by Phil Rickman
‘My information is Rector had a substantial neo-Nazi following from his first book – dealing with the occultism of Nazi Germany. He was distancing himself from it by then… but some of them clearly found that hard to accept. If they even believed it. It was as if they thought he had some secret source that they could tap into. Did Rector know what Brace was?’
‘And who is your secret source, Mrs Watkins?’
‘Erm… I think that had better remain secret for the time being. Reliable, though.’
She wondered if his interest stemmed purely from his own involvement in a case that was still on the books. Did he feel the answer was here, in Hay?
‘Did you talk to Peter Rector, Gwyn?’
‘The Messiah? Not one-to-one, having gone there as bag-carrier to my DI.’
‘The Messiah? Who called him that – the Convoy?’
‘And others. He’d stride the bare hills looking like a prophet. Hair suspiciously black for a man well into his fifties. But when you spoke to him he was unexpectedly quiet. Almost – what’s the word? – diffident?’
‘You think working with the Convoy filled some need in him? Like to help the homeless? Or was it more cynical? People who wouldn’t tell. Or, if they did, wouldn’t be believed.’
‘He certainly used to hang around with that chap, the television playwright. Jeremy Sanders…? Sandford.’
‘Cathy Come Home?’
‘You remember that?’
‘Yeah, seminal TV play about homelessness. We watched it at theological college in connection with something. Man with a strong social conscience. He was there?’
‘Lived nor far away, in Herefordshire. Still interested in the homeless. And gypsies of all kinds – a member of the Gypsy Council. And he’d written a book about magic mushrooms. Someone said it was Sandford who encouraged Rector to involve the Convoy in his activities. And there was that other chap, Bruce Chatwin, the writer, he was staying with Rector when we talked to him. Used to stay with him while writing.’
‘Both dead now.’
‘There we are. Regular little arts festival up there.’
‘So why would Brace have a hidden swastika in his shop? Inside the chimney which was obviously still in use in his time and then was blocked up. By him?’
‘Don’t know what to make of it. Set in stone, or brick, like a family crest. His father, Sir Charles, died quite recently.’
‘I don’t think I’ve heard of him.’
‘Well connected in the City. Second home in Herefordshire, to which he eventually retired. Victorian Gothic monstrosity out near Bromyard which he enjoyed making even more medieval. As Mrs Wilby said, he was a friend of the Nazi-sympathizer Lord Brocket. Also, incidentally, of the fugitive Lord Lucan.’
‘He was right-wing?’
‘Oh hell, aye. Brace was one of the people mentioned as possibly sheltering Lucan when he was being sought for the murder of his children’s nanny. A lot of it going on, then, under the surface. Talk of a right-wing coup, being planned when it was suggested that the prime minister, Wilson, was being controlled by the Soviet Union. Very dark days, and the Welsh Border… little hotbed of prominent fascists. But… being a neo-Nazi was not an offence, except to the sensibilities of some of us.’
‘Are they still around? Frannie Bliss is a bit dismissive about their continued potential as a threat. My source… less so.’
‘It’s an interesting question.’ Gwyn Arthur had his pipe going. ‘Throughout the eighties and nineties, we were occasionally alerted to the existence of extreme right-wing cells in Mid Wales, Shropshire, Herefordshire. Often indistinguishable from the survivalists in their remote farms, with more weaponry than was legal. You’ll still find them on the Internet.’
‘You think Brace was actually a member of one?’
‘Not sure. Could be he was simply serving a gap in the market. Dealing in the kind of books he knew some of these people would pay enormous prices for. Using his father’s contacts.’
‘You think there was more, though, don’t you?’
He took his pipe from between his teeth.
‘Merrily, you dismiss these people as complete crackpots, see, and then something happens. But is there anything here to risk public humiliation by passing on to my former colleagues? I tend to think not. Still… it’s been very interesting talking to you. Let’s stay in touch.’
She noticed he’d called her Merrily, as if accepting her, at last, as some kind of colleague, a legitimate confidante. And yet…
She watched him walk away, thinking that, for events of more than thirty years ago, they all seemed very clearly defined in the mind of Gwyn Arthur Jones.
