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Overview
Then Gilchrist’s flatmate, Kate Simpson, discovers that acts of sacrilege and grave robbing have been routinely taking place in Brighton and the surrounding villages. And ex-Chief Constable Bob Watts is puzzling over inscriptions in his late father’s books. Specifically, books by occult writers Dennis Wheatley, Colin Pearson - and the feared Aleister Crowley, cremated in Brighton in 1947.
Old Religion and New Age collide and the body count mounts as the Devil’s Moon slowly rises …
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847514851 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Severn House |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2015 |
| Series: | Brighton Series , #4 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
As the rain pelted down, Sarah Gilchrist splish-splashed along the narrow passage of Meeting House Lane, focused on avoiding a poke in the eye from one of the jumble of umbrellas around her. That meant she was off guard when the large fish fell on her head and almost knocked her down.
Not that she would normally be on her guard against fish. She stopped and looked down at it, dead in the puddle at her feet. She looked up at the rooftops to find the joker who had dropped it on her. Another fish slapped her in the face and slid away.
Shielding her head with her hand, she looked around. People were crying out and ducking as a hail of fish of all shapes and sizes rained down on them.
What the hell? The fish were not being dropped or thrown by anyone. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them were falling out of the sky.
Gilchrist pushed through to the junction with Union Street, fish pelting her as she went, and ducked into the Bath Arms. The staff and the early-morning drinkers were all at the window, gazing out open-mouthed or filming the surreal sight with their phones. One alert staff member pulled on the pub door and hooked it open.
The others laughed as he called into the street: 'Don't you even know enough to come in out of the fish?'
Gilchrist laughed too, though her neck and her head ached. Ludicrous as it sounded, those fish hurt. They were heavy and hit with force. The hail of them was doing real damage. People were being beaten to the ground. Some people just slipped and slithered as the lane filled up with fish. There was panic in the confined space.
The fish were all shapes and sizes, all colours. They were already dead as they dropped from the sky. All except for these long, writhing creatures with heads the size of watermelons and fearsome-looking jaws.
Conger eels.
Gilchrist watched, horrified, as a shower of them plummeted on to the crowded lane, jaws snapping, tails thrashing. They crashed through umbrellas and bore people to the ground beneath their weight. There was terrified screaming.
One eel, about four feet long, dropped like lead on to the shoulders of a teenage girl and sent her reeling into the window of the jeweller just across from the pub. The glass shattered and girl and eel both fell into the window display.
A jangling alarm blared out as jewellery fell into the street. Girl and eel sprawled, half in, half out of the window. Gilchrist could see jagged shards of glass sticking up from the base of the window frame but hoped the girl's thick waterproof was protecting her.
Gilchrist watched, stupefied, as people ignored the fish falling on their heads to grab at the jewellery in the window and on the lane. She was astonished when the girl who had fallen into the window reared up, screaming, but with fistfuls of jewellery in her hands. She stumbled away, clutching her loot, blood streaming down her face.
The jewellery shop manager came to the shop doorway to remonstrate with those people scrabbling for his silver watches and brooches and necklaces. He tried to snatch the jewellery back. Someone pushed him in the chest and he fell into the shop.
Gilchrist barged out of the pub and over to the shop, her boots slithering on the fish and the slick of water in the lane. 'Police officer!' she called. 'Make way.'
'Go fuck yourself,' a fat man snarled. As she looked towards him he shouldered her away. She lost her footing and fell towards the broken window. She reached out a hand to stop her fall. It landed on the slick skin of the eel. She grabbed the door frame with her other hand and steadied herself.
As Gilchrist did so, the eel whipped its head round and sank its teeth into her hand. She snatched her arm back and stood looking in horror at the eel dangling from the web of her skin between thumb and first finger. She shook her arm feebly to dislodge the eel but all it did was lash its tail. Blood dripped off Gilchrist's hand. The pain was intense.
Gilchrist shrieked. The alarm shrieked. Fish fell from the sky. Looters jostled each other for a share of the jewellery shop spoils.
Gilchrist prised at the jaws one-handed. She was surprised the eel, out of water, showed no sign of expiring. It was strong and every time it writhed it dragged at her flesh. She had a sudden thought that an eel might be like those dogs whose jaws remain clamped shut even after death.
Gilchrist looked at the jagged glass sticking out of the window frame. She swept her hand towards it, dragging the heavy fish with her. She tried to impale it on the broken shard. The eel, as if sensing what she was trying to do, released her hand. It thrashed its tail and slithered to the ground.
Gilchrist fell back against the doorjamb. The hubbub continued around her. Holding her throbbing hand, she let her head fall back and looked up at the roiling sky. At least it had stopped raining fish.
'You're listening to Simon Says on Southern Shores Radio, in case you thought you'd died and gone to heaven. Well, talk about being slapped in the face with a wet fish. The people of Brighton were stunned earlier this morning when fish rained down on them from a clear sky. But it's no laughing matter. So far, three people have died and at least forty people have been treated at Sussex County Hospital for cuts and bruises and shock as the fish – some weighing up to twenty-five pounds – plummeted down on the centre of town. One man had his skull crushed by a conger eel weighing seventy-five pounds; another of the dead was hit by a bass and a third was killed by a falling pollack ...'
