The Devil's Moon (3 page)

She was nervous about her next-day meeting with the chief constable but that wasn't why she was here. Nor did she think the fish falling from the sky had any religious significance. She wasn't a believer. For her God was Absence. She was here to try to make a connection. Or rather a re-connection.

She looked slowly around. She'd been a child the last time she'd been here and it had seemed vast. It was still impressive, the size of a cathedral, high-ceilinged and broad though not particularly long.

Someone in jeans and a T-shirt was fussing with the flowers beneath the carved altar, showing what seemed like an indecent amount of bum crack for a church.

‘Excuse me?' Gilchrist called. ‘Is the vicar around?'

The person – Gilchrist couldn't immediately see if it was a man or a woman – remained bent over but pointed to the right.

‘Thanks,' Gilchrist said, muttering, ‘Don't put yourself out.'

Gilchrist walked over to a narrow door halfway along the wall. It opened on to a small office over-stuffed with filing cabinets and a broad desk covered with papers. There was an ancient computer on the desk. An electric fan heater was rattling away in the corner but the room remained chilly.

There was another door in the corner behind the desk. Gilchrist squeezed between the edge of the desk and a bulky filing cabinet and tried the handle. This door was locked. As she turned away she thought she heard movement behind it.

‘Hello?' Gilchrist said, rapping on the wood.

‘Someone has locked me in,' a female voice said.

Gilchrist looked back at the desk. ‘Where is the key usually kept?'

‘In the door.'

‘It isn't here. Give me a minute to look.'

‘Hurry.'

Gilchrist opened drawers and filing cabinets but found no key. She went out into the church to get the help of the person who'd been by the altar. She couldn't immediately see him or her. ‘Is anybody there?' she called.

‘A question I often ask myself,' a voice close beside her said.

She jumped and turned.

‘Forgive me for startling you.'

It was not the person she had seen at the altar. This was a tall, slender, middle-aged man in a dark suit and a dog collar.

‘I believe God is in this place but sometimes it feels like a hope rather than a certainty.' He held out his hand. ‘I'm David Rutherford, one of the vicars here.'

‘I thought certainty came with the job,' Gilchrist said as she briefly shook his hand.

‘Most definitely not. Death and taxes are, I believe, the only certainties in life. In your profession, you must deal every day in uncertainties and the contingent, surely?'

‘Is it so obvious what I do for a living?'

‘It is if you are recognized, Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist.'

She examined his face. ‘Do I know you?'

He shook his head. ‘Not really. For my sins, I've seen you in the newspapers.'

‘For my sins,' Gilchrist corrected him.

Rutherford gave her an inscrutable look. ‘But how can I help you?'

‘Well, for one thing you have a woman locked in your office store and the key is missing.'

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Isn't that a children's rhyme?'

‘I think that's a lavatory occupied by three old ladies.'

He smiled. He had good teeth. ‘You're right.' He gestured for her to precede him into the office. He rooted in a small wooden cupboard on the wall and produced a key. ‘The spare,' he said.

He unlocked the storeroom door and a near-hysterical, middle-aged woman came rushing out, pulling the door closed behind her. As the vicar calmed her Gilchrist wondered if she was claustrophobic. She couldn't think why else the woman was so distressed. She had not been attacked. She had simply been looking for something in the storeroom when she heard the door close and the lock turn.

Gilchrist went round the desk and pushed the door open again. When she saw the pool of liquid in the corner she understood the woman's distress. Being locked in the lavatory would have been more appropriate.

She left the vicar comforting his secretary and wandered back into the church. She was thinking about the person who had been at the altar. Had he or she locked the door on the woman?

She walked to the centre aisle and looked up at the altar. It had been overturned. Spray-painted in red across the wall were the words: THIS IS NOT THE PLACE.

She moved nearer. A crucifix had been torn down from the wall and now leaned, upside down, against it. Something was impaled on it. Something bloody. Gilchrist peered. It was a heart. She counted the thorns sticking into it. Thirteen.

Bob Watts took a sip of his scrumpy cider and looked at a pleasure boat chugging past the pub heading west towards Hampton Court. He was in Ye Old White Hart by Barnes Bridge. It was his father's old local. Well, one of them.

