The Devil's Moon (15 page)

Pearson got up and excused himself to go to the toilet. As he left the room he called back: ‘I could have been a guru but it would have taken time away from what I want to do.'

Watts looked over at Avril, who was reading a gardening magazine, the parrot still on her shoulder.

‘I'd better make a move,' he said.

‘He'll expect you to stay,' she said without looking up.

‘What time does he normally go to bed?' Watts said.

‘He's gone,' she said. She glanced up and saw Watts' look of surprise. ‘We're not big on social niceties. He'll want to talk to you in the morning.'

‘You mean
stay
stay?'

‘There's a guest chalet in the back garden. It's got everything you'll need. We're early risers in the summer and he'll be impatient to start work so if you could aim to come in for breakfast by seven he'd appreciate it. He'll want to show you around. And talk, of course.'

Watts didn't want to stay but nor could he think of an immediate excuse. He stood.

‘Well, you probably want to get to bed too.'

She put her magazine down. ‘I'll take you to the chalet.'

The parrot hopped off her shoulder when she stood. It perched on the back of her chair, its baleful eye on Watts as she led him into the kitchen. She picked up a screw-topped bottle of red and handed it to him with a glass.

‘In case you need a nightcap.'

‘I'll be fine, I'm sure.'

She shrugged. ‘Then bring it back in the morning.'

They went out into the back garden. At intervals there were half-a-dozen garden sheds and a couple of bigger chalet-style sheds each with a small veranda.

‘He keeps books in the sheds,' she said, stopping at the nearest chalet. It started to rain as she opened the door and stood aside to let him step in. She followed him inside and turned on a garish fluorescent light. She looked up at him. ‘Would you like me to suck your cock?'

He thought at first he'd misheard. Her face was still wearing that same placid expression. He glanced at the long dribble of yellow bird shit encrusted on her blouse.

‘That's kind of you,' he finally said, conscious of the ludicrousness of his remark.

‘I'm very good,' she said matter-of-factly.

‘I'm sure . . .'

She scrutinized his face then turned and opened the door. ‘Breakfast at seven,' she said without turning, closing the door behind her. Watts stared at it. He was bewildered by the oddness of the whole evening but Avril's offer had capped it. There had been no coyness or seductive tone in her voice. No lust. It had been as matter-of-fact as if she'd been asking if he needed a towel. She had seemed indifferent to his response.

He turned and examined the chalet. Aside from a vase of lilies by the bed, the cloying scent of the flowers filling the room, it was a mess. Watts wasn't particularly house-proud but even he recognized filth when he saw it. The floor was covered in crumbs. He opened a cupboard. It was full of filthy crockery. The reading lamp was a small strip of fluorescent tubing above the bed. Garden chairs and a barbecue had been haphazardly tossed into a corner.

Everything looked bodged. He pulled the duvet off the bed. There were crumbs and other unidentifiable things down the bottom. He touched the mattress. It was cold and damp.

He'd been in the army and was used to roughing it but even so he contemplated sneaking to his car, driving to the nearest hotel and coming back at the crack of dawn.

He went to the door and looked out at the hard rain now falling through the blackness. He went back inside the chalet.

‘A
nother day, another spooky happening in Brighton. Simon here. Last night, as many of you will have seen, the Devil cast his giant shadow over the city and far out to sea. I know, I know, but Simon is just paid to read this stuff. Blame my producer Kate – she wrote it. Actually, Simon didn't see the shadow and he's truly cheesed off – it's not as if he was doing anything more interesting. No offence, Phil, if you're tuned in. And if you're not – why not?

‘Anyways, a giant man with the head of a goat cast a shadow some ten miles long – that's my kind of guy – from somewhere on the Devil's Dyke – naturally – over the city and out to sea. Kate, I have to say I'm finding this hard to comprehend but I know we've had lots of calls from people who saw it. People who are freaking out, quite frankly. Calm down, madam. Oh, except I'm freaking out too so carry on.'

‘Let me help you here, Simon,' Kate said. ‘In certain atmospheric conditions this phenomenon is quite common.'

‘A man with the head of a goat casting an enormous shadow over the city is common? We have
got
to do something about the licensing hours here.'

