Sympathy for the Devil (23 page)

There didn’t appear to be any bell outside, but after a few moments the door swung inwards to reveal the glare of lights. About halfway down the hall, a small girl was standing, her long chestnut hair framing a pale face. She was wearing a pinafore dress over white tights. She looked about six but her eyes seemed to have the confidence of someone much older.

Without speaking she led them into a room lined with paintings of Hereford cattle, at its centre a table with a bowl of russet apples on it. Pausing beside the table, the girl gestured to a ramp that rose towards a wide doorway at the back of the room. She took an apple, then ran off down the hall. They heard a low rasping sound from the far side of the room.

In the doorway was a man in a wheelchair. He was dressed in a baggy tracksuit, and covering his head was a black mask with slits at the level of the eyes and mouth. He raised a gloved hand, and beckoned them over.

‘Come through,’ said the man, and he prodded the keypad on the chair so that it began to turn.

They followed him down the ramp into a room with a single narrow window. The door was made from thick hardwood, Catrin noticed, and reinforced with steel cross-bars. Inside it was several degrees warmer than the rest of the house; tropical ferns had been arranged on shelves. As the chair moved ahead she caught a glimpse of something crimson under the lower half of the mask.

She turned away quickly. The images on the walls were of Seerland, and all appeared to be from the very early days of the band. In several of the photographs adolescent acne was still visible beneath clumsily applied layers of make-up.

Catrin knelt low by the wheelchair and took the masked man’s hand. It felt strangely rigid, but there was a faint warmth there.

‘So you must be the elusive Overseer,’ she said. He didn’t move, didn’t respond. She wondered how strong his sight was, if he could see her clearly. He’d seen them over the twenty-foot length of the hall, judged them to be no threat, so she assumed his vision must still be sharp.

‘I’m from the police,’ she said. She took out her card, and then the still of Rhys, held them up to the slits in the mask. He still didn’t react.

‘This man,’ she said. ‘Do you recognise him?’

He said nothing, but the black mask shook fractionally.

‘The name Rhys Williams mean anything to you?’ she asked.

Again he shook his head.

‘In any of the unofficial chatrooms,’ she said. ‘Have you heard talk of any recent Face sighting photos? Pictures that seem to show him in a wood wearing robes?’

The man in the wheelchair moved his head forward, as if what she had said might have interested him. But then he shook it again.

‘Nothing like that,’ he said. His voice was almost a whisper.

Catrin looked up again at the photos on the walls. None of the memorabilia was more recent than Face’s disappearance. Huw was stepping from image to image, as if in a museum, studying each one closely then moving on. He’d stopped at a photograph of Nails and Face posing in a cemetery. Their rake-thin bodies draped over a gravestone, their eyes heavy with kohl, they seemed fawn-like, exotic, the Shelley and Keats of rock ’n’ roll.

‘I used to follow them in the very early days.’ Pryce’s mask was swivelling slowly towards the object of Huw’s gaze.

His speech was slurred and slow. Through the open door of the cabinet in the corner Catrin could see tidy rows of diamorphine ampoules, blister packs of Demerol, other prescription medications she didn’t recognise.

‘It must have been a small group back then?’ she said.

Pryce pointed his gloved hand at two photographs above the cabinet. The first showed a group of fans, mostly girls, who were sitting cross-legged in a circle. They were not dressed in the Goth black of the girls outside Shift studios, but in the baggy smocks and flares of the late eighties psychedelic scene. These images belonged to the very earliest days of the band.

The last photograph was a close-up. To one side was a girl, pale and dreamy-looking, with a pair of Lennon specs pushed up into her hair. Her head was resting against her partner, a thin boy with wavy, shoulder-length locks. They could have modelled for Burne-Jones or Rossetti, their eyes had the inward-looking, morbid appearance of the models of that period. They looked no older than eighteen, and had a close resemblance that made her wonder if they were siblings, possibly twins.

‘So you must have known Face in the old days?’ she asked.

Pryce was shaking his head, slowly.

‘No, he was always distant with those he didn’t know.’

‘But it was a small group then, you must have got to know him a little?’

