The Deceit (21 page)

‘So, Karen, er, it’s not a homicide yet?’

Curtis always called her Karen. At the beginning of their working relationship they had experimented with his calling her ‘Ma’am’, but she’d decided that made her feel like an ancient dowager in a period drama, so they’d reverted to Karen.

He said, ‘I’m not quite sure why we’re concentrating so much on this.’

‘I think it’s going to get worse. Maybe homicide.’

‘Why? How do you know?’

‘I have a feeling.’ She smiled. ‘In my waters.’

‘My nan used to say that, in Kilkenny. Turned out she had a bladder problem, from all the stout.’

Karen clicked on her computer. ‘The suicide might be manslaughter, the guy might have been driven to do what he did, or drugged, we don’t know. But we do know there were seven other people in that cottage, burning the cats, staying at Trevelloe. Where are they? We need to trace them. They may be in serious trouble: of the only two we have located, one is dead and one is psychotic. What about the rest?’

DS Curtis nodded. ‘OK, Ma’am!’

‘Yes, yes. Let’s start by chasing up Alicia Rothley. She had friends in London, we have a list. Get on that. OK? And I’ll do my homework.’

The office was productively quiet for several hours. Lunch came and went with a flurry of supermarket sandwiches and hot coffee. At the end of it, Karen was decided: Aleister Crowley really
was
crucial
.

They knew that the gang members were re-enacting magic associated with Crowley: Taghairm and Abra-Melin, in particular. They also knew the gang was using properties linked to Aleister Crowley: Carn Cottage, Trevelloe Lodge. Where were they now? If they were still in the country – and Alicia Rothley in her madness had implied that her brother was still here – then possibly they were staying in some other property with Crowley connections.

So who was Crowley? Karen had only read snippets, so far; now she needed the full works, all the details. They weren’t hard to source. The web was full of ‘Crowleyana’, an entire industry of speculation and rumour, and even some hard facts – dedicated to this strange man.

One newspaper piece gave her almost all she needed to know:

Edward Alexander Crowley was born in Leamington Spa in England in 1875, to a wealthy brewing family who were hardcore Protestant evangelicals: Plymouth Brethren. The future Satanist was named Edward, after the father he came to adore. But Edward Crowley Senior died of cancer when the youngster was eleven, an experience so traumatic that Crowley lost all interest in the family’s fierce religion.

The boy hated his pious mother, who sent him to a series of private schools where he was mercilessly bullied because he was fat. Having persuaded her to remove him by claiming he was being sexually abused, he was given a home tutor who, despite being a former Bible Society missionary, introduced him to such worldly pursuits as card games and billiards.

In 1895, Crowley, by now calling himself Aleister because of its Celtic overtones, went to Cambridge University to read moral sciences. Instead of studying, however, he boasted he spent his time on sexual experimentation.

Leaving three years later without a degree, he used his considerable family inheritance to take a flat in a large building in Chancery Lane, London, signing the lease with one of the many aliases he loved to use, Count Vladimir Svaroff.

The flat in Chancery Lane, in an area of London full of medieval resonances, was perfect for the budding Satanist, who was fast making it his mission to dispel Victorian hypocrisy by any means he could.

Crowley had just been introduced to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a mysterious magical society which claimed to possess arcane truths handed down to the modern world from ancient Egypt.

He soon became an initiate, taking the name of Brother Perdurabo, meaning: ‘I will endure’.

But Crowley rapidly came to despise his fellow brethren – who included the Irish poet W B Yeats – because of their timid approach to magic. Determined to conduct bolder experiments into the supernatural, he took as his personal instructor an impoverished magician called Alan Bennett whom he invited to stay with him.

And so a period of intense magical activity began, based on the invocations of a medieval Egyptian mage called Abra-Melin. Crowley and his followers believed that they could summon the spirits of the dead, and perhaps even the Devil himself, through animal sacrifice and pagan rituals.

Piecing together Crowley’s writings and those of the impressionable acolytes that visited the place in Crowley’s day, we have a good idea what the flat looked like, not to mention the unsettling things that went on inside.

