Authors: Phil Rickman
16
The unknowable
S
UDDEN SUN HAD
pushed a bar of light through the crack between grey velvet curtains, bringing out the glow in two vast rugs. They looked kind of Zoroastrian. Men with curious waist-level wings, cauldrons of fire.
‘Mmm,’ Merrily said. ‘Looks like the kids weren’t far off.’
Bliss walked over to the mahogany desk by the tall window. All a bit churchy, but it didn’t seem to be an altar.
‘He
was
a wizard?’
‘How about we don’t use that word.’
Floor-to-ceiling darkwood bookcases lined the walls. Deep shelves, shadowed but you could see they were full. In the few spaces between the bookcases, there were small pictures. Black-framed drawings or engravings, all figurative, and all the figures were naked. And active.
Bliss pointed up at the ceiling. The two oak beams crossing it looked older than the house.
‘Could be replacing supporting walls. I reckon this might be three rooms knocked into one.’
Merrily turned to where a dozen plain, darkwood chairs had been arranged in short rows. Freestanding wrought-iron candle-holders stood behind them, layers of wax on the candle trays showing they were not merely decorative. A sweetish scent weighted the atmosphere. Incense rather than cannabis.
‘Don’t see it as a temple, though.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, unless…’ She bent and pulled back a corner of one of the rugs. ‘No… just floorboards. A temple would be designed to some strict geometric format. And it would have a magic circle. A protective circle. And generally there are black and white squares on the floor.’
‘So what’s this?’
‘It’s what it looks like – a library. And a lecture room. Or it might have been used for group meditation. And yet…’
Shallow niches either side of the long window housed small statues. On the left, an Egyptian woman with a thin staff and an ankh. Isis? On the right, what was almost certainly the Virgin Mary, hands raised. Curious.
‘Yet what?’ Bliss said.
‘Have you looked elsewhere in the house? In the barns? For anything resembling a temple?’
‘The other rooms are what you’d expect. Plainish bedrooms, two bathrooms, the kitchen, which you’ve seen, and a little study. The outbuildings all have holes in the roofs, old bales of straw, a rusting tractor… What was he – a witch, warlock? What do they call it these days?’
‘I’ll need to have a better look at the books, but I think this is something more… academic. You’re probably looking at ritual magic.’
‘Which means?’
‘How many weeks have you got? It’s a formalized system – in fact, several formalized systems – with origins going back far further than contemporary witchcraft. As far back as ancient Egypt. Possibly.’ She nodded at the statuette in its niche. ‘I think that’s Isis – Egyptian goddess. Can we draw back the curtains then I can see some of these books?’
‘Little switch, near Tamsin’s elbow. Thank you, Tamsin.’
‘Well,’ Merrily said, ‘that’s nicely done, isn’t it?’
Velvety light in all the bookcases now displaying thousands of volumes, some clearly old, leather bound. You’d never get Jane out of here.
‘I could look at some of this stuff and think this guy was a collector, possibly a dealer.’ She put out a finger without touching the faded ochre spines of a set of four. ‘This looks like it could be Israel Regardie’s original publication of the rituals of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. You know about them?’
Bliss said, ‘There’s an early David Bowie song…’
‘Well referenced, Frannie.’
Tamsin, standing in the doorway, looked a little mystified. A great oak door, possibly from a church, hanging open to the windowless inner hall linked to the kitchen. This room could be in a different and older house.
‘The Golden Dawn was Britain’s most famous nineteenth-century magical order, involving people like W. B. Yeats, the poet, and Aleister Crowley, the Beast 666. Its rituals were all very secret, until Regardie blew the lot in these books in maybe the nineteen thirties. There was a row about it. And I’m thinking this edition could be worth an arm and a leg.’
‘So Hambling could’ve been dealing in this stuff?’
‘Well, no… probably not, because… look, lot of new editions. Lot of paperbacks. Reprints. You can get some of these for ninety-nine pence in The Works. And they’re stacked alongside the expensive stuff. This is a working library, isn’t it? Alphabetical.’
Crowley in quantity. All the well-known ones,
Magick in Theory and Practice
, the
Confessions
, the novels,
Moonchild
and
Diary of a Drug Fiend
. And others she’d only heard of:
The Book of Lies, The Book of Thoth
. Bound copies of magazines and journals, like
The Equinox
.
Above, in the Bs, were Helena Blavatsky’s
Isis Unveiled
, Alice Bailey’s
A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
.
And some oddities.
‘More than just a magical library.’ Merrily pulled out a book. ‘The autobiography of Richard Booth, the King of Hay?’
