by Adam Nevill
In their professional relationship, Kat had only ever been required to agree with everything that Sheila thought and said. She only ever pitched her ideas to her boss casually, in one-to-one meetings, and only those topics that reinforced Sheila’s notions of what was of interest to her world. That was how Kat had prospered at L&S.
The discourse the editor maintained in print was directed at those with plenty of disposable income: folks interested in luxury and the leisure opportunities their affluence afforded them. Most of the readership was retired or only resided in the area when using a second home. L&S was no place for real news. Nothing could be found in its pages about the multiple local crises in the NHS and Devon’s care homes, or the falling wages and paucity of school places, or the lack of infrastructure investment and affordable housing. Those concerns didn’t touch the readership.
Subscribers received the publication sealed inside a polythene bag. The magazine’s lifespan expired after a few months of idling upon elegant tables in spas, hotels, private dentists and conservatories blessed with panoramic sea views.
Over half of each monthly edition was paid for as advertorial for chi-chi businesses in the Southwest: vast hotels, retirement villages, Michelin-starred restaurants, farm shops, private boarding schools, cruises, wine importers. Kat wrote many of these advertorials: commercial copy dressed up as feature articles. Local interest pieces about notables, cosy histories, wildlife initiatives, charity balls and society news filled what remained of each edition.
Professional survival was about consensus, not creativity, or blue-sky thinking, or rocking the boat, or originality. In Kat’s experience, an employee’s longevity depended on identifying the key figures in a business who struck the drum, before dancing deferentially to their rhythm.
In light of what Matt Hull dropped on her the night before, before failing to return her calls, and combined with Steve’s failure to return her calls or reappear at his flat, when Sheila summoned her to discuss the supplement, Kat’s front had slipped for the first time in seven years. But here was also a chance to acquire a second opinion from someone who would know someone, who would know something about Redstone Cross. Sheila.
‘Well, I really don’t know what to make of this, Kat. So much to take in all at once,’ Sheila said, peering at one of Matt’s pictures on Kat’s tablet. Her expression suggested she’d seen half of a worm wriggling in the apple she’d just bitten through.
She looked away from the tablet screen and her concern eventually overrode her distaste. ‘Steve first. Where do you think he could be?’
Kat shook her head. ‘He always calls back, eventually.’
‘He was off on a walk, you say?’
‘Not really.’ Kat sighed.
Here goes. She then took Sheila through Steve’s theory and motivation for taking a ‘look around’ Tony Willows’s farm.
‘My word, he is intrepid. I had no idea.’ Sheila looked out of the window while she considered the preposterous information she’d just received.
Kat embellished her story with the catalogue of Matt Hull’s revelations and grievances about his persecution at the hands of the ‘red people’. Finally, she passed her phone to Sheila so that her editor could listen to Matt’s recorded message.
‘I feel sick with worry, Sheila, for both of them.’
‘I can imagine,’ the editor said in a neutral tone, though one clearly fringed with the dismay of having to concern herself with the situation.
As a footnote, Kat mentioned the girl she and Steve had met at the exhibition, Helene Brown. Only when she’d described the girl’s recordings, adding that her brother went missing, presumably killing himself within two weeks of making his final recordings at Redstone Cross, did Sheila’s tone change.
‘How simply awful,’ she said, though little else and when she spoke again her voice had thinned. ‘I can see how a wild imagination might . . .’ Her attempt at a reassuring smile was so awkward that the gesture was quickly abandoned. She closed the conversation.
‘I have a meeting in five minutes, dear. I’m not even remotely prepared. Can this wait until I’ve made some calls? If you come back at . . . let’s say four thirty, we’ll try and get to the bottom of this. I’d also like to show these pictures to someone.’
‘Of course.’
‘You’ll see Steve again. So I don’t think you should worry,’ Sheila said, swinging her chair left and right to collect papers and to operate her desk mouse: ever Kat’s cue to leave. ‘The thing is to not get yourself too worked up, dear. Not to let your imagination run riot like our Steve did. I know someone on the force who’ll look into this.’
