62
Symbol of intent
MERRILY STOOD IN the alley, looking at rooftops, as if there might be visible signs of distress rising through the curling streets, like oil up the wick of a lamp, until a desperate light would flare from a window of the empty castle.
Nothing to see, of course, nothing to hear. Nobody would know yet, except for senior police and the cops in the patrol car who’d followed up an anonymous call and gone down the steps with their flashlights and come out personally sickened and professionally thrilled, to make way for the Durex suits.
Robin came down from the shop next door, saying he and Betty had cleaned the place up. Put the stones back in the chimney, brushed up the dust. It was ready.
‘I’ll come soon,’ Merrily said. ‘Very soon.’
Thinking, why? What’s the point? What am I for? A walking anachronism. Who cares?
‘Sure.’ Robin raised a hand. ‘Thanks.’
He was looking lost, like somebody had taken an axe to his idyll. Did he really think she might achieve anything other than to make Betty feel a little more calm?
‘Hold on.’ Gwyn Arthur Jones was at the door. ‘Don’t go yet, Robin. I think I asked you about the laughter?’
Robin came wearily back into the cricket shop.
‘Jesus, Gwyn, what am I supposed to say? It’s a goddamn nightmare. Yeah, we both heard it. Yeah, we thought it was like a laugh we’d heard someplace else. I guess a laugh doesn’t alter that much over time. You can change the pitch of your voice, go live in some other place and absorb a new accent, but…’
‘Laughter’s the result of an inner process too deep for control,’ Gwyn Arthur said. ‘Hard to fake. And who laughs at violent death, in such a gleeful, uninhibited way?’
‘Children,’ Merrily said. ‘Children who’ve only seen it in horror films. Who’ve never thought much about the reality of it. It was a young person’s laugh.’
Gwyn Arthur came from a different, maybe more reflective era of policing which perhaps had lasted longer in country towns. His aromatic tobacco calmed the air like the incense in St Mary’s church.
‘The father’s name,’ he said, ‘is Tim Wareham. Retired now, and no more an old hippy than any of us who were around in 1967. I really don’t think, but for his wife’s poor health, that he would have contacted me at all. I think, even then, he realized that whatever fate had befallen his daughter would be something they might be better off going to their graves without knowing about.’
‘You have to wonder,’ Merrily said, ‘why they called her Mephista. I mean, not everybody would see it as tempting fate, but…’
‘They didn’t. Her name was Melissa. Which, as a young child, she’d pronounce as Meffissa. And Tim, when she was naughty, would change it to Mephista. Which, being the free spirits they thought they were, they found funny and affectionate. And it stuck. Melissa Wareham, her name. And she was often naughty. They stopped keeping pets because of the way she would have fun with them. As she’d put it.’
‘He told you this?’
‘Makes me smile how, when some teenager is missing or dead, the parents appear on TV to tell the nation how you could not wish for a better son or daughter. A beautiful, thoughtful child. And the candles are lit and the shrines are built. Doesn’t help. It’s what they don’t tell the nation that might have helped. I said to Mr Wareham that if I was to find her I’d need to know it all – the good and the bad. But mainly the bad. And mostly it was.’
‘Sorry, Gwyn, you said they were from London?’
‘Brighton. Where the girl was joining questionable gangs before she was twelve. Had a tattoo, when it was still an aggressive sign in a female.’
Robin said, ‘Where?’
‘Left armpit, Robin. Swastika, as it happens. Common enough in those days, though still very much a bad-taste symbol – a snigger against the parents and the grandparents. A wounding form of teenage protest. But then the Warehams were remembering their own protests. They remembered a peaceful rebellion – smoking cannabis, dropping a little acid. And picking magic mushrooms, once, in an area they recalled as a heaven on earth. You see where this is going?’
‘To the Convoy,’ Merrily said. ‘To becoming holiday hippies in the hope that Mephista would absorb the old ideals?’
‘But it’s not always heaven, see. Tim Wareham remembers an early autumn of rain and fog. No proper heating in their old ambulance. Tim and his wife were excited by the discovery of Peter Rector in a farm nearby, offering enlightenment, for free. But the girl was at her worse. Frequently drunk on cheap cider. In a perpetual rage.’