The Magus of Hay (4 page)

‘One of the charms of Hay,’ Mr Oliver said drily, ‘is the number of
characters
one finds here.’

Mrs Villiers stopped.

‘Dickhead,’ she said.

Robin smiled happily. You wouldn’t get that on the street in Bath or Cheltenham.

As they walked away, Betty said something about them accepting there’d have to be sacrifices. Robin stared at her in the alley, knowing that making sacrifices wouldn’t mean like coming down from Michelob to Budweiser. Nor would it involve a white cockerel, a knife and a full moon. Usually, something less bloody than one and more painful than both.

‘We’d need more stock,’ he said. ‘I figure our stuff will fill about half the shelf space. Not much more than what’s left of his. We need to check out some car-boot sales.’

They’d discussed this. Charity stores and boot sales were always full of books that might roughly qualify as pagan-oriented. They had just over two-thousand pounds saved to spend on more stock. Not be too many signed first editions there, but New Age pulp would fill a few holes.

‘Bets,’ Robin said at last, ‘were you… getting something? Upstairs?’

One thing you needed to know about Betty, she never claimed to be psychic any more. She just had feelings about places. It wasn’t a sixth sense, no such thing as a sixth sense. It was just about paying attention to the other five, getting them working in concert. Which most people rarely did, if ever.

That was her story, anyhow.

‘I just think,’ she said, ‘that we might have some work to do. To make it ours.’

‘Ours? Rather than…?’

‘Rather than… someone else’s. I don’t know. Forget it.’

Hardly the first time this had happened. These things, Betty would say, they want to play with you, and it’s very rare that anything good comes out of it, so you don’t get drawn into the game.

This was when they’d broken with Wicca and begun to avoid anything with any kind of organisation or hierarchy. When
paganism, for Betty, had become no more than a viewpoint. If you started seeing it as a stepping-off point, she’d say, you’d just step into a situation with people who wanted a piece of you. Or into a mental-health crisis.

But right now he wanted to know. He wanted her to feel as good about this place as he did.

‘Whose?’ Robin said. ‘Ours rather than whose?’

‘Dunno.’ She was looking steadily ahead of her, but not seeing what he saw: the brick, the stone, the patched stucco. The solemnity of her expression indicative of some interior process beyond explanation. ‘Anyway. Doesn’t scare me any more.’

Something else she’d say: never let it scare you. That’s what it wants.

‘Whatever it is, we take it on.’ Betty came out of it, shrugged. ‘We fix it.’

6

Formless conceit

H
AVING PRAYED SHE
wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night, Merrily woke up in the middle of the night.

Encased in cooling sweat, still hearing the metal-framed typist’s chair creaking gently in a corner of the bedroom.

Not this one, of course. No chairs in this bedroom. She’d moved last month to a far smaller one in the north-eastern corner of the vicarage where the leaded window would catch the first light as the dawn chorus opened up.

Still a couple of hours to go before the blackbirds began. The panes in the window were blue-black. The softly stated certainties of Ms Sylvia Merchant, head teacher, retired, retained control of the dark.

Because I would expect someone in your position to have had considerable experience of the earthbound dead.

Actually, no. It came down to one experience, in this house. On the third staircase leading to the attic which Jane had claimed for her apartment.

She hung on to it, an anchor now. It had begun with the sense of an unending misery which, for an instant, had been given vaguely human form before becoming a minimal thing of pure, wild energy.

That was it. Lasting seconds. Maybe not even one – who knew how long an instant was? Events were expanded by the mind according to their significance. This one had persuaded her, months later, to say yes to an extra role in the diocese, a
job which handed you the keys to a repository of collected shadows.

The dictionary said:

Exorcist: one who exorcizes or pretends to remove evil spirits by ritual means.

Or something like that, suggesting that you could still qualify as an exorcist even if you only pretended to do it. Even if you thought it was bollocks.

And the Church… Merely by introducing the replacement term, Deliverance, the Church had been backing away, softening it, erasing the shamanistic overtones, making it sound more like a social service, a token nod towards the boundaries of belief… and leaving a handy escape route, because who, in all seriousness, could, in this day and age, accept that people and premises could be psychically disinfected through a priest’s petition to that increasingly formless conceit known as God?

Those blokes down there – solid, stoical, middle-aged priests. I can tell you four of them won’t go through with it. Out of the rest, there’ll be one broken marriage and a nervous breakdown.

This was Huw Owen, in charge of C. of E. and Church-in- Wales Deliverance courses, now her self-appointed spiritual adviser. Whether you chose to dismiss it as pure delusion or the product of some brain-chemical cocktail, it was, Huw said, still capable of rotting the fabric of everyday life.

A movement next to her.

