The Devil's Moon (2 page)

‘Hi everyone, apologies for the sudden silence here at Southern Shores Radio but Simon is having a coughing fit. As he said, the lethal fish fell from a clear sky and included pollack, bream, cod, mackerel, bass, ling, thornback rays, tope and smoothhound.' She stopped for a moment then gasped, ‘Excuse me . . .'

She'd forgotten that giggles, like yawns, are catching.

Sarah Gilchrist, listening to Southern Shores Radio in the waiting room in A&E, laughed at the silence that followed. It was clearly a Jim Naughtie moment. Watts had heard Naughtie's famous fit of the giggles when the
Today
programme presenter had made a classic spoonerism in his introduction to Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary, in the days before the politician became Minister for Murdoch and it didn't seem quite such a spoonerism.

Gilchrist could imagine first Simon then her flatmate, Kate Simpson, suffering in the same way. She looked down at her crudely self-bandaged hand and grinned. There
was
something inherently funny about being killed by a fish falling out of the sky.

This weather. The River Ouse, which ran through Lewes, had broken its banks and the meadows outside the town were lakes. Cliffe village, at the bottom end of town, was in danger of being flooded again as it had been in the nineties. All around Brighton there were posters from the Water Authority advising that despite the rain there was still a drought. ‘Please be careful with our water' the posters said. Most had been defaced by the same graffiti in various styles: ‘We will if you will.'

Marble and tiled floors in shopping centres and restaurants were so slippery they had turned into ice rinks. There were large puddles and small lakes on every road and street. Most sensible women had abandoned fashion raincoats and boots for rainwear that was actually waterproof, giving them all a certain bulky uniformity.

Of course, in Brighton, that still left a lot of not-so-sensible women – and men – getting soaked through on a daily basis.

Gilchrist had never had much vanity when it came to clothes – not much point in the days she was a uniformed copper weighed down with clobber – and she was tall enough never to need high-heeled boots and shoes except when she really wanted to intimidate.

The man sitting next to her gave her the slightest of nudges. ‘Bloody biblical, that's what it is,' he said. ‘It'll be frogs next.'

The man on the far side of him leaned forward to address them both. ‘Long as it's not cats and dogs,' he said. ‘If it rains the Rottweilers and bull terriers from the Milldean estate we've no bloody chance.'

Gilchrist smiled awkwardly. Milldean held only bad memories for her.

The man next to her nodded at her hand. ‘Looks nasty, that hand. What did it?'

Gilchrist couldn't really be bothered but she didn't want to be rude. ‘A conger eel bit me.'

‘Nasty things them eels,' the other man said. ‘They're quite the predator. Ugly looking things too. Expect you'll need a tetanus jab.'

She frowned. ‘Not sure how tetanus from fish would work – it's usually linked to farms, isn't it?'

‘You never heard of fish farms?' the man said, and Gilchrist couldn't work out from his expression whether he was being funny or not.

She looked at the gash on the side of the head of the man beside her. ‘What clobbered you?' she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Damned if I know. The only time I usually see a fish it's got batter on it.'

Gilchrist's mobile rang. ‘Excuse me,' she said and stepped away.

‘The chief constable wants to see you,' said the voice on the other end of the line. ‘Tomorrow. Nine a.m. prompt.'

E
x-Chief Constable Bob Watts wandered aimlessly from room to gloomy room of his late father's Barnes Bridge house. His father, Donald Watts, aka bestselling thriller writer Victor Tempest, aka thorough bastard.

The house had a sour, old person's smell but it also smelled still of his father's bay rum aftershave. Watts looked in his father's wardrobe where the suits and jackets and shirts and trousers were all hung in neat rows. He examined at random cufflinks in surprising numbers in a leather box that also contained dress shirt studs, tiepins and even a worn brass ring. He wondered if it was his wedding ring. His father was of the generation that tended not to wear a wedding band.

Although he had loved his mother more, he didn't remember feeling this depth of emotion when she had died many years earlier. Given the tangled relationship he had with his father, this surprised him.