‘Not really, he’d often leave the studio for days on end, come back moody, difficult to reach.’

Pryce’s voice had grown even fainter as he spoke, as if the events came back to him now as from some dim, legendary past, like an ancient story from the Mabinogion. He was putting a tissue up to the mask which had darkened with some form of moisture coming from within. Catrin remembered that burns victims often suffered damage to their tear ducts.

‘When Face went off from the studio, was it with the other members of the group?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘On his own?’

‘No, a man would pick him up in a big car. He was older; I know that, because I caught a glimpse of him once. The rumour was that Face was his lover.’

‘Who was he?’

‘I didn’t really see him ever. He had long black hair, down to his shoulders.’

‘Anything else?’

‘He never got out of the car, never parked up close either.’

Pryce was moving the tissue slowly over the slits in the mask.

‘You don’t know who he could’ve been?’

Huw had crouched down on the other side of the chair.

‘No, but if you’re looking for Face you may really be looking for this man.’

The surface of the mask around the mouth had puckered back into what might once have been a smile, or a grimace of pain.

‘What do you mean?’ Huw said.

‘In the very early days of the band several of the fans close to Face went missing, just disappeared without saying they were moving on. But they were the ones into the heavy tripping scene, so no one made much of it at the time.’

‘And you think this older man had something to do with this.’

Catrin had to bend down by the chair to hear his words now. She reached down and lifted the oxygen tube to his mouth.

‘I’m not certain. All I can tell you is that when this man came on the scene, the inner circle around Face went missing, one by one.’

Pryce gestured for Huw to lean over the arm of the chair, so his head was close to the slit over his mouth.

‘Then after Face disappeared, a group of us from the old days tried to find out what had happened.’

‘Did you find anything?’

He shook his head, slowly. He was struggling to breathe and Catrin moved the tube closer.

‘Nothing . . . but gradually we began to notice that members of the group looking for him were beginning to have accidents.’

‘That’s what you’ve been posting about in the chatrooms?’

This time the pause was longer. Pryce moved his head in the direction of the cabinet, and Huw brought out the diamorphine solution. Pryce filled the syringe at the side of the chair which was connected through an IV line to the rear of the mask. After a minute he raised his head, began to speak again.

‘It was around that time that I heard from Ianto,’ he said, haltingly.

They waited a few moments, then slowly he continued. ‘That wasn’t his real name, that’s just what we used to call him. He was one of the diehards, had been there since the band first started to write songs together. He said that he’d learnt something important, sounded excited and worried at the same time.’ Pryce’s gloved hand brought the tube up to his mouth. ‘He told me then that a couple of his mates looking into Face had disappeared, and he sounded scared.’

Huw bent closer again.

‘He say why he was scared?’

Pryce shook his head slowly.

‘I never heard anything more from him. I heard later Ianto died in a car crash abroad. I never knew his real name, so that was the end of it.’

Huw glanced out at the field, where the wind was whirling damp clothes round on a revolving dryer. For a moment Catrin thought he winked at her. He put his glass down by one of the monitors.

‘Who looks after you?’ he asked.

Pryce touched a button on his pad and a screen-saver flickered onto the monitor. Beside the screen was a framed degree in classics, half obscured by a small classical bust. The plinth beneath identified the figure as Cato the Elder, and in a square at the bottom was a line inscribed in a stone tablet.
Ubi facies omnium, facies bonorum personas gerunt
.

As Pryce pressed the pad, a collage of photographs appeared on the screen. All of them, from the earliest graduation portraits to the most recent, featured an attractive, dark-haired woman.

A sudden movement outside made Catrin look into the field. Two people, one large, one small, were walking up the path through the snow flurries. The young girl who had met them was holding the hand of the woman on the screen-saver. She looked much older than in the photographs, her hair grey, unkempt. She was staring up to the window, and she appeared to be shouting but they could not hear her words through the thick pane.

Pryce motioned with his head towards the door. ‘Try to find Face’s family,’ he whispered.

Huw gently squeezed Pryce’s shoulder in thanks, then gestured for Catrin to get moving.

