by Phil Rickman
It was actually Betty who’d seen it first, after Robin had come off the phone with Seymour Loftus.
‘Brace,’ she said. ‘Is Brace an English corruption of De Braose?’
* * *
‘Nobody knows that,’ Robin said now. ‘Coulda come from anyplace. And it isn’t always even spelt the same. There’s a block of new apartments down the street called De Breos Court, with an e.’
‘Always struck me as odd,’ Jones said, ‘that they should name luxury flats after one of our great historic villains. The man who massacres the Welsh aristocracy over Christmas dinner, then slaughters one of their sons, aged seven. Odd, too, that this forbidding grey apartment complex is – in size – the biggest development in Hay since… the castle, I suppose.’
‘But those apartments weren’t here when Jerry Brace arrived in Hay?’
‘Like’s Garage, it was, in those days. You’d never have a hope of filling all those flats back then.’
‘So, OK, Brace arrives, conceives the idea he’s a descendant of de Braose, the Ogre. Or is that something his old man had told him way back? Is that, in fact, why Jerry fetches up in Hay?’
‘Either is possible, boy. It’s entirely in keeping with the way these people like to think. And also explains his obsession with the castle. He convinces himself he’s the true heir. In essence, it belongs to him, not the interloper, Booth, who takes a fine military fortress and fills it – pah! – with books.’
‘Actually,’ Betty said. ‘If you’re looking for the last time this country was subject to a fascist dictatorship you could very well be looking at de Braose’s time. Even Hitler never managed what the Normans achieved. OK, not an Aryan invasion, if they came from France, but—’
‘No?’ Jones lifted a forefinger. ‘I may be wrong…’ He opened the laptop ‘… but I believe the Normans were a race apart from the French.’
‘Just don’t make it any more weird,’ Robin said.
‘Earlier on, Mrs Watkins was asking me why Brace had chosen to set up his business here, and I was forced to say I didn’t know. What I do recall from my reading is that William de Braose was, at first, well regarded by King John and allowed to behave like a king himself in the borderland. They eventually fell out – probably over de Braose’s failure to disclose income to which John thought he was entitled. Anyway, he went on the run. Was finally killed and his wife and child starved to death. But, right up to the end, William was insisting he’d return one day to his beloved borders, and he— Ah, here we are. The Normans were descended from Nordic invaders who settled in France. Vikings, in fact. Or Germanic. So there’s a case for saying the Normans were Aryans… yes.’
‘Tradition,’ Betty said. ‘Heritage. Destiny. Hell.’
‘Bets, it’s just an elaborate fantasy they built around themselves.’
‘It’s a… septic obsession,’ Betty said.
Robin pulled open the door and walked out to see if there was any sign of Kapoor. It was night now, so no bastard wardens with a licence to kill; Kapoor would park right outside. Robin did not turn, as he usually did, to look up at the castle with an element of possession based on a desire to paint it. He was hearing Betty: I just think that we might have some work to do. To make it ours. Rather than… someone else’s.
He took a few paces then came back, shut the door hard. The castle walls would be blackening.
‘There you go.’ Betty turned the laptop away from herself. ‘British neo-Nazi pagan factions tend to associate themselves with Anglo-Saxon and Nordic traditions.’
Jones produced his pipe.
‘All right if I…?’
‘Sure,’ Robin said. ‘Just don’t bring out a pork pie.’
‘You didn’t finish telling us, Robin. What, in the final analysis, was your opinion of our friend Loftus?’
‘He was lying. It all came too easy. He’s a local politician now. Green Party. Then again, he could be lying about that, too. I almost told him about the videotape.’
‘Perhaps you should have done,’ Jones said. ‘Time, I think, to start nudging the applecart. Perhaps beyond time.’
58
A dark symmetry
SOMETIMES, WHEN THE worst had happened, you were angry with yourself. You’d thought about it repeatedly, in vivid detail, convinced that self-torture could alter reality. Not only stop it happening but stop it having happened.
Worthless superstition.
