The Devil's Moon

by Peter Guttridge

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘In his name, yes. But at the siege of Toulouse, the crusade leader got his comeuppance when a big stone launched from a catapult crushed his head.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear that, but what does this have to do with Saddlescombe and Provence?’

  Perkins shrugged. ‘I don’t have answers, just a lot of strange coincidences. Here’s one. The man who led the Albigensian crusade – the man who had his head crushed at Toulouse?’

  ‘What about him?’ Watts said.

  Perkins caressed his bushy beard. ‘His name was Simon de Montfort.’

  NINETEEN

  Sarah Gilchrist stood in the foyer of St Michael’s Church as the Reverend Rutherford hurried towards her.

  ‘I have to ask you some questions,’ she said.

  ‘Of course. And I have one for you. Why did you come to the church that day?’

  Gilchrist smiled, though she didn’t feel it. ‘Later. Do you believe in evil, Vicar?’

  He gave her a long look. ‘That comes with the job, Detective Inspector.’ He waved his arm at the spacious church. ‘If I believe in one I have to believe in the other.’

  ‘No God without the Devil?’

  ‘And no Good without Evil – otherwise, how would we know the difference?’

  He was still looking at her.

  Gilchrist looked down. ‘In my job I unfortunately see more evil than good.’

  ‘But you represent the good,’ Rutherford said.

  Gilchrist glanced at him. ‘I may represent it . . .’

  Rutherford had a lovely smile. ‘I’m sure you’re better than you think you are. Most people are in my experience.’

  ‘You go looking for the good in people, Vicar, so you’re going to find it,’ Gilchrist said softly. ‘I’m looking for the bad – and I find it wearyingly often. Especially in myself.’

  She felt self-conscious as he examined her face for a long moment.

  ‘If we’ve anything about us, it’s in our nature to be harsh on ourselves,’ he said. ‘My view – hard won, I assure you – is that there are enough other people wanting to be harsh on us. We should give ourselves a break.’

  Gilchrist looked at the crucifix mounted high on the wall above the pulpit. She’d always found the idea of a religion based on an act of extreme sadism difficult.

  ‘If only it were that easy,’ she murmured.

  Watts frowned at Perkins and Slattery. ‘Simon de Montfort? The man who won the Battle of Lewes in 1264? That’s not right. Those dates don’t fit.’

  ‘They do if we’re talking about his father,’ Perkins said. ‘Also called Simon de Montfort. He led the Albigensian crusade. And, actually, Simon the Younger – the de Montfort who won the Battle of Lewes in 1264 – did accompany his father on his crusade campaigns when he was a child. He was at the siege of Toulouse, though not on the day his father got clobbered by that stone.’

  ‘So what you’re giving me are lots of links between the south of France and this area. You are suggesting the Templars at Saddlescombe were guarding some secret but you’ve no idea what it is.’

  ‘Corrrect.’

  Watts was exasperated. ‘Was any of this confession stuff true?’

  ‘Probably not. You know about confessions, ex-Chief Constable. People confess to crimes that haven’t even been committed, especially if there is torture or the threat of torture. Intimidation. You know how it works.’

  Watts looked again at the display cases but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Templars were often from grand families and stayed in touch with them,’ Perkins went on. ‘If de Fosse did start these weird inner circle things you’d think that somebody who wasn’t happy about it would have told somebody in the fifty years before Philip the Fair struck.

  ‘Also, people left the Templars. Sometimes they were kicked out because they weren’t suitable, sometimes because they’d done something wrong. In extreme cases they apostasized. Now that was a serious thing to do – you were automatically excommunicated and you became a fugitive, pursued by church and state. You’d think to justify desertion some apostate would claim this stuff was going on. But nobody did. Not a whisper.

  ‘And Saddlescombe? There was something going on but I don’t know what it was. Sorry. One thing I do know. Saddlescombe was transferred to another fighting order, the Hospitallers, but the Templars joined the Hospitallers so they continued to run it. When the Hospitallers eventually got it, that is – the king hung on to it as long as he could and claimed all the movable stuff, as he did all over the country.’

