The Magus of Hay(117)

‘OK, I’ll do what I—’

He’d gone. Betty was backing off.

‘Whatever it is, just go ahead. Seriously, just put me in the queue. As long as I know you’re there and you’re prepared to help…’

‘I’ll only be at Cusop. But let me do a quick… something before I go.’

Fuse wire, Huw called it. Never leave without applying it.

The kitchen door opened.

Robin, Kapoor and the spade.

On its blade a wooden box, the size of an old-fashioned cigar box, encrusted with rubble dust.

‘Maybe it isn’t ours,’ Robin said. ‘We’re just the tenants here.’

‘I don’t think that should hold you back, necessarily.’ Gwyn Arthur Jones examining the box, a cop again. ‘Do you?’

Merrily watched from the doorway. Could hardly leave here until they’d opened it. If they were going to.

It went quiet. Kapoor looked from face to face.

Gwyn Arthur Jones nodded.

Kapoor fitted the blade of the chisel under the lip of the lid and the box sprang apart, Merrily instinctively taking a step back. Well, who knew what abomination Jerrold Adrian Brace had buried deep in the castle wall?

Robin looked inside.

‘Oh.’

‘Come on, then, mate,’ Kapoor said. ‘Ancient stash of smack?’

Robin turned the wooden box upside down over the console table and another slim box fell out, cardboard this time. The word Maxell on it, in big lettering.

Kapoor looked up at the ceiling.



‘He buried a videotape?’ Robin said. ‘That a let-down for you, Gwyn?’

‘I think not.’ Gwyn Arthur Jones bent over it. ‘Brace sold videos. Gareth Nunne mentioned it. Hitler’s rallies. He copied them.’

‘He buried Hitler in the castle wall?’

‘I don’t think this is Hitler, do you?’

‘Then what is it?’

‘I suspect something more contemporary.’

‘And it won’t wait till tomorrow?’ Kapoor said.

‘I would not wait half an hour if it could be avoided.’

‘Yeah, me neither,’ Robin said. ‘We need an old-fashioned VCR.’

Kapoor took a look.

‘Extremely old-fashioned.’

Gotta be a few still around.’

Kapoor shook his head.

‘Wouldn’t bet on it, mate.’ He turned the tape box around with a forefinger. ‘This is Betamax. Big in the nineteen eighties, then VHS swallowed the market. By the mid-nineties they’d vanished completely. I can still sell VHS test-match tapes, or transfer them to DVD, but I won’t touch these. We’ll be bloody lucky to find anybody who’s still got a Betamax player tonight.’

Silence.

‘Shit,’ Robin said.

Merrily slipped upstairs with the airline bag. When she did the prayer, standing beside the heap of rubble in the lowering, flesh-coloured light, it felt like talking into a pillow pressed over your face.

Or maybe she was just impressionable.

Whatever, she brought out the flask of water.





PART FIVE


Chaos magicians… only get together to work on specific projects.

Prof. Ronald Hutton, in

The Book of English Magic,

by Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard

Heygate (2009)





52

The last redemptive project


THE WIND WAS rising. A smoky cloud-mass shaped like a rabbit made a forward bound in slow motion and then came apart over Hay Castle, a mile away on the horizon.

Rector’s gate was open and Merrily drove through. She was early, but there was already another car here. A small car, and her heart jumped like the rabbit in the sky.

But, no. Tamsin’s car was green, a Clio. What was she thinking?

Nerves.

She got down from the Freelander, and saw a woman standing at the top of a paddock next to the house. The other car was a Mini Cooper, black and grey, no sign of a red Audi.

The woman turned, black against a deep red sun frizzling the day’s embers. Merrily unzipped the black hoodie to expose her second-smallest pectoral cross. She scowled, slipped it over her head and into a pocket of her jeans. Opened the wooden five-barred gate and they met somewhere in the middle of the paddock.

‘Mrs Watkins.’ A hand came out. Blue-varnished nails. ‘Claudia.’

‘You came early then.’

‘Worried I might have bothered Bliss for nothing, I suppose.’

‘Oh?’

‘Actually just worried.’

Claudia was nearly a head taller, a big-boned woman in a sheepskin gilet, pink jeans pushed into soft leather boots. The kind of woman you saw picking up her kids in a Toyota Land Cruiser on the nanny’s day off. Merrily followed her back to the gate, and they stood with their backs to it watching the sun set over Hay.

‘I read what I could find about you on the Net,’ Claudia said. ‘And then I rang Athena White.’