But please God…
When they reached the bottom of the steps, Bliss was coming out, shutting the white door, putting his back against it, snatching off his face mask.
‘No point. Nothing to be done.’
Moving his arms, trying to sweep them back up the stairs, like crowd control.
‘No.’ Claudia Cornwell carried on down to the bottom of the steps until she was face to face with Bliss. ‘We need to see this.’
‘Claudia—’
‘This isn’t about the law, Francis, or regulations, this is about what I might be able to tell you that you wouldn’t get from anyone else. I need to see. Or else why am I here? Why’s Merrily here?’
Bliss tapped gloved fingers against a thigh, his left side, the side that went numb. He looked up at Merrily.
‘You all right with this?’
She just nodded, not all right with any of it. She wanted out of here. Wanted to go running back up the steps, tripping over her Durex suit until she could tear it off and keep running into the darkness. She wanted a cigarette.
‘All right then.’ Bliss stepped aside. ‘Remember, you don’t touch anything, even with the kit on. Don’t lean against any walls. And especially you don’t throw up. The first hint of nausea, you get out and into that field. Or, better still, your own car.’
He opened the door.
‘Take some deep breaths now. You won’t want to in a minute.’
A crypt, with adornments. Uplighting, shaded.
Tiled floor, earth-coloured walls, a low ceiling, a false ceiling.
A ceiling of midnight blue. A black and white floor, like a chess-board. Circles, one inside the other.
Cardinal points.
Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, the archangels through which magicians paid tribute to their Hebrew ancestors.
All there.
On the altar, a chalice.
Also fat candles with white wicks, brown-flecked.
And a chair. A stiff-backed chair with arms, like a throne. Inside the circle where it would be protected.
Yes.
Where the King sat.
If only. ‘She never left Cusop,’ Bliss said.
Stepping away so they could see her. If they wanted to. If they could bear it.
They were spared Tamsin’s face. Her head had fallen forward on to her chest, hair screening the wound which had produced all the blood, like waxwork blood now, dry and ridged, and the stink of it all, in this vacuum, was the worst you’d ever know. A sweetness under it, as if incense had been burned in here, the stench of death and evil.
You’ve gorra big future, PC Winterson.
‘I need some information, Claudia,’ Bliss said through his mask. ‘From when you first arrived in Cusop yesterday.’
Jesus, Merrily thought. Yesterday. The hood was tight around her face, a white-gloved hand pressing the mask into her nose and mouth, but the smell got everywhere.
‘We’ve been through this, Francis,’ Claudia said.
Her eyes, unexpectedly, hot with panic. A barrister and a magician. A mother. With daughters?
‘No,’ Bliss said. ‘When we went through it, Tamsin was missing. So let’s start with the assumption that it wasn’t you who killed her.’
Claudia gasped. Bliss pulled down his mask, took a savage breath, did not choke.
‘Let’s assume somebody saw you come into the barn and uncover the entrance to the cellar. Could’ve been Tamsin herself, who saw you leaving and then went down. Maybe someone else followed her and then…’
‘Her throat’s cut?�
�� Claudia said. ‘Somebody cut her throat?’
‘Claudia, when you were there, in full daylight, did you see anybody else in the vicinity? In Cusop? Anywhere?’
‘Nobody. Although people evidently saw me.’
‘Kelly James. And – assuming pregnant Kelly has nothing to hide – someone else. There are several possibilities, and the one that seems most likely is that someone saw you go in and, when you’d left, came down here to take a look. What’s he find, Claudia. The King’s in his chair?’
Bliss was talking faster, battling his condition with an unnatural, forced, clipped authority.
‘The King’s always in his chair,’ Claudia said.
‘For Christ’s sake, Frannie, stop it!’ All the breath pumped out of Merrily and thank God it was only breath. ‘This is not an interview room, this is… this is…’
But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop.
‘The King’s robe was red, but not with blood. The King had already gone, right? Whoever it was didn’t want the effigy messed up?’
