The Magus of Hay(30)

She thought of that comforting homily, often read at funerals, about the dead person being only in the next room.

There was a young policewoman waiting for them.

‘Merrily, this is PC Winterson. Tamsin, Mrs Watkins is here in a consultative capacity. So this is between us, right?’

The girl was nodding quickly, evidently flattered at being included. Bliss was like that, oblivious of rank and pecking order. You were his mate till you let him down. He pulled out a chromium-framed stool and sat on it.

‘I think… we might help ourselves to a pot of Mr Hambling’s tea. Would you mind, Tamsin, if it’s norra terribly sexist request? Could mairder a cuppa.’

Tamsin smiled, took a stainless steel teapot to the stainless steel sink. She was pale and freckly, ginger hair tied back with a rubber band.

Merrily remembered the first time Bliss had asked her to take a look at someone’s house. Specifically two white walls of photos of women, now dead. You’re looking at his inspiration. These are the ones he wishes he’d done. The ones he wishes he’d got to first. Deceptive, in the end, but he wouldn’t have taken liberties there with the teapot.

‘Is this… any kind of a crime scene, Frannie?’

‘Not that we know of.’

‘Mr Hambling – how old did you say?’

‘Over ninety. Which is one reason why nobody but me and Tamsin’s thinking of crime. Yet.’

‘No relatives, Frannie?’

‘May take some time to get them up here. He had a wife, from whom he seems to have been estranged but not divorced. And who we think is now dead. We also think he’s gorra daughter… somewhere. But Tamsin’s the expert, Tamsin’s local to the area and therefore in possession of that distinctive Welsh border character-trait where you drip-feed information gradually in case you’re talking to an enemy. Taken me friggin’ ages to gerrit out of her. You were born on a farm at…?’

‘Dorstone, sir.’ Tamsin was blushing to the roots of her pulled-back hair. ‘Near there. Few miles from here. It’s where I live. But I had this friend from school who lived at Cusop, and I used to spend a lot of time here, and she told me, way back, about Mr Hambling. How kids used to dare one another to sneak up and… well just dare to come here, really.’

‘Because…?’

Bliss waited. He evidently knew the answers to all these questions, wanted Merrily to get them first hand.

‘Stupid, really. It seemed stupid at the time, but we were all reading like Harry Potter in those days? We wanted to believe it could be like that. In real life?’

She looked at Bliss, who nodded, good as saying, Don’t tell me, tell her; she gets paid not to laugh at this shit.





15

Catered for


TAMSIN SAID, ‘I just assumed it was because he looked like one. And because it was supposed to be haunted up here.’

The bungalow overlooked Cusop Dingle on one side. Another offered a view across fields to the castle at Hay-on-Wye, the lesser-known side, the part that was more like a mansion on a hill.

This bungalow, unusually big, solidly built of brick and stone, was itself on a small promontory surrounded by decaying outbuildings inside a half-circle of oak and thorn and yew trees. Another stream was frothing over shallow rocks below it and down to the dingle. But it was an ordinary enough bungalow, surely no more than fifty or sixty years old.

‘How old would he have been then?’ Bliss asked.

‘Seemed like out of the Old Testament at the time. Or Charles Dickens? With his white hair, white whiskers. From a distance, it was like— I remember thinking, it was like a halo, all around his face. He’d’ve been eightyish, I reckon, but he was pretty sprightly. Chase you off. And catch you. Sometimes.’

‘And was he nasty? When he caught you? Or… nice?’

‘He never caught me. Well, I never went that close. Too spooky for me up yere.’

Merrily said, ‘Why do you say that?’

‘They used to say you could see like strange… lights? My friend reckons she seen it once. Like the countryside was lit up from inside? It was only for a fraction of a second. Like one of those… like a UFO experience. Nothing to say it was anything at all to do with Mr Hambling, except it was near his house. I’m just telling you this ’cos the DI said to tell you everything, no matter how daft it sounded.’

‘So just part of local folklore,’ Merrily said.

‘Don’t know how far it went back. I probably wasn’t born before Mr Hambling was here. My friend, she asked a bloke and he said she wasn’t the first to see it, the light. It’s just something you can’t confirm one way or the other. Sorry.’