Next to it, two novels by Beryl Bainbridge. On the shelf above Crowley, several books by Bruce Chatwin, travel writer and novelist. Who’d spent time in the Black Mountains, so maybe
that accounted for him.
Tamsin said, ‘Should I make some fresh tea, boss?’
‘Yeh,’ Bliss said. ‘That’d be good.’
When she’d gone, Merrily shut the oak door.
‘So which of you really thinks there’s more to this than an old man falling into a pool – you or Tamsin?’
Bliss smiled. It was still lopsided, and there was a red scar under his left eye.
‘And how bad
are
you? Really. No bullshit, Frannie.’
Bliss wiped a hand across his mouth as if he’d been punched.
‘Could be better. Tunnel vision when I’m tired, which isn’t good, driving-wise. Double vision, when I look down without bending me head, whether I’m tired or not. Which means I don’t go up ladders in case I start missing steps on the way down by treading on the one that doesn’t exist. Offered surgery to correct the eyes, but they couldn’t guarantee it’d work, and apparently if it didn’t it might be friggin’
wairse
. So I said it was improving all the time.’
‘Who knows the truth?’
‘Couple of people. One of whom could shaft me bigtime with West Mercia if we ever fell out. And someone who only knows what he can actually spot with his bits of kit. What he can’t detect, I haven’t told him.’
‘Frannie, you’re a—’
‘Fool to meself, yeh. But I think you can understand why I wouldn’t wanna spent me days knocking around a house that sooner or later Kirsty’s gonna get half of. If not the lot. First week out of hospital, I’d just sit down and pass out in the chair.’
‘You’re over that?’
‘Still gorra phobia about it. That and bright lights. Rooms like this – gloomy – are good. Powerful lights do me head in, so if I wound up with a friggin’ desk job I’d need an office with subdued lighting. Which’d probably contravene some Health and Safety shite to stop you tripping over the waste bin. Worst-case scenario is semi-permanent sick leave. That well-known euphemism for
scrapheap. Not gonna happen, Merrily. Just need to stay in the saddle till it turns the friggin’ corner.’
‘That’s like walking a cliff edge.’
‘And if you look down you see all these pointed rocks. Only double.’ Bliss found a sickly laugh. ‘Good days and bad days, Merrily, and a bad day is how I wound up investigating a small drowning at Cusop Dingle. Dull morning, office lights, head feeling like it belongs to some other bastard. Small drowning? Ha. No such thing as a small drowning. Just gonna check it out.’
Merrily let her face fall into her hands.
‘Excuse was a dead drug dealer we pulled out of the Wye up towards Mordiford. Turf war thing. You get inventive when you’ve something to hide. And I gerra bit of leeway, being a damaged hero, and Brent had a day’s leave. And then… bugger me if it doesn’t get interesting. Tamsin shows me the dope… and all this. Kid thinks there’s more to it, and nobody else is likely to – the coroner’s officer wasn’t impressed. Be nice if the kid was right, wouldn’t it?’
‘And useful for you, under the circumstances. Where’s she based?’
‘Peterchurch. Last of the village copshops, about nine miles from here. The short-sighted suits are gonna close it down soon. So – bottom line, Merrily – this is not a temple, but Mr Hambling could actually have been a… what?’
‘Magician?’
‘And what’s that mean outside of fairy tales?’
‘Magic is… the science and art of causing change to occur, erm, in conformity with will. The late Aleister Crowley’s definition.’
‘But he was a friggin’ fruitcake.’
‘He just liked to mix business with pleasure. Extreme pleasure.’
She inspected two of the framed drawings on the wall. They were both explicitly sexual. One, which looked as if it had been photocopied from an illustration in a book, was a rough and fibrous, coital tangle of threshing limbs. Underneath was
written:
Man is matter and spirit, both real and both good
. The other involved several figures with exaggerated genitalia, both male and female, the kind of drawing done by a dirty old man with a stub of a pencil and one hand in his pocket.
‘Also looks like Hambling was holding meetings here. Giving… intimate lectures?’
‘Intimate?’
‘I mean to small, exclusive groups. He wasn’t advertising it, was he? There are groups that meet to meditate together. Like prayer groups only… more esoteric. That Crowley description about causing change to happen through focused will power… the changes they’re looking for are mostly in themselves. They want to increase their level of consciousness, they want heightened awareness. Contact with other spheres of existence.’
‘Psychic powers, in other words.’
‘People who follow a religion, like Christianity or Islam, have faith that there’s something beyond normal life. A magician wants to
know
. To know the unknowable.’
