by Howard Marks
The sensei here was older than Walter but, to judge from his accent, a much more recent arrival. His face was very lined, very smiley.
Cat bowed her head. It had felt strange doing that to begin with, with Walter, but now it seemed respectful. Ordinary. She’d called Walter an hour ago, looking for support really, but he’d been in the middle of a class and just told her to go to this address. ‘He’s a friend of mine. A very good teacher, a good soul. He’ll be good for you, Catrin.’ Cat had accepted his order at face value. She’d learned to do that.
The sensei took her to a small windowless room, spotlessly clean, with a single bed, white sheets, white duvet, one pillow. A small basin in the corner. A tatami mat. ‘We have shower room downstair.’ The older man made a gesture, as though uncertain that she would understand his accent.
She smiled and thanked him.
‘Please. You sit.’
He indicated that she should sit on the bed, and she did so. He sat beside her, took her wrist and began to feel her pulses. The six pulses of Chinese medicine. Three shallow, three deep. He muttered to himself as he read them.
‘You are not so well.’
If that was a question, the answer is ‘yes’. Cat nodded and said, ‘I’ve had a rough few weeks.’
‘Heart meridian very weak. Heart, also heart protector. Very important for body.’ He felt the pulses again and said, ‘Body and soul. Is same thing. Please, come.’
She followed him down to a tiny office off the dojo. The walls were crammed with glass storage jars filled with strange things. Herbs some of them, perhaps, but there was one jar with what looked like the rind of some dried fruit, some containing bark or twigs, one with what looked like dead locusts.
The sensei started throwing bits from some of the jars into a small saucepan. Cat saw bark go into the pan but not, she was relieved to see, any of the locusts. The sensei took the saucepan to a small kitchenette and put the pan on to boil.
‘You go up. You wash. You relax twenty minute. Then come down. And I give you medicine.’
Cat showered, feeling every bruise, every ache from the last weeks. The dull beating of the tranks in her system was like another ache. A pain she’d grown half-used to living with. She had brought clothes with her to London, unsure if she’d be staying, so she changed into some clean things. She still felt bad, but at least she felt clean and bad.
She went down. The sensei was typing an email one-fingered and with concentration.
‘Computer, very difficult,’ he said, worked a bit longer, then stopped and gave Cat one of his full-beam smiles. There was a stink coming from the kitchen, as though some dead cats had been boiled up with a splash of ammonia.
He took her through. Drained the water from the saucepan into a mug, added some cold, and passed it over. He laughed at Cat’s expression of dismay. ‘Taste very bad. Is very good.’
The drink was worse even than it smelled. She gagged once, then drank it down.
‘Good.’ The sensei checked her pulses again, and gave her a minute or two of acupressure on some points on her inner arm. The pressure was hard enough to hurt. Then he checked her pulses one final time, said ‘good’ again and ordered her to bed. She fell asleep almost instantly and slept straight through for eleven hours, dreaming of nothing.
She woke up feeling refreshed. Stronger, clearer, sharper. It was as though she’d been looking at the world through some grimy glass and someone had come along to wipe away the grime.
She went looking for Walter’s friend to thank him, but he wasn’t there, just a couple of spotty teenagers practising kick-boxing moves. She left a thank-you note and left.
What to do next? Thomas was in Camarthen now, debriefing Riley, setting up a major inquiry. His technical team would be sweeping the computer and phone records for anything which might add to – or contradict – Riley’s tale. Meanwhile, the Met’s forensics people would be doing all they could to locate evidence of drugs in Riley’s flat. She vaguely hoped they’d damage it along the way. They probably would.
Cat thought about calling Kyle, any copper’s first move in her situation, but she desisted. Kyle somehow wanted her on the team, but not quite on it. Since that’s how Cat liked working anyway, she wouldn’t push the issue.
She found herself a café that served a full English breakfast and had wi-fi. Not an easy ask, but after half an hour tramping about she found somewhere. She ordered food and tea and booted up.
She started to sweep the net looking for anything to confirm or disconfirm Riley’s theories. It wasn’t long before the first disappointing news started to appear. She went through to the National Missing Persons Helpline. Its pages were more recent than the press reports Riley had relied on, and Cat saw that the first two of his girls – Lisa Marr and Sara Armitage – had been accounted for, or almost accounted for. They’d been in touch with their loved ones by phone and skype, saying that they were ‘on tour’, working as ‘singer/songwriters’, very ‘involved in the music scene’. That alone might not be decisive, but Lisa Marr had twice been home for special occasions. Her family reported that she was behaving a bit strangely, but was OK. They told police they thought she might be on drugs. In the case of Sara Armitage, the local officers had a suspicion – nothing more than a hunch, really – that she had walked out on her long-term English boyfriend, because she was fed up with him. They thought she had probably returned to Poland, her mother’s homeland, though they had not been able to verify that. But they had spoken to her by phone and she had seemed fine.
