Sympathy for the Devil (29 page)

The cliffs fell sheer to the churning breakers beneath them, this darkness broken only by the specks of foaming blowholes and a line of needle-shaped rocks rising to the north. The only link to the mainland appeared to be a lane running along a slender spit, a natural bridge between the opposing bluffs. It was visible as a thin black line rising towards a shelf cut into the cliffs that loomed out of the fog. Above on the thermals black-backed gulls and chough rode and through the screeching of the wind Catrin could hear the low, whining call of ravens.

Returning to the car, they drove slowly across the narrow spit, then down towards the headland across a plain of frozen winter bracken. The place seemed more extensive than it had appeared from the mainland. The road narrowed and wound through woods of ancient oaks, the way wide enough for just a single vehicle. Among the trees the only sign of habitation was a pair of black wrought-iron gates behind which glimpses of gables appeared among the branches.

From the gates the lane led through the woods until it came out at a cluster of cottages around a small, ruined chapel. There were no cars parked along the roadside. The cottages were empty, rotting shells, without windows and roofs. All the way down into the village the only sounds had been the cawing of the birds, and the crash of the breakers far below. But now there was a sudden stillness broken by the distant note of a foghorn from further down the shore.

Nothing they had yet seen committed the area either to the twentieth or the twenty-first century. They drove on past a further warren of cottages, built close to the edge of the cliff. Catrin slowed beside a view through the fog to the same line of needle-shaped rocks they had seen from the mainland.

‘A lot of people out here used to survive off smuggling and wrecking,’ she said.

‘And now?’

‘Off not much, by the looks of things.’

Beyond the village, they saw ahead the lights of a larger building, and two smaller cabins at an unmarked junction. These looked as if they had once been craft shops, but now were closed, either for the winter or permanently. The shutters were partly down, the windows boarded-up. Through one they could just make out some dust-covered shelves of Celtic crosses and pentangles alongside pendants and earrings of the same elaborate designs.

They carried on to the larger building, where the windows on the lower floor were dimly lit, a trail of grey smoke rising from the chimney. In front was a gravel clearing, an old-fashioned petrol pump set up beside a hut. Two rusting camper vans were parked on a square of poured concrete, a ragged fence separating it from the drop to the rocks below.

‘This must be the pub with the phone,’ Catrin said and pulled in.

The high grass at the front obscured the path to the entrance. Under a weathered lintel the door was ajar, revealing a pub interior. Several men were standing at the bar, dressed in boots and fishermen’s sweaters, the type of foul-weather gear that marked them out as locals.

It was dark inside. A bar counter stretched the length of the room. Behind it on the wall were photographs of different generations of a local lifeboat crew as its only decoration. There was a facial similarity between most of the lifeboat men, grandfathers, fathers and sons going down the years. Occasionally more than two generations appearing in the same shot. The barman had much the same features, was dressed the same way as the crews, but Catrin could not see his face in the pictures.

She noticed they were already attracting glances from the men further down the bar. She saw the phone now, and why Rhys had chosen it. It was the old-fashioned sort, with a long cord, so he could have backed into the passage behind to make his calls unheard. She went over to it, memorised the number. Later she’d try to get call lists from the service provider, see if any interesting numbers came up. But she didn’t hold out much hope.

Rhys had probably not used it more than a few times. If he believed he was being tracked, in danger, she knew he wouldn’t have used any regular call points. One of the reasons he’d been such an effective undercover officer had been his unpredictability. Lay down patterns of behaviour, and you become predictable. Become predictable, you become vulnerable. It was probably one of the few rules Rhys had still lived by.

She approached two men at the bar and pulled up a stool. One man was short, with curly black hair. His companion was taller, his beard and sandy hair fading to grey. Putting her bag up on the bar, she took out the picture of Rhys from her wallet, another of Face cut out from a CD cover. She put them both on the bar.

‘Seen either of these two recently?’ she asked quietly.