  ‘And the place in Shoreham?’

  ‘Matilda Lot died in 1336. The Shoreham place went to Carmelite Friars with the permission of the Hospitallers.’

  Watts looked from Perkins to Slattery. ‘I don’t know where this leaves us.’

  Perkins shrugged. Watts thought for a moment.

  ‘Nothing remains from the Templars?’

  Slattery spread his hands. ‘There was a chapel at Saddlescombe. It’s supposedly long gone but other parts of the old structure were incorporated in the construction of the current farm some four hundred years ago – so some bit of it might still be there.’

  ‘Incorporated in the farm,’ Watts said.

  ‘Who knows? Or something else the Templars valued might still be there.’

  ‘Or people think it is there.’ Watts rubbed his chin. ‘And that valuable thing is why Crowley was at the farm?’

  Perkins and Slattery said together: ‘Maybe.’

  Watts nodded thoughtfully, wondering whether that was why Colin Pearson chose to live there. He walked over to the display cabinet behind Perkins and pointed at a small lump of polished rock he’d been absently looking at throughout their discussion. ‘What’s that?’

  Perkins joined him. ‘Doctor Dee’s crystal. He could foretell the future by looking into the depths.’

  Watts looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘So it’s believed.’ Perkins laughed. ‘And, of course, it’s what people believe that matters. If someone believes Druids worshipped stones or did sacrifices on them, if someone believes that the Templars held black masses on the Devil’s Dyke and John Dee conjured up the Devil at Saddlescombe Manor no amount of rational argument or presentation of what facts we know will make any difference. We live in an irrational world.’

  ‘Do they believe John Dee conjured up the Devil there? Did he even visit Saddlescombe?’

  ‘John Dee lived a long life for his time – from 1527 to approximately 1608. There’s no evidence Dee was ever at Saddlescombe Manor but he was definitely in Sussex for a period doing conjurations. We assume the farm was in continuous use from the Templar time – we certainly know it was being used in the early 1600s.’

  ‘So how did you end up with the crystal?’ Watts said.

  ‘Donated sometime in the 1940s but its provenance before then is difficult to track.’

  ‘You know John Dee’s magical equipment from the British Museum has been stolen?’ Watts said. ‘And an attempt was made on his crystal in the Science Museum. I should keep a close eye on your rock.’

  Perkins scratched his beard. ‘Maybe there is some design in all this. A crude attempt was made to steal this a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘How crude?’ Watts said.

  ‘I was out the back for a moment and when I came in someone was fiddling with the lock of the cabinet. Pretended they weren’t but asked if they could examine the crystal more closely. I might well have said yes had I not seen her behaviour.’

  ‘It was a woman? Description?’

  ‘I’m assuming from the voice it was a woman. No description – she was pretty much covered from head to foot in waterproofs.’

  Just as Gilchrist and Heap were leaving the incident room to go to Saddlescombe Farm, Bilson called.

  ‘As my initial tests indicated, whoever was smearing excrement on the vicar’s walls and dropping it on you is the same person. And that person definitely has cancer. Not just the blo
od but the raised ph levels show that. If they are not already doing so, this person will need to have treatment somewhere.’

  ‘That’s a great start. Thanks, Bilson.’

  She started to end the call.

  ‘Oy!’ he shouted.

  She put the phone back to her ear. ‘No, Bilson,’ she said, glancing across at Heap, ‘that doesn’t mean we’re going to have sex.’

  ‘God, I’m so over you,’ he said. ‘But I thought you might want the rest.’

  ‘What, you can get name and address and National Insurance number from a stool sample?’

  ‘Pretty much. Be careful where you evacuate your bowels if you don’t want your identity stolen.’

  ‘Moving on . . .’

  ‘People who have regular anal sex are more likely to get colorectal cancer than other people. This being Brighton and without being judgemental I’m going to start referring to the person as “he”.

