I had needed a fresh whiskey at that stage I recall. My mental commitment to do as Juliet asked and look at all this stuff without the prejudice of my natural state of committed non believer was being sorely tested.
What she had achieved was to convince me that there was enough in it to motivate some people to seek power over others and to use that power once gained for evil and violent purposes. She had also done enough to convince me that such people would naturally flock together and that these things had been happening pretty much since the dawn of civilisation. In a way that did make me see it differently. This occult stuff was like prostitution or blackmail, it was an established form of human behaviour.
Pan the flute player of the Gods was everywhere in Juliet's books from the picture on the Tarot Cards to being the evil entity that Crowley had tried to raise from Hell in a hotel room in Paris, an attempt that sent Crowley, a practised Black Magician, to a mental asylum and his assistant to an early grave.
I recall sitting there listening to the polished performance of Diana Krall and wondering how all this related to Hainsley-Sihl? Was he a person like Crowley who had set out to become a master of the dark arts? Did he kidnap and kill because that would allow him to progress towards Ipsissimus? Was that motivation enough?
I read on for a couple of hours, I wanted to do full justice to Juliet's attempt to help me and in the end I decided that it was enough. If this man thought that by ceremonially taking the life of a child to raise some demon from hell that would then grant him greater power over other people - advancement along his chosen path, he would do it.
With a lifetime of devil worship behind him he would hardly be a saint anyway. No doubt the road to where he now stood was paved with less serious crimes. That was a help to me, a path through minor crime to major crime I could handle.
Upon reflection I then asked myself where that meant Hainsley-Sihl now stood on his journey to Ipsissimus. Was his power over his subordinates related to his status? Probably so, and that meant as he had motivated them to very serious crime and the risk of life Imprisonment, that his power was considered by them to be substantial. So I was dealing with a Black Magician of some considerable standing, a modern day Alistair Crowley.
The ring on the Curator's hand told me that Hainsley-Sihl was not without support locally. Was the link between the Caverns and the Museum telling me something? I couldn't answer that one. What was it he had said? He was interested in Torre Abbey. What did Torre Abbey have to do with all of this?
I had read something in Juliet's marked pages about black magic ceremonies needing to be carried out on consecrated grounds and a long history of old churches and such places being used for that purpose. Would Torre Abbey be such a place? An eight hundred year history of religious orders practising there said it could be so.
Had Hainsley-Sihl having been excommunicated by his Church purchased the caves because they were the perfect place to hide his activities? Almost certainly so and that was where we needed to look for the evidence of his crimes.
Needing to look and being legally entitled to look are two different things. We didn't have a single shred of solid, tangible evidence against the man. He had never been charged with anything.
I was tempted to give Juliet a ring, I had the perfect excuse but that meant confronting my own emotions and I opted out, not for the first time. I was looking forward to my dinner the following night and I made my mind up that I was not going to leave without a good night kiss! French suit or no bloody French suit!
The phone was staring at me and the temptation persisted, then I saw there was a message on it. I had used it earlier to order my food but hadn't noticed it. I seldom get messages and the stupid little red indicator was about as much use as bucket in a torpedoed ship.
I pressed the button and Juliet spoke. The moment she said she had been in the Museum I was filled with anxiety for her. Unwittingly she had followed Henry and me there and that meant the Curator had had two enquiries that day, each of which would have caused him considerable unrest.
That she had seen and recognised the ring did not surprise me. She was the brightest person I knew. I just hoped she hadn't said anything to Joplin about it. I didn't want them to know we had identified it, that it had allowed us to make the possible connection between Joplin and Hainsley-Sihl.
I looked at my watch it was close to ten thirty. Would she be in bed already? I decided it didn't matter and rang her number. The phone reported a fault on the line. I rang it again and it was the same. I was feeling decidedly restless by the time I'd tried a third time.
She lived in a very out of the way place and it was more than possible, in the sleet storm outside, that something had interfered with her local line. Thinking about that reminded me that she also lived at an altitude well above mine here in Torquay; the sleet was more than likely falling as snow out there.
I tried to control my anxiety for her but it wasn't working. I picked up the telephone and took out my wallet. Henry's card was in it with his mobile number. Quickly I dialled it. I’d let him decide if I was being rational. I could not escape the feeling that Hainsley-Sihl would not want anyone to be asking questions about that ring. How would he react? Given what I thought he was capable of I felt even more anxiety for Juliet.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MURDER AT MORETONHAMPSTEAD
Juliet parked her Land Rover beside Torwood Gardens and locked it. Looking down towards the harbour she could see the time on the Clock Tower on The Strand. It was one minute to four.
