The Magus of Hay (16 page)

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B
LISS HAD BEEN
here before. Hated it.

Not Dorstone. Other places, three of them, all in the years before he came down to Hereford. Bigger places, with more people to disappear.

All of them in summer, as it happened. One had been the home of the kid who drowned. Missing for a night before they found him, and Bliss remembered the overcrowded living room, all the helpful neighbours swelling the anxiety until the critical moment when it all went down around the mother’s arid wail.

That had been on a former council estate on Merseyside, this was a farmhouse at the end of a pitted track with wooded Dorstone Hill behind it. Still at the arse-end of the day, but all the lights were blazing, as if someone thought Tamsin might be out there and had forgotten where she lived.

Annie parked the BMW on the edge of the field, close to the entrance to the yard.

‘Better not come in with you.’

‘I know.’ He was struggling into his jacket to cover up the baseball sweater with the big, cheerful numbers on the chest. Just grateful she’d driven him out, knowing what he was like at the wheel when it got late. ‘You’re not here.’

It was a sagging, rubblestone house, quite low, not very big. The man standing in front of the porch was wearing an unfarmery light suit. Robert Winterson, dressed for a night out with his wife that never happened. He held out his hand to Bliss
and they shook under a domed security lamp projecting from the side of the house, showing Winterson to be about forty, thickset, close-cropped hair.

‘Like I said…’ Bliss turned his back on the light. ‘I don’t want you to start gerrin too worried. Not yet.’

‘It’s my mother, it is. She’s the baby of the family, you know? My mother never wanted her to be in the police, see. Not the way it is now, women doing the full job.’

Bliss saw a woman’s face at the nearest window, all the lights on in there, walls, ceiling, table.

‘She’s a clever girl, and she’s a good copper. There’ll be a reason for this.’

‘Of course,’ Robert Winterson said. ‘Course there will. I feel bad about bothering you.’

‘Hell, no, you did the right thing.’

‘Anyway, we got Kelly yere,’ Robert Winterson said. ‘She insisted on coming over.’

‘Kelly?’

‘Kelly James – Tamsin’s mate? From Cusop?’

‘Sorry, yeh…’ Sometimes he wanted to kick his own head in. ‘Good.’

When he’d called back, Robert Winterson had said this Kelly had rung the farm, expecting a call from Tamsin that hadn’t come.

‘Mr Winterson, about Kelly, could you do us a favour? There’s things I need to know, questions I need to ask, but I don’t want to distress your mother by asking them in front of her.’

‘You want me to get Kelly out yere?’

‘Exactly. Thank you.’

Kelly James was in a baggy white YFC hoodie, looking even younger than Tamsin, golden curls like a baby.

Conspicuously pregnant, eyes aglow with tears.

‘I just did what she told me. I was only trying to help. It’s all my
fault
…’

‘We could all say that, Kelly. Just… take your time. When exactly did you call Tamsin?’

‘Must’ve been about half-six?’

‘And what did you tell her?’

‘Told her I’d seen this woman. Near Mr Hambling’s house? She’d asked me if I seen the woman again, could I let her know.’

‘When was this? When you saw the woman.’

‘After I came home from work. Four? I go home early now, what with…’

She’d lowered her voice, covering the bump with both hands, like she didn’t want the baby to hear and develop a prenatal anxiety problem.

‘Where do you work?’

‘In Hay. I work for my Uncle Geoff, he’s an accountant? When I get home, I’ve been going for a walk, with the dog. Get some… fresh air and exercise.’

‘And you went up by Mr Hambling’s house.’

‘Not that far. I don’t go that far. I went by the church, as far as the ole castle. The mound, earthwork jobbie? And that’s where I seen her. Standing on the mound. Really still. Like some monument.’

‘And this was definitely the woman you’d seen before, going to Mr Hambling’s place.’

‘With a cardboard box. Groceries type of thing. Bottles sticking out.’

‘What’s she look like?’

‘Tallish. Posh-looking. Fairish hair, up in a scrunch at the back. You could tell she was posh, the way she walked. Head in the air kind of thing. She had classy boots on.’

‘She see you?’

‘Dunno. Mabbe. I was a bit excited, see, so I just like turned round and walked back with the dog, and I could see this car on the church car park?’

‘What sort?’

‘Audi. Dunno what model, but it was red. Well, I hadn’t got the mobile with me, I was only out for a short walk, so I just kept saying the number over and over again so I wouldn’t forget it, and then I went home and called Tamsin. It was her day off, so she’s at home, and she said she’d come right away.’

‘So she took down the number.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Tell me exactly what she said.’

‘She said, “I’ll report it,” and then she said “I’ll come out.” And I’m like, “What do you want me to do?” And she said, “Nothing. You stay there.” She said, “I’ll ring you later.”’

