The Magus of Hay E-Book

Phil Rickman

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

The Magus of Hay

Also by Phil Rickman

THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

The Wine of Angels

Midwinter of the Spirit

A Crown of Lights

The Cure of Souls

The Lamp of the Wicked

The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

The Smile of a Ghost

The Remains of an Altar

The Fabric of Sin

To Dream of the Dead

The Secrets of Pain

The Magus of Hay

THE JOHN DEE PAPERS

The Bones of Avalon

The Heresy of Dr Dee

OTHER TITLES

Candlenight

Curfew

The Man in the Moss

December

The Chalice

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2013 by Corvus,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Phil Rickman, 2013

The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 0 85789 865 4E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 867 8

Printed in Great Britain.

CorvusAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

My father had a seven-year-old boy killed.

It had to be done. I understand this fully.

Earlier, he’d murdered the boy’s father.

On Christmas Day.

Perfect timing.

The slaughter reveals important qualities in my father: he did what was necessary, untroubled by accusations of cruelty and bleatings about mercy, and he clearly had little regard for the Christian religion which has held back the progress of mankind for so long (although all the signs are that it won’t survive much longer).

My father understands the role of violence in mankind’s striving for perfection. Who amongst us would not respect a man of pure descent from a northern race bred to kill and prosper?

I speak of my father in the present tense because he lives on in me. My aim is to restore to him what was his. When the time is right I shall make a blood sacrifice in his name, and this will be my ascendance to the Fourth Degree.

What I am saying to you in this article is that you should search for your own true father. Search through old records or, if you have the money, employ a genealogist to find the ancestor with whom you should connect in order to fulfil your earthly destiny.

Somewhere in your ancestry your father is waiting, sword drawn, for your summons.

from an article by Frater J.in the newsletter ‘Dark Orb’,Autumn, 1985

Contents

Part One

1 A rebuilding… maybe

2 Without light

3 The crown

4 Needs

5 Fix it

6 Formless conceit

Part Two

7 Sad case

8 No strings

9 Old habits

10 A better place

11 Without comfort

12 Cripple

13 Protocol and courtesy

14 A hollow in time

15 Catered for

16 The unknowable

17 Putrid

18 The word

19 Small obsession

20 Transition

Part Three

21 An extremely brief affair

22 Worm in the apple

23 Victims

24 We shall come again

25 The quiet

26 Nemesis

27 Orange spine

28 Report it

29 Nail bar

30 Blowtorch

31 Treats

32 Plea of insanity

Part Four

33 The N‐word

34 Niceties

35 Cold history

36 The Wire

37 The full Lazarus

38 Take the money

39 Convoy

40 Mephista

41 Into the hearth

42 Unfinished

43 Weight of bone

44 The mountains and the word

45 Third-class citizens

46 Naked talk

47 Blinded to the rest

48 Messiah

49 Superstition

50 Spartan

51 Received wisdom

Part Five

52 The last redemptive project

53 Right-hand path

54 Poppet

55 Out of blood

56 Vision and need

57 English corruption

58 A dark symmetry

59 Poltergeists

60 Name of my father

61 Look what you made me do

62 Symbol of intent

63 The case for atheism

64 Physical things

65 The darknesses

66 A social basis

67 Crystal tulip

68 Martyr

69 Spirit rising

70 An occasion

Notes & Credits

PART ONE

MAY

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

RICHARD BOOTHMy 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, what am I saying? Twenty times… thirty times… maybe more…’

‘But even if that were true, I’d have to sell them all, wouldn’t I? How long you think it takes to even get your money back? What percentage of customers are looking for weird books? You think that’s so bloody easy in a double-dip recession, you try it.’

Big silence. Betty drawing a long, hissy breath. Robin leaning forward on his stick with the ram’s head handle.

‘You know what?’ Robin had said. ‘We might just fucking do that.’

Betty going, ‘Robin…’

G. Nunne looking unperturbed.

‘Fifteen hundred books en’t a bad start. It’s how most of us got going, flogging our own. Then you wind up like me.’ A toothy wheeze. ‘Life sentence.’

G. Nunne was like walled in by books, all the shelves loaded up, hundreds more stacked up either side of his chair. He scratched his nose.

‘Nice little shop gonner be up for rent soon, I reckon. Back Fold. Have a look. Small but perfectly formed. Like its owner.’

And then he’d done the smile.

They hadn’t checked it out. Not that day. Too annoyed. Too deflated.

No smile from Mr-American-Gothic-but-actually-painfully- English pitchfork guy.

‘And who told you that?’

Who tewld you? Now, here was a London intellectual.

‘Just a… guy in town.’ Robin followed him inside. ‘He said the store might be up for rent. Soon.’

‘Bookseller, was it?’

The cold stare over the glasses.

The guy switched on lights, an antique gas mantle, electrified, a magnesium glow over mainly empty shelves. It certainly looked like an outlet for old books. You could spend a week cleaning and dusting and it would still smell musty. You could replace the gas mantle with halogen spots and it would still look Dickensian-drab.

Which was kind of good. Wasn’t it?

‘And you’re looking for an outlet, are you?’

‘Could be,’ Robin said.

‘A bookshop?’

‘You even get a choice in this town?’

Though evidently you did have a choice now. Driving slowly down the main street with its painted hanging signs which were probably newer than they looked, he’d noticed two new womenswear stores and an outward-bound emporium. Most likely by-products of the new wealth the book trade had brought.

