The Magus of Hay(106)

She looked at Gareth, who looked down into his beer.

‘He’d been dead for well over a week, see, when they found him. What was it, Connie, overdose or a bad batch of something?’



Connie shook her head. Betty didn’t react. Merrily wondered if she’d been expecting something worse.

‘All too common nowadays,’ Connie said, ‘but back then, in Hay…’

‘Where did they find him?’ Betty asked.

‘If it was me about to live there,’ Gwenda said softly, ‘I wouldn’t want to know. Don’t put yourself through it, darling, he’s gone. And you’re young. Sterner stuff, what?’

Connie laughed.





48

Messiah



MERRILY HAD DRAWN it, from memory, on the back of a post office receipt – no room on a cigarette packet any more because of the horror photos which could surely only encourage more hard kids to smoke. She wanted to follow Robin and Betty out of the bar, but Gwyn Arthur had shaken his head: not yet.

He’d waited for a couple of minutes after they’d left before standing up.

‘Didn’t think you were still here, Gwyn,’ Gwenda said. ‘A little tryst, is it?’

‘This is my friend, Mrs Watkins, Gwenda. Person of the cloth.’

Merrily felt the gaze of the close-bearded man standing close to Gwenda, polishing a glass.

‘You must have hidden qualities, Gwyn,’ he said.

‘So well hidden my wife can barely remember them. I’ll see you, boy.’

‘That’s her son?’ Merrily said outside.

Gwyn Arthur laughed.

‘A customer who once said that was almost glassed. He’s… her boyfriend of some long standing. Gwenda has charms which are not so well hidden. As you may have noticed. Some men who’ve never read a book in their lives patronize that bar just to watch her move.’

Merrily followed him across to a bench near the spired clock tower which she saw, for an instant, as a huge hypodermic syringe. Two cops were talking in its shadow. She took out the post office receipt.

‘Quite an unusual swastika. Less angular.’

He shook his head, didn’t seem to recognize it.

‘I was here when they found Mr Brace. About a year before I went home to West Wales in search of fame and fortune. Welsh-speaker, see, instant fast-track out there. But my wife had never learned, so we came back in the end.’

A cameraman from Sky TV was shooting the two cops against the clock while a reporter studied notes on a clipboard. There was a chilly feeling now that if you turned away you’d miss some development.

‘I tend to smell it, in my memory, every time I go past that shop, which is almost every day. The smell from when we broke in, and there was Jerrold Brace, mostly naked, decaying in the bath.’

‘Do you know why the Thorogoods have opened a bookshop when they’re closing down in all the high streets? Hard enough for a seasoned professional.’

‘If things weren’t as bad as they are, I don’t suppose they’d find a shop here at a rent they could afford. I’m guessing they never quite recovered from what happened to them. And they were welcomed here. The booksellers are glad to have another bookshop to strengthen the foundations. If they hadn’t taken that shop, it might’ve been a nail bar. Another one gone.’

‘And that’s why nobody wanted to tell them about the death in their bath?’

‘I expect it’s a different bath now. Wasn’t that gruesome, apart from the condition of the body – quite a warm autumn. Brace had apparently been off heroin for a while and then got hold of some particularly pure stuff and… gone. There was the syringe on the bathroom floor and the remains of the unadulterated smack.’

‘And he had links with the Convoy? And the missing girls?’



‘As Mrs Wilby said in there, he was a good-looking boy and he liked the ladies… No, that’s wrong. Almost certainly wrong. It wasn’t ladies he liked. He’d grown up with them. He liked… if he was a woman or a gay man we’d use the words rough trade. He appeared to like the sort of women you might find attached to the convoy. And when Gareth Nunne says he wasn’t at the shop for long periods, you might find that one of the long periods was during the magic mushroom season.’

‘He’d join the Convoy on the Bluff?’

‘He was certainly there when we were questioning them about the missing females. I recall asking him if the older one, Cherry Banks, had ever been seen in Hay. If he’d said he didn’t know what Cherry Banks looked like, my suspicions would have been aroused. But no, he admitted to having had sex with her. He said he came up to the Bluff to chill out, or however they put it back then. Chill out and get laid.’