‘And then what happened?’

‘I don’t know. I just… did what she said. Nothing.’

‘You didn’t see the red car again? Or the woman?’

Kelly shook her head.

‘You can’t see the road from our house. I’m like, Oh please don’t come down before Tamsin gets yere. In my head, kind of thing. And then when I didn’t hear anything after about an hour I thought I’d better go up there again, and there was no sign of anybody. And I waited another… don’t know how long, and I rang her mum.’ Kelly started to cry. ‘Left it too long, didn’t I?’

‘You’d no reason to think there was anything wrong,’ Bliss said. ‘Did you?’

He looked back at the house. Two faces at the bright window now. He hated this. Motioned Kelly further away from the house, under a Dutch barn with a tractor and trailer in it.

‘Who did Tamsin say she was going to report it to?’

‘Just said she was gonner report it.’

‘Right,’ Bliss said. ‘This car number. I don’t suppose you remember it do you?’

‘I put it down. Soon as I got in. Put it in my phone.’

‘Good
girl
—’

Kelly was fumbling out her smart phone.

‘She’s gonner be all right?
Is
she? It was just one… posh woman. If it’d been a bloke… but it wasn’t.’

‘She’s probably doing a bit of investigating, Kelly. Things she wasn’t sure she could tell you about.’

‘Did she not phone you?’

Kelly’s shoulders shaking.

‘I’m sure she intends to,’ Bliss said. ‘She probably just… hasn’t had a chance.’

When the duty sergeant at Gaol Street, Gerry Rowbotham, came back, they were parked in a roadside picnic place past Hardwicke Church, just before the junction. Like a courting couple, Bliss thought bitterly.

Except for the mobile phone clamped to his left ear, the gathering anxiety.

‘Claudia Cornwell,’ he repeated and spelled it out, Annie writing it down. ‘And it’s Plas Gwyndwr, with a W. Near Talgarth. Thanks, Gerry. Just say the postcode again.’

His mouth was dry and he was going numb all down his left side, to the waist. He’d been through his phone for texts, emails, anything. He’d avoided meeting Tamsin’s parents. Nothing to tell them, nothing that wouldn’t make it worse, couldn’t face the cups of cooling tea, the untouched biscuits. Plus, their situation wouldn’t be eased by watching a senior copper struggling to stay upright, blinking in the lights, slurring his words.

‘All right, Gerry, listen, can you ring whoever’s been at Peter-church today, find out when they last heard from Tamsin. I know it’s her day off, but somebody might know. And if she’s got any close mates in the job. But, most important, find out if she’s also done a PNC check on that reg. and when. And come back to me.’

‘Francis,’ Annie murmured. ‘Just report it.’

‘How far’s Talgarth from Hay, Gerry, ten minutes? Fifteen?’

‘I’m really not trying to pull rank,’ Annie said, very low and urgent, ‘but I’m saying it again. You have to report this.’

Bliss nodded, put up his hand, then got both hands round the phone, his forehead banging inside.

‘Gerry, listen… this could be nothing. This could be a complete false alarm, but Tamsin Winterson’s brother rang me and they can’t find her and they can’t raise her on her mobile. She was last heard from trying to trace that car. No known offence involved, no suspicion of any offence. As I’m only about fifteen minutes away, I’m nipping over there, have a word meself.’

‘It’s Dyfed-Powys area, isn’t it?’ Gerry said. ‘It’s in Wales.’

‘No need for them to be involved. Yet. Let’s keep this low-key, might be nothing. Just call me back ASAP.’

When he came off the phone, Annie was hissing like a punctured tyre. This really was not like the December night when they’d been working together, off the meter.

‘Annie, what am I supposed to friggin’ do? Nobody else knows enough to talk to this woman.’

‘The central issue…’ Annie slumped back hard in the driver’s seat, both hands tight on the wheel ‘… is you have a missing person. Yes, I can see a small advantage in your talking to the woman, rather than anyone else, but I can also see you dropping yourself very deeply in the shit if this escalates.’

‘A missing woman. A missing adult. We don’t overreact any more, do we, if it’s norra kid?’

‘It’s a
police
woman, for Christ’s sake. A very
young
police-woman.’

‘Off duty. And no reason for them to think she’s in any danger. And she’s gonna be embarrassed as hell if there’s a simple explanation, like… like she thought she was babysitting
tomorrow
night. Could be that simple. And she wasn’t exactly gonna report back to Kelly, was she, on police business?’

‘Do we even know she
went
to Cusop?’

‘Annie, we don’t even know she left the farm. Her mother was in Hereford, shopping, most of the afternoon, and her dad and her brother were out picking up a second-hand trailer. Last time they saw her was lunch.’

