‘So how did he wind up as a recluse in Cusop Dingle?’
‘Couldn’t tell you. Until you told me he’d been found in a pond, I didn’t even know he were there. He was supposed to’ve gone abroad. All I knew was the Centre for Transformation got wound up in the mid-eighties, not long before I came down here, and he’d sold the farm to an adventure-holiday firm. All over.’
‘Right. Huw…’ She was curious. ‘How come you know so much about Peter Rector?’
‘Good question. I… I suppose I encountered him in my… quest, if you like, for summat else. Small obsession, Merrily. Listen, I’d love to take this further, lass, only I’ve a bunch of Deliverance rookies at the chapel till weekend. But if you want to meet me up there Saturday morning, you might find it enlightening.’
‘First day of my so-called holiday.’
‘We’ll do that, then. I’ll see you at Capel around ten. At the little church.’
‘OK. I’ll be there. Thanks, Huw. Erm… one final thing… was Miss White involved in Rector’s activities in the mountains?’
‘I don’t know. You going to ask her?’
Merrily said nothing. Athena White. The use of words like bête noire might be a bit excessive when applied to a woman approaching eighty, last seen in a wheelchair. A retired spook – possibly – whose tiny frame enclosed a monstrous intellect.
‘In an old folks’ home, in’t she?’
‘The Glades at Hardwicke. Next place up from Cusop. Quite an upmarket home. Always maintains she’s able to live happily in a place like that because of her rich inner life. Always been blatantly contemptuous of me.’
‘If she were that contemptuous,’ Huw said, ‘she wouldn’t talk to you at all.’
And he was gone, before she’d had a chance to ask him about Ms Merchant and Ms Nott.
But then, what could he have said?
She hadn’t mentioned the photocopy, either, because Bliss had told her not to discuss it directly with anybody.
Like he said, it told you nothing. Could have been a copy of a picture from a book. Some Holocaust horror.
Part of Rector’s research, maybe – she hadn’t known then that he’d written books. The female, photographed from behind, was unidentifiable, the picture so grainy you couldn’t say with any certainty that it was a female. The words could mean anything.
What will you do now?
Who? Rector himself? It had been hand-printed on the photocopy.
Why had the copy been kept in that particular book? No possible connection with Nazism there. It was mainly about medieval monastic life.
Impossible, without tests, Bliss said, to say how old the copy was, either. It had been flattened in a hardback book in a shelf unit protected from the light.
For the moment, Bliss had said, might be best just to put it back.
But keep it in mind.
And then he’d photographed it with his phone.
Merrily switched off the computer and went upstairs for a suitcase. Couldn’t get the image out of her head. Couldn’t lose it. The way it had come out of a book she’d pulled out almost at random.
What was random?
20
Transition
AFTER DARK, SHE carried the first of two suitcases of clothes, toiletries and food across Church Street to Lol’s cottage.
The silence of the living room – no bleeps, no strings – felt softer, no longer dispiriting. Merrily switched on the wall lights and the ceiling shone a vibrant orange between chocolate beams. It felt like – be careful – coming home.
She fell back into the sofa, thinking about Peter Rector’s room, with the Zoroastrian rugs, the erotic drawings, the books on ritual magic and some not obviously related subjects. In her mind, the room now had an atmosphere of intense serenity so ingrained it was like a perpetual hum. Until you shook a photocopy from a book about religious life in the Black Mountains.
She’d only been once before to Capel-y-ffin, on a late-winter’s afternoon, finding it remote and bleak, residual snow caught like pockets of plaque in the teeth of the rocks.
She wondered about Bliss and the physical problems that were blighting his working life and could still end it prematurely. Had he thought of trying natural therapy? Would he have the patience? Could she help in any practical way?
Shoulders fitted into a corner of the sofa, Merrily stretched out her legs, with a guilty sense of detachment. Could never quite achieve this state at the vicarage. Living, as it were, over the shop, in a too-big house that had to be a refuge, twenty-four/seven, for anybody troubled.
Nobody yet knew where she was. Only Lol. She listened to his voice in her head, thought of the M-word, a pleasant pre-sleep lethargy setting into her leg muscles.