The Devil's Moon

by Peter Guttridge

  But as a woman who had decided ten years earlier that she never wanted children, as a woman who hadn’t liked teenage girls when she was a teenager herself, never mind now, the last thing she wanted to do was have any dealings with them. Especially feral ones.

  She glanced at the files with something like loathing. Not that she was allowed to call them ‘feral’ any more. According to social theorists they were simply ‘troubled’. ‘Feral’ was too judgemental. Yeah, right.

  ‘Oh, Reg,’ she sighed. ‘I could do with you to laugh at me right now.’

  She fished out her phone and called Kate Simpson. She was put on hold, the current radio programme streaming down the phone line. Kate was mid-show, of course. Gilchrist hadn’t got the hang of Kate’s new job as producer. She wasn’t sure Kate had either.

  Kate Simpson’s mobile rang. It was Phil, the guy who ran her scuba-diving club.

  ‘A newspaper has asked me to see if there are any fish left in the waters around Brighton. Of course there will be, but I wondered if you fancied coming down with me. I’m putting a little team together.’

  Last time she’d been involved in one of Phil’s little teams they’d found the remains of a woman killed in the sixties. She recognized that was a one-off. Or so she hoped.

  ‘When?’ she said.

  ‘This teatime?’

  ‘I’ll see you at the marina.’

  The light on her desk phone was flashing. She pressed for the landline.

  Kate Simpson’s voice broke in on Gilchrist listening to the radio show. She sounded breathless. Gilchrist could hear the hubbub of the radio studio’s outer office in the background.

  ‘Sarah – what’s up?’

  ‘Thought you’d want to know,’ Gilchrist said. ‘You’re definitely not going to be charged with using an illegal weapon to fight off your attacker.’

  Simpson was silent for a moment. ‘What’s happened?’ she said, her voice low.

  ‘The volt gun has gone missing from the evidence room,’ Gilchrist said, equally quietly. ‘No stun gun, no prosecution.’

  Kate cleared her throat, then said, ‘Thank God. Oh, Sarah, thank bloody God.’ Then, with excitement: ‘Does that mean you’re off suspension too?’

  Gilchrist grinned, even though she knew it was pointless down a phone line. ‘And promoted.’

  ‘Wow. Congratulations.’

  ‘Except for what my first job is.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Never mind – I’ll tell you later. Are you around tonight? Let’s go to Plenty to celebrate.’

  Oliver Daubney was on good form. He led Watts at a pretty brisk trot round the Picasso prints. ‘Fine work,’ Daubney said. ‘But, you know, what was once challenging has long been absorbed into the mainstream.’

  They moved through a couple of Egyptian galleries to the restaurant underneath the dome of the Great Courtyard. They were seated at a table with a gentle buzz of sound from the courtyard below refracting around them and a soft white light falling from above. And for the next hour, Daubney shared with Watts some of his many stories about writers great and small of the past sixty years.

  Even if he didn’t represent them, he knew them all. And Watts immediately realized that Daubney wasn’t sharing. He was giving a performance. An Audience with Oliver Daubney.

  ‘Agatha Christie?’ Daubney said. ‘No conversation. None at all. Such a shy creature. Raymond Chandler? A drunk and an egoist – the admiration of T S Eliot went right to his head – but most charming and still talented when I met him. In the late fifties, when I was scarcely an adult, I went on a bender with your father, Ian Fleming and Chandler. I got home sometime in the early sixties.’

  Daubney paused for Watts to laugh and the ex-chief constable obliged.

  The next time Daubney paused for breath – by which time he’d run through Amis père and fils, the two Durrells, Willliam Golding, John Fowles, Muriel Spark, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia and Ted – Watts said, ‘Did you find out anything about my father and Wheatley, Pearson and Crowley?’

  Daubney seemed slightly miffed to be interrupted in mid-flow but he composed himself. ‘With Wheatley it was simply a friendship between two fellow writers, I believe. He did a Foyles lunch with Pearson in the sixties but whether the friendship went any further I don’t know. Crowley – I couldn’t find out anything about that connection.’

