Sympathy for the Devil

by Howard Marks

  Huw was still staring out at the lone figure out in the mist. ‘I was part of the team that devised that sting,’ he said without looking at her.

  ‘Thomas told me.’

  ‘That lab was a dead end. We never found out who was behind it.’

  Huw put his arm around her waist as he spoke. Gently she pulled herself away. She’d had an idea, something vague, a sensation as much as an idea, but now she felt it slowly gathering momentum inside her, like a desire, a hope. ‘The drugs from that lab had no known commercial value, right. They’re deep trance drugs, Thomas said, the type used in some forms of witchcraft and by ancient shamans to enter the spirit world.’

  Huw seemed dubious, perhaps not following her yet. She thought back to what Thomas had said, that all the time Rhys had been working a single case. She ran the chain of events once more in her mind. The first three bodies with liver damage had led Rhys to the lab in Heath Park. Then the trail had led Rhys back to the island, and he’d found her drugged and senseless in the woods. In Rhys’s mind whoever had abducted her was behind the lab, behind the nineteen disappearances, the nineteen dead. He was the man with the long hair, the man in the films.

  This same man behind everything, all right, but who was he? She thought back to how the abduction dates coincided with Jones’s. Two prolific serial abductors wouldn’t have been operating independently, not within the same small area and time frame. So everything pointed to that figure being Jones, and Rhys had evidently been of the same view. Rhys arresting Jones no longer seemed a chance event. Rhys had arrested Jones because he’d already been looking for him.

  But if Jones was the man, then how to explain why bodies were still turning up? This was what had drawn Rhys out again to the area, and had led to his death. Slowly Catrin drew a shape in the condensation on the pane, a stylised bird’s head, watched as the shape dissolved back into the moisture.

  ‘The type of drugs made in that lab, the trance drugs, Thomas said you’re transported into a parallel reality, one that seems as real as this one. This was why the shaman would believe, when he took those drugs, he would meet his spirits and gods.’

  Huw was staring at the ghost of the shape on the pane.

  ‘Or his demons. Much of the imagery of our devil has been taken from what was witnessed during the trances of ancient shamans. You think the abductor has been using these drugs to conduct seances, necromancy. That’s what we’re seeing in those films?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Catrin put her hand over his, held it tightly. ‘Did you ever encounter drugs like those in any other busts during that period?’

  Huw seemed hesitant. She watched him click into what looked like a secure private email account. There was some text encrypted there in PGP and another encryption system she’d never seen before.

  ‘This was some research I did, at the time we found the lab.’ He paused. ‘It didn’t make much sense to me then. Still doesn’t, really.’

  Catrin looked at the text. Most of the first part was a series of chemical formulas. She recognised only some from her drugs training. The main formula was for a synthetic variation of something called dimethyltryptamine. DMT, a very powerful hallucinogen, one of the most powerful and dangerous ever discovered. Usually the hallucinations were short and intense, no more than a few minutes before the chemical was metabolised by the body. But what she was seeing on the screen shocked her. There were formulas for prolonging the experience, blocking metabolisation with harmaline and other inhibitors. This would enable the intense hallucinatory effects to continue for days, maybe weeks even.

  ‘Dimethyltryptamine,’ she said. ‘It’s known as the soul molecule. It’s plant-derived, but also intrinsic to the human brain. It’s found in the pineal gland, that’s where up to the time of Descartes philosophers located the human soul. It’s the chemical associated with near-death experiences, crossing over to the realm of the dead.’

  Huw nodded. ‘Also with witchcraft,’ he said, ‘and ancient Celtic shamans would use fungi and other plants that contained it to travel into the underworld. Like the plants in those sheds. If the figure we see in those films is the abductor, then what the hell was going on there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She put her hand over his fingers, felt how cold they were. Gradually letting go she bent over the keyboard. She cross-searched the names of the drugs with the words ‘witch’ and ‘shaman’ and confirmed what Huw had said. She looked up to where she had drawn the bird’s head; only the faintest outline was left of it now. She keyed in the word ‘raven’ and a long list of links to various anthropological studies came up. It seemed the raven had symbolism for many ancient religions. She narrowed the search to Celtic significances. The raven she saw had been a symbol of hidden knowledge, of death and departed souls, and the costume worn by shamans making the journey into the underworld had often been that of a raven.