The visitor passed from the cold stone dusk of the stairs to a palace of rose and gold that has long since vanished. Gold-black Japanese wallpaper covered the rooms and the place was lit like a brothel by an ancient silver lamp with a red bulb. The floor was covered with leopard skins and on the wall there was a huge crucifix in ivory and ebony.

There were two temples, one to good, the other to evil. In Crowley’s ‘Black Temple’, actually more of a cupboard, a bloodstained skeleton sat before a sinister altar, made of a round table supported by the figure of an ebony Negro standing on his hands.

On the altar, a sickening perfume smouldered in a container and one visitor claimed the stench of previous blood sacrifices filled the air. In his delusions, Crowley used to feed the skeleton blood, small birds and beef tea in the hope of reviving it.

No wonder people were afraid of him. It was said that in the streets he could make himself invisible; others claimed that he was throbbing with so much magical power that his coat once burst into flames. Horses were generally frightened of him. However, despite these ‘gifts’, and in order to create real magic, Crowley believed he needed the use of a large remote country house with a terrace at the door facing north: the best direction in which to create a spell.

In Boleskine, in northern Scotland, he found the perfect house. He fell in love with it, and having inherited nearly five million pounds in today’s money immediately bought it. There he claimed he invoked at least a hundred spirits. But he soon began to disturb his neighbours: villagers accused him of summoning ghosts from Boleskine churchyard, and a local butcher accidentally chopped off his fingers when he inadvertently handled a word square – a written spell – associated with the Abra-Melin ritual.

It was time to move on. Still honing his evil persona, Crowley travelled to Egypt with a young bride – whom he liked to string up naked in a cupboard. In Cairo, he claimed to have had a vision of himself as the new Messiah, saying he had received a message from an angel called Aiwass who told him he was the herald of a cult which would have its own Bible, the Book of Thelema, the Greek word for will …

Karen read on, amazed. From Egypt, Crowley had gone to America, India, Sri Lanka, China, then back to England, then Germany – apparently he went everywhere, spending the last of his inheritance from his ironically God-fearing parents. And the debaucheries got worse: whoring, heroin, cocaine, pederasty, coprophagy. The sentences blurred in front of Karen’s eyes: ‘he liked to bite the hand of his mistress until she bled’; ‘at least five of his girlfriends committed suicide’; ‘in Sicily, he fatally poisoned his friend by making him drink a glass of cat’s blood’.

Karen googled a picture of Crowley. Fat, bald and unprepossessing. Apparently he seldom bathed. When Karen found a recording of his voice, online, it was impossibly reedy and unsexy, like a castrated Anglican vicar intoning the Acts of the Apostles.

Yet this man
must
have had some immense mesmeric potency. Despite his increasing corpulence and horrible demeanour he attracted followers and lovers – male and female – well into his sixties. And his cult was powerful to this day. What was it that he possessed? What hypnotic power? Was there really something in his magic that worked? Most importantly, had Rothley tapped into the same Crowleyan magic?

For another hour she researched the Abra-Melin ritual. As she did, she recalled the words of Donald Ryman: ‘
the rite of Abra-Melin is the only magic in history that, for whatever reason, and in some terrifying way, actually appears to work’.

‘How’s it going, Karen?’

Curtis had returned from the cold outside, bringing with him the faint smell of cigarette smoke. She didn’t envy him these little smoking breaks: it was freezing out there. Minus two. A very cold January.

‘I’m getting there, I think. I’m sure the key is wherever Crowley stayed.’

‘Sorry?’

‘We know Rothley likes to use properties associated with Crowley. Right?’

‘Yes …’

‘So I’m going through the main ones first, surviving apartments, hotels, et cetera. But we mustn’t stop there
.
Remember Crowley was around a hundred years ago, and he moved constantly. We need to check out
every possible address
. Even if the site where he stayed has been demolished, and rebuilt, it might still attract – God knows – the vibrations Rothley likes. The spirits. That is what he believes.’

DS Curtis smiled.

‘I’m serious,’ Karen said. ‘Make a list, and go there, even if it’s been turned into a bloody car park. We need to get into Rothley’s head.’

Her junior officer nodded, and sat down at his desk.