  ‘I can’t imagine my father spending much time with such an obvious charlatan as Crowley.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Daubney said, draining the last of the Burgundy.

  They parted shortly after. Watts left feeling he’d been sold short but not knowing exactly how. The cobbled courtyard at the front of the museum was, as usual, thronged with tourists. Small and large groups in lines being photographed from too far away so that people walked between photographer and subjects all the time. Anoraks and umbrellas as far as the eye could see.

  The paving stones were slippery with rain and even his rubber-soled shoes didn’t help. He made his cautious way out on to Museum Street. The Museum Tavern looked appealing, its Victorian lights glowing through the rainy gloom. Watts liked a Victorian artist called Grimshaw who seemed to specialize in gaslight in foggy, rainy dusks. He might have painted this scene, even though it was only mid-afternoon.

  Watts walked past the pub to a bookshop on the left. He remembered his father bringing him to the British Museum and walking down this street when it was all second-hand bookshops and quirky art galleries. Now there was only the one bookshop and a range of cafés and tourist souvenir shops. Plastic police helmets and Union Jacks on mugs, tea towels, beer mats and assorted garments proliferated.

  The bookshop was theoretically an occult bookshop but, Watts reflected, commerce gets everywhere. Toy witches on broomsticks hung in the window and inside there was the usual gallimaufry of crystal balls, Tarot cards, angel cards, crystals, Ouija boards and general cheap quasi-spiritual tat.

  On the bookshelves Harry Potter predominated along with modern young adult vampire novels. There were New Age novels too: Paulo Coelho featured large.

  Over by the sales desk – a bureau complete with ink pot and old-fashioned nib pen – there was a more serious-looking bookcase. Old leather volumes behind glass. A man with long, wet, curly black hair, wearing a shapeless raincoat, was standing in front of it, tilting his head to read the spines of the works there.

  In front of him, at the bureau, was a large woman in the kind of kaftan Watts hadn’t seen since, as a child, he’d watched some hefty Greek man with a falsetto voice perform on the telly.

  She smiled at Watts in an inquiring way. He took the book out of his briefcase.

  ‘I’ve got this first edition of an Aleister Crowley novel, signed to my father. I wondered if you might be able to value it?’

  ‘I’ll buy it,’ the man with the wet hair blurted.

  Kate had been a bit befuddled for the rest of her shift. After Sarah’s call she’d been thinking about her new freedom and flashing back to the awful attack on her in the bedroom of her flat.

  A smelly man pawing her, hitting her, tearing her clothes off, falling on her with all his weight. Kate scrabbling under the pillow for the feel of the plastic weapon Gilchrist had left her when they first shared flats. Grabbing it, thrusting it at the man’s neck, pressing every button on it she could find. And then she’d been abruptly brought back to the present.

  ‘Kate? Kate?’ Simon’s voice urgent in her ear. ‘Jesus, woman, don’t zone out on me again. You gotta start getting a grip. I need the poll results for “George Clooney Gay or Guy?” Kate?’

  At the end of her shift she headed down to the marina. She was late getting there but she doubted they were going out. The weather was filthy, the boats in the harbour rolling and rattling.

  A regular gang of half a dozen of the keenest divers were below. Phil kissed her on the cheek and looked at her with his startling blue eyes. He shook his head.

  ‘We’re going to give it half an h
our to see if it blows over then go down the pub.’

  Kate looked out of the porthole. ‘I’d be as happy skipping straight to the pub option.’

  Phil smiled and indicated some packets on a narrow table. ‘Scopolamine patches if you want one.’

  She shook her head. ‘Touch wood, however rough it gets I don’t get sick. I might drown but I won’t be sick.’

  She looked across at the one person in the group she didn’t know. He looked like he was about to burst out of his clothes. His head was tilted back and he had a dropper in his meaty hand poised just above his eye. She watched him do both eyes then blink until he got his vision back. He saw her looking.

  ‘Bit extreme if we don’t actually go out, isn’t it?’ she said.

  He grinned but there was a coldness to it.

  ‘Bugger going out – this is to stop the motion of this boat in dock making me heave.’

