The Magus of Hay (10 page)

18

The word

W
HEN SHE GOT
in, the phone was ringing.

‘I nearly cried off, Merrily. Nearly rang you and said I couldn’t do it after all.’

Plump, comfy Martin Longbeach. As was.

Oh God
.

‘What brought that on, Martin?’

‘Couldn’t sleep hardly at all last night. I was thinking I should get out altogether, move to another part of the country. East Anglia, Cornwall. Where nobody’s talking about me.’

Inevitable that, sooner or later, this was going to come up.

‘All they’re saying,’ she said, ‘is that you had a bereavement and a subsequent breakdown.’

Forgive me
.

‘But then I thought, how often do you and Jane have a chance of some days out together?’

Might have been a good time to tell him about Jane not being here, how the situation had changed. She didn’t.

‘Anyway. Friday morning be all right to bring my stuff, Merrily?’

‘Or you can move in then. Whatever’s best for you.’

‘That would be good. You’ve been very kind to me, Merrily.’

‘Listen, I’m not coming on Sunday, Martin. You’re on your own.’

Better all round if she wasn’t there to listen to his sermon. If he was planning to unload something on the congregation, she’d rather be out of the village.

Unload something on the…?

Oh, Jesus wept. Merrily clapped a hand over the mouthpiece of the Bakelite phone, took a deep, deep breath. In Martin’s particularly conservative part of Herefordshire, no matter how far this faded into history, it would never be a laughing matter. Nor here, except possibly in the saloon bar of the Ox. To which you could only hope the intelligence had not yet permeated.

One way or another, next week was not going to be easy.

She stayed in the scullery and rang Huw Owen.

No answer. She leaned back in her curved captain’s chair. Even Ethel was out. The silence in the vicarage was like earwax. She switched on the computer and Googled Cusop Dingle.

Wikipedia said it was a single track road once known as Millionaire’s Row because of all the big houses. It ran alongside the Dulas Brook, with its many waterfalls, into the foothills of the Black Mountains, and had been home to the notorious Hay poisoner Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the only English solicitor ever hanged for murder.

Which was a long time ago. To go back even further, she looked up Cusop in Jane’s much-thumbed copy of Ella Mary Leather’s
Folklore of Herefordshire
, first published in 1912. As always, more illuminating, if you were the kind of person who specialized in peculiar tangents.

Fairies have been seen dancing under foxgloves in Cusop Dingle within the memory of some now living there.

Not far from Hay Station on the Herefordshire side there are some rocks overhanging a brook which flows into the Wye. Fairies or ‘little people’ formerly lived in these rocks and in the haymaking time used to provide dinner for the haymakers in the adjoining fields. But once a haymaker took away a knife; after
this the fairies never came again, although the man took the knife back.

The last line almost adding a nice touch of credibility. A Welsh Border farmworker would be well miffed with himself at ruining a source of free meals. Less cosy was a mention, four pages later, of Cusop as a place where people believed in the will-o’-the-wisp, Mrs Leather quoting a certain Parry, of Kington, in 1845.

The
ignis fatuus
or exhalation termed Will-o’-the-wisp or Jack with a lanthorn, which is sometimes seen in churchyards or marshy places in summer and autumn, was considered by many old inhabitants in this neighbourhood, when the author was in his infancy, to be a kind of device of the evil spirit to draw human beings from the road they were pursuing into some frightful abyss of misery; and there leave them without any hope of regaining the enjoyment of happiness in the land of the living.

Will-o’-the-wisp had more recently been explained as marsh gas, a phenomenon not, presumably, confined to marshes.

You just never heard about it, though, did you? Though someone drawn to peculiar tangents might well, on reading about a
frightful abyss of misery
, picture a deep waterfall pool with a dead man in it.

‘David Hambling,’ Huw said when he called back. ‘No. New one on me.’

She could almost see him in his chair in the stone rectory, sinking lower as more stuffing leaked out. Welsh born, brought up in Sheffield, returning as ordained minister. There might even be a low fire, as summer didn’t much like the Brecon Beacons and this was hardly an effective summer.

Merrily said, ‘How about Peter Rector?’

There was a pause.

‘He’ll be dead now.’