Annie stared through the windscreen towards a placard in
front of the hedge across the main road. It was advertising some philosophy event in Hay. It said,
How The Light Gets In
.

‘Please?’ Bliss said.

‘Francis, you may never be able to pay me back for this.’

Annie started the engine, put on the headlights.

29

Nail bar

‘S
LAUGHTERHOUSE AREA, SEE
.’

‘What is?’

‘That’s what it was. Back Fold. The town abattoir. Back Fold ran with blood. Echoed to the sounds of bellowing.’

‘When was this?’

Robin laid his glass down, dismayed.

‘
I
dunno,’ Gareth Nunne, the human barrel, said. ‘Within living memory, more or less. Some people’s memory. Likely my dad’s. He’s eighty-nine.’

‘I’m vegetarian,’ Robin said.

There was a short, hollowed-out period of quiet and then enough laughter to blast all the glasses off the bartop. Robin found he was also laughing. Had to have been an abattoir someplace in a farmers’ town. No bookstores back then, maybe a newsagents that sold books on the side.

The way Gwenda’s Bar did. Under the tawny lantern light, you walked down this widening alley of crooked bookshelves, all books priced at a pound, before you emerged into this oak-panelled parlour, which smelled like pubs used to smell, and the embrace of laughter.

The panelling was chipped and stained in places, shabby-chic, without the chic. About twenty people were drinking real ale and local wine, served at fat farmhouse dining tables with chips and gouges in them. The bar was like a butcher’s slab, lit by globular frosted lanterns, teardrops of cracked yellow light.
Robin, meanwhile, was lit by most of a bottle of something from a Welsh vineyard.

Would’ve been churlish to keep refusing. They were nice people, even Gareth Nunne who’d tried to rip him off and wound up inspiring him. None of them what he’d been expecting, still figuring that the stringy entrails of his meagre knowledge of the book trade would be exposed on Gwenda’s rugged bar and publicly picked over by experts.

Her name was Gwenda Protheroe. Someone said she used to be in the theatre. Sometimes she served behind the bar, sometimes just sat on a tall stool, wearing a little black dress and a wry, sympathetic smile that was kind of sexy in a momsy way. Not long after he’d walked in here Gwenda had told him the bar was an attempt to restore the way rural pubs used to be in the old days – parlour pubs, someone’s living room where ale was served. Like the Three Tuns in Hay used to be before it was done up, back when it was run by someone universally revered called Lucy.

Not actually that long ago, apparently, but a rough old parlour pub wouldn’t be economically viable now, which was why this had become a wine bar, also serving coffee and food. But Gwenda said this was just one small retro development. In other areas, Hay was in danger of going
badly
wrong.

‘I hear there was a woman with plans to open a nail bar there,’ she said now.

‘Where?’

Gareth Nunne looked up from his cloudy beer.

‘In the Back Fold shop,’ Gwenda said. ‘Oliver’s shop – Robin’s shop. Seriously, a flaming
nail bar
.’

‘What, like carpentry supplies?’

‘You’re an old fool, Gary,’ Gwenda said fondly.

Just a trace of a London accent there. Gareth Nunne smiled into his beer, his port wine stain skin blemish laid around one eye and down into his left cheek.

‘And what,’ he said, ‘did Mr James Oliver say to that, Gwennie?’

‘Well, I’ve heard several versions, but some might’ve been made up, so I won’t pass them on. Yet.’

Nunne turned bleary eyes on Robin.

‘He know what kind of books you’re gonner be selling?’

‘Leave the boy alone,’ Gwenda said. ‘He doesn’t need to worry about that.’

‘No, come on, what did you tell him, Mr Thorogood?’

‘Uh…’ Robin shrugged. ‘I just said books. General books.’

‘So you didn’t mention
The Teen Witch Style-guide
—’

Robin threw up his hands.

‘Aw, you just
had
to pick on that one. It’s a book I did some creepy Goth drawings for, is all. They dumped a dozen copies on me.’

‘Get off his back,’ Gwenda said. ‘A bookshop’s a bookshop. Teen witches are fine by me. Not that you find them much any more.’

‘Period value?’ Robin said.

‘There, see, he’s learning.’ Gwenda smiled at him. ‘So you’ve been an illustrator, then, Robin?’

‘Gwenda, sweetheart.’ A murmur. ‘This is the man who gave form to Lord Madoc.’

It was Gore. Welsh rugby shirt, white jeans.

Gwenda looked blank.

‘The
Intergalactic Celt
?’ Gore said.

Robin gazed uncomfortably into his glass. Gwenda raised a forefinger.

‘Hold on, those the books you used to collect when you were a kid? The warrior chappie with big hair? Great pile of them down the bottom of your wardrobe?’

‘I know it wasn’t really aimed at kids,’ Gore said to Robin. ‘But I was a precocious reader. Man, I wanted to
be
that guy. What happened to him?’

