‘And was he there?’
Claudia was sitting on a bail of straw, as if she’d felt suddenly weak.
‘Don’t know. Don’t know.’
Bliss looked irritated.
He went down.
Presently, the lights came on in the cellar. Sounds of Bliss unlocking a door, but there was a long period of hush before Merrily heard his moan.
57
English corruption
BETTY SAID, ‘FUNNY how you don’t see things. Really obvious things.’
Robin held tight to his mug of tea. He’d been resistant to tea for so long; now, sometimes, he couldn’t get enough, and it couldn’t be too hot, couldn’t be too strong.
‘You knew, didn’t you?’ Betty said.
Looking at Gwyn Arthur Jones, an old golem in a drooping suit. A discontinued line in cops.
‘Actually, Betty, I didn’t. When you have a name like Jones, these conceits seem so far removed from your own kind of reality as to appear quite nonsensical.’
‘You think it was a conceit?’
‘Perhaps a genealogist would say otherwise, I don’t know. Anyone can prove anything. If I had the money and the patience I could demonstrate my own line of descent from the Princes of Dyfed. No, no—’ He lifted a hand. ‘I’m not serious.’
‘But something lit your lamp,’ Robin said.
‘Yes. Something did. Been on the back-burner for so long that I lacked the courage to approach it. What business was it of mine, an old copper with a long nose and too much time on his hands?’
It was actually Betty who’d seen it first, after Robin had come off the phone with Seymour Loftus.
‘Brace,’ she said. ‘Is Brace an English corruption of De Braose?’
* * *
‘Nobody knows that,’ Robin said now. ‘Coulda come from anyplace. And it isn’t always even spelt the same. There’s a block of new apartments down the street called De Breos Court, with an e.’
‘Always struck me as odd,’ Jones said, ‘that they should name luxury flats after one of our great historic villains. The man who massacres the Welsh aristocracy over Christmas dinner, then slaughters one of their sons, aged seven. Odd, too, that this forbidding grey apartment complex is – in size – the biggest development in Hay since… the castle, I suppose.’
‘But those apartments weren’t here when Jerry Brace arrived in Hay?’
‘Like’s Garage, it was, in those days. You’d never have a hope of filling all those flats back then.’
‘So, OK, Brace arrives, conceives the idea he’s a descendant of de Braose, the Ogre. Or is that something his old man had told him way back? Is that, in fact, why Jerry fetches up in Hay?’
‘Either is possible, boy. It’s entirely in keeping with the way these people like to think. And also explains his obsession with the castle. He convinces himself he’s the true heir. In essence, it belongs to him, not the interloper, Booth, who takes a fine military fortress and fills it – pah! – with books.’
‘Actually,’ Betty said. ‘If you’re looking for the last time this country was subject to a fascist dictatorship you could very well be looking at de Braose’s time. Even Hitler never managed what the Normans achieved. OK, not an Aryan invasion, if they came from France, but—’
‘No?’ Jones lifted a forefinger. ‘I may be wrong…’ He opened the laptop ‘… but I believe the Normans were a race apart from the French.’
‘Just don’t make it any more weird,’ Robin said.
‘Earlier on, Mrs Watkins was asking me why Brace had chosen to set up his business here, and I was forced to say I didn’t know. What I do recall from my reading is that William de Braose was, at first, well regarded by King John and allowed to behave like a king himself in the borderland. They eventually fell out – probably over de Braose’s failure to disclose income to which John thought he was entitled. Anyway, he went on the run. Was finally killed and his wife and child starved to death. But, right up to the end, William was insisting he’d return one day to his beloved borders, and he— Ah, here we are. The Normans were descended from Nordic invaders who settled in France. Vikings, in fact. Or Germanic. So there’s a case for saying the Normans were Aryans… yes.’
‘Tradition,’ Betty said. ‘Heritage. Destiny. Hell.’
‘Bets, it’s just an elaborate fantasy they built around themselves.’
‘It’s a… septic obsession,’ Betty said.
Robin pulled open the door and walked out to see if there was any sign of Kapoor. It was night now, so no bastard wardens with a licence to kill; Kapoor would park right outside. Robin did not turn, as he usually did, to look up at the castle with an element of possession based on a desire to paint it. He was hearing Betty: I just think that we might have some work to do. To make it ours. Rather than… someone else’s.