The men looked over briefly and shook their heads. In the poor light she knew they could hardly see the photographs. But they made no effort to look more closely. She passed the pictures down to the men at the other end, who barely glanced at the shots and shook their heads.

‘Looking for someone?’ The voice was educated, probably English, definitely not local. She looked round. A young man in a long dark coat was standing behind her. She hadn’t noticed him as she’d gone over to the phone.

He had thick fair hair, the even features of a romantic lead, somewhere on the borderline between handsome and bland. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes narrowed. Unlike the regulars at the bar he looked like a man with a purpose.

The man asked her again if she was looking for someone. He was keeping his voice low, so the others couldn’t hear. His forehead, she noticed, was covered with a beading sweat. She nodded, showed him the two pictures. He passed quickly over the image of Rhys and looked more closely at the shot of Face.

‘Isn’t that that singer who jumped off the Severn Bridge?’

Huw was standing behind the man now, leaning an elbow on the bar.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Has someone else been looking for him?’

The man’s eyes were slightly glazed, feverish. His breath smelt stale.

‘If there had been I’m sure I’d have heard about it,’ he said. ‘This is a small place, word would have got around.’

Huw was running his eyes over the man’s well-cut coat.

‘You don’t exactly look like a local.’ The man glanced at the characters in waterproofs and heavy jerseys.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ he said drily.

‘What brings you down here then?’ Huw asked.

‘The clinic. I’m the new psychiatrist there.’

‘It’s a psychiatric unit?’

‘Just a rehab unit. Part private, part National Health funded.’

‘So you’d know if any celebrities like Face had stayed?’

‘I’d be the first to know,’ he said, smiling. ‘But we tend just to get routine referrals from the local NHS trusts.’

Huw indicated the men at the other end of the bar.

‘When my friend showed the photographs around, the others here weren’t exactly helpful.’

The man motioned Catrin and Huw away from the bar, the sheen of sweat over his face glistening in the half-light. He took out a silver cigarette case, tamping the tip of a cigarette briefly on the case before lighting it. His fingers were trembling slightly.

‘You have to understand,’ he said. ‘The clinic up in the woods is just about the only employer here. Many of the patients stay on after their treatment, living in the community. They’re given work at the clinic. They enjoy the peace and quiet and keep out of anything that smells like trouble.’

He signalled to the barman, who pulled a pint of Felinfoel and slid it along to him. A quick ripple of laughter passed between the men at the bar. Catrin put the photographs away in her bag. She waited for the young doctor to come back with his drink, then pushed the ashtray over to his side of the table.

‘We heard there was some hippie cult here in the Seventies. They were led by a character who looked a bit like Charlie Manson. Anyone like that still around?’

The man smiled thinly, shook his head, tapped a worm of ash into the ashtray.

‘No one like that.’

‘Anyone still here from those times?

‘Not that I know of. But Old Tudor might know.’

‘Old Tudor?’

‘He works part-time as a nurse at the clinic. He’s got one of those New Age shops on the road to the woods. It used to attract the hippie types in the summers. He came back here a couple of years ago. It’s on my way to the clinic, I’ll take you,’ he said.

Outside the wind stung their faces. The man pulled a scarf over his face, eyes narrowed against the frozen grit being blown across the drive. He held out one gloved hand to Huw, then to Catrin, his back turned to the wind.

‘Name’s Doctor Smith by the way, Jonty Smith.’ He laughed briefly, nervously, began to cough. He got into a large pickup, and they followed him past the gift shop with its dusty displays, past the cottages and ruined church. He took a fork left, out along a straight road under an arching tunnel of birches and black alders.

Where the trees thinned there were brief views over the entire island. The place was much larger than it had looked from the shore. Through the fog loomed a long escarpment, an inland cliff face, that seemed almost to cut the island in half on the diagonal, running from south-west to north-east. They were driving along the lower half of the island and there was no obvious way to climb to the higher ground. There might be goat tracks, but it looked inaccessible by car.

Catrin took a pair of binoculars from the glovebox. There was no evidence of any paths up the sheer face. Above she could see only more dense forest and some further rising of the ground hidden by the steep, mist-shrouded cliffs.

