The Magus of Hay(94)

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Brent said.

You could see him forgetting it before your eyes.

Robin was quiet now, Betty hoping to all the gods that it wasn’t relief. She stood in the damp, musty silence, surrounded by all their lovingly collected books which deserved better, and wiped her eyes with a sleeve.

The hardest part had been holding Robin back without this looking like something she had to do all the time.

She was in the tiny kitchen getting a glass of water when she heard Robin calling to her from upstairs. She found him standing in the middle of the rust-coloured rug, hands on his hips. He did that sometimes to ease the pain.

‘What the hell…?’

Pale daylight gave the room a greasy yellow patina. A sooted board lay in front of the upstairs fireplace.

‘Hmm,’ Betty said. ‘One of them mentioned that on the way out. It was sealing the chimney off, one of them tapped it and it fell out. Seems we’re breaking the law. It’s asbestos.’

‘Bastards just had to find something, didn’t they?’

‘We need to dispose of it, but not in a public skip.’

Betty bent and lifted the plate, getting sticky soot over both hands. She just wanted to hurl it through the window. Went on her knees to the cramped fireplace. There was a small pyramid of soot in the bottom and another trickle coming down like black sand in an egg timer. Betty squinted up the chimney.

‘Yeah, I know,’ she said, ‘I’ll send the cleaning bill to the police.’

There was a crisping from above, and she backed out fast. Soot was one thing, but a major eruption of dead jackdaws…

She sat back on her heels in the dirt, suspended in an extraordinary moment of crystal I-am-here consciousness. What the hell was she doing? If Robin really was no longer happy here, was ready to take the money and run…

Something fell into the hearth. Nothing dead, only an accumulation of tar. Where it had broken off, she saw a bare patch on the firebricked wall and the edge of something crudely carved there. There was a buzzing in her ears, like tinnitus. Coldness in her chest.

‘Betty?’

‘Hang on.’

She reached up and pulled off more flakes of tar, brushed the wall clean with the edge of her hand until it was fully revealed.

Maker’s mark? Too big, surely.

‘Robin, is the phone up here?’

They had just the one mobile.

‘In my pocket.’

‘Put it on camera for me, would you?’

She scrambled out of the fireplace and went to put on the light. She could see now that the carving on the chimney wall was not as crude as it had looked. Didn’t have Robin’s finesse, but there was a kind of painstaking precision. It looked old, but it couldn’t be very old because brown firebricks like this couldn’t have been around all that long.

And which firebrick manufacturer in the last eighty years would have put out a product carrying a swastika?

Of sorts, anyway. Robin handed Betty the phone, and she thrust it firmly up the chimney and took a picture in case it should crumble to dust before her eyes. When she rolled away, she had the impression of a shadow rising as if formed from soot. She scowled.

‘Iain, for what it’s worth…’ Bliss had caught up with Brent in the doorway after the others had left. ‘For what it’s worth, I think she’s a smart girl. And totally committed to the Job. I don’t think she’s the kind of girl who’d cop off on a whim with some piss-artist bookseller.’



‘The vagaries of human behavioural patterns will always surprise me, Francis,’ Brent said.

‘You being a PhD and all.’

Brent shook his head, kind of pityingly, then it came up, jaw jutting.

‘And what about a policeman, Francis? Would she… cop off with a detective, do you think?’

‘What’s that mean?’ Bliss’s guy went tight. ‘Sir.’

Brent waved it away.

‘Don’t you need some sleep?’

‘And you need everybody you can get,’ Bliss said. ‘If your bookseller angle falls down, all overtime restrictions’ll be off by tonight.’

‘If.’ Brent headed for the operation room. ‘Go home, Bliss. Have a bath, have a shave.’

Bliss walked savagely away, through the main doors, letting one swing behind him. Couldn’t remember whether he’d left his car on the field at the back or the big car park. Couldn’t believe what he thought Brent had said.

The numbness had taken half his face.

Couldn’t find his car on the field behind the community centre. No, he wouldn’t’ve put it there; he hadn’t even known they were using it until he’d got here. Bugger. He walked round the building and out of the entrance into Oxford Road, where a woman came up to him, pushing a bike, panting.