One side of the car park backed on to the grounds of Hay Primary School, a TV reporter was standing by the gate, recording a piece-to-camera as children came out, met by parents and minders.
Merrily unlocked the Freelander and got in, slammed the door, feeling tired and frustrated, that elusive moment of illumination at Hay Church far behind her now. Nothing quite added up, just became more complicated, more tangled. She rang Bliss’s mobile and filled up his answering service with an edited version of what she’d learn from Gwenda’s Bar and her discussion with Gwyn Arthur Jones, who she didn’t name.
On the way home, the mobile chimed, and she stopped on the edge of the village of Dorstone, where Tamsin lived, to pick up a text.
Gwyn Arthur:
I got it wrong. It was not Messiah
they called Rector. It was Magus.
The Magus of Hay.
For what that’s worth.
Magus. An archaic term, applied to sundry sorcerers and the Three Wise Men of the New Testament.
Magus of Hay?
She texted back at once.
Who actually called him that?
Can you remember?
When she drove into Ledwardine twenty minutes later, her head was still so clogged with it that she turned into the vicarage drive, almost running into the back of Martin Longbeach’s Mini Cooper. Bugger. Slammed on, backed out and reversed all the way into Church Street.
Parking on the square, she gathered up her bag and her fleece and stumbled down to Lol’s cottage, where Ethel was waiting behind the door, slaloming around her ankles, as the mobile chimed.
The text from Gwyn Arthur Jones said,
I think it was the
novelist
Beryl Bainbridge.
She called him back, but there was no answer.
49
Superstition
UPSTAIRS, KAPOOR BENT to examine the derelict fireplace.
Robin said, ‘You see it?’
Kapoor straightened up. ‘It was an Indian sun symbol, you know that? My gran was always pissed off at Hitler nicking it off us.’
‘You notice this one is going backwards? That a negative thing?’
‘Dunno, mate. Never heard of a satanic swastika. Coulda phoned my gran, she’d know. If she wasn’t dead. Tell you what, put the plate back, forget it.’
‘And the fact that a guy obsessed with Nazi black magic was living here? And that it sounds like nobody ever made a success of a business here ever since?’
‘That,’ Kapoor said, ‘is just superstition.’
‘Well, yeah. Of course it is. Holy shit, Kapoor, I’m a pagan. I’m a superstitious person. Superstition is good. Superstition is opening yourself to hidden messages. Recognizing what the world’s telling you and reacting accordingly. Taking precautionary measures.’
‘No, mate.’ Kapoor’s eyes narrowing. ‘That’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.’
‘You know what? Your gran would not like how you turned out.’
Robin looked at Betty who’d followed them up and was standing near the top of the stairs, face clouded with uncertainty in a place once a magnet for razored racists and disaffected street scum. A room that once had shelves packed with tracts full of hatred, according to Gareth Nunne – a guy entitled to a degree of contempt by virtue of being about as far removed as you
could imagine from the Aryan ideal of superfit manhood.
After a while, Betty said, ‘I probably told you about my brief encounter with neo-Nazism.’
Robin blinked.
‘Bets, for some reason I have no recollection of that.’
‘It was before we met. I went out with one, once. Kind of.’
‘And you told me about this?’ Robin was blinking. ‘I don’t think you did.’
‘Once, OK? All right, maybe it’s not the kind of thing you boast about.’
‘Take a seat,’ Robin said.
‘I was about seventeen.’ Betty dropped into a cane chair. ‘I was with a mate, and we got talking to these two guys in a second-hand record shop in Llandod – Llandrindod Wells,’ she said for Kapoor’s benefit, ‘where we moved when I was a kid. They asked us if we wanted to go to a festival up on the border, towards Shropshire. They seemed quite normal in the shop, but when they picked us up they were in a black van and wearing what I thought at first was just standard goth kit. I was a bit suspicious, but, you know, there were two of us, and I didn’t see the swastikas till we got out at the festival. Which, of course, was right in the middle of nowhere and not exactly Glastonbury.’
