The Devil's Moon (6 page)

‘The herbalist with the shops?'

She smiled.

‘I think they're just named after him. He was a doctor too but preferred to use herbs as cures. He used the crystal to cure illness but apparently stopped in 1651 when a demon burst out of it.'

‘That would make you wonder about the cures you were giving,' Watts said. ‘All these crystals – he must have lived in Brighton.'

Travis laughed.

‘Has the Science Museum object gone missing too?' Watts said.

She grinned. ‘That would be freaky. I don't believe so. We think this was an opportunist theft. That's why these are still here. We have a lot of casual staff working here when we're putting an exhibition together.'

‘I would have thought security would be pretty tight.'

She made a face. ‘Oh, it is out front but in the back is sometimes another story. We have this dreadful habit of trusting people.'

‘And the stuff that was stolen – I presume there's a market for it?'

‘For magical apparatus linked to John Dee, the most famous magician in the world? I would say so.'

‘I thought Doctor Faust was the most famous magician in the world?'

‘He's based on Doctor Dee – certainly in Christopher Marlowe's version.'

They had reached the lift.

‘It's funny we should be talking about this,' Watts said. ‘I'm meeting my father's agent in a minute to discuss my father's acquaintance with three writers on the occult, including Aleister Crowley.'

Travis stood directly in front of him. Close to him.

‘The Great Beast, eh?' she said. ‘But it's not so funny. The supernatural is everywhere these days. My colleague's teenage nieces were obsessed with Harry Potter and now
Twilight
and all these vampire things. My colleague calls that chastity porn.'

‘Chastity porn?'

‘
Twilight
has this vampire. Robert Pattinson in the films. All the girls swoon over him but he's kind of a pervy stalker of this chaste young woman. Kristen Stewart in the films. She's a virgin and if she succumbs to him she'll be damned. So it's a lot of titillation. The books are essentially extended foreplay. Very extended.'

‘And you don't like that?' Watts said.

She laughed. ‘I like foreplay as much as the next girl . . .'

Watts smiled, suddenly embarrassed by her proximity. He was easily embarrassed by women. He pressed the lift button.

‘You want the top floor,' she said.

He nodded and smiled awkwardly. She took out a card and pen and wrote something on the back.

‘My old one – which I'm sure you've kept – is out of date now.'

Watts took the card and turned it over.

‘My home number,' Travis said. ‘Ring me here or there – it doesn't matter which. If you've a mind to.'

She turned and walked away, hips swinging, her hand raised in a little wave goodbye.

‘I will,' he called after her. Then he muttered, ‘Most certainly.'

B
uggeration. Gilchrist stomped down the stairs of the police station and out into the street. The sky had turned black as night and the first drops of rain were falling. She looked up, wary of falling fish. At least that thought made her smile. She turned into the first café she came to and put the big bundle of files she'd spent the rest of the morning with on the counter.

‘Looks like we're in for it,' the barman said, frowning as the rain rattled against the window. ‘But at least it is just rain. For the time being anyway.'

Gilchrist nodded curtly, glancing at her watch. She wasn't in here just to get out of the rain. The sun was over the yard-arm somewhere.

‘Chardonnay. Big one.'

Talk about giving with one hand and taking away with the other. She was more than relieved that she was not being disciplined or ejected from the police force. She was elated that she had the promotion she always felt should have been hers, though conscious it was in some sense at the cost of her friend's life.

But as a woman who had decided ten years earlier that she never wanted children, as a woman who hadn't liked teenage girls when she was a teenager herself, never mind now, the last thing she wanted to do was have any dealings with them. Especially feral ones.

She glanced at the files with something like loathing. Not that she was allowed to call them ‘feral' any more. According to social theorists they were simply ‘troubled'. ‘Feral' was too judgemental. Yeah, right.

‘Oh, Reg,' she sighed. ‘I could do with you to laugh at me right now.'

She fished out her phone and called Kate Simpson. She was put on hold, the current radio programme streaming down the phone line. Kate was mid-show, of course. Gilchrist hadn't got the hang of Kate's new job as producer. She wasn't sure Kate had either.

