The Devil's Moon (21 page)

‘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 blood 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?

B
ob 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.

‘A Wicker Man not unlike that one on the hill there. Does that belong to you?'

The man nodded.

‘And the one on the beach?'

The man nodded again.

‘I think perhaps you'd better let us in,' Gilchrist said.

The woman pushed the front door wide and led the way into a long, Victorian-looking scullery, high-ceilinged and tiled on floor and walls. They sat at a big table in the centre of the room. Gilchrist sat on the other side whilst Heap remained standing in the middle of the room.

Their names were Ev Johnson and Tabby McGrath and they were exactly what Gilchrist had expected. No leather in evidence about their persons or on their feet. Hair in clotted dreadlocks, man and woman both. Ev Johnson had a scrappy beard and metal hanging from ears, eyebrows, nose and bottom lip. The woman, Tabby McGrath, was nut-brown and weather-beaten with the same amount of metal cluttering up her face. Both gave off a stuffy, wet wool odour.

Once the usual regulatory stuff had been sorted Gilchrist got straight to it. ‘You burned a person alive this morning.'

‘What are you talking about?' Johnson said.

‘There was a person in your Wicker Man and when you set fire to it you set fire to him too.'

‘Now just a blooming minute,' Johnson said, jabbing his finger at the table. ‘First of all there was no person in our structure and second we did not set fire to it.'

‘Ev – that's an unusual name,' Gilchrist said. ‘What's it short for?'

‘It's short for Ev.'

‘It will be Everard, ma'am,' Heap chipped in.

Gilchrist looked at the man. ‘Is that right? Everard. Often misinterpreted at school, I'm guessing, young people being what they are.'

‘I didn't go to school. I was home-educated.'

Gilchrist smiled and turned to the woman, who was picking at a spot. ‘Tabby – that's Tabitha, yes?'

‘So?' the woman said.

‘So, a couple of nice middle-class youngsters – what are you doing constructing a Wicker Man on our beach? And when did you construct it?'

‘Over the past couple of weeks,' Johnson said. ‘We hauled it by flatbed lorry on to the beach in the middle of the night and six of us erected it in the water.'

‘In the water?'

‘Yes – it wasn't so difficult. Once we'd got it upright its own weight sank its base stilts deep enough into the shingle to stabilize it. But we hadn't taken account of the tide going out. We lost some impact there.'

‘And there was no one inside it?'

‘Of course not.' Johnson was indignant. ‘What do you think we are?'

‘Actually, now that you raise the question: what exactly are you?'