Sympathy for the Devil (46 page)

Briefly their eyes meet. His expression is dull, cold, inhuman, he is looking at her as if at something already dead.

She sees Huw striding forward now, his hand outstretched. Deep inside her, rage boils up and turns to white-cold anger. She pulls Face in towards her, clasping his head beneath her arm and catching the first flicker of emotion in his eyes. If I go, you go, she thinks, and reaches out with her other hand for Huw, pulling him forward with his own momentum. As Face bites at her hand, she pulls them both towards the edge and steps out into the void. For a moment, she hangs there. And then all three of them fall. Strange that it is so peaceful, she thinks, and then nothing.

When she came to, she was aware only of the contrast in feeling between her left side, cold and exposed to the elements and her right, warmed by something firm and soft. The smell of Huw’s cologne was everywhere, vetiver and lime. Her feet were dragging beneath her through the mud.

No, Thomas, she thought. It was Thomas who was pulling her to the far side of the mudflat. Moments later, he laid her gently down, turning her head away from the ground. And then he was gone again. She watched him move further along the beach, and thought how strangely like a baby she felt, calm and motionless as he began to move an inflatable out from the rocks.

Everything was playing out as if on a distant screen. In the weak light she saw him moving back towards her, but far away still.

There was a shuffling sound nearby. Dazed, she turned her head to see a hooded figure standing on a rock a few yards behind her. There were others behind him, up on the cliffs.

The man wore a long robe of coarse cloth, and held in front of him the long and bright blade of a sword. He lifted it high above his head.

Thomas ran, dropping the dinghy behind him, only a few feet away as the figure came down towards them. He held out the sword in front of him, stroking the air between them, gesturing that she should move away towards the rocks.

Everything was happening as if in slow motion, Thomas hesitating, brushing the hair from his face. The man striking out towards them, sparks rising where the blade struck. Now he’d ripped the front of Thomas’s jersey. The blood was spreading over the wool. Thomas was reaching out and wrestling him for the handle of the sword.

Above, the figures stood silent, watching. Then the air was filled with a rushing and a hollow rasping sound, as Thomas broke away and drove the blade into the man’s heart, and then a second time. With the second thrust the robed man slumped into a heap on the rocks.

Catrin found an unknown secret reserve of energy, and raised herself from the ground. She walked over to the body and pulled back the cowl. There was mud on Huw’s cheeks, and his greying hair had matted close to his scalp. His eyes stared back, level and lifeless, and his robe was open to the thick, silver hair of his chest.

Thomas was standing over her, hand to his belly, his face still flush with colour, betraying no pain. She felt him pulling her hand, her feet dragging in the pebbles.

He pulled the dinghy down to the edge of the water. Another figure was there, walking as tall as a giant against the tide. It was Old Tudor, carrying what looked like a child in a blanket across his chest. They pushed the boat down to the foaming wash.

As Thomas knelt over it the outboard spluttered into life. The wind had slackened and mist hung thick over the water. There was a cold, dark crossing ahead.

SOME MONTHS LATER

It was almost silent on the tennis court. All Catrin could hear was the distant chug of a motor yacht far out past Mumbles Head.

She bounced the ball at her feet, then looked up to see where her opponent had positioned himself. Thomas was wearing baggy beachcomber’s shorts and a Lion-of-Judah T-shirt. He hadn’t dressed the part, nor did he look anywhere near ready to return service.

She served hard down the centre, the ball catching the inside of the line. It was a good, precise serve, but not quite hard enough. From nowhere Thomas returned the ball surprisingly deep to her backhand, a clean winner.

That was the thing about Thomas. He played like he worked and lived, never seeming to have his eye on the ball or anywhere near it. But it was all misdirection. When he reached the ball he knew exactly what to do with it.

She still had match point. She served again, hard at his body. This time she ran behind her serve to the net, volleyed his return deep. His return down the line missed by inches.

They sat on a small bench at the edge of the court. Thomas had brought some beers and smoothies in a cooler down from the house.

‘The first rule in any game,’ she said. ‘Always play with someone better than yourself or you’ll never improve.’