‘Thank you, Sheila. I really appreciate it. I’m sorry for bothering you with it.’
‘Oh, nonsense. Makes the job a bit more exciting. But keep trying his phone. The cliffs out that way can be . . . a bit tricky.’
15
Tony Willows’s thematic preoccupations were predominantly derived from M. H. Mason’s Ancient English Poems and Ballads, published in 1908. Some of Mason’s verses were, in turn, newer versions of compositions in Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Yet almost all of Tony Willows’s lyrical output was inspired by the most gruesome and grotesque interpretations in Mason’s ballads.
Wikipedia
Kat unlocked her front door at eight. She’d taken the second meeting with Sheila, at which her ‘friend on the force’, a detective called Lewis, had been present. Following the editor’s summons, the officer had arrived swiftly. That hadn’t surprised Kat as her boss’s local reach seemed infinite.
After the meeting, Kat had driven to Steve’s flat. He’d still not returned so she’d put in an unannounced visit at his parents’ vast house in Divilmouth.
As Reg and Delia had been denied contact with their cherished son since the previous evening (apparently he checked in every morning), his mother was already walking the foothills of frantic when Kat rang the doorbell. This served to ease Kat’s passage into the six-bedroom mothership.
Reg and Delia had claimed they’d wanted to call Kat but didn’t have her number. Although she had been involved with their son for over three years, his parents still had no means of contacting her in an emergency. In a more benign situation, Kat would have spent time analysing the subtext of this communication failure. Instead, she’d extracted their promise to ring round his friends and left.
Kat had written down the names of everyone in the group of men Steve spent so much time with. She didn’t have contact details but Reg and Delia knew most of their parents.
Kat’s anxious wait beside the phone continued through the evening. By nine, she’d still heard nothing from Detective Lewis, though he’d promised to keep her updated. Earlier he’d patiently, though not without a hint of inappropriate amusement, sat through Kat’s retelling of Steve’s hunches, Helene’s recordings, Mat Hull’s stories, his pictures and the recorded message. The pictures Kat had also forwarded to Lewis at his request. He’d told her not to erase Matt Hull’s phone message just in case it was ‘pertinent’.
The detective had then disappeared to ‘ask around’ about Steve, as he’d put it. Interestingly, before he left, Lewis claimed to know Willows. He’d been out to his farm several times following a series of break-ins and the theft of some farming equipment. The gang from Plymouth who’d been raiding rural properties in that area had eventually been caught. But Lewis had scoffed at the idea of Tony Willows producing or supplying drugs.
‘He’s just an old man. Bit grumpy but harmless. I was up there about a year ago. Someone had drained one of his diesel tanks. His health wasn’t so good and his place is falling to bits. Has been for years. I don’t get the impression he’s all that flush these days. Hasn’t played gigs in a while and doesn’t get the royalties he used to.’
According to Lewis, Steve’s ‘airstrip’ was a field given over to Tony’s son for racing his motorbikes.
&
nbsp; So where was Steve?
Perhaps Steve and old Tony had become fast friends and were sharing a joint right now as an old Witchfinder Apprentice album played on the stereo. The idea briefly took hold in Kat's imagination only to disperse when she recalled Helene’s story about the dogs and the hostile couple who’d confronted her. Trespassers were clearly not welcome at that farm.
In her home office, Kat attempted to distract herself, as much as she was able, by delving deeper online into Tony Willows and Redstone Cross. She’d glanced at Willows’s Wikipedia page after Matt Hull had reappeared on her radar and briefly perused it when Steve made it glow brighter with his theories, but she'd never identified anything worth pursuing in depth. Now that Steve had travelled to snoop on Willows’s land and not been seen since, she found herself revisiting her internet tracks more thoroughly.
