The Devil's Moon (12 page)

The others dribbled in over the next hour and settled in front of their computers and phones with mugs of lousy office coffee.

Gilchrist telephoned David Rutherford, the vicar at St Michael's.

‘I was checking nothing else had happened to your church,' she said. ‘That heart was animal, not human, by the way.'

‘I'm relieved to hear it,' he said. ‘I believe your policemen are driving by quite regularly during the night and we ensure we keep our eyes peeled during the day. It's timely that you should call, however, as I was toying with the idea of calling the station myself.'

‘Why?'

‘First, though, I owe you an apology. In all the kerfuffle the other day I omitted to ask how I might help you. You never told me why you came to my church.'

Gilchrist gave a quick look round the incident room. ‘Something and nothing,' she said. ‘But why were you going to call us?'

She guessed Rutherford took the hint because he moved on. ‘My fellow vicar has gone missing. We share our mission at the church.'

‘How long missing?'

‘Hard to say. He took a leave of absence three weeks ago but was due back three days ago. He has not been in contact and does not return our calls. I have visited his flat but if he is there he does not answer the door. His upstairs neighbour can't even remember the last time he saw him.'

‘Three days isn't very long, Vicar.'

‘Call me David, please. You mean old ladies have been stuck in lavatories longer?'

She smiled. ‘Something like that.'

‘You're right but Andrew has been very troubled lately. The Reverend Andrew Callaghan, I should say. He's young and quite narrow in his views. He's had a bit of a bee in his bonnet about the rise in interest in the supernatural and what he regards as Devil worship. So you can see how I'm wondering if his disappearance might somehow link to what happened in our church.'

‘You said leave of absence, not holiday. What was that for?'

‘He was quite worked up. He needed a break. There had been threats against him. He believed he was in a battle with the forces of evil.'

‘And do you believe the same?'

‘Whilst not being a proponent of Satanism I am perhaps more ecumenical in my approach.'

‘Have you been in touch with his family?'

‘He has no family that I'm aware of. He was an orphan.'

‘Friends?'

‘He was what is often called a loner, although he was a full member of our church community.'

‘Do you know where he took his leave of absence?'

‘He was unsure of his destination.'

Gilchrist looked at her watch. ‘Give me his address and I'll have someone call round.'

‘And if he isn't there?'

‘We'll have to see,' she said. ‘We try to avoid breaking into citizens' houses without due cause.'

There was a silence on the other end of the phone and she wondered if he was thinking Milldean Massacre, the occasion when the police had not only broken into the wrong house but had also shot everybody inside it.

‘And you don't think there is due cause,' Rutherford finally said.

‘I'm not sure,' Gilchrist answered honestly.

Bob Watts looked again at the inscription in Colin Pearson's book that called his father
mon semblable, mon frère
.
Frère
he knew was brother. He looked up
semblable
in an online French dictionary. It meant ‘likeness', possibly ‘double'. He didn't have a hard copy of Eliot's
The Waste Land
but he found the text online. Watts had done it in the sixth form and vaguely remembered the poem was based on two books: one about the search for the Holy Grail and the other a multi-volume Victorian tome about ancient fertility rituals and religions
.

The French phrase concluded the poem's first section
.
The lines before ‘my double, my brother' were about someone called Stetson planting a corpse
in his garden and the poet asking whether it would bloom that year. Rebirth then, but Watts couldn't see what the French phrase had to do with that.

He read on. He came to another French phrase –
Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole
. An online translation was: ‘And O those children's voices, singing in the cupola'. He knew a ‘cupola' was a dome, usually of a church. The line was from Symbolist Paul Verlaine's poem
Parsifal.
It occurred when the knight, Parsifal, found the Grail and became its guardian.

Almost at the end of Eliot's poem Watts found another French quote:
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie.
The Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower. Wasn't there a ruined tower in the Tarot pack? The line was from a poem by a near-symbolist French poet, Gerard de Nerval.

