The Magus of Hay

Phil Rickman

• Publisher: Corvus
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780857898678
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

The 12th instalment in the Merrily Watkins series

When a man's body is discovered near the picturesque town of Hay-on-Wye, his death appears to be 'unnatural' in every sense. Merrily Watkins, priest, single mother and exorcist, is drafted in to investigate.


A man's body is found below a waterfall. It looks like suicide or an accidental drowning - until DI Frannie Bliss enters the dead man's home. What he finds there has him consulting Merrily Watkins, the Diocese of Hereford's official advisor on the paranormal.

It's nearly forty years since the town of Hay-on-Wye was declared an independent state by its self-styled king. A development seen at the time as a joke. But the pastiche had a serious side. And behind it, unknown to most of the townsfolk, lay a darker design, a hidden history of murder and ritual magic, the relics of which are only now becoming visible.

It's a situation that will take Merrily Watkins - on her own for the first time in years and facing public humiliation over a separate case - to the edge of madness.

PART ONE

MAY

‘Hay-on-Wye remains as it was in the fifteenth century – a tightly-walled medieval city.’

RICHARD BOOTH
My Kingdom of Books

(Y Lolfa1999)

… by 1460, the castle was described as ‘ruinous, destroyed by rebels and of no value’. In 1498, a survey reported that the town, as well as the castle, was ruinous. The whole area within the town walls was described by John Leland in 1538 as ‘wonderfully decaied’.

WELSH CHRONICLES ONLINE

1

A rebuilding… maybe

IT WAS THE kind of place they just never would have considered living in. At one time. When he’d loved the empty hush of a cold night and the whingeing of old timbers in a gale. Oh… and when he could walk across the yard without a goddamn stick.

He said, kind of tentatively, ‘Don’t you love it… just a little?’

Facing Betty in the curve of the alley, where there was a café and sandwich bar with outside tables, people having morning tea and fooling themselves this was summer.

‘“Love”’s not quite the right word,’ Betty said. ‘Though little certainly fits.’

It was a stone building, maybe a former outhouse, somewhere between a stable block and a pigsty. Most of its ground floor seemed to be a bookstore.

Robin was silent, looking up over the roofs of the shops to the castle’s ivy-stubbled stone, his fingers curling with the need to paint it. She must’ve seen him catch his breath when they drove over the long bridge across the Wye that was like a causeway between worlds.

There weren’t many towns left in this overloaded country that you could see the whole of from a distance, nesting in wooded hills, the streets curling up to the castle, warm grey walls under lustrous clouds. He’d been here a dozen times but never before with that sense of electric anticipation, that sense of intent, Jesus, that sense of mission.

‘So, could you maybe like… grow to love it?’ he said.

Betty gave him the long-suffering look.

‘I know what you love about it. You love how close it is to the castle. If it wasn’t for the castle you wouldn’t even consider living up an alley in the middle of a town.’

Ah, damn, she knew him too well. Robin took a step back. Here, in this alley, the castle was so close that one of its walls seemed to be growing out of the roofs of shops. Including this shop, virtually in its foundations. If he could hop, he’d be hopping. Come on. How often did you get a chance like this, to be almost part of a castle?

And make money. How could they not?

‘And let’s be honest.’ Betty looked up. ‘As castles go, it’s not the most scenic. Some medieval walls, most of a tower. A knackered Jacobean mansion somebody built inside, only it keeps burning down. But then – I keep forgetting – you’re American.’

Two young guys walking down from the main road gave Betty long glances, the way guys did faced with a lovely fresh-faced blonde. She had on the shocking-pink fleece with the naive flower motif that made her look sixteen, unzipped to below her breasts, swelling the tight T-shirt underneath. Robin couldn’t see her expression because the sun was suddenly dazzling him through a split in the rainclouds, and she was spinning around, canvas bag springing from her shoulder on its strap.

‘Bugger! We’re overdue.’

‘What?’

‘Car park. Ten forty-six on the ticket. They’re complete bastards now, apparently.’

Shouldering her bag and stomping off up the alley, away from the café, towards the main road. Robin didn’t move, not ready to lose the ambience of a different era. An old lady was ambling past wearing a tweed cap. She was whistling. He didn’t recognize the tune, but how many places did you actually encounter an old lady whistling? He hissed and tightened his fists until his nails dug into his palms, then limped off after Betty. A tug on his hip as he drew level.

‘I suppose they’re not actually bastards in themselves,’ Betty said, ‘they’re just – according to that woman in the ice cream parlour, you probably weren’t listening, you were gazing around – they’re under orders from the council that anybody gets a ticket, even if they’re only a minute over. Councils are so desperate for cash they’re mugging tourists.’

