem of crusty mud. A big dome of a hill blocked the eastern horizon. ‘What if he had good reason to think there were bad vibes here? The atmosphere soured.’
‘Your mate White’s evidently still on his side. Bloody owd witch.’
‘I’m not being naive, Huw, but suppose he had been infiltrated by some seriously awful people? What I’m thinking, could they have come in through the convoy? Like you said, anybody could join it.’
‘Happen.’
‘And what if he did have a good reason for… making something happen?’
‘What, like introducing Anglo-Catholicism to Hay?’
‘Not sure I was thinking of that, but it’s there. It’s happened.’
‘So,’ Huw said, ‘he finds himself a nice, secluded refuge a few miles away, where it’s not quite as cold and you can grow proper trees, surrounded wi’ nice, middle-class country dwellers.’
‘And begins what Miss White calls his Last Redemptive Project.’
‘Redemptive, eh?’ Huw sank his hands into the pockets of his ancient jacket, looked down at his trainers. ‘To redeem himself?’
‘Or the area? Where Father Ignatius failed, presumably, and his church collapsed into a dangerous ruin, and Eric Gill got all excited but then couldn’t stick it for long. And where Rector himself let the past catch up with him. If you keep on walking from Cusop Dingle, this is where you finish up.’
‘And where do you go from here, lass?’
‘Don’t know. Sometimes it all looks like a crooked path that leads nowhere other than Richard Dawkins’s back door. Do people like Rector just create a working fantasy? Do we all?’
‘Wasn’t what I meant, lass,’ Huw said gently. ‘I meant are you going to tell Bliss any of this?’
‘What would that achieve? You really think the police are going to follow it up on the off chance it might point up a reason for somebody to have killed Rector? Thus providing a very tenuous link with a missing girl?’
She looked up into the hills, from whence there were no visible offers of help.
41
Into the hearth
‘NAME’S ROBIN THOROGOOD,’ Brent said. ‘American. A bookseller in Hay. Or planning to be.’
Small group of them on benches in a back room of the community centre, down near the toilets: Bliss, Ceri Watts of Dyfed-Powys, Karen Dowell, Terry Stagg, Rich Ford.
‘So what’ve we got?’ Ceri Watts said.
‘Circumstantial up to now. However…’ Brent started counting off the pluses on his fingers. ‘He only lives in Kington, but he was in town all night. Leaving his truck on the car park near where Winterson’s car was found. Says he got drunk and – rather than get a taxi home to his rather lovely wife – chose to sleep over his shop. Which, as he’s only just taken it on, has no furniture, least of all a bed. I’d have to be extremely pissed to sleep there in any circumstances.’
‘And that’s it?’ Bliss said.
‘He says he slept in the bath,’ Terry Stagg said. ‘Even though he claims to be disabled. His fellow drinkers at Gwenda’s Bar have confirmed he was there until eleven-ish, but none of them knows where he went after that. Although two people in the town say they saw him wandering the streets, unsteadily. Like someone who should be in Talgarth, as one put it.’
‘Meaning the former psychiatric hospital there,’ Ceri Watts said.
For Brent’s benefit. Whoever this feller was, Bliss felt a twinge of sympathy, remembering how, just after they let him out of the hospital, he was all over the pavements in Hereford and people would cross the road to avoid him.
‘Any previous, Iain?’
‘No, but the word is his circumstances have changed quite a bit in the last couple of years, and not in a good way. Soon as Stagg started talking to him, on the car park – just routine stuff, to begin with – it was like he was still drunk. Very obviously lying. His wife was with him, and you could tell she didn’t believe him either.’
‘Maybe she thought he’d been playing away.’
‘And maybe he’d been playing with Tamsin Winterson. And maybe something got out of hand.’
‘Big leap, Iain.’
‘You’ve taken enough of those in your time, Francis. Something else about Thorogood is that he denied all knowledge of Winterson. Virtually every other shopkeeper – bakers, ironmongers, café and sandwich bar owners and booksellers too – either knew her personally or recognized her picture. It’s her local town. People are worried – except for Thorogood.’
‘Although, as I understand it,’ Rich Ford said, ‘he’s only been around for a matter of weeks.
‘So what’s he done with her?’ Bliss said.
Brent turned to Terry Stagg.
Staggy had grown this spotty beard, probably to cover up a couple of his chins. He cleared his throat.
‘Well, she’s not in his shop. It’s not even as big as it looks from outside. Books downstairs and a kitchen. Upstairs, living room, two bedrooms, bathroom. Mrs Thorogood said they were planning to move in properly when their house was sold, but hardly any furniture there yet.’
‘What did crime-scene think?’
‘Not impressed, sir, unfortunately. We went over the place thoroughly. No cellar, no outbuildings, no room for any. It’s quite a confined space.’
