by Phil Rickman
‘Thanks.’
‘You don’t get it, do you? This Brace… he had money, it sounds like. He was from money. He could’ve got a better shop than this. Why would he want this one? Maybe the same reason you wanted it, except you just like it because it’s old and the nearest thing in Hay to a romantic ruin. But for him… a military stronghold? Dedicated to violence?’
‘I don’t—’
‘It’s how they think.’
‘Right.’
He was recalling last night, though it seemed like another life. The way he’d seen the castle through the small, square window in the bathroom and felt no welcome there. Thinking how, even when the castle was in ruins, a tradition of blood-flow had continued under the walls.
This would mean nothing to most people. It was in the past. Over.
‘It doesn’t end there,’ Betty said. ‘The space. I don’t think it ends with the wall. I’m guessing some old stones at the end have been taken out and replaced.’
‘How d’you know that?’
‘It’s not mortared. It’s just rubble.’
Robin looked at Kapoor.
‘I can’t reach that far,’ Kapoor said. ‘Can’t get inside there with a hammer and chisel. You got a crowbar? You know? Like a big tyre iron?’
Robin shook his head.
‘Got a spade in the truck I keep for if we get stuck in the snow.’
It had been snowing until well into April, and he’d felt if he’d taken the spade out it would snow again.
‘Better than noffing, mate.’
‘I’ll go fetch it,’ Robin said. ‘Long as the cops don’t see me and think I’m using it to bury someone.’
Wasn’t a joke, and nobody laughed.
50
Spartan
‘SHE WAS AT Rector’s place when we went to talk to him about the girls,’ Gwyn Arthur said on the phone.
Beryl Bainbridge.’
‘Dame Beryl Bainbridge, I think,’ Merrily said. ‘Distinguished novelist.’ She looked at her cigarette. ‘Distinguished smoker.’
‘Rector liked writers, as you know,’ Gwyn Arthur said.
Merrily lit the cigarette. She’d been finishing her omelette in Lol’s kitchen when he’d called back.
‘This woman answered the door when we arrived,’ he said. ‘Quite… petite, long dark hair. Made us a cup of tea. “I’m Beryl,” she said. Very pleasant, she was, very nice to us. She said, “I suppose you want to talk to the Magus of Hay.”’
‘You didn’t, by any chance, ask her to explain why she called him that?’
‘It was said in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, and I was just a policeman, not a potential acolyte. Why is it important?’
‘Puts him in a different light, somehow. It’s all stayed with you, hasn’t it? Didn’t take much memory-jogging.’
He was silent. Time to push him?
‘I’m wondering… if there was something that, with hindsight, Gwyn, you feel you could have done that you didn’t.’
‘Isn’t there always? I wish I’d known then what I know now. I wish I’d been a more senior officer at the time. I wish I’d had someone like you with whom to exchange ideas.’
‘I’m not—’
‘By which I mean someone who can explain aspects of human behaviour by seeing them from a different perspective. Who talks to people who wouldn’t talk to me. Or not in the same way.’
She could hear his breath, slow, almost meditative.
‘Oh dear. I think I need,’ he said, ‘to take you into my confidence. Before something happens.’
She stared out of the window into the sandy light on Church Street. This had been a long time coming.
‘If it hasn’t already,’ he said.
He’d opened the shop, selling second-hand crime novels, with the help of an old friend, a long-established bookseller in Hay. Didn’t really know why. He liked books, but had no particular aptitude for selling them
‘However, the Brecon and Radnor Express thought it was worth a story. Top Detective – as they were generous enough to describe me – Turns To Crime. I get my picture taken between Inspector Wallander and Inspector Rebus on the book covers. After it appeared in the B & R, the story was picked up by a couple of the national papers. Not big, but it was there.’
Weeks later, he said, he’d had a phone call from an elderly man in North Wales, to whom he hadn’t spoken since the 1980s, when the man’s daughter had gone missing from an encampment on Hay Bluff.
‘Mephista’s dad?’
