‘You think Brace was actually a member of one?’
‘Not sure. Could be he was simply serving a gap in the market. Dealing in the kind of books he knew some of these people would pay enormous prices for. Using his father’s contacts.’
‘You think there was more, though, don’t you?’
He took his pipe from between his teeth.
‘Merrily, you dismiss these people as complete crackpots, see, and then something happens. But is there anything here to risk public humiliation by passing on to my former colleagues? I tend to think not. Still… it’s been very interesting talking to you. Let’s stay in touch.’
She noticed he’d called her Merrily, as if accepting her, at last, as some kind of colleague, a legitimate confidante. And yet…
She watched him walk away, thinking that, for events of more than thirty years ago, they all seemed very clearly defined in the mind of Gwyn Arthur Jones.
One side of the car park backed on to the grounds of Hay Primary School, a TV reporter was standing by the gate, recording a piece-to-camera as children came out, met by parents and minders.
Merrily unlocked the Freelander and got in, slammed the door, feeling tired and frustrated, that elusive moment of illumination at Hay Church far behind her now. Nothing quite added up, just became more complicated, more tangled. She rang Bliss’s mobile and filled up his answering service with an edited version of what she’d learn from Gwenda’s Bar and her discussion with Gwyn Arthur Jones, who she didn’t name.
On the way home, the mobile chimed, and she stopped on the edge of the village of Dorstone, where Tamsin lived, to pick up a text.
Gwyn Arthur:
I got it wrong. It was not Messiah
they called Rector. It was Magus.
The Magus of Hay.
For what that’s worth.
Magus. An archaic term, applied to sundry sorcerers and the Three Wise Men of the New Testament.
Magus of Hay?
She texted back at once.
Who actually called him that?
Can you remember?
When she drove into Ledwardine twenty minutes later, her head was still so clogged with it that she turned into the vicarage drive, almost running into the back of Martin Longbeach’s Mini Cooper. Bugger. Slammed on, backed out and reversed all the way into Church Street.
Parking on the square, she gathered up her bag and her fleece and stumbled down to Lol’s cottage, where Ethel was waiting behind the door, slaloming around her ankles, as the mobile chimed.
The text from Gwyn Arthur Jones said,
I think it was the
novelist
Beryl Bainbridge.
She called him back, but there was no answer.
49
Superstition
UPSTAIRS, KAPOOR BENT to examine the derelict fireplace.
Robin said, ‘You see it?’
Kapoor straightened up. ‘It was an Indian sun symbol, you know that? My gran was always pissed off at Hitler nicking it off us.’
‘You notice this one is going backwards? That a negative thing?’
‘Dunno, mate. Never heard of a satanic swastika. Coulda phoned my gran, she’d know. If she wasn’t dead. Tell you what, put the plate back, forget it.’
‘And the fact that a guy obsessed with Nazi black magic was living here? And that it sounds like nobody ever made a success of a business here ever since?’
‘That,’ Kapoor said, ‘is just superstition.’
‘Well, yeah. Of course it is. Holy shit, Kapoor, I’m a pagan. I’m a superstitious person. Superstition is good. Superstition is opening yourself to hidden messages. Recognizing what the world’s telling you and reacting accordingly. Taking precautionary measures.’
‘No, mate.’ Kapoor’s eyes narrowing. ‘That’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.’
‘You know what? Your gran would not like how you turned out.’
Robin looked at Betty who’d followed them up and was standing near the top of the stairs, face clouded with uncertainty in a place once a magnet for razored racists and disaffected street scum. A room that once had shelves packed with tracts full of hatred, according to Gareth Nunne – a guy entitled to a degree of contempt by virtue of being about as far removed as you could imagine from the Aryan ideal of superfit manhood.
After a while, Betty said, ‘I probably told you about my brief encounter with neo-Nazism.’
Robin blinked.
‘Bets, for some reason I have no recollection of that.’
‘It was before we met. I went out with one, once. Kind of.’
‘And you told me about this?’ Robin was blinking. ‘I don’t think you did.’
‘Once, OK? All right, maybe it’s not the kind of thing you boast about.’
‘Take a seat,’ Robin said.
‘I was about seventeen.’ Betty dropped into a cane chair. ‘I was with a mate, and we got talking to these two guys in a second-hand record shop in Llandod – Llandrindod Wells,’ she said for Kapoor’s benefit, ‘where we moved when I was a kid. They asked us if we wanted to go to a festival up on the border, towards Shropshire. They seemed quite normal in the shop, but when they picked us up they were in a black van and wearing what I thought at first was just standard goth kit. I was a bit suspicious, but, you know, there were two of us, and I didn’t see the swastikas till we got out at the festival. Which, of course, was right in the middle of nowhere and not exactly Glastonbury.’