  ‘He is probably a vegetarian – at least hasn’t had meat for some while. Aside from missing out on all the nutritional stuff meat gives him, he’s a pretty healthy eater. I’d judge he’s a regular at Plenty.’

  ‘Ha, Sherlock – there are lots of vegetarian restaurants in the city. This is Brighton, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, I know – getting a pair of leather shoes might be problematic but getting veggie anything, you’re in clover – or some other non-animal substance, obviously.’

  ‘Might the veggie diet be a way of dealing with the cancer?’

  ‘Could be – or the person might be a veggie anyway. I would be Sherlock if I could deduce that. However, I can say with some certainty that he ate at Plenty.’

  ‘You found an undigested till receipt in his faeces?’

  Bilson laughed. ‘As good as. Plenty use seriously unlikely foods that in combination produce a certain chemical reaction – you know all cooking is chemistry, right?’

  ‘Even in the canteen’s special of the day?’

  ‘Especially in that – though in a horribly different way.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘OK. Now hard as you may find this to believe I eat regularly at Plenty – it is one of the finest restaurants in the country, after all.’

  ‘Which is currently closed for poisoning people.’

  ‘I’d heard that. Well, chemistry can go wrong. Even so – I got talking to the chef last time I was there and she has a fondness for using heritage herbs and vegetables – stuff that was popular centuries ago but is almost forgotten now. In the stool sample I found undigested the seed of a pignut and some ground ivy. I can’t imagine any other chef in Brighton cooking with those things in combination, if at all. Ergo, this person eats at Plenty.’

  ‘Hang on – ground ivy sounds like something poisonous.’

  ‘But it’s not – that’s not what poisoned you.’

  ‘What did, then?’

  ‘Give me a stool sample and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘But we’ve only just met,’ Gilchrist tried to joke, thinking what an intimate thing providing a stool sample to someone she knew would be to do.

  There was a silence, then Bilson said: ‘Please yourself.’

  Gilchrist cleared her throat. ‘So we have someone with colon cancer eating at Plenty?’

  ‘Sometime in the three days before he dropped the gift on you.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you happen to know if they have CCTV at the restaurant, maestro?’

  ‘Outside my area of expertise. But I’m hoping this has won me dinner with you. Have you tried Hawksmoor? Best fillet steak I’ve ever eaten. Hung for twenty-one days. Melts in your mouth.’

  ‘Whoa – I thought you said you were vegetarian.’

  ‘No. I said I liked eating at the best restaurants in the country.’

  ‘Thanks, Bilson.’

  ‘Call me when you’ve had a chance to check your diary,’ he said.

  Gilchrist hung up. Great. Now she had to navigate the National Health Service. Which reorganization was taking place at the moment?

  TWENTY

  Bob Watts couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a church. His wedding, maybe? He’d come straight to the Church of the Rock in Brighton from Lewes for its evening service, his mind reeling from all he’d been told.

  He sat at the back. What followed was not the kind of service he was used to. A choir of about twenty youngsters all had white T-shirts with ‘For Christ’s Sake – Give God a Chance’ stencilled on the front. About half of them had guitars.

  They began with the Beatles song ‘She Loves You’ but they had changed the words. Now it started, ‘God loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah’ and went rapidly downhill thereafter.

  Watts knew the next song. He’d heard it once on his car radio in France. He had been so appalled by the breathtaking banality of the lyrics, delivered in this young girl’s nasal voice, he’d actually looked it up online. He’d assumed the singer/songwriter was a twelve-year-old.

  But, no, Joan Osborne was a grown woman and her song had apparently been a big hit. It was based on questionable theology. Osborne wondered what it would be like if God were ‘just a slob’ like the rest of us?

  Osborne then pictured God as a stranger on a bus, just trying to get home, heading back to heaven all alone.

  What had made Watts almost crash the car when he’d first heard it – and made him now bury his face in his hands so no one would see the expression on his face – was a line which proposed that this poor guy, God, didn’t even have anyone to phone, although he might consider phoning the Pope.

