by Phil Rickman
‘Well, of course it existed,’ Neil Cooper said. ‘It’s a Roman religion favoured by the military elite. It’s Mithraism.’
‘Neil… can I call you back? I have to… go.’
52
Grassed
The edges of the bandage were pink. Lol pulled his sweatshirt sleeve back over it.
‘Five stitches. The cops took me straight to the hospital.’
Merrily had pulled off the road a few miles out of the city, where the suburbs leaked into the countryside. She let go of Lol’s hand, relief and compassion turning to an irritation she didn’t want to feel.
‘I still don’t see why you did it… what you expected to find.’
‘I know. It was stupid. I can see that now. It just seemed like I was being pointed at something. If I went there something significant would jump out.’
‘Like half the Hereford police?’
‘Five of them,’ Lol said. ‘All because of the truck, apparently. There were sightings of a pickup truck near Oldcastle the night Mansel Bull was killed.’
He told her how, after his wrist had been stitched, they’d put him in a cell in Gaol Street. Banged up. Instant flashback: eighteen again, slammed into the system. Fear had flared inside him. He knew how easy it was to get yourself convicted of something you hadn’t done, through being in the wrong place. The wrong vehicle.
They’d put him into a little grey interview room that stank of guilt. He’d kept telling them exactly where he was the night Mansel Bull was murdered, giving them a list of people they could call – Danny Thomas, Barry, James Bull-Davies. DS Stagg didn’t seem to be interested. Lol had met him before and he’d seemed OK, but now he was a predatory stranger, a schoolyard bully swollen with ignorance and conceit.
‘He kept looking at my hands and the stains on my sleeves. He said, did I like that – the feel of blood all over me? He asked me that twice, like he’d thought of something really clever. Still…’ Lol leaned his head back over the top of the seat, where the headrest had broken off. ‘The other cops, in general, were OK. One went out and brought me some chips.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘I said I’d been working on some songs, went out to soak up some atmosphere. It sounded bonkers, even to me, but then they found the ley map in the truck, so obviously I was bonkers. They still took a swab for DNA.’
‘You see Annie Howe?’
‘No.’
‘Right. Let’s just get back home.’ Merrily started up the car. ‘You need sleep.’
‘Uh…’ Lol shook himself. ‘I need – if you’ve got time, I need to get something sorted.’
‘Where?’
‘Brinsop.’
The wide fields were opening out before them into what remained of Magnis, which was nothing you could see.
Merrily switched off the engine.
‘Aren’t we both too tired for humour?’
This wasn’t good. They were parked where a rutted mud track finished inside a wood, near the top of a hill which Jane didn’t know, except that it was nearer Leominster than Hereford and therefore not where she wanted to be. Trees, mostly conifers, were dense on three sides, a mesh of branches overhead.
Jane’s left hand was already behind her, groping for whatever passed for a door handle.
‘For a start,’ Cornel said, ‘how about you drop the hokey accent? Your mother’s the vicar of Ledwardine, and you haven’t lived here that long.’
Jane thumped back against the door. Which of them had betrayed her: Lori from the Ox or Dean Wall, who hated her from way back?
Cornel’s tongue tickled his top lip.
‘You want to take a walk, Jane?’
‘No, I don’t.’
Maybe she could manage to get out, and maybe she could run. But Cornel’s legs were a lot longer than hers and he was clearly a fit guy, despite all the drink. There were things you couldn’t easily do in a Porsche, if one party was unwilling, that would be so much easier on a lonely wooded hillside, so best not to move.
‘What do you want?’ Cornel said.
Half-turned towards her, one hand on his thigh. Jane looked him in the eyes.
‘Like I’m supposed to feel threatened up here? It’s a small county. All I have to do is scream.’
‘What are you like?’ Cornel shook his narrow head, then tipped it back and let out a roar. ‘Help! Help! This girl keeps grabbing my cock!’
A crow replied from somewhere. Flashes of hard white sunlight were splintered by the still-wintry trees.
Jane was shocked into silence.
‘What do you want?’ Cornel said.
