The Devil's Moon Read online

  He wondered again who the woman was and what part she had played in his father’s life. A mystery he would probably never solve.

  A number of books surprised him. There were several signed by Albert Camus, the French existentialist philosopher. R D Laing’s anti-psychiatry works, once so influential, had personal inscriptions.

  Watts could understand the signed copies of the novels of thriller writer Alistair MacLean. MacLean had been his father’s friend as well as rival. There was a scrawled card tucked in MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone: ‘Victor – scopolamine – use in moderation! Affectionately, Alistair.’

  On the title page of Where Eagles Dare MacLean had written: ‘Truth drug all used up. Maybe you’ve still got some. Admiringly, Alistair.’

  Watts had come across the tropane alkaloid scopolamine as a truth serum during his army career but had been dubious about its value. His father had referred to it two or three times in his thrillers. People strapped to a chair, injection in the arm, helpless blabbing of things supposed to be kept secret, and so on. He deduced MacLean had done the same in these two novels.

  Dennis Wheatley was fond of Victor Tempest, judging by the affectionate inscriptions in his books The Devil Rides Out, To the Devil a Daughter and They Used Dark Forces. The inscriptions were all variations of the message in the first of them: ‘To Victor, mon semblable, mon frère. Yours ever, Dennis.’

  Watts frowned. He didn’t really understand the French. The Devil Rides Out, he noted, had been published in 1934, the same year as the Brighton Trunk Murders.

  There were half a dozen of Colin Pearson’s books. There was his precocious first work, Outside Looking Out which, in the sixties, when Pearson was in his early twenties, had made him a philosophical wunderkind; four of his famously didactic novels; and a copy of his biggest seller, Magic.

  Watts drew Magic out. According to the blurb on the back this was the seminal work on the occult as a pathway for what Maslow had called meta-motivated people. Whatever that meant.

  Watts read the inscription: ‘Victor, let the search continue, mon semblable, mon frère. Salutations, Colin.’

  The same French phrase. And the search for what?

  Watts was puzzled to think of his father befriending such men as Wheatley and Pearson. He didn’t think that black magic mumbo-jumbo had been his father’s thing. At Halloween, when his mother got out the Ouija board, his father would play along, depending on his mood, but it was jokey, never sinister.

  That was about the extent of it as far as Watts knew. But, as he’d been discovering in recent months, there was a lot he didn’t know about his father.

  A friendship with Wheatley he could understand – two professional writers talking shop. Watts went over to the roll-top desk where he’d set up his laptop and Googled Wheatley. A well-educated, prolific author whose eighty or so novels, especially in the fifties and sixties, sold in their millions around the world. He wrote mostly adventures but there were some novels dealing with Satanism, often featuring a wealthy aristocrat, the Duc de Richleau.

  Wheatley and Victor Tempest had the war in common, of course, although Wheatley – like Tempest’s other writer friend, Ian Fleming – had been in the Navy. Tempest had been a commando.

  Watts read about Wheatley’s admiration for Mussolini. Perhaps that was also something the two writers had in common. Victor Tempest had been one of Mosley’s Blackshirts for a while.

  Pearson, though, was more of a puzzle. Sure, he was a writer, but he was better known for his eccentric philosophizing. Pearson’s take on existentialism had soon been ridiculed and he had sidelined himself by heading into eccentric waters in pursuit of his theories about people fulfilling their true potential.

  By that, as Watts recalled from various discussion programmes over the years, Pearson meant accessing the ninety-nine per cent of the brain people don’t use to raise their levels of consciousness and live at the peak of experience. Watts shook his head. He was impatient of such New Age stuff. As far as he was concerned, every morning he needed to figure out anew just how to get through the day.

  Pearson was also almost two decades younger than Victor Tempest. On its own that didn’t preclude friendship. Watts knew that women of Pearson’s age hadn’t had any trouble relating to the older man. Still, it was strange.

  Watts went back to the shelves. Next to Pearson’s books was a novel called Moonchild. The author was Aleister Crowley.