Kate laughed. ‘The phenomenon is common. If someone is standing at a high point with a low sun behind them and clouds below them they cast an exaggerated shadow in front of them. The original is the Brocken Spectre. Those who know what that is perhaps weren't too alarmed. Those who don't were probably pretty spooked.'

‘That figures. Men are always bragging they're ten miles long but rarely are. But, producer-mine, gotta ask: what's the Brocken Spectre?'

‘It occurs in the high mountain areas of Brocken, Germany. Oddly enough where witches in the Middle Ages used to hold their sabbats on Walpurgis Night – coming up any night now at a spooky place near you.'

‘But here it was the shadow of a giant man with the head of a horned goat thrown on to a bank of clouds over the city.'

‘That's right. One legend about the creation of the dyke is that the Devil was in the form of a giant goat when he made it. He was intending to crush the surrounding area. He smelled the tang of salt water in the wind and worried his coat would get damp and spoiled so he ran off, leaving nothing but the hoof-print we now call Devil's Dyke.'

‘Or Big Wuss's Dyke as I now call it. Running off because of a bit of damp.'

‘Last night's goat was making a hieratic gesture.'

‘Filthy beast. What's one of those when it's at home? As I boringly was.'

‘Arms outstretched.'

‘You could have just said that, Kate. No need to rub my nose in your university education.'

‘You need to be kept in constant check, Simon.'

‘Probably right. Was it some kind of video installation?'

‘I don't think there's the technology to do that.'

Simon laughed. ‘These days there's the technology to do anything.'

Bob Watts had a restless night. There were no curtains in the chalet and lightning flashed, thunder rolled. Rain hammered on the roof and against the windows and the wind gusted so strongly the hut trembled on its foundations.

When he did sleep he had vivid, lascivious dreams. They muddled Pearson's wife with the mystery woman who had come to his parents' house to see his father so many years before.

At one point in the night, when he didn't know for certain whether he was asleep or awake, a lurid flash of lightning lit up Avril, kneeling between his legs, head bobbing. Then she threw back her head, baring those long, vulpine incisors. He struggled to come to consciousness and at the next flash of lightning she was gone.

When he woke in the morning he still remembered the dream vividly. So vividly, he wondered if it had been a dream at all. He thought to check himself but felt ridiculous.

The scent of the lilies was even more cloying than the night before.

‘Avril's working on her vegetables,' Pearson said when Watts walked into the sitting room. Pearson was eating toast and jam on a tray. He waved a buttery knife at the big pot of coffee on the table.

‘Coffee there, muesli and fruit on your tray. If you want toast you'll have to make it yourself.'

Pearson was listening to the
Today
programme on a modern-looking radio. When Watts tried to ask a question, Pearson shushed him. ‘Not over breakfast, old man. After.'

But after breakfast Pearson wanted to show Watts round what he called ‘the estate'.

‘Must be pretty unique,' Watts said.

‘There's no such thing as pretty unique. Unique or not unique.'

They walked out of the cottage garden past a duck pond and between old buildings. There was a blacksmith's forge, pens for pigs, a dairy.

They stopped in front of a tall, relatively narrow wooden structure housing the famous, 400-year-old donkey wheel. There was an ancient bucket on the ground in front of it. Behind the wheel was the well. The donkey used to draw water from it in the bucket by using the wheel as a treadmill. Now the well had a padlocked wooden cover on it.

‘Still used?' Watts said.

‘We're on the mains,' Pearson said absently, looking up at the Wicker Man planted on the horizon.

‘Lovely spot,' Watts said.

‘I'm indifferent to nature,' Pearson said. ‘I walk along the dyke and never see where I am. There are traces of Roman and Saxon habitation around here apparently. Doesn't interest me.'

‘And the Templars?'

Pearson gave him an odd look.

‘You know about them? The National Trust owns the farm and the land around it. They mention the Templars because they figure after Dan Brown it has a magical effect on people. If they could somehow attach Harry Potter too, they'd be even happier.'

He gestured with his thumb at the wheel.

‘This is the only bit of the Templar tenure that has survived.'

‘The donkey wheel?'