‘I don’t see why he wouldn’t.’ Claudia’s voice high and hoarse. ‘If his intention was to desecrate the temple. Blood, piss… anything. You know what they’re like.’
‘No, I don’t, necessarily. Who?’
‘People who’d do this.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘Frannie, can we get the… get out of here? Please?’
‘You didn’t have to come in, Merrily. It was your decision. All right, let’s say he – or even they – came in for a look around.’
‘So the intruder just takes the King – planning to throw him in the river? Is that what he’s come here for?’
‘Or in the brook,’ Claudia said. ‘More likely the brook.’
‘Why? Under your… rules. Quick, Claudia. Don’t stand there refining it, you’re not presenting a defence.’
‘All right!’ Claudia’s hands up in front of her face. ‘One – it was the brook where Peter died. Two – lots of rain lately, the water would be high and rushing. Wouldn’t take long for it to get washed down to the Wye.’
‘Why?’
‘A kind of ritual drowning of… all our efforts? The project? I don’t know. I’m just talking off the top of my head, Francis, and I may be talking balls.’
‘Doesn’t matter. So Tamsin, having been alerted by Kelly James, turns up, looking for you. Sees the barn door’s open and the hatch. Comes down and confronts the intruder, the way she… the way she would. What’s he thinking, then? He hasn’t done anything? He hasn’t even broken in. He’s just a trespasser. He’s just curious. He’s like, “Sorry, officer, but… well… you gorra admit it’s a bit weird in here, isn’t it?” That’s what he’d say.’
‘If he was an ordinary trespasser.’
Claudia stood looking at Tamsin, making herself look, Merrily thought, in case any of this was her fault. Looking at the big cakes of dried blood encrusting the poor kid’s T-shirt.
‘How does that,’ Bliss said, ‘lead to this?’
Hardening his questions now, Merrily thought. Going for Claudia – almost certainly unconsciously, but it was there – the way so many defence barristers must have gone for him in the witness box. But the corpse, in all its pitiful horror, was never in court, where the only smell would be wood polish.
‘Do you know all the people in Rector’s coven or whatever you prefer to call it?’
‘I think so.’
‘How well?’
‘Christ, Francis!’ Claudia snatched away her white mask. ‘These are not bloody satanists! They’re people – mainly elderly people – of a gentle and spiritual disposition. Learned people. They don’t do… sacrifices. Not of anything living.’
‘Then who would? What about someone she knew? Say the trespasser is someone she’d talked to. In her spare-time inquiries into Rector’s death. Suppose she came face-to-face with someone she’d already had cause to be a bit suspicious of?’
‘Wouldn’t the killer be covered in blood?’
‘That would depend if… if he knew what he was doing?’ Bliss went to stand behind the chair. ‘I’m inclined to think she’d been disabled first. Maybe barely conscious when she was arranged in this chair like the effigy. If she was already disabled, he could’ve done it from behind, one slash, jump back, stand in the doorway, watch her…’ His breath catching in his throat ‘… bleeding out.’
Merrily heard Claudia’s indrawn breath, or maybe it was her own.
‘And then,’ Bliss said, ‘having hidden his or her own motor in any one of a few dozen places within walking distance, the killer – at some stage – drives Tamsin’s Clio back to Hay, with her phone in there, leaves it on the car park and goes back across the fields to Cusop for his vehicle. How long a walk – twenty minutes?’
‘Or,’ Merrily said, ‘if he was on foot in the first place…’
‘Someone local,’ Claudia said.
Bliss shrugged.
‘Can we get out of here now, Francis?’
‘Not quite yet.’
‘I need to go home tonight.’
‘Just be glad you can.’
Bliss was still standing behind Tamsin’s body. He had his torch out, directing the beam down to where her hair had fallen forward.
‘I won’t ask you to examine this, but her head’s been mutilated.’ Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘Remember the photograph you came across in Rector’s library?’
‘Like I’d forget?’
‘Hard to be sure, but two cuts…’ He was looking down into the circle of light. ‘Two deep cuts on Tamsin’s head… crossing over.’
