Seaton nodded at the shelves. ‘Your books?’
Mason was silent, looking at him. ‘I asked you a question, Paul.’
‘Bear with me. Your books?’
‘Mostly. A few were my dad’s. I like reading.’
‘Ever come across a writer called Dennis Wheatley?’
Mason chuckled. ‘I’ve read one of his. One was enough. Supernatural thrillers, right?’
‘I’m surprised you’ve heard of him. They’re no longer in print.’
‘Picked it up at a boot sale, I think. Don’t think I ever finished it.’
‘He was a terrible writer,’ Seaton said. ‘But he was very successful in his time. His peak years were between the wars. But he believed in Aryan supremacy and was quite a fan of Hitler and Mussolini and wasn’t shy of saying so in his fiction, where he also argued the racial inferiority of blacks. And he was an anti-Semite. Even in the late forties, he was still trying to salvage Hermann Göring’s reputation.’
‘So he’s not due a revival any time soon, then.’
‘It’s unlikely,’ Seaton said. He stopped. He was struggling with a way to continue. ‘From his late youth, Wheatley manifested some sort of character defect.’
‘Get away,’ Mason said.
‘His prejudices were pretty widely shared among his class, in the period. I’m talking about something more subtle than proto-fascism. Wheatley’s father was well-off, a Mayfair wine merchant. He took his son out of school and made him serve a year aboard a Napoleonic-era naval vessel to try to put some backbone into him. An ambitious father had to be pretty desperate even in those days to do that to his son and heir. Then the Great War started and the boy served as a young artillery officer at Mons and Ypres.’
‘That should have done the trick,’ Mason said. ‘Backbone-wise.’
‘It should have. But apparently it didn’t. Not long after the armistice, his father died and Dennis inherited the wine business. This in the early nineteen twenties. He ran with a very louche crowd. At a very louche time. Do you know much about the twenties and thirties in England?’
‘Educate me,’ Mason said.
‘There was a great deal of social unrest.’
‘I know about the Jarrow March. The General Strike.’
‘Wheatley drove a London bus during that. And wore a pistol on his belt to combat the Bolshevik menace.’
‘He sounds like a wanker.’
‘He was a toff,’ Seaton said. ‘If you’ve read your Orwell, and I’m guessing you have, you’ll know that the judiciary and the police had their hands full in those days suppressing a very large and sometimes very militant working class. The government was unnerved by what was going on in Russia in the years after the Bolsheviks murdered the Tsar and his family. They were frightened by the pithead shop stewards in Wales and the north, tough men pissed off after four years of combat in the trenches, only to come home and discover none of the promises concerning social injustice were going to be kept. These were the years when a peacetime army confronted striking dockers in Liverpool and Tilbury and Chatham with their bayonets fixed. If you were a toff, in the years between the wars, the law didn’t really touch you. The law had its hands full. You were outside it, irrelevant to it, really. And this state of affairs led to some very decadent behaviour.’
‘Cocaine and caviar?’
‘A bit more extreme than that,’ Seaton said. ‘Satanism.’
Mason raised an eyebrow. ‘And this Wheatley character was involved?’
‘He almost bankrupted the wine business supporting his recreational habits, including a mistress he set up in a London flat, with the obligatory accounts at Harrods and Fortnum & Mason. Then, after his wife divorced him, he remarried. His second wife supported him financially until the novels started to pay. That happened when he began to write about black magic and its English practitioners, a group he called followers of the Left Hand Path. He wrote his first bestseller in 1934. And he never looked back.’
‘And he was a satanist?’
Seaton hesitated. He cleared his throat with a cough. ‘Wheatley knew a great deal about black magic ritual. He certainly knew black magicians. He was an intimate of Aleister Crowley. But he always denied being personally involved in the rituals, in the ceremonies. I think he was lying.’
‘Your point being?’
‘He was a friend of Klaus Fischer. He advised Fischer on the purchase of his property on the Isle of Wight. He may even have acted as his intermediary in the sale. He seems to have had a way about him when it came to striking a deal. He was a frequent guest of Fischer’s, so it’s a safe assumption he was invited to the parties thrown there. Dennis Wheatley was Fischer’s calling card on London society. And he was the reason, ten years ago, that I visited the Fischer house myself.’
The two men were silent for a while. Seaton felt tense, despite the alcohol. He kept expecting to hear a scream from the top of the stairs. He kept expecting ‘Tam Lin’ or ‘Imagine’ to start seeping out of Mason’s lacquered stereo speakers. ‘Imagine’ would have a sardonic, ragtime lilt. He glanced down at his wristwatch. It was a little after midnight.
‘To get back to my original question,’ Mason said. ‘Are we dealing here with ghosts?’
