The Magus of Hay (23 page)

41

Into the hearth

‘N
AME
’
S
R
OBIN
T
HOROGOOD
,’ Brent said. ‘American. A bookseller in Hay. Or planning to be.’

Small group of them on benches in a back room of the community centre, down near the toilets: Bliss, Ceri Watts of Dyfed-Powys, Karen Dowell, Terry Stagg, Rich Ford.

‘So what’ve we got?’ Ceri Watts said.

‘Circumstantial up to now. However…’ Brent started counting off the pluses on his fingers. ‘He only lives in Kington, but he was in town all night. Leaving his truck on the car park near where Winterson’s car was found. Says he got drunk and – rather than get a taxi home to his rather lovely wife – chose to sleep over his shop. Which, as he’s only just taken it on, has no furniture, least of all a bed. I’d have to be extremely pissed to sleep there in any circumstances.’

‘And that’s it?’ Bliss said.

‘He says he slept in the bath,’ Terry Stagg said. ‘Even though he claims to be disabled. His fellow drinkers at Gwenda’s Bar have confirmed he was there until eleven-ish, but none of them knows where he went after that. Although two people in the town say they saw him wandering the streets, unsteadily. Like someone who should be in Talgarth, as one put it.’

‘Meaning the former psychiatric hospital there,’ Ceri Watts said.

For Brent’s benefit. Whoever this feller was, Bliss felt a twinge of sympathy, remembering how, just after they let him out of the
hospital, he was all over the pavements in Hereford and people would cross the road to avoid him.

‘Any previous, Iain?’

‘No, but the word is his circumstances have changed quite a bit in the last couple of years, and not in a good way. Soon as Stagg started talking to him, on the car park – just routine stuff, to begin with – it was like he was still drunk. Very obviously lying. His wife was with him, and you could tell she didn’t believe him either.’

‘Maybe she thought he’d been playing away.’

‘And maybe he’d been playing with Tamsin Winterson. And maybe something got out of hand.’

‘Big leap, Iain.’

‘
You’ve
taken enough of those in your time, Francis. Something else about Thorogood is that he denied all knowledge of Winterson. Virtually every other shopkeeper – bakers, ironmongers, café and sandwich bar owners and booksellers too – either knew her personally or recognized her picture. It’s her local town. People are worried – except for Thorogood.’

‘Although, as I understand it,’ Rich Ford said, ‘he’s only been around for a matter of weeks.

‘So what’s he done with her?’ Bliss said.

Brent turned to Terry Stagg.

Staggy had grown this spotty beard, probably to cover up a couple of his chins. He cleared his throat.

‘Well, she’s not in his shop. It’s not even as big as it looks from outside. Books downstairs and a kitchen. Upstairs, living room, two bedrooms, bathroom. Mrs Thorogood said they were planning to move in properly when their house was sold, but hardly any furniture there yet.’

‘What did crime-scene think?’

‘Not impressed, sir, unfortunately. We went over the place thoroughly. No cellar, no outbuildings, no room for any. It’s quite a confined space.’

‘And how’s Mr Thorogood behaving?’

‘Pretending to be outraged, sir, but I reckon he knows what he’s fucking done.’

Bliss looked at Brent, sensing a muted excitement there, before turning to Stagg.

‘Done
, Terry? Do I take it we’re now of the opinion that Tamsin’s definitely dead? Because that’s a different kind of search, isn’t it? You think this was something random? Or was he thinking, I know, I’ll park me truck very visibly next to this girl’s car, look for an opportunity to rape her—’

Brent put up both hands for silence.

‘Let’s not get
too
far ahead of ourselves but, all the same, this is clearly not the most balanced bookseller in the town. I’ve known longer shots that paid off.’

‘So which one’s the most balanced, Iain? They’re friggin’
booksellers
. It’s hand-to-mouth these days. And like Rich says, this feller’s not been around the place for long. Is there
any
connection we know of between him and Tamsin?’

