The Deceit

26

By the time Karen was buzzing her cousin’s front door, in the frosty darkness of a January evening in suburban Muswell Hill, she realized she was nervous, like someone going on a date with someone very nice. Her heartbeat was raised, she was caffeinated by anxiety: the idea of seeing her daughter after two solid weeks of separation was exciting and disruptive.

That was one of the many things that surprised her about parenting: the way you loved your kids and missed them. She had, theoretically, expected to love her daughter when she arrived, but she hadn’t been prepared for the overwhelming rush of conflicting emotions when she’d taken little baby Eleanor home from hospital, the overpowering sense of gratitude and sudden vulnerability, the desperate happiness tinged with fear, the hallucinatory levels of paranoia: my God, my baby is choking on a grape; my God, she’s blind; my God, she’s like her father. Or her mother.

And as Eleanor had grown up Karen had learned that she actually liked her daughter, too. At six Eleanor was bubbly, good-natured and funny; sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. She could also be infuriating, and definitely headstrong. But she was a proper personality, a vibrant if tiny personality, and when Karen went to work she found she missed her daughter’s presence even as she breathed a sigh of relief that she could get on with business.

‘Hello?’

Karen pressed the buzzer for a third time. She could hear noises inside, the sounds of kids. Now the hallway light came on, the door was opened, and a tiny blonde tornado of love came shooting out of the door and jumped into Karen’s arms.

‘Mummy Mummy Mummy Mummy!’ Eleanor squeezed her so tightly Karen felt as if she was choking.

Alan stood in the door with the twins at his feet, smiling. ‘I see she missed you then.’

‘Didn’t!’ said Eleanor, as Karen laboriously unwrapped her daughter’s arms from her neck and set her down. As soon as Ellie was on the ground she wrapped her arms around her mother’s legs instead and said, ‘Mummy is cold, she needs some soup.’

Alan laughed, handing over several tons of kit. ‘Here’s her bags, and her clothes, they’re mostly washed.’

Karen thanked her cousin several times; he waved away her gratitude. ‘It’s been great, I told you: the twins love her.’

For several minutes the six-year-olds said goodbye to each other, mainly by lifting up their shirts and comparing the fake mermaid tattoos on their stomachs, then Karen kissed Alan, and Ellie kissed her cousins, Jake and Daisy, and mother and daughter got in the car and drove the few hundred yards to their smaller home, a garden flat, where Eleanor flung herself at her wooden toy train and the doll that said, ‘Hell’s bells’.

It was good to be home. With her daughter. In her pyjamas, reading Winnie the Pooh. When it was midnight, after two glasses of wine, Karen went into her daughter’s room and listened to her daughter’s breathing.

The sound was gratifying. Karen recalled an old Buddhist saying that her Detective Sergeant, Curtis, had once intoned to her:

‘What is the definition of happiness? Grandmother dies, mother dies, daughter dies, in that order.’

There was a profundity there. So Karen’s mother had died, but that was how it was meant to be; it wasn’t a tragedy, it was the way the world turned, it was sad but it was right. Feeling angered by it was like feeling angry at the arrival of autumn, or taking rainfall personally.

And children were the purest solace. Karen brushed her daughter’s hair from her frownless, worryless, six-year-old forehead, and wondered if she could give her only child a brother or sister. But doing that probably meant a man in her house, and something in her found that difficult. She liked the independence, she liked the need for self-reliance. I can do this. I don’t need anyone.

‘Goodnight, sweetheart.’ Karen kissed her sleeping daughter in the darkness and shut the door.

For the first time since her mother’s funeral, Karen slept properly and dreamlessly; and when she took her bonny daughter to school in the morning, Karen smiled at the other mums, and made a joke with the teacher, and when she arrived at work, in the busy offices of New Scotland Yard, she was very rested, and very eager to get on with the case.

DS Curtis was an affable red-haired Irishman of about her age, not entirely ambitious, but not lacking talent, either. He listened attentively as she went through the narrative. The cats, the suicide, the girl in the psych ward.

‘So, Karen, er, it’s not a homicide yet?’

Curtis always called her Karen. At the beginning of their working relationship they had experimented with his calling her ‘Ma’am’, but she’d decided that made her feel like an ancient dowager in a period drama, so they’d reverted to Karen.

He said, ‘I’m not quite sure why we’re concentrating so much on this.’

‘I think it’s going to get worse. Maybe homicide.’

‘Why? How do you know?’

‘I have a feeling.’ She smiled. ‘In my waters.’

‘My nan used to say that, in Kilkenny. Turned out she had a bladder problem, from all the stout.’

Karen clicked on her computer. ‘The suicide might be manslaughter, the guy might have been driven to do what he did, or drugged, we don’t know. But we do know there were seven other people in that cottage, burning the cats, staying at Trevelloe. Where are they? We need to trace them. They may be in serious trouble: of the only two we have located, one is dead and one is psychotic. What about the rest?’

DS Curtis nodded. ‘OK, Ma’am!’

‘Yes, yes. Let’s start by chasing up Alicia Rothley. She had friends in London, we have a list. Get on that. OK? And I’ll do my homework.’