About two miles along they came to a lay-by. On either side were thickets of hawthorn and piles of moss-covered logs. Set back from the clearing, a few yards down a frozen track, stood a prefabricated shed. It had been painted black, the twelve signs of the zodiac added in silver and glinting at them through the gloom.

Catrin pulled the car up a few feet short of the shop, which looked deserted. No lights were visible, the door was closed and there was no sign to indicate whether the place was open for business.

‘It looks closed,’ she said.

Smith coughed again, opening his door.

‘To the general public maybe, but Tudor’ll be here. He kips on a folding bed in the stockroom summer and winter. He’ll open up for me.’

The glass in the door was covered with faded papers advertising tarot card, palm and crystal readings. Huw pushed on the door. It was locked, but the movement was enough to cause wind chimes to jangle inside. Catrin peered through the gaps between the posters, saw several candles in tall holders giving out a weak, flickering light.

Smith banged his fist against the door. ‘Open up, Tudor! It’s the fraud squad!’

The man who opened the door to them was perhaps more than six and a half feet tall. He had a mane of long white hair, an extravagant beard, and was wearing the local uniform of waterproofs under a long black cloak. They trooped in, Tudor holding the door open, Huw ushering Catrin in ahead of him into a dark room filled with the scent of the candles.

Smith gave another of his dismissive snorts.

‘Dear, dear. Forgot to pay our electricity bill again?’

Tudor led them back towards some seats by the till.

‘What’s all this about the fraud squad?’ His deep voice betrayed no obvious anxiety.

Smith gestured at the arrays of tarot cards, crystals, bottles of homeopathic oils, dream-catchers, amulets, then at the shelves filled with black magic guides and histories of Celtic mysticism.

‘Everything in this shop is a load of old bollocks, Tudor. We both know it. You’re a bloody fraud, man.’

He barked another laugh, coughed, took out his cigarette case, ignoring the ‘no smoking’ sign that hung behind the till, and busied himself with lighting up. Catrin reached out to shake Tudor’s hand, smiling apologetically.

‘Get many visitors through in the summer?’ she asked.

The old man pulled out the chairs around the low table so they could sit down. ‘A few twitchers, ramblers from Cadw.’ He spoke in a slow, wheezing drawl.

She glanced round the shop, there was a track through the dust from the counter to the table and chairs. Nothing else had been touched for some time. Tudor said nothing more, looking from Huw to the doctor as if checking everyone was comfortable in their seats, then slowly he turned to Catrin again.

‘You remember how it was here in the early Seventies?’ she asked, holding the old man’s gaze. The man was looking to the back of the shed, a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Do you remember a hippie group, a commune that lived in a big house at that time?’

The old man sat down beside the counter. Behind it were pictures of a young teenage girl, tanned with brown cloudy eyes, pretty, his daughter perhaps. The pictures were ringed with fairy-lights and more flickering candles. Draped over the frames was a garland of feathers, shells and small bones, a fetish, like one of the amulets on the shelves, but more elaborate. The girl reminded Catrin a little of the fan she’d seen in a picture in Pryce’s room, but as she looked closer she saw that was all it was: a resemblance, an echo, no more than that. The combination of the girl’s pale skin and thick coal-black hair was common enough in the area.

‘Your daughter?’ she asked. ‘She’s very pretty.’ The old man made a noise that sounded pained. From the counter he had picked up a briar pipe. He had a slight tremor in both his hands.

‘You asked if I remembered a group in a big house,’ he said at last. ‘There were a lot of hippie groups coming through at the time.’

‘But this one was different, they had money. They didn’t mix much. It was rumoured their leader had relations with all the women in his group.’

Tudor looked down at the floor, gave what seemed a wry smile. ‘Their children dressed alike, the leader was the one with long hair?’ he asked.

Huw nodded. The man pushed his hands under his weatherproofs. ‘Like you said, they kept themselves to themselves,’ he said.