Robin said, ‘You never told me any of this.’
‘Maybe you weren’t listening. Anyway, it wasn’t one of my favourite nights, and I’ve not thought about it much since. We kept away from them, wondering how to play it. They got stoned and came looking for us, and we’d realized by then that we were supposed to camp out with them for the night. So we just took off for the nearest farm and asked if we could use their phone. Spent just about every last penny we’d got on a taxi. But not before we’d listened to all this shit, in the van and then round the fire on the site.’
‘Like what?’
‘How their generation – our generation – was going to see the birth of a new aeon of Aryan supremacy of which Hitler was only the prequel. How the spirit of Hitler was still out there to initiate the… I don’t know, the warrior replacing the wimp-culture. Make war, not love. How the weak should be culled. And the work-shy scroungers.’
‘Was everybody there that way inclined?’
‘Probably no more than a dozen. It was an acoustic festival run by local beardies, and I think they were a bit pissed off by these guys who were kind of jeering at the music. But nobody wanted to cause any trouble.’
‘I’d’ve caused some trouble,’ Robin said. ‘Back then.’
‘I ran into a few later, on the pagan scene. Always hanging around the fringes of Wicca and Druidry. Lowest kind of goth – heavy metal, death metal, grandiose, sexist. It’s mainly a man-thing.’
Robin thought of his paintings for Lord Madoc, the intergalactic Celt. A lot of violence there. Not that he’d written the stuff.
‘You never told me,’ he said sadly. ‘Not all this.’
‘Robin, I was never very interested. I’ve always followed the Celtic tradition. I knew they were into some of the same things as us – earth energies, green politics. Just in a different way. They reject the matriarchal element in Celtic paganism, the Mother Goddess. And they say we got the back-to-the-land thing wrong. You can’t just get by with apple orchards and growing your own veg, you need to kill. Kill the wildlife, cull the population. Get rid of the weak.’
‘That’s religion?’
‘Oh, and democracy can never work. And the name of the God-like Hitler was blackened by us inventing the Holocaust. And all non-whites are a result of our ancestors having sex with monkeys, but you knew that.’
Robin’s hand closed on the ram’s head knob on his stick, aware of something rising within Betty that didn’t occur too often. She’d been the one to suggest they show the picture of the swastika around town, which translated as Gwenda’s. Betty had gone in meaning business, Gwenda backing her up, two strong women, both outsiders.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Whadda we do?’
‘If he’s left anything here, we need to get rid of it. Starting, I suppose, with the purely practical stuff.’
‘The easy bits, huh?’ Robin knelt down, ran his fingers over the contours of the crooked cross in the chimney. ‘You wouldn’t have a stone chisel, Kapoor? I got one back at the bungalow, but we should do this now. Now it’s exposed to the air.’
‘Well, yeah,’ Kapoor said. ‘Suppose I can find summink. But if you bring the whole wall down, it ain’t my fault.’
‘Accepted.’
‘Fair enough. Don’t go away.’
When he’d gone, Robin was aware of the cold, metallic weight of the air in the room. Maybe imagination, but the ambient calm around Betty wasn’t. He knew that calm, like a vulcanologist knew volcanos.
‘You’re quiet.’
‘For too long.’
She went over to the window, looking down into Back Fold, the town slowing down for the evening like some old crustacean settling into its shell.
‘They should’ve told us.’
‘Maybe it was just we didn’t ask.’
‘Crap.’
‘Bets, we’re—’
‘You’re right. Nobody’s had much luck here, have they? From a back-street antiques dump with a phone number in the window to a failed literary bookshop. And Jeeter’s right, people cover up things they don’t like. It’s like this guy Tom Armitage – “Oh, life’s too short for what you can’t explain.” Wrong!’ Betty banged the flat of a fist on the window sill, turned round, glaring at him. ‘You explain it, then you fix it. Meanwhile… yes, get rid of the obvious. Knock the bloody wall down, if you have to.’