‘So it is gonna be available for rent, Mr, um…’

‘Oliver. Let me say from the outset that we have never offered this shop for rent and anyone who told you otherwise is being deceitful and possibly malicious.’

‘Malicious?’

Jeez.

‘There’s a small but pernicious element here that seeks to cause unrest.’

Mr Oliver’s short, sandy hair was parted in a Victorian way over a thin, scholarly face on which disapproval was always just a blink away.

‘I apologize,’ Robin said, ‘if we were in any way used by these bas— elements.’

‘You’ve had previous experience of the book trade?’

‘Books. I have experience of books.’

Robin turned. Betty was back.

‘My wife,’ Robin said. ‘Betty Thorogood. I’m Robin Thoro-good.’

Small exchange of nods.

‘Well,’ Mr Oliver said. ‘If you leave your contact details, I may possibly be in touch.’

When they left, the lights went out.

‘Holy shit,’ Robin said.

2

Without light

THE BEDROOM HAD fitted wardrobes, floor to ceiling, and lemon walls on which the shadows of trees trembled. It overlooked a garden, well screened with silver birches and larches and woody extras: unnecessary gates, two beehive composters, a Gothic arbour, like a boat stood on end, with a seat for two.

The bedroom had twin beds with quilted bedheads and matching duvets, one blue, one light green. Also, a typist’s chair. Merrily had been shown directly up here. No living room chat, no offer of tea.

Ms Merchant, Sylvia, sat on the side of the blue bed facing the green bed.

‘This is mine. When I awoke in the morning, I’d see the sun over the trees at the end of the garden, and then Ms Nott’s face on her pillow. She tended to awake before me but would not get up in case that disturbed me. When I awoke, her eyes would often be open and looking at me.’

Ms Merchant was what used to be known as a spinster. An early retired secondary school headmistress with a live-in companion, who used to be her secretary. Used to be alive.

Rather than go to her parish priest, as was usual, Ms Merchant had made a direct approach to Sophie at the Cathedral gate-house office.

Merrily hovered by the typist’s chair, metal-framed, in the bay window.

Sylvia Merchant nodded.

‘Please…’

‘This was…?’

‘Ms Nott’s office chair. I bought it for her when we retired. From the education authority.’

Sylvia Merchant had moved from Wiltshire to Hereford, the town of her birth, with Ms Nott, on retirement. She had a long, solemn oval face, short bleached hair solid as an icon’s halo.

Merrily lowered herself on to the typist’s chair, the light-green bed between her and Sylvia Merchant.

‘And… she worked for you for…?’

‘Twelve years. For ten of them, we had separate homes.’ Ms Merchant’s soft voice trailed the faintest of Hereford accents which somehow made her sound even more refined. ‘But, as times – and attitudes – were changing, it seemed silly, as well as uneconomical, to pay two lots of council tax, insurance, water rates, all that.’

Merrily nodded. There was a murmur of traffic from the Ledbury road. This was Tupsley, the main southern suburb of Hereford, uphill from the town. Away from the main road it had these secure, leafy corners.

‘Ms Nott managed the garden,’ Sylvia Merchant said. ‘I’ve hired a girl. It’s not the same. Not yet, anyway.’

‘Looks wonderful. I don’t talk about mine.’

The movable backrest of the typist’s chair was fixed at the wrong angle, thrusting her forward. To keep herself steady, she had to push her feet into the carpet and her hands into her knees. Sylvia Merchant didn’t seem to notice.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I must have seen you around the Cathedral. Which we’ve always thought of as… our church, I suppose.’

‘Well, we’re based – Deliverance, that is – in the Bishop’s Palace gatehouse office, as you know. Although I tend not come in more than once or twice a week. I have a parish to…’

‘Ledwardine, yes. Not quite as charming as it was when I was a child, though it’s resisted most of the excesses. We park there regularly, on the square, to walk the lanes on summer evenings. And occasionally have dinner at the Black Swan. Sad to hear about the manager losing an eye. He was quite a pleasant man.’

‘Still is. And handling the situation brilliantly. Sometimes, I suspect he rather likes wearing a black eye patch, although it—’

‘Deliverance,’ Ms Merchant said suddenly. ‘I’m not sure I like that word. In this context.’

She was sitting up, straight-backed. She wore a white blouse and jeans with creases. You could imagine her sitting just like that in her office when some kid was pulled in for smoking in the toilets. Last of a breed, perhaps.

Merrily shrugged.

‘Oh. Well. Nor me, really. I even prefer the term it replaced…’

‘Exorcist.’

‘… in a way.’

‘Although I gather,’ Ms Merchant said, ‘that you don’t perform that function very often these days.’

Sounding as if she’d gone into it. The Internet?

‘Well, that’s true,’ Merrily said. ‘Some of us go through an entire career without once facing a major exorcism. It needs special permission from the Bishop, anyway. And usually the involvement of a psychiatrist.’

‘And may only be applied against evil. A word seldom used these days.’

‘Shouldn’t be allowed to slip out of use, though,’ Merrily said.

Beginning to think she should have worn the full kit. The blue sweater and small pectoral cross… this looked like one of those situations where friendly and casual were inappropriate.

‘So,’ Ms Merchant said, ‘how would you describe your main function?’

‘Well… essentially…’ Never an easy answer to this one. ‘We try to help people deal with problems often dismissed as irrational. Which covers… quite a lot.’

‘You take such matters seriously.’

‘Always.’

Ms Merchant nodded. She was expecting jokes?

‘I have to say you seem quite young for this.’

‘I’ll be forty soon.’

‘Have you known bereavement?’

‘I’m a widow.’

