There are two members of the Welsh constabulary sitting in my cottage, drinking Twinings Earl Grey. I find myself unable to take them entirely seriously. The man, a detective sergeant, is tapping his pen impatiently against his notepad, his digits smeared with cheap ink; the woman, a detective constable, pats her mousey perm. I feel a sense of the unreal, of observing myself from afar, as though I have been forced to participate in some low-budget crime drama playing out on a television channel on a Sunday night, dissected by adverts for washing powder and dental shine.
In a review of my 2010 novel The Priest, the Daily Telegraph observed that I have ‘a telling eye for minutiae’. In other words, the reviewer seemed startled by my apparent willingness to engage in rudimentary research for my novels. I studied the weather forecast with care in the weeks before Jaime was due; I was able to change the date of his interview on an easy whim, my publishers attributing this to my habitual truculence. The snow had fallen for three consecutive days when he arrived. Nature was my accomplice, covering his tracks by the end of the day. When I informed the police that he had left my cottage at seven o’clock that evening, it was entirely plausible that his footprints were buried beneath the soft kiss of snow.
And yet, still, they return, and we go over the details again, and again. 310
‘You stated in your previous interview that Jaime Lancia left the cottage at seven p.m.,’ says the sergeant. ‘And yet now you state it was seven thirty …’
‘At my age,’ I reply, my voice quavering, ‘one becomes muddled so easily …’
I am obviously a poorer actor than I imagined, for the two exchange looks, and I detect that the woman’s sympathetic expression is merely a veil covering steel. Suddenly I have a sense of reality cutting into the farce, of the threat that knuckles me. Claustrophobia has afflicted me since I was a boy. Being condemned to a cell would result in me tearing sheets into strips to fashion a noose for myself; and then there is the horrifying thought of them combing through my precious papers, their smears on my Montblanc.
We continue to circle through the same questions for another ten minutes, when, through my window, I see a figure on my lawn, prancing in the melting snow. Ryan, a young village farmer, who has a predilection for spicing his mind with LSD. He regularly trespasses on my grounds, giggling and gallivanting as I shout threats from my window. Scapegoat: a word coined in the sixteenth century, describing the animal on which communal sins were placed before its slaughter. Ryan might become my ritual sacrifice.
‘He is here most days, I am afraid … Taunting me, threatening violence. Which reminds me …’ My voice gathers pace and volume with the excitement of feigned recollection. ‘Ryan was here the night Jaime Lancia interviewed me. I saw him waiting under the shadow of the oak as Jaime left, now that I think on it.’
‘Really?’ the woman adds the note to her pad. 311
‘This is the first time you have mentioned this,’ the sergeant asserts, but I see the gleam in his eye.
‘Ryan once threw a stone through my conservatory window,’ I add. ‘I reported the matter to the police. You can check your files – I believe it was around three years ago.’
Why, this is all coming together rather nicely. They are already reassessing me, comparing my elderly frame to Ryan’s strapping physique. I am being shrunk back down to a harmless old fool. A sudden urge to giggle assails me and I swallow it down with a mouthful of tea.
As they rise, the woman’s face frets with uncertainty. She stops, turns and reaches for her bag. Then, despite the frown of her superior, she withdraws a copy of Glossop Inn, and requests a signature for her son. After they have departed, I sit and laugh and laugh and listen to the sound echo and fade. Dorothea jumps on to my lap and I stroke her softly into a state of somnambulistic peace.
I am massaging Rachel’s shins gently, in order to prevent muscle wastage while she lies in her swoon, when I suddenly experience a sensation of déjà vu. I recall how I once gave Mr Gwent the same treatment when he lay in my cottage, his ankles growing more stark by the day as his body weight decreased. Each morning I resolved to wake him, only to find myself too enchanted with plotlines I could ensnare him in.
