MW 12 - The Magus of Hay

by Phil Rickman

  Bliss felt himself lose it. Could almost feeling it squirming out of his head, dancing down the street in front of him, turning round to make faces at him, gleeful fingers in the corners of its mouth.

  ‘I’m gonna have him for this. I swear to God, I’m gonna take it all the way—’

  ‘Francis, for Christ’s sake, he said it to me!’

  ‘And you think you’re the only one he’s said it to?’

  ‘Yes, I do. So far. He feels sure of his ground with me. You and me, long record of no love lost.’

  ‘When this is over… I’m gonna dismantle that bastard. Nobody stops me.’

  ‘Do nothing. Do you understand? Anything you do… anything… will rebound. On both of us… on every level. Just go along with everything he tells you to do. And stay out of Hay when you’re not on duty.’

  Bliss was leaning against the bus shelter, numb down the left side, from his temple to below his knee.

  ‘I’m not on duty now. He sent me home. I don’t wanna go home. I hate home.’

  ‘You can come here if you like,’ Annie said.

  ‘So you can keep an eye on me?’

  ‘Both eyes. And… maybe the rest of me.’

  Mother of God, when did Annie Howe start talking like Mae frigging West?

  Only when she was genuinely afraid he might do something that played into Brent’s hands.

  Not an entirely unfounded fear, he’d concede that.

  ‘I’ll come over, then.’

  ‘We can talk about it.’

  ‘Talk,’ he said. ‘Yeh.’

  Not a euphemism. Talk made them compatible. Talking dirty, talking crime. Hard talk, naked talk.

  He drove down Oxford Road, for England, but the left side of his head was dragged down with misgivings and the feeling that he wasn’t going to make it to Malvern, that something was too close.

  47

  Blinded to the rest

  BETTY FIDDLED WITH the phone until the picture appeared then she pushed it to the middle of the table, folded her arms and became very still.

  Merrily remembered this about her, an ability to withdraw into herself as if she was watching the scene on some inner monitor. They’d met twice since the Radnor Valley witch-hunt, but not in the past year. Her face was firmer than before. Not that much older, but certainly stronger. Her blond hair was back off her face, held by an old-fashioned Alice band, her eyes startlingly clear and focused even in the dim light.

  ‘Where was it, darling?’

  ‘Gwenda Protheroe,’ Gwyn Arthur whispered. ‘Proprietor.’

  Long wings of thick dark hair. Leaning over the bar, displaying an impressive cleavage.

  ‘Set into the back of the fireplace, upstairs,’ Betty said. ‘Probably hidden for years.’

  ‘We’re just looking for a little help here,’ Robin said, ‘if it’s only to eliminate the possibility of Mr Oliver being Adolf Hitler’s long lost grandson.’

  The photo in the phone was a close-up, just discernible in the dimness, from where Merrily and Gwyn Arthur were sitting, way back in the shadows. She glanced at Gwyn Arthur, half alarmed; it was like he’d plugged her into some circuit that edited reality, cut to the chase.

  ‘It is though, isn’t it? Sort of a swastika.’ Gwenda snatched up the phone, hair swinging, then called out, ‘Anybody know about any Nazi stuff in Hay, back in the war? Come on…’

  Holding up the phone displaying the soot-rimed swastika.

  ‘Wossisname,’ the man with the wine stain said. ‘Hitler’s Number Two. Rudolph Wossisname… I got no memory these days.’

  ‘Rudolph Wossisname,’ Gwenda said. ‘Parachuted down to try and wind up the war, something like that. Wasn’t he incarcerated somewhere round here for a while, or was that just a story?’

  ‘Rudolf Hess. Abergavenny, that was. Taken there for interrogation. It’s only half an hour away. How would that work, then, Gwennie, with the carving on the chimney?’

  ‘Er… no idea.’

  Somebody laughed. Merrily recognized Wine-stain now: Gareth Nunne, a name that looked good over a bookshop. A dealer who somehow acquired cheap remaindered copies of books before they even went into paperback.

  Betty said, ‘What are you guys not telling me?’

  Robin said, ‘Bets…’

  ‘Die, Englisher pig!’ Betty said.

  All eyes on her, including Robin’s, bagged now. His hair was still long, but less sleek than it had been. He looked like a man from whom something was slipping away. You hoped it wasn’t Betty.

