Alchemist

  ‘Beautiful, don’t you think?’

  ‘Very.’ Monty looked up at him, wondering who it was.

  ‘My late wife,’ he said.

  She tried to contain her surprise.

  ‘We met in Vietnam – where I was a correspondent for Reuters and she was a reporter for Paris Match. One day we were with an American platoon heading towards a village where they suspected Vietcong were hiding out. A US air patrol mistakenly attacked us. Françoise was in a jeep a hundred yards ahead of me and was burned alive in front of my eyes; there was nothing I could do.’

  Monty read the sadness in his eyes, and let him go on.

  ‘Thirty-three years later I sometimes have difficulty recalling her face. But I can still smell her burning and I can still hear her screams – just as clearly as if it were only a few hours ago.’ His eyes dropped towards the carpet. ‘There are some chemical substances that no one should ever make. But someone will. Someone always will.’ He shook his head from side to side. ‘Profit, you see. There’s the devil.’

  He looked up suddenly, and grimaced. ‘I watched Françoise get out of that jeep and run across a paddy field like a human torch, covered head to foot in a burning jelly that had been manufactured by Bendix Schere for the United States Air Force.’ He blinked slowly. ‘The same company that manufacture creams for the relief of burns and which you can buy over the counter. The same company that makes pain relievers for arthritis, that makes suntan lotion, that donates millions to charities and to research. A Bendix Schere product made my wife’s skin slough off her body in front of me and I could do nothing to prevent it.’

  Monty found this man’s bitterness almost chilling in its intensity. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘The pharmaceutical industry has so much potential to do good, Miss Bannerman, but mostly it’s in the business of the ultimate alchemy: turning death into gold.’

  Wentworth heaved himself slowly to his feet, looked up at the ceiling as he did so and then dabbed at his eyes with his index finger. ‘Wooden beams. So good to see a room that still has them.’ He turned towards her. ‘I’m taking over this story myself, Miss Bannerman. I’m writing it from now.’

  ‘I’ll help you in any way I can.’

  He ambled out into the hall. ‘You are very kind, but I’m not sure it’s wise for you to remain involved.’

  She was quiet for a moment, thinking, and then told him that she was already far too involved just to walk away now. ‘But I don’t know how much use I can be.’

  ‘All I need to know at this stage is whether there’s a connection through Maternox between my daughter Sarah and the other two women who died.’ He hesitated. ‘You see Zandra Wollerton telephoned me on Thursday morning and told me she’d established that all three women had taken Maternox from the same batch. But I don’t know how large the batches are. I don’t know if that batch was different from the others. It obviously worries me very much that the two people involved in finding out more have both died within a day and a half of each other.’

  ‘That may be a tragic coincidence and nothing more,’ Monty offered.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Give me the batch number and I’ll keep working on this; I’ll be in touch as soon as I have anything.’

  ‘A word of warning,’ Wentworth said after he’d jotted down the serial number she needed. ‘Be careful about using any phone inside the company.’

  ‘Do you think they’re bugged?’

  ‘Put it like this, I’d be very surprised if they were not.’

  ‘Seriously? Every conversation?’

  ‘There are very sophisticated methods of monitoring such things. Possibly even employees’ homes.’ He stared pointedly at the telephone on the hall table. ‘Use a pay phone to contact me. I gave you my office and home numbers last time?’

  ‘Yes, I have them,’ she said, staring at him incredulously, his paranoia striking her as a little absurd.

  ‘Thank you for letting me barge in on you this evening.’ He looked down at the floor. ‘Such a fine carpet, what a beautiful thing to own. You are very fortunate.’

  She helped him into his raincoat, picked up a torch and opened the door. ‘It’s dark, I’ll show you to your car.’

  Both cats slunk past them and ran off into the garden. She switched on the torch and shone the beam on the small Nissan parked in the lane.

  Wentworth turned back to her. ‘I don’t want you to feel in any way obliged. If you wake up tomorrow and change your mind, I’ll understand. You’re young, with everything in front of you; I don’t want to be responsible for damaging your future.’ He eased himself into the driver’s seat.