He walked over to the bookshelves and ran his fingers over the spines of the books. He had been working his way through his father's library, sorting out which books to sell and which to keep. His own small library of books was in store until he figured out where he wanted to live.

He glanced to his left out of the long window at the heavy rain and watched for a moment the brown tide of the Thames washing over the towpath. It had been raining solidly for a month.

He could live here, he knew, if he bought out his brother and sister. But he was a Brighton boy at heart and a river was no substitute for the sea, even if that river was the Thames.

Many of the books on the shelves were signed first editions with personal dedications to his father. Margot Bennett was most effusive in her inscription in her 1958 crime novel,
Someone from the Past
. Watts thought he could probably guess why.

His father had been a womanizer, no getting around that. His mother had been stalwart for the sake of the children although she must have felt so wretched at her husband's infidelities.

A recurring, puzzling memory was of a beautiful, enigmatic woman coming to their house once when the family was in the back garden. Watts, a teenager at the time, had been sent to let her in. He remembered vividly how sensual she'd seemed. How, back out in the garden, he saw her at the window and how she slowly faded as she withdrew into the room. How his mother looked up from her book and saw the woman at the window then looked fixedly back at her book again.

He wondered again who the woman was and what part she had played in his father's life. A mystery he would probably never solve.

A number of books surprised him. There were several signed by Albert Camus, the French existentialist philosopher. R D Laing's anti-psychiatry works, once so influential, had personal inscriptions.

Watts could understand the signed copies of the novels of thriller writer Alistair MacLean. MacLean had been his father's friend as well as rival. There was a scrawled card tucked in MacLean's
The Guns of Navarone
: ‘Victor – scopolamine – use in moderation! Affectionately, Alistair.'

On the title page of
Where Eagles Dare
MacLean had written: ‘Truth drug all used up. Maybe you've still got some. Admiringly, Alistair.'

Watts had come across the tropane alkaloid scopolamine as a truth serum during his army career but had been dubious about its value. His father had referred to it two or three times in his thrillers. People strapped to a chair, injection in the arm, helpless blabbing of things supposed to be kept secret, and so on. He deduced MacLean had done the same in these two novels.

Dennis Wheatley was fond of Victor Tempest, judging by the affectionate inscriptions in his books
The Devil Rides Out
,
To the Devil a Daughter
and
They Used Dark Forces.
The inscriptions
were all variations of the message in the first of them: ‘To Victor,
mon semblable, mon frère
. Yours ever, Dennis.'

Watts frowned. He didn't really understand the French.
The Devil Rides Out
, he noted, had been published in 1934, the same year as the Brighton Trunk Murders.

There were half a dozen of Colin Pearson's books. There was his precocious first work,
Outside Looking Out
which, in the sixties, when Pearson was in his early twenties, had made him a philosophical
wunderkind
; four of his famously didactic novels; and a copy of his biggest seller,
Magic
.

Watts drew
Magic
out. According to the blurb on the back this was the seminal work on the occult as a pathway for what Maslow had called meta-motivated people. Whatever that meant.

Watts read the inscription: ‘Victor,
let the search continue,
mon semblable
,
mon
frère
. Salutations, Colin.'

The same French phrase. And the search for what?

Watts was puzzled to think of his father befriending such men as Wheatley and Pearson. He didn't think that black magic mumbo-jumbo had been his father's thing. At Halloween, when his mother got out the Ouija board, his father would play along, depending on his mood, but it was jokey, never sinister.

That was about the extent of it as far as Watts knew. But, as he'd been discovering in recent months, there was a lot he didn't know about his father.

A friendship with Wheatley he could understand – two professional writers talking shop. Watts went over to the roll-top desk where he'd set up his laptop and Googled Wheatley. A well-educated, prolific author whose eighty or so novels, especially in the fifties and sixties, sold in their millions around the world. He wrote mostly adventures but there were some novels dealing with Satanism, often featuring a wealthy aristocrat, the Duc de Richleau.

