The Magus of Hay (25 page)

45

Third-class citizens

V
ELVET-VOICED, QUIETLY
cerebral, just slightly sinister. He’d been in charge of what became a murder inquiry in the Radnor Valley. Head of Dyfed-Powys CID at the time. A caretaker role, he’d told her, in the year before his retirement.

‘You’ve shaved off your moustache,’ Merrily said.

‘So people keeping reminding me. As if there was little more to me than that.’ He turned to his companion. ‘Mrs Watkins is an investigator for the Diocese of Hereford. We met when she was sent by the Bishop to try and resolve the difficulty between a religious fanatic and the Thorogoods. Mrs Watkins, this gentleman is their immediate neighbour, Mr Paramjeet Kapoor.’

She shook hands with Mr Kapoor, a little confused.

‘I’m sorry – where is this?’

‘The Thorogoods? Across the road, up the alley.’ Gwyn Arthur Jones pointed. ‘Set up a little bookshop, the name of which suggests they haven’t yet been converted to your faith. Not surprising you don’t know, they aren’t open yet.’

‘How are they? How’s Robin now?’

‘Injuries
appear
to be under control. More than can be said for his temper, mind.’

‘Don’t help,’ Mr Kapoor said, ‘having the cops on his back.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘Wrong place, wrong time,’ Gwyn Arthur said, ‘and didn’t feel a need to justify his behaviour.’

Merrily remembered how Robin Thorogood had taken the
impact of a load of falling stone to save his wife. No Father Ignatius around, then, with his bottle of Lourdes water.

‘Erm, do you… do they think Tamsin’s dead?’

‘Experience tells them this will be the most likely outcome. Sometimes you find the killer before the body. One leading to the other.’

He’d always looked mournful. He was like most people’s mistaken idea of what an undertaker was like.

Mr Kapoor said he needed to get back. Not that trade was great.

‘It’s like people are just wandering around waiting for somefing to happen. I don’t know this girl but a lot of ’em do, and it’s like family, you know?’

When he’d gone, they kept on walking up the street, Gwyn Arthur observing things in the way of an old-fashioned beat copper, though he must have been at least a detective superintendent when he retired.

‘Changing,’ he said.

‘Fewer book shops? Or am I imagining that?’

‘Look there. Antique shop – used to be a bookshop. Fashion shop – used to be a bookshop. Shoe shop – need I go on? The irony is that few of them would be here if it wasn’t for the bookshops.’

‘Must be strange for you,’ she said, ‘being in the middle of a big police operation and not part of it.’

‘Mrs Watkins, it feels sometimes as if I no longer exist. I have a share in a bookshop, now, specializing in the fictional exploits of detectives who, of course, age very slowly or not at all.’

‘Isn’t there, you know, cold-case work you could do?’

He laughed.

‘Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Like archaeology. Cold case is mainly paperwork, computer work. Rather dull, and you don’t get out much.’

They walked along the street of stone shops and offices, treeless until the jagged shock of the castle, like a gigantic broken
ornament on a shelf. They stopped by the war memorial on the square, a pay-and-display car park on all but market days. Well, then… no point in letting an opportunity go.

‘Do you remember the Convoy, Gwyn? On Hay Bluff?’

‘Strange days,’ he said.

‘What about Peter Rector?’

‘Who drowned this very week.’

‘And who was once, I understand, a near neighbour of the Convoy, up on Hay Bluff?’

‘Ye-es,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘He most certainly was.’

‘Did you know that Tamsin Winterson was a bit obsessed with the death of Peter Rector?’

She sensed his focus sharpening like a camera lens.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I do know – having been there myself at the time – that PC Winterson, in plain clothes, was asking questions about Mr Rector in Gwenda’s Bar, where information gets exchanged. I wondered at the time if she was in plain clothes officially – sent to milk her local connections – but I’m inclined to think not. There are distinct levels of society in Hay and I would guess she, as a farmer’s daughter from Dorstone, was not part of the one that meets in Gwenda’s. Booksellers, mainly. Seemed out of place there, unsure of her ground.’

‘What was she asking?’

‘Trying to find out if anyone in Hay had known a David Hambling, of Cusop.’

‘Did
you
know the real identity of David Hambling at the time?’

‘No, I did not.’

He looked down at her, eyelids lowered, and she realized she must, serendipitously, be tapping into something here. That he was as interested as she was, if not more so.

‘I met Tamsin, you see,’ Merrily said. ‘The day before she vanished.’

‘Did you now?’

‘Someone thought I might be able to shed some light on
Rector’s world. And she happened to be there at the time. You had to like her. Serious, dedicated. Ambitious in an almost touchingly transparent way.’

She waited.

‘Also’ he said, ‘she was asking about a woman in a red Audi. In the light of her subsequent disappearance, I thought I’d better call in at the community centre this morning to report what I’d heard. Asked if I might speak with the senior investigating officer. I was allotted a uniformed constable who wrote down my statement, asked no questions, and that’s the last I heard.’

‘He know you were a former senior detective?’