‘Well, no… and yes.’ Brent looked entirely untroubled. ‘And you might find this interesting, considering your apparent interest in the late Peter Rector’s library. The only connection’s the books. The kind of books that Thorogood sells. Terry?’

‘It’s all he’s got in there,’ Stagg said. ‘Weird books. Witchcraft books. Crank stuff. Reckons he’s a pagan.’

‘Norra crime, Terry.’

‘He’s a nutter, boss, trust me, and I’ll tell you something else. When we went in there, it was just him and his missus and there was some tension there. Between them. I may be wrong but I reckon he’d been in tears. What’s that say?’

Ceri Watts scratched the side of his neck.

‘As it happens, I know a bit about this man. Involved in a fracas in Radnor Forest, few years ago. An evangelist guy, Ellis, very much a crackpot himself, took against Thorogood and his wife because they were doing whatever pagans do in a ruined church. All got a bit overshadowed, at the time, by an arrest for an ostensibly unconnected murder in the same area. But it was
fraught enough, and that’s how Thorogood got his injuries. Now, Gwyn Arthur Jones was SIO on that, and he’s living in Hay now, so if you want any background on Thorogood, he’s your man.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Brent said.

You could see him forgetting it before your eyes.

Robin was quiet now, Betty hoping to all the gods that it wasn’t relief. She stood in the damp, musty silence, surrounded by all their lovingly collected books which deserved better, and wiped her eyes with a sleeve.

The hardest part had been holding Robin back without this looking like something she had to do all the time.

She was in the tiny kitchen getting a glass of water when she heard Robin calling to her from upstairs. She found him standing in the middle of the rust-coloured rug, hands on his hips. He did that sometimes to ease the pain.

‘What the hell…?’

Pale daylight gave the room a greasy yellow patina. A sooted board lay in front of the upstairs fireplace.

‘Hmm,’ Betty said. ‘One of them mentioned that on the way out. It was sealing the chimney off, one of them tapped it and it fell out. Seems we’re breaking the law. It’s asbestos.’

‘Bastards just had to find something, didn’t they?’

‘We need to dispose of it, but not in a public skip.’

Betty bent and lifted the plate, getting sticky soot over both hands. She just wanted to hurl it through the window. Went on her knees to the cramped fireplace. There was a small pyramid of soot in the bottom and another trickle coming down like black sand in an egg timer. Betty squinted up the chimney.

‘Yeah, I know,’ she said, ‘I’ll send the cleaning bill to the police.’

There was a crisping from above, and she backed out fast. Soot was one thing, but a major eruption of dead jackdaws…

She sat back on her heels in the dirt, suspended in an extraordinary moment of crystal
I-am-here
consciousness. What the
hell
was she
doing
? If Robin really was no longer happy here, was ready to take the money and run…

Something fell into the hearth. Nothing dead, only an accumulation of tar. Where it had broken off, she saw a bare patch on the firebricked wall and the edge of something crudely carved there. There was a buzzing in her ears, like tinnitus. Coldness in her chest.

‘Betty?’

‘Hang on.’

She reached up and pulled off more flakes of tar, brushed the wall clean with the edge of her hand until it was fully revealed.

Maker’s mark? Too big, surely.

‘Robin, is the phone up here?’

They had just the one mobile.

‘In my pocket.’

‘Put it on camera for me, would you?’

She scrambled out of the fireplace and went to put on the light. She could see now that the carving on the chimney wall was not as crude as it had looked. Didn’t have Robin’s finesse, but there was a kind of painstaking precision. It looked old, but it couldn’t be very old because brown firebricks like this couldn’t have been around all that long.

And which firebrick manufacturer in the last eighty years would have put out a product carrying a swastika?

Of sorts, anyway. Robin handed Betty the phone, and she thrust it firmly up the chimney and took a picture in case it should crumble to dust before her eyes. When she rolled away, she had the impression of a shadow rising as if formed from soot. She scowled.

‘Iain, for what it’s worth…’ Bliss had caught up with Brent in the doorway after the others had left. ‘For what it’s worth, I think she’s a smart girl. And totally committed to the Job. I don’t think she’s the kind of girl who’d cop off on a whim with some piss-artist bookseller.’