‘Dark night of the soul, Lol,’ she said. ‘I collect them, as you know.’

Had her thoughts been loud enough to wake him up, too? She reached for his hand.

Lol said, ‘You want to – as they say – talk about it?’

‘Thought you’d never ask.’

Lol had slipped across to the vicarage from his cottage in Church Street, just on twilight. Jane was spending the last weekend of her last school half-term at Eirion’s parents’ place near Abergavenny. Jane and Eirion had been down to Wiltshire
to check out the Bronze Age dig where it looked like Jane would be starting her gap year in July, skivvying for archaeologists.

And in her absence… well, everybody in Ledwardine must surely know about Lol and the vicar by now. Just that not everybody approved, and some of them were the most constant members of an unsteady congregation. Which made her, on top of everything else, a hypocrite.

‘So Sylvia Merchant sends for me – that’s what happens, we get
sent for
– to confirm what she
wants
to be the truth. And if it goes against centuries of established theology, well, anything can be changed these days, if you don’t like it much. And if
God
doesn’t like it… well, we created him, we can uncreate him. Up yours, God.’

‘That
dark, huh?’ Lol said. ‘Poor soul.’

‘I should be unfrocked.’

‘You are.’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘So you went along with it.’

‘Mmm. Did the prayers.’

‘With the two of them?’

‘Don’t think I had a choice.’

Huw Owen’s First Law of Deliverance – or it might be the second – was never to leave a disturbed environment without administering a blessing. What he told his exorcism students after the story of the woman who seemed like a liar and then killed herself.

‘Actually, I didn’t.’ Merrily sat up in bed, naked before God. ‘I asked for release. For both of them. Can’t remember the actual words, but that was the essence of it.’

There was a mauve tint to the square panes of old glass. Later than she’d thought.

Lol said, ‘How did she take it?’

‘I don’t know. I kept my eyes closed.’

The implications were vast and terrifying. If you didn’t think
it was delusion or brain chemicals. If you thought there was a possibility that you were more than a social service.

She leaned into him, slid back down into the bed.

‘Actually, I’m not sure she took it very well. She was a head teacher. Used to calling the shots. Maybe that’s why she liked having Alys Nott around. A secretary for all eternity. And, presumably, Alys liked that too.’

‘Doesn’t matter one way or the other, now, does it?’

‘I don’t know. Do I have responsibility to what remains of Alys?’

‘Hell, no. Definitely not. I don’t know much about theology, but I’m guessing she’s well out your sphere of influence now.’

‘Out of the mouths of babes and songwriters… bugger.’ She pushed back the duvet. ‘I need a wee. Do you want a cup of tea, or…?’

It was chilly, for May. She pulled her bathrobe from the back of the door. She was replaying what Sylvia Merchant had said.

Her eyes were without light. And I wasn’t sure she could see me.

Alys Nott held in some limbo. Trapped and blind.

‘You know that night? When I thought I saw something on the stairs to the attic?’

He’d been here that night, though long before they were an item. Downstairs on the sofa while she was upstairs, getting speared by the pure wild energy. He’d been the first to see her, afterwards.

‘You
had
seen something,’ Lol said. ‘Nightmares don’t have that effect.’

‘But, given the state I was in at the time, to what extent was that a subjective experience? I was looking for answers, and that’s how the answer came. Was that a case of the subconscious mind translating something into an image? I don’t know. I still don’t know how any of this works.’

‘You know more than most people.’

‘I’ve read a lot of books about paranormal phenomena, mysticism, occultism. I’ve studied case histories. I’ve observed other
people’s spiritual crises, but I still don’t know how much I can accept. I could be self-deluded. I could be a charlatan.’

This was how you thought in the darkest hours.

‘Actually,’ Lol said, ‘there’s something I need to tell you…’

She turned, the robe half on. Because it was still before dawn, the devil’s time, she felt queasy with trepidation.

PART TWO

JUNE, end of

My Cabinet was picked in five minutes in the pub. Most were wearing jeans and there was a high proportion of lorry drivers.

Richard Booth
My Kingdom of Books

(Y Lolfa, 1999)

7

Sad case

T
HE NOISE OF
the waterfall was like mass excitement, but not in a good way. Bliss was thinking of football frenzy before a grudge game. Wincing at a jagged memory from when he was a young copper in Liverpool, getting his wrist broken on a barricade at Goodison Park. He’d loved it then, the Job. Really hated how long that wrist had kept him off the streets.

In retrospect, it was bugger all, a broken wrist. Fully fixable.

Bliss could’ve wept.

He was unsteady and locked an arm around one of the young trees growing out of the steepening bank just before the rushing water went into its lemming dive. On a warm day it might even be nice here, dappled sun through big trees, white splatter like a vanilla milkshake. Not today. Not with a dead man down in the pool.