‘Yes. He is. That’s what I said.’

‘We’re happen at cross-purposes here,’ Huw said. ‘The Peter Rector known to me must’ve been dead years.’

‘Well… the post-mortem results aren’t through yet, but this one, as I understand it… less than two days? Believed to be over ninety years old. Would that fit?’

‘Aye. It might, too.’

‘White hair and beard. Large collection of mainly esoteric books. Smoked cannabis.’

‘And living in… where did you say?’

‘Cusop Dingle. About a mile out of Hay-on-Wye, on the English side.’

‘And how long’s he been there?’

‘Don’t know exactly. Could be anything over twelve years. He lived very quietly, didn’t have a car. He had friends who did his shopping. His neighbours didn’t know much about him but seem to have respected his privacy. He was known as a healer, a bone-setter and possibly a dowser.’

Huw’s laugh carried a yelp of astonishment that was rare. You could hear his chair scraping on the flags as he stood up.

‘Small world then?’ Merrily said.

‘Smaller than I’d reckoned possible. You do know about his activities at Capel-y-ffin?’

‘In the Black Mountains?’

‘Aye.’

‘No, I don’t. Just that he was running educational courses.’

‘Long time ago. Over thirty years. You’d’ve been a kid. Everybody thought he’d gone abroad. And he were just a few miles away? Beggars belief. I’m looking at the map now. Cusop – got it. Nowhere else in the country, I reckon, where you’d get such a change of landscape, climate and culture in… six miles? As the crow flies. You know about his books?’

‘I saw them. A roomful. A big roomful.’

‘No, I mean,
his
books. Rector’s. The ones he wrote.’

‘He wrote books? I never even thought to look. Bookwise, it was all a bit overwhelming.’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Huw said, ‘while I get my head round this, why don’t you look him up on the Internet? I’ll call you back.’

‘All right, but I’ll just tell you one more thing. He’s left his house and contents – which, depending on how much land goes with it, could be worth the best part of a million – to Anthea White.’ She paused. ‘Get your head round
that.’

‘Athena?’

‘The Witch of Hardwicke. Frannie Bliss is trying to persuade me to talk to her with a view to finding out why. The kind of people he was mixing with. What was happening at Cusop. And yes, I
have
told him I’d prefer root-canal surgery without the anaesthetic.’

‘Intriguing, though, lass. Give us an hour, and I’ll try and equip you for the ordeal.’

Five minutes later, with Peter Rector entered into Google, Lol called.

He was in a motel outside Carlisle. He didn’t sound gloomy, exactly, but he did sound tired. He was expressing dismay at how much had changed since he was last on the road. Merrily was resisting the urge to ask if he was getting regular meals.

Regular meals – she should talk.

‘So much more music in pubs now,’ Lol was saying. ‘Bigger towns, where they get lots of gigs, they carry on talking and drinking. You’re just a distant soundtrack to their night out. It’s the more remote places where they actually listen. They’ve travelled further, so they listen.’

‘So you’re doing OK?’

‘More than OK, I suppose. Doesn’t seem right.’

Merrily said nothing. How could a man who’d been so comprehensively crapped on over the years be so pathetically grateful?

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m bored with me. Seeing too much of me. You and Jane, how’s, uh… how’s that going?’

‘Erm…’

Merrily transferred the phone from one hand to the other. She hadn’t wanted to but, under the circumstances, there was no way of avoiding spelling it out.

‘Not a problem, though, it really isn’t. I can try and beg some time off when you get back.’

‘Except that you’re on your own. On holiday in an empty house.’

‘Well, it’s never
totally—’

‘How about you
don’t
mention the presence of God. It’ll just make me want to ask you to marry me, again, put the old bugger’s nose out of joint. Abandon the rest of the gigs, square things with Danny, hit the long road home.’

‘Through the darkness and the rain.’ She felt her voice floating away. ‘Like in some old movie.’

In the tradition of which, about twenty miles from home, in blinding rain, he’d be involved in a shattering collision with an exhausted lorry driver who didn’t know the road and…

Oh Christ, stop it
. She gripped the phone with both hands.
Rationalize
.