  However, the singers – they were probably too modern to call themselves a choir – were giving it their all and one girl’s pure voice went right to the rafters. Watts sighed. Such a voice for such a song.

  The song climaxed with another question. If you met God on the bus and could ask him just one question, what would it be?

  ‘Can I see your ticket, please?’ Watts muttered.

  If this was the level of modern Christian responses to the world, he despaired. The Devil not only had the best tunes, he had the best lyricists.

  As if to prove the point a thin, crop-haired man in a crumpled suit went up to the lectern and said: ‘This is a song about species respect. If you want to join in the chorus it’s a very simple one.’

  Watts remained blank-faced as the man started to sing, a capella: ‘We’re superior to other species? What a load of faeces . . .’

  Watts squirmed in his seat as he watched the rapt attention with which the congregation listened to the dire song. People applauded wildly, whooping, when it ended. Watts thought he might whoop because it had ended.

  The man in the crumpled suit bowed briefly then said, ‘Here’s a rap about animal liberation as a means of personal liberation.’

  Watts focused on the face of the tall, blonde girl with the pure voice then again at the earnest faces of the young audience around him then back at the beautiful girl, her face glowing.

  He wasn’t the right market for rapping but he couldn’t understand why rappers got away with such terrible rhymes. Was their audience so dumb that they accepted ‘cat sat on the mat’ levels of poetry?

  When he’d been a child he’d been singing along to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ on the radio and his father had explained the terrible grammatical error Lennon had made for the sake of a rubbish rhyme that stopped the song being brilliant.

  ‘And no religion too should, of course, be and no religion either.’

  At the end of the service the vicar came to the lectern to whoops and applause. Vicar Dave, he was called.

  ‘Thank you for coming to the Church of the Rock. The church of the rock ’n’ roll.’

  More whoops and high fives from the audience.

  ‘We hope you have felt welcomed and inspired.’

  Applause. The vicar looked round the congregation.

  ‘Don’t forget, though, that on Sunday we will have a more serious intent.’ He frowned. ‘We will be casting out demons. If you know anyone
who you feel is troubled by Satan, bring them here to be saved. If you are troubled by Satan do not feel shy about coming forward.’

  The service ended with a mercifully short drum solo then yet more whoops and hollers. Watts stayed seated, looking down, as the congregation filed past him. When virtually everyone had left, the visiting group of singers were still gathered before the altar. Watts raised his eyes. They met those of the beautiful young woman with the great voice. For a few seconds they looked at each other then she dropped her eyes and tugged on her hair. Bob Watts kept his eyes fixed on his daughter, Catherine.

  Heading up Dyke Road in an unmarked pool car, Heap driving, Gilchrist said: ‘What’s with the blushing, Bellamy?’

  ‘I just flush, I don’t know why,’ he replied, glancing in the rear-view mirror. ‘I suppose it’s a residual thing from childhood and because I’m surrounded by men who are . . . well, you know.’

  ‘Know what about these men?’

  ‘I think of them and I think of Piltdown, ma’am.’

  Piltdown was a village on the Downs a few miles outside Brighton. Gilchrist knew that much. She was also dimly aware of the Piltdown Man but couldn’t say exactly who he was. Heap could. He glanced at her as they came out of the city on to the Downs.

  ‘You’ll remember the Piltdown Man, the scientific fraud that found a link between Neanderthal man and modern man? And women. The Missing Link? Something not quite Neanderthal, not quite human.’

  ‘And?’

  Heap gave that cute grin again though he kept his eyes on the road. ‘Definition of most policemen, ma’am.’

  Gilchrist didn’t crack a smile, even though Heap was focused on the road passing beside the golf course. Couldn’t, given her new rank. But damn if he wasn’t right.

  A man and a woman answered the door of Saddlescombe Farmhouse.

  ‘We’re here about the Wicker Man set alight on Brighton beach,’ Gilchrist said, by way of introduction. ‘And the man burned to death inside it.’

  The couple exchanged looks. Heap pointed towards Newtimber Hill.