Crowley ended up living in Hastings, a tired and drug-addicted old man. He died there two years later. Until his death this Pasadena sect paid his rent.
Sarah Gilchrist plumped down beside Kate with a bottle of lager at around nine.
‘How’s it going?’ Kate said.
‘Not great,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Bad things coming up.’
Sarah was really stressed, that was obvious. The policewoman jiggled her foot and ran her hand continually through her hair.
‘I’ve found out something you might not know about,’ Kate said. ‘In passing, when talking to church authorities and vicars, I’ve discovered that in recent months there have been a dozen cases of sacrilegious behaviour in churches around Brighton.’
‘I saw an example of it.’
Gilchrist described what she’d seen at St Michael’s.
‘I’ve just heard the heart is that of a pig. It looks almost identical to that of a human.’ She grimaced. ‘I don’t mind telling you I’m starting to get seriously freaked.’
Gilchrist looked at her bottle of beer, seemingly surprised she had already finished it.
‘You don’t believe in magic though?’ Kate said.
‘Everything can be explained, I know that,’ Gilchrist said. ‘It isn’t the thing, it’s the bloody people. Who knew there were so many nutters around? Is this what the world is turning into – a bunch of loony people believing in absolute garbage?’
‘You’re describing Brighton then.’
Gilchrist gave Kate a look.
‘When has it ever been different?’ Kate laughed. ‘Wait until you meet the man with the hole in his head.’
Gilchrist sighed. ‘You think he’ll be the first man I’ve met with a hole in his head? Remind me to give you the history of my love life.’
Kate laughed again. ‘No, really. He’s been trepanned – a hole drilled into his head to release, well, something or other in his mind. There’s a church for it. There’s a church for everything in Brighton.’
‘A church of – what did you call it – trepanning? Not Christian, I assume.’
‘Not so you’d notice. There are some fundamentalist, happy-clappy Christian churches where they exorcize demons and fall into ecstatic fits and sometimes just sing really bad Christian pop songs. The most extreme – which I’m visiting on Saturday – is supposed to be the Church of Holy Blood.’
‘How come you’re doing that? You’re planning a programme?’
‘Yes. I was partway through when the fish fell out of the sky – do you think I should have taken that as a sign?’
Gilchrist smiled, her face relaxing for the first time since she’d joined Kate. ‘You going to drink something stronger than cranberry juice?’
When she came back with two beers, Kate said: ‘We need to talk.’
‘About what?’
Kate lowered her voice. ‘About what happened last night.’
Gilchrist paused for a moment. ‘I don’t know what happened last night,’ she said, ‘except that Plenty poisoned us. Whatever happened, happened because of that.’
A man came in with a girl of about sixteen. A father getting his access, Simpson guessed. They sat down a couple of tables away.
Gilchrist looked down, then at Kate. ‘I’m not really sure how that happened,’ she said. ‘I woke up this morning and there we were.’
‘And there we were,’ Kate murmured.
‘I’m not . . . you know . . . that way,’ Gilchrist said.
Kate took a breath and leaned forward. ‘I am.’
Gilchrist tilted her head. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Sort of. Brad Pitt comes along, it’s “sayonara missy”.’
Gilchrist laughed. ‘I’m a Clooney gal myself.’
Kate nodded. ‘That’s a generation thing. If you were for Robert Pattinson I’d be worried.’
‘Who he?’
‘Vampire guy. Twilight?’
Gilchrist did a mock groan. ‘Don’t go back to that.’
Kate laughed.
While this conversation had been going on both of them had been aware of the loud voice of the man with the young girl a couple of tables away. Now they both tuned in, Gilchrist absently gnawing at a fingernail.
‘I tell you what,’ the man said. ‘You’re heavier than you used to be. Too much lasagne.’
Gilchrist glanced at Kate.
A couple of minutes later the girl got up to go to the bathroom.
‘Hang on a minute,’ Gilchrist said.
Kate watched her walk across to the man. He was wearing a neat grey suit but terrible pointed black shoes with purple soles. Yuck.
