The Devil's Moon by Peter Guttridge Page A

reminder. OK, gang, it might seem unlikely that this is not somehow linked to the Wicker Man but Bellamy is right – let’s not get too carried away.’
    â€˜Although, ma’am . . .’ Heap continued.
    Donaldson gave an exaggerated sigh.
    â€˜Lilies are used in Catholic iconography – paintings and such – to represent Mary and purity. But at Easter they represent Christ’s death and rebirth. May Day is about rebirth – spring and everything. So there is a kind of link to neo-pagan beliefs.’
    Gilchrist stood. She looked down on Heap. He really wasn’t very tall.
    â€˜Thanks for muddying the waters again, Bellamy.’
    â€˜My pleasure, ma’am.’
    His face was deadpan as she gave him a second look. She looked across at Sylvia Wade. ‘Sylvia, you chase up the CCTV. See if we’re lucky enough to find someone who was in the gallery
and
on the beach. To use DS Donaldson’s technical term: some weirdo.’
    The others smiled at that but smirked at Sylvia, knowing what a tedious job was before her.
    â€˜Will do, ma’am,’ she said flatly.
    Kate Simpson was a good researcher – one of the few things she recognized she was good at. Perhaps the
only
thing she accepted she was good at. She’d been researching extreme churches on and off for weeks. At eight in the evening she put her phone down, rubbed her eyes and logged off her computer.
    She gathered up her papers and her laptop and left the office. It was raining again; stinging rain. She walked down the busy street from the station and turned left to splosh through puddles down the back end of the North Laines. She cut along the narrow alley that had the sorting office’s wall on one side and a terrace of old flint and cob cottages behind shallow gardens on the other.
    She glanced in Bob Watts’ front window but there was no sign of his presence. She didn’t understand why he wanted to live here. The cottages were tiny and he was a big man. Orderly and organized but sprawling too.
    And looking out on to a blank wall was just weird. Especially as she knew he used to have a fabulous view of the Downs when he lived on the other side of them. Then again, she wasn’t even sure he still did live here. She hadn’t seen him for weeks.
    She cut diagonally across Church Street and through a little dog-leg path next to the multi-storey car park into Bond Street, almost opposite the Theatre Royal’s narrow stage door. The theatre was showing a touring stage adaptation of the sixties horror film
Rosemary’s Baby
. She’d seen the original on late-night telly once and it had been kind of creepy.
    A wet, simpering actress called Mia Farrow had almost wrecked it though. Kate, perhaps because she had always needed to work at keeping her weight down, had no patience with grown women who flirted with anorexia as this actress with the whiny voice clearly had. She’d known too many lovely teenage girls when she was growing up who’d suffered terribly and genuinely from the illness.
    Kate was vaguely aware of the actress and associated her with nepotism. She’d read somewhere she was the daughter of Hollywood royalty, had been the wife of decades-older Frank Sinatra (what was that about?) then partner of Woody Allen who, later in her life, gave her the only acting gigs she got. How easy do you want it?
    Kate knew that her visceral dislike of such nepotism was because that was entirely the world in which her parents operated and she had rejected it. Hence Southern Shores Radio and not Broadcasting House.
    She cut across North Street and up into the Laines. The fish were pretty much gone now but she could see the occasional tail or fish head sticking out of guttering. Seagulls were still strutting along the alleys looking for fishy remains. She had to walk round them to pass through the tiny square that was leading her to the Druid’s Head pub.
    Her parents. She had to