The Devil's Moon (13 page)

‘What's this giant? Another chalk man?'

‘Them hippies running the organic farm. Commune, they call themselves. Made it out of wicker. They stuck it up there to burn come Mayday then for some reason didn't.'

‘Do you think it frightened the goats?'

The old man leaned forward. ‘Bugger that. If you ask me Old Scratch did it.'

‘Who's he?'

The man laughed. ‘You know him,' he said.

Watts frowned, out of his depth. Again. ‘Give me his real name,' he said.

‘He has many names. Mr Grimm for one. I'm partial to the Goat of Mendes—'

‘Hang on. You're not talking about a person.'

‘That's a matter of opinion.'

‘You mean the Devil.'

The man gave him an odd look. ‘Who did you think I was talking about?'

‘You think those goats were possessed by the Devil?'

‘This is the Devil's Dyke. You have a better idea?'

Watts smiled. ‘Which one is Colin Pearson's house?'

The old man ignored the question. He took off his hat, revealing flattened-down lengths of white hair scraped across his pate.

‘You know the history of Devil's Dyke?' he said. ‘The Devil dug it as a trench to the sea to drown all the churches in these parts. But he was making such a racket he woke an old woman who lit a candle which woke up a rooster which began to crow, thinking it was dawn. The rooster crowing made the Devil think it was dawn too so he fled, leaving his trench unfinished.'

‘Why didn't he finish it the next night?'

The old man cackled. ‘Bloody good point,' he said. ‘Before he went he threw the last shovelful of earth over his shoulder and it landed in the sea and created the Isle of Wight.'

‘That so?' Watts said.

‘The Devil is buried at the bottom of the dyke with his wife.'

‘His wife?'

‘Absolutely. There are barrows there. If you run seven times around them – backwards, whilst holding your breath – the Devil pops up.'

‘The wife too?'

‘Not that I'm aware of.' The old man pointed up towards a little gathering of outbuildings. ‘The Witchfinder's house is up there.'

‘A
word,' Gilchrist mouthed to Heap. She crooked her finger and Heap followed her into the corridor. He looked wary.

‘Ma'am?'

‘Actually, two words,' she said. ‘Gait and ambulation.'

Heap frowned. ‘Ma'am?'

‘Bellamy, this bunch will continue to take the piss out of you as long as you talk like that.'

Heap confirmed her worry. He shrugged and said, ‘If they're ill-educated ignoramuses, that's not my lookout.'

Gilchrist laughed. ‘Do you actually know any small words?'

Heap nodded. ‘With respect, ma'am, I know two.' He gave her a surprisingly impish grin. ‘Fuck them.'

As Watts opened the garden gate of Colin Pearson's house a striking woman came round the side of the cottage. She was probably in her early sixties, with a trim figure, long, grey/blonde hair tied back and a slash of bright red lipstick on her full lips.

‘You must be Mrs Pearson,' Watts said. ‘I'm Bob.'

She was carrying a bunch of flowers with their bulbs dangling down. She transferred them to one hand and pulled the gardening glove from the other with her teeth. She had long, strong incisors.

‘I'm Avril, Mr Watts. Colin isn't expecting you but I am.'

‘Bob, please. But I thought we'd confirmed?'

‘No, no – you and I have. What I mean is that for something as mundane as a meeting or an appointment Colin has a memory like a sieve. I've come to accept that he lives in his own intellectual world and day-to-day matters pass him by.'

‘But I won't be interrupting . . .?'

‘You would be interrupting whenever you came and whatever arrangements had been made – for Colin the world is an interruption.'

Watts smiled. ‘Has he always been the same?'

‘The only interruptions he ever tolerated were when he wanted to fuck me.' She gave him an intent look. ‘And that hasn't changed.'

Watts nodded, avoiding her candid eyes. He gestured at the flowers. ‘You grow lilies.'

She frowned at the clumsy change of subject then looked at the flowers in her hand.

‘I grow all kinds of things. For the kitchen usually.' She pointed at the bulbs. ‘Very good substitute for potato. Good for thickening soups.'

‘This weather must have put a damper on your summer crop.'