‘Excuse me,’ Gilchrist said, flashing her warrant card.
The man looked bemused.
‘Nothing heavy – just a moment.’
The man stood and they moved away a couple of yards, the man giving an expressive shrug to nobody in particular.
Gilchrist tried to get the guy to focus on her eyes. His eyes were looking from side to side. She jabbed him in the chest.
‘Hey . . .’ She eyeballed him. ‘Never, ever, tell a young girl she’s overweight.’
He was befuddled but he tried for indignant. ‘I didn’t – I said . . .’
‘You said she was heavy and it was too much lasagne. Big mistake.’
‘I’m not getting you,’ he said, temper showing. ‘And what’s it got to do with you anyway?’
‘What you said to her is going to resonate for the rest of her life.’
‘Whoa,’ he said, rearing back from her vehemence.
Gilchrist, head down, took a moment. She leaned in next to his ear. ‘Reassure her. She’s a beautiful kid. Tell her that. Again and again. Never ever tell her she is overweight.’ She pushed him in the chest again. ‘Got it?’
He nodded, mumbling.
Gilchrist turned, picked up her bag and left the pub. Kate grabbed her own bag and followed.
ELEVEN
‘There’s a flaw in The Wicker Man.’
‘I’m sure there are many flaws,’ Southern Shores Simon said. ‘That’s part of its charm. As it is of mine.’
Kate snorted a laugh.
‘Ignore Miss Piggy and carry on, sir,’ Simon said.
The caller had a nasal voice.
‘Do you remember the scene where Britt Ekland, the publican’s daughter, is offering herself to the copper – Edward Woodward – by dancing naked in the room next door to him and driving him mad with lust?’
‘Who could forget? She’s tempting him for sure – although I believe they used a body double for some of that dance.’
‘But why?’
‘Maybe Britt was shy about showing her bum.’
‘I mean why was she trying to seduce him? Christopher Lee had gone to a lot of trouble to get a virgin copper to the island. They’d built this Wicker Man to burn a virgin copper. For the plan to work the copper had to be a virgin. What if Woodward had opened his door and spent the night with Britt – the film would have ended right there. No virgin, no Wicker Man sacrifice, no crops.’
Kate Simpson laughed. She’d seen the film a couple of times at the Duke of York’s and on telly. The caller was right.
Sarah Gilchrist was kicking herself for losing her rag the night before. A private person, even with a friend such as Kate, she also felt she had revealed herself and that annoyed her even more.
Kate had followed her out of the pub and they’d walked back to the flat in near silence. Neither of them mentioned the waking up in bed together incident and Kate had resumed the sofa bed in the corner of the lounge.
Gilchrist had slept like a log and Kate had already left for work when she got up. After a hasty shower she hurried in to the office, her head buzzing with the things she needed to achieve today.
The others dribbled in over the next hour and settled in front of their computers and phones with mugs of lousy office coffee.
Gilchrist telephoned David Rutherford, the vicar at St Michael’s.
‘I was checking nothing else had happened to your church,’ she said. ‘That heart was animal, not human, by the way.’
‘I’m relieved to hear it,’ he said. ‘I believe your policemen are driving by quite regularly during the night and we ensure we keep our eyes peeled during the day. It’s timely that you should call, however, as I was toying with the idea of calling the station myself.’
‘Why?’
‘First, though, I owe you an apology. In all the kerfuffle the other day I omitted to ask how I might help you. You never told me why you came to my church.’
Gilchrist gave a quick look round the incident room. ‘Something and nothing,’ she said. ‘But why were you going to call us?’
She guessed Rutherford took the hint because he moved on. ‘My fellow vicar has gone missing. We share our mission at the church.’
‘How long missing?’
‘Hard to say. He took a leave of absence three weeks ago but was due back three days ago. He has not been in contact and does not return our calls. I have visited his flat but if he is there he does not answer the door. His upstairs neighbour can’t even remember the last time he saw him.’
‘Three days isn’t very long, Vicar.’