Once more she focussed on the facts. If the gang were staying in another property directly linked with Crowley, there were two serious and obvious options, as the biography told her. The first was Boleskine House near Loch Ness.

But, as Karen swiftly ascertained, Boleskine was, these days, privately owned by a perfectly upright family – a lawyer, his wife and four young kids. The lawyer was legitimate, and quite senior, and he didn’t take kindly to being called a third time, in his Edinburgh office, to have his bona fides assessed. ‘I can assure you the law firm of Macdonald and Griffiths is entirely unconnected with medieval demonic rituals. Now goodbye.’

That left the apartment in Chancery Lane as the only major property with Crowley connections still standing in the UK.

This time, her brisk research was more generously rewarded. The entire block of 102 Chancery Lane – once home to the ‘wickedest man in the world’ – was being redeveloped. But the slowdown in the property market meant this redevelopment
was on hold
; the place was a shell: unused, boarded up, empty, it hadn’t been touched for two years. Anything could be happening in there.

Karen called the developers and was quickly put through to the site manager, Darren Glover.

‘Chancery Lane?’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Yep, s’on our list. We’re hoping to be back in next month, site’s been a mess for so long, be good to get cracking.’

‘When did you last visit the site?’

‘Oh. God knows. Months ago. Like I say, it’s been empty—’

‘Does anyone ever go inside the building?’

The man paused. ‘I guess not. We have security, but they patrol – you know – the perimeter, occasionally. Er. But why would anyone want to break in? There’s bugger all in there. Place is gutted.’

Karen glanced at the darkening sky. ‘Do you have a spare hour after work, Mr Glover? Could you meet me there?’

‘You really want to go inside?’

Karen paused. For some reason she was suddenly reminded of Donald Ryman’s words:
Some say the Abra-Melin ritual can only be successfully completed if several humans are sacrificed, culminating in the murder of a living child.

‘Miss Trevithick? Hello?’ The man was still on the line. ‘Hello, are you there?’

‘Yes. Sorry.’ She paused. For a few seconds. Resisting the faint tremors of dread. Then she said, ‘Yes, I want to go inside.’

Karen got off the Tube at Blackfriars. It was a cold and rather drizzly evening. Tourists were wandering along the Thames Embankment. She called the school to make sure Eleanor had been collected by Alan, as arranged.

Her first day back as a mother and
already
she was neglecting her daughter.
Again.
The guilt burned but Karen did her best to ignore it.

As she walked along, Karen gazed about; she’d always loved this part of London. The exotic clash of ancient and modern, the surreal quietness at night. She used to walk here when she was a student in the big city, loving the hushed and medieval precincts of the Temple, tucked between the shining offices and bank HQs, the cenotaphs of money.

She passed one particularly glamorous and empty new office block. The darkness of a cold winter evening had sent the office workers home. Spires of Georgian churches loomed between chasms of glass. And then she found it.

102 Chancery Lane. It was a rundown Victorian building, a sooty old heap with greyed windows, yellow brickwork and an air of sickliness. It was also pretty much derelict, ripe for redevelopment. Surrounding the ground floor of the block was a palisade of wooden walls, with scaffolding creeping up the sides.
KEEP OUT
signs were everywhere.

But the builders were nowhere, of course. The whole block was desolate. Indeed this whole quarter of London was so very quiet: another enclave of historic silence amidst the monied and glittering bustle.

‘Ah, hi. Darren Glover.’ The young site manager came running up the road. ‘Sorry I’m late, just got off the bus.’

He turned a padlock and pushed open a temporary wire door, and they squeezed inside the palisade. The last thing Karen saw of the outside world was a bus rolling down Holborn, and then she was inside. It was gloomy within. A couple of bare, shining bulbs were strung on naked wires, hanging from a cracked and corniced ceiling, but they didn’t seem to work. There was an old chandelier covered in oil lying in a corner of the lobby. Karen and Darren switched on their torches.

The ground-floor rooms were bare and bereft, having been already stripped by the developers and then left to go damp. They offered no sign of life, and no sign of habitation in the recent past. Darren Glover put his hands on his hips, vindicated. ‘I told you, it’s empty! Nothing here.’