Friends of the Dusk (46 page)

‘The fans. Lots of them.’

‘What happened at the other events?’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there.’

Merrily took in a slow breath.

‘What do you
think
happened?’

‘I don’t know, but I think it went on happening… after they’d left. He’d found a way in. Maybe he’s still doing it. I don’t know.’

‘From where he is? From Lyme Farm?’

‘I don’t know.’ Caroline looked confused. ‘I think he needs Cwmarrow.’

‘Do you think there’s something… something left at Cwmarrow?’

‘
He’s
there. When he wants to be. He can be anywhere he wants to be. It’s something he’s always been able to do.’

‘He? Do you mean Selwyn Kindley-Pryce. Or… the Summoner? The
maleficus
?’

Caroline was hugging herself, shaking. Merrily had never felt closer to the dark heart of the job, felt it pulsing away. Here, in front of an altar, the haloed mother and child.
I’m increasingly
inclined to think that it’s simply a demand we’ve created
, Craig Innes said.
Or have – unwisely – allowed to create itself
.

‘Caroline, listen, it’s a funny job, mine. You have to consider things that could get you laughed at. Sometimes, I just have to sit for a moment and think, well, I’m a vicar. And there are many thousands of us, and we like to think we work for this huge, benificent supernatural force, and here’s me…’

She stopped talking, aware of Caroline Goddard laughing quietly. Rocking slowly in the old wooden pew, kneading the prayer book inside her woollen scarf. When she looked up, Caroline’s eyes were unblinking.

‘Thing is, Hector can’t get away. He’s been seeing his father all his life.’

‘Seeing?’

‘All his life.’

‘But… Hector was here. His father was in America.’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘Hector told you this?’

‘Selwyn told me. How he’d visit his son. Hector never came near me. He didn’t really like women.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘What are you going to do with this, Merrily, please?’

‘I don’t know.’

She was feeling so very cold, the chantry no longer cosy; its intricate, organic stonework seemed to be flexing like a map of muscles.

‘I suppose I’m going to take advice,’ she said. ‘I’ll try to keep you out of it.’

‘You can tell who you like as long as I don’t have to speak to them. Some people I just can’t talk to, because they don’t believe in anything. They’d think I was mental.’ Caroline looked into the chantry’s small, quite modern stained-glass windows, their colours beginning to dull. ‘I’ll have to go soon. It’s getting dark. My sister’ll be worried.’

‘Why will she be worried?’

‘Because he’s still out there.’ Caroline stood up. ‘The killer.’

Merrily didn’t move, looked up at her.

‘You mean the killer of Tristram Greenaway?’

‘I saw his picture on the TV. I didn’t even know he was back in town.’

‘Tristram?’

Caroline breathed in hard, leaned her back against the richly carved stone and let her breath out slowly.

‘To me, he’ll always be Geraint,’ she said.

61

The cloaked

S
HE CHECKED IN
at the desk at Gaol Street, but they said Bliss had gone out. It was dark now, all the lights on, a lot more cops around than usual, inside and out. The lights weren’t very bright but they hurt her eyes and she felt very tired and confused and wanted to go home and think about all this. But the DCI was at the door to the stairs.

‘Come up.’

Annie Howe, wearing a dark suit, looking not happy. Leading Merrily up to CID and through to Bliss’s office.

‘You
didn’t
go shopping, did you?’

‘Ended up meeting Caroline Goddard. Though I didn’t know that was going to happen when I left here. If there’d been anybody with me, Annie, it’s unlikely she’d have said a word. She’s… eccentric. Lives in town but won’t say where. I don’t think she’s using her own name, and she looks nothing like the woman in the video.’

‘You’re sure it
was
Caroline Goddard?’

‘Without taking a DNA swab, yes, I’m sure.’

‘All right.’ Howe pulled out a chair for Merrily and sat on the edge of Bliss’s desk, an open notepad in front of her. ‘What can you tell me?’

‘Well, I’m not sure how much you—’

‘I’m the SIO, Merrily. I know everything. And while I’m not a lapsed Catholic and have never worked in Liverpool – or indeed
been
to Liverpool – I think I can have a vague stab at grasping whatever you’re trying to say.’

‘OK.’ Merrily shrugged. ‘Tell me when I reach the elements you don’t want to go near.’