  ‘I’m not put off.’ She smiled.

  ‘Please think about it carefully.’ He pushed the key into the ignition. ‘You know the Chinese proverb about revenge?’

  ‘No.’

  He was looking at her intently. ‘Before you seek revenge, first go out and dig two graves.’ Taking his time, he started the engine. ‘It’s different for me, you see, Miss Bannerman. I’ve no choice but to do this – you have no motive.’

  ‘You’re wrong, I do have a motive,’ she said. ‘I care very much about the pharmaceutical industry; I want it to be moral and responsible. If something foul is going on, I want it stopped. Sir Neil Rorke is a wonderful man. He would be appalled if there was something wrong in Bendix Schere, right under his nose. He’d not stand for it, I can tell you that, and I can go and see him any time.’

  ‘Don’t rush into anything. It’s always good to know one has an ally, but keep him in reserve for the time being. Let’s try to progress one step at a time.’

  She agreed and directed him with her torch to a clearing where he could turn, then watched his tail lights disappear towards the main road until only the dark ribbon of the empty track stretched out in front of her.

  Shivering with cold, Monty called out to the cats, then went back inside and locked the front door, checked that the back door was locked also, and began to check in turn each of the windows.

  Two people she had known, who were alive last week, were now dead. That really spooked her. It wasn’t possible that Bendix Schere could be involved in anything illicit, surely? Hubert Wentworth was just a sad case clutching at straws.

  Then she realized with a chill that in thinking that, she, too, might be clutching at straws.

  38

  Barnet, North London. 1951

  Daniel Judd had noticed the skull in the window of the junk shop many times from the upstairs window of the bus he took to school, which often stopped at the traffic lights just beyond.

  The shop was in a drab but busy thoroughfare, sandwiched between an ironmongery and a credit draper. The frontage was in peeling black paint, and the grimy glass of the unlit window displayed a haphazard assortment of books, decorative plates, cutlery, Toby jugs and general bric-à-brac.

  But what had really aroused his curiosity, beyond the fascination of the skull itself, was that he had also noticed a number of candelabras, chalices, figurines and ceremonial daggers – athames – which he thought he recognized from his library books as occult artefacts.

  He stood, hesitantly, on the pavement outside, and waited for a bus to pass. It was his mother’s coffee morning at church, but even so he was nervous she might for some reason come by. Or that one of her friends might see him.

  She had been much less violent to him in the five years since his father had died, and although he was no longer terrified of her, now that he knew he had the power over her, he still tried to avoid incurring her wrath. She had long ceased tying his hands to the bed, but there were still occasions when she hit him. Sometimes, bruised and in pain afterwards, he had contemplated using the ritual to kill her, but one of the main reasons he did not was because he found her a good subject on which to experiment, so he allowed her to continue to think, as he approached his seventeenth birthday, that he was still no different from the child he had always been.

 
He could use her to test the strength of spells which would induce nausea, spells that would make her lose her memory, ones that would get rid of her anger (only for short periods), ones that would bring her down with ailments, and even ones that would make her buy him particular presents for his birthday or Christmas, although some of the latter were a bit erratic.

  He had managed to get her to buy him the Encyclopaedia of Modem Science, and a copy of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, both of which she had previously always refused to have in the house, believing science to be evil and calling Darwin’s theory a hideous blasphemy. But his attempts at putting a message into her mind to buy him a candle-making kit, so that he could fashion effigies, had been a disaster: she had instead bought him a plaster of Paris modelling kit of famous British warriors.

  His biggest failure of all had been the spells he had cast to turn her against God. He had tried very hard, holding his own private black masses at home, using communion wafers secreted out of church, which he defiled with urine, excrement, semen and even, on one occasion, menstrual blood, which he had obtained from a sanitary towel he had retrieved from the bin in the bathroom.