‘Dear God.’
‘Claudia… thoughts. What are your thoughts?’
‘I’m thinking I just want to see my childre— All right, I’ll— There’s a dark… what I can only describe as a dark symmetry… to the removal of a power-object and its replacement by a dead body.’
‘So we’re looking at somebody who knows this stuff?’
‘I think that’s the most likely explanation.’
‘And what might he do next?’ Bliss said.
Merrily saw the woman’s shaven head in a grainy photocopy, the message beneath.
What will you do now?
Outside they stripped off their Durex suits, gave them back to Bliss who stowed them in the boot of his Honda.
He’d inspected the temple in case they’d left anything behind, switched out the lights, sealing the crime scene like some chamber at the bottom of a pyramid in the desert. The hatch had been replaced, the bales of straw moved back.
‘We drive out of here at a normal night speed. One of you leave about half a minute after the other. Drive into Hay and we’ll meet on the car park, down by the recycling bins. Go.’
Claudia nodded, went to her car. Merrily turned bitterly towards Bliss.
‘Why did you do that? Why did you keep us in there? What the hell was the point? As if it wasn’t bad enough.’
‘Needed answers. Before the shock-factor set in.’
His voice muffled because he was bent over, hands on his knees, shaking. As he came up, his face was lit briefly by the lights of Claudia’s car and his eyes were hot and pooled.
‘Just leave me alone, eh, Merrily.’
She nodded.
As she drove between the broken gateposts, hands cold on the wheel, there was one narrow, pale strip over Hay, like the light under a closed door.
59
Poltergeists
THEY WALKED AWAY from the cars, stood near the bottom of the Oxford Road car park, amongst the moonlit bins: glass, plastic, cardboard, garden waste. No more than twenty cars on here and four were police.
‘What a friggin’ awful mess,’ Bliss said. ‘For everybody.’
Car-hiss on Oxford Road. Otherwise silence. Merrily felt the sweat forming like cold dew on her forehead.
‘You have to tell them, don’t you? Now.’
Bliss stared at the foothills of the Black Mount
ains, embossed on the pale night sky.
‘Claudia and me, we’d rather someone else made the discovery. I’ve been trying to think about how that’s achievable. If it is.’
‘Think about Tamsin’s family. Sitting there, drinking too much tea, waiting for the phone to ring. Reassuring each other over and over. Telling them now isn’t going to shorten the suffering, but it’ll at least end the crippling anxiety.’
Bliss turned to Claudia.
‘You go home, eh?’
‘No.’ Claudia backed away. ‘You’re not going to be able to keep me out of this. I told you and I told Merrily that I’d rather my private interests didn’t become public knowledge, but… after seeing what we all saw… that doesn’t matter. Think about it.’
‘What I’m thinking about is you spending several long days beating your head against a wall trying to initiate acting-DCI Iain Brent, PhD into stuff he thinks wouldn’t motivate even the most irrational killer. You know how this goes.’
‘Yes, I do. And I’m a barrister. I can handle it.’
Merrily’s phone chimed. She moved out into the car park.
‘Merrily.’
‘Gwyn Jones, Merrily. Where are you?’
‘Back in Hay.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m all right.’
‘Francis Bliss… is he with you, now?’
‘Not far away.’
‘All right, listen to me, Merrily. Can you ask him to meet me? Just him, nobody else. Next shop along from the Thorogoods. Mr Kapoor’s cricket shop.’
‘Gwyn, I’m not sure he’s going to want to right now.’
‘Merrily, look, this is going to be too big for me now. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s taken a turn for the serious.’
A soft drumming, and she turned to see Claudia Cornwell quietly hammering the soft undersides of her fists against the bottle bank’s rusting flank.
‘… the enormity of it,’ Claudia was saying. ‘None of our careers are worth this.’
‘Tell him it’s important, Merrily. Tell him it’s more important than anything in my long career in the police.’
‘Gwyn, what I suggest is you come here. We’re at the bottom of the car park, near the bins. Can you do that?’