‘Betty!’ Robin was wringing his hands. ‘Fuck the goddamn parking wardens! Fuck the council! Whatta we do here?’

She didn’t answer. He followed her out to the main road which was called Oxford Road, although it in no way could be said to lead to Oxford on account of Oxford had to be something like a hundred miles away and comparable to Hay only in its book-count.

Across this road, over the chain of vehicles and beyond the wide, sloping parking lot prowled by bastards, hills of pool-table green were snuggled into the Black Mountains. The hills between the mountains and the river. The flesh between the bones and the blood. And in the middle of this right now, the centre of everything, was the grey-brown town, the only actual urban space where Robin had ever totally wanted to be since leaving the States. They could make it here. Get something back. Maybe not all of it, but some of it. A start. A rebuilding. Maybe.

Betty said, ‘I think it was bullshit.’

‘Because?’

‘You only had to look at his face when he smiled. He wanted to cause trouble. Not for us, for the guy in the shop. That’s my feeling.’

Betty’s feelings. You did not lightly ignore Betty’s feelings.

‘We could at least ask,’ Robin said. ‘Not like we got anything to lose.’

Betty stood with her back to the sign that said Back Fold and another bookstore on the corner. Three bookstores in this one short, twisting alley with a pole at its centre, phone or power cables spraying from it like ropes from a maypole. Robin looked back down towards the third bookstore, its window unlit. The shelves inside had seemed far from full. It had looked like a bookstore waiting to die.

Or get reborn…

‘OK.’ Betty threw up her arms. ‘We’ll get another parking tick— no, I’ll get it. You go back. There might even be nobody in there.’

‘Said Open on the door.’

Over the door it said Oliver’s Literary Fiction. Robin walked back down there, peered into the window, saw a short rack of hardback novels by Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Atwood and like that. He tried the door. It didn’t open.

Why was that woman always right? He shouted after her.

‘Bets!’

But she’d gone. He hated that his wife could now move so much faster. Hated how old ladies would cut him up in a supermarket aisle.

But then the door of Oliver’s Literary Fiction opened, and…

Oh my God.

The man in the doorway, in his collarless, striped shirt with the brass stud, his severe half-glasses, looked like nobody so much, Robin thought, as the guy with the pitchfork in Grant Wood’s American Gothic. It was the kind of face that only promised more humiliation.

Humiliation. How all this had begun, on a cold, rainy day when spring was an ailing baby squirming feebly out of winter’s womb. Just under a week ago.

They weren’t broke, but they weren’t far off.

Robin’s income had been smashed around the same time as his bones. They’d sold a house in the sticks, into a falling market, for less than they paid for it. They’d taken out a mortgage on a humbler dwelling. Now they were having difficulty paying the premiums and Betty had to work checkout at the Co-op.

One day Robin had been sitting, feeling hopeless, staring at the wall.

The wall was all books. Like all the other walls in the living room. And the hallway and the bedroom. And he was thinking, We’re never gonna read all these books again.

Collecting a rueful smile from Betty who, it turned out, had been thinking pretty much the same for several months, wary of approaching the issue because some of those books had great personal significance. They’d each brought a few hundred into the relationship and they’d bought one another more books, over the years, as inspirational presents.

But, hell, there it was. Circumstance.

So they’d driven over to Hay, the second-hand book capital of the entire universe and gone into the first shop they found with a sign that said BOOKS BOUGHT.

The name over the shop was G. Nunne. Robin had walked in with a holdall full of books, dumped it on the counter, told the guy there was another fifteen hundred back where they came from. All on the same subject. A collection.

The guy took a cursory look. He was built like an old-fashioned beer keg and had one of those red wine-stain birthmarks down one side of his face.

‘All more or less like this?’

Robin, who’d brought along what he judged to be the most valuable, beautifully produced, hard-to-find volumes on their shelves, had nodded.

The guy had rolled his head around on cushions of fat.

‘Market en’t good.’

He had, surprisingly, a local accent. Robin had figured that all the booksellers here were, like, London intellectuals.

‘See, you can get most of these as e-books for a few quid,’ G. Nunne said. ‘Nothing’s out of print these days. So… I’d need to take a look, but I’m guessing…’ blowing his lips out, considering ‘… three, four hundred, the lot?’

‘You mean these… these here…?’

‘No, the lot. Fifteen hundred, you said?’

‘What?’ Close to dropping the stick and dragging the guy across the counter by the lapels. ‘You’d make ten times that much. Hell, wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Notes & Credits