  Watts had heard of Crowley but as a charlatan occultist rather than a novelist. The novel had a winsome-looking woman on the cover with an even more winsome child behind her. It seemed an odd cover for a book by the self-styled Great Beast, who had been dubbed by one newspaper ‘the wickedest man in the world’.

  The inscription was undated but the book’s frontispiece gave the book’s publication as 1917. The publisher was The Mandrake Press at an address in New York. Even odder was the fact that Crowley had signed the title page, in a shaky hand: ‘This in honour of you, magister Victor, mon semblable, mon frère, from a mere acolyte. Aleister.’

  There it was again, the same bloody French phrase. And his father had known Aleister Crowley? Watts hadn’t read all his father’s novels but he didn’t recall that any of the ones he had read dealt with black magic. In the Wikipedia entry for Dennis Wheatley it stated that he too had known Aleister Crowley. He had based the character Mocata in The Devil Rides Out on the occultist.

  Watts knew Crowley called himself 666 but he had no clear idea what that meant. The anti-Christ? He had a vague memory of seeing The Omen in which a devil child also had the 666 tag. He remembered Gregory Peck searching through some child actor’s hair for the numbers etched somewhere on his scalp.

  Watts Googled Crowley. The magician seemed to be nothing more than a bombastic poseur, albeit one who had destroyed a number of people’s lives. The creed of his church – Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law – was an excuse for degeneracy of every sort.

  In one way, Watts felt a little sorry for the man. He had set up his own church and wealthy people had occasionally funded it. But he had ended his life in poverty in a Hastings nursing home, his health shattered by heroin and morphine addiction.

  Others after him had followed his model of starting new spiritual movements and made a mint. Such movements had proved licences to print money in the confusing and troubled modern world. Crowley had been ahead of his time and so not for him the millions of dollars with which gurus and cult leaders had been showered since.

  Watts took the book over to the window. He looked at the inscription again. What the hell was Crowley doing inscribing a book to Victor Tempest and referring to him as magister? And how come all the books had the same French phrase?

  There was a sudden crack of thunder and Watts looked up at the sky, at the sudden gust of wind and the swill of dark clouds above his head. He laughed. Spooky.

  THREE

  Sarah Gilchrist did a double-take when she turned a corner and saw a poster outside the imposing Saint Michael and All Angels Church with crime scene tape all across it. The statement on the poster was: SOMEONE IS DEAD AND THE BODY IS MISSING. It took a moment for her to realize it was a now-out-of-date advert for Easter services. She shook her head and laughed.

  She walked round the church, trying each door in turn, embarrassed that it had been so long since she’d been here that she didn’t know where the entrance was. Eventually she reached some steps that led up into the large vestibule. She went through that and into the church.

  She was nervous about her next-day meeting with the chief constable but that wasn’t why she was here. Nor did she think the fish falling from the sky had any religious significance. She wasn’t a believer. For her God was Absence. She was here to try to make a connection. Or rather a re-connection.

  She looked slowly around. She’d been a child the last time she’d been here and it had seemed vast. It was still impressive, the size of a cathedral, high-ceilinged and broad though not particularly long.

>   Someone in jeans and a T-shirt was fussing with the flowers beneath the carved altar, showing what seemed like an indecent amount of bum crack for a church.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Gilchrist called. ‘Is the vicar around?’

  The person – Gilchrist couldn’t immediately see if it was a man or a woman – remained bent over but pointed to the right.

  ‘Thanks,’ Gilchrist said, muttering, ‘Don’t put yourself out.’

  Gilchrist walked over to a narrow door halfway along the wall. It opened on to a small office over-stuffed with filing cabinets and a broad desk covered with papers. There was an ancient computer on the desk. An electric fan heater was rattling away in the corner but the room remained chilly.

  There was another door in the corner behind the desk. Gilchrist squeezed between the edge of the desk and a bulky filing cabinet and tried the handle. This door was locked. As she turned away she thought she heard movement behind it.