Don’t ask, Ms Merchant. Really, don’t ask.

‘Bereavement is a challenge,’ Ms Merchant said.

Ms Nott, Alys, had died a month ago following a stroke. She’d been cremated at Hereford, her ashes sprinkled on the garden, below the arbour. Telling Merrily about this, Sylvia Merchant had displayed no emotion, as if the ashes had been seeds. This was unusual. Normally, helping someone with this particular problem, you’d be faced with an uneasy mix of gratitude and the most gentle form of fear.

‘Erm, when did you first…?’

Ms Merchant extended her long legs, in surprisingly tight jeans, to the base of Ms Nott’s light-green bed.

‘Three days after the funeral, I awoke, as usual, at seven prompt. The sun was shining, much like today, but it was a cold morning. The winter wasn’t letting go. I’d look down, as I forced myself to, every morning, at Ms Nott’s pillow.’

Each of the beds had a pillow in a fresh white pillowcase.

Pushed unnaturally forward by the typist’s chair’s tilting back-support, it was hard not to look towards the pillow on the light-green bed. There was a shallow dent in it, as though a head had recently lain there.

‘She was smiling at me,’ Ms Merchant said. ‘As usual.’

Merrily nodded carefully.

‘Although her eyes were without light.’ Ms Merchant took a considered breath. ‘And I wasn’t sure she could see me.’

3

The crown

BETTY SAID, ‘No, hold it.’

Watching Robin trying not to lean on his stick at the top entrance to Back Fold. His wild black hair was not so wild any more and not so black.

He was still in recovery. It would be a long recovery, never a full recovery, but he was not going to accept that. There was a jerky electricity in his movements and he kept looking all around him, his eyes collecting the sights the way a magpie crammed its beak full of the bread put out for all the birds. The sloping streets, the patched-up castle. His images.

As if he thought the town could help heal his bones: the idea of living in an old stone town under a medieval fortress. Right under the castle, part of the castle. Fused into a fairytale.

‘You know what?’ Betty said. ‘This pisses me off.’

It had been her idea, after they’d walked away from Nunne, actually to give some serious thought to starting a bookshop.

OK, it was crazy. They were closing down on every high street in the country. Like Nunne had said, e-books were strangling the second-hand trade. But e-books were boring, and a sufficiently seductive shop, given over to a particular theme, in the right location, was always going to pull people in.

And also – she wasn’t telling him this – it could be a showcase for Robin’s paintings. After the commercial work dried up, all he’d had left had been the paintings and, in a recession, original paintings by unknown artists were among the first items to vanish from wish-lists. Especially paintings like Robin’s graphically brilliant but slightly skewed, spiritually-disturbing landscapes, streetscapes, stonescapes. But in Hay, with its international tourists… in the kind of bookshop they’d talked about… well, who knew?

‘What I think,’ Betty said, ‘is we should go and talk to some of the others.’

‘The other what?’ Robin glanced sideways at her. ‘Other damaged bastards?’

‘Booksellers. Other booksellers.’

Crazy, but the thought of talking to other booksellers gave him cold feet. Forget Nunne, he’d said on the way here, booksellers are not like grocers and ironmongers. Booksellers, there has to be a hierarchy. Maybe subdivisions for philosophy and anthropology and like that. We’ll need to tread carefully.

His ideas could only have been confirmed by Mr Oliver, peering at him over those academic glasses. Betty really hated it when Robin got treated like the thick, naive American. But, more than that, she hated being used by people pursuing personal agendas.

‘There could be another shop available,’ Betty said.

‘With living accommodation? Near a castle?’

The alley was quiet. The remodelled red chimneys from the castle’s second incarnation jutted into the luminous grey sky like cigars from a packet. They walked down past Oliver’s darkened window and the next shop they came to had giant cricket stumps painted either side of its doorway and bails over the top, below the name P. T. Kapoor. In the window was an archaic-looking biography of Denis Compton, priced at thirty-five pounds.

The name would mean nothing to Robin, who shook his head in wonderment. Even after years living with an Englishwoman born in Yorkshire, he still didn’t get it about cricket.

‘All I can say, if this guy can make a living…’

‘Let’s find out how,’ Betty said.

Before he could argue, she was between the stumps.

*  *  *

Robin figured the guy was around his own age, maybe a little older. Stocky, with a dark-stubbled face, deep-set sparky eyes and what Robin figured was an East London accent. His blue and white T-shirt said MUMBAI INDIANS.

‘Bleedin’ Gareth Nunne, eh?’ he said. ‘What is it wiv these guys? Truth is, he don’t know if Oliver wants to sell. Nobody in the trade here knows, on account of Oliver don’t talk to them. Well, me, sometimes, to show he ain’t racist, but not often. He finks he’s been dissed, is what it is.’

‘What’s that about?’ Betty said.

‘How long you got?’ He looked at Robin’s stick, pulled out a stool for him, looked around for somewhere for Betty, but she shook her head. ‘Fing is, he’d never had a bookshop before, new or second-hand. College librarian or somefing academic. Told everybody who’d listen that he’d moved to Hay to be close to literature. Yeah, right.’

That was frowned on? Robin looked around the store. The spotlit walls and ceiling were painted different shades of green, the window frame white. A cricket bat hung on chains over the counter which you reached through an alleyway of book-stands, the books displayed face-up. Peeling dust-jackets with guys in caps, killer balls coming at you. Didn’t appear to be too much in here that wasn’t cricket-related.