‘Anything non-corporeal I simply tune out.’

Better, perhaps, not even to go into any of that. She talked about Caroline’s relationship with Kindley-Pryce, how they’d slept together on an irregular basis, but not cohabited. How Caroline was dominated and not – if you believed her – given partner status, on any level.

‘Now why do we think that was?’ Howe said. ‘Given that, at his age, you’d imagine that a bit of local arm-candy with waist-length hair would be quite a flattering addition to his… ménage. Also, as they were working together, quite intensively…’

‘I think she did most of her writing at her own cottage. As for him, although the age gap is about thirty years, perhaps – and this can be surmised from the video – perhaps he’d been given access to even… fresher fruit.’

‘Yes, we did see the tree on the DVD.’

‘It was the time, wasn’t it? Thousands of teenage girls either side of the Atlantic drawn towards the… the apocryphal world of the undead.
Buffy
,
Twilight
– had
Twilight
started then?’

‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps I need to look all this up. In the meantime…’

Extending an open hand. Merrily nodded.

‘OK… part of my job is to monitor semi-spiritual social patterns. I remember reading about million-copy print-runs of romantic vampire novels aimed at young adults. Teen hysteria. This is some years after it started, so I’m not saying the Foxy Rowlestones were doing that kind of business – I didn’t actually know about
them
– but if the series had carried on they might well have done. I was given the impression the series stopped because Kindley-Pryce’s mind was going and Caroline hadn’t the heart to carry on.’

‘What is Ms Goddard actually saying?’

‘She was walking all around the subject. Trying to be helpful
but obviously anxious not to bring anything down on herself. Truly, I think there’s a lot she didn’t know. A lot she didn’t
want
to know. Didn’t want to be exposed to. And Kindley-Pryce wouldn’t want to scare her off.’

‘What did scare her off, if not his dementia?’ Annie said. ‘I mean, I doubt that would make him easy or at all pleasant to work with. What kind of dementia does he have? All we tend to hear about is Alzheimer’s disease.’

‘I don’t know. There must be medical records. The doctors who look after Lyme Farm would know.’

‘Hmm.’ Howe made a note on her pad. ‘Was all this pre-Internet?’

‘No, but not a great deal was happening social-media wise when it started, I’d imagine.’

‘So if we’re looking at – let’s not dress this up – abuse of readers, young fans, it’s the books themselves that were doing the grooming?’

‘In a way, yes. Not a word that was in use in a sexual context, when this started. But, yeah, there was no need for grooming, the magnetism was there – the glamour, the romance, the mystery. And this sense of the clandestine, the cloaked.’

‘You do seem
very
informed about all this.’

‘Because I’ve been there. Well, not
there
, but… for a short time – though not as short as I’ve assured my daughter – I was a bit of a teenage goth. Black T-shirt, black nails, black lipstick, spooky music, Anne Rice novels… I’m not sure there
was
any young-adult gothic romance back then but if I’d read
The Summoner
at fifteen I might well have fantasized about baring my throat for Geraint, the blacksmith, under a full moon. There. Said it. Caution me.’

Annie stared at her.

‘And
I
was supposed to be quite intelligent,’ Merrily said. ‘Hormones can take you to some dark places. And nowhere darker – perhaps – than Cwmarrow. It seemed significant to me that Caroline was urged by Kindley-Pryce to make Geraint,
the male lead, the heart-throb, increasingly appealing in a sexual way. Which had to be done subtly to get published – the vampire in the Twilight series is a vegetarian, for heaven’s sake.’

‘So if the Friends of the Dusk were preying on young readers, fans… how does this work?’

‘I don’t know. But I
can
tell you about the bait. Jane did just a cursory search of the Net – the Foxy Rowlestone Appreciation Society – still active – and something called the Fang Forum, ostensibly for adults. She found members claiming they’d been to the Nightlands, as it’s called in the books. And others saying they’d actually seen Geraint.’

‘How would they know where to go?’

‘Some came in on the train and Hector Pryce coaches would ferry them to Cwmarrow.’

‘Interesting.’

Caroline says that people who wrote to Foxy Rowlestone – or
certain
people who wrote – would receive a circular or an email package which might include a photograph of Geraint, half in shadow but every bit as good-looking as they could wish for.’