‘I grow most of it in poly-tunnels and my greenhouse. But, yes, perhaps rice would have been a better proposition this year as much of my garden is like a paddy field.'

She half-turned towards the cottage. ‘Let me take you to Colin,' she said.

She led the way into a rickety-looking porch, navigating a narrow path between a deep freeze and a teetering pile of abandoned chairs. It led into a room that was equally jumbled. There were old-fashioned records and videos, CDs and DVDs piled floor to ceiling on every wall. In the centre of the room more chairs and three sofas and a big old TV were crammed together. A parrot eyed him from a perch in an ancient birdcage on a stand by the window. The cage door was open. Bird shit was piled on newspaper laid out on the carpet beneath the cage.

Watts followed Avril into the kitchen. The clutter was absolute. Piles of washed-up pots on the drying board. Crockery and cans and bottles and cutlery piled on the one narrow work surface. There were no cupboards so every available surface was being used for storage. On a table in the middle of the room, more flowers and bulbs and vegetables from her garden. Watts assumed they were vegetables: he didn't recognize any of the gnarled and twisted roots.

She looked back and seemed surprised he was following her. ‘I must get on. He's in the other room.'

Feeling dismissed, Watts walked back through the crowded room and poked his head into the next one. More of the same clutter and in the middle of it, lying legs apart and scratching his balls in a reclining armchair, was Colin Pearson, seventy-year-old intellectual.

He was swigging a large glass of red wine. The bottle was on a table beside his chair next to a remote for a giant TV that was on but with the sound off. He was listening to music from an ancient record player. Watts thought he recognized Miles Davis –
Miles Ahead
? Pearson probably couldn't hear it because he was wearing on his head, covering his ears, what at first sight looked like a giant cotton tea cosy with a tube coming out of the side. It was plugged into the mains and the contraption was making a racket like a vacuum cleaner.

Pearson looked across at the doorway and bellowed: ‘If you're from that fucking cock next door tell him it's not my wife's fault if his goats strayed into her vegetable patch. Frankly, if they eat stuff that doesn't belong to them without first checking out what it is, that's their fucking lookout.'

Sarah Gilchrist was looking up at a four-storey Georgian house. It was on a corner just off Seven Dials. She'd decided to visit vicar Andrew Callaghan's home herself as she felt the need to get out of the office.

There was an old-fashioned bell pull inside the tiled porch with a neatly typed note behind cellophane saying: ‘Not working but antique – Please Do Not Pull'. Instead she used the knocker in the shape of a lion's head on the old green door. She heard it echo down the corridor beyond but no sign of movement in the house. She rapped again. Still nothing. To her right, beyond a short railing, there was a narrow basement yard. On the railing was a hand-painted wooden sign saying Basement Flat with an arrow pointing down.

She went back out into the street and down a steep, worn set of steps. The door to the basement was underneath the steps into the house above. She rang the bell. Whilst waiting for an answer she peered in through the window but dark drapes blocked her view. No answer to the bell. There was a small nameplate beside the bell with ‘Andrew Callaghan' printed in neat script.

As she turned away from the door something dropped in front of her from the street above. Involuntarily, she reared back. The object hit the floor and exploded.

Watts sorted out with Pearson who he was. Pearson accepted his presence without question. He turned back to the TV screen. Watts recognized images from
The Wicker Man
flickering across it.

‘Turn that music down, will you?' Pearson said. ‘You'll have to put up with the hairdryer for another ten minutes.'

‘A hairdryer?' Watts said, indicating the tea cosy on Pearson's head.

‘Of course. Portable. Had it forty years and it's never needed repairing.' He lowered his voice as Watts lowered the volume on the music. ‘What – did you think I was some mad scientist trying to enhance his brain power or send telepathic messages? You wouldn't be the first fuck to think that about me. Or write it either.'

Watts grinned sheepishly. That's exactly what he'd been thinking, although Pearson also looked like some peculiar pasha lying there so indolently.

‘Want a glass of Beaujolais?' Pearson said. He waved at a table covered in piles of papers. ‘Should be a glass over there.'

