‘Who told you all this?’
‘Emrys. Who else? He’s a good man. He’d go up and chat to the Convoy now and again, see if they needed any help. They never told him to bugger off. He thought they were generally harmless, happy to be up there out of the way. It’s interesting, psilocybin, the mushroom drug, I were reading about that not long ago. Banned now, ranked alongside cocaine, but some experts reckon it’s up there wi’ Prozac as an antidepressant. A natural antidepressant. If you were a homeless hippy, happen it made you feel less like trash.’
‘These girls – neither was ever found?’
‘Nor came back. There was a police investigation, but where do you start? Especially if they don’t want to be found.’
‘If the older one was on the game…’
‘I imagine that worried the parents quite a lot over the years. That Mephista might be down in Swansea or Cardiff or Bristol, turning tricks, getting ravaged by hard men, hard drugs. They never stopped looking, the parents. They’d keep coming back – Emrys’d see them in the hills, as if it were at all likely their daughter would show up here again.’
‘And Rector?’
‘He’d’ve been checked out at the time by the police. Nothing happened to him. But it all ended soon afterwards, anyroad. Happen it were the missing girls. Anyroad, he went quiet.’
‘He had a breakdown, according to Athena White.’
‘Oh, a breakdown…’
Merrily shrugged. Huw’s lined face looked bitter, as if Rector had stolen his private vision and trashed it.
‘Farm went on the market and Emrys never saw Peter Rector from that day to this.’
‘Not knowing he was just a few miles away. Under a different name. With a beard.’
‘Ah, let’s go down to Hay, get summat to eat, eh?’
‘Wait.’ They’d reached the Freelander with its hem of crusty mud. A big dome of a hill blocked the eastern horizon. ‘What if he had good reason to think there were bad vibes here? The atmosphere soured.’
‘Your mate White’s evidently still on his side. Bloody owd witch.’
‘I’m not being naive, Huw, but suppose he had been infiltrated by some seriously awful people? What I’m thinking, could they have come in through the convoy? Like you said, anybody could join it.’
‘Happen.’
‘And what if he did have a good reason for… making something happen?’
‘What, like introducing Anglo-Catholicism to Hay?’
‘Not sure I was thinking of that, but it’s there. It’s happened.’
‘So,’ Huw said, ‘he finds himself a nice, secluded refuge a few miles away, where it’s not quite as cold and you can grow proper trees, surrounded wi’ nice, middle-class country dwellers.’
‘And begins what Miss White calls his Last Redemptive Project.’
‘Redemptive, eh?’ Huw sank his hands into the pockets of his ancient jacket, looked down at his trainers. ‘To redeem himself?’
‘Or the area? Where Father Ignatius failed, presumably, and his church collapsed into a dangerous ruin, and Eric Gill got all excited but then couldn’t stick it for long. And where Rector himself let the past catch up with him. If you keep on walking from Cusop Dingle, this is where you finish up.’
‘And where do you go from here, lass?’
‘Don’t know. Sometimes it all looks like a crooked path that leads nowhere other than Richard Dawkins’s back door. Do people like Rector just create a working fantasy? Do we all?’
‘Wasn’t what I meant, lass,’ Huw said gently. ‘I meant are you going to tell Bliss any of this?’
‘What would that achieve? You really think the police are going to follow it up on the off chance it might point up a reason for somebody to have killed Rector? Thus providing a very tenuous link with a missing girl?’
She looked up into the hills, from whence there were no visible offers of help.
41
Into the hearth
‘NAME’S ROBIN THOROGOOD,’ Brent said. ‘American. A bookseller in Hay. Or planning to be.’
Small group of them on benches in a back room of the community centre, down near the toilets: Bliss, Ceri Watts of Dyfed-Powys, Karen Dowell, Terry Stagg, Rich Ford.
‘So what’ve we got?’ Ceri Watts said.
‘Circumstantial up to now. However…’ Brent started counting off the pluses on his fingers. ‘He only lives in Kington, but he was in town all night. Leaving his truck on the car park near where Winterson’s car was found. Says he got drunk and – rather than get a taxi home to his rather lovely wife – chose to sleep over his shop. Which, as he’s only just taken it on, has no furniture, least of all a bed. I’d have to be extremely pissed to sleep there in any circumstances.’