Once her eyes and thoughts had stopped jumping about her laptop screen, she learned a little more about how haematite and limestone had been mined in parts of Brickburgh from the 1800s until the 1950s. The biggest quarry was near Redstone Cross but she could find nothing else about the site online.
She moved on to the scores of articles available about Tony Willows and Witchfinder Apprentice at fan sites.
An online encyclopaedia of folk music seemed to be the most popular site, one recognised and endorsed by many musos and critics. Kat skim-read the biographical entry for Witchfinder Apprentice:
The darker musical tones that accompany their songs distinguished the band from most of their folk rock contemporaries. From the group’s founding in Warwickshire in 1966, the musical direction was driven by Willows, who hailed from Leamington Spa . . .
The band’s electric sound grew to be harder than any other folk band of 1969. Increasingly, the recorded music was underwritten with big rock arena drumming. Full harmony choruses tempered the sad and tragic tales with lingering melodies . . .
By 1973 Witchfinder Apprentice’s ominous down-tuned electric guitar sound was higher in the mix, though still blended with the traditional styles of English folk music . . .
A refusal to lighten the tone hampered more than the fleeting commercial success the band had enjoyed between 1970 and 1973; this heavier direction also disaffected many of the band’s musicians.
‘I was fed up with Tony the grim and moody. After a while the songs were giving me nightmares. They were a bad trip all by themselves when you were playing them, over and over again, six days a week,’ ex bass player Rob Pryor said in a BBC interview in 1973 . . .
Most critics believed that Willows’s musical obsessions with madness, bloody revenge, demoniac possession, black magic, witchcraft and human transformation by means of the supernatural were solely responsible for enshrining the band’s enduring cult status among so many progressive and black metal musicians for subsequent decades. The band’s antecedents can be found in heavy metal more than the folk music that followed Witchfinder Apprentice.
The list of song titles for their last album, Friends of the Dark, caught Kat’s eye. The record had been recorded when all had been going south for the band and released after their acrimonious split in 1978.
‘Old Black Mag’
‘Call the Hungry Worm with This Horn’
‘A Gest of Woe’
‘The Death of Proud Lamkin’
‘The Slaughter of Bonny Lizie’
‘Saw You My Body?’
‘The New-Slain Knight’
‘Bar the Door to Old Friends’
‘The Lord in the Well’
‘The Friar Wrapt in Blanchfour’s Skin’
‘Crust Beggar’
‘Young Quin Buried a Fair Lad’
‘The Daemon’s Rantin Daughter’
Kat got the gist of the subject matter without analysing the lyrics.
There had been seven Witchfinder Apprentice studio albums; their chart positions were given between 1968 and 1978.
Their ascendance was as well documented online as their fall. The latter was attributed to three changes of management, three record labels applying pressure for hit singles and the endless lineup changes caused by Willows’s unpredictable, controlling and caustic temperament. No fewer than ten musicians passed through the band in twelve years.
Kat read a dozen pages of text, printed in a small font, to get some idea of what a handful, or serious narcissist, Tony Willows had been. More enlightened critical hindsight suggested that a personality disorder, or mental illness, had reflected the dark side of his musical genius.
The biography also detailed the committal of an oboe player during a tour of Germany in 1974 and the tragic death by electrocution of the beautiful fiddler, and Willows’s lover at that time, Agnes Crown, also in 1974.
Heavy and continual use of psychedelic drugs, violent mood swings and hallucinations, even on stage, plagued Tony’s life from 1972 to 1978. His unpredictability and antics onstage forged part of the band’s appeal to their fans.
Mandrax had been the drug of choice from 1972 . . . During a final Witchfinder Apprentice tour in 1978, cancelled after five dates, Willows was taken into psychiatric care. He discharged himself and fled to the farmhouse he’d purchased the same year in a remote area of South Devon . . .