‘Sounding much the same. Still desperate to know if his daughter was alive or dead. Even more desperate, perhaps, because his wife, he said, was very seriously ill and perhaps there might not be so much time left for her to achieve peace of mind. It made me feel guilty over the quality-time we might have spent soon after the girl disappeared if we hadn’t been inclined to suspect it was all a scam to keep the Convoy on the Bluff for a few more weeks. I wondered if we had treated them like third-class citizens.’
‘Attitudes were different, back then.’
‘But… I was retired now. I said – without promising anything – that I’d go back and review the case. They wanted to pay me, but I thought it was the least I could do. And it also gave me a reason to… feel worthwhile again. Every couple of weeks, I’ve been giving him a ring and going over a few things. Even tracked down a couple of former members of the Convoy – one of whom liked the area so much he came back, to live, with his family. Has a plumbing business now. One thing I was able to harden up was the evidence of Mephista’s relationship with Brace, which I now know to have been a close one.’
‘How close?’
‘Extremely close. She had what used to be called a crush on him. Which developed. He’d bring her back to Hay in his vehicle.’
‘She couldn’t have been here when he died if he lay undiscovered for so long.’
‘Couldn’t she? What if she didn’t want to go back to her parents? Or be called to give evidence at the inquest?’
‘But if Brace was dead… where could she go? She was just a kid.’
‘Interesting, isn’t it?’
‘With the older girl, Cherry Banks?’
‘Cherry’s role in this… is uncertain. No mention of her again.’
Merrily watched the clouds breaking up over the vicarage chimneys. Going to be a clear night.
‘You learn anything from Mephista’s father that you didn’t learn at the time?’
‘Not a great deal. The truth is that it was not possible to pick up Mephista’s trail without access to the Brace family.’
‘Sir Charles? The old Mosleyite? How does that work?’
Sir Charles is indeed central to this. I, ah, went to his funeral.’
‘Where?’
‘Hereford Cathedral. As any detective will tell you, funerals can be… revelatory. Who’s shedding tears, who isn’t. Who’s shedding tears to an implausible extent. I finally struck pay-dirt, as they say, that evening, in discussion with a nephew of Sir Charles who, I think it’s safe to say, did not share his politics and was not expecting to receive anything in the will. He only came out of curiosity, to see who turned up.’
Merrily kept quiet. Gwyn Arthur evidently wasn’t taking her fully into his confidence. What had given him reason to think the Braces would know what had happened to Mephista?
He told her Sir Charles’s nephew had decided to skip the finale at the crematorium, to spend a couple of hours with him in the bar of the Castle House Hotel. Obviously some resentment here. Gwyn Arthur had learned how Sir Charles’s estate had been depleted by the arrival of a grandson.
‘Seems that not long after the death of their son, Sir Charles and Lady Brace were made aware of a young woman who insisted she was carrying Jerry’s child.’
‘Ah… And did he believe her?’
‘Might have been more resistant had she not been accompanied by someone he knew and trusted – and one can only assume this was in a political context. Perhaps someone
who was a regular customer of Jerrold Brace and had got to know Mephista. Anyway – the upshot – he took her in.’
‘Adopted the child?’
‘This is where it gets interesting. My new friend, the nephew, believes both mother and child spent some time in London, at a hotel owned by friends of Sir Charles, who provided employment for the mother until what may have been her first marriage. The boy gets sent away to a series of famously tough boarding schools. Spending his holidays at one of the farms or communes we were discussing earlier. Where there’s a regime of fitness, self-sufficiency.’
‘But wasn’t Mephista resistant to all that?’
‘Hippy self-sufficiency is not the same, is it? This was not benign. It did not involve peace and love. And, anyway, it appears she didn’t go with him. Mephista seems to have spent most of her time in London, whoring around, in the words of Sir Charles’s disgusted nephew. He may have exaggerated. But as far as Sir Charles was concerned, it seems, her role, essentially, was over.’
‘So Brace’s grandson is taken from his mother at an early age… brought up as…’
‘As a warrior, I suppose.’