She had been delayed in Court, waiting to give evidence in a criminal case. It had dragged on interminably and in the end she was heartily relieved to escape the Crown Court and get out into the sunshine to drive her car through the school pick up time traffic and take a route that led her first to Mike Milton's apartment and then on through Ellacombe, across the lower Warberries and into the Babbacombe Road.
She had deliberately chosen a route that would take her up Pembroke Road on the left side of which was the house that Mike Milton had grown up in. He had been on her mind a lot recently and particularly so since their meeting beside Exeter Cathedral.
The house was unchanged, three floors and a tiny garden just above street level that in the sixties had been planted with rambling roses and some mostly wild plants. They had partied there frequently, dancing to the music of Mike's fine record collection - his pride and joy.
A whole lifetime of friendship existed between them and at the far away beginning of that friendship - teenage days of sunshine on Moors and beaches - a childhood love story that she had never quite grown out of. In a strange way she had carried a small flame for him, like a fragile candle burning in a window far away, through the whole of her adult lifetime, through a happy marriage, the birth of two children and through the painful years as her husband's life drained away from him.
During all that long period of time the friendship had remained strong although sometimes there were periods when their roads did not cross for years but occasionally something would happen socially or his job with the Police would bring them back into contact and the bond would be there untouched and, she believed, untouchable. From the very first day at Belever their friendship was destined to be forever. Their roots had become tangled inseparably.
For months she had been aware that she was finally going to take a belated retirement. For some years since her husband died, she had only been working part time anyway, maintaining her working relationships and the contact of doing her job as a Pathologist because she was aware there was a danger she would become too reclusive if she did not fight the temptation to do so. It would have been easy living in such a secluded place as she did to shun all contact and settle down to enjoy a fine library and a lovely garden.
In the past few months she had become increasingly aware that her memory of a good husband and father had found a place at rest inside herself and that finally her heart was ready to consider moving on. At the same time she had also begu
n to think that life without companionship - without a loving relationship - was not something that she wanted at all. Experience told her that she had been happiest within such a relationship.
She had the luck to be very fit and very healthy and a home that had no mortgage outstanding. She was comfortably off financially and life had everything but that one fulfilling relationship to make it truly worthwhile.
The meeting with Mike in Exeter had had all the hallmarks of so many meetings across the years. There was ever present that bond, the tangled roots that sensed each other chemically through the soils of time.
It was constructed upon the memories of a lifetime, happy times and sometimes - as with the loss of Tim - sad times too. Always he had been able to make her laugh, make her see the world in terms that were not about physical things or things achieved in their professional capacities but about the deeper meaning of things. He was one of those other worldly people for whom the boy had become the man but the man somehow had remained the boy. He had not changed in the slightest over the whole of a lifetime. He was somehow different to everyone else she had ever known and he was still different now.
There had been across the years at least two occasions on which she had thought they were drifting into an extramarital love affair. They had come very close both times. The chemistry was always right the mutual attraction always present. And there was of course inevitably it seemed now looking back, the third time when drift had become headlong rush and with him between two marriages and herself in the only truly rocky period of her own marriage they had had a short hot and passionate love affair.
They had done the whole classical extramarital love affair things - meetings in cars, pubs chosen for their likelihood of their not meeting anyone either of them knew, restaurants that neither of them had ever visited before, the horrible lies that formed made up professional meetings to cover a stolen weekend away, walks on secluded beaches. Tears and hot love, recriminations and remorse, two months of love so bright it burnt and then the reality check of current commitment and children at school and the inevitable crushing goodbye.
In all the years that had passed since then the subject had never been mentioned. If he had any recriminations against her he had never said so, never shown any signs of it at all. He had taken goodbye with grace and gentleness. He had held her like a man holding a Dove and opened his hands at her request to let her fly free and by so doing unknowingly entangled their roots more firmly than ever.
In Exeter he had been looking tired and pressured. On Hope's Nose, cold and bleak as the morning itself had been. Still fit like herself, still active like herself and still with that devilish charm of the successful seventies D.J, trying to convince the world he was jaded and worn out and not showing the tiniest sign of either.
In Exeter there had been the good food and wine and the knowledge that he could offer her all the companionship and caring she could ever want. But had he ever forgiven her? She didn't know but on Friday she was determined to find out. It was time for life to move on for both of them.
His current case was a worry for her. His utter lack of belief in anything other than the rather hard world of Policemen that he inhabited was not going to help him at all and so she had decided to help him herself.
