‘Bookseller, bartender, builder, carpenter…’
Gore grinned.
‘Patronizing bastard.’
They set up two pairs of steps either side of the doorway, a little uneven on account of the way the ground sloped. Gore Turrell drilled four holes in the oak sign, two either side, and plugged the walls. Then he went on the higher steps with a screwdriver and some long screws, Kapoor on the other end holding it up, getting it aligned, Gore calling to Robin on the ground.
‘That about right for you?’
Robin looked up, felt a tremor.
Thorogood Pagan Books
Jeez, they’d arrived. Part of the town. And, more than that, part of the castle. The castle of Richard Coeur de Livres. Book-heart. Though from down here, the renewed red chimney stacks of the Jacobean extension looked like a modern affirmation of the castle’s original military purpose: a row of bullets in a magazine.
He’d never thought of it that way before. He felt a momentary dismay, but what the hell?
‘Yeah,’ Robin said. ‘Thanks. Thanks, guys.’
‘They reckon the King had a handful of blokes like this,’ Kapoor shouted down. ‘It was how the new Hay was made. Miles of bookshelves sawn and hung by local craftsmen. Makes you feel inadequate, don’t it?’
‘I am inadequate,’ Robin said.
Turning away so they wouldn’t see the terror on the face of a guy who knew nothing about bookselling and was too crippled to go up a ladder. Jesus, in a life full of false starts, this could be the—
He heard Kapoor’s cut-off cry, a scraping of wood on tarmac that turned into a near screech as he swung round, saw the ladders swaying then toppling, Kapoor on the ground, the oak sign coming down on him like a falling tree.
24
We shall come again
BLISS WOULDN’T TALK about it on the phone, not even in the car park. After work, he came over to Ledwardine, running crookedly through the rain, from the vicarage where he’d left his car.
‘Forgot you were on holiday at Lol’s.’
It had gone quite cold; Merrily had lit the stove. Bliss looked around Lol’s living room.
‘Not too bad, as holiday homes go. Nice stereo. But then I suppose he would have, in his trade.’ He sat on the edge of the sofa, upright, as if he was still afraid of suddenly losing consciousness. ‘So we have a problem, then, do we?’
‘I’m trying not to overreact, but…’ She put coffee in front of him. ‘Yes. I think so.’
‘Makes me manic, this stuff, did I tell you?’
‘You may have done.’
‘Suggests you want me not to underreact. Interesting.’ He sipped, put the mug down. ‘Let’s take it from the start. The woman who stands to collect… let’s say over a million… is not exhibiting conspicuous signs of… what? Joy… gratitude? I don’t know how excited they get at that age.’
Merrily dropped into the armchair near the stove.
‘This is a woman you normally can’t get near. She tells you no more than she feels you deserve, in between the barbs and the insults. She doesn’t want you to like her. Or – even worse – pity her.’
‘That’s what I’d heard.’
‘From whom?’
‘You, probably.’
Merrily sat down with a glass of water and told him all of it. All of what she’d assured Athena White he’d dismiss as bollocks. Solidifying the story with what she’d learned about Peter Rector from Huw Owen. Putting it all together for someone else gave it a cohesion and credibility that she hadn’t expected.
‘These neo-Nazi cults,’ Bliss said. ‘I’ve come across a couple over the years. Not round here, up north. The situation is, in Germany, Scandinavia, these guys are bad news, all tooled up. Over here, usually a disappointment. Tends to be some little twat with a swazzie tattoo, a reedy voice and a mountain bike.’
‘So what about the photograph? The woman with the bloody—’
‘Merrily, as we agreed, we’ve no way of knowing if that’s something or nothing. It’s certainly not enough to launch an inquiry.’
‘When we found it, we didn’t know there was any connection between Rector and Nazism, and now we do.’
‘Yeh. Thanks to you. I asked you to check out his place and, as it turns out, I did the right thing. So, yeh, now we know he was the inspiration for our friends with the reedy voices and the mountain bikes. But did he really move back over the border because he was scared of these buggers? I don’t see it.’
‘Maybe he’d just had it up to here with their attempts to bring him back into the fascist fold. I don’t know, either. I don’t think Athena’s saying he was scared exactly. He just didn’t like the way they kept showing up at his place in the mountains. Where he wasn’t able to screen the people signing up for his courses. Not as easy then as it is now.’