Kate Simpson looked into the studio. Simon was corpsing. He'd spun on his chair away from his microphone and was trying to control his giggles. Inevitably that meant there was going to be a big explosion when he failed to do so. She flicked a switch and spoke into the microphone on her producer's desk.
'Hi everyone, apologies for the sudden silence here at Southern Shores Radio but Simon is having a coughing fit. As he said, the lethal fish fell from a clear sky and included pollack, bream, cod, mackerel, bass, ling, thornback rays, tope and smoothhound.' She stopped for a moment then gasped, 'Excuse me ...'
She'd forgotten that giggles, like yawns, are catching.
Sarah Gilchrist, listening to Southern Shores Radio in the waiting room in A&E, laughed at the silence that followed. It was clearly a Jim Naughtie moment. Watts had heard Naughtie's famous fit of the giggles when the Today programme presenter had made a classic spoonerism in his introduction to Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary, in the days before the politician became Minister for Murdoch and it didn't seem quite such a spoonerism.
Gilchrist could imagine first Simon then her flatmate, Kate Simpson, suffering in the same way. She looked down at her crudely self-bandaged hand and grinned. There was something inherently funny about being killed by a fish falling out of the sky.
This weather. The River Ouse, which ran through Lewes, had broken its banks and the meadows outside the town were lakes. Cliffe village, at the bottom end of town, was in danger of being flooded again as it had been in the nineties. All around Brighton there were posters from the Water Authority advising that despite the rain there was still a drought. 'Please be careful with our water' the posters said. Most had been defaced by the same graffiti in various styles: 'We will if you will.'
Marble and tiled floors in shopping centres and restaurants were so slippery they had turned into ice rinks. There were large puddles and small lakes on every road and street. Most sensible women had abandoned fashion raincoats and boots for rainwear that was actually waterproof, giving them all a certain bulky uniformity.
Of course, in Brighton, that still left a lot of not-so-sensible women – and men – getting soaked through on a daily basis.
Gilchrist had never had much vanity when it came to clothes – not much point in the days she was a uniformed copper weighed down with clobber – and she was tall enough never to need high-heeled boots and shoes except when she really wanted to intimidate.
The man sitting next to her gave her the slightest of nudges. 'Bloody biblical, that's what it is,' he said. 'It'll be frogs next.'
The man on the far side of him leaned forward to address them both. 'Long as it's not cats and dogs,' he said. 'If it rains the Rottweilers and bull terriers from the Milldean estate we've no bloody chance.'
Gilchrist smiled awkwardly. Milldean held only bad memories for her.
The man next to her nodded at her hand. 'Looks nasty, that hand. What did it?'
Gilchrist couldn't really be bothered but she didn't want to be rude. 'A conger eel bit me.'
'Nasty things them eels,' the other man said. 'They're quite the predator. Ugly looking things too. Expect you'll need a tetanus jab.'
She frowned. 'Not sure how tetanus from fish would work – it's usually linked to farms, isn't it?'
'You never heard of fish farms?' the man said, and Gilchrist couldn't work out from his expression whether he was being funny or not.
She looked at the gash on the side of the head of the man beside her. 'What clobbered you?' she asked.
He shrugged. 'Damned if I know. The only time I usually see a fish it's got batter on it.'
Gilchrist's mobile rang. 'Excuse me,' she said and stepped away.
'The chief constable wants to see you,' said the voice on the other end of the line. 'Tomorrow. Nine a.m. prompt.'
CHAPTER 2Ex-Chief Constable Bob Watts wandered aimlessly from room to gloomy room of his late father's Barnes Bridge house. His father, Donald Watts, aka bestselling thriller writer Victor Tempest, aka thorough bastard.
The house had a sour, old person's smell but it also smelled still of his father's bay rum aftershave. Watts looked in his father's wardrobe where the suits and jackets and shirts and trousers were all hung in neat rows. He examined at random cufflinks in surprising numbers in a leather box that also contained dress shirt studs, tiepins and even a worn brass ring. He wondered if it was his wedding ring. His father was of the generation that tended not to wear a wedding band.
Although he had loved his mother more, he didn't remember feeling this depth of emotion when she had died many years earlier. Given the tangled relationship he had with his father, this surprised him.
He walked over to the bookshelves and ran his fingers over the spines of the books. He had been working his way through his father's library, sorting out which books to sell and which to keep. His own small library of books was in store until he figured out where he wanted to live.
He glanced to his left out of the long window at the heavy rain and watched for a moment the brown tide of the Thames washing over the towpath. It had been raining solidly for a month.
He could live here, he knew, if he bought out his brother and sister. But he was a Brighton boy at heart and a river was no substitute for the sea, even if that river was the Thames.
Many of the books on the shelves were signed first editions with personal dedications to his father. Margot Bennett was most effusive in her inscription in her 1958 crime novel, Someone from the Past. Watts thought he could probably guess why.
His father had been a womanizer, no getting around that. His mother had been stalwart for the sake of the children although she must have felt so wretched at her husband's infidelities.
A recurring, puzzling memory was of a beautiful, enigmatic woman coming to their house once when the family was in the back garden. Watts, a teenager at the time, had been sent to let her in. He remembered vividly how sensual she'd seemed. How, back out in the garden, he saw her at the window and how she slowly faded as she withdrew into the room. How his mother looked up from her book and saw the woman at the window then looked fixedly back at her book again.
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Devil's Moon"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Peter Guttridge.
Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
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