Sympathy for the Devil

by Howard Marks

  ‘The girl Della saw you with way back. The girl you used in all the profiles?’

  ‘Caris, Tudor’s daughter,’ he said. ‘I loved her, but she used me, her cult used me. I was their scapegoat. They needed a bogeyman figure as a cover for all the disappearances back then, so through her they fed me, fostered my myth.’

  ‘You knew this and still loved her, still branded yourself with her cult’s sign?’

  ‘You don’t stop loving someone because they’re using you. She let me do to her what I could only do to others by force. Rhys knew that I loved her, that was why he knew I had to tread a careful line. If I exposed myself openly as the source, then I’d have lost her.’

  ‘But he told you to trust me, why not reveal yourself as the source?’

  ‘I tried. I asked the doctor to hold you, I followed but you were always with Powell or Thomas.’

  ‘You followed me from the club?’

  ‘All the time I was trying to reach you Catrin.’

  ‘And down in the village, the inn?’

  ‘The whole village is bugged, there’s constant surveillance.’

  She thought about all the cameras she’d seen, the units around the wards; what he was saying had a ring of truth to it. ‘That was why you gave me your handle, to contact via the site?’

  Jones nodded weakly, his hands still covering his face. She knew she couldn’t let her guard down. He’d deceived many before her, this was probably all part of the game for him, winning the trust of his victims before taking them down.

  He was silent for a moment. She sensed him watching her carefully from between his fingers. He seemed to have read her mind. ‘You’re not exactly in a position to bargain, Catrin – if I’m who you think I am, the witch, why would I bother to feed you a line?’

  It made a certain strange sense, but several things still weren’t adding up. If what he told her was true it begged another more disturbing question.

  ‘But if not you, then who is he?’

  ‘He always wears a mask when he comes here.’

  Jones handed her a photograph, a tall man in robes, his hood pulled up over a long, beaked mask. The image could have been of anyone. It told Catrin nothing.

  ‘So you’re saying you don’t know who he is?’ she said incredulously.

  He shook his head very slowly. ‘No one here knows. Some do what they do because they’re paid, others out of a mixture of superstition and fear. They think what he’s done to his children means he’s protected by the devil.’

  She looked around. There were no sounds from further inside. The only movement was that of a small black bird that had been perching on the wall gliding away into the tunnel.

  ‘And Rhys never told you who he thought it was?’

  He moved his hands over his face very slowly, like someone who’d been in pain for a long time. ‘No, but I think Rhys was close to finding out before he died.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ she said.

  Jones had shifted closer and was looking down at the picture. Through the space ahead she could detect a slight movement of air, bringing with it the faint scent of the sea. She stared into the blackness.

  ‘Rhys didn’t know who it was,’ he said softly. ‘He did know about the nineteen drifters and dropouts from the scene around Face. But the rumours he’d heard of someone else in the background were always too sketchy to follow up.’

  ‘Penrhyn. It was the family name of a man once accused of sacrificing his children to the devil. This man seems to have been doing the same thing.’

  ‘Rhys said he rarely heard any name used. In fact, he wondered sometimes if we were pursuing a myth, a phantom.’

  ‘And Rhys thought he was here on the island?’ Catrin asked.

  ‘Rhys thought he only came occasionally to the island, that he had another life on the mainland.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure. In those last weeks at the cottage, Rhys was in a bad way with the heroin. He’d become paranoid, incoherent. He’d stopped trusting me. He’d go off for days on end. Then before he vanished that last time he said he was on the edge of something, some sort of breakthrough, but I never got to hear what it was.’

  A weak smile flickered across Jones’s face.

  ‘It certainly all makes a pretty story,’ she said.

  Jones didn’t look as if he cared what she believed. His cigarette dropped from his fingers, rolled onto the table. The smoke drifted up into his eyes. He stared into it as if at something alien.

  She didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but the tiredness that seemed to grip him matched her own, made her feel that in this at least he was a kindred spirit – not a saviour, not a solution, though perhaps as close to it as she was ever going to find in that place and at that hour.

  ‘You say Rhys was “on the edge of something” before he disappeared. Did you form any idea of what that was?’

  He shook his head. ‘His mind was so confused by then,’ he said.

  ‘But what was he working on prior to his telling you about this “breakthrough”?’

  Catrin sensed he was listening but not to her, to something she couldn’t yet hear, but he remained motionless. ‘How can I trust you?’ he said slowly.

  She lifted the scythe to his neck again.

  ‘Because Rhys told you to,’ she said.

  His eyes gave nothing away. ‘Rhys ended up dead, maybe he told me to trust the wrong person.’

  She pushed the blade into his skin, drew blood. He didn’t flinch.

  ‘He had a lot of international law pages bookmarked on his old laptop. The floor of the room where he worked was covered with notes on all the equipment and chemicals ordered during the Heath Park lab sting. Something about the whole operation was still worrying him. He kept saying that the internal investigation into the failed sting had been looking at the operation from the wrong end.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  He glanced at her as if expecting her to know only too well what he was about to say. ‘Well, the investigation had always assumed that all the big orders of lab equipment and specialist chemicals were designed to generate kickbacks for the officers in the sting. But they never turned up a single piece of evidence.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So all the focus was on locating traces of a money trail from parties acting for the supply companies back to the officers. What was never explained was why so much – all the precursor chemicals and the top-end lab equipment – could not be accounted for when the sting was wound down.’

