Trying to be a Priest
‘Mal tailed Preston day after day,’ Syd Spicer said. ‘Into Worcester, Gloucester and Cheltenham, parts of Birmingham. Finally, down towards Tregaron, near where the old acid factory was, back in the 1970s. The only deals Preston cuts in Wychehill at the moment are with people who come to stay in his holiday apartments, but I’m guessing that in the early days it was buzzing.’
Preston Devereaux slid his hand into a pocket of his overall. Syd moved closer to him. Devereaux brought out a packet of cigarettes, held it up. Syd nodded.
‘But Preston’s still got to be directing the business, else why would he be making the visits? Sometimes, he goes alone to Worcester or Cheltenham, sometimes it’s him and Louis. Mal had to lie a bit to Winnie, because occasionally they’d drop into clubs and massage parlours as well – sampling the pleasures of the cities they were poisoning. But mostly it was private houses, or the offices of an independent cattle-feed dealer, or a couple of family-owned abattoirs. The service industries.’
‘Victims of Blair’s slow demolition of England’s oldest industry,’ Devereaux said.
Merrily shifted on the baked earth, still resisting the urge to smoke.
‘How long since Mal France told you all this, Syd?’
‘Over a period. Up to last night, on his way back from the West Wales coast. Had to leave in a hurry to lose someone on a motorbike. Seems to be a string across the border counties and down through Mid-Wales. Couple of coastal landowners. Some of it, mainly smack, comes in that way, all courtesy of selected tight-lipped farmers. And no profession has tighter lips than farming. Inbred silence, inbred resentment. Watertight. Supplemented, in this case, by people who lost jobs after the hunting ban. A feudal thing, really. Old feudal instincts. Almost – God forbid – a crusade.’
Devereaux lit a cigarette. Syd moved away from the smoke.
‘Not quite sure how long it’s been going on, maybe two years, maybe four. It only starts to make serious sense when you look back to Preston’s formative years. His university years.’
‘Oxford?’ Merrily said. ‘Balliol?’
‘In the 1960s. Wasn’t that guy, the Welsh guy, Mr Nice…?’
‘Howard Marks?’
‘That’s him. World-class dope dealer. Living legend in his field. And, as it happens, a student at Balliol College in the 1960s. You knew him, Preston?’
‘Before my time.’
‘Not that much before, by my reckoning. Maybe you just had some of the same contacts – I’m guessing here, you understand, I’m just a simple cleric. But where Mr Marks stuck with dope – marijuana-based goods…’
‘Evangelical, with him,’ Merrily remembered.
‘Yeah, a real calling. So he’s always maintained. The fact that he also made a few fortunes before he was nicked and banged up in the States… Preston, it’s different. Different background altogether. And different attitude. Fuelled by this self-righteous, blind resentment. Powerful. It’s in his Norman blood. Blood of the Vikings.’
Devereaux smiled. Merrily saw Lol stand up and wander over to the oak tree.
‘Mal reckoned it probably wasn’t as difficult as you might think,’ Syd said. ‘Just a question of renewing old student contacts and making connections with new ones. Cultures have changed, of course. Would’ve taken patience at first, convincing the sources. But when they know you’re a safe pair of hands, and that you mean it – that’s the important thing. Showing them that just because you come from money, that doesn’t mean you’re soft.’
Merrily said, ‘Wicklow…?’
‘Would reverberate nicely. But the way it was done… stupid. Attention-grabbing. But, like I say, Louis’s immature. He thinks it’s hugely clever. The sacrificial stone.’
‘He sent a text about human sacrifice to Raji Khan. From Elgar’s Caractacus. Whether that was intended to point to Tim…’
‘Whatever, it came off. When you’re arrogant and cocksure and on a high, things often do come off. For a while. But it’s clever-clever and so immature. Preston knows that. Anybody in their right mind, if it was really necessary to get rid of Wicklow, they’d do it the way someone got rid of that guy in Pershore… forget his name…’
‘Chris Smith. Which the police think was Wicklow. Smith worked in an abattoir.’
‘Ah. One of your boys, Preston?’
Devereaux said nothing. Not once had he admitted to anything specific.
‘Farms, abattoirs, feed merchants. Little crack labs, some of them. The stuff moved in cattle transporters, feed trucks. The kind of country-road vehicles the police were never going to search in a million years. Shambolic but also very neat. I believe we might also be looking at secret compartments in the SUVs and people-carriers of the holidaymakers coming to stay in Preston’s luxury units. Bet you’d find some of those holidaymakers had only just been on holiday. Some to Spain, some to less-favoured resorts like… which is it these days, Rotterdam?’
‘Be more than happy,’ Devereaux said, ‘for the police to search all my buildings. I’d challenge them to find a trace of anything.’
‘Lying fallow at the moment, are we, Preston? Movable feast, innit? What – a dozen farms? More? Whichever way you look at it, this has to be the most successful farmers’ cooperative since the first Iron Age village.’
‘What about Raji Khan?’ Merrily said.