  ‘Hello?’ Gilchrist said, rapping on the wood.

  ‘Someone has locked me in,’ a female voice said.

  Gilchrist looked back at the desk. ‘Where is the key usually kept?’

  ‘In the door.’

  ‘It isn’t here. Give me a minute to look.’

  ‘Hurry.’

  Gilchrist opened drawers and filing cabinets but found no key. She went out into the church to get the help of the person who’d been by the altar. She couldn’t immediately see him or her. ‘Is anybody there?’ she called.

  ‘A question I often ask myself,’ a voice close beside her said.

  She jumped and turned.

  ‘Forgive me for startling you.’

  It was not the person she had seen at the altar. This was a tall, slender, middle-aged man in a dark suit and a dog collar.

  ‘I believe God is in this place but sometimes it feels like a hope rather than a certainty.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m David Rutherford, one of the vicars here.’

  ‘I thought certainty came with the job,’ Gilchrist said as she briefly shook his hand.

  ‘Most definitely not. Death and taxes are, I believe, the only certainties in life. In your profession, you must deal every day in uncertainties and the contingent, surely?’

  ‘Is it so obvious what I do for a living?’

  ‘It is if you are recognized, Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist.’

  She examined his face. ‘Do I know you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not really. For my sins, I’ve seen you in the newspapers.’

  ‘For my sins,’ Gilchrist corrected him.

  Rutherford gave her an inscrutable look. ‘But how can I help you?’

  ‘Well, for one thing you have a woman locked in your office store and the key is missing.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Isn’t that a children’s rhyme?’

  ‘I think that’s a lavatory occupied by three old ladies.’

  He smiled. He had good teeth. ‘You’re right.’ He gestured for her to precede him into the office. He rooted in a small wooden cupboard on the wall and produced a key. ‘The spare,’ he said.

  He unlocked the storeroom door and a near-hysterical, middle-aged woman came rushing out, pulling the door closed behind her. As the vicar calmed her Gilchrist wondered if she was claustrophobic. She couldn’t think why else the woman was so distressed. She had not been attacked. She had simply been looking for something in the storeroom when she heard the door close and the lock turn.

  Gilchrist went round the desk and pushed the door open again. When she saw the pool of liquid in the corner she understood the woman’s distress. Being locked in the lavatory would have been more appropriate.

  She left the vicar comforting his secretary and wandered back into the church. She was thinking about the person who had been at the altar. Had he or she locked the door on the woman?

  She walked to the centre aisle and looked up at the altar. It had been overturned. Spray-painted in red across the wall were the words: THIS IS NOT THE PLACE.

  She moved nearer. A crucifix had been torn down from the wall and now leaned, upside down, against it. Something was impaled on it. Something bloody. Gilchrist peered. It was a heart. She counted the thorns sticking into it. Thirteen.

  Bob Watts took a sip of his scrumpy cider and looked at a pleasure boat chugging past the pub heading west towards Hampton Court. He was in Ye Old White Hart by Barnes Bridge. It was his father’s old local. Well, one of them.

  People on the boat waved at him – he was the only one on the balcony – and he half raised his arm in a self-conscious gesture of acknowledgement.

  The river was high. He’d been unable to do his riverside run earlier that day because the towpaths on both sides of the river were flooded.

  London hadn’t had the deluge as badly as Sussex but it had been raining pretty steadily and it seemed the Thames was in flood whether it was high or low tide. He looked up at the sky. Black, brooding clouds hung low.

  He’d brought the Aleister Crowley book down with him and a paperback biography of the black magician he’d found elsewhere on his father’s shelves.

  On a whim he telephoned Oliver Daubney, his father’s elderly literary agent. While the number was ringing he looked at his watch. Daubney was old-style publishing; he was probably at lunch.

  But Watts was wrong. Daubney himself answered on the fifth ring.

  ‘Expected you to be lunching,’ Watts said.