‘Not this one, though they would have used something similar. But, no, I mean the well itself. They cut a shaft through flint and chalk for a hundred and fifty feet to get to the water table. Now that shows something about strength of character.'

‘Although I doubt they did it themselves. Some poor peasants would have done the hard graft.'

Pearson grinned. ‘I'm sure you're right.' He looked back up at the Wicker Man. ‘When we lived at Burling Gap that Harry Potter writer used to come down, you know. Descend from the sky right on the cliff top.'

Watts suspected a gag. ‘On a broomstick, you mean?'

Pearson looked at him oddly. ‘Of course not. She's an author, not a witch. In a bloody helicopter.'

Watts was no wiser. ‘Why?'

‘Speed? Privacy? Because the publisher could afford it?'

‘I mean: why was she coming there?'

‘Her publisher's summer party. The main man had a cottage over there. Big summer parties. She came with that English Patient fellow.'

‘You were there as an author?'

‘My stuff is a bit below the salt for that sort of gathering. Plus I avoid publishers like the plague. Cheapskate profiteering bastards.'

‘Your books sell well though.'

‘I have a small, dedicated following. Some readers really get me. Most are cranks, frankly. You should witness one of my book signings, Watts, if you want to see all the world's eccentricities gathered in one place.'

When Sarah Gilchrist arrived at the office, Donaldson, Heap and Sylvia Wade were already there.

Bellamy Heap came over to her and shifted his feet.

‘Are you going to swear at me again, Constable?' Gilchrist said.

‘With respect, ma'am, I wasn't swearing at you.'

‘Call me Sarah, Constable.'

‘Yes, ma'am.'

Gilchrist looked at him. ‘What is it?'

‘We've tracked the picture thieves through the streets on CCTV. We can follow them up past the clock tower but then we lose them. They go into the Imperial Arcade and don't come out.'

The Imperial Arcade was a once-glamorous Art Deco arcade with flats above it on the seaward side. The Churchill Square shopping centre had been built opposite, presumably totally blocking what in the twenties would have been a privileged view down to and over the sea.

‘Don't ever come out?'

‘Not in the next six hours.'

Gilchrist thought for a moment. ‘Then maybe we haven't lost them; maybe we've found them. They live in one of those apartments in the front or maybe work in one of the shops. Do we now have a clearer image of them?'

Heap shook his head. ‘They were savvy about the cameras. They kept their heads down.'

‘No face shots at all?'

‘I'm afraid not. S-Sarah.'

Gilchrist looked at him for a moment. ‘No, you're right.'

‘About what, Sarah?'

‘About calling me ma'am. Stay with that.'

‘Yes, Sarah. Ma'am.'

Donaldson and Sylvia Wade joined them.

‘Knowing how busy Constable Heap here was,' Donaldson said, ‘Sylvia and I have been finding out about Duck or Fuck or whatever she's called.'

‘Gluck, Detective Sergeant,' Gilchrist said, unamused.

‘Yes,' Wade said. ‘Or rather Gluckstein – her real name.'

‘And?'

‘Lesbo artist,' Donaldson said. ‘Usual fuck-up. Big exhibitionist.'

‘DS Donaldson,' Gilchrist said, giving him her hardest stare. She knew it didn't count for much but she was trying. He played along.

‘Sorry. Forgot we were in Lesbo-land.'

‘Meaning?'

‘We're in an equal opportunities country. Ma'am.'

‘That we are and that we should be,' Gilchrist said. ‘And just as well you remember it.'

‘Ma'am,' Donaldson said. ‘Gluckstein was a spoiled little rich girl with a private income. Her uncle set up the Lyons teashop chain. Didn't have to work. Called herself a painter but in any other field of endeavour would be – what are they called, Belly?'

‘Dilettantes?' Heap said.

‘That'll do. She faffed around on her paintings for ages, doing little bits when she felt like it, lazing around when she didn't.'

‘Insisted on just being called Gluck,' Sylvia said. ‘I mean just the one name. Once resigned from some art committee which had called her Miss Gluck on a letterhead. Loved to startle people by dressing as a man. She went to the best fashion designers to have her clothes tailored but had a tin ear as far as that awful name was concerned.'