  Catrin sensed something tugging at her memory. She went back to the account by the American academic of witchcraft on the island, and read it through again. The account claimed children in the area had become possessed by spirits, and had disappeared into a place the locals believed was a mouth to hell. Sightings of the older man, Penrhyn, had continued for many years afterwards, as had the disappearances.

  The piece still felt sketchy and incomplete. She knew she couldn’t read too much into it and looked again at the small illustration of a man wearing long black robes and standing at the mouth of a cave. His arms were outstretched and at the edge of the cave stood several young people, their faces distorted, as were their limbs, within a circle of what appeared to be black arrowheads or feathers. She thought of what Tudor had said he’d glimpsed in the woods, a child playing in a cloak made of feathers. She touched Huw’s hand and noticed it was cold.

  ‘From the beginning of this case, I’ve had a sense that everything’s been happening for one purpose, for one specific but terrible purpose. And Rhys understood that purpose, it was a burden he carried within him, that ate away at him. He became a junkie to cope with the pain of carrying it. That was why Rhys was still working something related to that old case after all these years. Once it was inside him he could never let it go.’

  Catrin felt for her roll-ups. ‘And at the end, when Rhys had no one else to turn to, when they were hunting him down, he was trying to reach me. He had to pass the knowledge of the case on to someone, and he chose me.’

  ‘So where does his source fit in?’

  ‘Rhys made sure his source knew who I was, knew I could be trusted. That’s the way Rhys kept his secret knowledge of the case alive.’

  ‘Yet the source never came to you. Rhys said the source would trust only you, so why has that source not revealed himself?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She moved away from the middle of the room, sat down on the bed, laid the pouch of Drum on her naked thighs.

  She heard the sound of water pouring from the bath taps. Then Huw came and sat at the table, his fingers moving over the outlines of the faces he’d printed out. In the flickering light from the Glangwili Hospital portal his eyes had that deep-set, hollow look of someone who had been staring at the screen for hours.

  ‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘the teleconference, it gave me a chance to check on something.’

  ‘Something you didn’t trust me with.’ Catrin stared hard at him, steadied herself on the chair and felt a surge of anger rise through her. All the times Rhys had not told her things came back to her, those nights she’d waited up at the flat, drinking alone until sleep came. At least I must really feel something for him, she told herself. If I couldn’t I wouldn’t care what he did.

  ‘This thing,’ he said, ‘it was about Emyr Pugh.’

  ‘Ah, I get it, you know Pugh and I go way back, so on this you kept me out of the loop.’

  She thought he was smiling, trying to hide it. ‘No, I didn’t want to use the phones here.’

  She didn’t see why he found it funny. ‘Bollocks, you’ve been haunted by this case for years, lik
e Rhys. I’m just a means to you, a tool.’

  Catrin got up, went into her room, slamming the door, then realised she’d left her tobacco behind and felt even angrier. She needed to know what the connection with Pugh was, and if she sat in the dark fuming she wasn’t going to find out.

  She opened the door a crack, stood there silently. Huw threw her the tobacco, smiling sheepishly up at her.

  ‘Pugh,’ he said. ‘If I’d really meant to keep that from you, I’d not have mentioned it, would I?’ He looked down, no longer smiling. ‘Think about it.’

  She knew he had a point, began to calm down a little. ‘So what was it?’

  ‘I wanted to know if Rhys had ever mentioned the case to Pugh.’ He paused. ‘I know you said Pugh sometimes saw Rhys around town, usually down the riverside where his body was found.’