A female member of the band’s entourage, Jessica Usher, accompanied Willows to Redstone. Since her appearance in Tony’s life in 1974, they’d become inseparable. This member of the Witchfinder Apprentice entourage, or ‘groupie’, had long been cited by band members as a divisive influence within the outfit . . . Her status as a Clear in Scientology, was cited as part of Usher’s influence over Tony. They never married but had twins after the band broke up . . .
One low profile solo album was later released by Willows on an indie label, recorded in 1986 at his home studio at Redstone Farm. But the rock stylings of Witchfinder Apprentice records were erased from the solo effort. The album marked a complete return to traditional acoustic instruments and an emphasis on woodwind.
There was no mention of festivals on his land but there was a link to the news story of the death of a young woman, Maddy Gross, in 1979. Kat had already read that story: Gross had been a guest at Tony’s home and there was no official resolution to the mysterious circumstances that surrounded the discovery of her body on the edge of his land, though toxicology tests had detected high levels of illegal substances in her system. She’d died of heart failure. Tony was convicted of drug possession and manslaughter and served four years of a ten-year sentence. He was released in late 1984.
Maybe the girl’s death was an indication that Tony’s old habits had died hard. Maybe the incident had even called time on his rock-and-roll lifestyle and career. He’d never toured after 1978 and, following the release of the solo album, completely abandoned professional music in favour of horticulture, agriculture and animal husbandry. That much Kat already knew, but better understood why Steve had been fascinated with the man and thrilled by his close proximity to where they lived.
Beyond cover versions and remastered releases of Witchfinder Apprentice records in a box-set there was little recent news concerning Willows. A site dedicated to the music of Witchfinder Apprentice’s longest serving musician, the mandolin player Ade ‘Rhymer’ Lankin, did mention how Willows was hounded by fans of their early albums for years after they’d broken up. People often made the long trip to Willows's farm to catch sight of the musician or to get their albums signed. Apparently they were given short shrift by his family. The last time Ade Lankin and Tony Willows had any contact was in 1986. Lankin had played mandolin and contributed vocals to Willows’s only solo album.
Anxiety overran Kat’s mind at 9.30 p.m.
She called Sheila at home, something she’d never done before. As soon as Sheila picked up, Kat became conscious of how thin and breathless her own voice sounded.
‘Still not shown up?’ Sheila asked, while trying to mask her uninterest, or was it annoyance now? ‘Well, I’m not surprised you’re worried. Afraid I’ve not heard a thing, dear. L
et me chase Lewis and I’ll get back to you.’
After that, Kat was left to the four walls of her cottage for another hour. Fear gnawing at her raw nerves in a suffocating silence, she remained on the sofa, nursing a lukewarm cup of coffee, watching her screens.
Breathless with panic, Steve’s mother finally called at 10.30, which did nothing for Kat’s nerves either. When Kat claimed she still hadn’t heard from Steve, Delia hung up without another word. The role of Steve’s girlfriend seemed inconsequential to his mother.
Kat’s second attempt to contact Sheila soon after that was met with a recorded voicemail message.
While trying to distract herself with the BBC news and recurring thoughts of cold white wine, the first red face appeared at the window closest to where Kat sat.
16
Tapping on the glass. That came first. And for reasons Kat later attributed to wishful thinking, she imagined that Steve was outside her home knocking on a window. By then he was all she could think about.
This desire for an external sign to end the terrible wait for her boyfriend compelled her to draw the curtain back from the window.
Before she had an opportunity to regret her haste, she was staring into the primitive face of an adult man. The first feature to claim her attention was the intruder’s eyes. They were mean: the sclera yoke-yellow, traversed by blood vessels. From under the crusting thickets of the brows his glare bulged: as clear an expression of instability and rage as she’d ever seen. Pugnacious, leering, a brutish face from times long past. Her sole reaction a sharp intake of breath.
The smeared figure had pressed itself against the window. When he removed the stained palms of each hand from the pane of glass, she saw him more clearly: pot-bellied, flabby-chested, bearded, balding, entirely naked, a stub of purplish genital evident in a scarlet scrub of pubic hair.