‘OK, you’re right. It feels a bit odd. There
is
that rattling around feeling. Until Saturday. When Martin Longbeach arrives.’

Short silence.

‘Forgot about that. You and Martin.’

‘Who
is…’

‘Gay. I realize that.’

‘And not in a good state, losing his partner. Everybody says it’s easily controlled these days, but that’s not always the case.’

‘Martin’s not got it, has he?’

‘Don’t think so. So why was
he
spared, all this self-laceration. And I…’ Hard to stop her voice speeding up ‘… don’t want him thinking he’s being supervised, or on suicide watch, so, bottom line, can I live in your house?’

‘What?’

‘Your cottage. Can I live in it?’

‘Blimey.’

‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

‘Drink out of my cups? Light my stove if it gets cold?’

‘I’d bring my own logs.’

‘Bathe in my bathroom?’

‘Bring my own soap.’

‘Um… sleep in my bed?’

‘And eat your porridge, yeah.’

‘Well, that… that should be… that would be OK.’

‘Good.’

‘OK… well, you’ve got the key. Just one thing…’

She waited.

‘You have to promise not to wash the duvet cover afterwards,’ Lol said.

Emerging from the scullery, she felt feather-headed. Couldn’t be sure how he’d phrased the bit about asking her to marry him, convinced that even though he’d said
again
it was actually the first time the M word had ever passed between them.

She was still sporadically smiling, in an appallingly stupid, trembly, girly way, when she was sitting at the computer, clicking on links to Peter Rector, and the word
Nazi
came up.

19

Small obsession

H
ERE WAS A
man who wanted to be in the Rolling Stones: long black hair with a few grey tufts, clean-shaven, generous Jaggeresque lips in a loose, amiable smile. A face deeply scored by experience but lit up by big, brown owl-like eyes – the eyes of somebody who was either preternaturally wise or doing a lot of drugs.

But this was the 1970s and Peter Rector must have been twenty years too old to be in the Stones, and there seemed to be no more recent images anywhere.

The biographical detail was scant, his age nowhere apparent. He appeared on several occult sites. His books were not available on Amazon but Abebooks had links to a few second-hand copies, mainly at eye-watering prices.

Notably
A Negative Sun
, a dense study of the mysticism at the core of Nazi Germany, published in 1969.

Which had changed his life, she learned as the phone rang.

Huw said it was about Himmler and the SS and the occult roots of the Aryan dream. Explained as never before… at the time.

‘As a young lad, Rector were in the war. Captured by the Germans at Tobruk. When he wound up in a prison camp in Poland, the camp security happened to seize a book on ritual magic that one of Rector’s girlfriends had posted to him from Cambridge.’

‘So his interest in this stuff goes back a long way,’ Merrily said.

‘Almost lifelong,’ Huw said. ‘Parents were Cambridge professors, father a theologian. Peter Rector grew up in a house full of religious tomes, and the ones that interested him most tended to be on the occult fringe.’

‘Where did you learn that?’

‘He wrote occasional articles for magazines. Some of them are reproduced on the Internet. He said he was very keen to serve in the Middle East to get into Egypt… investigate the pyramids and the Sphinx and the birthplace of Hermetic Magic. Hadn’t counted on winding up in a German POW camp, but that were a blessing in disguise. The deputy commandant, one Kurt Scheffler, had SS links, strong esoteric leanings and nobody amongst his fellow officers genned up enough to hold a meaningful discussion with. So he has Lieutenant Rector brought in for questioning.’

Thus, Huw explained, had begun a friendship that was to transcend the armistice and lead, after Scheffler’s death, to Peter Rector’s seminal exploration of Nazi sorcery.

‘You had a lot of time on your hands in a prison camp. They’d sit up half the night, him and Scheffler, discussing the magical symbolism of King Arthur’s Camelot, Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophist movement. Most of it starts wi’ the Nazi interpretation of Blavatsky’s bonkers evolution theories suggesting fair-haired Aryans were the purest strain of humanity. Arising in the last days of Atlantis.’

‘I know. I
think
. All the rest of us came from polluted strains caused by, erm…?’