  ‘But Pugh’s had plenty of occasions to tell me if Rhys had said anything to him, and he didn’t.’

  ‘Right, so I wondered, well if maybe it was something he didn’t want to tell you, because he didn’t think there was anything in it, didn’t want you chasing after what he thought was junkie bullshit.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I left a message, told him if there is, to get in touch but not by phone. But he’s away on leave.’

  Catrin laughed. ‘I could’ve told you that anyway.’

  She came back to the table and sat down at the screen beside him.

  ‘Any other acute liver conditions in the mispers not uploaded into the files then, the type that might’ve been caused by these extended trance drugs from the lab?’

  ‘I checked the GP notes, the NHS inpatients records at Withybush, Glangwili and the Morriston hospitals for all the other mispers we’ve pulled, and drew a blank for any liver or toxicity-related admissions on any of them.’

  ‘Anything else come up?’

  ‘Just the usual pre-teen, early teen issues – routine fractures, asthma, suspected meningitis, nothing that ties into the Stephens file.’

  In the half-light, she began to roll a cigarette by touch.

  ‘Something doesn’t feel quite right about that.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Mispers, runaways tend to have fairly active medical records. One would expect some incidence of teenage pregnancy, self-harm, psychological or drug-related problems.’

  ‘But the more sensitive issues – teenage pregnancies, self-harm episodes – these often get handled in the private sector at the request of the parents. That would explain their not showing in the NHS databases.’

  She opened the steamed-up window a crack, felt in the drawer for a lighter.

  ‘That might explain the cases from middle-class backgrounds, but about half of them, like Stephens, were the children of long-term unemployed and travellers or were in care.’

  ‘But we know those are just the types that can slip out of the system altogether.’

  When she sparked the lighter, the flame was too long. She could smell her hair singeing. She blew the smoke up towards the window.

  ‘Another explanation could be that someone deliberately wanted some of those medical histories off the radar, either by paying for the youths to go private, or by wiping the files.’ She watched the smoke drift out into the mildewed air.

  ‘So why did the Stephens admission still show then?’ Huw asked.

  ‘That admission was over five years before his disappearance. You said that the cases had all the usual records up to early teens. Maybe the wipe-out only went back five years from the disappearance dates, so the Stephens notes got through?’

  She had the sense suddenly that Huw was no longer listening to what she was saying. He went through to the bathroom and turned off the taps.

  She switched on the lamp, started to gather up clean underclothes, jeans, a sweatshirt. Then she sat on the edge of the bed, just as she used to with Rhys, waiting for her turn in the bathroom.

  Huw stepped out of the door, a white towel wrapped around his waist. He put his right hand up to her face, pushing a stray hair away from her lower lip.

  Unfastening the towel, she began to dry him. He was still, head bowed, lifting his arms as she ran the towel down his chest. She worked quietly, methodically. When she had finished she put the towel on the bed, her arms around him so that she could rest her head in the warm, salty groove of his collarbone. He was kissing the top of her head, so softly she could barely feel his breath through the strands of her hair. She felt an unexpected moment of emptiness and calm.

  Huw moved away from her towards the table. Catrin carried her clothes through to the bathroom, leaving the door open so they could still hear each other.

  ‘Those cottages at the cove,’ she called through the steam. ‘I got another look at them. Most have been done up in a similar style to Rhys’s. It looks as if they’re all owned by a single company?’

  She could hear Huw working the keyboard.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Eglwys Beach. It’s owned by a company registered to an address in Cardiff.’ He repeated the address to her. She heard more tapping. ‘But on the registry that address is listed as derelict.’

  Catrin let the warm water course down her tensed-up back. Through the door she saw Huw lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘In the village, have you seen any other cottages being refurbished?’

  ‘None.’

  Through the steam she could see nothing clearly now. ‘That older man with the cane, I asked him and he said he was doing up some holiday lets near the village.’

  ‘Must be those then.’