The books she had just dropped off at his apartment were the result of several days of research on her own behalf. Bringing back to mind things she had learned as a girl on the Moors and things that she had learned from her parents and grandparents lives upon the Moors. Her family had been there since the Doomsday book, she was Moorland through and through and - unlike Mike - this was not the first time that occult things had become involved with her professional discipline.
Long ago there had been another case on Dartmoor that was about murder and Black Magic and the whole history of the Moor was so steeped in it that having done the autopsy on that case she had made a study of the history of occult practises on Dartmoor.
She had started out thinking that it would fill a couple of weeks and give her an after work interest but it had taken her eleven years. The results had been stacked for her retirement when she had planned to write a book on the subject but now they were once again imparting their knowledge and she wanted to make sure that Mike did not underestimate the potent deadly force he was up against. She was worried about him.
She understood instinctively that he was one end of a string - the total non-believer - and the person he sought was the other, the totally committed practitioner. Chalk and Cheese, diametrically opposed.
This particular totally committed practitioner thought it was alright to wield a knife with such force that it almost decapitated a young woman. The worst single blow that she had ever witnessed as a Pathologist just as she had told Mike in Exeter. Anyone capable of that was not to be taken lightly and anyone capable of that for occult reasons was not an adept to take lightly either. He was a person of some very considerable power. Mike would never admit or truly understand that. She'd known him too long and too well.
To Juliet it seemed as though he was going into battle without a gun, without armour and without military training. The battlefield itself was totally alien territory to him. On Friday she would change that too.
In the night she had remembered something from the days when she had given her spare time to her study of Moorland occult history and decided to check her memory at Torquay Museum where she hoped they would have the information she needed. If she was correct she thought she would be able to tell him where the murder of the girl took place.
Crossing the road she entered the Museum and found herself surrounded by Victorian age stuffed birds and old display cabinets full of local history, a lot of it about Torquay's fine natural history.
She wasn't in any hurry and began to enjoy the quiet building full of well-presented pieces of local discoveries. Some of the prints and paintings were really beautiful; she was walking through a real treasure trove.
The time that she could allow for herself was soon past and she went in search of someone who could help her with her quest before the Museum closed for the day. It took some time to find anyone - she had the building to herself it seemed but finally she found the Curator in a corner working with some old water colour paintings of flowers and assorted sizes of frames.
She introduced herself and told him she was researching for a novel about local customs and places and he was all kindness and help. A small, well-dressed man with a quick mind she decided.
“A long time ago I came across an old leaflet and I'm hoping to read it again for my book,” she told him. “It was only a page or two, just a folded leaflet really but it was about a place that had been built by the Monks of Torre Abbey. If my memory serves me correctly it was called Ilsham Chapel.”
She had been watching him inserting a print into a frame as she spoke and saw his hand jerk as she mentioned the Chapel. It was the jerk that did it, drawing her attention to his hand. On his finger was a large ostentatious ring and on the ring was Il Diavolo. Unmistakeable after the notes she had attached to one of the books she had just left at Michael's apartment. She had been looking at precisely that figure the previous evening.
“Ilsham Chapel?” He put the print down and placed the frame carefully onto the table. “I don't recall having ever seen anything here about such a place. Are you sure it was Torquay? There is an Ilsham Valley here but that's all buildings from long after the time of Torre Abbey as a working monastery. Hundreds of years. Mostly Georgian and Victorian. It's just up the road from here.”
“He wasn't very good at lying at all. He looked shaken by her reference to Ilsham Chapel and Juliet's mind was racing. The ring had shaken her as much as her words had shaken him. She was about to say something else when a tall red haired youth appeared between the cabinets behind him carrying an armful of packaging materials.
“Ah Harold there you are!” He turned to Juliet, “would you be kind enough to excuse me for a moment, we have to send something off
to the British Museum and it's rather important.” He walked away not waiting for an answer and took the tall youth by the arm hurrying him away through a door to their left.
Juliet was glad of a moment to herself. Who would wear a ring bearing a Tarot symbol? What were the chances of her writing notes for Michael about exactly that symbol and then less than twenty fours later seeing it as jewellery? It took her only a few seconds to make the mental leap to the question that Mike would ask immediately. Why was he wearing a ring that had a picture which had been painted on a girl’s corpse?
Some people cannot tell lies and the Curator was one of them. She had clearly startled him into speaking without thinking and he had not done a very good job of deflecting her from her interest in Ilsham Chapel.
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