  ‘Everybody else is out at lunch,’ Daubney said in his pleasant voice. ‘I’m manning the phones and eating sandwiches.’

  Daubney always reminded Watts of an old Hollywood actor called Louis Calhern. Watts had seen him in some black and white movies on late-night TV. Same relaxed charm and affability, same timbre to his voice.

  ‘I assume with a glass of decent red,’ he said.

  ‘I did manage to find something quaffable in the back of my drinks cabinet. How can I help you, Robert?’

  ‘Was my father good friends with Dennis Wheatley, Colin Pearson and Aleister Crowley?’

  Daubney chuckled. ‘There’s an unholy trio. He did know the first two, yes. Crowley is a bit before my time – he died in the late forties, didn’t he?’

  ‘Cremated in Brighton, 1947.’

  ‘Ah. As always, all roads lead to Brighton.’

  Watts heard Daubney take a glug of his wine. He could picture him at his desk, white linen napkin tucked into his shirt collar. (‘Never seen the point of putting the napkin in your lap – too many other things for your sauce or wine to stain on the way down.’)

  ‘I can root through my files, ask around, if it’s important to you.’

  ‘Would you mind? It’s only curiosity but . . .’ Watts tailed off.

  ‘I’ll get on it after lunch. Not much doing at the moment. I deal with more dead authors than live ones these days. In fact I need to talk to you about your father’s literary estate sometime soon.’

  ‘How soon? Tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow? And it’s only curiosity you say?’

  Watts laughed but said nothing.

  ‘How would the British Museum suit? I’ve got a meeting with Faber and Faber nearby. I haven’t had a chance to see the Picasso prints yet. We could see those and then, after, we could lunch in the restaurant up in the rafters in the Great Courtyard.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was one.’

  ‘Not bad. Decent wine list.’ Daubney laughed. ‘You feel somehow more cultured just breathing in the atmosphere.’

  They arranged to meet at noon in the Print Rooms and Watts hung up.

  Frankly, he was at a loose end. For years he’d thrived on getting things done but since he’d lost his job he’d found it hard to find an outlet for his energy. Hence his almost obsessive interest in his father’s secretive, complicated life.

  A man in a paint-splattered jumper came on to the balcony at the far end. He looked like an artist rather than a decorator. In a vaguely fastidious way he took off his jumper and folded it neatly on the chair. Before he pi
cked up his pint he laid out on the table in front of him an asthma inhaler, a mobile phone and a packet of cigarettes.

  The deliberation with which he did this reminded Watts of his friend and comrade-in-arms, Jimmy Tingley, recuperating from more than just physical injuries somewhere in Italy. Watts had been keen to visit the ex-SAS man but Tingley had discouraged him, saying he needed time alone and would be back in touch when he was ready.

  Although close, the two men had never been in each other’s pockets, so Watts had accepted this, albeit reluctantly.

  Watts drained his glass and stood as the man took a sip of his beer, a puff from his asthma inhaler and a drag from his cigarette. He coughed as he smoked. Watts glanced back at the swirling river and listened to the low rumble of distant thunder.

  He took his empty glass back to the bar. As he turned to leave a man standing a few yards along the bar beckoned him over.

  He was an ageing rock ’n’ roller, abundant white hair in a ponytail, face deeply lined. He was a long, lean man, though he had a little round belly over his tight leather jeans. Watts figured late sixties, early seventies: both the musical period and the age of the man.

  He was with a woman in her forties who oozed rock chick. She had matching leather jeans tucked into cowboy boots. She was buxom beneath her denim jacket. Leather trousers rarely looked good on anybody, especially an old man with stick-thin legs, but Watts was kind of impressed that these two had the swagger to give it a go.

  The man pointed a be-ringed finger at the bright cover of the Crowley novel Watts was holding in his hand. ‘Don’t see many of those these days.’

  Watts glanced down.

  ‘Looks in great nick,’ the man continued. ‘The colours haven’t faded at all.’

  The man was familiar and not just because Watts had seen him in here before.