‘Still a bit of a mystery there,’ Syd said. ‘He’s not clean, obviously. But he must be a very small player by comparison. Can’t be involved, or he’d never have been allowed to move in so close. What was that like, Preston, Raji moving in? You must’ve been awful nervy. Did he know, or didn’t he? If he ever found out, that could be tricky – and always a possibility with ambitious little men like Wicklow around. And do you officially support the opposition? Leonard Holliday and WRAG? Difficult one.’
‘Especially if it attracted too much publicity,’ Merrily said. ‘Thus engaging the attention of hundreds of thousands of Elgar enthusiasts, all over the world. You really had to curb Mr Holliday, didn’t you?’
‘And maybe do something about Tim Loste,’ Syd said. ‘Very much a wild card. And supported – more than supported – by your former good friend but not any more, Winnie Sparke. I tried to warn her, best I could. She wouldn’t buy it. Syd, she said, this is England.’
Lol didn’t do drugs. The only reason he had to be grateful to his psychiatric hospital: a sojourn in Medication City and you never wanted to swallow so much as an aspirin ever again.
The white in the sky had dulled, the oak was going grey. A great and beautiful mystery had shrunk to something squalid. Lol sat down next to Tim, whispered to him.
‘How much did you drink from the hip flask?’
‘Chap offers you a swig, not the thing to decline, Dan.’
‘Depends who’s offering.’
‘Raised it to my lips. Faked it.’
‘Oh.’
‘If he brought it back now, I’d drink the lot. Elgar was right, old cock. God’s against art.’
‘May just be,’ Lol said, ‘that artists don’t have mystical experiences. Artists are a medium. Think of it as an internal process you’re not aware of. You don’t have to see blinding light and the heavenly host. You might sit down tomorrow and it’ll all come out in the music.’
‘You’re full of bullshit, Dan. Anyone ever tell you that?’
‘Never,’ Lol said honestly. ‘I’m normally a low-key sort of bloke. But it did seem to me as if the leaves had turned white. Don’t give up. Give it a try.’
‘For Winnie?’ Tim said.
‘Tim-’
‘Thought it was a dream. Thought it was a fucking dream.’
‘I didn’t know, either. I’m sorry.’
‘Blocked it out. Why didn’t I stop them? Why couldn’t-?’
‘Because, somehow, you were drugged. Sedated. I’ve been there. Seen it happen. I can tell you for certain there was nothing you could’ve done.’
‘It’s a sick fucking joke, Dan. I’ve been sitting here all this time, waiting for-’
Tim’s hands squeezing the roots either side of him.
‘As a gentleman, I’m listening to you,’ Devereaux said. ‘Just not talking to you.’
‘A gentleman?’ Merrily sat up. ‘A gentleman who kills kids? Teenagers with infected syringes? Teenagers who murder old ladies in their own homes to steal enough to keep them going for another week?’
Preston Devereaux stared into the shadows below his feet.
‘The cities are a lost cause, Mrs Watkins. Reinfecting themselves on their own sewage. Nothing to be done about that. The road to ruin. No doubt the two of you can find Biblical parallels.’
‘And out of the ruins will rise… what?’
‘Better government,’ Devereaux said.
At first Merrily thought he was coughing over his cigarette. But he was laughing. She looked at Syd Spicer. Where was he going with this? Did he have some plan that she couldn’t see? Why hadn’t he just let Devereaux walk away? Why did he have to throw out that remark about the Gullet?
‘Why did you kill Winnie Sparke?’ Syd asked.
‘I didn’t.’
‘Whoever murdered France took his files,’ Merrily said, just wanting to end this. ‘Presumably that’s where they found Winnie’s name. Who would recognize that but you?’
‘Winnie’s name’s on Mal’s books,’ Syd said, ‘so it must be Winnie who’s paying him to look into the drug operation. And Winnie being Winnie, a loose cannon- My fault. Should’ve been my name.’
‘Syd, this is not something you could ever have predicted.’
‘Who rumbled Mal?’ Syd said. ‘I’d like to know that, Preston.’
Devereaux tossed his cigarette end into the pit.
‘Who told you about the Gullet?’ he said.
‘You were going to take Tim back that way, right? You waited for… Mr Robinson to leave, and then you were in with the spiked Scotch and time to go home, Tim. How desperate was that?’
‘Who told you about the Gullet?’
‘Hugo, actually.’
‘ Hugo? ’ Devereaux looking at him at last.
‘We have to get our information where we can.’
‘Where is he? Syd, he’s a boy.’
‘He’s no more a boy than half the drug barons in Birmingham. And if you tell me he hasn’t killed anybody, I wouldn’t be sure and neither could you. Can’t control these boys like you used to, can you? Let them go too far down the road. Maybe that’s another reason Old Wychehill’s been fallow for a bit, you trying to rein Louis in before it’s too late. Tell me who rumbled Mal.’
‘Or what?’
‘Or tell the police when they get here, I don’t mind. It’ll add to what they’ll have learned from Hugo, already naming names faster than they can write them down.’
‘Hugo doesn’t know any names.’
‘Boy goes around with his eyes shut, does he? It’s over, Preston, it’s disintegrating as we speak. That’s what I’m trying to get across to you.’