‘He got fixed ideas on what’s literature. Imposes his own value-judgements. No crime novels apart from Danish, no romance post Jane Austen. Who’s he bleedin’ blame when his business bombs? Everybody but himself.’

‘Robin Thorogood.’ Robin jabbing a thumb into his chest. ‘This is Betty Thorogood.’

‘Jeeter Kapoor. Listen, Oliver ever lets you in, whatever rent he’s asking, offer him half and make him pay for repairs. He quibbles, tell him you’ve spent the last few hours talking to half a dozen suicidal booksellers.’

‘How do you know we haven’t?’ Robin said.

‘You’re still here.’

Robin nodded.

‘So how long you been here?’

‘Erm… free years, just over? Man and boy.’

Betty said bluntly, ‘Would you tell us about the suicidal booksellers?’

Robin frowned. His wife tended to skip the pleasantries.

‘Not all suicidal,’ Kapoor said. ‘Prozac does it for a few.’

‘You’re saying the book trade’s in what looks like terminal decline?’ Betty said. ‘Even here?’

‘Even here? Where do I start? Internet sales? E-books? Yeah, let’s start there. Back in the day, if you couldn’t find a book on account of it being out of print, you came to Hay, had a fun day combing fousands of shelves, and even if you didn’t find it, you’d come away wiv another half-dozen what took your eye. Now… almost noffing is out of print, and one click delivers it to your device for peanuts. Ain’t even second-hand. No germs.’

Robin sighed.

‘So you think we may be taking a… small risk?’

‘Depends how desperate you are, mate.’

Kapoor strolled over to a coffee machine, began messing with it.

‘Look, can I…’ Robin fished around for a tactful question, then his hip twinged. ‘How do you make a living from, like…all this?’

Kapoor tweaked a smile. Robin put up his palms.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean—’

‘Nah, nah, fair question. Answer is, this is niche. You prob’ly wouldn’t know, coming from a baseball nation. Don’t need whole books to explain baseball, pamphlet, maybe.’ Kapoor nodded at the computer on the desk. ‘Good portion of my trade’s in there. Mail order. Internet sales. Autographed copies. You get test cricketers passing frew town, none of ’em gonna walk past this shop. And I know what they all look like and I’m ready wiv the pen. You ain’t got their book, you get ’em to sign old programmes, anyfing.’

‘So how much value’s a signature put on a book?’

‘Varies from a couple of quid to a hundred. Depends who it is. How often they sign. Or if they’re dead by now. Lot of my stuff goes abroad – all the big cricketing nations.’

‘You’re the only cricket bookshop?’

‘Only one in Hay, mate, and masses of stuff to go at. Biogs, real and ghost-written, back copies of Wisden, facsimile back copies. Then you got the specialist stuff, scientific analysis of bowling techniques, spin ratios. Also cricket novels, cricket poetry, vintage cricket annuals for kids. And cricket video on the side. No end to it, mate.’

Robin surveyed the racks.

‘A Hundred Great Cricket Jokes?’

‘Volume One,’ Kapoor said. ‘Ran for fifteen years until nineteen eighty. Full set, depending on condition, can fetch up to ninety quid. Another seventeen sets in the stockroom, job lot, firty quid. Small tip: only display one. Suggests rarity value.’

Kapoor stood back, looking at Robin.

‘You’re gonna be feeling your way, yeah? You need advice, you ask anybody. Well, almost anybody. What I’m saying, Hay ain’t about competition. Not that kind. Not now. Even the old-timers’re well pleased to see a new bookshop, long as it ain’t too shit or too cheap. Your visitors’re buying into the whole package. What’s left of it. Used to be over forty book dealers in Hay, back in the day. And that was only yesterday. Am I telling you stuff you know already?’

‘Uh…’

Kapoor peered into Robin’s face.

‘So, your niche. Trust me, a niche helps. Nobody wants their nice cricket library in a bit of plastic tat you gotta keeping charging up.’

The coffee machine started to babble and hiccup.

‘OK,’ Robin said. ‘We have a niche.’

Kapoor smiled.

‘Weird stuff, yeah? Witchy books, Teach Yourself Cursing.’

Robin felt himself going red, also felt Betty’s tension, which was rare. They’d told nobody. Nobody.

‘Hey…’ Kapoor lifting up his hands, like in some Indian benediction. ‘No cause for panic. Bloke here seen you hanging round Oliver’s shop and recognized you. You got some sympaffy, mate, leave it at that.’ He looked down at Robin’s stick. ‘You still do that stuff?’

‘Like, you’re saying if we open a pagan bookstore we’re gonna encounter fundamentalists waving their crosses and calling down reprisals from a vengeful God?’

‘Here? Unlikely. Highly unlikely.’

‘I mean you’re Indian, right, you’d know all about this stuff. Sacred cows, elephant gods? Ganesh, Kali the destroyer with all the arms?’

‘Born in Brentford, mate, but, yeah, my people have many indigenous gods.’ Kapoor did a little guru-type bow, gestured at a framed and signed photo of an Indian-looking guy in shades and a white cap. ‘But while I’d be the last to diss the deities of my ancestors, when did Ganesh get a hundred test centuries?’

The card underneath the picture said Sachin Tendulkar. Robin had never heard of him, but he was getting the point.

‘Coffee?’ Kapoor said.

‘Thanks. Thanks, um, Shiva. You did say your name’s Shiva?’

Kapoor threw up his hands.

‘Stone me, you can’t get away from it, can you? Jeeter. Short for Paramjeet. Try fitting that over a bleedin’ shop doorway.’

