Sympathy for the Devil (38 page)

She went up the stairs, to the room, locked the door. She waited, listened. But there were no sounds outside.

She took out the card he’d given her and held it under the light. F
RANSIS
S
ERAFIM
. F
RANCIS
S
ERAFIM
L
TD
. Then a Cardiff address. She booted up her Mac, ran his name and address on the PNC. Nothing came up, he had no record at all. She went into the Companies House site next. It was a new company, just formed, hadn’t even filed its first accounts yet. He was listed as a sole trader, no associates.

She ran a few more searches: there were a couple of listings in Cardiff and London gyms, a surf club membership, an earlier membership to a house builders’ association. It all seemed banal enough.

Catrin got up, went through to Huw’s room. He wasn’t back yet. Under a bottle of whisky he’d left on the table was a note, saying he’d gone into Fishguard to use a teleconferencing facility. She called his mobile from the landline.

‘You’ve got your guards with you?’ she asked.

‘They picked me up.’

‘Don’t bring them. It will attract too much attention. Come back alone.’

She poured some of the whisky, drank it neat. She still felt tense, rolled a cigarette. She reached into Huw’s dope box, picked out one of the baggies and crumbled some in.

It was strong. A couple of drags and she felt light-headed, slightly giddy. She picked up the surfer’s card again, noticed the old-fashioned writing on the back. She held it under the light again. There was a single name.
The Wing
. Then the web address of a popular BDSM site, not the most fashionable but one of the largest.

She clicked onto the site. It was the usual dom’s profile. She’d seen dozens like it over the years when she’d worked that scene undercover. A couple of shots with bare torso and leather mask. Then some shots of him in civilian life, standing with his surfboard, to show his face, to show he was just a normal guy.

She took a closer look at his interests: conventional enough in the context – spanking, whips, bondage, role play. Nothing that heavy, no mention of edge play or any of the more extreme areas. Many doms would show off their dungeons if they had them, or their arrays of toys and whips, but despite his obvious experience there were no pictures of that sort. She noted the site worked like most of the other BDSM sites, on a rating system. The contacts would score each other out of five. This way members could check if another member was trustworthy, worth contacting. It wasn’t foolproof but it seemed to work.

He was an active member, he’d had over a dozen encounters in the last three months; all had given him the full five stars. This was unusual, subs could be notoriously choosy. Normally it would take several encounters before a sub built up the requisite trust with her dom or found a match for her needs.

Intuitive, she thought, good at reading people. That usually comes with having started out as a sub. Usually there would be some negative feedback along the line, but Catrin could see none at all.

She did next what prospective subs would do. She checked the profiles of his various encounters to see what kind of members had attracted him. The photographs were all characteristically coy, but there was enough detail to see they were good-looking girls and women between late teens and early thirties. There were different types, different hair colours. There didn’t seem to be any clear common denominator, except that where they were visible all seemed to have brown eyes. Deep brown eyes, just like hers. Oh fuck, she thought, just my luck.

She looked carefully from one profile to the next. There were the typical poetic self-descriptions, talk of empty souls and voids and a returning, irresistible need to submit their will utterly to another, of the paradox of freedom through enslavement. Like most subs they were quite articulate. She clicked from one text to another, then back again. Something wasn’t quite right. She looked carefully at the syntax, the punctuation. Then it struck her. All the profiles had been written by a single person.

It felt like a set-up, a trap. He could be that thing subs fear most, a rogue dom. Once someone was shackled, they were helpless. If the trust wasn’t there, anything could happen.

7

Catrin woke late, after eight. It was still dark outside. She could see Huw in silhouette at the window. On the table lay rows of printouts. The laptop was open over on the dressing table, its screen glowing with the blue and white of the Glangwili Hospital portal.

Huw was staring out at the weather. Catrin could see the tendrils of mist moving past the window, the deep grey sky that probably wouldn’t lift all day. Huw pointed at something outside.

‘Whose car’s that?’