‘I didn’t make a thing of it, though I rather expected that someone would know. But there we are. Once you’re gone, you’re gone. I’m… mildly interested in why you should be asking me about all this.’

Mildly was not the word. Merrily raised the bar.

‘I was also going to ask if you knew anything about the disappearance of two girls from the Convoy in the earlier nineteen eighties.’

‘I think we need to sit down,’ Gwyn Arthur said. ‘Don’t you?’

They found a table in the shadows, and there were plenty of those in Gwenda’s Bar. No windows, only yellowy globes and strips of light through the slats of an extractor fan high on a wall. Yes, you could imagine information being exchanged here, possibly even drugs.

She’d never been in before, hadn’t even known it existed at the end of this short entry lined, like so many in Hay, with books. Gwyn Arthur had raised a hand to the young, tight-bearded man behind the bar and the only customer, a bulky guy with a port wine stain who Merrily was sure she remembered from one of the bookshops.

It made it easier for both of them that Gwyn Arthur knew Bliss and had even met Huw Owen during his years based in Brecon. Gomer Parry, too, come to that, but everybody knew Gomer.

And oh, yes, he well remembered the ragged, dope- and diesel-smelling Convoy. Who, policing the border in the nineteen eighties, did not?

Not that CID had much to do with it until the girls went missing. The Convoy had been a headache for the uniforms. Gwyn Arthur said Ralph Rees had been uniform super in those days, one of the most decent, humane coppers you could ever have encountered. Ralph had been planning a second career as a vicar, fixing his retirement to get into a theological college in Cardiff before the cut-off point. Never made it – he’d died while Gwyn Arthur was out west. Bloody tragedy.

‘Anyway, Ralph was the man in charge of moving on the Convoy, and a professional diplomat couldn’t have handled it better. Quite organized, they were by then. One had researched all the law relating to travellers, and he’d appear in court for them – in a dark suit, for heaven’s sake, with a stack of law books, though he had no qualifications. He’d negotiate with Ralph, man to man. I think Ralph rather liked him.’

Sometimes the travellers had been given diesel for the vans and buses, just to get them back on the road, keep them moving – even if it was only past the boundary of the Dyfed-Powys police area.

Then, one autumn day, a posse of travellers had gone into the station at Hay to report that two girls had not come home for two nights.

‘Just disappeared from the camp, and the Convoy were reluctant to move on until they came back. Well, we thought at first it was just a scam to buy more time. But the parents of the younger girl were virtually camped out at the station.’

‘Mephista?’ Merrily said.

‘Not a name you forgot. The parents were decent people in their way. Old hippies from Brighton. Good-life types. They were frantic.’

‘Did you find out anything at all, in the end?’

‘We did what we— I believe we did what we could. Probably not enough. The older one, Cherry Banks – I say older one, she was about twenty-three, but she’d been around. Well, mostly around Cardiff docks, to tell the truth. Mixed race, prostitute-and-sailor parentage. Inquiries were made in that area, to no avail.’

‘You thought the younger girl had gone off with her?’

‘I was a detective sergeant then. Not my place to point the inquiry in any particular direction. My main job was to question everybody in the convoy. Not easy, as some had criminal history, but they couldn’t have it both ways. Either we took it seriously, which meant asking some intrusive questions, or we treated them like the third-class citizens they thought we thought they were.’

‘So the girls are still listed as missing.’

‘In some dusty database.’ Gwyn Arthur leaned back in his rickety chair. ‘Tell me… are you – or, indeed, Francis Bliss – seeing a connection here with PC Winterson’s disappearance?’

‘Just me at the moment. Not particularly on anyone’s behalf.’

‘Christian duty?’

‘Unwanted holiday. Bit of a loose end. Just doesn’t feel right walking away.’

He nodded.

‘Christian duty.’

Merrily smiled. He’d been very patient, so she told him how, because of what she did and the kind of people she occasionally had to mix with, Bliss had asked her to take a look through Rector’s library. How she’d wound up looking into matters that he wouldn’t, especially with Brent at the wheel, be permitted to waste time on.

‘Become your case then, has it? I’m not being patronizing here—’

‘Don’t really like sticking my nose into police business.’

‘People in this area do tend to. A vast area, it is, with not so many people. Or noses. Few longer than mine.’

The bar’s swing door had opened. Several people had come in, including a man and a woman silhouetted against the globe lights. The woman had blond hair and the man came with a walking stick.

46

Naked talk

P
ARKED NEAR THE
entrance of the Oxford Road car park, Bliss called Annie. He guessed she’d be at home, at the flat in Malvern, but he rang the mobile.

‘Francis.’

He pictured her in her pale-green bathrobe on the sofa, soft towelling around those sharp bones, freshly washed hair in a turban. The unexpected domestic side of Annie, what a turn-on that had been, along with the shop-talk: talk dirty to me, talk to me about criminal investigation.

‘What’s been on the telly?’ Bliss said.

‘You don’t know?’

‘Just tell me.’

‘Never watch daytime TV, as you know, but it was second lead on the radio news. Just the basics. Hunt for a missing police-woman on the Welsh Border. Soundbite from Brent, appealing for anyone, et cetera, et cetera.’