Robin seemed happier. Danger sign. He’d just been told the second-hand book trade was in possibly terminal crisis and they’d be gambling on a niche, but he looked happier.

He’s found a possible mate, Betty thought warily. A guy who, on a slow day, he can walk out of the shop and trade insults with.

‘You knew he wasn’t called Shiva, didn’t you?’

‘Who, me? A naive cripple from a land where they play baseball and chequers instead of chess?’

They were walking along Castle Street, the main shopping thoroughfare in Hay. Betty saw food shops, fashion shops, an antiques’ shop and an outdoor pursuits shop selling canoes. A chemist and a jeweller’s which had a long-established look about it.

Robin, meanwhile – he gave Betty a commentary on all this as they walked – saw streets laid out like the fingers of a grey glove below the castle. A marketplace that sloped away from its curtain wall. A small statue with a crown high up on the gable end of a bookstore. A little structure with stone pillars like a Greek temple. Everything crowded, intimate. Once a walled town, most of the walls gone now, but still a town that was all old, just different periods of old.

And a handful of bookshops, of course, though possibly fewer than either of them remembered.

And one Betty didn’t remember.

‘Hey.’ Robin started to cross the narrow street, calling back over his shoulder. ‘Lemme just check this out.’

It was, at first glance, another bookshop, but it had more than books in the window. Behind the guides to the town and the castle were posters and certificates. One said Hay Order of Chivalry beside a picture of a man on a horse. A small flask was labelled Royal Tipple. There was also a picture of Henry VIII with no beard, a different face and glasses.

A red robe hung in the window. It had a fleece trim, like the one around the rim of the crown, which seemed to be made of thin, bevelled copper with a scattering of what looked like glass scabs. Robin pointed at the orb below the crown.

‘That’s gotta be out of a toilet! Am I right?’

‘It’s an old ballcock, Robin.’

Betty glanced up at the sign. The shop was called The King of Hay. In the centre of the window was the King’s autobiography.

Richard Booth, My Kingdom of Books.

The man on the book cover wore the robe and the tin crown and carried the orb made out of a cistern component. Books were piled around him. In the background you could see part of the castle and the foothills of the Black Mountains.

‘I’m going in,’ Robin said.

‘No…’

Betty was grabbing for his arm, but it was too late. She stood uneasily in the open doorway, listening to him talking to a woman and a bulky man of mature years who occasionally grunted. Robin was nodding at the crown.

‘It really safe to leave that in the window? All those jewels?’

‘Hmph,’ the bulky man said. ‘Could be right. Might not be easy to find another poodle collar.’

His laugh was the kind of laugh you rarely heard any more. It’s a guffaw, Betty thought, as Robin took down a copy of My Kingdom of Books.

‘This second-hand?’

‘Bugger off,’ the bulky man said.

Robin came out grinning, cradling the book he’d bought at full price, and the future was spinning in Betty’s inner vision and not all of it – she’d have to admit this – was optimistic.

4

Needs

BEREAVEMENT APPARITIONS WERE the most common and least-alarming of all reported paranormal phenomena. The recently dead husband pottering translucently in his greenhouse, the much-loved cat on the stairs.

Seldom scary. The cats you were inclined to leave alone. They seemed happy enough and didn’t leave gutted mice on the doormat.

Close relatives seeing the ghosts of known people… this was usually comforting, one of the mechanisms of mourning. You would try and explain it, you’d offer comforting prayers. Then you’d do what you could to help it all fade into a warm memory.

More complicated were the guilt-trips, remorse externalized. Perhaps the dead person had been neglected, unvisited or even abused. Usually, the person reporting the sightings was in need of counselling.

Merrily had spoken to other Deliverance ministers who thought virtually all bereavement apparitions were down to psychological projection.

Understandable, but a bit patronizing.

‘You don’t disbelieve me, then,’ Sylvia Merchant said. ‘You don’t think I’m deranged.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘In which case – two questions here – do you believe I actually saw what I’ve described to you? And do you believe that what I saw was the spirit of Alys Nott?’

What was this?

Merrily tried to sit up straight; the chair wouldn’t let her. It was as if it was pointing her at the depression in the pillow on the empty pale-green bed. A dent which, obviously, might have been made by Sylvia Merchant, reverently lying on her companion’s bed. As anyone might do, at some time, in these circumstances.

‘Well… as we met for the first time less than half an hour ago,’ Merrily said, ‘and I can tell you’re not looking for platitudes, it would probably be irresponsible for me to give you an unequivocal answer. The truth is I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps,’ Ms Merchant said softly, ‘you would want to consult a psychiatrist before forming an opinion?’

This was well out of the box. You listened, you comforted, you explained. You didn’t expect to have to explain yourself before you started. The way this was going, she’d be quietly asked for a written estimate.

‘In a case of apparent demonic possession, I’d be obliged to consult a psychiatrist. Otherwise, I’d be unlikely to go near one.’ Time to turn it round. ‘What do you think you saw?’

‘But I know what I saw. I know who I saw.’ Said in a calm, explanatory way, no stridency. ‘It was not a dream. It was not an hallucination. It was not some by-product of sleep-paralysis. I am not a stupid woman.’

Merrily nodded.

‘Has it happened since? Anywhere else.’

‘It’s happened twice more. No, three times.’

‘Is there a pattern?’

‘No. Once was in town. I saw her reflection, very clearly, in the window of a restaurant we used to frequent. The third and fourth times were like the first. In the bed.’

When they kept coming back… that was when an unease set in. As an indication of survival, once was enough, maybe twice to make it less easy to dismiss as imagination. But the third time…

‘How clearly did you see her, Ms Merchant?’

