The Magus of Hay(100)

Two men were looking into the window, one wearing a T-shirt with a design involving the word Mumbai.

‘… you are, boy,’ the other man said, ‘there’s the originals, all intact. Now isn’t that odd? Why would anyone go to all that trouble?’

‘I fought London was a mad place, Gwyn. Hay, I give up trying to work it out.’

Merrily glanced between them and saw the crown jewels in the window, in all their pound-shop splendour, and was aware of the taller man looking down on her then leaning over to her, with a smile and a murmur.

‘You’re looking well, Mrs Watkins.’





45

Third-class citizens


VELVET-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.’