by Phil Rickman
70
An occasion
‘DOESN’T END, MERRILY,’ Gwyn Arthur Jones said.
She took his call in the picnic place – one of Herefordshire’s rare roadside gestures to the tourist – on the edge of Hardwicke.
‘Message on my machine to call Tim Wareham as soon as I got in, regardless of time. I call him back, intending to let it ring three times and then hang up, so as not to disturb his wife. But he picks up at once. Having heard on the radio that Tamsin had been found murdered.’
‘I’m trying to think how that would affect him. I mean personally.’
‘Well… it’s interesting. He never met Tamsin, but when he saw her parents on television, he was reminded of a holiday they spent on the Winterson farm. Years before Tamsin was born, this was, when her father had not long taken over the farm and was diversifying into tourism. Opened two fields as a campsite. The Warehams hired a pitch for a week.’
‘With Mephista?’
‘Mephista found the farm boring. Would walk around leaving gates open. Mr Winterson explained to her the problems caused by allowing animals into a potato field. Mephista left even more gates open, with predictable results, causing Mr Winterson to lose his temper with her. Not a girl, as you know, who appreciated admonishment. That night, a barn catches fire. Well, no proof. Fulsome denials. The Warehams invited to leave. Could you blame the farmer?’
‘Erm… no. What did you tell Mr Wareham? About Mephista.’
‘Told him a certain amount and left it to him to join the dots. I think he’ll choose to shiver alone rather than tell his poor wife.’
Merrily watched the sun explode through the dead flies on the windscreen.
‘You realize there are now three possible motives for a psychopath like Gwenda to kill Tamsin in Rector’s holy of holies. If you get inside her head, it has a horrific logic.’
‘Much of which,’ Gwyn Arthur said, ‘would be shredded by a defence counsel with half the skills of, say, Ms Claudia Cornwell.’
‘There’s ironic.’
‘But perhaps Gore had taken as much of this as he could stand.’
‘Bliss told you about Gore and Tamsin?’
‘The murder of Tamsin would surely bring about a fundamental change in a relationship very much dominated by Gwenda, in her dual role.’
‘He wanted to end it and get out? Do we really know why they came back to Hay?’
Explaining that, Gwyn said, might thrust them back into the world of the mystical and the symbolic. The King withdrawing from public life. The castle changing hands. Bookshops closing. The possibility of change and decay. A sense – to Merrily – of Rector’s magic breaking down. Gwenda nourishing an old hatred for both Rector and Hay itself.
Dualism, Merrily thought. The prospect of being there in the fading of the light, darkness rising.
‘I think,’ Gwyn Arthur said, ‘that after the murder of Tamsin Winterson, if Gore had made it to his motorbike last night, he might never have been seen here again. Amidst all the talk of blood legacy, blood sacrifice and ushering in a new aeon of violence… it’s small breath of possible humanity, isn’t it?’
‘How’s Robin?’
‘Bruised. Angry. I feel a terrible guilt about that boy. We used him. We have a debt to repay. We – the booksellers – are having a collection for them. Of books. Not many of us won’t have the odd pagan-oriented item on our shelves.’
‘You might have a problem getting Robin to accept charity.’
‘A problem to which we are now applying ourselves.’
‘I had a similar idea.’
Involving Athena White and a small but meaningful portion of Peter Rector’s library. They couldn’t all be relevant to the future of the last redemptive project.
‘Gwyn… one thing…’
‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘Go on.’
‘Gwenda describes you, more than a bit disparagingly, as “the King’s Chief of Police”.’
‘Now how would she know a thing like that?’
‘She knows everything, Gwyn.’
‘Well, it’s a joke, obviously.’
‘Is it? Like the Kingdom of Hay itself?’
‘Look… Even as a working policeman, I was always a tacit admirer of Richard Booth, for whom life was not always easy. Over the years, there have been many attempts by people in local and national government to discredit him. Some – usually by rival businessmen with far more money – quite public. Others shady and scurrilous. I have, at various times, been in a position to provide what you might call counter-intelligence. I tend to prefer the term Internal Security, to police. Please don’t broadcast this.’