  There was another reason to keep her alive. If she was dead or incapacitated, either of which conditions he was confident he could bring about quite easily, he would have to go and live with an uncle and aunt and share a room with his cousin, which was no good at all. Privacy was essential to his plans.

  Important exams were coming up over the next four years, and it was vital for him to work hard on the development of his powers. He practised obsessively, into the late hours every night, and sometimes right through the night; he had discovered that with proper control over his mind and body he could survive on only a couple of hours sleep a day for weeks on end.

  Early experiments on his teachers had been moderately successful, but the exam papers crucial to his future plans, the ones that would see him, gain a scholarship to university, would be marked by total strangers, whose names he did not even know. He would have to design talismans to wear, would have to cast spells on the ink he used, and stay in mental communication with that ink to reach through it into the minds of the examiners. It could be done. Anything was possible.

  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love under a strong will.

  The needlework words stared at him from the small sampler on the wall as he entered the shop. A bell pinged sharply as the door swung shut behind him, and Daniel felt suddenly very enclosed. There was a slightly sweet smell he recognized as incense, and he stared around in awe at the treasure trove of curios in the strange, church-like dark, his eyes alighting on a sword decorated with chains, a sinister wood carving on a plinth, a shelf of large, dusty volumes.

  Behind the counter an emaciated, beaky-looking woman, with dead straight hair pulled back in a ponytail, watched him with tiny, insect-like eyes.

  Blushing, Daniel turned away, reached behind a George VI Coronation mug and picked up a copy of a book called High Magic’s Aid by one of his heroes, Gerald Gardner. He opened it at random, aware of the eyes absorbing him like blotting paper.

  ‘You have a sharp aura for such a young fellow.’ The voice washed as gently as a wave of music through the silence.

  Startled, Daniel stared back at the counter. It was a man, he realized, not a woman. He had never seen a man with a ponytail before. ‘Thank you,’ he replied nervously, putting the book back.

  ‘I haven’t seen you here before.’

  He noticed the pentacle on a silver chain hanging over the man’s black shirt. ‘I haven’t been here before.’

  The man watched him in silence for some moments with a humorous glint in his eyes, then smiled warmly. ‘I would have noticed your aura if you had been here before, see.’

  Daniel was not sure how to take the remark, but the tone of it was friendly. ‘Thank you,’ he said again.

  ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘Daniel.’

  ‘God is my judge.’

  Daniel stared at him blankly.

  ‘That’s what Daniel means: God is my judge. All names have a meaning. Is God really your judge?’

  The question penetrated a nerve deep inside Daniel. He shook his head. ‘No, God is not my judge.’

  ‘I did not think so. Good! Daniel. Daniel.’ The man smiled and tilted his head back so that he was addressing the ceiling, and declaimed: ‘“A second Daniel, a Daniel, Jew! Now, infidel, I have thee on the hip.”’

  Daniel looked bewildered.

  ‘Merchant of Venice? Not read Shakespeare?’

  Daniel shook his head once more.

  ‘No? Well, there are more important things to read, for a boy with your aura, and you have been reading them, I’m sure, haven’t you?’

  Daniel nodded. As he did so, his eyes went to the shelf above the man’s head and picked out the title in gold lettering on the spine of a large green book: Barrett. The Magus. The words sent a frisson of excitement skittering through him.

  ‘But who’s been helping your development, Daniel? You have an adept?’

  He noticed the man’s fingers; they were bony, almost skeletal, the fingernails protruding an inch from the tip and painted black; above them a mass of bracelets were entwined on his wrist. Adept. He tried to think what the word meant, his eyes drawn back to the green book.

  ‘I’m sorry – I don’t understand what you mean.’

  The man watched him again, then a light seemed to sparkle in his eyes. Daniel could not tell whether it was humour or anger. He shifted his position on his chair, like a bird squatting on a perch, touched his forehead and said: ‘Ateh.’ He winked.

  Daniel understood, and beamed; a warmth, deeper than anything he had ever felt in his life, flooded through him at this sudden, intense communion with a total stranger. He touched his chest and responded: ‘Malkuth.’