‘About Hambling,’ Bliss said. ‘He wasn’t Hambling.’
Merrily pulled out one of the chairs. It was solid, had a straight back, no arms. Good chair for meditation. She sat down, keeping her gaze on Bliss.
‘You’re saying the body in the pool was someone else’s?’
‘I’m saying David Hambling was an assumed name. Only learned that this morning when the coroner’s officer was here with Hambling’s solicitor. Who’s been his solicitor for many years and his father before him, so very solid.’
Merrily said, ‘Was he Lord Lucan?’
‘You’re being bloody frivolous this morning.’
‘Demob happy.’
‘His name was Peter Rector. Before he came here, he was living in a farmhouse up in the Black Mountains where he ran educational residential courses. And not in cookery.’
‘I see.’
‘Another thing we’ve learned is that he’s left most of his money… to one person. To whom he was not related.’
‘Ah.’
‘Who I was thinking you could have a word with. On the basis you’d get more out of this person that I would.’
‘Bloody hell, Bliss, you go on about people like Tamsin taking ages to get to the point—’
‘Just to draw a line under it. Or not. Don’t look at me like that! If I’d had the balls to tough it out under the lights in Gaol Street neither of us would be in this position. However, if it turns out there
is
something suspicious which I, having come all the way out here on a whim, have somehow failed to uncover…’
‘Egg on face?’
‘The full Spanish omelette. But unless Billy Grace’s PM reveals something iffy, I’m in no position to take it much further after today, anyway. There’s certainly no basis on which I can legitimately approach the beneficiary.’
‘You said he was running his courses in the Black Mountains?’
She pulled a book from the shelf, next to Richard Booth.
Hills of Vision
:
a history of religious life in the Black Mountains
by R. H. Beynon. Sorry… the beneficiary?’
‘Everybody’ll know about Rector by tonight, Merrily, so nothing classified, but we might have a few days on the identity of this person. Someone I’m not acquainted with, obviously, but, more significantly, nor is Tamsin. Despite living in the next village.’
‘One of the women who did his shopping? His dealer? Oh—’
A piece of paper had fallen out of the Black Mountains book. She bent to retrieve it.
‘Actually, this is someone,’ Bliss said, ‘who I believe is known to you.’
‘Oh good. Maybe he can lend me some money to get Jane through university.’
‘
She
, actually.’
‘Can’t be anybody I know well. In fact I can’t think of anyone I know in Dorstone or any neighbouring village.’
‘I don’t think Hardwicke even qualifies as a village.’
Tap on the door. Sound of crockery wobbling on a tray.
Hardwicke?
‘Oh my God.’ Merrily stared at Bliss. ‘Not
her…’
Bliss shrugged, looking helpless. It made sense now. She’d tie him in knots.
God, the way you just walked into these situations. Merrily, exasperated, opened
Hills of Vision
to slip the paper back inside, saw what was on it, recoiled.
‘Frannie…’
They intercepted Tamsin with the tea, took the tray, with the book and the paper, back into the kitchen. Laid the paper on the worktop under the window.
It was a photocopy. A black and white photo occupying the middle of a single piece of A4 copier paper folded in two.
Bliss didn’t touch it.
Merrily said, ‘Do you think she’s dead?’
‘I don’t know.’
The picture was grey and grainy. It was a photo of a woman seen from behind and from above.
At least, the narrow shoulders suggested a woman. Her head had been shaved, but not carefully, leaving some tufts of hair and a lattice of blood trails. And on the skull, the way skinheads used to have it done and maybe some still did, a crude and bloody swastika.
Under the picture, a single hand-printed line. Felt pen, it looked like.
It said,
What will you do now?
17
Putrid
R
OBIN LOOKED OUT
of the sitting room window, down into Back Fold.
‘Only drawback here, is what you see. Or don’t see.’
What you saw were the modern buildings opposite, housing an opticians and some other stores that were not exactly historic. What he hadn’t realized before was that Back Fold was only half medieval. What you couldn’t see from the bookstore was the castle.
‘Downside of actually having the castle wall as your own back wall. You wanna see the castle, you gotta go open the bathroom window, stick your head out.’
‘Or perhaps,’ Betty said, ‘you could just pop downstairs and out of the front door and… wooh, a castle!’
Yeah, what the hell. He hauled the rolled-up rug they’d brought into the middle of the room, and they both unrolled it. Only a plain rust-coloured rug, but it gave the room a new warmth.
Betty stood in the centre of the rug.
‘Only real problem is that we can’t have a fire.’