  They all laughed. Phil said, ‘Kate, I don’t think you and Don have met. Don’s with a club over in Worthing.’

  The man nodded. ‘Call me Don-Don.’

  Kate’s phone rang. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, clambering up on deck.

  ‘Kate? It’s Sarah. I’m finished earlier than I thought if you can get away.’

  Gilchrist was already sitting at the back of Plenty when Kate arrived. Gilchrist got up, towering over her as usual, and gave her a hug.

  ‘Hope I didn’t wreck your evening?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘I was going to go to the pub with a bunch of divers but, you know, I like diving with them rather than socializing. Their main topic of conversation is cubic pressure per foot per pound.’ She laughed. ‘There’s a new guy. Bit of a creep but keen – he would dive seven days a week if he could. But he gets serious sea-sickness.’

  ‘A diver with sea-sickness?’

  ‘Some do. They slap on a travel sickness patch and that’s fine. This guy uses a dropper in his eyes to dose himself up with liquid scopolamine.’

  ‘Scopolamine?’ Gilchrist said. ‘Isn’t that the truth drug?’

  ‘Don’t know about the truth thing,’ Kate said. ‘I think it’s the basis of the travel patches but you can get it more concentrated in liquid form.’

  ‘You use it?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Never had a need. Plus I’m a drug novice. I’m reluctant to take even aspirin. It’s the same with alcohol. You know me: if you have a drink I get a hangover.’

  ‘Have you been diving since the fish thing?’

  ‘We were supposed to but I’m glad we haven’t. That water spout churned things up so much I wouldn’t be surprised if we bumped into the Loch Ness Monster or a great white down there.’

  When their drinks arrived they chinked their glasses.

  ‘Onward and upward,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘God, I hope so,’ Kate said.

  Plenty had been voted the best vegetarian restaurant in Britain about six times in a row. As usual, the description of the meal was like a work of art in itself. Then the food came. For the next half hour different tastes zinged across Kate’s palate.

  ‘What did we just eat?’ she asked Sarah at the end of the final course, as the bottle of organic wine took hold.

  ‘Fuck if I know,’ Sarah said. ‘Great though, yeah?’

  What they then talked about became a bit of a blur. Sarah talked about a church being desecrated but what Sarah was doing in a church Kate couldn’t imagine. Kate blethered on about the guy with the eye dropper.

  Getting home was more of a blur, although Kate remembered the two of them tumbling into a taxi together. Then she remembered the two of them staggering into Sarah’s flat.

  What she didn’t remember was what happened between then and the moment she woke up the next morning in bed with her friend.

  SEVEN

  ‘Those of you who are early risers – and include me out of that category except when I’m dragged, kicking and screaming, from my bed to do this show – may have seen a Wicker Man go up in flames on Brighton beach this morning. Love that film. The original, British classic obviously, not the mad Nicolas Cage remake.

  ‘That’s right. No sooner are we shot of falling fish and aggressive seagulls than we’ve got a Wicker Man on our beach. And the Brighton Festival hasn’t even started yet. What do you say, Kate? Oh, I forgot, Kate isn’t in yet. Who knows what my producer was up to last night?

  ‘Anyway, you’ll recall from the original film of The Wicker Man that Christopher Lee, the Lord of Summerisle, believed that the failure of his island’s crops could be reversed by the sacrifice of a virgin policeman in a pagan ceremony. So he lured to his island a poor virgin copper, Edward Woodward, who ended up burned alive inside a Wicker Man. Gruesome.

  ‘I’m not sure if any crops have failed here in Brighton, though my window box is looking a bit sad. And, so far as we’re aware, unlike the film, no virgin policeman went up in flames this morning – no offence to the Brighton police but they might be hard to find in our fair city.

  ‘But, anyway, this morning’s burning coincided with the sunrise so it may have been part of a pagan ceremony. No one has yet come forward to claim responsibility or provide an explanation.

  ‘If you know anything about the Wicker Man’s construction and the reason for it please get in touch with us here at Southern Shores Radio. We await your call. And if you witnessed it going up in flames, phone in too and tell us what you saw.