‘Having sex wi’ monkeys, aye. Scheffler had academic and SS contacts in Berlin, and he’d obtain books and documents which he showed to Rector. Who was jotting it all down from memory. If Berlin had found out, Scheffler would’ve been pulled out of Poland and shot before you could say Heil Hitler, but they got away with it. Happen Scheffler thought he were making a convert.’

‘Was he?’

‘Who knows?’

Merrily was remembering a TV documentary she and Jane had watched about Heinrich Himmler’s SS stronghold, the dramatic castle at Wewelsburg, organized around his Aryan take on Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table, the quest for the Holy Grail.

‘Rector spoke German?’

‘He did by the time the war ended.’

‘You wouldn’t think mixing with the enemy would go down all that well with his fellow prisoners.’

‘Oh, I think it would, lass. Nights drinking schnapps in the German officers’ quarters would give him a lot of useful details to pass on to the escape committee. Anyroad, end of the war, Rector emerges with a goldmine of incredible history and a stack of useful contacts. Moves back to Cambridge where it takes him twenty years, on and off, to turn it into a book. Widely acclaimed as a seminal work on magic and the Master Race. Wasn’t written in a sensational way and it wasn’t full of strident condemnation. Which was what caused some confusion later.’

‘So you’ve read it?’

‘Years ago. Gives you a vivid understanding of how occult theories came to justify the mass extermination of Jews – small hairy men, inferior species polluting the gene pool, all this. You can even understand why they saw Hitler as an avatar, a god incarnate with a mission to guide mankind into the next phase of the golden age or some such crap.’

‘You sound… surprisingly impressed.’

‘It’s compelling. He intended it to be. It’s shown from the Nazi perspective, rather than just… look at these bloody crackpots. And he does it that way because that’s how he received the knowledge. While it was happening. While it was convincing men like Scheffler. While it was white hot.’

‘So what were Rector’s actual views?
Did
he have Nazi sympathies?’

‘He said not, after the war, when he got accused of it. What he
said to the Germans is another matter. It got him through it, anyroad. And it made him a lot of money when it was over. Goes back to university, studying theology and ancient history. Lectures for a while, joins a number of occult fraternities. Meets Crowley in his heroin days, Israel Regardie, Kenny Grant, Austin Spare.’

‘There’s one of Spare’s… erotic cartoons on the wall at Cusop.’

‘Good mate of Rector’s, by all accounts. Maverick, even amongst his occult peers. Died in the sixties.’

‘So why are Spare and the others remembered more than Rector?’

‘Hard to say. Unless, after being suspected of Nazi sympathies, he deliberately courted obscurity. Seems to have given a few lectures to boost sales of
Negative Sun
and then moved on. Never wrote about Nazism again, despite offers from publishers. Went to ground. Here.’

Seemed Rector’s parents had a farmhouse with some land between Capel-y-ffin and Hay Bluff. A second home; they’d loved it there because it was all so different from the flatlands of Cambridgeshire and the Fens. Summers at the cottage, all the long holidays. So, while Peter wasn’t born there, he and his siblings had done a lot of their growing up in the Black Mountains.

‘Where there’s a tradition of odd events that he must’ve shared with Scheffler on those long night over the schnapps,’ Huw said. ‘You’ll’ve heard of Father Ignatius.’

‘Established an Anglican monastery up there? Around the turn of the twentieth century?’

‘Rector’s old man’d written a paper on him. Father Ignatius being the name adopted by an ordained C. of E. minister called Joseph Leycester Lyne, fanatical Anglo-Catholic. The monastery’s up there to this day, spooky owd place. Better known now, mind, as the home of the artist Eric Gill, who set up his own community in the nineteen twenties. Great sculptor, mad Catholic, colourful sex life involving his daughters. Summat in the air up there.’

‘So we’re actually talking not far from Cusop.’

‘As the crow flies, about six miles. He inherited his parents’ house up in the mountains. This was the nineteen seventies, his escape from the taint of Nazism. He’d written two more books on magic by then, nowt to do wi’ Nazis, but none of ’em sold like
A Negative Sun
. Sod’s law.’

‘So people did think he was actually a closet Nazi?’

