‘This was when she found Jerry Brace? Or did he find her?’
‘Brace had dropped out of university. Avoided the military career his father had in mind for him. He was given, as a last chance, a sum of money to build himself a business. Ending up in Hay – like you, boy.’ A nod at Robin. ‘With a vanload of war books, many purloined from his family’s huge library, I’d guess. Including the only one that obsessed him, that he’d never sell. Which, of course, was Rector’s book on Nazi occultism – mystical racism and the Aryan Holy Grail.’
Merrily took out her cigarettes then put them away again. They lacked the appeal of a pipe, and she didn’t want to stand in the doorway.
‘Was Rector’s father into the mysticism?’
‘Not so much, I don’t think. But the discovery of Nazi occultism was, I imagine, what finally made the rather indolent Jerrold Brace into his father’s son. Sending him in search of Peter Rector, the man they’d both come to believe was… a secret master – is that the term?’
‘Something like that.’
‘He once told his cousin, Roger – my Brace family contact – of his belief that he was receiving telepathic messages from Rector. Did I tell you that?’
‘No.’
‘Ah, there’s so much of this, Merrily. It was said Sir Charles himself once hired a medium to put him in touch with Hitler. Jerry Brace was picking up all kinds of nonsense from the skin-heads and extremists who haunted his shop, bringing their own self-published books and pamphlets for him to sell.’
‘I’m guessing,’ Merrily said, ‘that a lot of this was fantasy magic, only vaguely based on the wartime Nazi mysticism. Which, from what I’ve heard and seen on TV, was more grandiose and pompous and masonic. Dressing-up games. Were the wartime Nazis as openly satanic? I don’t think so.’
‘No. But if Jerrold Brace came here to follow Peter Rector and was disappointed, he may have turned to people like Seymour Loftus. Seymour in his more fanatical days, preaching illumination through violence in the approach to his new aeon.’
‘And Mephista?’
‘Apparently the kind of sixteen-year-old who, today, in Robin’s homeland, might be found in a primary school with an assault rifle. Intimate with a man taking too many drugs and fantasizing about being descended from a robber baron. Volatile cocktail, wasn’t it?’
* * *
Frannie Bliss was at the open door. You could feel his tension rising with the deepening growl of traffic on Oxford Road at a time when it might normally be dying back. Had he been seen at Cusop? Was Brent looking for him?
Gwyn Arthur Jones was retelling the history of his breakthrough at the funeral of Sir Charles Brace, most of the detective work already done for him by the nephew, Roger Brace, alienated from the rest of the family and attending the old man’s funeral for pretty much the same reasons as Gwyn.
Bliss shut the door and came back to hear about the pregnant girl Sir Charles had taken in and yet was careful to keep at arm’s length. Finding her and the child a home at a family-owned London hotel, where she was expected to earn her keep.
In the end, Gwyn said, she’d become a junior manager, with a talent for charming guests while ruthlessly culling superfluous staff. She might have been running the hotel by now, if she hadn’t begun an affair with the bar manager. Breaking up his marriage and then leaving with him to take over management of a Soho pub. Then marrying him.
‘Thus,’ Gwyn said, ‘becoming Mrs Turrell. The boy also taking the name, under which he was later sent to a prep school at Sir Charles’s expense.’
He waited. The name was vaguely familiar to Merrily, but Robin was the first to react. He looked shaken.
‘So, uh… what was the kid’s name?’
‘George.’ Gwyn Arthur opened his venerable tobacco pouch, excavating with a finger. ‘George Brace Turrell. You can imagine the Turrell part being casually discarded if he met his grandfather’s expectations.’
‘Shit,’ Robin said. ‘How bad’s this gonna get, Gwyn?’
‘Depends how much you want to stay for, boy. Shall I continue?’
His mother hadn’t seen much of him after that, for several years. He’d attended private school and spent his holidays at a farm owned by associates of his grandfather, where he underwent fitness training and learned all the right skills. Learned, essentially, how not to be his father.
The stepfather, Mr Turrell, had died in a shooting incident a year after the marriage. Collateral damage in a gang war. Gwyn had made contact with two old colleagues who’d left Wales to join the Met, now also retired and happy to talk, like old cops always did to other cops. One of them had sent Gwyn a scan of an old newspaper story, which included a photo of the young widow.