  ‘The fire service was summoned but decided against dampening down the fire as it was on the water’s edge and did not constitute a hazard. Having said that, we have Johnny Clarke from the council’s seafront team on the line to warn against any copycat activity. Johnny, good morning to you.’

  ‘Morning, Simon.’

  ‘You’re not expecting anyone else to plonk a Wicker Man on the beach, I assume. But, in general terms: a fire on the beach – what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘I know it sounds a bit odd and we’re certainly not trying to discourage people from making the most of the beach. However, a fire – especially a big one like this – even on a beach is potentially dangerous both to humans and to physical structures. It only needs a few sparks to carry on the wind and we might end up with the rest of the West Pier burning down – or some even more solid structure catching fire.’

  ‘And yet the fire brigade deemed it wasn’t a hazard.’

  ‘I can’t speak for them but I believe they made that decision because it was a very still morning, with only the slightest of breezes. Having said that, once the flames had damped down a bit, they killed the fire with foam and have put a cordon round the remains of the structure.’

  ‘Right. Just hang on a minute, Johnny, my producer has finally arrived and is talking in my ear but not about why she’s so late. As you know, when she speaks, I listen. OK, boss, will do. Johnny, we’re told the police, who have been on the scene a little while talking to witnesses, have now thrown their own cordon round the remains of the Wicker Man. What’s that about?’

  ‘I can see them doing that but I don’t know why. The main thing I want to say is that the council is relieved nobody was hurt but that we strongly discourage this sort of activity.’

  ‘Thanks, Johnny. There you are, folks – you heard it here first on Southern Shores Radio, your local look at the world. Hello, my producer, Kate, has now entered my inner sanctum. Oooh, missus. That usually means Simon is in bother. What have I done now, Kate? You’re looking great, by the way – especially your face. The white tinged with green look is very fetching. Though maybe change out of your pyjamas when you’ve a moment?

  ‘Hang on – she wants to address you directly. Hope that doesn’t mean I’m out of a job. I was only kidding wid ya, Kate. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the beautiful and talented – and probably hung-over – Kate Simpson. Not that she’s mine to give.’

  ‘Morning, everyone,’ Kate Simpson said. ‘Just an update on that police activity on the beach before I hand you back to Simon. We’re hoping to have a police spokesperson
on the show later but for now police are asking those of you who took any photographs or video footage of this morning’s Wicker Man ceremony – if ceremony is what it was – to get in touch with your local police station, or even just your community copper, if you have such a thing.

  ‘They would also like whoever was behind this morning’s burning Wicker Man to come forward. Any problems with these instructions just phone us here at Southern Shores Radio and we’ll put you in touch with the right people. OK? Now back to you, Simon. Oh, and your job is safe – for the time being.’

  ‘Thanks, Kate. Now back in your coffin.’

  Bob Watts was wondering what to do about the Aleister Crowley novel. He had intended to sell it – and he had two offers – but the inscription intrigued him.

  He was tucking into his breakfast at the French café across from Ye Olde White Hart. He could cook. He had indeed a half-dozen pretty impressive signature dishes. But breakfast was too much of a faff. Especially when he’d just done his run.

  So he usually came in here after his run, dripping with sweat, to replace the calories he’d just burned up. The café people were tolerant of him stinking up the place.

  Today his run had followed a dawn conversation with his wife, Molly, calling from Canada. ‘How are my children?’ Watts said. Although his wife now lived three thousand miles away, their two children had more contact with her than him.

  ‘Your daughter is going to be in Brighton this week.’

  ‘I saw it on her Facebook page.’

  ‘When was the last time you actually got in touch with her?’

  ‘I leave phone messages. She doesn’t reply.’

  His wife didn’t comment.

  ‘How are things with you?’ Watts said to change the subject.

  ‘I’m doing a writing course. An MA.’

  ‘Great. That’s not quite what I meant.’

  ‘I know that’s not what you meant. I’m going to write about us.’

  Watts said nothing.

  ‘What am I, after all? I have no definition except in terms of others. Mother. Wife. Negatives.’