  ‘So Rhys was staying in one of his cottages,’ Catrin said. The steam was stinging her eyes, making her sweat. ‘But when I asked him if he’d seen Rhys, he said he hadn’t.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t recognise Rhys from the picture?’

  ‘I pointed out Rhys’s earrings. They’re not the sort of thing you’d forget. Fransis Serafim he calls himself, unusual name for a local man.’

  ‘Rhys could’ve asked this Fransis to keep quiet about his being there?’

  ‘Or Fransis chose to keep quiet about it.’

  She went and sat in front of the small dressing table by the window as Huw called the barman to ask if he knew where Fransis’s place was.

  ‘And?’

  ‘He thought he might be connected to the clinic in some way.’

  Catrin cast her mind back to the staff register she’d run, didn’t remember his name there. ‘He’s a patient?’

  ‘The barman didn’t seem to want to talk about him.’

  ‘He seemed all on edge yesterday when the man was here. Like that dealer, he seemed uneasy when we mentioned him.’

  She pulled on the band that held her hair out of her face when she did her make-up.

  ‘Call him again, ask him which room Thomas is in,’ she said.

  Behind her she heard Huw’s calm professional tone, a pause, then the click of the receiver dropping back onto its cradle. Huw got up, stood by the door.

  ‘Thomas didn’t come back to his room last night.’

  ‘How did he know that?’

  ‘When he went in this morning the bed hadn’t been slept in. He said he saw Thomas leaving the building last night in a van with builder’s tarps on it.’

  The bar looked closed, the doors shut. Glasses lay on the tables, uncleared from the previous night’s lock-in. A fug of stale smoke hung in the still air.

  The young barman was crouching at the back, painting a long, old-fashioned surfboard. The wood had been sanded down and he was applying to it a thick coat of some pungent metallic paint.

  Huw cleared his throat. ‘Sorry to bother you again,’ he said quietly.

  ‘That’s all right.’ He’d directed towards them that cautious yet curious expression of people from country parts for whom any stranger seems an object of fascination.

  ‘The man who didn’t come back last night.’ Huw was standing over the board admiring the barman’s handiwork. ‘We’re frien
ds of his. We’d like to take a quick look in his room, if you don’t mind.’

  They followed him upstairs to a room opposite the first landing. It was smaller than theirs, recently repainted in the same muted primrose as the landings. Near the ceiling the damp was already showing through.

  ‘There’s nothing here, as you can see.’ The surfaces in the bathroom were still wet where they had been wiped down. Catrin went and had a closer look, ran her fingers along the gaps between the tiles.

  She could see the remnants of a dark stain, but it had all but disappeared. She lifted her fingers, smelt them. It wasn’t a smell she recognised, something sharp, chemical.

  ‘You don’t think that’s odd?’ she said. ‘He books a room but doesn’t use it?’

  The man closed the door and led them downstairs again. ‘Well, that’s what happened before,’ he said.

  The doors to the yard were still closed, the lights off, a feeble glimmer filtering through the dirty panes.

  ‘How many times has Mr Thomas stayed here?’ Huw had followed the man into the narrow passage where the old board was leaning against the wall. Catrin waited a little way behind as they spoke.

  ‘He’s stayed maybe half a dozen times over the last year.’

  She wondered what to make of this. ‘Know what he’s been doing here?’

  ‘No idea. He never talks with any locals.’

  The man was moving his brush quickly over the board, some drops of paint falling to the floor. She glanced further down the passage. Stacked against the wall were what looked like antique children’s toys, next to them some small dolls made from reeds. ‘This gentleman with the van, Fransis, know anything more about him?’ she asked.

  The barman shook his head. Catrin thought she’d take a chance now. ‘I heard this Fransis was seen up on that escarpment above the woods,’ she said. She was a good liar, she’d kept her tone almost indistinguishable from her previous questions. The man stopped moving his brush in mid-motion, and only when the paint began dripping on the floor did he look down at it.