‘You’re saying…’ Annie screwing up her eyes. ‘… that this Geraint, on some level, existed?

‘
Geraint
on
no
level existed. And yet… Oh God, I need to think about this.’

‘Just tell me what you know of the facts.’

‘The only fact I have is that the shadowy Geraint in the picture was Tristram Greenaway.’

‘Goddard told you this? Kids who wrote in were all receiving pictures of
Greenaway
?’

‘
That
was the nature of his employment, while still at school, by Kindley-Pryce. He was also in charge of sending the fan pictures off. Nice Saturday job if you can get it. Whether he’d be instantly recognizable is debatable…’

‘Was that it? Or is it possible he was involved… further?’

‘If he was gay, he couldn’t have been all
that
involved.’

‘Unless there were a few boys writing in. Can’t be ruled out, Merrily.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘But I can see what you mean about all this being confusing. It wouldn’t, of course, necessarily be criminal behaviour unless the girls were under-age. The ones on Turner’s film could all be over sixteen. What happened after the photographs of the… the shadow-Greenaway were sent off or emailed? What happened next?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘Well, I think I can speculate,’ Annie said. ‘I think the correspondence would move to a different level. Less public. Perhaps using the Neogoth network, if Bliss has mentioned that to you. They don’t want to ask for trouble, so they would prune the list to isolate the most enthusiastic… or fanatical, or… needy…? Still strikes me as astonishing that this could go on in the Herefordshire countryside, for so long with so little leakage. But then, if we consider the industrial scale of sexual abuse of girls by Asian gangs in the north and even Oxford, over years, with no action by the police…’

‘I think,’ Merrily said, ‘that you’re looking at something much smaller, if more intense and more… well, more occult. Do you see what I’m—?’

‘And that in itself is another can of worms. I imagine police and social services were still nursing their wounds over the satanic child-abuse fiasco.’

‘The girls involved… I’d suggest that they don’t see themselves as having been sexually exploited as much as… initiated. If finding the Nightlands wasn’t made easy for them, that would only add to the excitement… and the commitment, the need – the
desire
– to maintain secrecy. They’d be feeling like the chosen ones. And once they got there… a place that’s remote, deeply atmospheric and just sufficiently forbidding, in an enticing way… to somehow bridge the gap between Tristram Greenaway, who doesn’t, with girls, and Selwyn Kindley-Pryce who—’

Merrily’s shudder made the chair move.

‘There could have been use of drugs,’ Annie said soberly. ‘To make it all more… almost hallucinatory. Very easily administered.’ She levered herself from the desk. ‘Where’s Goddard now?’

‘In the city, somewhere. Wouldn’t give me her address. I don’t honestly think she’d make a great interviewee. Not for the police. She’s all over the place.’

‘That would be for us to decide.’

‘Sure.’

It was a police matter now. Whoever killed Tristram Greenaway and the other guys, that was no business of hers.

‘All right.’ Annie Howe opened the door, held it back. ‘Why don’t you go home and get some sleep? I’ll organize a car. I think I need to get hold of Bliss. ASAP.’

Waiting outside, she felt cold and lost. An unmarked car drew up next to her, to take her home. The driver was nobody she recognized.

62

A flogging

C
HARLIE
H
OWE WAS
so very friendly that, but for the call from Annie, Bliss might well have cut his losses and walked out.

‘Only just talking about you, boy.’

‘Who to?’

Charlie tapped his nose.

‘Take a seat, Brother Bliss.’

Bliss hesitated. Last time, he hadn’t even got out of the rain outside Charlie’s tall, brick home on the main road out of Leominster. Now he’d been ushered into the home office: two desks, filing cabinets, dense black carpet and matching soft leather chairs. Bliss chose the one that didn’t swivel.

‘Just surprised you took so long, boy.’

Charlie sat in the swivel chair next to the roll-top desk. He never changed: the short, stiff white hair over an indestructible leathery face that just got more lived-in and comfortable, like an old biker jacket. He wore a waistcoat and had an old-fashioned pin through his shirt collar.

‘To congratulate you, right?’ Bliss said. ‘On your candidature for Police and Crime Commissioner.’

Charlie beamed.