Kate Simpson's mobile rang. It was Phil, the guy who ran her scuba-diving club.

‘A newspaper has asked me to see if there are any fish left in the waters around Brighton. Of course there will be, but I wondered if you fancied coming down with me. I'm putting a little team together.'

Last time she'd been involved in one of Phil's little teams they'd found the remains of a woman killed in the sixties. She recognized that was a one-off. Or so she hoped.

‘When?' she said.

‘This teatime?'

‘I'll see you at the marina.'

The light on her desk phone was flashing. She pressed for the landline.

Kate Simpson's voice broke in on Gilchrist listening to the radio show. She sounded breathless. Gilchrist could hear the hubbub of the radio studio's outer office in the background.

‘Sarah – what's up?'

‘Thought you'd want to know,' Gilchrist said. ‘You're definitely not going to be charged with using an illegal weapon to fight off your attacker.'

Simpson was silent for a moment. ‘What's happened?' she said, her voice low.

‘The volt gun has gone missing from the evidence room,' Gilchrist said, equally quietly. ‘No stun gun, no prosecution.'

Kate cleared her throat, then said, ‘Thank God. Oh, Sarah, thank bloody God.' Then, with excitement: ‘Does that mean you're off suspension too?'

Gilchrist grinned, even though she knew it was pointless down a phone line. ‘And promoted.'

‘Wow. Congratulations.'

‘Except for what my first job is.'

‘What's that?'

‘Never mind – I'll tell you later. Are you around tonight? Let's go to Plenty to celebrate.'

Oliver Daubney was on good form. He led Watts at a pretty brisk trot round the Picasso prints. ‘Fine work,' Daubney said. ‘But, you know, what was once challenging has long been absorbed into the mainstream.'

They moved through a couple of Egyptian galleries to the restaurant underneath the dome of the Great Courtyard. They were seated at a table with a gentle buzz of sound from the courtyard below refracting around them and a soft white light falling from above. And for the next hour, Daubney shared with Watts some of his many stories about writers great and small of the past sixty years.

Even if he didn't represent them, he knew them all. And Watts immediately realized that Daubney wasn't sharing. He was giving a performance. An Audience with Oliver Daubney.

‘Agatha Christie?' Daubney said. ‘No conversation. None at all. Such a shy creature. Raymond Chandler? A drunk and an egoist – the admiration of T S Eliot went right to his head – but most charming and still talented when I met him. In the late fifties, when I was scarcely an adult, I went on a bender with your father, Ian Fleming and Chandler. I got home sometime in the early sixties.'

Daubney paused for Watts to laugh and the ex-chief constable obliged.

The next time Daubney paused for breath – by which time he'd run through Amis
père
and
fils
, the two Durrells, Willliam Golding, John Fowles, Muriel Spark, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia and Ted – Watts said, ‘Did you find out anything about my father and Wheatley, Pearson and Crowley?'

Daubney seemed slightly miffed to be interrupted in mid-flow but he composed himself. ‘With Wheatley it was simply a friendship between two fellow writers, I believe. He did a Foyles lunch with Pearson in the sixties but whether the friendship went any further I don't know. Crowley – I couldn't find out anything about that connection.'

‘I can't imagine my father spending much time with such an obvious charlatan as Crowley.'

‘I'm sure you're right,' Daubney said, draining the last of the Burgundy.

They parted shortly after. Watts left feeling he'd been sold short but not knowing exactly how. The cobbled courtyard at the front of the museum was, as usual, thronged with tourists. Small and large groups in lines being photographed from too far away so that people walked between photographer and subjects all the time. Anoraks and umbrellas as far as the eye could see.

The paving stones were slippery with rain and even his rubber-soled shoes didn't help. He made his cautious way out on to Museum Street. The Museum Tavern looked appealing, its Victorian lights glowing through the rainy gloom. Watts liked a Victorian artist called Grimshaw who seemed to specialize in gaslight in foggy, rainy dusks. He might have painted this scene, even though it was only mid-afternoon.