Watts read to the end of
The Waste Land
and started on Eliot's lengthy notes. He remembered how pretentious he had found these as a teenager. Eliot used quotes in their original languages but without any translations. If you weren't conversant with Italian, French or German you were lost. Watts distinctly remembered wondering if the Notes were Eliot's po-faced joke as they read like parodies – and probably had been much parodied since.

He remembered his mates double-checking the Latin name for a hermit-thrush Eliot quoted in one daft line reference because the Latin name –
Turdus
something – was just too funny to be true for any schoolboy. But it was true.

Now he found that Eliot took ‘my double, my brother' from Charles Baudelaire, perhaps the first Symbolist poet. The line was from a poem,
To the Reader
, which acted as the foreword to Baudelaire's controversial 1857 collection: six poems from the collection had been banned in France until 1949.

According to Baudelaire, Satan controlled people's every move.

Baudelaire identified boredom as the worst misery in the world and said that extreme acts he called ‘pleasant designs' – ‘rape and poison, dagger and burning' – might take a reader who was bold enough out of ‘the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies'. Watts wasn't sure if Baudelaire was being serious or tongue in cheek to make a point.

‘
Mon semblable, mon frère
' appeared in the final two lines. The bored man was having a drugged dream of going to the gallows for those crimes mentioned earlier and Baudelaire was suggesting he was only thinking what the reader – ‘my double, my brother' – was thinking.

On Wikipedia someone had called Baudelaire's attempt to implicate the reader in his own dark imaginings a malediction. Watts had to look the word up. It was a curse, a magical word or phrase uttered with the intention of bringing about evil or destruction.

Watts Googled Baudelaire. He had translated Gothic horror writer Edgar Allan Poe into French. That figured. Fellow drug addict. He had influenced a generation of poets including Arthur Rimbaud, whose first collection of poetry was called
Season in Hell.

Watts read the translation of the whole poem again. He thought it infantile, written by someone out to shock. He couldn't imagine his father, who had seen death more than once in wartime, would value this kind of poser.

Baudelaire had given the collection the title
Les Fleurs du Mal
. The Flowers of Evil.

‘Anything yet on the flower painting?' Gilchrist asked Sylvia Wade.

Wade grinned. ‘Just this second, ma'am. We've located the part of the CCTV footage from the museum showing the theft.'

‘And?'

‘The footage isn't too clear – you can't see features,' Wade said.

Gilchrist peered at the screen. ‘Isn't there something we can do with pixels?'

‘Not if the picture isn't clear in the first place,' Wade said.

They were looking at a person swathed in waterproofs hurl a brick through the glass case. This person made no attempt to take anything from inside the case. Another camera further up the gallery caught another swaddled figure, taller, take the painting off the wall and walk calmly round the corner. Just before the CCTV lost them, the two of them hoiked the picture out through the emergency exit.

‘Show it again,' Gilchrist said to Wade. Then, to no one in particular, ‘Can we even determine the gender of these two?'

‘I can't,' Wade said.

‘Bloody great,' Donaldson said, scowling. ‘So what can we analyse?'

Wade clenched her jaw. ‘We have pictures of two people, gender indeterminate, faces obscured by rain hoods, stepping close, stepping away. Unhurried.'

‘Height?'

‘The person who throws the brick appears to be medium height, gender non-specific. The other is taller. That's about it.'

‘Aside from the gait,' Heap said.

‘Gate?' Donaldson said. ‘Is this the one there's no point closing because the horse has already bolted?'

Heap flushed again. ‘The way the taller one walked, sir.'

‘Gait,' Donaldson said.

‘Tell me,' Gilchrist said.

‘I believe this person is a woman.'

Donaldson snorted. Gilchrist recognized that Heap's hesitant delivery and his flushed face did not necessarily inspire confidence.

‘Why would you think so?' she said, managing to combine an encouraging look at Heap with a fierce stare at Donaldson. She hoped. ‘About the woman, I mean.'

‘I'm hesitant to be s-sexist,' Heap said, flushing more deeply. ‘But it's the way that person walks. It's a woman's ambulation.'

Donaldson gave him a look.

