Sympathy for the Devil

by Howard Marks

  As Thomas knelt over it the outboard spluttered into life. The wind had slackened and mist hung thick over the water. There was a cold, dark crossing ahead.

  SOME MONTHS LATER

  It was almost silent on the tennis court. All Catrin could hear was the distant chug of a motor yacht far out past Mumbles Head.

  She bounced the ball at her feet, then looked up to see where her opponent had positioned himself. Thomas was wearing baggy beachcomber’s shorts and a Lion-of-Judah T-shirt. He hadn’t dressed the part, nor did he look anywhere near ready to return service.

  She served hard down the centre, the ball catching the inside of the line. It was a good, precise serve, but not quite hard enough. From nowhere Thomas returned the ball surprisingly deep to her backhand, a clean winner.

  That was the thing about Thomas. He played like he worked and lived, never seeming to have his eye on the ball or anywhere near it. But it was all misdirection. When he reached the ball he knew exactly what to do with it.

  She still had match point. She served again, hard at his body. This time she ran behind her serve to the net, volleyed his return deep. His return down the line missed by inches.

  They sat on a small bench at the edge of the court. Thomas had brought some beers and smoothies in a cooler down from the house.

  ‘The first rule in any game,’ she said. ‘Always play with someone better than yourself or you’ll never improve.’

  He took a sip of beer, his eyes half closed against the late afternoon sun. ‘That’s exactly why I play with you,’ he said.

  She gave him a quick smack with her strings. He was looking back up the staggered lawns towards the grand Victorian house ringed by small, spiky palm trees. At the back, facing them, was a large conservatory, to one side of it a pool, black-tiled in the shape of a heart.

  ‘I thought you hated Della,’ he said. ‘So why use her court?’

  Catrin glanced up at the upper windows, their curtains drawn, and thought she glimpsed Della watching them.

  ‘We seem to have a strange understanding now,’ she said. ‘The fire hasn’t changed her. But she never goes out now, just sits in that big house on her own, won’t talk to anyone. I feel bad if I don’t come here.’

  Thomas looked at her carefully. ‘You think if she’s given the chance she could change?’

  Catrin didn’t answer, wasn’t sure if she could. She wondered if Thomas could tell how difficult and how new everything now felt. Even the smallest things, leaving the house, taking a walk, deciding what to wear. The enormity of what had happened still weighed on her chest, making it difficult to breathe at times. Sometimes she still woke sweating in the night, had to run to the window and gulp down the cold night air. Remind herself she was alive: not free of it, she would never be that, but alive, able to try to live again. She clung to what little hadn’t been contaminated. Her bike, her exercise routines, she strung them out all day, or played chess online, over and over again. She wanted to be too tired to think. No therapists, no counsellors. She never kept the appointments Occupational Health had made for her. If there was a way for her to live now, it would be her secret. She didn’t know what lay ahead there out in the light. She didn’t know quite who she’d be. Someone different certainly, maybe someone she wouldn’t entirely recognise.

  She looked up, saw Thomas beckoning her, a second beer in his hand. She followed him down steps to the bottom of the garden, where a gate opened onto the beach road. Her Laverda was chained to the railings. Down on the beach a small café decorated like a surfer’s shack had been set up under the promenade.

  It was still early in the season, and the place looked almost empty. Inside, a school leaver with spiky hair showed them to a table. Thomas pointed to the glass counter. Under it were the usual array of sticky buns and flapjacks.

  A single black fly was buzzing, drawn by the sweet things under the glass.

  ‘Watch the flies,’ Thomas told her. She watched as the fly made its way to the counter. But then, as it was about to enter, it paused. Something else had caught its attention, higher to the right of the counter.

  It flew up in that direction, and into a small black box. There was a frantic buzzing from inside the box. Then all was still.

  ‘Powell’s operation,’ Thomas said. ‘It was meticulous from the start. Being a drugs cop gave him the ideal cover, a supply platform for precisely the specialised drugs he needed for his occult practices. By using the ancient trance drugs and that ancient place of sacrifice he thought he’d tapped into a reality lost to us down the ages.’

  Catrin didn’t need to be reminded. She understood only too well how his infernal machine had worked. ‘Powell must’ve believed in his primitive, psychotic mind,’ Thomas continued: ‘that only by sacrificing his own to his master could he achieve what he wanted to.’

  She stared at him. ‘Yes, but I’m still not sure I know what that was exactly. What did he believe he was getting in return for such a high sacrifice? Money, power, a crack at immortality – or was it something else?’

  A dubious look crossed Thomas’s face. ‘We’ll never know. But strangely I don’t think Powell wanted much. You’d think he’d expect something vast in exchange for such a high price, much like Faust. But I don’t think he did. I suspect he just saw it as protection money. He believed he’d got what he had the way he had, and to keep it he had to keep on placating his master in the same way.’

  Thomas shrugged. ‘I may be wrong,’ he said. ‘It may have been something conventional, or something too terrible to describe. But I somehow doubt it. Every man has a desire they believe can only be granted by a power greater than themselves. Powell believed he’d found a radical and effective way of achieving that desire, but that same desire is there in all of us.’ He glanced at her, squinting in the sun. ‘I mean, what price would you pay if you believed it would buy you what you wished? Can you say for sure that you’d know what to ask for?’