‘We have fireplaces.’
‘Two,’ Betty said. ‘Ground floor and here. However, if you go outside, walk up the castle drive to the point where you can look over the wall and down on this place, you’ll see a plain, slate roof with no stack, and no aperture through which smoke may be released into the air.’
‘Huh?’
‘Check it.’
They went downstairs. No need to walk up the castle drive. Even from street level you could see the roof was all slates, no chimney. The castle’s curtain wall rose just higher than its apex. Had this been the original wall? Probably, in some form. No reason why it shouldn’t date back at least to the twelfth century when the castle had belonged, like most of the southern border castles, to the de Braose Family.
‘Shit,’ Robin said. ‘You’re right. Wonder if there’s a planning law to prevent us installing a small wood-burner and shoving a neat flue up between the tiles? This is like when we make so much money we buy the place from Oliver.’
Betty gave him a smile. He was in optimistic mood today. He’d chosen a bedroom for his studio.
The phone beeped.
‘You leave a message for me? Tom Armitage, Salisbury?’
Betty said, ‘Sorry, you’re breaking up. Can you hang on?’
She pointed at the phone, conveying to Robin that she needed a stronger signal, and took it to the top of the alley, watching Robin going back into the shop. Hadn’t said a word to him about her call to Mr Oliver or any of this.
‘That’s better.’
‘Sounds exactly the same to me,’ Tom Armitage said.
The size of his website suggested he was thriving in Salisbury, which doubtless still had a good percentage of residents who could afford antique furniture. He asked Betty who exactly she was.
‘I’m a bookseller.’
‘In Hay? Are there any left?’ His accent wasn’t local to Hay. Or Wiltshire, come to that. He sounded posh, a touch cavalier. ‘Booth still there? Indefatigable old bugger. Luck of the devil. When he’s gone – if he ever consents to go – he’ll be seen striding the battlements with his tin crown under his arm. What’s the problem, Mrs Thorogood?’
‘We’re opening a book business in your former premises. In Back Fold.’
‘And?’
‘I was interested in who might have had it before. Its history.’
‘Because?’
‘Basically, because I’m a nosy cow.’
Tom Armitage was silent for a moment. Betty heard a semi-distant sawing in the phone, somehow not a sound you associated with antique furniture. She saw Jeeter Kapoor outside his shop, talking to the old lady who whistled.
‘Trouble with me,’ Armitage said, ‘is that as long as everything’s ticking over nicely I tend not to ask too many questions. That, of course, is one of the things about me that irritates the hell out of women.’
‘Luckily, I’m very accommodating.’
‘We must meet one day. Are you a divorcee?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I see. So he’s off at last, is he?’
‘Who?’
‘Jamie Oliver.’
‘We’re renting it. From Mr Oliver.’
‘Ah. And somebody told you bad things about the shop, did they?’
‘Are there bad things?’
‘Way I see it, the only reason you’d be talking to me, well out of town, is not wanting someone to know you were asking. Now that could be Oliver, in which case, fair enough. A smug git. I can tell you we more or less used it as a store room. We’d have big items in the window and if anybody was interested there was a phone number to call.’
‘Who had the place before you?’
‘My old man, actually. This was when Booth was getting into the papers as King of Independent Hay. Idea of that appealed to my dad, so he sold his business down in Essex, came up there, bought a big place and accumulated other bits of the town over the years. Of which Back Fold was one.’
‘When was this?’
‘Early nineties.’
‘And he bought it from…?’
‘Bloke who’d been there about a year and, if my old man was interested, was selling it off cheap. Because… ah, this might be what you’ve heard about. There was a chap who dealt in ancient comic books – war comics. We kept finding pages under floor-boards or lining shelves. Stormtroopers with bayonets, screaming
Die Englisher pig!
Which he did, apparently.’
‘Who did?’
‘The guy who sold the comics.’
‘Died?’
‘Overdid it with the drugs.’
‘Oh.’
‘Look, I don’t… I don’t know the details. Except that he apparently wasn’t found for about a week.’
‘Where?’
‘Well… where he lived.’
‘Over the shop?’
‘I suppose.’
‘I see.’
‘Which is the only bad thing I’ve heard connected with that shop. But we all have to die somewhere, don’t we?’
‘Can’t have been pleasant,’ Betty said, ‘for whoever found him after a week.’
She was looking at the whistling old lady, who sounded angry with Jeeter Kapoor.
‘If you en’t seen it,’ she said, ‘you got no right to say it en’t true.’
‘All right.’ Kapoor had his hands up. ‘So it’s true.’