Seaton stifled a yawn. He was tired, as well as tense, as well as scared and intimidated by the prospect of what he thought he was going to have to do. Quietly, he said, ‘Why? Do you believe in ghosts, Captain Mason?’
‘I’ve sat here in my own home tonight,’ Mason said, ‘listening to a lecture in English social history delivered by a Paddy drinking my Scotch. At this moment, given the circumstances, I think I’m ready to believe anything.’
Seaton smiled to himself.
‘I’ve got a story to tell you,’ Mason said. ‘I’m going to tell it to you, because it might be important in how things develop between you and me. And then you’re going to tell me about your visit to the Fischer house. Aren’t you, Mr Seaton?’
‘We’ll be up all night,’ Seaton said.
‘There’ll be plenty of time for sleep when you’re dead,’ Mason said.
And Seaton thought that he would have liked very much to be able to say amen to that. ‘Talk, captain,’ he said. ‘I’m all ears.’
It was a covert job, helping the French sort out some tribal trouble on the Ivory Coast. A team of three had been seconded from the regiment and attached to a company of Gurkhas. The terrain was dense jungle, the Gurkhas chosen because they were tough and silent and uncomplaining about the country they would have to live and fight in. The two blokes with Mason were NCOs, good soldiers, veterans of special ops in the Falklands and Northern Ireland and the Gulf War, men coming to the end of their lives on active service still fitter than most fit teenagers. There was no hierarchy among the trio, despite Mason’s rank. It just wasn’t the regiment’s way. They were equals in the field, all reliant on each other, the same hardware and the same intel – French on this particular occasion, piss poor as always and suffering in translation, as if things weren’t already bad enough.
The way it went in these conflicts was always pretty much the same. The tribes squared off over disputed land, or cattle or a waterhole or whatever. The skirmishes and ambushes escalated into attritional war. Wells were poisoned. Villages were burned. Cows and goats were stolen until things peaked with the rape of women and the hacking off of limbs. There came a point where cost started to outweigh potential advantage and the elders of the opposing tribes got together and reached a settlement involving as little loss of face on both sides as possible. Then they went home to mourn their dead and bandage their wounds until the next time.
‘Why couldn’t the French sort it out themselves?’ Seaton said.
Mason smiled. ‘The French are very attached to their bits of Africa.’
‘You don’t mean they’re still empire-building?’
‘You have to remember how long they’ve been there. Anyway, they’ve no plans to leave that I’ve ever been aware of. But they have learned some things. One of the things they’ve learned is not to be seen as one-sided in tribal debates. It’s much easier to let foreign troops take the blame for partiality. It’s why Paris will pay for Gurkhas. To the tribes-people, Gurkhas don’t look French. French intervention in the Ivory Coast means French troops leaving their garrisons in convoys of troop lorries. We arrive at night aboard Chinooks. We could be anyone.’
‘It can’t be a cheap way of doing things.’
‘I don’t suppose it is. But sometimes it’s the only way.’
‘Because this tribal conflict wasn’t petering out,’ Seaton said.
‘No,’ said Mason. ‘It wasn’t. This one was rather different.’
They were in the north of the country, in the hilly region west of Touba, maybe a hundred kilometres from the border with Guinea to the east. The border was far too remote there to be anything more significant than a dark squiggle on a map. Certainly it meant nothing to the warring tribes-people. At first, all Mason and his company of Gurkhas could find was the aftermath of fighting. They found scorched villages and corpses, and dead beasts bloating and alive with maggots and blow flies. So far, so predictable. But the really odd thing, the bizarre thing, was that all the fatal casualties they came across were from the same side. The two tribes were ethnically distinct. The corpses were all from the taller, paler-skinned Kesabi tribe. The Tengwai, their opponents, were either uncharacteristically fastidious about collecting their fallen comrades, or they were close to invincible. The shadow-chasing went on for six days and seven nights. Never once did Mason or any of the force he commanded see a single protagonist in the fighting alive. They would always arrive in the silence and death of the aftermath. And it began to unnerve the two regimental NCOs because they were experienced jungle fighters and had never in their professional lives encountered anything like it. The silence under the tree canopy was almost palpable. The smell of death seemed to permeate their clothing and kit and their sleeping bags. They began to feel more like prey than predators – or that laughable compromise, mediators. There was nothing to mediate. There was no conflict to resolve. They felt like witnesses to an ethnic-cleansing campaign carried out by murderous phantoms.
‘What do you know about Gurkhas, Paul?’
‘Valiant little fighters from Nepal. Bloodthirsty mercenaries in the cynical pay of the Brits.’
