Under a Watchful Eye(62)

They had also murdered Ewan, in effect, by using an assassin that left no evidence beyond what was etched into a victim’s death mask.

What did they want with him?

Ghost-writing Ewan’s manifesto was off the table, and it was hard to imagine a reading and Q&A sufficing to keep them away. Much more was involved. The woman on King Street had mentioned an event, a meeting.

I think you’re fucked, that’s what Ewan had said.

Had the woman also implied that Seb would meet ‘Him’ too, before Ewan’s dreadful form had appeared on the quay? Him? Who was ‘Him’? Hazzard? He had been dead for decades, but considering what Seb had seen in the last few weeks, any assurance offered by a death notice was disputable.

How had this happened, so quickly?

He didn’t know what to do, or where to go. And the SPR was in Devon. Mark Fry had said so. There was even the mention of a house in the email: Hunter’s Tor, their ‘old HQ’.

Where the hell is it? Seb used combinations of keywords to squeeze something, anything at all, out of the internet, but came away with nothing.

If the author Mark Fry could tell him where the building was, he’d have a start at confirming the group’s persisting existence. Maybe this Fry could tell him other things too. If anyone could explain the peril that he was currently in, then it was this connoisseur of the weird and esoteric. Forewarned was forearmed.

Seb replied to the email.

Mr Fry

Thank you so much for your message. This might sound unusual, but could we speak today?

Seb added his phone number to the mail.

This is a matter of urgency and I would be enormously grateful for any time you could spare to clear a few things up. Afraid I haven’t read your book yet (it’s still on order from the States), and I had no idea until I read your mail that the SPR were based in Devon. Whereabouts? Can you tell me? This might explain something of a personal nature that I have recently experienced. I also know almost nothing about the organization, or M. L. Hazzard, and have only discovered information about his society within the last fortnight.

Kind regards

Seb Logan

Mark Fry wrote back within the hour.

I’m just about to finish some lesson planning. Full day of classes tomorrow. No rest, aye? But I could call you in an hour or so. Or is that too late? That would be eleven-ish.

Mark





Seb quickly agreed to the time, then headed to the drinks cabinet.

‘Who was he?’ Mark Fry repeated Seb’s question, and followed it with a chuckle. ‘Hazzard used so many personas, I don’t think he was ever one person for long enough to establish himself as a single personality. And I doubt I uncovered them all. Every time something didn’t work out for him, he just reinvented himself and started over. He may even have been a composite of shifting identities with unique personalities. But I can tell you that he began in life as one Ernie Burridge, and that he ended life as his literary pseudonym, Montague Leopold Hazzard.’

‘I had no idea.’ Seb near clawed at the phone to extract the information.

Mark Fry had called Seb at eleven p.m. and spoke in a soft northern accent. He embellished most of what he said with an irrepressible chuckle. Seb took to him immediately. He might even have fooled himself that this was the first friendly voice he’d heard in years.

‘I don’t think anyone knew much about Hazzard when he was alive, Mr Logan, let alone after he died. At the time the SPR was active, most of those involved probably didn’t know who they were dealing with. By then, Hazzard was a much better confidence trickster and was covering his tracks more effectively.

‘The SPR were a very different animal to most other cults of that time too. As far as I could tell, no one ever broke silence from within the SPR. That was odd, considering what they were up to. Temple of the Last Days and the Process Church were similar in that respect, though in few others. And the SPR didn’t go out like the Temple and there were no Manson Family trials. They barely left a trace of their existence.’

‘Why the silence, the secrecy? This was a criminal organization?’

‘Well Hazzard had learned some hard lessons when he’d fallen foul of the law in the past, and had learned to conceal his past, I think. It was a different time in the UK too. Not so much public scrutiny. As for it being illegal, you know that he did time in prison?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Sorry, you haven’t read my book. And probably none of his stories beyond the two that Pantheon anthologized. That right?’

‘Yes. This is all news to me. There’s almost nothing online.’

‘You’re not wrong. But his writing was never more than a footnote in his life. Not enough money or adulation in it. He found being a cult leader, because that is what he was, far more lucrative when he hit his stride in the sixties.’

‘If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your connection, Mark?’

‘Goes back to my teens. I was fascinated by his stories when I was younger. Me dad had both Hazzard books, and later on, when I realized that no one knew anything about the guy, I started looking around to see if he’d written anything else, and that’s when I discovered the SPR connection.’

‘I see. You mentioned prison.’

Mark laughed. ‘Oh, he was a right scoundrel, but it all caught up with him in the fifties. The first time he went down it was because he’d forged a birth certificate and was masquerading as an aristocrat. A minor baron and war hero. He even had a coat of arms on his cards, his cane, cigarette case and watch. He was running a bogus mental illness charity for victims of war, the servicemen, and the refugees coming in from Eastern Europe. Collected subscriptions, that kind of thing, through soirees in West London and newspaper ads. When he was rumbled, he went down for fraud by deception. Conned about three grand out of people.