‘Sounds almost Spartan. In the original sense.’
‘Oh, it was. I was directed to specific websites where I read of young people being turned out into the hills for whole days and nights to live on what they could find, what they could kill or steal. Discovering their inner resources.’
‘What the hell kind of man was Sir Charles?’
‘I’d say a man who was ashamed at his son failing to live up to the Aryan ideal. Deserting his fitness programme, descending into drug use, sexual adventures with unsuitable women of uncertain origins.’
‘No other children?’
‘Daughter in America. Another son who distanced himself from his father’s politics enough to become a radical journalist in Scotland.’
‘So Jerry must’ve been a real loss.’
‘One wonders, where did Sir Charles lay the blame for what happened?’
A pause. The clouds had dispersed. Swallows dived for insects, tiny, efficient acts of carnage.
Merrily said, ‘Rector, do you think? For betraying the cause?’
‘And who supplied Jerry Brace with the raw heroin?’
‘What, you think…?’
‘Happens in Hay at a time when more or less all the bookshops – all forty-plus of them – were flourishing. When the town was acquiring an international reputation. When the first festival was being planned. So you have a town trembling on the brink of affluence… and, close to its centre, a bookshop trading in the vilest form of political pornography.’
‘You think Brace’s death was…? That he was seen as damaging to the town’s image?’
‘Not something ever likely to be proved, one way or the other. Heroin, in the right situation, can be the most effective of murder weapons. But, yes, Sir Charles seems to have blamed what he thought of as the degenerate hippy element in Hay for the death of his… true heir? Rather contemptuous of Independent Hay.’
‘But he must’ve been aware of it happening, Gwyn. If he saw Jerry as his true heir he must’ve stayed in touch with him. Why didn’t he take steps to get him out of there?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know why Jerrold Brace came to Hay in the first place. I’d guess he was no more a natural bookseller than I am.’
‘So are you any closer to finding Mephista?’
‘I…’ You could almost hear him wondering if he’d said too much. ‘The truth of it is, there may be a dilemma here. Would it be better, in many ways, for her father and her ailing mother to remain in ignorance of what became of their daughter?’
‘That doesn’t sound good.’
‘It probably isn’t.’
Ethel watched, golden-eyed, from her fleecy bed by the side of the unlit stove as the evening brightened. Merrily carried the empty mug back to the kitchen, which overlooked the remains of the orchard that once encircled the village. Maybe Lol would call tonight. She wished he’d just come home. Being alone was not about freedom.
She Googled Beryl Bainbridge, groaning softly at the result: nearly three quarters of a million mentions. She put in Beryl Bainbridge, Peter Rector: nothing to suggest a connection. Beryl Bainbridge, Hay-on-Wye: yes, she’d appeared a few times at the Hay Festival, she’d enjoyed it, she liked the place, its eccentricity. Her London home apparently looked like a Victorian museum of childhood, with ornate religious over-tones and her funeral had been incense-soaked Anglo-Catholic.
Merrily didn’t remember falling asleep on the sofa, only the dream of a darkened church that stank of hash, lit by a single, hovering candle casting no light as she walked towards it along an aisle that went on forever.
A time-lapse, and then the candle was directly in front of her, blinding white, held aloft by a man far taller than her, whose face was a shoal of flitting shadows.
‘What will you do now?’ he said.
When the phone chimed she awoke with a throb, the way you did when the nightmare bucked and you were thrown to the ground, lying there and praying, like a child prayed: Please God, save me from the bad things in the dark.
‘Are you doing anything important tonight,’ Gwyn Arthur Jones asked, ‘or are you available for work?’
‘Work?’
‘Do you… keep a black bag or something, at the ready?’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Not everyone,’ Gwyn Arthur said, ‘is an old agnostic like myself.’
She stood next to the open window, hands flat on the sill. No breeze now, the evening becoming the warmest part of the day.