  The man touched his right shoulder. ‘Ve-Geburah.’

  Daniel touched his left shoulder. ‘Ve-Geburah.’

  The man clasped his hands in front of him. ‘Le-olam.’ His eyes glazed as if he were in a trance. ‘Eko, Eko, Azarak.’

  ‘Eko, Eko, Zomelak,’ David responded.

  ‘Eko, Eko, Cernunnos.’

  ‘Eko, Eko, Aradia,’ Daniel said.

  The man took a deep breath then looked hard at Daniel. ‘You have no adept; but you want to learn? You want to develop? Is that why you’re here? You’ve come in quest of knowledge?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How badly do you want it, Daniel?’

  Daniel faced his questioner with a confidence he did not know he possessed. ‘I want it very badly.’

  ‘You want to develop more than anything in all the world?’

  Daniel thought, for a brief moment, about God. But there was something about this man that made him feel instinctively safe. As if he had met, for the first time in his life, someone who might understand his interest in the arcane, someone with whom he could discuss it with no fear of it getting back to his mother, someone he could trust.

  He needed that badly. There were many times in the past few years when he had sat in church and thought back to the night his father had died. Sometimes he really believed he had killed him, and he was glad. Other times, he became scared of what might happen to him. God was everywhere; they worshipped God in school, in Sunday school, on the wireless, in the newspapers. It seemed to him that everyone else in the entire world, except himself, loved God. Maybe his mother was right, and maybe his father had been right. Perhaps he was a sinner and would be condemned to eternal damnation.

  He had tried to bring up the subject of the occult and of alternatives to God with the vicar, but the vicar had looked shocked and merely spouted the same kind of biblical quotations as his mother. But here, now, in this shop with this strange-looking man, he experienced a deep sense of kinship. He had no fear and no guilt. He felt only a profound sense of having come home.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I do want to develop more than anything in the world.
’

  ‘You would like to join a coven, wouldn’t you, Daniel?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Good,’ the man said. Then he smiled. ‘I’m sure I can help you there. More than you know. Give me your hand.’

  Tentatively, Daniel proffered his right hand. The man took it, turned it over and studied the palm for some moments, then he closed his own fingers tightly into it. He squeezed hard and Daniel winced, stifling a cry of pain. Then the man released his grip and gave him a gentle squeeze on the shoulder.

  Daniel stared at his palm in shock. All five of the man’s nails had made tiny, half-moon incisions, through which blood was beginning to rise. But he felt no anger, only overwhelming gratitude; it was as though, by this act, the man had signalled he was accepting him.

  ‘You have very good blood, Daniel,’ the man said. ‘It flows fast and the colour is rich.’ He smiled again. ‘Do I make you nervous? Do not be afraid. Only those who have God by their side need be afraid.’

  ‘I’m not afraid.’

  The man turned, pulled The Magus off the shelf and laid it on the counter, then gestured Daniel to have a look at it.

  Daniel approached the thick, green tome, holding his breath in awe. Then he solemnly raised the cover and turned it over. On the inside was written, in pencil, the price. ‘£3.10s.’

  A fortune, Daniel thought. His pocket money was sixpence a week. He did a quick calculation. At twenty shillings to a pound, three pounds and ten shillings was seventy shillings. He would have to save for one hundred and forty weeks – nearly three years.

  ‘Would you like to buy the book? It’s an original – 1801. Very rare; if it was in better condition I would have to charge much more for it.’

  ‘I’d like it very much, but I can’t afford it at the moment. I only have seven shillings and four pence saved up. My father left me a little money but I can’t have that for another six years – when I’m twenty-one,’ he said wistfully, and turned to the index, hurrying in case the man took the book away again. Celestial Influences, The Occult Properties of Metals, Herbs and Stones. Alchymy, or Hermetic Philosophy. Talismanic Magic. Cabalistical Magic. Conjuration of Spirits. His heart began beating faster with excitement. It was all here, all in this book that he had read so much about.