The Magus of Hay(111)

‘I don’t—’

‘It’s how they think.’

‘Right.’



He was recalling last night, though it seemed like another life. The way he’d seen the castle through the small, square window in the bathroom and felt no welcome there. Thinking how, even when the castle was in ruins, a tradition of blood-flow had continued under the walls.

This would mean nothing to most people. It was in the past. Over.

‘It doesn’t end there,’ Betty said. ‘The space. I don’t think it ends with the wall. I’m guessing some old stones at the end have been taken out and replaced.’

‘How d’you know that?’

‘It’s not mortared. It’s just rubble.’

Robin looked at Kapoor.

‘I can’t reach that far,’ Kapoor said. ‘Can’t get inside there with a hammer and chisel. You got a crowbar? You know? Like a big tyre iron?’

Robin shook his head.

‘Got a spade in the truck I keep for if we get stuck in the snow.’

It had been snowing until well into April, and he’d felt if he’d taken the spade out it would snow again.

‘Better than noffing, mate.’

‘I’ll go fetch it,’ Robin said. ‘Long as the cops don’t see me and think I’m using it to bury someone.’

Wasn’t a joke, and nobody laughed.





50

Spartan


‘SHE WAS AT Rector’s place when we went to talk to him about the girls,’ Gwyn Arthur said on the phone.

Beryl Bainbridge.’

‘Dame Beryl Bainbridge, I think,’ Merrily said. ‘Distinguished novelist.’ She looked at her cigarette. ‘Distinguished smoker.’

‘Rector liked writers, as you know,’ Gwyn Arthur said.

Merrily lit the cigarette. She’d been finishing her omelette in Lol’s kitchen when he’d called back.

‘This woman answered the door when we arrived,’ he said. ‘Quite… petite, long dark hair. Made us a cup of tea. “I’m Beryl,” she said. Very pleasant, she was, very nice to us. She said, “I suppose you want to talk to the Magus of Hay.”’

‘You didn’t, by any chance, ask her to explain why she called him that?’

‘It was said in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, and I was just a policeman, not a potential acolyte. Why is it important?’

‘Puts him in a different light, somehow. It’s all stayed with you, hasn’t it? Didn’t take much memory-jogging.’

He was silent. Time to push him?

‘I’m wondering… if there was something that, with hindsight, Gwyn, you feel you could have done that you didn’t.’

‘Isn’t there always? I wish I’d known then what I know now. I wish I’d been a more senior officer at the time. I wish I’d had someone like you with whom to exchange ideas.’

‘I’m not—’



‘By which I mean someone who can explain aspects of human behaviour by seeing them from a different perspective. Who talks to people who wouldn’t talk to me. Or not in the same way.’

She could hear his breath, slow, almost meditative.

‘Oh dear. I think I need,’ he said, ‘to take you into my confidence. Before something happens.’

She stared out of the window into the sandy light on Church Street. This had been a long time coming.

‘If it hasn’t already,’ he said.

He’d opened the shop, selling second-hand crime novels, with the help of an old friend, a long-established bookseller in Hay. Didn’t really know why. He liked books, but had no particular aptitude for selling them

‘However, the Brecon and Radnor Express thought it was worth a story. Top Detective – as they were generous enough to describe me – Turns To Crime. I get my picture taken between Inspector Wallander and Inspector Rebus on the book covers. After it appeared in the B & R, the story was picked up by a couple of the national papers. Not big, but it was there.’

Weeks later, he said, he’d had a phone call from an elderly man in North Wales, to whom he hadn’t spoken since the 1980s, when the man’s daughter had gone missing from an encampment on Hay Bluff.

‘Mephista’s dad?’

‘Sounding much the same. Still desperate to know if his daughter was alive or dead. Even more desperate, perhaps, because his wife, he said, was very seriously ill and perhaps there might not be so much time left for her to achieve peace of mind. It made me feel guilty over the quality-time we might have spent soon after the girl disappeared if we hadn’t been inclined to suspect it was all a scam to keep the Convoy on the Bluff for a few more weeks. I wondered if we had treated them like third-class citizens.’