He saw one of the divers heaving himself up on to a rounded rock-shelf, mask on his forehead. Grinning up at Bliss.

‘Wanna stay put there for a bit, boss? Should we call for risk assessment?’

‘Piss off,’ Bliss said mildly enough. ‘Left me wellies in the car, that’s all.’

How much did the diver know about his condition? How much did any of them know? He looked down into the pool and felt dizzy. The diver and his mate were at the water’s edge, below the fall. Apparently it was deeper than it looked, this pool.

Bliss glanced back the way he’d come and saw two rapid
streams, side by side.
Shit.
Hands linked around saplings either side, he leaned forwards, his neck inclined until the two streams coalesced into one, and he straightened up.

‘Just get him out, eh?’

Back in Hereford, he’d seen Terry Stagg exchanging a look with Darth Vaynor – why would the DI want to drive all the way out to the rim of Wales for a body spotted in a pool, likely a routine drowning?

Why
had
he? He could’ve just told them he was taking an early lunch, gone out and sat in his car till the numbness subsided.

Terry Stagg had been smiling thinly, probably thinking Bliss was trying to put some ground between himself and acting DCI Twatface Brent, who’d been running the show while he was in hospital and Annie Howe still working out of Worcester. Well, fair enough, he wasn’t exactly best mates with Brent and better Staggie thought that than nurture any suspicions about the dangerous brightness of office lights.

Bliss gripped the trees. The truth was that it went further. He couldn’t take the city at all any more. It came at you mob-handed. Sensory overload, bit like this frigging waterfall.

He’d been thinking it’d be some peaceful stagnant pond in the middle of a field, but no, the pool was right next to the lane and filled up by a mini cataract shooting almost sheer from the tarmac’s edge, white foam harsher on the eye than a fluorescent tube and a noise like you were inside an espresso machine.

The diver raised a hand to his mate, lowered his mask and slid into the pool. Bliss took a long breath and edged towards the falls, tree to tree. There was a crash barrier at the side of the road; to reach the falls in safety you had to cross a bridge, follow the stream through a field and then negotiate the bank. Worse and worse.

After a while, the diver came up, in no apparent hurry.

‘Just an old man, boss.’

You could hear the disappointment. Bliss inclined his head,
reducing two pools to one. It seemed squalid down there now, like a broken stone lavatory in perma-flush. He even thought he could see the body, half under a projecting rock. It seemed to be moving. But then, in his state, everything bloody did.

‘That’s a shame,’ he said, ‘but how about we
still
bring him out, eh?’

Yeh, he got the inference. Old people would often wander out into the night. In winter, hypothermia would get them. In summer, they might fall into a pool. With drowned old people, the suspicious-death meter tended to drop below the police concern threshold. He’d take one look and leave them to it. Maybe drive into Hay and sit over a coffee in the ice cream parlour, deal with his blood sugar.

The rattle of a vehicle made him turn his head, the sides of his vision squeezing in like an accordion. Billy Grace’s old Defender was reversing into the entrance of the nearest big house. This valley was full of big houses, mostly hidden away behind mature trees. Cusop Dingle. He’d never been here before and he probably wouldn’t need to come back, ever.

‘Try not to damage him, eh? We don’t know anything for certain yet. Bring him up to some level ground, for the doc.’

Only seen one drowned person before, a child, again back when he was a young scally, not long before he did his wrist on the barricade. Little kid brought out of a grotty canal, laid on the bank next to the old bike frame his foot had been wedged in. Bliss had had to tell the parents. First time. That night he’d been ready to put his papers in.

One of the three uniforms was waiting for him on the edge of the field, slim, freckly, red-haired girl.

Bliss said, ‘The dog walker thought there was some blood, did I get that right?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that was what he
thought
. On one of those sticky-out shelves of rock? Long washed away though now, obviously, sir. But then, if the gentleman fell from the other side… that is, went over the barrier from the road…’

‘If the dog walker saw blood on the rocks, it suggests he was on the scene not long after the old feller went in.’

‘I suppose. This was not yet six, still pretty dark down here amongst the trees.’

‘Early risers,’ Bliss said. ‘The SOCO’s friend, your dog walker.’

The numbness was in his forehead, travelling down the left side of his face. He started to sweat.

‘We have a possible name, sir. The chap recognized his hat. He wore a distinctive hat, with like a brim? It was wedged… down there. In like a crevice?’

‘Gorrit? The hat?’

‘Bagged, sir. Anyway, I’ve just been to his house. His back door’s unlocked, nobody home. He lived alone. His name’s David Hambling.’

‘He
have a dog?’