Wheatley and Victor Tempest had the war in common, of course, although Wheatley – like Tempest's other writer friend, Ian Fleming – had been in the Navy. Tempest had been a commando.

Watts read about Wheatley's admiration for Mussolini. Perhaps that was also something the two writers had in common. Victor Tempest had been one of Mosley's Blackshirts for a while.

Pearson, though, was more of a puzzle. Sure, he was a writer, but he was better known for his eccentric philosophizing. Pearson's take on existentialism had soon been ridiculed and he had sidelined himself by heading into eccentric waters in pursuit of his theories about people fulfilling their true potential.

By that, as Watts recalled from various discussion programmes over the years, Pearson meant accessing the ninety-nine per cent of the brain people don't use to raise their levels of consciousness and live at the peak of experience. Watts shook his head. He was impatient of such New Age stuff. As far as he was concerned, every morning he needed to figure out anew just how to get through the day.

Pearson was also almost two decades younger than Victor Tempest. On its own that didn't preclude friendship. Watts knew that women of Pearson's age hadn't had any trouble relating to the older man. Still, it was strange.

Watts went back to the shelves. Next to Pearson's books was a novel called
Moonchild
. The author was Aleister Crowley.

Watts had heard of Crowley but as a charlatan occultist rather than a novelist. The novel had a winsome-looking woman on the cover with an even more winsome child behind her. It seemed an odd cover for a book by the self-styled Great Beast, who had been dubbed by one newspaper ‘the wickedest man in the world'.

The inscription was undated but the book's frontispiece gave the book's publication as 1917. The publisher was The Mandrake Press at an address in New York. Even odder was the fact that Crowley had signed the title page, in a shaky hand: ‘This in honour of you,
magister
Victor,
mon semblable, mon frère
, from a mere acolyte. Aleister.'

There it was again, the same bloody French phrase. And his father had known Aleister Crowley? Watts hadn't read all his father's novels but he didn't recall that any of the ones he had read dealt with black magic. In the Wikipedia entry for Dennis Wheatley it stated that he too had known Aleister Crowley. He had based the character Mocata in
The Devil Rides Out
on the occultist.

Watts knew Crowley called himself 666 but he had no clear idea what that meant. The anti-Christ? He had a vague memory of seeing
The Omen
in which a devil child also had the 666 tag. He remembered Gregory Peck searching through some child actor's hair for the numbers etched somewhere on his scalp.

Watts Googled Crowley. The magician seemed to be nothing more than a bombastic poseur, albeit one who had destroyed a number of people's lives. The creed of his church –
Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law
– was an excuse for degeneracy of every sort.

In one way, Watts felt a little sorry for the man. He had set up his own church and wealthy people had occasionally funded it. But he had ended his life in poverty in a Hastings nursing home, his health shattered by heroin and morphine addiction.

Others after him had followed his model of starting new spiritual movements and made a mint. Such movements had proved licences to print money in the confusing and troubled modern world. Crowley had been ahead of his time and so not for him the millions of dollars with which gurus and cult leaders had been showered since.

Watts took the book over to the window. He looked at the inscription again. What the hell was Crowley doing inscribing a book to Victor Tempest and referring to him as
magister
? And how come all the books had the same French phrase?

There was a sudden crack of thunder and Watts looked up at the sky, at the sudden gust of wind and the swill of dark clouds above his head. He laughed. Spooky.

S
arah Gilchrist did a double-take when she turned a corner and saw a poster outside the imposing Saint Michael and All Angels Church with crime scene tape all across it. The statement on the poster was: SOMEONE IS DEAD AND THE BODY IS MISSING. It took a moment for her to realize it was a now-out-of-date advert for Easter services. She shook her head and laughed.

She walked round the church, trying each door in turn, embarrassed that it had been so long since she'd been here that she didn't know where the entrance was. Eventually she reached some steps that led up into the large vestibule. She went through that and into the church.