  ‘One of the officers had been selling the materials sideways?’

  ‘But no market had ever existed for such chemical exotica – for the precursor chemicals for tryptamines, belladonna alkaloids and DMT, the ancient deliriants. Yet what Rhys noticed was how the requests on the order forms to the Home Office had always been surprisingly specific. None of the officers had a formal background in chemistry, but the precision of the orders seemed to imply the guiding presence of someone with advanced narco-pharmacological training.’

  ‘So maybe one of the officers was consulting with a chemist? That doesn’t add up to much.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t, not in itself.’

  ‘So why was Rhys interested?’

  He smiled as if the answer was only too obvious.

  ‘Timing,’ he said, ‘that’s what interested him. This was the era of the international crackdown on all the MDMA and acid labs – remember – when precursor chemicals and large-volume lab equipment were becoming very hard to obtain by anyone outside government or the large pharmaceutical companies. If someone had wished to obtain these chemicals in volume, and remain undetected, the infiltration of a police sting would have provided an elegant mechanism for achieving this.’

  ‘So what you’re saying is that the lab sting in Heath Park wasn’t to provide kickbacks for some of the officers, but simply a supply platform for the materials and chemicals? That the whole thing was a set-up from the very beginning.’
/>
  ‘It’s the only explanation.’

  ‘But surely the Internals would have found traces of a money trail?’

  ‘No traces of any payments were ever found.’

  ‘So you’re suggesting one of the officers in the op may have been under the control of those who were sourcing the chemicals, answering directly to the cult?’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘There may be a simpler explanation,’ Jones said, reaching into his inside pocket and producing some pieces of paper, pages from the Western Telegraph that had been tidily folded many times over. The first showed a scene Catrin recognised: an open, snowbound field, in the centre of which stood the charred remains of a cabin. In the foreground, an electric wheelchair lay on its side in the sludge.

  ‘The man who died in that fire, Gethin Pryce, was the last of the early group around the band. He’d been out of sight for years.’

  The second page unfolded into an image of a tidy close of Seventies-style semis. The front of one house was blackened with soot, its windows charred hollows.

  ‘That house belonged to Gwen Evans,’ Jones said. ‘She’d lived next door to Face’s grandmother in Bancyfelin for years. She died in a domestic house fire a day after Pryce’s house was torched.’

  Seeing the pictures Catrin began to feel dizzy, so she lowered her head, took deep breaths. ‘It was Gwen who led us to this island. But the weather was bad that day. The roads were empty. We’d have noticed if anyone had tailed us to her house.’

  ‘Who could have known your itinerary?’

  ‘No one,’ she said.

  ‘Except one person, of course.’

  She felt a slow lurching sensation, a spreading emptiness in her stomach. Nothing felt certain any more, not the room in front of her eyes, not the words that Jones was speaking to her.

  She heard a noise behind her and spun round. Little was visible in the light of the tapers, their soft glow barely illuminating a foot from the walls.

  She moved to the nearest one, dipped the scythe into the oil, and held the flaming blade up above her. Jones was no longer at the table, she could no longer see him.

  She heard the distant sound of the waves crashing against the rocks. She called out, her cry echoing far below her. But there was no reply. Behind her she thought she could sense something moving, brushing low against the ground.

  Then the lights went on and she saw that Huw was standing at the end of the chamber. On either side were his two bodyguards, and two more men behind.

  ‘I hired you to find the source of the pictures,’ Huw said.

  Catrin looked around, tried to see where Jones had gone. In the brighter lights she caught glimpses of the tunnel ahead. The walls were shivering with the black wings of the ravens.

  ‘Now your job is done, my child,’ Huw said.

  Beside him she saw more men standing around Jones’s slumped form. His head was bloodied, and his eyes were bleeding slits. He was being dragged among the birds, and they closed on him from every side until he disappeared.

  She felt the tingling of something sharp puncturing her arm, a needle. Lights pulsed around her. Along the walls the birds looked vast, they seemed like messengers from another world. They were carrying her down, and silhouetted on the wall above her were other long, beak-like shapes.

  Now she saw it as if for the first time. The dream had been a memory, she had been one of his, one of his many children. Her mother had been one of his group. Those were where the other dreams had come from, the dreams of the beach and the rocks and the man with long black hair running round her in a circle.

  Later they had come and reclaimed her, taken her by force, the men in the car. Rhys had found her, freed her. He had protected her, from the cult and from the truth of who she was. But she knew now this place was her fate, and it had been waiting for her all along.

  She feels the hands touch her again. Some are calloused and knotted with muscle. They are Huw’s hands. They have always been Huw’s hands. The men’s bodies are shaved, damp with paint, the masks cool as they brush across her skin.

  They drag her down into the darkness. The smell of the sea strengthens as they pull her towards its sound. The place around her now is a nesting cave high in the cliffs. Against the rocks the birds are clustering over something on the ground. Their wings seem not black but a colour she has never seen before, iridescent in the spray from the waves far below, rising and falling like the wings of angels.