People on the boat waved at him – he was the only one on the balcony – and he half raised his arm in a self-conscious gesture of acknowledgement.

The river was high. He'd been unable to do his riverside run earlier that day because the towpaths on both sides of the river were flooded.

London hadn't had the deluge as badly as Sussex but it had been raining pretty steadily and it seemed the Thames was in flood whether it was high or low tide. He looked up at the sky. Black, brooding clouds hung low.

He'd brought the Aleister Crowley book down with him and a paperback biography of the black magician he'd found elsewhere on his father's shelves.

On a whim he telephoned Oliver Daubney, his father's elderly literary agent. While the number was ringing he looked at his watch. Daubney was old-style publishing; he was probably at lunch.

But Watts was wrong. Daubney himself answered on the fifth ring.

‘Expected you to be lunching,' Watts said.

‘Everybody else is out at lunch,' Daubney said in his pleasant voice. ‘I'm manning the phones and eating sandwiches.'

Daubney always reminded Watts of an old Hollywood actor called Louis Calhern. Watts had seen him in some black and white movies on late-night TV. Same relaxed charm and affability, same timbre to his voice.

‘I assume with a glass of decent red,' he said.

‘I did manage to find something quaffable in the back of my drinks cabinet. How can I help you, Robert?'

‘Was my father good friends with Dennis Wheatley, Colin Pearson and Aleister Crowley?'

Daubney chuckled. ‘There's an unholy trio. He did know the first two, yes. Crowley is a bit before my time – he died in the late forties, didn't he?'

‘Cremated in Brighton, 1947.'

‘Ah. As always, all roads lead to Brighton.'

Watts heard Daubney take a glug of his wine. He could picture him at his desk, white linen napkin tucked into his shirt collar. (‘Never seen the point of putting the napkin in your lap – too many other things for your sauce or wine to stain on the way down.')

‘I can root through my files, ask around, if it's important to you.'

‘Would you mind? It's only curiosity but . . .' Watts tailed off.

‘I'll get on it after lunch. Not much doing at the moment. I deal with more dead authors than live ones these days. In fact I need to talk to you about your father's literary estate sometime soon.'

‘How soon? Tomorrow?'

‘Tomorrow? And it's only curiosity you say?'

Watts laughed but said nothing.

‘How would the British Museum suit? I've got a meeting with Faber and Faber nearby. I haven't had a chance to see the Picasso prints yet. We could see those and then, after, we could lunch in the restaurant up in the rafters in the Great Courtyard.'

‘I didn't know there was one.'

‘Not bad. Decent wine list.' Daubney laughed. ‘You feel somehow more cultured just breathing in the atmosphere.'

They arranged to meet at noon in the Print Rooms and Watts hung up.

Frankly, he was at a loose end. For years he'd thrived on getting things done but since he'd lost his job he'd found it hard to find an outlet for his energy. Hence his almost obsessive interest in his father's secretive, complicated life.

A man in a paint-splattered jumper came on to the balcony at the far end. He looked like an artist rather than a decorator. In a vaguely fastidious way he took off his jumper and folded it neatly on the chair. Before he picked up his pint he laid out on the table in front of him an asthma inhaler, a mobile phone and a packet of cigarettes.

The deliberation with which he did this reminded Watts of his friend and comrade-in-arms, Jimmy Tingley, recuperating from more than just physical injuries somewhere in Italy. Watts had been keen to visit the ex-SAS man but Tingley had discouraged him, saying he needed time alone and would be back in touch when he was ready.

Although close, the two men had never been in each other's pockets, so Watts had accepted this, albeit reluctantly.

Watts drained his glass and stood as the man took a sip of his beer, a puff from his asthma inhaler and a drag from his cigarette. He coughed as he smoked. Watts glanced back at the swirling river and listened to the low rumble of distant thunder.

He took his empty glass back to the bar. As he turned to leave a man standing a few yards along the bar beckoned him over.