There were three or four. Watts chose the least dirty, gave it a surreptitious wipe with a tissue from his pocket and took it over to Pearson.

‘Help yourself,' Pearson said, his eyes glued to the screen. ‘Great tits, that Ingrid Pitt.'

Watts glanced up at the screen to see the actress sitting naked in a bathtub when Edward Woodward as the policeman burst in on her.

‘She does indeed,' he said, taking his glass over to the least lopsided-looking armchair and sitting carefully down in it. ‘Funny you should be watching this . . .'

‘No, it's not,' Pearson broke in. ‘I know what you're going to say but the Wicker Man on the beach in Brighton
is
the reason I'm watching it. That and the one up the hill here. Always got to be sure you get your reasoning the right way round. That's the trouble with half those fucking plonks these days. Can't reason their way out of a paper bag.'

‘Which particular fucking plonks?'

‘Philosophers. So-called. Thinkers? I've shat 'em.'

Watts could think of nothing to say to that. ‘I'm here because you knew my father, Donald Watts.'

‘I knew him as Victor Tempest, yes.'

‘How did you know him?'

‘It must be twenty years since I last saw him. I remember your father had a great intellectual curiosity . . .'

‘He did,' Watts said. ‘What did you talk about?'

Pearson gave him a look. ‘. . . However, if I may be blunt, he lacked the intellect required to make anything of what he learned. But at least he was open-minded about things. He was interested in peak experiences.'

‘What are they?'

‘The crux of my endeavours. Maslow came up with the term. You know his work?'

‘His hierarchy of needs. That's about it.'

Pearson nodded. ‘This is something else. Maslow didn't believe his peak experiences could be recreated at will. I do. Those moments when you reach a completeness. Athletes operating in what is known as The Zone experience it. Sex addicts go in frustrated search of it through orgasm.'

‘That sounds like my father.'

Pearson gave him an odd look. ‘Is that so? I mostly recall he quoted Camus at me constantly.'

Me too when I was young, Watts thought. His father's favourite paraphrase of Camus – which Watts was surprised he hadn't used when his son had lost his job – was ‘freedom is what you do with the hand you've been dealt'.

‘I'm assuming he knew Camus,' Watts said now. ‘There are signed copies of his books, as there are of yours.'

‘He met Camus several times. But, I believe, conversation never went much beyond football. I'm too young to have met Albert, alas. Your father's fondness for Camus' philosophy came down to the fact that the goalkeeper was trying to provide something that worked for the common man in the modern world. I've always been trying to give wider significance to experiences that, in his view, would always be abnormal – never the norm for the common man. Well, of course, I don't give a fig for the common man. My interest is in the uncommon one.'

Avril walked into the room balancing trays of open smoked salmon sandwiches in each hand. She handed one to Pearson and the other to Watts. She returned a moment later with her own tray and sat down in the chair beside Pearson. The parrot was perched on her shoulder.

Gilchrist looked down at her trousers covered in shit from the exploding bag. She cursed, partly because she'd only just bought her trouser suit, partly because the mess was disgusting and partly because her disgust had slowed her responses. By the time she had got back up on to the street whoever had tossed it down at her had disappeared.

Holding down bile, she returned to the front door of the basement flat. She rang the bell again. No answer. She looked at the shit-smeared trousers of her new outfit. She'd be binning them.

She examined the locks: a Yale and a Chubb. She pushed against the top and then the bottom of the door. Bolted. She went back up on to the street and round the corner to the side of the house. There was a low wall and, about three feet below it, a garden. The garden stopped a few yards before the house and dropped away to a basement yard.

Gilchrist lowered herself into the garden and sank into mud. She squelched over to the fence that separated it from the yard and climbed over it, lowering herself into the yard. The drapes were closed on the rear windows and a blind was down over the glass of the back door. This door had only a Yale lock. Gilchrist rooted in her purse for her gym's plastic membership card. She slid it between door and its frame beside the lock then rammed her shoulder against the door. It popped open, momentarily unbalancing her.

Regaining her balance, she grinned. She'd always known about the plastic card trick but had never actually tried it before. She pushed the door fully open and stepped inside.