  She turned away. To have Rhys back. Is that what he thought? She suspected he had been drinking before they’d met for tennis. No smell, but she just knew. She’d heard he’d been reporting for work later every morning, and sometimes not coming in at all. Hiding what he was going through, playing the lad. But that was his way and she knew whatever she said wouldn’t help. Of course the therapists all said sharing helped, but if they didn’t they’d be out of a job, and for some things she knew it didn’t, it just didn’t. Talk about the outside stuff all you want, she thought, the logistics and reasons of it all, that helps, but not what’s really going on inside. Not what you see when you’re alone. He’d do it in his own way and his own time, just like her.

  ‘Angel Jones,’ she said, ‘at what point d’you think he realised Powell was the hidden hand protecting him all those years?’

  Thomas took a sip of beer. ‘Maybe the night of the fire at Pryce’s? Once Jones suspected it was Powell, he’d have known his chances of surviving were slim.’

  She knew Rhys had taken a significant risk in freeing Jones, releasing a big evil in order to snare an even greater one. She’d no doubt he’d put safeguards in place, Jones had hinted as much, probably a statement and evidence left with a commissioner for oaths so Jones could have been tried under double jeopardy laws if he hadn’t kept to the deal. Rhys had gambled on Jones preferring to bite the poisoned hand that had fed him, to die a free man than live on as a puppet. But she wondered if the safeguards had actually been necessary. She knew now that on the final night Jones had come to Thomas, not knowing if he could trust him and told him where the dinghy was. Surely that had limited his own chances of escape. That he’d also directed the old man and his girl Caris to the boat had diminished those chances yet further.

  She looked at Thomas. ‘Building Jones up into a bogeyman provided the cover for the disappearance over the years of Powell’s children, the nineteen half-siblings,’ she said quietly. ‘Of course Powell played it safe, never showed himself to Jones. He used Caris as his main connection. He made su
re Jones never knew too much about his cult, nor his cult about Jones.’

  ‘Right, and Powell’s eldest son Face’s underground following provided a way to draw the children back into Powell’s web without anyone noticing. The island was his sacred ground, his killing ground. But the younger children, no one knew of their existence, so he didn’t need a cover for them.’

  Thomas was looking closely up at the black box above the glass counter.

  ‘All right,’ Catrin said, ‘so what’s your point?’

  He was pointing up at the fly-trap. ‘But when Face himself disappeared, Powell knew the press and every conspiracy theorist around would be all over the case.’

  She watched as another fly flew unwaveringly up from the counter and after a short buzzing inside the box was silent.

  ‘Powell devised a clever defence mechanism,’ Thomas went on. ‘By setting himself up as a Face obsessive with big money, he ensured that any investigation into Face or the fans who’d disappeared – his nineteen children – always went through him.’

  ‘And Rhys walked right in.’

  ‘Yes, but not entirely.’

  ‘Because Rhys wouldn’t reveal his source?’

  ‘And that’s why Powell needed you, because you were the only person named as trusted by the source. And as you were the final child who’d escaped the cult, you suited Powell’s purposes perfectly.’

  Thomas finished his beer. She glanced at him; he was still smiling his lazy smile.

  Slowly he nodded. ‘When Rhys was killed, I already suspected the island was at the centre of it all. That’s why I’d begun to focus there.’

  ‘But why didn’t you use back-up?’

  ‘Because that way I’d never have found out who the leader was. Powell was a surveillance expert, the place was always monitored closely. Any big operation and Powell would have known it was coming. Out there, on his own terms, he was always a step ahead.’

  The surveillance, all the contracts with the CCTV companies, she knew that was how Powell had been able to destroy any footage that might have shown Rhys being drowned. The companies might have also removed footage of the second man, the one in the hut, who Rhys had attacked because he knew he was one of Powell’s men. Foiling the surveillance may also have helped Powell to protect Jones. But there was much she might never know. Who Powell’s associates were, for instance, and how far their influence reached. The unknowability had been designed in from the start, so any associates might survive him. Rix, for instance, had kept a lid on Jones’s release, which served Rhys’s purpose. It had made her consider again those old rumours about Rix having a crush on Rhys. Perhaps there was something in them after all, or maybe Rhys had had something on him. Though she knew Rix could have acted for other reasons, and if he had he was someone she would have to watch in the future.

  Thomas was moving closer. ‘Face’s body, they still haven’t found it.’

  ‘But I saw it there in the mud.’

  ‘The islanders must have moved it before the uniforms arrived.’

  ‘So Face is still officially missing?’

  ‘Yes, the case remains open.’

  She didn’t ask about Caris and Tudor, she’d checked in with him every week. His girl was still in a secure clinic in London, not talking. Tudor visited every other day, but months had passed without her breaking her silence. Thomas pushed the window wider and the salty spring breeze passed over their faces.

  Catrin felt Thomas touch her hand under the table as she looked out. The boat she’d heard earlier had crossed to the far edge of the horizon, almost out of sight now.

  When she stood, Thomas made as if to follow but she gestured him back and walked out onto the beach on her own. She didn’t look at the boat. She closed her eyes. She felt very alone. Maybe that’s how it would always be now. If there was a way to carry on, she would have to leave Rhys behind.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to Geoff Mulligan, Alison Hennessey and Briony Everroad for their painstaking editing and proof reading; Patrick Walsh for keeping it all on track, Jake and the rest of the team and John Williams for his invaluable advice.

  My hat off to KJ for her input on Pembrokeshire, the band and much else; to Paul Powell for his advice, Richard T for those discussions way back; Maruja K for Spain; HTR and Valerie Demat for their unknowing but significant support, and the Valley Commandos for their unique friendship, companionship, and protection.

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