‘I've seen you walk that way, Belly,' somebody muttered, loud enough to be heard.

Gilchrist stared into the room. Sylvia Wade was the only other woman. Gilchrist was out of her depth dealing with a bunch of men like this. Nevertheless she gave each person in turn the hard stare. Perhaps her height helped or they were cutting her slack because she was newly promoted. Whatever the reason, they calmed down.

‘Or rather,' Heap persevered, ‘it's the way a woman walks when trying to walk like a man.'

Gilchrist was trying to be patient. ‘In what way?'

How red can a person go? Bellamy Heap looked round the room, his ears pulsating. Gilchrist wanted to give him a hug.

‘It's a hip swivel thing, ma'am. Men and women have a different way of walking because of the hip structure. Gay men sometimes imitate women but there's a natural difference. I think this is a woman trying to walk like a man.'

Gilchrist knew what Heap meant. In Brighton that thrust of the hip, that deliberate parody of a man's walk was common among lesbians who wanted to play tough but, for better or worse, weren't the real thing. A bit like Donaldson with his Jack-the-Lad shoulder roll. All for show.

Gilchrist stood. She looked from one to the other of them. ‘Thanks Bellamy and Sylvia. So: what were these people up to? Let's tentatively assume, based on her
gait
,
that one of them is a woman. Why did she steal the picture?'

‘We'll find out when we find her,' Donaldson said.

Gilchrist ignored these words of wisdom. ‘Sylvia, you've got even more boring hours ahead of you because I want these people tracked on CCTV from the moment they stepped on to Church Street from the Dome café to wherever home is.'

Sylvia didn't even nod her perfectly coiffed head.

Bob Watts pulled into the narrow car park at the side of the road opposite Saddlescombe Farm just as another car pulled out. He'd driven his father's from London, with the roof up since he'd come through yet another thunderstorm.

For the moment the rain had stopped. He looked across the road at a ram with enormous curled horns rubbing itself against a wooden fence. Beyond it was a wide dewpond stacked with rushes.

To his immediate right there was a steep track leading, he assumed, to the Devil's Dyke. Watts crossed the road. There was a sign for Saddlescombe Organics on the wall. He started walking up a wide, dirt pathway, the overgrown dewpond on his right.

Saddlescombe Farm was more of a hamlet. He could see on a ridge above him a row of eight or nine farm cottages. There was a big house in front of the dewpond at the edge of the farm property and beyond he could see a range of outbuildings. The farmhouse itself was in the middle of the outbuildings.

The National Trust owned the farm and he knew the main farmhouse was tenanted. As far as Watts understood it from the Trust's website, it rented out a working farm here which visitors could access only a couple of times a year although an ancient donkey wheel and a café could be visited at any time.

He wasn't exactly sure where Colin Pearson's home was. He walked slowly up the dirt road between two large barns. The yard for the one on the left had been converted into the café. The barn on the right had information placards from the National Trust about the farm's history.

An old man in a bright yellow sou'wester and hat was sitting at a table outside the café. Watts nodded at him.

‘You here for the organic farm or to visit the Witchfinder General?' the man said.

Watts smiled. ‘You live here?' he said.

The old man nodded. ‘Man and boy,' he said. ‘Two houses along from the Witchfinder. You here to talk about the goats?'

‘Goats?' Watts said. ‘No. Yours?'

The old man shook his head. He indicated a sign pointing towards Newtimber Hill.

‘I saw them fall off the hill yesterday. Arse over tit. Up by the giant.'

‘Really?'

‘Aye – six of them. Probably broke their bloody necks. All had to be put down, I wouldn't be surprised.'

‘Aren't goats supposed to be sure-footed?'

The man laughed, scratching under his hat. ‘Drunk as buggery they were.'

Watts knew there was a pub on the top of the dyke. He pointed in that direction.

‘Regulars?'

The man laughed again. ‘They looked possessed to me. Up on their hind legs prancing about like they wanted to be human. I was on the opposite ridge. I watched them get to the edge and just drop off.'