He was an ageing rock 'n' roller, abundant white hair in a ponytail, face deeply lined. He was a long, lean man, though he had a little round belly over his tight leather jeans. Watts figured late sixties, early seventies: both the musical period and the age of the man.

He was with a woman in her forties who oozed rock chick. She had matching leather jeans tucked into cowboy boots. She was buxom beneath her denim jacket. Leather trousers rarely looked good on anybody, especially an old man with stick-thin legs, but Watts was kind of impressed that these two had the swagger to give it a go.

The man pointed a be-ringed finger at the bright cover of the Crowley novel Watts was holding in his hand. ‘Don't see many of those these days.'

Watts glanced down.

‘Looks in great nick,' the man continued. ‘The colours haven't faded at all.'

The man was familiar and not just because Watts had seen him in here before.

‘Worth a bob or two.'

‘You know the book?' Watts said.

‘Got a copy myself – without the cover, mind.'

‘Is it any good?'

‘Not that I remember. Not the point though, is it? You must be Don's son.' Watts took a moment, surprised by the statement. ‘Don Watts. Also known as Victor Tempest? The late lamented – by me at least.' The man smiled, wrinkles deepening further all across his face. ‘And many others, I'm sure.'

‘Did I see you at the funeral?' Watts said, though he knew he hadn't. Only three people had attended.

The man shook his head and grinned again. His eyes glittered with amusement and intelligence and probably the amount of drink he'd consumed.

‘Funerals are a bit close to the bone for me.' He sniffed. ‘Intimations of immortality and all that.'

Watts didn't correct him. Instead, he nodded and smiled back.

‘You want to sell it?' the man said.

Watts lifted the book. ‘This? Probably. In due course.'

‘Let me know – I'll top anything you get offered.'

‘How do I find you?' Watts said.

‘Knock on the wall – that should do it.'

Watts looked from the man to the woman, whose laugh turned into a barking cough. ‘You live next door?'

‘Gustav Holst's old gaff,' the man said. ‘Well, his gaff for a bit.' He held out a veined hand. His fingernails were long and almost horny. ‘Billy Caspar.' He gestured at the woman. ‘And this is Fi, my old lady.'

She gave Watts a shallow nod.

Watts recognized him now. Lead guitarist and vocalist for one of the big rock bands of the late sixties and seventies. Stadium rock.

Caspar was known for dabbling in the occult.

Watts took his hand. ‘Bob Watts.'

‘The disgraced copper.'

Watts nodded cautiously. ‘That would be me.'

‘Well, where would rock 'n' roll be without a bit of disgrace, eh?'

Watts smiled.

‘I've got a place down Brighton way,' Caspar said. ‘The other side of the Downs near Westmeston. Big old Elizabethan job. With a moat yet. Lovely. Bloke who designed Delhi for the old British Raj did a lot of work on it in the twenties. Luytens.'

‘Westmeston Manor.'

‘You know it?'

‘I know of it – I used to live a couple of miles up the road. I thought an American romantic novelist owned it.'

‘Michelle Irons? No, she rented it when I was living abroad for health reasons. I bought it from Jimmy Page years ago.'

Fi snorted. ‘Health reasons my arse. Tax reasons more like.'

‘Doesn't maintaining a healthy bank balance count as a health reason any more?' Caspar said deadpan. He gestured to the book. ‘Aleister Crowley. The Great Beast of Revelations, whose number is six-six-six. The mage. The black magician.'

‘According to what I've read online, a fraud, a sponger, a sexual pervert and a bully,' Watts said. ‘One biographer said he drove more men and women to drink, insanity or death than most incarnate devils.'

‘Incarnate devils, eh?' Caspar said. ‘Don't see many of them around. Don't forget drug addict. And in later years also guilty as charged of wearing a ridiculous wig.' He took a sip of his drink. ‘You're not a devotee then?'

‘I admire his chutzpah, I suppose,' Watts said. ‘But people who delude and then damage other people . . .' He tailed off.

‘He stayed in my house a couple of times before the war,' Caspar said. ‘First time, he took a dump on a rare Persian rug in the library. That was his calling card, apparently, wherever he was a guest: crapping on the carpet.'

‘Did he get many return invitations?'