  Impressions swing dizzyingly in and out of focus. Something is drawing her towards them, telling her to give herself to them. The only way forward is to wade through the rock pools and as she does so, her legs numb in the water, she realises that the shape is a body, bound in sacking. She knows it’s the man that she’d seen being dragged into the cave. He seems to call to her. As his fair hair moves with the water, she makes out the face of the young doctor. His eye sockets are empty and the place echoes with the cries of birds.

  As she looks up she sees a raven’s mask leaning over her. She wants to cry out, but the words are frozen in her throat. In their place a metallic taste, ice cold, cuts away her breath.

  The robe beneath the mask parts to reveal a painfully emaciated torso, the raven’s head entirely out of proportion to the skeletal frame beneath. Each limb is lined with the elaborate stigmata of track marks, of blackened veins and lesions. The man’s breathing rasps again through the mask, the long beak distorting the sound.

  Strength, she thinks. From nowhere, she finds the energy to reach up and grab the mask, tearing it off. The man makes no move to stop her. The face beneath seems barely less dead than she feels.

  She knows at once it is Face, that he was her second abductor in the chamber. Face, the favoured son, the heir. He grabs at her with stick-like arms as she moves back towards the edge, grasping at the air. Under his scars, the raven wings scored into his chest seem to beat, as if about to rise into the air. His breath smells of death. She cries out, pushing him away.

  Suddenly he is on her, mantling her in his cloak as he bares his teeth over her face. He is looking at her eyes, not into them. She knows then he is about to bite.

  She rolls back towards the edge. Ahead far below lie the churning waters – she pushes towards the gap. But the others are close, their hands touching and scratching at her body. Her legs are lifted, and she feels cold rock cut into her bleeding skin as they drag her.

  She reaches out, holds onto the rock. He moves his mouth over her face, pulling up her skin with his teeth.

  He weighs no more than a child, but the drugs make him powerful. She holds his twisting shape above her, but it is like fighting a tree, or a living root, and she hasn’t the strength. She can feel his animal teeth nipping at her scalp, biting through her hair. When she pushes him back, she succeeds only in bringing his eyes before hers, then he is at her again, his teeth digging into the skin of her cheek.

  Briefly their eyes meet. His expression is dull, cold, inhuman, he is looking at her as if at something already dead.

  She sees Huw striding forward now, his hand outstretched. Deep inside her, rage boils up and turns to white-cold anger. She pulls Face in towards her, clasping his head beneath her arm and catching the first flicker of emotion in his eyes. If I go, you go, she thinks, and reaches out with her other hand for Huw, pulling him forward with his own momentum. As Face bites at her hand, she pulls them both towards the edge and steps out into the void. For a moment, she hangs there. And then all three of them fall. Strange that it is so peaceful, she thinks, and then nothing.

  When she came to, she was aware only of the contrast in feeling between her left side, cold and exposed to the elements and her right, warmed by something firm and soft. The smell of Huw’s cologne was everywhere, vetiver and lime. Her feet were dragging beneath her through the mud.

  No, Thomas, she thought. It was Thomas who was pulling her to the far side of the mudflat. Moments later, he laid her gently down, turning her head away from the ground. And then h
e was gone again. She watched him move further along the beach, and thought how strangely like a baby she felt, calm and motionless as he began to move an inflatable out from the rocks.

  Everything was playing out as if on a distant screen. In the weak light she saw him moving back towards her, but far away still.

  There was a shuffling sound nearby. Dazed, she turned her head to see a hooded figure standing on a rock a few yards behind her. There were others behind him, up on the cliffs.

  The man wore a long robe of coarse cloth, and held in front of him the long and bright blade of a sword. He lifted it high above his head.

  Thomas ran, dropping the dinghy behind him, only a few feet away as the figure came down towards them. He held out the sword in front of him, stroking the air between them, gesturing that she should move away towards the rocks.

  Everything was happening as if in slow motion, Thomas hesitating, brushing the hair from his face. The man striking out towards them, sparks rising where the blade struck. Now he’d ripped the front of Thomas’s jersey. The blood was spreading over the wool. Thomas was reaching out and wrestling him for the handle of the sword.

  Above, the figures stood silent, watching. Then the air was filled with a rushing and a hollow rasping sound, as Thomas broke away and drove the blade into the man’s heart, and then a second time. With the second thrust the robed man slumped into a heap on the rocks.

  Catrin found an unknown secret reserve of energy, and raised herself from the ground. She walked over to the body and pulled back the cowl. There was mud on Huw’s cheeks, and his greying hair had matted close to his scalp. His eyes stared back, level and lifeless, and his robe was open to the thick, silver hair of his chest.

  Thomas was standing over her, hand to his belly, his face still flush with colour, betraying no pain. She felt him pulling her hand, her feet dragging in the pebbles.

  He pulled the dinghy down to the edge of the water. Another figure was there, walking as tall as a giant against the tide. It was Old Tudor, carrying what looked like a child in a blanket across his chest. They pushed the boat down to the foaming wash.