‘Gwyn, I’m not sure he’s going to want to right now.’
‘Merrily, look, this is going to be too big for me now. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s taken a turn for the serious.’
A soft drumming, and she turned to see Claudia Cornwell quietly hammering the soft undersides of her fists against the bottle bank’s rusting flank.
‘… the enormity of it,’ Claudia was saying. ‘None of our careers are worth this.’
‘Tell him it’s important, Merrily. Tell him it’s more important than anything in my long career in the police.’
‘Gwyn, what I suggest is you come here. We’re at the bottom of the car park, near the bins. Can you do that?’
‘Three minutes.’
‘All right,’ Claudia said to Bliss. ‘I will go home. I’ll go home and drink black coffee and wait for the knock on the door. It’s not going away. We don’t get rid of a night like this.’
They watched her walking to her car. Merrily saw that the left side of Bliss’s face was sagging. He needed sleep, but how much sleep was he going to get when he went to Brent and told him what they’d found? This was awful. Everything tonight was awful.
‘Frannie, that was Gwyn Jones. He wants to talk to you.’
‘Stall him.’
‘I can’t. He’s on his way down. He says to tell you it’s more important than anything in his time as a cop.’
Bliss sighed.
‘Gwyn Arthur Jones. One of your bloody poltergeists that doesn’t know it’s dead. I’ll be just like him when they kick me out.’
He leaned back beside a wide metal mouth choking on cardboard.
‘All right, tell me quick. What did Claudia say before I arrived. What did she tell you?’
God.
Merrily lit a cigarette.
‘Some people called Rector the Magus of Hay.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Priest in the pre-Christian sense. Someone who works magic. And we’re not talking end-of-the-pier. Claudia’s a barrister, you don’t get to be a barrister overnight. She aspires to work magic and she knows that’s going to take her a lot longer. It’s psychology, only deeper. It’s religion for people who aren’t into faith. It demands massive self-discipline.’
‘Yeh, we’ve been here before. Does it work?’
‘Works for them. For people who take it seriously, this stuff’s bigger than life and bigger than death. You know what I’m saying?’
‘And I can just hear meself repeating it to Claudia’s mates in the CPS. Now tell me what it means in terms of crime and motive.’
‘I can tell you what it means in human terms. Some of it. For Rector, it was about conscience and atonement. He’d written a book explaining how a belief in magic had inspired the most evil regime in history, and he did it so persuasively he was seen as one of the major voices of New Right mysticism. When they found out he wasn’t, some people felt betrayed.’
‘Enough to kill him?’
‘Enough to want to spoil his party, certainly. Rector was looking for a way to repair his karma. Persuade somebody to leave heaven’s gate off the latch. He wanted to devote his last years and all his learning to something essentially… positive.’
‘As symbolized by an old clothes shop dummy in a crown? And then replaced by a young copper who gets a swastika carved into her head?’
‘Just accept it. All that matters is that enough people believed— Oh.’
‘Good evening, Gwyn,’ Bliss said.
He was agitated. She could tell that by his breathing. In that, for the first time, she was aware that he was breathing. He nodded at Bliss, before turning to her, his voice unexpectedly sharp.
‘He knows about this?’
‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘Other things came up.’ She paused. Sod it. ‘Like… the discovery of a young copper in a cellar. With her throat cut.’ Heard Bliss pulling in a furious breath. ‘Frannie, for God’s sake, it’s bloody pointless holding anything back at this stage.’
‘You are saying…’ Gwyn Arthur Jones swung round to Bliss ‘… that Tamsin Winterson—?’
‘You say nothing about this, Gwyn,’ Bliss hissed. ‘That clear?’
‘And I’ll say, Francis, is that you need to come with me. You need to see something.’
‘Look, we’ve got—’
Gwyn Arthur was already walking away, long strides towards the top of the car park where car-beams intersected like shining blades under the castle wall. When they caught him up, he started talking about Jerry Brace and his obsession with the castle. Also a former fascist called Seymour Loftus who was perhaps all that remained of the Order of the Sun in Shadow.