  ‘Anybody remember Tom Armitage?’ Betty said. ‘Antiques?’

  Gwenda shook her head. Gareth Nunne grunted.

  ‘Cocky bugger.’

  ‘Only I was talking to him on the phone, because I was interested in people who’d had the shop before, and he was telling me about how they used to find bits of war comics around the place. There was a guy there once who sold them, including rare German comics. Nazi stuff, I assume he meant. He said the guy OD’d on drugs.’

  Gwyn Arthur was nodding.

  ‘But you guys,’ Betty said, ‘when I show you this, you just go rambling on about Rudolph bloody Hess.’

  Gareth Nunne looked at her, mock-startled. Gwenda laughed.

  ‘You tell them, girlie.’

  A woman said wearily, ‘Jab.’

  Gwenda said, ‘What?’

  ‘Jerrold Adrian Brace. Gorgeous, pouting Jerry Brace. Used to sign his initials, JAB. He’s the guy sold the war books and comics.’

  ‘Connie…’ Gareth Nunne putting on a warning tone. ‘You remember what we…?’

  ‘Oh Gawd, Gary, what’s the point? It was a long time ago.’

  Merrily saw she was quite elderly and sloppy, about six necklaces, and smoking what looked like a slim panatella. Betty turned her wooden chair.

  ‘Sorry, is it Mrs Wilby? Look, we’re not having a great day, and I know there’s something so much worse going on all around us, right, but it would be helpful to deal with this. That shop’s important to us, and it doesn’t seem to have a good history. Just helps to know these things.’

  ‘So, like, anything you can tell us,’ Robin said, ‘be helpful if you didn’t hold back.’

  ‘Yeah, go on, Con,’ Gwenda said. ‘Somebody tell them. Tell me. We’re all grown-ups here.’

  ‘Nobody remembers now, anyway,’ Gareth Nunne said. ‘He wasn’t yere that long. And when he was yere he wasn’t yere half the time.’

  ‘Gareth likes you,’ Connie said to Betty. ‘Gareth thinks we have far too many ugly old booksellers and you would help redress the balance. Gareth’s sexist, ageist and everything else ending in ist. And I’ve been charmed by your insanely dashing, disabled husband, and we knew from the papers what had happened to you, so we wanted you to be happy here. And, as we said, it’s a very long time ago.’

  ‘Don’t stop there,’ Betty said.

  ‘Well, he died, you see,’ Gareth Nunne said. ‘In the end, that was what most people remembered about Jerry Brace. The way he died.’

  ‘He OD’d,’ Betty said. ‘That is right, is it?’

  ‘Yes, but not quite so many people did in those days, my dear. Not in places like Hay. Not heroin, anyway. Bit of a nine-day wonder. Not that there weren’t many of those, mind – oh, the glamour. The lovely Marianne Faithfull here for a while. April Ashley, Britain’s first ever sex-change sailor. Not that poor bloody Jerry was famous.’

  ‘Except for the way he died,’ Connie said.

  ‘Flaming Nora!’ Gwenda threw a bag of crisps in the air. ‘Get to the point. I don’t know any of this, and I’m furious.’

  ‘Well, of course you don’t, dear,’ Connie Wilby said. ‘It was over thirty years ago. He was an ex public-school boy. Wealthy, titled father with strong fascist leanings. Sir Charles. His Mosleyite mate was Lord Brocket, who lived at Kinnersley Castle, end of the war. And he’d infected his son with his political views. Jerry had this awful obsession with what you might call the dark side of the last war.’


  Gareth Nunne grunted.

  ‘Ostensibly. In the shop you’d have books on Churchill and the Battle of Britain and piles of war comics. But upstairs, up past the sign that said “Staff Only”… was the other stuff.’

  ‘We used to think it was just pornography,’ Connie Wilby said. ‘Sort of stuff you’d sell on the Internet these days. You knew people were going to that shop who never went anywhere else. Men usually, sometimes in pairs, in those short denim jackets. It was only when he died that we found out that it was wall-to-wall heavy-duty Hitler and the SS and satanism.’

  ‘Some of those books,’ Gareth Nunne said, ‘were actually plain-cover stuff. Interminable tracts full of hatred. Privately published by the neo-Nazi fraternity in the UK. He also – this was the early days of video – would put together old films of the rise of Hitler and those Berlin Olympics, the Aryan fitness dream. And footage from Himmler’s magic castle at Wewelsburg. He had a video copier, churning out all this stuff.’

