‘No other children?’
‘Daughter in America. Another son who distanced himself from his father’s politics enough to become a radical journalist in Scotland.’
‘So Jerry must’ve been a real loss.’
‘One wonders, where did Sir Charles lay the blame for what happened?’
A pause. The clouds had dispersed. Swallows dived for insects, tiny, efficient acts of carnage.
Merrily said, ‘Rector, do you think? For betraying the cause?’
‘And who supplied Jerry Brace with the raw heroin?’
‘What, you think…?’
‘Happens in Hay at a time when more or less all the bookshops – all forty-plus of them – were flourishing. When the town was acquiring an international reputation. When the first festival was being planned. So you have a town trembling on the brink of affluence… and, close to its centre, a bookshop trading in the vilest form of political pornography.’
‘You think Brace’s death was…? That he was seen as damaging to the town’s image?’
‘Not something ever likely to be proved, one way or the other. Heroin, in the right situation, can be the most effective of murder weapons. But, yes, Sir Charles seems to have blamed what he thought of as the degenerate hippy element in Hay for the death of his… true heir? Rather contemptuous of Independent Hay.’
‘But he must’ve been aware of it happening, Gwyn. If he saw Jerry as his true heir he must’ve stayed in touch with him. Why didn’t he take steps to get him out of there?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know why Jerrold Brace came to Hay in the first place. I’d guess he was no more a natural bookseller than I am.’
‘So are you any closer to finding Mephista?’
‘I…’ You could almost hear him wondering if he’d said too much. ‘The truth of it is, there may be a dilemma here. Would it be better, in many ways, for her father and her ailing mother to remain in ignorance of what became of their daughter?’
‘That doesn’t sound good.’
‘It probably isn’t.’
Ethel watched, golden-eyed, from her fleecy bed by the side of the unlit stove as the evening brightened. Merrily carried the empty mug back to the kitchen, which overlooked the remains of the orchard that once encircled the village. Maybe Lol would call tonight. She wished he’d just come home. Being alone was not about freedom.
She Googled Beryl Bainbridge, groaning softly at the result: nearly three quarters of a million mentions. She put in Beryl Bainbridge, Peter Rector: nothing to suggest a connection. Beryl Bainbridge, Hay-on-Wye: yes, she’d appeared a few times at the Hay Festival, she’d enjoyed it, she liked the place, its eccentricity. Her London home apparently looked like a Victorian museum of childhood, with ornate religious over-tones and her funeral had been incense-soaked Anglo-Catholic.
Merrily didn’t remember falling asleep on the sofa, only the dream of a darkened church that stank of hash, lit by a single, hovering candle casting no light as she walked towards it along an aisle that went on forever.
A time-lapse, and then the candle was directly in front of her, blinding white, held aloft by a man far taller than her, whose face was a shoal of flitting shadows.
‘What will you do now?’ he said.
When the phone chimed she awoke with a throb, the way you did when the nightmare bucked and you were thrown to the ground, lying there and praying, like a child prayed: Please God, save me from the bad things in the dark.
‘Are you doing anything important tonight,’ Gwyn Arthur Jones asked, ‘or are you available for work?’
‘Work?’
‘Do you… keep a black bag or something, at the ready?’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Not everyone,’ Gwyn Arthur said, ‘is an old agnostic like myself.’
She stood next to the open window, hands flat on the sill. No breeze now, the evening becoming the warmest part of the day.
In the distance, the low growl of a tractor in a field south of the village, some farmer starting his haymaking early, remembering last year’s drowned summer. The possibility of climate change, and the farmers changing with it, ready to work through the night if necessary.
A now-familiar grey car appeared on the cobbled square where, it being Friday night, about a dozen others were parked, for the Black Swan.
No surprise. It was Sylvia Merchant’s car and probably Sylvia who got out. Certainly tall enough, but the woman wore a long, light-green raincoat and, even though this was the warmest dry night in over a month, its hood was up, a hand holding it together over her face. Another woman emerged from the passenger side. She was more seasonally clad in a white linen jacket, and her black hair was uncovered.