‘And how’s Mr Thorogood behaving?’
‘Pretending to be outraged, sir, but I reckon he knows what he’s fucking done.’
Bliss looked at Brent, sensing a muted excitement there, before turning to Stagg.
‘Done, Terry? Do I take it we’re now of the opinion that Tamsin’s definitely dead? Because that’s a different kind of search, isn’t it? You think this was something random? Or was he thinking, I know, I’ll park me truck very visibly next to this girl’s car, look for an opportunity to rape her—’
Brent put up both hands for silence.
‘Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves but, all the same, this is clearly not the most balanced bookseller in the town. I’ve known longer shots that paid off.’
‘So which one’s the most balanced, Iain? They’re friggin’ booksellers. It’s hand-to-mouth these day
s. And like Rich says, this feller’s not been around the place for long. Is there any connection we know of between him and Tamsin?’
‘Well, no… and yes.’ Brent looked entirely untroubled. ‘And you might find this interesting, considering your apparent interest in the late Peter Rector’s library. The only connection’s the books. The kind of books that Thorogood sells. Terry?’
‘It’s all he’s got in there,’ Stagg said. ‘Weird books. Witchcraft books. Crank stuff. Reckons he’s a pagan.’
‘Norra crime, Terry.’
‘He’s a nutter, boss, trust me, and I’ll tell you something else. When we went in there, it was just him and his missus and there was some tension there. Between them. I may be wrong but I reckon he’d been in tears. What’s that say?’
Ceri Watts scratched the side of his neck.
‘As it happens, I know a bit about this man. Involved in a fracas in Radnor Forest, few years ago. An evangelist guy, Ellis, very much a crackpot himself, took against Thorogood and his wife because they were doing whatever pagans do in a ruined church. All got a bit overshadowed, at the time, by an arrest for an ostensibly unconnected murder in the same area. But it was fraught enough, and that’s how Thorogood got his injuries. Now, Gwyn Arthur Jones was SIO on that, and he’s living in Hay now, so if you want any background on Thorogood, he’s your man.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Brent said.
You could see him forgetting it before your eyes.
Robin was quiet now, Betty hoping to all the gods that it wasn’t relief. She stood in the damp, musty silence, surrounded by all their lovingly collected books which deserved better, and wiped her eyes with a sleeve.
The hardest part had been holding Robin back without this looking like something she had to do all the time.
She was in the tiny kitchen getting a glass of water when she heard Robin calling to her from upstairs. She found him standing in the middle of the rust-coloured rug, hands on his hips. He did that sometimes to ease the pain.
‘What the hell…?’
Pale daylight gave the room a greasy yellow patina. A sooted board lay in front of the upstairs fireplace.
‘Hmm,’ Betty said. ‘One of them mentioned that on the way out. It was sealing the chimney off, one of them tapped it and it fell out. Seems we’re breaking the law. It’s asbestos.’
‘Bastards just had to find something, didn’t they?’
‘We need to dispose of it, but not in a public skip.’
Betty bent and lifted the plate, getting sticky soot over both hands. She just wanted to hurl it through the window. Went on her knees to the cramped fireplace. There was a small pyramid of soot in the bottom and another trickle coming down like black sand in an egg timer. Betty squinted up the chimney.
‘Yeah, I know,’ she said, ‘I’ll send the cleaning bill to the police.’
There was a crisping from above, and she backed out fast. Soot was one thing, but a major eruption of dead jackdaws…
She sat back on her heels in the dirt, suspended in an extraordinary moment of crystal I-am-here consciousness. What the hell was she doing? If Robin really was no longer happy here, was ready to take the money and run…
Something fell into the hearth. Nothing dead, only an accumulation of tar. Where it had broken off, she saw a bare patch on the firebricked wall and the edge of something crudely carved there. There was a buzzing in her ears, like tinnitus. Coldness in her chest.
‘Betty?’
‘Hang on.’
She reached up and pulled off more flakes of tar, brushed the wall clean with the edge of her hand until it was fully revealed.
Maker’s mark? Too big, surely.
‘Robin, is the phone up here?’
They had just the one mobile.
‘In my pocket.’
‘Put it on camera for me, would you?’
She scrambled out of the fireplace and went to put on the light. She could see now that the carving on the chimney wall was not as crude as it had looked. Didn’t have Robin’s finesse, but there was a kind of painstaking precision. It looked old, but it couldn’t be very old because brown firebricks like this couldn’t have been around all that long.
And which firebrick manufacturer in the last eighty years would have put out a product carrying a swastika?
Of sorts, anyway. Robin handed Betty the phone, and she thrust it firmly up the chimney and took a picture in case it should crumble to dust before her eyes. When she rolled away, she had the impression of a shadow rising as if formed from soot. She scowled.