  ‘You’d hear him talking about Hitler when he was pissed,’ Connie said, ‘like the Fuhrer was some bloody dark angel, and he—’

  ‘Was that his phrase?’ Betty’s head had snapped up. ‘Or yours?’

  ‘Oh, his, I ’spect. He was a bit of a… they’d say he was a Goth now.’

  ‘There was a stage,’ Gareth Nunne said, ‘where we’d have all these bloody skinheads in town, all filing into his shop. I hadn’t got a shop then, see, I was working for the King, and I don’t reckon he was too happy, but it wasn’t like he owned the place.’

  Gareth Nunne scowled, remembering, his facial skin flaw shining like beetroot. Gareth Nunne and Connie Wilby… Merrily had been in both their shops once or twice, over the years. She remembered Connie specializing in local history and old maps.

  ‘With hindsight,’ Connie said, ‘I think Jerry only opened that shop to feed his obsession. His opening hours were ludicrously irregular. Sometimes he’d close for a week and bugger orf somewhere – back to his parents’ house – or with some woman, we thought. He was very fond of women. But, as I say, he was terribly handsome. Blond hair.’ She looked up at the bar, wistfully. ‘Terribly handsome. Which rather blinded you to the rest.’

  Merrily saw Gwenda raising an eyebrow.

  ‘And so fit,’ Connie said. ‘As if he worked out at the gym, which was hardly fashionably in those days. I don’t think there were any gyms in this part of the world. Not outside schools anyway.’

  ‘You’re playing this for all it’s worth, aren’t you, darling?’ Gwenda said. ‘And you do keep dwelling on his physical attributes. That mean you… knew him well?’

  ‘Not well,’ Connie said gruffly. ‘But – yes – I knew him. Once. Couldn’t take my drink in those days, that was the trouble.’

  ‘Bugger me.’ Gareth turned his chair round to peer at her. ‘I didn’t know about that, Connie.’

  ‘Thought I was going to be his older woman at first, but he never even looked at me again. Or he looked at me properly and thought, “Oh Christ, what have I done?”’

  ‘You were still in your thirties,’ Gareth said. ‘Just about. If I’d known you was up for—’

  ‘Oh please! They were heady days, even the King bringing girls back to his castle. Nearest Hay ever came to a summer of love. And I didn’t know he was a bloody Nazi, did I? It was just war books, then, far as we knew.’

  Gwenda said. ‘Was this… you and the Aryan beauty… in the shop in Back Fold?’

  ‘Was, yes. I think Jerry was the last person to actually live there. He’d had the walls painted black, and there were posters and things. Joss sticks. Not bad for a man-pad. I remember he just had a bloody big mattress on the floor in the living area. And he’d light a fire in the small grate upstairs. Small burn marks all over the floorboards.’

  Connie burst into throaty laughter.

  Robin said, ‘What happened to all the books and tapes and stuff?’

  ‘Don’t know, dear. Somebody must’ve come to clean the place out, get rid of the stock. I doubt any of us would’ve wanted to take it on, even as a free gift. We didn’t know about his heroin habit. Wasn’t so ubiquitous, then, not like now, all those needle bins in the public lavs.’

  ‘A superfit heroin addict?’ Gwenda said.

  ‘Perhaps he was just wasted. I wouldn’t know, would I? I was a convent girl. Perhaps when he shut the shop and went away he was in some sort of rehab – they have rehab in those days? Can’t recall. Anyway, that’s why nobody noticed. When he… went.’

  She looked at Gareth, who looked down into his beer.

  ‘He’d been dead for well over a week, see, when they found him. What was it, Connie, overdose or a bad batch of something?’

  Connie shook her head. Betty didn’t react. Merrily wondered if she’d been expecting something worse.

  ‘All too common nowadays,’ Connie said, ‘but back then, in Hay…’

  ‘Where did they find him?’ Betty asked.

  ‘If it was me about to live there,’ Gwenda said softly, ‘I wouldn’t want to know. Don’t put yourself through it, darling, he’s gone. And you’re young. Sterner stuff, what?’

  Connie laughed.