As they crossed the yard, the woman’s angry words were lost in the sharp wind whistling around the sides of the cabin. Catrin looked back at the mother and daughter. Their faces were full of fury and fear.

On the road into Ammanford, Huw pulled into the car park of a modern red-brick pub, the Drover’s Rest. The sign said the place offered accommodation.

They took their drinks to a corner table, out of earshot of the bar. Huw took a deep swallow of his pint and sighed wearily.

‘Well, that was jolly, wasn’t it?’

Catrin tried to smile.

‘I’m sure the medication has been working on his imagination. That stuff about the disappearing fans sounded like off-the-scale paranoia.’

Huw picked up his briefcase and put it on the table.

‘Most of the early fans were drifters, travellers, underground characters. It would be next to impossible to verify who was there and what happened to them two decades on.’

‘What about that older man he mentioned, the one rumoured to be Face’s lover. He didn’t sound like a drifter.’

‘I don’t think he got that right,’ Huw said.

‘Oh?’

‘We know the band played up to a camp image. So if Face was involved in a gay relationship, more likely he would have publicised it, not hidden it.’

‘How does this older man fit into the picture then? A behind-the-scenes manager?’

‘But Pryce said he never saw this man with anyone else except Face. And it was Nails and Teifi who managed the band, not Face.’

‘A dealer?’

‘There’s nothing to indicate Face had more money than the others at that stage. Why would a dealer with an expensive car be bothering to target him? It doesn’t add up.’

Then a thought struck her. ‘This mysterious older man, the disappearances around Face,’ she said, ‘this was all happening during the same period as the Angel Jones abductions.’ She paused. ‘I’m not saying they are linked, but it’s interesting.’ She glanced at Huw. ‘We’ve no idea if there’s anything in Pryce’s story, but if there is we’re talking a small locus temporarily and geographically for two sets of serial abductions to have occurred.’

‘It’s interesting, but unlikely to be relevant.’ Huw smiled at her. ‘Let’s not go off on tangents here. Jones was into girls, focused mainly on BDSM. These fans who
allegedly
disappeared, they were both male and female, that wasn’t their scene.’

‘We can’t say for sure that wasn’t their scene. Della told me she met Jones way back via a BDSM site. Jones was with a girl, she said. The girl was spaced out, into Seerland, there’s at least one potential connection there.’

She sensed in Huw a disappointment again, that might have been due to the quality of the Overseer’s information but she felt perhaps it had spread out to herself and her approach.

He closed his briefcase. ‘Della’s not exactly a reliable source. This girl, do we even have a name for her?’

‘No name. This was through a BDSM site, no one uses real names. But she made quite an impression on Della. I got the sense there was something unusual about her. Big cloudy eyes, a real beauty Della said.’

‘Della kept any photos of this girl, trophies?’

‘Unlikely. It’s against privacy protocol to photograph contacts from a BDSM site, they’re strict about that, ban members who do.’

‘So basically this is nothing, we’re talking about a ghost here. A girl who exists in Della’s memory, nowhere else.’ Huw sipped his drink, lowered it slowly. ‘And half the girls in the city were into Seerland then. This wouldn’t place her among the inner fans. What about this Trainer creep, any connection with Pryce there?’

‘No, he knew of Pryce through the underground music scene. Pryce wasn’t into BDSM.’

Huw nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s move on, I’m not seeing any other links to the BDSM scene and Jones from what Pryce gave us.’

Catrin looked into Huw’s tired eyes. ‘Unless Jones was a larger, more complex predator than was assumed at the time.’

‘Apart from the dates, there aren’t any matches at all with Jones. Jones didn’t have any money that we know of, wouldn’t have had a big car. He used some old grey van.’

‘It was actually a similar grey van that followed us at the bridge.’

Huw raised his eyebrows. ‘Sounds like you’ve got a blow-back from Pryce’s paranoia. What are you floating here, some kind of Jones historical re-enactment society, a fan club?’ He looked up at the ceiling, his eyes half closed. ‘Forget about Jones. He’s been buried in Broadmoor for years and he’ll never get out alive. He’s kept in seg, as high-security as you can get. Come on, it’s a common model of van, that’s why Jones used it.’