Sliding down the bed, she peered over his shoulder. The boxy shape of Thomas’s Audi was just visible through the mist. Beside it she could see the distant outline of a man sitting smoking on the rocks. It didn’t look like Thomas; someone older, his head turned away, staring out to sea. She thought it might be Tudor from the woods, but couldn’t be sure. For a moment the man seemed to raise an arm, as if acknowledging her gaze.

‘That’s DS Thomas’s. He must have stayed overnight,’ she said.

‘A fishing expedition relating to the fires?’

Catrin felt Huw pulling her into his warmth. She knew immediately she didn’t want to talk to him about what had happened with Fransis. She didn’t want him to know about that side of her life, her undercover selves; however she tried to explain it, she knew it would come out all wrong.

‘How much did you give Thomas?’ he asked.

‘I told him about the Stephens file, that Stephens was a Face fan, maybe linked to some cult out here, maybe one of my abductors. That what looked like Stephens’s body had washed up on the Sands only a month ago.’

‘And?’

‘He thought the case had similarities to a suspected serial OD case Rhys had been working back in the Nineties.’

She exhaled slowly, feeling calmer than she’d expected. Huw had stopped kissing her, but his lips were close to her neck, his breath warm on her. ‘And these similarities were?’

‘The case had centred on three bodies of previously healthy young men that turned up on the coast here, all with acute liver damage.’

‘Did he say if Rhys had fingered any suspects?’

‘No, he said traces of synthesised tryptamines on the bodies led to that state-of-the-art drugs lab in Heath Park, and after that the trail went cold. A sting was launched, a mirror lab set up to draw in the buyers, get a fix on the distribution chain. But as expenditure spiralled without any results the whole op got a bad smell, got closed down.’

Huw was still staring out at the lone figure out in the mist. ‘I was part of the team that devised that sting,’ he said without looking at her.

‘Thomas told me.’

‘That lab was a dead end. We never found out who was behind it.’

Huw put his arm around her waist as he spoke. Gently she pulled herself away. She’d had an idea, something vague, a sensation as much as an idea, but now she felt it slowly gathering momentum inside her, like a desire, a hope. ‘The drugs from that lab had no known commercial value, right. They’re deep trance drugs, Thomas said, the type used in some forms of witchcraft and by ancient shamans to enter the spirit world.’

Huw seemed dubious, perhaps not following her yet. She thought back to what Thomas had said, that all the time Rhys had been working a single case. She ran the chain of events once more in her mind. The first three bodies with liver damage had led Rhys to the lab in Heath Park. Then the trail had led Rhys back to the island, and he’d found her drugged and senseless in the woods. In Rhys’s mind whoever had abducted her was behind the lab, behind the nineteen disappearances, the nineteen dead. He was the man with the long hair, the man in the films.

This same man behind everything, all right, but who was he? She thought back to how the abduction dates coincided with Jones’s. Two prolific serial abductors wouldn’t have been operating independently, not within the same small area and time frame. So everything pointed to that figure being Jones, and Rhys had evidently been of the same view. Rhys arresting Jones no longer seemed a chance event. Rhys had arrested Jones because he’d already been looking for him.

But if Jones was the man, then how to explain why bodies were still turning up? This was what had drawn Rhys out again to the area, and had led to his death. Slowly Catrin drew a shape in the condensation on the pane, a stylised bird’s head, watched as the shape dissolved back into the moisture.

‘The type of drugs made in that lab, the trance drugs, Thomas said you’re transported into a parallel reality, one that seems as real as this one. This was why the shaman would believe, when he took those drugs, he would meet his spirits and gods.’

Huw was staring at the ghost of the shape on the pane.

‘Or his demons. Much of the imagery of our devil has been taken from what was witnessed during the trances of ancient shamans. You think the abductor has been using these drugs to conduct seances, necromancy. That’s what we’re seeing in those films?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Catrin put her hand over his, held it tightly. ‘Did you ever encounter drugs like those in any other busts during that period?’