I remember the day that fate first brought us together. A decade ago, with The Priest on the Booker shortlist, and the bookies giving me the highest odds – eight to ten – to win, I found myself at a dinner party in Hampstead. Those were the days when I attempted to persuade myself that a connection with my fellow Homines sapientes might be possible. The guests 312were showering praise on each other and scorn on their rivals. In the midst of a discussion about new, upcoming critics, a Mr Gareth Saint (he has been Mr James Gwent for so long now, it feels odd to call him by this name), a science fiction author I had barely heard of, gave me his sincere condolences on the patronising review I had just received in the Sunday Times. It declared that I was doomed to forever remain a Booker bridesmaid, having at that time been shortlisted seven times, because my fatal literary flaw was my ‘poor’ characterisation. I responded tartly with a quote from Nabokov: ‘Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic’s intelligence, or honesty, or both.’ Gwent had the grace to look mortified. He was eager to stress how much he adored my novels, but the damage had been wrought: a crack had opened in my mind.
Two days later, I sat at the Booker dinner and even before the announcement was made, the cold shock of inevitable failure was upon me. I remained nonchalant in public; while in private I raged, wept, fasted and prayed. Sleep eluded me for a week. Suddenly my literary process seemed laughable – that interview where I had discussed how I might spend an hour toying with the placement of a semicolon or a full stop! In order to alchemise a gift into genius, to fly as close to the sun as one can, to reach those dizzying heights that immortalised Beethoven, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, what must one sacrifice? I was humbled, reduced to childlike terror, willing to do anything: play Faustus, make pacts.
In the end, it was Gwent, fittingly, who supplied my solution. I adopted him as a ‘friend’, listened to his burbles on quantum physics – consciousness as a field, ideas of entanglement – and William Blake’s lines on cleansing the doors 313of perception. How might such a theory be utilised, I pondered. A few days on, catching a butterfly between my palms, its beating wings a thrill, I considered how I might capture a human psyche in the same manner. I consulted religious tracts and spiritual texts; one must sift carefully through ancient wisdom, discard New Age-style twaddle and extract the pearls of true profundity. My revelation came in the form of a Welsh manuscript, the Meddygon Myddfai, a collection of medieval medicinal treatises. How my heart quickened when I reached a chapter which detailed how a musician had sought to enshrine his wife through a song – not through sentimental lyrics, mark you, but by preserving her consciousness in its coda; how the man’s son, a poet, had in turn immortalised his father in both verse and spirit, so that the family line was known as anfarwol, immortal. The listed herbs could be found on Bardsey Island – my very own birthplace – and famed for the twenty thousand saints buried in its soil. I took a boat there three times over the course of one year, plucking plants appropriate to each season – mandrake, corn bellflower, sharp dock and river startip – and used the Grand Kuding as a base for my tonic. My first guinea pig was a dog. A shaggy creature who drank the tea I placed in a bowl for him, and whose consciousness entered a short story that I penned that afternoon.
The day that I found Gareth Saint’s heart had stopped came as more of a shock to me than it ought to have done; in my folly, I had imagined that my pen had made him immortal. I returned to my desk in a despondent mood, only to discover that his consciousness still beat, still breathed within the confines of Mr Gwent. I have neglected to avenge myself on him for stealing Rachel and Jaime from me; potential punishments that I might inflict remain a list in my notebook. For this is 314the rub: when a torture victim becomes fully acquainted with the methods of their tormentor, the element of surprise is lost. There is little fun to be had with Gwent anymore. I require fresh blood.
I continue to massage Rachel’s ankles. The protrusion of bone through the papery skin of my hands, such a contrast to the sweet bloom of her flesh, begins to disturb me. I suffered a cancer scare last year; an operation the year before; my body mocks me, daily. Thomas Turridge might be my swansong, my last hope of glory. Yet still they desert me and wander in distant narratives, no more than vague shapes on the horizon of my consciousness.
My telephone remains silent. A fortnight later, the newspapers report that a Mr Ryan Walsh has been arrested on suspicion of murdering Jaime Lancia, ‘while the hunt for his body continues’. The Fates have blessed me. I remove their bodies from the basement and, with great effort and pain, carry them upstairs to the guest bedroom, where I lay them on the four-poster like a prince and a princess, the sun falling through the window forming haloes around their heads.