The Magus of Hay(101)

‘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.’