‘The vagaries of human behavioural patterns will always surprise me, Francis,’ Brent said.

‘You being a PhD and all.’

Brent shook his head, kind of pityingly, then it came up, jaw jutting.

‘And what about a policeman, Francis? Would she… cop off with a detective, do you think?’

‘What’s that mean?’ Bliss’s guy went tight. ‘Sir.’

Brent waved it away.

‘Don’t you need some sleep?’

‘And you need everybody you can get,’ Bliss said. ‘If your bookseller angle falls down, all overtime restrictions’ll be off by tonight.’

‘If.’ Brent headed for the operation room. ‘Go home, Bliss. Have a bath, have a shave.’

Bliss walked savagely away, through the main doors, letting one swing behind him. Couldn’t remember whether he’d left his car on the field at the back or the big car park. Couldn’t believe what he thought Brent had said.

The numbness had taken half his face.

Couldn’t find his car on the field behind the community centre. No, he wouldn’t’ve put it there; he hadn’t even known they were using it until he’d got here. Bugger. He walked round the building and out of the entrance into Oxford Road, where a woman came up to him, pushing a bike, panting.

‘Excuse me, are you with the police?’

She was looking at him, uncertainly, and he realized he was still wearing his baseball sweater with the big numbers on the front. He nodded.

‘Only somebody asked me to tell the first policeman I saw. They’re saying a body’s been found in the river.’

42

Unfinished

W
ALKING DOWN TOWARDS
the clock, they saw shoppers sitting at tables outside one of eateries, some examining books they’d bought, some looking around, aware of something happening that wasn’t quite normal.

Under a darkening sky, Merrily and Huw grabbed one of the tables outside the Granary, across from the clock tower. Merrily pulled out her cigarettes.

‘OK to smoke here, you think?’

‘You’ll soon know if it isn’t.’

‘Huw, they’ve got better things to do.’

Merrily guessing you rarely saw any police at all, on foot, in the streets of Hay-on-Wye. You wouldn’t see this many on a normal day in a city, and they looked more menacing now, more militaristic with all those straps and pouches. Like the addition of a gun for every cop was only one strip of Velcro away.

‘So you met her,’ Huw said, ‘the missing copper?’

‘She was very… She
is
very likeable. Very keen.’

Lighting up, she had a vivid mental image of eager, freckly Tamsin Winterson, back in Rector’s stone bungalow.

CID, sir?

I’ll bear that in mind, Tamsin.

Telling her to call him
boss
, as if she was already halfway there. Oh God, this was awful. She felt like some tourist voyeur in her jeans and T-shirt and a fading grey fleece.

‘Doesn’t look too good for her, does it?’ Huw said. ‘Police don’t go missing.’

‘But with a police officer, they’re never going to give up the search.’

They’d stopped their cars at the ruined stone circle by Hay Bluff, Huw pointing out where the Convoy used to gather. Open common land, once a big bus station for psychedelic single-deckers and luminous haulage vans with windows punched in their sides. Fence-post fires, generators for the music, astral travel, courtesy of the psilocybin mushroom. A woman and a girl slipping away into the crazy night, forever.

They’d seen a police helicopter, so low that it appeared almost to be grazing the hills.

‘If you want to hold the table, I’ll get us summat to eat. Anything in particular?’

‘Anything.’ She got out her purse. ‘But not much. If they still do those goat’s cheese open sandwiches… Or whatever’s similar.’

‘Put that away, lass. I’ve got a private income.’

‘Have you?’

‘No. Listen, if you get time, after, go and have a quick look at Father Richard Williams’s Marian grotto. You might like it.’

‘Oh… the church. Yeah, I will. Might pray for guidance.’

By the time he was back out, with two teas, her phone was chiming. She inspected it. Oh, hell.

‘It’s Martin Longbeach. I’ll have to call him back.’

‘Just hope he’s not desecrated your church already.’

‘What I’ve always admired about you, Huw,’ Merrily said. ‘That overwhelming compassion.’