Huw seemed hesitant. She watched him click into what looked like a secure private email account. There was some text encrypted there in PGP and another encryption system she’d never seen before.

‘This was some research I did, at the time we found the lab.’ He paused. ‘It didn’t make much sense to me then. Still doesn’t, really.’

Catrin looked at the text. Most of the first part was a series of chemical formulas. She recognised only some from her drugs training. The main formula was for a synthetic variation of something called dimethyltryptamine. DMT, a very powerful hallucinogen, one of the most powerful and dangerous ever discovered. Usually the hallucinations were short and intense, no more than a few minutes before the chemical was metabolised by the body. But what she was seeing on the screen shocked her. There were formulas for prolonging the experience, blocking metabolisation with harmaline and other inhibitors. This would enable the intense hallucinatory effects to continue for days, maybe weeks even.

‘Dimethyltryptamine,’ she said. ‘It’s known as the soul molecule. It’s plant-derived, but also intrinsic to the human brain. It’s found in the pineal gland, that’s where up to the time of Descartes philosophers located the human soul. It’s the chemical associated with near-death experiences, crossing over to the realm of the dead.’

Huw nodded. ‘Also with witchcraft,’ he said, ‘and ancient Celtic shamans would use fungi and other plants that contained it to travel into the underworld. Like the plants in those sheds. If the figure we see in those films is the abductor, then what the hell was going on there?’

‘I don’t know.’ She put her hand over his fingers, felt how cold they were. Gradually letting go she bent over the keyboard. She cross-searched the names of the drugs with the words ‘witch’ and ‘shaman’ and confirmed what Huw had said. She looked up to where she had drawn the bird’s head; only the faintest outline was left of it now. She keyed in the word ‘raven’ and a long list of links to various anthropological studies came up. It seemed the raven had symbolism for many ancient religions. She narrowed the search to Celtic significances. The raven she saw had been a symbol of hidden knowledge, of death and departed souls, and the costume worn by shamans making the journey into the underworld had often been that of a raven.

Catrin sensed something tugging at her memory. She went back to the account by the American academic of witchcraft on the island, and read it through again. The account claimed children in the area had become possessed by spirits, and had disappeared into a place the locals believed was a mouth to hell. Sightings of the older man, Penrhyn, had continued for many years afterwards, as had the disappearances.

The piece still felt sketchy and incomplete. She knew she couldn’t read too much into it and looked again at the small illustration of a man wearing long black robes and standing at the mouth of a cave. His arms were outstretched and at the edge of the cave stood several young people, their faces distorted, as were their limbs, within a circle of what appeared to be black arrowheads or feathers. She thought of what Tudor had said he’d glimpsed in the woods, a child playing in a cloak made of feathers. She touched Huw’s hand and noticed it was cold.

‘From the beginning of this case, I’ve had a sense that everything’s been happening for one purpose, for one specific but terrible purpose. And Rhys understood that purpose, it was a burden he carried within him, that ate away at him. He became a junkie to cope with the pain of carrying it. That was why Rhys was still working something related to that old case after all these years. Once it was inside him he could never let it go.’

Catrin felt for her roll-ups. ‘And at the end, when Rhys had no one else to turn to, when they were hunting him down, he was trying to reach me. He had to pass the knowledge of the case on to someone, and he chose me.’

‘So where does his source fit in?’

‘Rhys made sure his source knew who I was, knew I could be trusted. That’s the way Rhys kept his secret knowledge of the case alive.’

‘Yet the source never came to you. Rhys said the source would trust only you, so why has that source not revealed himself?’

‘I don’t know.’ She moved away from the middle of the room, sat down on the bed, laid the pouch of Drum on her naked thighs.

She heard the sound of water pouring from the bath taps. Then Huw came and sat at the table, his fingers moving over the outlines of the faces he’d printed out. In the flickering light from the Glangwili Hospital portal his eyes had that deep-set, hollow look of someone who had been staring at the screen for hours.