‘Neither of those stereotypes really fits them,’ Mason said. ‘Oh, they’re brave enough. And they’re as tough as fuck. And they’re very disciplined. But they’re a long way from being just hired guns. They’re extremely loyal. But they do like to know what’s going on. In fact, they insist upon it. Back in the Korean War, a company of Gurkhas refused to fight in a particularly difficult engagement because they felt they’d been sold an optimistic lie about the strength and disposition of the forces opposing them. So their commander, who was a Sandhurst man, decided on what’s still today a pretty novel approach in the British army. He opted to tell them the truth. He told them that they could expect casualties of around sixty per cent. But that he would personally lead them.’
‘I’m sure that reassured them.’
‘It did. That’s their mentality. They fought and they did take around sixty per cent casualties, and they won one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war.’
‘The Sandhurst officer?’
‘Killed,’ Mason said. ‘Early on in the engagement. But that’s not the point.’
On the morning of their seventh day in the jungle the Gurkha soldier nominated to speak for his comrades voiced their general disquiet. They were not comfortable. They did not feel they knew everything they needed to know to make their mission one they could successfully execute. Mason agreed. He asked SAS sergeant Tom Dillon, who was carrying their coms equipment, to break radio silence and appeal to the French for any information that might possibly assist them. Two hours after the request, the French came back on and gave Dillon coordinates for a missionary outpost about twenty kilometres from their position.
‘Crafty, the French,’ Mason told Seaton. ‘The only thing you can say with any certainty about them in the field is that they always know more than they let on.’
It was the early hours of the following morning before they reached the outpost, a shack on stilts on the banks of a tributary of the Sassandra River.
Seaton frowned. ‘Actually over the water?’
‘Why? Jungle architecture an interest of yours?’
Seaton just looked at him.
‘Yes,’ Mason said. ‘The priest’s house was over the water. You reached it via a pontoon of logs and old oil drums roped together.’
‘And the priest was there?’
‘It was night when we arrived. He was on his knees, praying by candlelight, fingering a worn set of rosary beads in a tiny tin-roofed chapel built above his living quarters. You climbed a ladder to enter it. It was consecrated, a holy place, but desperately poor. A zinc pail for a christening font. His Mass paraphernalia, the goblet and hosts, in a wooden footlocker embellished with gilt paint on top of an old linen chest for an altar.’
‘But a holy place?’
‘Yes. In a careworn sort of a way. It was a holy place, all right. But it felt weary. Weary, like its occupant.’
The priest showed no surprise on seeing armed men enter his tiny place of worship in the early hours. The Gurkhas had removed their bush hats, perhaps as a sign of respect. The priest nodded slightly and rose slowly to his feet and measured his place on the beads of the rosary with his fingertips and kissed its crucifix tenderly before placing the rosary around his neck and kissing the crucifix again. He looked educated, sallow-skinned, high-born, blue eyes fierce in the candlelight in his ancient bony face; his priestly humility both the gift of, and the penance paid for, his enduring ancient faith.
‘A Jesuit,’ Seaton said.
Mason nodded, remembering. ‘Not just a Jesuit. A French Jesuit,’ he said.
He twisted his rifle on its strap so that the butt faced forward and he took both hands away from the weapon and held them out in front of him with the fingers splayed. He recited his name and his rank. ‘We mean you no harm, Father,’ he said.
The priest merely nodded. He showed no sign of being remotely afraid of uninvited visitors, armed to the teeth and smeared in camouflage cream. His composure was completely unruffled. Indeed, the look on his face when his eyes met Mason’s seemed almost to suggest a sort of amusement. ‘You will take tea?’ he said in English. ‘They slaughtered my goats a fortnight ago. So I can offer you no milk with it. But you are welcome to the fortification of tea. And you will need, gentlemen, to be fortified.’
Seaton said, ‘Was there anything unusual about the church?’ and he could see that his question broke Mason’s reverie, his reminiscences, annoying him.
‘Doesn’t it sound unusual enough for you already?’
‘Anything else,’ Seaton persisted.
Mason looked reluctant to consider the question. It was his story, after all. It was his telling of it. ‘It was cold. It wasn’t cool, it was cold in there. It was dense with night heat and humidity outside and the place had a tin roof and wooden walls with chicken wire nailed over gaps in the planking for windows. It should have been stifling, but it was as cold as the grave.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yeah. No insects. They are always around you in the jungle, the flies and moths and mozzies, buzzing, crawling, biting, especially at night. But there were none in there. It was still and cold and the air was subdued in that chapel, in the proximity of the priest.
‘The sound of running water carries at night. But when I think of it, you couldn’t even hear the trickle of the water in the tributary underneath us,’ Mason said.
Both men were silent for a moment.