  48

  Messiah

  MERRILY HAD DRAWN it, from memory, on the back of a post office receipt – no room on a cigarette packet any more because of the horror photos which could surely only encourage more hard kids to smoke. She wanted to follow Robin and Betty out of the bar, but Gwyn Arthur had shaken his head: not yet.

  He’d waited for a couple of minutes after they’d left before standing up.

  ‘Didn’t think you were still here, Gwyn,’ Gwenda said. ‘A little tryst, is it?’

  ‘This is my friend, Mrs Watkins, Gwenda. Person of the cloth.’

  Merrily felt the gaze of the close-bearded man standing close to Gwenda, polishing a glass.

  ‘You must have hidden qualities, Gwyn,’ he said.

  ‘So well hidden my wife can barely remember them. I’ll see you, boy.’

  ‘That’s her son?’ Merrily said outside.

  Gwyn Arthur laughed.

  ‘A customer who once said that was almost glassed. He’s… her boyfriend of some long standing. Gwenda has charms which are not so well hidden. As you may have noticed. Some men who’ve never read a book in their lives patronize that bar just to watch her move.’

  Merrily followed him across to a bench near the spired clock tower which she saw, for an instant, as a huge hypodermic syringe. Two cops were talking in its shadow. She took out the post office receipt.

  ‘Quite an unusual swastika. Less angular.’

  He shook his head, didn’t seem to recognize it.

  ‘I was here when they found Mr Brace. About a year before I went home to West Wales in search of fame and fortune. Welsh-speaker, see, instant fast-track out there. But my wife had never learned, so we came back in the end.’

  A cameraman from Sky TV was shooting the two cops against the clock while a reporter studied notes on a clipboard. There was a chilly feeling now that if you turned away you’d miss some development.

  ‘I tend to smell it, in my memory, every time I go past that shop, which is almost every day. The smell from when we broke in, and there was Jerrold Brace, mostly naked, decaying in the bath.’

  ‘Do you know why the Thorogoods have opened a bookshop when they’re closing down in all the high streets? Hard enough for a seasoned professional.’

  ‘If things weren’t as bad as they are, I don’t suppose they’d find a shop here at a rent they could afford. I’m guessing they never quite recovered from what happened to them. And they were welcomed here. The booksellers are glad to have another bookshop to strengthen the foundations. If they hadn’t taken that shop, it might’ve been a nail bar. Another one gone.’

  ‘And that’s why nobody wanted to tell them about the death in their bath?’

  ‘I expect it’s a different bath now. Wasn’t that gruesome, apart from the condition of the body – qu
ite a warm autumn. Brace had apparently been off heroin for a while and then got hold of some particularly pure stuff and… gone. There was the syringe on the bathroom floor and the remains of the unadulterated smack.’

  ‘And he had links with the Convoy? And the missing girls?’

  ‘As Mrs Wilby said in there, he was a good-looking boy and he liked the ladies… No, that’s wrong. Almost certainly wrong. It wasn’t ladies he liked. He’d grown up with them. He liked… if he was a woman or a gay man we’d use the words rough trade. He appeared to like the sort of women you might find attached to the convoy. And when Gareth Nunne says he wasn’t at the shop for long periods, you might find that one of the long periods was during the magic mushroom season.’

  ‘He’d join the Convoy on the Bluff?’

  ‘He was certainly there when we were questioning them about the missing females. I recall asking him if the older one, Cherry Banks, had ever been seen in Hay. If he’d said he didn’t know what Cherry Banks looked like, my suspicions would have been aroused. But no, he admitted to having had sex with her. He said he came up to the Bluff to chill out, or however they put it back then. Chill out and get laid.’

  ‘What about the other girl, Mephista? Was she rough trade? At sixteen?’

  ‘She was… intelligent. But different. Her parents were old hippies. Her dad told me they’d tried to bring her up with their values – live frugally, be at one with nature. I remember thinking, she’s too young for all that. She’ll rebel. The way her parents rebelled against capitalism, consumerism, shiny suits.’

  ‘What did Brace have to say about her?’

  ‘Thought he knew which one she was. Well, yes, I’m quite sure he did. They were both to be found at Rector’s farm – Mephista dragged there by her parents, Brace helping out.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘I don’t know. But, of all the people from the Convoy, he seems to have been the closest to Rector.’

  Grainy clouds had slid across the sun, enough to bring out a breeze. Merrily zipped up her coat.