She didn’t feel scared any more, just stupid.
‘If you’re this big, successful banker, why are you staying at the Ox?’
Even to her, it sounded sulky, a bit childish.
‘I like the Ox,’ Cornel said. ‘It’s full of sad oafs who live with their mothers and wear wide wellies. To stick the sheep’s hooves down while they’re…?’
‘We all knows that one,’ Jane said in a small voice. ‘Round yere.’
‘Where you really from?’
‘All over. Cheltenham, Liverpool… but this is where I belong.’
‘Where’s your dad?’
‘Dead. Car crash, years ago.’
‘My dad lives in LA now,’ Cornel said. ‘Got out while he could. My stepfather’s a maths teacher at a comp in Middlesex. Last year his entire salary came to so much less than my bonus. Pretended he was pleased for me, but anybody could see how totally pissed off he was really.’
‘Right.’
‘It’s moments like that make it all worthwhile – the day you watch your pompous little stepfather eat shit.’ Cornel leaned back, hands behind his head. ‘There’s my confession. Now it’s your turn. Why were you looking for me? And don’t say you weren’t, you were in the Ox twice.’
‘Cockfighting. I told you.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Cornel’s head shaking. ‘That was girlie’s reason.’
‘Yeah, well it’s my -’
‘Seems to me girlie wouldn’t’ve come near me again after that distressing incident in the Swan.’
‘No… no, listen, I’m telling you the truth. If Savitch is running cockfights, I want him exposed. I want it in all the papers, so he can never hold his head up here again and has to… leave.’
‘Savitch? The vicar’s daughter takes on Ward Savitch?’
‘You don’t know me. This used to be a good place – I mean Ledwardine. Seeing it become the New Cotswolds was bad enough, all these women hugging each other in the street, How are yoooo, mwah, mwah… but having it turned into some bloody hunting resort for bastards who think you can get away with anything if you can afford to pay people to look the other way…’
‘I see.’ Cornel tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘I see .’
‘You see what?’
‘Where you’re coming from.’
‘You did go to a cockfight?’
‘Oh yeah. It’s one of those things they make you do. Prove how hard you are.’
‘Savitch?’
‘Let’s get some lunch,’ Cornel said.
Lol seemed to know exactly where he wanted to go. Merrily was wary, experiencing a fleeting fear that he might have lost it and he was actually taking them to Byron Jones’s place. The fields looked wide and bright and open. Sporadic woodland, isolated dwellings, a clear grey border of small mountains. The fox-brown soil and the bones of Magnis.
Over a rise, a small timber-framed farmworker’s cottage had appeared. A ramshackle porch, peeling render. A man on his knees inside a circle of spanners and a spilled socket set, tinkering with a quad bike. When Lol got out of the Volvo, he came to his feet, wiping oily hands on his jeans.
‘Fawt you might come back.’
‘If only to find out why you grassed me up,’ Lol said.
53
Sideshow
A brass oil lamp, obviously still in use, hung low over the table. The underside of the cen
tral beam was blackened. Two chocolate Labradors prowled around, watched by a ginger cat on the window sill, but only the Rayburn growled.
‘Yeah, I heard he was friends with a lady vicar,’ Bax said. ‘That’s nice.’
Just the three of them around the table, in chairs painted in primary colours. Bax’s wife was at work, at the farm shop owned by Sollers Bull.
‘I’m sorry,’ Bax said, ‘but anybody could see that no way was this boy going home till he’d had a peek over Mr Jones’s fence. Didn’t want him hurt, was all. What else can I say?’
‘You could’ve told me,’ Lol said.
‘Told you what?’
‘Whatever you didn’t tell me that made you think I might get hurt.’
Bax shook his head slowly.
‘Don’t do that, mate. Even if you fink you know a guy from his music.’
Merrily understood. Bax belonged to an established sub-category of incomer: the old hippie good-lifer who’d made a go of it, eventually winning the respect of the native farmers but knowing, all the same, that if he put a foot wrong they’d turn on him: bloody Londoner, give them an acre of ground and a few sheep and they think they know it all.