‘Call me David, please. You mean old ladies have been stuck in lavatories longer?’
She smiled. ‘Something like that.’
‘You’re right but Andrew has been very troubled lately. The Reverend Andrew Callaghan, I should say. He’s young and quite narrow in his views. He’s had a bit of a bee in his bonnet about the rise in interest in the supernatural and what he regards as Devil worship. So you can see how I’m wondering if his disappearance might somehow link to what happened in our church.’
‘You said leave of absence, not holiday. What was that for?’
‘He was quite worked up. He needed a break. There had been threats against him. He believed he was in a battle with the forces of evil.’
‘And do you believe the same?’
‘Whilst not being a proponent of Satanism I am perhaps more ecumenical in my approach.’
‘Have you been in touch with his family?’
‘He has no family that I’m aware of. He was an orphan.’
‘Friends?’
‘He was what is often called a loner, although he was a full member of our church community.’
‘Do you know where he took his leave of absence?’
‘He was unsure of his destination.’
Gilchrist looked at her watch. ‘Give me his address and I’ll have someone call round.’
‘And if he isn’t there?’
‘We’ll have to see,’ she said. ‘We try to avoid breaking into citizens’ houses without due cause.’
There was a silence on the other end of the phone and she wondered if he was thinking Milldean Massacre, the occasion when the police had not only broken into the wrong house but had also shot everybody inside it.
‘And you don’t think there is due cause,’ Rutherford finally said.
‘I’m not sure,’ Gilchrist answered honestly.
Bob Watts looked again at the inscription in Colin Pearson’s book that called his father mon semblable, mon frère. Frère he knew was brother. He looked up semblable in an online French dictionary. It meant ‘likeness’, possibly ‘double’. He didn’t have a hard copy of Eliot’s The Waste Land but he found the text online. Watts had done it in the sixth form and vaguely remembered the poem was based on two books: one about the search for the Holy Grail and the other a multi-volume Victorian tome about ancient fertility rituals and religions.
The French phrase concluded the poem’s first section. The lines before ‘my double, my brother’ were about someone called Stetson planting a corpse in his garden and the poet asking whether it would bloom that year. Rebirth then, but Watts couldn’t see what the French phrase had to do with that.
He read on. He came to another French phrase – Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole. An online translation was: ‘And O those children’s voices, singing in the cupola’. He knew a ‘cupola’ was a dome, usually of a church. The line was from Symbolist Paul Verlaine’s poem Parsifal. It occurred when the knight, Parsifal, found the Grail and became its guardian.
Almost at the end of Eliot’s poem Watts found another French quote: Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie. The Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower. Wasn’t there a ruined tower in the Tarot pack? The line was from a poem by a near-symbolist French poet, Gerard de Nerval.
Watts read to the end of The Waste Land and started on Eliot’s lengthy notes. He remembered how pretentious he had found these as a teenager. Eliot used quotes in their original languages but without any translations. If you weren’t conversant with Italian, French or German you were lost. Watts distinctly remembered wondering if the Notes were Eliot’s po-faced joke as they read like parodies – and probably had been much parodied since.
He remembered his mates double-checking the Latin name for a hermit-thrush Eliot quoted in one daft line reference because the Latin name – Turdus something – was just too funny to be true for any schoolboy. But it was true.
Now he found that Eliot took ‘my double, my brother’ from Charles Baudelaire, perhaps the first Symbolist poet. The line was from a poem, To the Reader, which acted as the foreword to Baudelaire’s controversial 1857 collection: six poems from the collection had been banned in France until 1949.
According to Baudelaire, Satan controlled people’s every move.
Baudelaire identified boredom as the worst misery in the world and said that extreme acts he called ‘pleasant designs’ – ‘rape and poison, dagger and burning’ – might take a reader who was bold enough out of ‘the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies’. Watts wasn’t sure if Baudelaire was being serious or tongue in cheek to make a point.
‘Mon semblable, mon frère’ appeared in the final two lines. The bored man was having a drugged dream of going to the gallows for those crimes mentioned earlier and Baudelaire was suggesting he was only thinking what the reader – ‘my double, my brother’ – was thinking.