In the distance, the low growl of a tractor in a field south of the village, some farmer starting his haymaking early, remembering last year’s drowned summer. The possibility of climate change, and the farmers changing with it, ready to work through the night if necessary.
A now-familiar grey car appeared on the cobbled square where, it being Friday night, about a dozen others were parked, for the Black Swan.
No surprise. It was Sylvia Merchant’s car and probably Sylvia who got out. Certainly tall enough, but the woman wore a long, light-green raincoat and, even though this was the warmest dry night in over a month, its hood was up, a hand holding it together over her face. Another woman emerged from the passenger side. She was more seasonally clad in a white linen jacket, and her black hair was uncovered.
They walked across the square and into the vicarage drive, and then the leaner, more serious Martin Longbeach was padding into Merrily’s mind.
I hope I’ve made it clear that it’s nothing for you to worry about. You’re on holiday and you can relax.
Sylvia wanting Martin to meet her medium. In the white linen jacket, for innocence. Not at all an unhealthy practice, spiritualism. Something the Church might as well accept, in these liberal times. Merrily was thinking, this should be me in there.
The whole thing becoming clearer now. Sylvia Merchant had wanted to put her on the back foot. To feel threatened and make concessions to prevent the humiliation of accusations about the misuse of deliverance, accusations of spiritual bullying.
A Christian woman, worshipper at the Cathedral, who wanted its blessing for communication with the dead.
Pick and mix. Where would it end? Merrily felt a rush of anger. Should go in there, sort this out, not leave it to Martin. He’d be her witness and she’d be his.
And how long would that take?
Oh God.
Merrily pushed stiffened fingers through her hair, picked up her phone and her car keys and carried her airline bag out to the Freelander.
51
Received wisdom
HALFWAY DOWN BACK FOLD, she jumped, as Gwyn Arthur Jones detached himself from a doorway, like an urban fox.
‘Never thought,’ he said, ‘that I’d be a party to anything like this. But, there we are, I suppose life should never become predictable.’
The evening was unclouded, the castle like a cut-out. B
ack Fold bumped crookedly down its left flank into the town centre. And you could almost hear an old but well-serviced motor running inside Gwyn Arthur Jones, a man who would always know more than he’d reveal.
‘This all comes about, of course, because I happened to mention your name to Mrs Thorogood.’
Holding open a shop door for Merrily, and then she was stepping into a woodland glade on a moonlit night. Tree shadows on the walls, which faded up in shades of blue between the bookcases, to a celestial ceiling.
And like a solemn tableau, amongst the trees: Mr Kapoor in his Mumbai Indians T-shirt, Betty Thorogood in her Alice band and Robin Thorogood leaning not on a stick but a spade.
Betty stepped forward at once, hugging Merrily. Spontaneous but stiff with apprehension, and the hug was not so much a greeting as a transfer of tension, emotional osmosis.
‘Betty… you all right?’
‘Not totally. Thanks. Thanks so much for coming.’
Betty looking down at the airline bag. Everybody looking at the airline bag, which contained a Bible, a prayer book, a flask of water and salt.
The swastika brick lay on a console-type table. Gwyn Arthur picked it up, a forefinger following the relief pattern.
‘It’s left-facing, see. The technical term for which, I’ve learned tonight, is sauwastika. But see how its arms are rounded rather than angular, so it’s also two letter esses, crossed.’
Robin looked over Gwyn Arthur’s shoulder.
‘SS? Himmler?’
‘No, no, the circle in the middle is a letter O. Which also represents the sun, in negative.’ Gwyn Arthur opened the laptop, already booted, found a bookmarked site and the symbol came up at once. ‘The Order of the Sun in Shadow.’
‘And that is what?’ Robin said.
Merrily bent to the screen.
‘It was an ultra right-wing sect based not far from here.’
‘We’re not sure if it still exists,’ Gwyn Arthur said. ‘It had a newsletter called Dark Orb, which then became a website. The last edition I can find dates back seven or eight years. The symbol has also been changed several times. The one on your brick doesn’t seem to have been used for over twenty.’