‘Iain, for what it’s worth…’ Bliss had caught up with Brent in the doorway after the others had left. ‘For what it’s worth, I think she’s a smart girl. And totally committed to the Job. I don’t think she’s the kind of girl who’d cop off on a whim with some piss-artist bookseller.’
‘The vagaries of human behavioural patterns will always surprise me, Francis,’ Brent said.
‘You being a PhD and all.’
Brent shook his head, kind of pityingly, then it came up, jaw jutting.
‘And what about a policeman, Francis? Would she… cop off with a detective, do you think?’
‘What’s that mean?’ Bliss’s guy went tight. ‘Sir.’
Brent waved it away.
‘Don’t you need some sleep?’
‘And you need everybody you can get,’ Bliss said. ‘If your bookseller angle falls down, all overtime restrictions’ll be off by tonight.’
‘If.’ Brent headed for the operation room. ‘Go home, Bliss. Have a bath, have a shave.’
Bliss walked savagely away, through the main doors, letting one swing behind him. Couldn’t remember whether he’d left his car on the field at the back or the big car park. Couldn’t believe what he thought Brent had said.
The numbness had taken half his face.
Couldn’t find his car on the field behind the community centre. No, he wouldn’t’ve put it there; he hadn’t even known they were using it until he’d got here. Bugger. He walked round the building and out of the entrance into Oxford Road, where a woman came up to him, pushing a bike, panting.
‘Excuse me, are you with the police?’
She was looking at him, uncertainly, and he realized he was still wearing his baseball sweater with the big numbers on the front. He nodded.
‘Only somebody asked me to tell the first policeman I saw. They’re saying a body’s been found in the river.’
42
Unfinished
WALKING DOWN TOWARDS the clock, they saw shoppers sitting at tables outside one of eateries, some examining books they’d bought, some looking around, aware of something happening that wasn’t quite normal.
Under a darkening sky, Merrily and Huw grabbed one of the tables outside the Granary, across from the clock tower. Merrily pulled out her cigarettes.
‘OK to smoke here, you think?’
‘You’ll soon know if it isn’t.’
‘Huw, they’ve got better things to do.’
Merrily guessing you rarely saw any police at all, on foot, in the streets of Hay-on-Wye. You wouldn’t see this many on a normal day in a city, and they looked more menacing now, more militaristic with all those straps and pouches. Like the addition of a gun for every cop was only one strip of Velcro away.
‘So you met her,’ Huw said, ‘the missing copper?’
‘She was very… She is very likeable. Very keen.’
Lighting up, she had a vivid mental image of eager, freckly Tamsin Winterson, back in Rector’s stone bungalow.
CID, sir?
I’ll bear that in mind, Tamsin.
Telling her to call him boss, as if she was already halfway there. Oh God, this was awful. She felt like some tourist voyeur in her jeans and T-shirt and a fading grey fleece.
‘Doesn’t look too good for her, does it?’ Huw said. ‘Police don’t go missing.’
‘But with a police officer, they’re never going to give up the search.’
&n
bsp; They’d stopped their cars at the ruined stone circle by Hay Bluff, Huw pointing out where the Convoy used to gather. Open common land, once a big bus station for psychedelic single-deckers and luminous haulage vans with windows punched in their sides. Fence-post fires, generators for the music, astral travel, courtesy of the psilocybin mushroom. A woman and a girl slipping away into the crazy night, forever.
They’d seen a police helicopter, so low that it appeared almost to be grazing the hills.
‘If you want to hold the table, I’ll get us summat to eat. Anything in particular?’
‘Anything.’ She got out her purse. ‘But not much. If they still do those goat’s cheese open sandwiches… Or whatever’s similar.’
‘Put that away, lass. I’ve got a private income.’
‘Have you?’
‘No. Listen, if you get time, after, go and have a quick look at Father Richard Williams’s Marian grotto. You might like it.’
‘Oh… the church. Yeah, I will. Might pray for guidance.’
By the time he was back out, with two teas, her phone was chiming. She inspected it. Oh, hell.
‘It’s Martin Longbeach. I’ll have to call him back.’
‘Just hope he’s not desecrated your church already.’
‘What I’ve always admired about you, Huw,’ Merrily said. ‘That overwhelming compassion.’
Looked like rain was coming in.
Martin came directly to the point. He said Sylvia Merchant had called in at the vicarage around mid-morning.
‘Just like that?’
‘She asked when you’d be back. I said you’d be away from the vicarage for ten days. I said – I hope you don’t mind – that you were upset about what had happened. She said she wouldn’t want that for the world.’
‘That doesn’t sound like her, Martin.’
‘Or words to that effect.’
‘So obviously you told her I’d mentioned it.’