Watts walked past the pub to a bookshop on the left. He remembered his father bringing him to the British Museum and walking down this street when it was all second-hand bookshops and quirky art galleries. Now there was only the one bookshop and a range of cafés and tourist souvenir shops. Plastic police helmets and Union Jacks on mugs, tea towels, beer mats and assorted garments proliferated.

The bookshop was theoretically an occult bookshop but, Watts reflected, commerce gets everywhere. Toy witches on broomsticks hung in the window and inside there was the usual gallimaufry of crystal balls, Tarot cards, angel cards, crystals, Ouija boards and general cheap quasi-spiritual tat.

On the bookshelves Harry Potter predominated along with modern young adult vampire novels. There were New Age novels too: Paulo Coelho featured large.

Over by the sales desk – a bureau complete with ink pot and old-fashioned nib pen – there was a more serious-looking bookcase. Old leather volumes behind glass. A man with long, wet, curly black hair, wearing a shapeless raincoat, was standing in front of it, tilting his head to read the spines of the works there.

In front of him, at the bureau, was a large woman in the kind of kaftan Watts hadn't seen since, as a child, he'd watched some hefty Greek man with a falsetto voice perform on the telly.

She smiled at Watts in an inquiring way. He took the book out of his briefcase.

‘I've got this first edition of an Aleister Crowley novel, signed to my father. I wondered if you might be able to value it?'

‘I'll buy it,' the man with the wet hair blurted.

Kate had been a bit befuddled for the rest of her shift. After Sarah's call she'd been thinking about her new freedom and flashing back to the awful attack on her in the bedroom of her flat.

A smelly man pawing her, hitting her, tearing her clothes off, falling on her with all his weight. Kate scrabbling under the pillow for the feel of the plastic weapon Gilchrist had left her when they first shared flats. Grabbing it, thrusting it at the man's neck, pressing every button on it she could find. And then she'd been abruptly brought back to the present.

‘Kate? Kate?' Simon's voice urgent in her ear. ‘Jesus, woman, don't zone out on me again. You gotta start getting a grip. I need the poll results for “George Clooney Gay or Guy?” Kate?'

At the end of her shift she headed down to the marina. She was late getting there but she doubted they were going out. The weather was filthy, the boats in the harbour rolling and rattling.

A regular gang of half a dozen of the keenest divers were below. Phil kissed her on the cheek and looked at her with his startling blue eyes. He shook his head.

‘We're going to give it half an hour to see if it blows over then go down the pub.'

Kate looked out of the porthole. ‘I'd be as happy skipping straight to the pub option.'

Phil smiled and indicated some packets on a narrow table. ‘Scopolamine patches if you want one.'

She shook her head. ‘Touch wood, however rough it gets I don't get sick. I might drown but I won't be sick.'

She looked across at the one person in the group she didn't know. He looked like he was about to burst out of his clothes. His head was tilted back and he had a dropper in his meaty hand poised just above his eye. She watched him do both eyes then blink until he got his vision back. He saw her looking.

‘Bit extreme if we don't actually go out, isn't it?' she said.

He grinned but there was a coldness to it.

‘Bugger going out – this is to stop the motion of this boat in dock making me heave.'

They all laughed. Phil said, ‘Kate, I don't think you and Don have met. Don's with a club over in Worthing.'

The man nodded. ‘Call me Don-Don.'

Kate's phone rang. ‘Excuse me,' she said, clambering up on deck.

‘Kate? It's Sarah. I'm finished earlier than I thought if you can get away.'

Gilchrist was already sitting at the back of Plenty when Kate arrived. Gilchrist got up, towering over her as usual, and gave her a hug.

‘Hope I didn't wreck your evening?' Gilchrist said.

‘I was going to go to the pub with a bunch of divers but, you know, I like diving with them rather than socializing. Their main topic of conversation is cubic pressure per foot per pound.' She laughed. ‘There's a new guy. Bit of a creep but keen – he would dive seven days a week if he could. But he gets serious sea-sickness.'

‘A diver with sea-sickness?'

‘Some do. They slap on a travel sickness patch and that's fine. This guy uses a dropper in his eyes to dose himself up with liquid scopolamine.'