The Magus of Hay(127)

He took a few paces then came back, shut the door hard. The castle walls would be blackening.

‘There you go.’ Betty turned the laptop away from herself. ‘British neo-Nazi pagan factions tend to associate themselves with Anglo-Saxon and Nordic traditions.’

Jones produced his pipe.

‘All right if I…?’

‘Sure,’ Robin said. ‘Just don’t bring out a pork pie.’

‘You didn’t finish telling us, Robin. What, in the final analysis, was your opinion of our friend Loftus?’

‘He was lying. It all came too easy. He’s a local politician now. Green Party. Then again, he could be lying about that, too. I almost told him about the videotape.’

‘Perhaps you should have done,’ Jones said. ‘Time, I think, to start nudging the applecart. Perhaps beyond time.’





58

A dark symmetry


SOMETIMES, WHEN THE worst had happened, you were angry with yourself. You’d thought about it repeatedly, in vivid detail, convinced that self-torture could alter reality. Not only stop it happening but stop it having happened.

Worthless superstition.

But please God…

When they reached the bottom of the steps, Bliss was coming out, shutting the white door, putting his back against it, snatching off his face mask.

‘No point. Nothing to be done.’

Moving his arms, trying to sweep them back up the stairs, like crowd control.

‘No.’ Claudia Cornwell carried on down to the bottom of the steps until she was face to face with Bliss. ‘We need to see this.’

‘Claudia—’

‘This isn’t about the law, Francis, or regulations, this is about what I might be able to tell you that you wouldn’t get from anyone else. I need to see. Or else why am I here? Why’s Merrily here?’

Bliss tapped gloved fingers against a thigh, his left side, the side that went numb. He looked up at Merrily.

‘You all right with this?’

She just nodded, not all right with any of it. She wanted out of here. Wanted to go running back up the steps, tripping over her Durex suit until she could tear it off and keep running into the darkness. She wanted a cigarette.



‘All right then.’ Bliss stepped aside. ‘Remember, you don’t touch anything, even with the kit on. Don’t lean against any walls. And especially you don’t throw up. The first hint of nausea, you get out and into that field. Or, better still, your own car.’

He opened the door.

‘Take some deep breaths now. You won’t want to in a minute.’

A crypt, with adornments. Uplighting, shaded.

Tiled floor, earth-coloured walls, a low ceiling, a false ceiling.

A ceiling of midnight blue. A black and white floor, like a chess-board. Circles, one inside the other.

Cardinal points.

Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, the archangels through which magicians paid tribute to their Hebrew ancestors.

All there.

On the altar, a chalice.

Also fat candles with white wicks, brown-flecked.

And a chair. A stiff-backed chair with arms, like a throne. Inside the circle where it would be protected.

Yes.

Where the King sat.

If only. ‘She never left Cusop,’ Bliss said.

Stepping away so they could see her. If they wanted to. If they could bear it.

They were spared Tamsin’s face. Her head had fallen forward on to her chest, hair screening the wound which had produced all the blood, like waxwork blood now, dry and ridged, and the stink of it all, in this vacuum, was the worst you’d ever know. A sweetness under it, as if incense had been burned in here, the stench of death and evil.

You’ve gorra big future, PC Winterson.

‘I need some information, Claudia,’ Bliss said through his mask. ‘From when you first arrived in Cusop yesterday.’



Jesus, Merrily thought. Yesterday. The hood was tight around her face, a white-gloved hand pressing the mask into her nose and mouth, but the smell got everywhere.

‘We’ve been through this, Francis,’ Claudia said.

Her eyes, unexpectedly, hot with panic. A barrister and a magician. A mother. With daughters?

‘No,’ Bliss said. ‘When we went through it, Tamsin was missing. So let’s start with the assumption that it wasn’t you who killed her.’

Claudia gasped. Bliss pulled down his mask, took a savage breath, did not choke.

‘Let’s assume somebody saw you come into the barn and uncover the entrance to the cellar. Could’ve been Tamsin herself, who saw you leaving and then went down. Maybe someone else followed her and then…’

‘Her throat’s cut?’ Claudia said. ‘Somebody cut her throat?’

‘Claudia, when you were there, in full daylight, did you see anybody else in the vicinity? In Cusop? Anywhere?’