‘It were all a bit of a mess.’ She heard the groaning of old leather as Huw stretched in his chair. ‘It came out he’d sent a chunk of his royalties from the book to Scheffler’s widow. Doing the right thing, as he saw it, and you can understand that. But you still had a lot of anti-German feeling in Britain, even in the seventies, and, aye, he were perceived by some as still being too close to it. I see him as just a very learned, erudite bloke who were a bit naive. And, like I say, he’d moved on.’

‘So he
was –
I mean the kids at Cusop had it right – he was a magician. Or just someone with an academic interest in it?’

‘Oh, bloody hell, more than an academic interest. Lot of popular demand, them days, for mystical experience, wi’ the drugs and the psychedelic music. He found a way to continue his studies and his… experiments… and make a good living from it. He rebuilds his life, up in the Black Mountains, in his fifties. Sets to work on the owd farmhouse, opens up outbuildings for self-catering accommodation. Converts the biggest barn into what today you’d call a conference suite. Lectures, workshops. People were taught meditation exercises, sent out into the hills to try them out. Strong vibes in the hills above Hay.’

‘Like an ashram?’

‘Aye, a Welsh ashram.
Transformation
– that were his buzzword. He called it the Centre for the Transformation of Mankind.’

‘There’s modest.’

‘It were the seventies, Merrily. You thought big. For Transformation, read altering your state of consciousness, discovering your psychic potential. Exploring the Inner Planes, as they liked
to say. Whatever you liked, except owt that stank of Nazism. He pulled a lot of celebrities into the mountains. Writers. Actors. Musicians.’

‘So how did he wind up as a recluse in Cusop Dingle?’

‘Couldn’t tell you. Until you told me he’d been found in a pond, I didn’t even know he were there. He was supposed to’ve gone abroad. All I knew was the Centre for Transformation got wound up in the mid-eighties, not long before I came down here, and he’d sold the farm to an adventure-holiday firm. All over.’

‘Right. Huw…’ She was curious. ‘How come you know so much about Peter Rector?’

‘Good question. I… I suppose I encountered him in my… quest, if you like, for summat else. Small obsession, Merrily. Listen, I’d love to take this further, lass, only I’ve a bunch of Deliverance rookies at the chapel till weekend. But if you want to meet me up there Saturday morning, you might find it enlightening.’

‘First day of my so-called holiday.’

‘We’ll do that, then. I’ll see you at Capel around ten. At the little church.’

‘OK. I’ll be there. Thanks, Huw. Erm… one final thing… was Miss White involved in Rector’s activities in the mountains?’

‘I don’t know. You going to ask her?’

Merrily said nothing. Athena White. The use of words like
bête noire
might be a bit excessive when applied to a woman approaching eighty, last seen in a wheelchair. A retired spook – possibly – whose tiny frame enclosed a monstrous intellect.

‘In an old folks’ home, in’t she?’

‘The Glades at Hardwicke. Next place up from Cusop. Quite an upmarket home. Always maintains she’s able to live happily in a place like that because of her rich inner life. Always been blatantly contemptuous of me.’

‘If she were that contemptuous,’ Huw said, ‘she wouldn’t talk to you at all.’

And he was gone, before she’d had a chance to ask him about Ms Merchant and Ms Nott.

But then, what could he have said?

She hadn’t mentioned the photocopy, either, because Bliss had told her not to discuss it directly with anybody.

Like he said, it told you nothing. Could have been a copy of a picture from a book. Some Holocaust horror.

Part of Rector’s research, maybe – she hadn’t known then that he’d written books. The female, photographed from behind, was unidentifiable, the picture so grainy you couldn’t say with any certainty that it was a female. The words could mean anything.

What will you do now?

Who? Rector himself? It had been hand-printed on the photocopy.

Why had the copy been kept in that particular book? No possible connection with Nazism there. It was mainly about medieval monastic life.

Impossible, without tests, Bliss said, to say how old the copy was, either. It had been flattened in a hardback book in a shelf unit protected from the light.

For the moment, Bliss had said, might be best just to put it back.

But keep it in mind.

And then he’d photographed it with his phone.

Merrily switched off the computer and went upstairs for a suitcase. Couldn’t get the image out of her head. Couldn’t lose it. The way it had come out of a book she’d pulled out almost at random.

What
was
random?