The office was productively quiet for several hours. Lunch came and went with a flurry of supermarket sandwiches and hot coffee. At the end of it, Karen was decided: Aleister Crowley really was crucial.

They knew that the gang members were re-enacting magic associated with Crowley: Taghairm and Abra-Melin, in particular. They also knew the gang was using properties linked to Aleister Crowley: Carn Cottage, Trevelloe Lodge. Where were they now? If they were still in the country — and Alicia Rothley in her madness had implied that her brother was still here — then possibly they were staying in some other property with Crowley connections.

So who was Crowley? Karen had only read snippets, so far; now she needed the full works, all the details. They weren’t hard to source. The web was full of ‘Crowleyana’, an entire industry of speculation and rumour, and even some hard facts — dedicated to this strange man.

One newspaper piece gave her almost all she needed to know:

Karen read on, amazed. From Egypt, Crowley had gone to America, India, Sri Lanka, China, then back to England, then Germany — apparently he went everywhere, spending the last of his inheritance from his ironically God-fearing parents. And the debaucheries got worse: whoring, heroin, cocaine, pederasty, coprophagy. The sentences blurred in front of Karen’s eyes: ‘he liked to bite the hand of his mistress until she bled’; ‘at least five of his girlfriends committed suicide’; ‘in Sicily, he fatally poisoned his friend by making him drink a glass of cat’s blood’.

Karen googled a picture of Crowley. Fat, bald and unprepossessing. Apparently he seldom bathed. When Karen found a recording of his voice, online, it was impossibly reedy and unsexy, like a castrated Anglican vicar intoning the Acts of the Apostles.

Yet this man must have had some immense mesmeric potency. Despite his increasing corpulence and horrible demeanour he attracted followers and lovers — male and female — well into his sixties. And his cult was powerful to this day. What was it that he possessed? What hypnotic power? Was there really something in his magic that worked? Most importantly, had Rothley tapped into the same Crowleyan magic?

For another hour she researched the Abra-Melin ritual. As she did, she recalled the words of Donald Ryman: ‘the rite of Abra-Melin is the only magic in history that, for whatever reason, and in some terrifying way, actually appears to work’.

‘How’s it going, Karen?’

Curtis had returned from the cold outside, bringing with him the faint smell of cigarette smoke. She didn’t envy him these little smoking breaks: it was freezing out there. Minus two. A very cold January.

‘I’m getting there, I think. I’m sure the key is wherever Crowley stayed.’

‘Sorry?’

‘We know Rothley likes to use properties associated with Crowley. Right?’

‘Yes …’

‘So I’m going through the main ones first, surviving apartments, hotels, et cetera. But we mustn’t stop there. Remember Crowley was around a hundred years ago, and he moved constantly. We need to check out every possible address. Even if the site where he stayed has been demolished, and rebuilt, it might still attract — God knows — the vibrations Rothley likes. The spirits. That is what he believes.’

DS Curtis smiled.

‘I’m serious,’ Karen said. ‘Make a list, and go there, even if it’s been turned into a bloody car park. We need to get into Rothley’s head.’

Her junior officer nodded, and sat down at his desk.

Once more she focussed on the facts. If the gang were staying in another property directly linked with Crowley, there were two serious and obvious options, as the biography told her. The first was Boleskine House near Loch Ness.

But, as Karen swiftly ascertained, Boleskine was, these days, privately owned by a perfectly upright family — a lawyer, his wife and four young kids. The lawyer was legitimate, and quite senior, and he didn’t take kindly to being called a third time, in his Edinburgh office, to have his bona fides assessed. ‘I can assure you the law firm of Macdonald and Griffiths is entirely unconnected with medieval demonic rituals. Now goodbye.’

That left the apartment in Chancery Lane as the only major property with Crowley connections still standing in the UK.

This time, her brisk research was more generously rewarded. The entire block of 102 Chancery Lane — once home to the ‘wickedest man in the world’ — was being redeveloped. But the slowdown in the property market meant this redevelopment was on hold; the place was a shell: unused, boarded up, empty, it hadn’t been touched for two years. Anything could be happening in there.

Karen called the developers and was quickly put through to the site manager, Darren Glover.

‘Chancery Lane?’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Yep, s’on our list. We’re hoping to be back in next month, site’s been a mess for so long, be good to get cracking.’

‘When did you last visit the site?’

‘Oh. God knows. Months ago. Like I say, it’s been empty—’

‘Does anyone ever go inside the building?’

The man paused. ‘I guess not. We have security, but they patrol — you know — the perimeter, occasionally. Er. But why would anyone want to break in? There’s bugger all in there. Place is gutted.’

Karen glanced at the darkening sky. ‘Do you have a spare hour after work, Mr Glover? Could you meet me there?’

‘You really want to go inside?’

Karen paused. For some reason she was suddenly reminded of Donald Ryman’s words: Some say the Abra-Melin ritual can only be successfully completed if several humans are sacrificed, culminating in the murder of a living child.

‘Miss Trevithick? Hello?’ The man was still on the line. ‘Hello, are you there?’

‘Yes. Sorry.’ She paused. For a few seconds. Resisting the faint tremors of dread. Then she said, ‘Yes, I want to go inside.’