No, sir.’

Bliss nodded. Sometimes people got themselves drowned going in after a pet.

‘No suggestion of dementia, sir, according to the neighbours. Even though they reckoned he must’ve been getting on for ninety. If not more. Could be a suicide?’

‘Worth the effort at ninety? Morning, Billy.’

Dr Grace, maybe twenty years older than Bliss, was striding over in his blazer and his old-fashioned gumboots, neon teeth whiter than the water. Mother of God, when even Billy’s frigging teeth hurt your eyes…

‘Francis?’
Billy contemplating Bliss with his chin tucked into his collar, all faux puzzlement. ‘Something I haven’t been told?’

‘Been advised to get more fresh air, Billy.’ Bliss turned to the uniform. ‘What’s this river called, again… um…?’

‘PC Winterson, sir. Tamsin. It’s not actually a river, it’s the Dulas Brook. Just a bit swollen with all the rain. It’s supposed to mark the actual border between England and Wales. Another few metres, this’d be one for Dyfed-Powys. Sir—’

‘What are you—?’

Bliss spinning round so fast he stumbled. Billy Grace was looking him up and down. Actually
up and down
. Another frigging expert feeding him through quality control. He walked – carefully – right up to the doc, leaving PC Winterson, thanks to the water-roar, just out of earshot.

‘I’m not your patient, Billy,’ Bliss said tightly. ‘All right?’

‘By virtue of being still alive after a savage kicking?’ Billy beamed. ‘Just about?’

‘Piss off.’ Bliss backed away, raising his voice. ‘As it happens, doctor, this sad case is unlikely to interest me any further. Just an old feller. So, in the absence of anything iffy, I’ll probably be leaving you in the capable hands of Tammy here.’

‘Tamsin, sir. Sir, there’s one other thing. Something we found in his kitchen?’

‘Porno DVDs? Bomb-making kit?’

‘Cannabis, sir.’

‘Really.’ Bliss blinked. ‘A ninety-year-old dopehead?’

‘Not
exactly
unheard of, Francis,’ Billy Grace said. ‘Occasionally prescribed by some of my more liberal colleagues for its analgesic qualities. And, of course, more often
self-
prescribed. Though I think if you’re suggesting the old boy might’ve toddled down here high as a bloody kite—’

‘You’d be able to tell?’

Billy shrugged

‘Immersion cases are almost invariably problematical. Even simple drowning… ridiculously hard to prove.’ He walked down to the stream’s edge, where you could see the waterfall and most of the pool. ‘Might’ve died through the shock of hitting cold water, or natural causes, precipitating the fall into the pool.’

‘Only if he was sitting on the barrier at the time,’ Bliss said.

‘Or wandered in from this side, across the fields.’

‘Yeh, I suppose.’

‘And there’s some other things, actually sir,’ Tamsin said to
Bliss. ‘Probably nothing to do with, you know, what’s happened… but a bit, you know…’

‘Things?’

‘Funny things. Oh God—’

Tamsin shook. Quite suddenly, the body had come up between the two divers, like an old inner tube, water sluicing through a jacket that might once have been white, froth like bubblegum around the mouth. Bliss winced, turned away and stumbled slightly in the mud.

Billy Grace caught hold of his arm, frowning, then steered him along the stream’s edge, away from PC Winterson, the corpse and the waterfall roar, the old bastard diagnosing aloud.

‘Occasional apparent difficulties with balance…’

‘Piss
off
!’

‘… and a slight, residual slurring of the speech perhaps discernible only to those of us who’ve known you for some years. Still getting the double vision, are we, Francis?’

‘Just gerroff my friggin’ case.’ Bliss dragged his arm away. ‘How about you confine yourself, Dr Grace, to suggesting whether this looks like an accident, or suicide – or if there are complications. Other words, did he fall or was he dumped?’

‘You’re a fool to yourself, Francis.’

‘I’ve been cleared by the medics.’

‘And does one of them owe you a favour, perchance?’

‘Up yours, Billy.’

Bliss steadied himself to walk back to PC Winterson. She seemed smaller. Sometimes his vision was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope.

‘You said funny. Funny how, Tamsin?’

‘Funny peculiar, sir. Seemed
very
peculiar to me. At least—’

‘Was it you who found out about this?’

‘Yes, sir. I’ve a friend who lives here, and the man with the dog… theirs was the first house he came to after he saw what he thought was a body in the pool. So she rang me, and I reported it and then came here with my friend and I realized
there was nothing we could do, and she saw the hat and she was like, Oh God, it’s Mr Hambling. So I went up to his house, and the door was unlocked and—’

‘Tell you what,’ Bliss said in an urgent kind of despair. ‘Show me.’