‘No background? Nothing about a feller helping with inquiries?’

‘Is there one?’ He could almost hear her sitting up. ‘Does that mean it’s known that she’s dead?’

‘I’m sure Brent’s hoping she is. Be a career-sealer in Hereford, pulling a cop-killer. Or a first-class ticket out of Hereford.’

Telling her about the seller of weird books who’d left his truck on the car park overnight, got drunk and claimed to have slept in his shop. Who, on being grilled in the street by the latently thuggish Stagg, had not sounded convincing.

‘Doesn’t seem all that likely to me,’ Bliss said. ‘You start disturbing the surface, creeps like this will always come crawling out, blinking in the daylight.’

‘Takes the pressure off you, anyway.’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘Oh
hell—’
Annie sighed irritably. ‘I was hoping to tell you this in person. Brent phoned me early this morning.’

‘He fancy you or something?’

‘Actually,’ Annie said, ‘he fancies you, and not in a good way. He thinks you may know more about Winterson’s disappearance than you’re admitting.’

‘Well, he would. I’m a wild card, me.’

‘No listen,’ Annie said. ‘In its ridiculous way, this is worse than you realize. Sheer wishful thinking on his part, but he has a way with psycho-jargon. Which I’ll translate for you. Just don’t over-react, all right?’

‘Hang on, I wanna better signal for this.’ Bliss got out of the Honda and went to sit on the low wall at the top of the car park. ‘Go.’

‘He thinks you’re damaged. Unstable. Unreliable. Before you were hurt you were merely erratic and wilful. You thought you were clever and invulnerable, a city-wise cop amongst the yokels.’

Annie speaking in the old ice-maiden voice to hold his attention.

She had it.

‘But then your wife left you for another man. And then, for the first time in your police career, you were badly hurt, physically. Brain damage.’

‘He said this to you?’

‘He suggested that this, so closely following the discovery of your wife’s affair, may have raised you to a different and quite dangerous level of instability. He cites your determination to come back to work before you were fully fit – he suspects some deception there, by the way, some calling in of favours. You had something to prove and not only in the job. You inflate an old
man’s accidental drowning into a possible murder case and you drag an impressionable young PC into your fantasy. A girl who’s already slightly in awe of you.’

The left side of Bliss’s head began to pulse all the way down to his shoulder, the top of his arm.

And what about a policeman, Francis? Would she… cop off with a detective, do you think?

He tried to laugh.

‘He’s such a twat, Annie.’

‘I realize he’s a twat. But do nothing about this, Francis, you understand? Do nothing. Because if this comes back on me, we’ve lost everything.’

‘Go on.’

‘Brent thinks you were leading Tamsin along, constructing an investigation – just you and her – with a view to… getting into her knickers.’

‘He actually said that?’

Not Annie’s kind of phrase.

‘He was thinking, what if it all backfired. She rejects you. Maybe she threatens to report you—’

‘And I
killed her
?’

Bliss found himself striding down the street towards the tourist centre like he was about to take off, leave the world.

‘He’s just flying a kite, Francis. He asked me, as a
trusted colleague
and someone who’d had dealings with you, if I thought it was too outlandish to consider. Bearing in mind that Winterson seems committed to her job in a way that’s almost unusual these days… and does not appear to have a regular boyfriend.’

‘You telling me I’m on his suspect list for killing… killing a girl who we don’t know isn’t alive and well? Because if that—’

Bliss felt himself lose it. Could almost feeling it squirming out of his head, dancing down the street in front of him, turning round to make faces at him, gleeful fingers in the corners of its mouth.

‘I’m gonna have him for this. I swear to God, I’m gonna take it all the way—’

‘Francis, for Christ’s sake, he said it to
me
!’

‘And you think you’re the only one he’s said it to?’

‘Yes, I do. So far. He feels sure of his ground with me. You and me, long record of no love lost.’

‘When this is over… I’m gonna dismantle that bastard. Nobody stops me.’

‘Do nothing. Do you understand? Anything you do…
anything…
will rebound. On both of us… on every level. Just go along with everything he tells you to do. And stay out of Hay when you’re not on duty.’

Bliss was leaning against the bus shelter, numb down the left side, from his temple to below his knee.

‘I’m not on duty now. He sent me home. I don’t wanna go home. I hate home.’

‘You can come here if you like,’ Annie said.

‘So you can keep an eye on me?’

‘Both eyes. And… maybe the rest of me.’

Mother of God, when did Annie Howe start talking like Mae frigging West?

Only when she was genuinely afraid he might do something that played into Brent’s hands.

Not an entirely unfounded fear, he’d concede that.

‘I’ll come over, then.’

‘We can talk about it.’

‘Talk,’ he said. ‘Yeh.’

Not a euphemism. Talk made them compatible. Talking dirty, talking crime. Hard talk, naked talk.

He drove down Oxford Road, for England, but the left side of his head was dragged down with misgivings and the feeling that he wasn’t going to make it to Malvern, that something was too close.