He nodded. Stood up, and the pain went up and down his back like a file. He felt his face go grey. He didn’t care.
Bliss was halfway to Ross-on-Wye, the back road to Annie’s flat in Malvern to avoid Hereford peak-hour traffic, when the mobile went.
By the time he’d found somewhere to pull in, with the warning lights on, the phone had already stopped, as if it had been a wrong number or a change of mind by the caller. Didn’t recognize the number, not one he’d stored, but he called it back anyway.
‘Oh. Bliss.’
‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s… Claudia Cornwell in Talgarth.’
It registered at once with Bliss that she sounded edgy and not in a barrister way. He kept quiet. He could see what looked like the full length of the Black Mountains from the English side. Against the late sun, they did look unusually black.
‘Bliss, I’m not sure how to handle this. I’ve just seen something on Wales Today. The Welsh news? Well, for a start, I saw you.’
‘In Hay, yeh. Apologies for not wearing me suit. Long night.’
‘It was just a parting shot in a long report on the missing policewoman. About a false alarm that had the police rushing down to the river.’
‘The King of Hay.’
‘Yes.’
‘Something you want to tell me, Claudia?’
‘There is, but I have another call waiting that might have a bearing on it. You going to be around tonight? I mean you, not the police, generally.’
‘I could be.’
‘You know what I’m saying. There are some things that have to remain confidential. As you must know yourself.’
‘And some things where privacy has to take second place.’
‘I just need a little more time to think, Francis, and perhaps an assurance that if I tell you something I’m not going to be making what amounts to a formal statement to West Mercia Police.’
‘You know I can’t make promises with something this big on the go.’
‘I’ll call you back,’ she said.
Bliss called Annie to say he might be late.
‘She’s a barrister,’ Annie said. ‘Be bloody careful, Francis. You’ve had very little sleep, which didn’t used to matter.’
‘Yeh. Thanks.’
A mile or so further on, he found a gate left open to a field newly mowed for hay. Pulled in, tilted his seat back and slept.
When Kapoor hit the e
nd of the chisel with the hammer, the chisel vanished up to its hilt.
‘Blimey. What’s happening here?’
‘A space?’ Robin said. ‘There’s a space behind the swastika?’
Kapoor dropped the chisel, cupping his hands to catch a little rubble. Concrete, Robin thought, not stone. Spider-cracks were appearing at the top of the swastika.
‘Gonna drop out in a bit, anyway,’ Kapoor said, ‘if I don’t help it along.’
‘Do it,’ Robin said.
Kapoor lifted the hammer and drove in the chisel one more time, Robin cupping his own hands underneath, letting the swastika fall into them in a puff of dust. Robin carried it away, a round of concrete a couple of inches thick, Kapoor scraping out the edge of the hole it had left.
‘Torch?’
Betty had the mini-Maglite ready, handed it to him and he shone it around in the hole then came away, turning the head to switch it off, putting it down in the grate, wiping dust from his mouth.
‘Just a hole.’
‘Lemme see.’
Robin picked up the torch, bent carefully to peer in there, saw a shallow tunnel, like a handful of bricks had been removed. At the back of them, stone.
‘Don’t get it. It’s like another wall.’
‘Well, yeah, it is,’ Kapoor said. ‘It’s the castle wall, innit?’
‘Yeah.’ Robin came out, his hip grinding. ‘Gotta be.’
Betty said, ‘The castle wall? Can I just…?’ She picked up the chisel. ‘Jeeter, if you can shine the beam to the back… Thanks.’
She reached an arm into the space. Robin heard the blade scraping at the stones, and then Betty withdrew it and lay down on her stomach and put her face up to the gap in the back of the chimney. Emerging with her face and hair like she was wearing clown’s make-up.
Robin smiled; didn’t think he ever loved her more than when she was all messed up and didn’t care.
‘Basically, this room,’ Betty said, ‘has a little entry to the castle. Right into the wall.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Does that not ring your bell, Robin?’ You were so excited to be living so close to the castle. And you’re not even a Nazi.’