‘You’ve told me some far-fetched theories, that’s-’
‘ That ’s because I’m not trying to trick you, mate. And because I’ve been trying, maybe not too successfully, to be a priest. Sometimes, especially lately, I have to keep reminding myself that that’s what I am now. I can look at this situation and see clearly what would be the best way of dealing with it if I was still in the Army.’
‘The situation being?’
‘The situation being a dangerous young man out there, and probably more dangerous because he’s frightened and not really, with his background, the big gangster he thinks he is. He’s clever, but clever’s not the same as smart. Police see what Louis did, it’s an Armed Response Unit. Marksmen all over the hills. The soldier in me would take him out ASAP. Expedience. But the priest doesn’t want another death. Not even Louis’s.’
‘And how would the priest avoid that?’
‘I think… by letting you walk away like you did a short time ago. You presumably know where he is, so you can explain to him what I’ve just explained to you, and then the two of you can walk into a police station of your choice.’
‘Or leave the country.’
‘Leaving young Hugo to take all the weight? Nah. You’ve got some honour left. It’s the best thing you can do as a father and a clever man. Exercise some control over your boy. Tell him it’s pointless.’
Preston Devereaux straightened his back, hands on his knees. There was a glaze of sweat on his forehead under the line of his cap.
‘Where’s the point in that, Syd, when you’ve already told him?’
Perhaps Louis Devereaux had been there the whole time. Plenty of cover. Coppices and dells.
Perhaps Syd had known this. He half-turned and looked up at Louis with no surprise.
Merrily was on her feet, backing away, instinctively looking for Lol, but seeing only Louis Devereaux, a half-silhouette in the grey light, as still, for a moment, as any of the oaks, arms extended, rigid as dead branches, both hands clasped around the pistol.
‘Where’d you buy that, Louis?’ Syd said mildly. ‘ Very professional. They say you can get them in Hereford these days. Glock?’
The gun twitched.
‘Move away from my father, Rector.’
‘What for? Which one of us you planning to shoot to prove your old man isn’t in control any more?’
‘And shut up.’
‘Shouldn’t that be shut the fuck up? Got to get the tone right, the correct phraseology.’
‘ Shut the -’ Louis’s hands jerking around the pistol. ‘I could kill you now.’
‘Or blow me away, even. Blow all of us away. That’d simplify things a lot. Like that feller in Hungerford in the 1980s. You probably don’t remember that, you’d’ve been just a kid, but he shot himself in the end. Like the bloke at Dunblane. It always ends where they shoot themselves.’
Merrily couldn’t move. Louis was panting with rage and frustration and probably fear. On a hot night, it was the most unstable combination imaginable. And all Syd had was…
‘The other ending is death by Armed Response Unit. Like I’ve already told your father, lots of police marks-men all over the hills. Automatic rifles. Night sights. Make that thing look like a spud gun and you like the crass amateur you undoubtedly are.’
‘You make one more… remark like that and then-’
‘And for a while you get to learn what it was like for all the foxes you used to hunt. Only with not even the faintest possibility of an earth to escape to. No escape at all from those boys. Terrorism-trained, now, and they don’t take any chances. At some stage one of them gets you in the cross-hairs and takes you out. You don’t even see him taking aim. Like a wasp doesn’t see the rolled-up newspaper.’
Syd standing there with his arms by his sides, an unmoving target. Merrily’s heart going, Please God, please God, please God.
‘We can get away,’ Louis said. ‘Any time we want. Just a question of whether-’
‘Nah. It doesn’t happen, son, not at this level.’
‘-Whether we leave you fucking dead when we go.’
‘You don’t understand. You graduated to a new level of achievement tonight, mate,’ Syd said. ‘In the big school now. Where they spend millions hunting you down.’
Preston Devereaux stood up.
‘Can I talk to my son?’
‘Don’t ask me, Preston – he’s got the weapon.’
‘What do I do?’ Louis’s whole body bending backwards like a water-skier, tensed around the swivelling pistol. ‘ What do I do? ’
‘You probably give the gun to me,’ Preston said.
‘We can still get out of this. He’s got to be lying about armed police. We could-’
Louis turned, the pistol pointing directly at Merrily. She felt a spasm below her heart like a long needle going in.
‘-Take Mrs Watkins with us?’
‘And then what, Louis?’ Syd said. ‘Demand a helicopter? Grow up, son.’
‘Stay fuck-’ Louis spun but not at Syd. ‘Stay fucking there!’
Merrily, heart jumping, heard a cry from Lol.
‘… Tim! ’
Tim Loste was lumbering out from the tree. In his stained singlet, he looked like an old-fashioned butcher, arms sleeved in sweat, finger out, pointing at Louis.
‘You were wearing a… a balaclava.’
‘Don’t come any closer,’ Louis said, ‘you wanker.’
‘Recognize your voice. Wearing a balaclava with eyeholes.’
‘Louis,’ Preston Devereaux said, ‘it’s not necessary.’
‘Big knife. You had this big- She was screaming at you to stop, screaming and screaming and… and crying and you just… you bloody bastard-’
Tim tumbled, sobbing, into Louis and Louis shot him twice.