‘Of course not. Thank you. That explains a lot. Including why you offered to look after the wet effigy. I expect he’ll be returned to the right hands.’
‘Already done, Merrily. Not that I would admit to giving any credence to, ah… However, the matter of Mrs Villiers…’
‘Gwyn… I don’t know what to tell you.’
‘Natural causes, they say. A heart attack is likely. There’ll be a post-mortem. She’d… been there quite a while, it seems. Dead. DS Dowell, who was the first to examine her, tells me there were obvious signs of rigor mortis around her mouth and jaw. Even in warm weather, which apparently accelerates the process, it’s at least three hours before that happens.’
‘Yes, that… in view of one thing and another, that’s odd.’
‘And died there. Where the Dulas Brook enters the Wye.’
‘I’m going to try not to think about it for a while,’ Merrily said.
But couldn’t stop thinking about something Athena White had said, relating to the immediate afterlife of Peter Rector.
She parked on the square at Ledwardine at just after eight a.m. Sunday. Locked the Freelander, shouldered her bags, started down Church Street to Lol’s cottage. Then stopped and turned, dragged out the church keys and went back across the square to the lychgate.
The main door was already unlocked.
Colours.
On the step outside, a scrap of something light blue, a fleck of something yellow. She slid through the lifting shadows, into the nave. The flush of red apples in the stained window and Martin Longbeach, emerging, pink-faced, from the chancel with a covered dustpan.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Merrily. Are you up early or…’
‘Home late. You know what it’s like, clubbing, you lose all track of time.’
‘Yes,’ he said, as though he believed her.
‘Everything OK?’
‘Oh. Yes. Everything’s… fine. Absolutely fine.’
‘Am I right in thinking Ms Merchant was here last night?’
‘Last night? Oh… yes. Can’t imagine you’ll hear from her again. Much better now. She left very happy. Very happy.’
‘With a friend?’
‘With a friend, yes. Indeed.’
She sought his eyes.
‘What’s in the dustpan, Martin?’
‘Ah, Merrily… we all do what we think best, you know?’
‘An occasion?’
‘A small occasion, yes. Under cover of night.’
‘The friend was her medium.’
‘Her name’s Gillian Williams.’
‘Able to channel Alys.’
‘So she says. But who knows?’
‘So Alys was there, too. As it were.’
‘As it… were. Yes.’
‘What’s in the dustpan, Martin?’
‘Oh…’ He didn’t lift the lid. ‘Dust… you know… bits of paper.’
‘Coloured paper.’
Martin shrugged.
‘It’s confetti, isn’t it?’ Merrily said.
Closing her eyes.
She didn’t want to talk any more. She wanted to go to bed and smother her screams in Lol’s pillow.
Notes & Credits
For reasons of credibility, the eccentricity of Hay has been underplayed.
The histories of Hay read by Robin Thorogood and others incl
ude Kate Clarke’s The Book of Hay (Logaston Press) and the large-format Planet Hay by Huw Parsons (Peevish Bee Books). Richard Booth’s My Kingdom of Books is published by Y Lolfa.
I’ve known the King of Hay for many years, since doing stories for BBC Wales on his various enterprises. Candlenight was probably the first totally new book he ever had in the window at The Limited. What a coup, huh? The second was probably, My Kingdom of Books which I helped launch, memorably, at the Hay Festival.
I also followed the late Supt. Ralph Rees, head of Dyfed-Powys Police in Brecon, who became a (much-missed) friend, on his adventures with the Convoy on Hay Bluff.
Capel-y-ffin is a fascinating place. Above the hamlet, you can still see the monastery of Fr. Ignatius, the remains of his church and the statue of Our Lady of Llanthony, a mystifyingly neglected apparition.
The waterfall in Cusop Dingle can be seen by the roadside, also the site of Cusop Castle. Good parking at the ancient church.
Hay Castle is in transition – again.
The Hay Festival lasts for about ten days around the end of May, under the direction of the ever-resourceful Peter Florence, and has spin-off festivals all over the world. St Mary’s Church in Hay, where Fr. Richard Williams holds his fascinating Anglo-Catholic services (you’re welcome to take your dog to mass) is indeed surrounded by an intriguing collection of natural water features, and a pathway does lead from the church to the mouth of the Gospel Pass.