Cat started to feel hopeless again, but she remembered that she was here because of Martin Tilkian. He needed her now, and she had once needed him. Push on, Price, she told herself. Occasionally, she remembered, missing persons files were closed prematurely. Abductees were pressured to give misleading accounts of their well-being or make forced visits home. She went through the girls’ closed files again, checking for some signs of this, but there did not seem to be any, aside from the comment about possible drugs from the Marr family.
She ordered more tea, worked hard for two hours, but still she had nothing useful.
She had already hit a wall. The freshness and clarity she had woken with were fading fast. For no real reason, beyond the desire to take a break and out of mild curiosity, she ran a search for the website Riley had shown them with the original reference to Tartini’s ‘Devil’s Trill’. She hadn’t expected anything much to come up – yet thousands of pages were indexed. Pages from intelligent sources, too. Finally she found what looked like the material Riley had been using. On the relevant page there was the same reproduced etching of the devil in a frockcoat playing the violin. It was a patchily maintained site from someone calling himself ‘Edgar Joseph, Musicologist’. Below the image was Guiseppe Tartini’s own account of the original episode:
One night, in the year 1713, I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and – I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the ‘Devil’s Trill’ …
Then, keeping the page open, she found Thom Yorke’s bleak commentary on the ‘Street Spirit’ song that Riley had referred to. ‘They don’t realise,’ he said, ‘that “Street Spirit” is about staring the fucking devil right in the eyes, and knowing, no matter what the hell you do, he’ll get the last laugh.’ The words shook her somehow. Perhaps it was her withdrawal speaking, but she felt a certain darkness entering her. Though she didn’t believe in the devil, others did.
She checked the details of the site. The �
��contact us’ address was in the East End. She ran the map function on her phone. It was not far away. This was hardly a conventionally promising avenue of enquiry, but as she was in the area she would check it out. At least that way it would be eliminated. This time could be used to let all she had learned in the last twenty-four hours settle into patterns and routes forward.
She needed a break to clear her head anyway.
Her phone led her away from the high streets, the brash, universal shops and their cheaper, local cousins. She found herself instead in a part of town that felt much closer to its original nineteenth-century state. A place of bleakly terraced streets and large brick-built warehouses. Neither bombs nor regeneration had left their mark. She half expected to see a housewife leave her house in corset and bustle.
She kept her eye on her phone map, but the system hadn’t fully penetrated these streets. Her phone led her confidently to a dead end. It was wired-off with scrub beyond. The old factory building ahead had three storeys, a dozen windows on each storey, and a dozen panes to each iron-paned window. She couldn’t see a single piece of glass that wasn’t missing, broken or cracked.
She pocketed her phone and beat a retreat. Turned instead to older methods of finding her way. She asked three girls hanging moodily on the corner for the address she wanted. To start with, none responded, then one of them pointed back down the alley.
‘It’s down there, where you’ve come from.’
‘It’s a dead end.’
The girl seemed to have turned mute but the shortest of the three said, ‘You can go through the wire. It’s cut.’ As the youngster spoke, Cat realised it wasn’t a girl but a boy. All three of them had the eyes that knew too much for their age.
Cat thanked them, went back to the alley and, sure enough, there was a strip of wire that could be pushed back, a path that wound its way across the scrub beyond. She forced her way through. Her police eye noted a scatter of hypodermics beneath the bushes.
She traversed a hundred yards of rough ground. There was a stink somewhere close by. An open drain? Some stagnant water? At the end of the path was a wire gate, the lock long since forced. Cat went through it and found herself on a short stubby street, the one she was looking for. There were more Victorian buildings, mostly boarded-up.
She found the right door. The buzzer was set next to a mirror behind thick, vandal-proof wire. She rang it, heard nothing.
The mirror was set at an angle and she wondered if it corresponded to another inside, so a person in the building could observe the porch. Peering in, she glimpsed a shape quickly moving out of view. She rang again and finally she heard the door click open.
There was no one behind it. She stepped through and closed the door.
The flooring was black and white tiles, the walls were panelled in dark mahogany. The only illumination was from a dim brass lamp and the play of light through a stained-glass window. There were doors to either side of her, a flight of stairs rising ahead.
She tried the first door: it was locked. Tried the second and it opened on to a huge room, crammed with dark oak furniture and the same mixture of dim lighting and coloured light through stained glass. The walls swirled with what looked like original Victorian wallpaper, all dark green foliage, heavy violet blooms and implausible, tropical birds. On the tables, the floor and mounted on the walls was a collection of musical instruments. A gilded Welsh harp. A group of round-bellied string instruments – lutes? A type of sitar? Some keyboard-percussion instruments. African drums.
There was no one there.
‘Hello,’ Cat called softly, but as she did so she heard a board creaking above her. She realised that the arrangement of mirrors at the front door had flashed her image up not sideways. She had been inspected from above.
She looked up.
There was a man on the landing. He was dressed in a corduroy suit with rounded lapels that looked almost as ancient as the furnishings. His hair was purest white and disorderly. It did not look as if it had been cut for many months. He had a distracted air, like an academic disturbed in his studies.