Never once had she said, ‘Call me Sylvia’.

‘As clearly as I see you.’

‘And – sorry if this seems a ridiculous question – but was the duvet disturbed? As it would be if someone was lying under it?’

‘I think I’d have noticed if it wasn’t. If it was just a smiling, disembodied head, that would be the stuff of trashy horror films, wouldn’t it?’

‘Mmm… possibly. When you say—’

‘And I feel her presence. That’s most of the time, wherever I am.’

‘That’s… not unusual.’

‘The visual manifestation…’ Sylvia Merchant was still, unblinking ‘… that is clearly harder for her to achieve.’

An expert. Oh dear. It was never a good thing when, instead of feeling sympathy, hand-holding, looking for ways to make it seem less like a haunting, more like a reassurance, you were continually made aware of the surreal nature of the job.

‘Erm… when you said her eyes were without light…’

Did you mean she looked as if she was dead?

Ms Merchant waited. Merrily drew breath.

‘Ms Merchant… why did you want me to come today?’

‘Because I’m a Christian. Because we’re both Christians. Because we’re members of the Hereford Cathedral congregation.’

‘Well, yes…’

‘And because I would expect someone in your position to have had considerable experience of the earthbound dead.’

Merrily stared at her.

You don’t really want me at all, do you? You want a bloody medium.

‘Ms Merchant, you’re… clearly familiar with a certain terminology.’

‘I’ve read widely. I’ve been head teacher at schools where Christian worship was observed. Something now frowned on. My attitude to this was, I suspect, one reason I was offered early retirement.’

‘Mmm. The way things have been going for quite a while. Look, can I…? You keep referring to Alys in the present tense. As if you’re not sure she’s gone.’

‘Of course she isn’t gone.’ Faint lines of disapproval were deepening either side of Sylvia Merchant’s mouth. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to convey to you.’

‘You… obviously don’t want her to be gone.’

‘She needs me. As I’ve needed her. On a number of levels. She very quickly became the best secretary, the best assistant I’d ever had. And then the best friend.’

Apart from the traffic, silence. Ms Merchant had reached a point beyond which she saw no reason to continue.

‘She died quite suddenly,’ Merrily said.

‘Very suddenly and unexpectedly. Didn’t want to go. Robbed of nearly half a life. She didn’t – and doesn’t – want to go.’

‘I’m sorry, but… it’s not easy for you to know that, is it?’

‘I do know. It’s entirely clear to me.’

‘Although you must also recognize, from your reading, that it’s not… natural.’

‘And how do you know that, Mrs Watkins?’

God. Never before, in a bereavement situation, had she faced a theological inquisition.

All she could give was the stock answer.

‘All religions take the view that the spirit, after death, moves on. Wants – and needs – to move on. Sometimes… there might be problems of withdrawal. For example – and I’m not qualified to express an opinion on this – but if Alys thinks your life will be unliveable without her, she might be held back. It could be up to you to help her.’

‘I intend to help her.’

‘And… I can help you to do that. If you like.’

‘And what would you advise?’

‘Well… there are situations – and this is far more common with parents who’ve lost children – where the child’s room is preserved as a shrine. Which is understandable, but not, long term, a good idea. The shrine should be… in the parent’s mind. Where the nature of it will usually be changed by time. Whereas the bedroom shrine will only come to resemble a museum.’

‘The bed.’

Sylvia Merchant was on her feet. She was very tall.

Merrily said, ‘An empty bed… waking up to an empty bed… keeping an empty bed in the same room…’

‘You’re saying I should get rid of Ms Nott’s bed?’

‘I can help you… if you like… to move it into another room?’

‘Why would I want that?’

‘She didn’t die in it, did she? She died in hospital. You could sell the bed. Or give it away. There are places always looking for good furniture.’

‘It is not an empty bed,’ Ms Merchant said.

Merrily said nothing. The shadow fronds of a willow tree in the garden wavered on the lemon wall above the beds. She felt constricted in the typist’s chair. Had the chair always been here, or had it been brought up after Alys Nott’s death?

‘I don’t understand, Sylvia. Why did you want me to come? Why me?’

‘Because I’m a Christian. Because we’re both Christians. Because there was no one to pray for her when she died. I’d like you to pray for her now.’

‘I’m sorry. Of course I will.’

Prayers. She could do that. No formal ritual at this stage. You could devise your own, as mild or as explicit as you felt necessary. The prayers would be for peace. And afterwards you might leave written prayers behind. Simple lines which could be uttered like a mantra. And then there might be further visits. Aftercare. And, gradually, the atmosphere would change.

Or it should.

‘Here?’ Merrily said. ‘Now?’

‘If you wish.’

‘Do you think I could alter the positioning of this chair?’

Sylvia Merchant smiled.

‘It won’t. That’s the position Ms Nott had it for years.’

‘Right.’

For a moment, Merrily found it hard to draw breath and sprang up, too quickly, from the chair.

A moment later, the chair creaked.

God.

Sylvia Merchant’s eyes were alight.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘we are all here. The three of us.’

5

Fix it

THAT EVENING, ROBIN read the book, Betty read the tarot.

Outside, kids were yelling and neighbours mowing their tidy, right-angled lawns, the ones that hadn’t been turned into extra parking space for their goddamn people-carriers.

This bungalow – Robin despised it – was attached to another one and built on an estate near Kington, fifteen or so miles from Hay. Pink-brick suburbia made all the worse for having empty hills tantalizingly on the horizon.