On Wikipedia someone had called Baudelaire’s attempt to implicate the reader in his own dark imaginings a malediction. Watts had to look the word up. It was a curse, a magical word or phrase uttered with the intention of bringing about evil or destruction.
Watts Googled Baudelaire. He had translated Gothic horror writer Edgar Allan Poe into French. That figured. Fellow drug addict. He had influenced a generation of poets including Arthur Rimbaud, whose first collection of poetry was called Season in Hell.
Watts read the translation of the whole poem again. He thought it infantile, written by someone out to shock. He couldn’t imagine his father, who had seen death more than once in wartime, would value this kind of poser.
Baudelaire had given the collection the title Les Fleurs du Mal. The Flowers of Evil.
‘Anything yet on the flower painting?’ Gilchrist asked Sylvia Wade.
Wade grinned. ‘Just this second, ma’am. We’ve located the part of the CCTV footage from the museum showing the theft.’
‘And?’
‘The footage isn’t too clear – you can’t see features,’ Wade said.
Gilchrist peered at the screen. ‘Isn’t there something we can do with pixels?’
‘Not if the picture isn’t clear in the first place,’ Wade said.
They were looking at a person swathed in waterproofs hurl a brick through the glass case. This person made no attempt to take anything from inside the case. Another camera further up the gallery caught another swaddled figure, taller, take the painting off the wall and walk calmly round the corner. Just before the CCTV lost them, the two of them hoiked the picture out through the emergency exit.
‘Show it again,’ Gilchrist said to Wade. Then, to no one in particular, ‘Can we even determine the gender of these two?’
‘I can’t,’ Wade said.
‘Bloody great,’ Donaldson said, scowling. �
��So what can we analyse?’
Wade clenched her jaw. ‘We have pictures of two people, gender indeterminate, faces obscured by rain hoods, stepping close, stepping away. Unhurried.’
‘Height?’
‘The person who throws the brick appears to be medium height, gender non-specific. The other is taller. That’s about it.’
‘Aside from the gait,’ Heap said.
‘Gate?’ Donaldson said. ‘Is this the one there’s no point closing because the horse has already bolted?’
Heap flushed again. ‘The way the taller one walked, sir.’
‘Gait,’ Donaldson said.
‘Tell me,’ Gilchrist said.
‘I believe this person is a woman.’
Donaldson snorted. Gilchrist recognized that Heap’s hesitant delivery and his flushed face did not necessarily inspire confidence.
‘Why would you think so?’ she said, managing to combine an encouraging look at Heap with a fierce stare at Donaldson. She hoped. ‘About the woman, I mean.’
‘I’m hesitant to be s-sexist,’ Heap said, flushing more deeply. ‘But it’s the way that person walks. It’s a woman’s ambulation.’
Donaldson gave him a look.
‘I’ve seen you walk that way, Belly,’ somebody muttered, loud enough to be heard.
Gilchrist stared into the room. Sylvia Wade was the only other woman. Gilchrist was out of her depth dealing with a bunch of men like this. Nevertheless she gave each person in turn the hard stare. Perhaps her height helped or they were cutting her slack because she was newly promoted. Whatever the reason, they calmed down.
‘Or rather,’ Heap persevered, ‘it’s the way a woman walks when trying to walk like a man.’
Gilchrist was trying to be patient. ‘In what way?’
How red can a person go? Bellamy Heap looked round the room, his ears pulsating. Gilchrist wanted to give him a hug.
‘It’s a hip swivel thing, ma’am. Men and women have a different way of walking because of the hip structure. Gay men sometimes imitate women but there’s a natural difference. I think this is a woman trying to walk like a man.’
Gilchrist knew what Heap meant. In Brighton that thrust of the hip, that deliberate parody of a man’s walk was common among lesbians who wanted to play tough but, for better or worse, weren’t the real thing. A bit like Donaldson with his Jack-the-Lad shoulder roll. All for show.
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