He took a sip of beer, his eyes half closed against the late afternoon sun. ‘That’s exactly why I play with you,’ he said.

She gave him a quick smack with her strings. He was looking back up the staggered lawns towards the grand Victorian house ringed by small, spiky palm trees. At the back, facing them, was a large conservatory, to one side of it a pool, black-tiled in the shape of a heart.

‘I thought you hated Della,’ he said. ‘So why use her court?’

Catrin glanced up at the upper windows, their curtains drawn, and thought she glimpsed Della watching them.

‘We seem to have a strange understanding now,’ she said. ‘The fire hasn’t changed her. But she never goes out now, just sits in that big house on her own, won’t talk to anyone. I feel bad if I don’t come here.’

Thomas looked at her carefully. ‘You think if she’s given the chance she could change?’

Catrin didn’t answer, wasn’t sure if she could. She wondered if Thomas could tell how difficult and how new everything now felt. Even the smallest things, leaving the house, taking a walk, deciding what to wear. The enormity of what had happened still weighed on her chest, making it difficult to breathe at times. Sometimes she still woke sweating in the night, had to run to the window and gulp down the cold night air. Remind herself she was alive: not free of it, she would never be that, but alive, able to try to live again. She clung to what little hadn’t been contaminated. Her bike, her exercise routines, she strung them out all day, or played chess online, over and over again. She wanted to be too tired to think. No therapists, no counsellors. She never kept the appointments Occupational Health had made for her. If there was a way for her to live now, it would be her secret. She didn’t know what lay ahead there out in the light. She didn’t know quite who she’d be. Someone different certainly, maybe someone she wouldn’t entirely recognise.

She looked up, saw Thomas beckoning her, a second beer in his hand. She followed him down steps to the bottom of the garden, where a gate opened onto the beach road. Her Laverda was chained to the railings. Down on the beach a small café decorated like a surfer’s shack had been set up under the promenade.

It was still early in the season, and the place looked almost empty. Inside, a school leaver with spiky hair showed them to a table. Thomas pointed to the glass counter. Under it were the usual array of sticky buns and flapjacks.

A single black fly was buzzing, drawn by the sweet things under the glass.

‘Watch the flies,’ Thomas told her. She watched as the fly made its way to the counter. But then, as it was about to enter, it paused. Something else had caught its attention, higher to the right of the counter.

It flew up in that direction, and into a small black box. There was a frantic buzzing from inside the box. Then all was still.

‘Powell’s operation,’ Thomas said. ‘It was meticulous from the start. Being a drugs cop gave him the ideal cover, a supply platform for precisely the specialised drugs he needed for his occult practices. By using the ancient trance drugs and that ancient place of sacrifice he thought he’d tapped into a reality lost to us down the ages.’

Catrin didn’t need to be reminded. She understood only too well how his infernal machine had worked. ‘Powell must’ve believed in his primitive, psychotic mind,’ Thomas continued: ‘that only by sacrificing his own to his master could he achieve what he wanted to.’

She stared at him. ‘Yes, but I’m still not sure I know what that was exactly. What did he believe he was getting in return for such a high sacrifice? Money, power, a crack at immortality – or was it something else?’

A dubious look crossed Thomas’s face. ‘We’ll never know. But strangely I don’t think Powell wanted much. You’d think he’d expect something vast in exchange for such a high price, much like Faust. But I don’t think he did. I suspect he just saw it as protection money. He believed he’d got what he had the way he had, and to keep it he had to keep on placating his master in the same way.’

Thomas shrugged. ‘I may be wrong,’ he said. ‘It may have been something conventional, or something too terrible to describe. But I somehow doubt it. Every man has a desire they believe can only be granted by a power greater than themselves. Powell believed he’d found a radical and effective way of achieving that desire, but that same desire is there in all of us.’ He glanced at her, squinting in the sun. ‘I mean, what price would you pay if you believed it would buy you what you wished? Can you say for sure that you’d know what to ask for?’