After supper, the sky reddening, they lit a fire in the small woodstove they’d installed to save on oil, and Betty sat on the rug near the legs of Robin’s chair and felt the excitement around him like ground mist.

‘See, this guy… a legitimate hero.’

‘Another one?’

‘This is the real thing,’ Robin said. ‘This matters.’

He hadn’t been sure if the man he’d talked to in the King of Hay shop – older than the man on the front of the book – had actually been the King of Hay and hadn’t dared ask. Robin was strangely shy with people he thought he might admire. But now he was halfway into the autobiography and sure on both counts.

‘I just didn’t know the half of this. You hear about the King, you think it’s a pisstake. Which, OK it was. Until it became majorly serious.’

He stared into the stove, the flames still yellow. Robin saw the stove as an essential energy source, like all the books on their shelves, soon to be turned into a different kind of energy.

Betty thought the King of Hay had just looked like some overweight, ageing bloke, detecting no obvious charisma, but…

‘OK… tell me.’

Richard Booth – later Richard Coeur de Livres – had grown up at Cusop, the strung-out village just on the English side of Hay. Back in the early 1960s, when Hay was a run-down farmers’ town, sinking into an economic ditch, he’d bought the old town fire station for seven-hundred pounds, opening an antique shop there.

‘But his business took off,’ Robin said. ‘Like really took off… when he switched to second-hand books.’

Booth loved books and books seemed to love Booth, and it was a slow explosion. In the years that followed, he opened bookstore after bookstore, building the town an international reputation as the place where you could find a book on anything you wanted, without paying through the nose.

Other book dealers moved in, and Booth bought the castle – part medieval, part mansion house, Jacobean through to Victorian – which also got filled up with books. Pretty soon, Hay had became a unique town with a whole new economic basis, a level of self-sufficiency unknown, not only in these parts, but anywhere in the UK.

‘Books had become like the currency of Hay.’

‘Well, yes,’ Betty said. ‘That’s nice, but—’

‘Nice? It was magic! And not in a pretentious way, because he wasn’t some nose-in-air, asshole-scholar type. At one stage, the books that nobody wanted, he even sold them as fuel… for burning?’

‘Would Mr Oliver be happy about that, you think?’

‘Oliver didn’t fit. Kapoor said that. Oliver was too Establishment. Booth’s Hay was outside all of that. He’d kick-started the economy of a town that was stagnating, and it was pulling visitors again – book tourists. OK, in a small way at first. Calls it trickle-tourism. The town doesn’t get swamped, it just builds steadily. But then the big guys get interested – the national chains, the Welsh development agencies, the Wales Tourist Board. Offering the kind of big money grants which your average entrepreneurs just grab and run with, milk the agencies for all they can get then move on when the grants dry up. But that…’

Robin was on the edge of his chair cushion, his hair in spikes.

‘…was precisely what Booth did not do. Sees these agency guys with their chequebooks and their government support and their big shit-eating smiles, and he’s like, FUCK OFF!’

Betty grinned. It was at times like this that Robin was able to forget his smashed pelvis, his wonky spine. She laid her head against his knees as he described how, as part of a battle to keep the town entirely local, beat off the national chains and the government agencies, Richard Booth and his supporters had decided that Hay, this ancient once-walled town which sat right on the border of Wales and England, should declare itself independent of both.

And that he should be its king.

Sure, it had started out as a kind of joke. There were Hay passports and HAY car-plates, and King Richard was bestowing honours on supporters, giving them Hay titles. Attracting the kind of free worldwide publicity that his powerful enemies on the tourist and development boards would’ve had to pay out millions for.

A sharp elbow in the ribs of the Establishment. A defiant finger in the face of the organized politics.

‘Guy’s a goddamn genius.’

Building on the fame, a father and son team from a neigh-bouring village, Norman and Peter Florence, had started a small festival of literature which, at first, Richard Booth opposed on the basis that it was promoting new rather than second-hand books. But within a few years – because things happened here – it was pulling in the best part of a hundred thousand people to hear the world’s greatest writers and thinkers. Finally winning Booth’s blessing around the time Bill Clinton had arrived in a smoke-glassed limo to address the world from a huge marquee in the grounds of Hay Castle, calling the festival the Woodstock of the Mind.

And when the crowds went home and the tents came down, it was still this small, once-walled medieval town that sold cattle feed and local honey between the second-hand books.

‘But now something’s slipping away?’ Betty said.

‘Like everyplace. Greedy bankers, idiots in government, the Internet collapsing high streets. Then the King’s health breaks down and he doesn’t get to spend as much time here. The castle goes on the market, and now it’s in the hands of a trust which may or may not pull it together. And the ideas that took the town on to a new level are just… running down.’

‘So it needs… us?’

Oh God. Robin was viewing his possible encounter with the King as a sign of converging destinies.

‘Needs people with commitment to more than their own bank accounts. Needs reconnecting to its energy-source.’

This was Robin, seeing everything in mystical terms. Betty thought it would have been so much easier if they’d come here a few years ago, before they’d bought a farmhouse with a ruined church on it and Robin’s body had been smashed by falling masonry.

‘We should go back,’ Robin said. ‘Gotta be some other place for rent.’

‘Let’s wait awhile, see what happens.’

‘That’s what you had from the tarot?’

Betty said nothing. Although the tarot was just points of reference, a way of seeing what, deep down, you already knew, it still scared Robin.

‘Could be like old times,’ he said. ‘Like the first apartment.’