‘Really, I don’t know why they need to send someone different each time,’ he complained.
‘Sorry?’
‘The last one didn’t even know how to do it. I had to show her myself.’
‘Maybe I’m not who you think I am.’
‘I don’t care, as long as you’ll do what I pay them to do.’
He pointed with a quivering finger at a long mahogany table. Some cleaning equipment was set out beside it.
‘French polishing, huh?’ said Cat, but she raised her warrant card as she spoke. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Catrin Price and I have some questions to ask.’
‘Really!’ The man – Edgar Joseph, presumably – was impatient and irritable, but not resistant. ‘Well, it can’t take long, because I have someone coming.’
‘But first, my questions. I’m working on a case that has … that has raised some unusual questions. A possible relationship between certain music and Satanism.’ She paused, looked closely at him. ‘And someone involved in the case was using information from your site.’
‘Yes, yes.’ When she didn’t immediately respond, he continued. ‘Well, of course there’s a relationship. As old as music, I suppose. In medieval times almost any music was associated with the devil, unless it was church music. But even that, if it was too ornate or beautiful, could be considered suspect.’ He stopped. She sensed there was a lot more he could say on the subject, but he seemed hesitant to do so.
She tried to catch his eye in the dimness.
‘I know, but in contemporary satanic practice, is there any way a certain song, for example, could have sacred associations, so that singing it could be considered blasphemy?’ She hesitated. ‘Like it was a curse to anyone who sang it?’
‘Naturally. These stories spring up always. Every age possesses them.’
He started to tell her a story about an eleventh-century religious community in Denmark. His white head nodded in the dimness. Cat wondered whether the guy even knew what century he lived in.
She interrupted. Played ‘Street Spirit’ through her phone. He tutted at the electronics, but listened.
‘This song has been associated with a number of deaths and disappearances. Real ones, not fictitious ones. You mention it on your site.’
The man looked bemused. ‘Well, I’m not very familiar with “contemporary music”.’ His fingers formed inverted commas round the despised words. ‘But that song makes extensive use of the flatted fifth, the tritone. Quite successfully, in fact. I listed a few such songs.’
‘You’ve never heard that people covering the song have been dying or disappearing?’
The man shook his head.
‘And this flatted fifth thing?’
‘That chord was long banned, of course. Banned by the Church because it was associated with states of satanic possession. The Devil’s Chord it was called. It was explicitly prohibited during the development of the hexachordal system. Named the diabolus in musica, some singers were excommunicated or otherwise punished by the Church for using it. Avoidance of the interval for musical reasons has a long history. You’ll find it underlying modern works where a certain darkness is invoked. Wagner’s ‘Gotterdämmerung’. Britten’s ‘War Requiem’. No doubt it occurs in much popular music also. I wouldn’t know.’
‘And the chord. Does it, in your view, have any power to alter state?’
‘Oh really! What an absurd question!’ The man flung his hands in the air. His bony white fingers fluttered briefly, like moths. ‘Of course it does. Listen.’ He walked over to an old-fashioned record-player and selected a record from a large rack of vinyl beside it. He put something on – Cat couldn’t see what – and placed the needle carefully on a track. Church music filled the room.
Godly, dignified tones. Elevated and solemn.
The man listened intently. As the music swelled, he raised a finger and said, ‘Now.’
&nb
sp; And she heard it. The flatted fifth. The devil’s interval. Beckoning through the half-light like an unsatisfied hunger. The tone never left the music from that point on. The melody kept circling back to it. The earlier golden tones felt like an abandoned heaven, the rest like the death of hope.
‘Can it alter state! Why would we listen to music if it couldn’t? Why would every religion, every ritual, whether sacred or profane, require it?’
The man snorted in contempt. He was done with her, but not his music. He replayed the record but at full volume. Standing white-haired at the player, the unpolished mahogany table behind him. The house filled with the music, the darkness, an ancient and vengeful past.
Cat backed away. He didn’t notice her go. He was doubtless still standing there, still listening to it, when Cat left the room, left the house, and found herself back out on the empty, sunny, expressionless street. Music still played from that upstairs room.
She made her way back through the scrubland and the wire.
The little posse of teenagers had thickened. Three more boys, dangerous looking. They looked at Cat but let her pass.
What had she been thinking of, going there? She reprimanded herself. She had wasted her time. She had real work to do. Real murders, real investigation. And already she knew where she needed to pick up her search. Music could have power: she knew that. You didn’t have to believe in the Devil’s Trill and the theories of medieval theologians to believe that. You could probably explain the whole thing with neurochemistry and alterations in the dopamine receptors. It didn’t matter how you explained it. What mattered was that fantasies could sometimes have greater power than the truth.
The man. The man you trust. Or trusted? Or will trust?
You can’t say. Those thoughts confuse you. They don’t help.
So keep it simple. Watch his lips. Listen to his words. Assess the facts yourself and draw your own best conclusions.
In his left hand, your old life. In his right hand, your new one.
But do you want to go for it? To erase yourself?