He’d learned the rural virtues of caution, circumspection and some other word beginning with c that meant you kept your head down and didn’t spread gossip if you wanted to survive.
‘To actually get somebody arrested,’ Merrily said, ‘you’d have to be very worried about what might happen to them.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Bax nodded at Lol’s bandage. ‘What happened there?’
‘Barbed wire.’ Lol pulled his sleeve down. ‘Wire which had already been snipped. Presumably by the same person who brought down the CCTV camera?’
‘Can’t tell you noffing about that, mate. That’s a mystery, that is.’
‘One of several, apparently,’ Merrily said.
‘Yeah.’ Bax massaged his whiskers. ‘I had a good long chat with Percy one night. A lot of the old funny baccy getting smoked, and he really opened up. All the other stories come out. The ones he still feels a bit aggrieved over, as a farmer.’
He fell silent.
‘Percy had dealings with Byron Jones?’ Lol asked.
‘Dear oh dear,’ Bax said.
It seemed that Percy and Walter had sold off the family farm and the buildings, for conversion. They were well-off now but still kept bits of ground, a few acres here, a few there. Mostly rented out for stock and grasskeep. But periodically Percy would invest in cattle and sheep again, just to keep his hand in.
At least, he used to, until the night when somebody stole a young bull from his herd of Herefords.
‘Percy’s about to report it to the police when this package appears in the back porch. Brown-paper parcel, ’bout this size…’ Bax opened his hands out, shoebox length. ‘Containing what you might call a considerable sum of money. No note, just the money.’
‘Compensation?’
‘ Good compensation, but no compensation at all, far as Percy was concerned. But what could he do?’
‘I don’t get it,’ Lol said.
‘I fink we talked about the Sass helping themselves to stock?’
‘A bull?’
‘Whatever they do,’ Bax said, ‘it don’t get questioned too hard. Everybody supports them. You get used to their little ways.’
‘Except this probably wasn’t the SAS, was it?’ Lol said.
‘ I wouldn’t fink so, no.’
‘Any idea what happened to the bull?’ Merrily asked.
‘Unlikely to’ve been nicked for breeding purposes.’
‘Mr Baxter, what did you think might have happened to Lol if you hadn’t called the rural crime line?’
Bax leaned forward in his spindly chair, inspecting a burn mark on the tabletop.
‘Two travellers show up one night in a van. This ain’t gossip, this is fact. Be not long after Jones moved in, so they didn’t know who he was. Looking for scrap, you know?’ Bax looked up warily. ‘Bear in mind this never come out, no cops involved. This geezer got systematically done over. While his mate’s still squirming around in the barbed wire. Fair play, they never fingered Jones. Too much to hide, ’spect. But, there you go… no police, no defence lawyers. Done and dusted.’
‘Jones beat up the guy?’
‘Maybe they was used for practice.’ Bax might have smiled. ‘ This is how it’s done, boys.’
‘What boys?’
‘I dunno – whatever boys was on the training course at the time. These courses, they say it’s all a bit unorthodox. Blokes arrive like soldiers, back of a truck, back of a van. Posh blokes, usually. City blokes living the SAS life for a few days. Don’t ask me what that means. Folks make allowances. But the travellers, that was a bit of a sideshow.’
‘This widely known?’
‘Not widely known at all. Had it from a mate of mine in Hereford, scrap dealer who saw the state of them when they was back in business. Bad guys, in general, avoid the area. Don’t know whose place they might be breaking into. Who needs cops, all them rules and paperwork, when you got Mr Jones?’
‘What’s it like up there?’ Merrily asked him. ‘What’s there?’
‘Bit like a golf course. Manufactured landscape, pond size of small lake wiv a rope bridge across. Quite a few sheds. Jones’s new bungalow’s halfway up the hill, wiv a pool. ’Bout four wooden chalets, parking area. But you can tell it’s not your ordinary holiday place. No flowers, and most of the trees are pine and fir, so it’s screened off all year round. Functional.’