The first apartment was when he’d followed her home to the UK after they’d met at a Wiccan international moot in Salem, Mass. Robin attending as an exhibitor of artwork for pulp fantasy novels, Betty as… well, as a witch. A sublime witch, Robin used to say, with hair like a cornfield in the warm days before the harvest, telling her how he’d felt his whole being drawn into a vortex of obsessive love… and something more, something epic and mythological that he could evoke in gouache and coloured inks but would never understand.

The way Betty saw it, him following her home to England, embracing paganism, had been like going to live in his own artwork. Which was fine, until the lucrative Lord Madoc series had suddenly been terminated and the other cover-artwork it had brought in began to tail off in the wake of a betrayal that made you realize that no religion run by human beings should ever be trusted.

‘Of course, we were young, then,’ Betty said.

‘We’re still young.’

‘What’s left of us.’

‘OK,’ Robin said angrily, ‘we’ll stay here. You can aspire to three days a week on the checkout and I can sit on my sorry ass trying to paint over the sound of lawnmowers and… and life grinds on.’

It was a matter of supreme irony to Robin that he now had an actual sorry ass.

‘OK, we’ll go tomorrow,’ Betty said.

The entry to Back Fold was facing them next morning as they came out of the parking lot, but they ignored it, heading up an adjacent short track that led around the castle and accessed stone steps leading down through its grounds to the marketplace.

At the bottom of the castle hill, there were unattended open-air bookshelves full of cheap books they relied on visitors’ honesty to pay for. Used to be books all over the castle itself, Robin told Betty – at least the parts you were allowed into without a hard hat. And down in the town even the shops that weren’t bookstores – the antique shops, the jeweller’s – all sold a few books as well.

Books had become the town’s circulation system. Carrying the energy, the mojo.

‘You take out books,’ Robin said, ‘you’re weakening the system. You’re inviting, like, entropy. So whatever they do to this castle, books need to be part of it. Crucial.’

Betty looked up at the castle. They were under the heavy medieval tower, with massive oak doors in the portcullis opening. Doors so huge and damaged they could even be original. A shudder took Betty by surprise; a voice from the square stopped her thinking about it.

‘Mr and Mrs Thorogood.’

A very dry, very Home Counties voice. Betty turned slowly.

‘Mr Oliver.’

‘So you’re back.’ He was in an Edwardian-length jacket, a suede hat with a turned down brim. ‘Still looking for a shop? I confess I didn’t think you were particularly serious about acquiring a lease on mine.’

‘I tend not to do things for laughs.’ Robin leaned on his stick. ‘Any more.’

‘Then I apologize. As you can imagine, there are passing tourists who just get it into their heads that they’d like to be booksellers.’

‘Time wasters,’ Betty said bluntly. ‘We’re not.’

‘I looked you up on the Internet,’ Mr Oliver said. ‘I didn’t realize you designed book covers.’

‘Just did the paintings for them,’ Robin said.

This was before publishers discovered Photoshop and no longer wanted to pay artists. He didn’t talk much about that.

‘Your designs for the Waugh reissues,’ Mr Oliver said. ‘Coincidentally, we sold one a few weeks ago. Alec, not Evelyn.’

Betty smiled, recalling how, when Robin had first been offered these Waugh covers, he’d asked her if Alec and Evelyn were husband and wife.

Mr Oliver said. ‘We… began by specializing in literary first editions but, sadly, there are not as many collectors as there used to be. Nor, indeed, as many bestselling literary writers.’

Betty saw Robin’s mouth opening, probably to say something like, fuck literary, just go with the flow, and shot him a warning glance. Robin shut his mouth, went loose.

‘Look,’ Mr Oliver said. ‘I don’t know how much time you have, but… ah… there may be a basis for discussion.’

All right, it wasn’t in totally great condition. There was some damp in the walls, and damp wasn’t good for books. Caused foxing – was that the term for the brown marks on the edges of pages? But damp could be dealt with… eventually.

Betty said. ‘If we decided to go ahead, how long would it take to draw up a lease?’

Mr Oliver’s hands opened out.

‘Drawn up already, Mrs Thorogood. Just a question of your agreeing to the terms.’

Interesting. When did that happen – before or since he’d checked them out on the Net? Robin was trying to catch Betty’s eye, but she kept looking at Mr Oliver, choosing the best time to hit him with Kapoor’s suggestions about rent and repairs. She pointed to the stairs.

‘Perhaps one more look at the living accommodation before we go away and think about it?’

Upstairs, it looked… OK. The rooms were not huge and the windows were small, but it was clean and the taps worked. The whole building had evidently been a barn at one time, and the upstairs was the loft. Must have been converted to living accommodation quite some while ago; there was a small fireplace, probably early twentieth century, another upstairs, now sealed off. Pity, it was cold up here.

Too cold? She went still, slowed her breathing. Robin must have seen her arms drop to her sides; he raised an eyebrow.

Betty shook herself.

‘So has this ever actually been living accommodation for you, Mr Oliver?’

Mr Oliver said he and his wife had a house on the outskirts of the town. Clearly it had provided living accommodation for someone in the not-too-distant past – note the replaced wiring, the extra power points, the TV aerial socket.

‘It’s a bit… compact, isn’t it?’ Betty said. ‘We’d have to put some of our furniture in store. Or sell it.’

‘I will admit,’ Mr Oliver said, ‘that I never thought of anyone actually living here. Wouldn’t deny that life could be a trifle cramped.’

‘For a while, anyway,’ Robin said. ‘Until we make enough money to turn upstairs into more book rooms. You ever think of that?’