She turned away. To have Rhys back. Is that what he thought? She suspected he had been drinking before they’d met for tennis. No smell, but she just knew. She’d heard he’d been reporting for work later every morning, and sometimes not coming in at all. Hiding what he was going through, playing the lad. But that was his way and she knew whatever she said wouldn’t help. Of course the therapists all said sharing helped, but if they didn’t they’d be out of a job, and for some things she knew it didn’t, it just didn’t. Talk about the outside stuff all you want, she thought, the logistics and reasons of it all, that helps, but not what’s really going on inside. Not what you see when you’re alone. He’d do it in his own way and his own time, just like her.

‘Angel Jones,’ she said, ‘at what point d’you think he realised Powell was the hidden hand protecting him all those years?’

Thomas took a sip of beer. ‘Maybe the night of the fire at Pryce’s? Once Jones suspected it was Powell, he’d have known his chances of surviving were slim.’

She knew Rhys had taken a significant risk in freeing Jones, releasing a big evil in order to snare an even greater one. She’d no doubt he’d put safeguards in place, Jones had hinted as much, probably a statement and evidence left with a commissioner for oaths so Jones could have been tried under double jeopardy laws if he hadn’t kept to the deal. Rhys had gambled on Jones preferring to bite the poisoned hand that had fed him, to die a free man than live on as a puppet. But she wondered if the safeguards had actually been necessary. She knew now that on the final night Jones had come to Thomas, not knowing if he could trust him and told him where the dinghy was. Surely that had limited his own chances of escape. That he’d also directed the old man and his girl Caris to the boat had diminished those chances yet further.

She looked at Thomas. ‘Building Jones up into a bogeyman provided the cover for the disappearance over the years of Powell’s children, the nineteen half-siblings,’ she said quietly. ‘Of course Powell played it safe, never showed himself to Jones. He used Caris as his main connection. He made sure Jones never knew too much about his cult, nor his cult about Jones.’

‘Right, and Powell’s eldest son Face’s underground following provided a way to draw the children back into Powell’s web without anyone noticing. The island was his sacred ground, his killing ground. But the younger children, no one knew of their existence, so he didn’t need a cover for them.’

Thomas was looking closely up at the black box above the glass counter.

‘All right,’ Catrin said, ‘so what’s your point?’

He was pointing up at the fly-trap. ‘But when Face himself disappeared, Powell knew the press and every conspiracy theorist around would be all over the case.’

She watched as another fly flew unwaveringly up from the counter and after a short buzzing inside the box was silent.

‘Powell devised a clever defence mechanism,’ Thomas went on. ‘By setting himself up as a Face obsessive with big money, he ensured that any investigation into Face or the fans who’d disappeared – his nineteen children – always went through him.’

‘And Rhys walked right in.’

‘Yes, but not entirely.’

‘Because Rhys wouldn’t reveal his source?’

‘And that’s why Powell needed you, because you were the only person named as trusted by the source. And as you were the final child who’d escaped the cult, you suited Powell’s purposes perfectly.’

Thomas finished his beer. She glanced at him; he was still smiling his lazy smile.

Slowly he nodded. ‘When Rhys was killed, I already suspected the island was at the centre of it all. That’s why I’d begun to focus there.’

‘But why didn’t you use back-up?’

‘Because that way I’d never have found out who the leader was. Powell was a surveillance expert, the place was always monitored closely. Any big operation and Powell would have known it was coming. Out there, on his own terms, he was always a step ahead.’

The surveillance, all the contracts with the CCTV companies, she knew that was how Powell had been able to destroy any footage that might have shown Rhys being drowned. The companies might have also removed footage of the second man, the one in the hut, who Rhys had attacked because he knew he was one of Powell’s men. Foiling the surveillance may also have helped Powell to protect Jones. But there was much she might never know. Who Powell’s associates were, for instance, and how far their influence reached. The unknowability had been designed in from the start, so any associates might survive him. Rix, for instance, had kept a lid on Jones’s release, which served Rhys’s purpose. It had made her consider again those old rumours about Rix having a crush on Rhys. Perhaps there was something in them after all, or maybe Rhys had had something on him. Though she knew Rix could have acted for other reasons, and if he had he was someone she would have to watch in the future.