‘Pleasant?’ Tom Armitage said. ‘No, it wasn’t, apparently. Place probably needed fumigating. They said you could smell him for… quite a while afterwards. In fact – oh hell, if you want the truth, an implausible amount of time afterwards. See, anything goes a bit putrid in a cupboard now, you’ll be wishing I’d said nothing.’
‘People who OD on drugs, they’re often a bit disturbed.’
‘I wouldn’t know, Mrs T. Like I said, I seldom ask questions.’
‘Not uncommon in the antiques trade, I’d guess,’ Betty said.
‘Oh, you
are
a caution. Are you beautiful? You sound beautiful.’
‘Face like the back end of a Renault Megane. When you sold it to James Oliver… did you tell him about the history?’
‘There
is
no history, for heaven’s sake! If some chap had gone berserk and slaughtered his entire family there, I’d’ve felt obliged to mention it, but nothing
happened
. So a guy OD’d on something. Commonplace end in those days. And Oliver was such a superior sort of fellow – agreeing a price and then coming back with a lower offer, saying he’d found something wrong – that I probably wouldn’t have told him anyway. Look, I’ll break the habit of a lifetime and ask: has something scared
you
? Have you smelled anything?’
‘I don’t get scared by this kind of thing,’ Betty said.
‘Good for you.’ He sneezed. ‘Sorry… bloody sawdust everywhere. Look, all I’d say to you is that places like that tend to become a refuge for people on the run. I don’t mean from the police or anything, but from something drastic in their lives – broken relationships, bereavement, unexpected job-loss. Not always happy people, that’s what I’m saying. And they tend not to stay long. I’d guess that shop’s been an unhappy stopgap in too many lives. So nobody’s ever bothered to make it look or feel good. How’s that?’
‘Very convincing. Thank you for telling me. Do you know the man’s name? The man who died?’
‘No. Don’t think I ever did. Look, must call in on you next time I’m up there on a buying expedition.’
‘I’ll look forward to it.’
She shut down the phone. The old lady was stumping towards her, florid-faced.
‘He don’t believe nothing.’ Peered closer at Betty. ‘I bets you do. You got the look. You go there, just on dawn, you’ll see.’
Betty didn’t smile.
‘Where?’
‘I just
said
. Where the
brook
comes in. You go down where the brook comes in. But don’t bloody take him. Bloody Pakis.’
Betty said, ‘Can I just…? You asked Mr Oliver if he’d smelled something.’
‘What?’
‘In the shop.’ Betty pointed. ‘
That
shop.’
The old lady said, ‘You smelled him yet?’
‘The man who died?’
‘You smelled him yet?’
‘No, but—’
‘You will.’
And she was off, hands rammed into the pockets of her stockman’s coat, Kapoor watching her, trying to smile.
‘You get used to Tessie.’
‘Who is she, exactly?’
‘
Exactly
– I dunno. All I know is she’s got what you’d call a chequered reputation. Married a rich old bloke called Mr Villiers decades ago when she was a young fing. Landed one of them tall terraced houses, bottom of Castle Street. When he snuffed it, they reckon she drank his money away and now she lets out rooms. She also sees fings. She’s harmless.’
‘So who did she see… where the brook…?’
‘The Dulas Brook. Where it enters the Wye. Little beach down by the sewage works. Don’t ask.’
‘What about the smell?’ Betty said.
‘
You
brought
that
up.’
‘I know. Jeeter, might she be talking about the man who died here? Drug overdose? Not found for a week?’
‘Shit,’ Kapoor said. ‘Who told you that? We agreed not to say noffing.’
‘Who did?’
‘Few of us. Not till you was settled, anyway. Not that it means anyfing, but nobody wants to fink of a niffy corpse in the building. He was just a junkie, far’s I know, and it was years and years ago. So any smell…’
Betty said. ‘Do you know his name?’
‘Jerry. I
fink
. He’s one of those faces the old-timers mention in passing and glance at each other meaningfully and if there’s somebody like me around noffing else gets said. But the idea of some old hippy haunting the place… Or his pong. Do me a favour.’ Kapoor paused, looking at her. ‘You don’t feel uneasy here, do you?’
Well, yes, she did, and not only in the shop. Even in the town centre, now, she sometimes had the feeling of being watched, and not just as a pair of nice legs in a short skirt. Not stalked exactly, just watched. Carrying somebody’s lingering gaze around like a clammy miasma, the way it had happened years ago, before Robin, with the high priest of a coven she’d left pretty quickly.
‘Of course not,’ Betty said.