The history – not all of it apocryphal – of satanic neo-Nazi groups on the Welsh Border is chronicled in considerable detail in Black Sun, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s authoritative exploration of Nazi occultism. If you thought all this was made up, you would be very wrong, though the extent of its support remains debatable. The Nazi-sympathizer Lord Brocket, who seems to have attended Hitler’s fiftieth birthday party, lived at Kinnersley Castle, a few miles from Hay, around the end of World War II. On the day this novel was finished, the front page lead headline of the Midlands’ Sunday newspaper, the Mercury, was EXTREMISTS IN BID TO REVIVE FASCIST PARTY. The faction, whose ‘spiritual leader’ was the late Sir Oswald Mosley, was described as a ‘sinister organization with many members claiming to be pagans or followers of satanic or Wiccan cults.’
Tracy Thursfield was hugely helpful with research into the esoteric and lots of discussion, as was Gary Nottingham. David Conway’s autobiographical Magic Without Mirrors is extremely convincing and very funny, and Gareth Knight’s I Called it Magic is another revelatory and rather heartwarming account of how a magician gets by these days. The magic of Gareth Knight, the most obvious heir to the great Dion Fortune, is also a key element in T. M. Luhrmann’s authoritative analysis of contemporary ritual magic in Britain, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft. Peter J. Carroll’s Liber Null remains (I think) the definitive guide to practising chaos magic. Read it and give up. Thanks, as ever, to Sir Richard Heygate, co-author with Philip Carr-Gomm of The Book of English Magic, already a classic work destined to live forever. And to Prof. Bernard Knight, who never fails to answer my desperate, eleventh-hour forensic-pathology questions.
You can find the unexpurgated facts about Eric Gill in Fiona MacCarthy’s biography, Eric Gill and the artwork-oriented Eric Gill and David Jones at the Capel-y-ffin by Jonathan Miles. The big Fr. Ignatius fanbook is The Life of Father Ignatius, the Monk of Llanthony by Beatrice De Bertouch and the embittered antidote is Nunnery Life in the Church of England by Sister Mary Agnes.
Also…
Hilary Morris for tales of old Hay. Betty and Robin’s much-valued neighbours, Haydn Pugh and George Greenway, of Back Fold.
The Prince of Hay and scourge of the Kindle, Derek Addyman.
Rob Soldat, author of A Walk Around Hay and fount of curious knowledge. Victor Hutchins, of Cusop Dingle. Anne Brichto, Hay bookseller. Ronald Verheyen, who had to come all the way from Antwerp to point out what I was missing on my own doorstep. i.e. Cusop.
Bev Craven, designer to the gentry, Mark Jones, farrier to the stars. Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records and a possible contender for the vacant role of Magus of Hay. Cathi and Thom Penman. Barbara Erskine, author of Lady of Hay which deals in depth with the de Braose family, a big novel now widely recognized also as an important reference work on the medieval Welsh border. Jessie and the late Ken Ratcliffe (a legend) who saw the light at Cusop. Duncan Baldwin for superfast legal advice.
Nick Talbot, who is the band Gravenhurst, whose lines ‘To understand the killer, I must become the killer’ infiltrated the end of the book.
Mairead Reidy, ace researcher. Anne Holt and Tom Young. Caitlin Sagan. Iain Finlayson. Dai Pritchard, master of all trades. Terry Smith, marketing executive, and the legendary composer Allan Watson, whose work can be heard on the two (so far) Lol Robinson albums, Songs from Lucy’s Cottage and A Message from the Morning. See the website, www.philrickman.co.uk.
My ever-helpful agents, Andrew Hewson and Ed Wilson. My unbelievably accommodating editor, Sara O’Keeffe. And Anna Hogarty for the painful final haul…
And – don’t know where to start – I owe Carol so much on this one. Weeks and weeks of late nights and early mornings. Reading different versions of the same chapters over and over until we get to the essence. Any flaws that remain unidentified are definitely not hers.