‘He finished,’ Robin said tightly. ‘The writer adopted a new pseudonym and started something else that didn’t need an illustrator.’ Felt his fingers forming fists. ‘The way no one seems to need one any more.’

‘That a fact,’ Gore said.

He had his hands curled around Gwenda’s shoulder, like doing a massage. Jeez… they were an item? Gwenda and Gore, who had to be fifteen years younger?

‘Cover designs get done in-house with Photoshop and other… similar money-saving devices,’ Robin said. ‘
Talent-
saving devices. The days when commissioned artwork was part of the creative process, when books were illustrated by legends like Mervyn Peake, that’s history. The days when you’d do a full-size painting for a book or an album sleeve, and the original was worth good money… that’s
over
.’

Robin unclenched his fists. An uneasy silence had broken out.

He swallowed some wine. His face felt hot. Mistake. Hadn’t intended for this to surface. Not so soon anyway, because it was one explanation of why he’d felt driven to open a bookstore. And what kind of bookstore it had to be. And he’d been sitting on this, thinking it was gonna make him look stupid.

‘I take it you don’t like publishers very much, then, Robin?’ Gwenda said gently.

‘It’s… one reason why we’re here. We came over one day, and I’d just been kicked off of what I’d figured for a long-runner, replaced by some kid with an Apple Mac, and I’m feeling pissed because I love books, and… and I’m thinking second-hand, that doesn’t do publishers any favours.’

His face felt redder than Gareth Nunne’s birthmark. Looked up to find Nunne giving him a level stare that was not unfriendly.

‘No need to apologize about that, man. Not yere. You’re right. We’re no good for publishers, and they know it. They love the Hay
festival
to bits – good publicity for new merchandise. But they don’t like the town so much. Or us. Specially us. They say they do, but they bloody don’t.’

Jeeter Kapoor was pulling out a stool, sitting down at the table opposite Robin, refilling Robin’s glass.

‘Be better for publishers if all our stock got bleedin’ pulped.
Better if we all got closed down, replaced by one big book-chain branch that only sells new and shiny.’

Robin looked up at the globes of light, a line of them like planets. Felt that everybody in here was tuned in now, waiting for him to say something. Somebody started to clap, and it got taken up. Somebody patted him on the back.

‘Finish the bottle, Robin,’ Gwenda said. ‘On the house.’ She looked around, meeting eyes. ‘Well, he is, isn’t he?’

‘What?’

‘Starting to sound like one of us.’

Robin glanced from face to face, unsure whether they were winding him up. He heard a throaty laugh, turned and met the eyes of Connie Wilby, a comfortably heavy, elderly woman with a shop in Lion Street. She lit a cigar, the smoke drifting into the inglenook beside her.

‘We started asking customers if anything had gone wrong with their e-book readers. Or if they’d been accidentally broken or dropped in the bath. And could they pass them onto us, in exchange for free real books. And we put them all together and we all brought hammers one market day and battered the guts out of them. An e-book massacre. Great fun. Great therapy. Luddites? We’re not Luddites, Mr Thorogood, we’re bloody aesthetes. Four bookshops shut down last year, replaced by shoe shops and frock shops and number five – but for you – would be a bloody nail bar.’

Gareth Nunne sank some beer.

‘You smell it in the air sometimes, boy.’

He burped. Robin looked at him. All he could smell was the rich smoke in the air around Connie Wilby. The smell of old pubs. She pulled from her pulpy lips the slender cigar she was puffing in blatant contravention of the law of the land, and gave Robin this lavish smoke-wreathed smile.

‘Never been banned in the Kingdom of Hay, Mr Thorogood.’

‘The beginnings of decay,’ Gareth Nunne said,

‘Huh?’

‘What you can smell.’

‘We gotta stop it,’ Robin said. ‘We gotta
fight
!’

His fist in the air like freaking Che Guevara. He was halfway smashed. His head sang, the yellow lamps were fused into a sweating necklace of light and somebody was talking about a drowned old man, a floater in a waterfall.

‘
And that was Peter Rector? Thought he was dead and gone years back. Peter Rector out at Cusop? All these years?
’

‘
Gone now. Peter bloody Rector
.’

Robin saw Gwyn Arthur Jones coming in, dipping his head under the hanging lantern, silently taking a seat at Connie Wilby’s table. Taking out a pipe and tobacco, saying nothing.

‘You got any Lord Madoc novels in your shop, Robin?’ Gore Turrell said, an arm around Gwenda’s waist.

‘Dozen, maybe.’

‘Consider them sold.’

‘Naw… no way. You fixed our sign.’

‘It was an honour,’ Gore said.

Robin felt his eyes fill up, struggled to his feet.

‘Think I could use some air.’