‘No women?’
‘Nah. They say Jones is seen around town wiv women, but he don’t bring them back. Look, I’m sorry. You mind if I ask what your interest is here?’
‘It’s the SAS chaplain who died on Credenhill. He was a friend, and… he had some past involvement with Byron. Sorry I can’t be more explicit.’
‘Only I’d rather you didn’t say noffing about me, wiv regard to Jones. The spooky stuff, that’s different. Percy always says he don’t like talking about it, but he loves it really. Some of it he exaggerates, some he don’t.’
Lol said, ‘So those figures in the mist that Percy saw…?’
‘I’m not sure it’s all as easily explained as like, Oh it’s only Mr Jones and his course students. Odd fings happen, don’t they?’
‘Percy says he’s seen… figures,’ Lol said to Merrily. ‘Where the Roman town was. In the river mist. One had a bird’s head.’
‘He ain’t the only one, neither,’ Bax said. ‘But that’s neither here nor there. Less you got a weak heart, they ain’t gonna harm you. But you can get harmed. Which is why I set the cops on you. I’m sorry, squire.’
***
As they drove away, they could see the afforested hill from end to end, a rambling natural mansion with great wooded halls and conifered corridors and the earthen back-stairs where Syd Spicer had died.
‘Mithraism,’ Lol said, ‘I don’t know anything about that. Do you?’
‘Not much. It was mentioned once at college, by a visiting lecturer. Pagan religion curiously similar to Christianity. Neil Cooper recognized it immediately when I mentioned Byron Jones’s soldiers’ religion. I don’t think there’s ever been a suggestion that Caradog adopted a Roman god to improve his fighting prowess, but it obviously worked for Byron.’
‘He was practising it?’
‘It would answer a few questions. Why he was getting careless with other people’s lives. It might also explain the rift with Syd, who went into Christianity with the wimps and the women.’
Not a man’s religion, Byron Jones had told his wife. Certainly not a soldier’s religion.
‘What do I do with this, Lol?’
‘I keep saying this… perhaps you take it and dump it, in its entirety, on James Bull-Davies.’
‘James is not the most imaginative of men.’
‘Really, really not your problem.’
Merrily turned onto the Brecon Road, past fields scrubbed
raw by winter, a landscape seldom noticed. No villages, no church towers, just a road that started on the edge of the city of Hereford and finished in Wales.
‘On the other hand,’ Lol said, more than a bit hesitantly, ‘Hardwicke’s… what… fifteen minutes away?’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘In that direction.’
‘I knew you were going to say that.’
‘If anybody can put a kind of perspective on this…’
‘Dear God. Do we need that kind of perspective?’
‘Of course, she might not be there any more,’ Lol said. ‘She might even be…’
‘We’d’ve heard,’ Merrily said tightly. ‘We’d know.’
‘OK,’ Lol said. ‘I didn’t want to say anything about this. I’m just a dreamy, whimsical songwriter, looking to pull tunes and textures and things out of the air. I don’t know why I went to that place last night. I just did. And it was a bloody awful place.’
Merrily slowed.
‘Awful how?’
‘I’m probably being subjective.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Tell me.’
‘It just… I don’t want to use emotive words, it just sounds like a cliche.’
‘This is no time for songwriter-pride, Lol.’
‘It was like it didn’t want to let me go. Like even the barbed wire was alive and hungry. Yeah, I know.’ Lol put up his hands in defence. ‘I know what that sounds like.’
‘Go on.’
‘So when the lights… when I found out it was only the police, I was so relieved I would’ve confessed to murder just to get the hell out of there.’
Merrily took the next left and turned the Volvo round clumsily in the mouth of the junction.
‘Hardwicke, then.’
54
Hell’s Kitten
It was a shock, really. She was in a wheelchair.
Brenda Cardelow, proprietor of The Glades Residential Home, pushed her into a big lounge freshly painted in magnolia. Bright red cushions on four cream sofas, like big jammy-dodgers.
A bulky cardigan around her tiny shoulders, a blue woollen rug over her knees.