Mason said, ‘His name was Father Lascalles. He had spent a great amount of time in Africa. He had been in the Congo in the nineteen fifties, he told me. And that was when he asked me whether the trader Philip Mason had been a relative of mine.’
‘Your father?’
Mason nodded. ‘The question at least explained the look on his face when I barged in on his meditations with a rifle in my hands. Lascalles had spotted the resemblance immediately.’
‘Was your father famous in the Congo?’
‘Notorious, would be a better word,’ Mason said. ‘But we were a long way from the Congo here and decades on from my father’s mischief there. He’s got nothing to do with this story, Paul.’
Seaton nodded. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I interrupted you. I won’t interrupt again.’
The priest told them that the chief of the Tengwai had entered into a pact with a demon. He had sacrificed five young, first-born sons of the tribe in return for invincibility in battle against their traditional enemy. The Tengwai warriors would be invulnerable in battle against the Kesabi, on the condition that they remembered each day properly to honour the Kheddi the demon had instructed the Tengwai chief to house in the best-appointed hut in their principal village.
But the Tengwai had become afraid of their own prowess on the battlefield. They mourned bitterly the loss of their five beloved tribal sons. They saw no honour in defeating an enemy with the diabolical intervention that made their own proud fighting skills obsolete. They admired the obdurate courage of the Kesabi, struggling to continue to wage a war that had become, for them, suicidal. And in their hearts they felt that the demon had tricked them, had reneged on the bargain. This because they were so deeply afraid of the Kheddi, enthroned in pomp in their midst, honoured, fêted daily. The Kheddi made slaves of them in its baleful presence and their dread obligation to it. They hated their chief and despised him for the foolishness of his dabbling with diabolical forces. They muttered about killing him, about deserting their own homes and lands and suing for peace with their enemies. They were grief-stricken, remorseful, ashamed and sleepless at night with their own convulsive, deepening terror. It goes against nature for a warrior to know his enemies cannot harm him, the Jesuit said. Men become unbalanced, forced to consider the prospect of their own immortality.
‘I’d have laughed at this stuff,’ Mason said to Seaton, ‘before I got there and saw the evidence with my own eyes of how that tribal war was being fought. But it didn’t seem funny, drinking tea and listening by candlelight that night, the way the old priest told it. And neither of the lads were laughing when I sneaked a look at them. And more to the point, since they outnumbered us, none of the Gurkhas were laughing, either.’
‘This idol. This…Kheddi?’
Mason shook his head, slowly. ‘More than an idol. A kind of golem, the priest said. The bogeyman made flesh. He wasn’t very specific about it. He hadn’t seen it himself. For some reason I imagined the tales from my own childhood of the tar baby, extricated from his tarry lair, grown-up and grown nastier. Certainly the Kheddi sounded like more than a totem, though. Animate, somehow. Malevolent. A Jesuit priest was never going to see the devil’s dealings in a charitable light. But even given his theological bias, he made it seem like the Tengwai chieftain had struck a very sticky bargain.’
Sticky. Tarry.
‘Animate?’
Mason nodded. He reached again for his cigarettes. He had chain-smoked throughout his story. There was a pall of cigarette smoke, thin and bitter, in the room where they sat in the house on the seafront in Whitstable. Rain scrabbled on the windowpanes like thrown grit in fierce, fitful gusts of wind. Seaton remembered the girl, then, sleeping her troubled narcotic sleep in her room at the top of the stairs.
‘The priest said it killed his goats,’ Mason said. ‘Gutted them, drank their blood, ate their livers and hearts.’
Wind howled outside, rattling the windowpanes in their painted wooden frames with a fury that made Seaton jump. He thought suddenly about the man he had left late that afternoon, about the ethics professor and his terminal case of entropy in his building gathering moss behind its enclosure of dripping trees.
‘By dawn, fortified by Jesuit tea, we had a plan,’ Mason said. ‘Our strategy was based on the old “cut off the head and the body dies” principle. Our Jesuit ally was able to provide a very detailed hand-drawn map of the village where he insisted we would find the Tengwai chieftain’s quarters. He sketched a route that would take us there in less than a day’s march undetected, an old hunting trail neglected and unused for decades, but there, if you knew where to pick it up. We would surround the village, do the necessary surveillance, establish a field of fire in case everything went pear-shaped. Then, after dusk, one man would go in and slot the chief. All the Gurkhas wanted to do it. There were nine Nepalese in our patrol and every single one of them volunteered. Either of my noncoms from the regiment would have gone in just as willingly. But there were two compelling practical reasons for having a Gurkha do it. They don’t eat the meat-based diet Westerners do and so their scent is harder to pick up than a European’s typically would be. That’s a big consideration in the heat and humidity of the jungle; just ask any of the old American or Aussie combat vets who ever fought in Vietnam.’