Looked like rain was coming in.

Martin came directly to the point. He said Sylvia Merchant had called in at the vicarage around mid-morning.

‘Just like that?’

‘She asked when you’d be back. I said you’d be away from the
vicarage for ten days. I said – I hope you don’t mind – that you were upset about what had happened. She said she wouldn’t want that for the world.’

‘That doesn’t sound like her, Martin.’

‘Or words to that effect.’

‘So obviously you told her I’d mentioned it.’

‘Well, yes. And then I invited her in for coffee and we had a long chat. I told her about Daniel. She asked if I’d… seen him? You know? I said I hadn’t.’

‘She was, erm… alone, I presume.’

‘Oh, yes.’

Merrily saw a policeman talking into his radio and then hurrying away down the street, several nearby shoppers watching him, expelling low, anxious whispers, a sorrowful excitement on their faces.

Oh God. Merrily throwing her concentration into the phone.

‘Martin, I’m curious. Did she ever specifically say to you that she was gay?’

‘She didn’t say she wasn’t. The thing is, Merrily, those of us who have never been any other way or sought to conceal it, we don’t make an issue of it. The longer I live, the more I think that’s the cause of all the ill-feeling, all the dissent. I’m not a gay priest, I’m just a priest. Should there be gay bishops? There always
have
been gay bishops. Just not with a capital G.’

‘Funny. Huw Owen makes the same point.’ She glanced at him. ‘If in a slightly blunter fashion.’

‘I suppose it’s just the same way, as Sylvia didn’t, for quite a while, say she was a spiritualist, although it became clear that she—’

‘What?’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘No.’

‘Doesn’t mean she’s one of these people who go to public seances every week. Seems to attend only one church, which is the Cathedral. What she wanted to know – and that, I’m
guessing, is what she wanted to approach with you – is whether spiritualism is considered compatible with Church of England worship.’

‘She didn’t mention this.’ The scream of an oncoming emergency vehicle forcing Merrily to switch the phone to her other ear. ‘She told Sophie I was treating her best friend as if she was an evil spirit requiring major exorcism. Which was, of course—’

‘Merrily, grief—’

‘Even allowing for what grief does. I don’t understand this. Or why she also avoided discussing it with George Curtiss from the Cathedral.’

A police car went past at speed, full squeal.

‘I think she just wanted to talk to you,’ Martin said. ‘To have an intelligent discussion, one-to-one.’

‘About spiritualism?’

‘Which we had. An intelligent discussion. And I thought I should tell you, as soon as possible, that she has no intention – nor ever did have – of making an official complaint against you.’

‘That’s not what she told Sophie.’

‘Merrily, it was a cry for
help
. She wanted attention. I’m glad that I was able to give it to her. Permitted to give it. No offence at all to you. She probably opened up to me because I’m gay.’

‘And what did you tell her – about compatibility?’

‘I told her it was a broad church and we never turned anyone away, but that our belief – or at least mine – was that attempting to maintain contact with our loved ones on the other side of death was unlikely to be beneficial to either.’

‘And she said?’

A woman came out of the Granary with their lunch on a tray. Merrily pushed her chair back and signalled to Huw to eat.

‘She said there was sometimes unfinished business,’ Martin said.

‘There’s nearly always unfinished business. This is still not making any sense, Martin. You tell her you don’t condone communion with the dead, where does this get her?’

‘Well, I hope I’ve made it clear that it’s nothing for you to worry about. You’re on holiday and you can relax.’

‘So you’re going to see her again? Unfinished business?’

‘She wants me to meet her medium. To make it clear to me, as she said, that there’s nothing unhealthy in it.’

‘And you’re going to—’ She waited for another police car to go through. ‘You’re actually going to
do
that?’

‘Can’t do any harm. It’s not as if I’m going to become a convert.
Relax
, Merrily.’

‘Be very careful, Martin. We’re both on unsafe ground here.’

She watched the blue lights dispersing oncoming traffic like fly repellent, nobody relaxing here.