The Secrets of Pain mw-11

by Phil Rickman

  ‘You won’t like this.’

  ‘I didn’t even like you asking the question.’

  ‘It was when Sollers said Mansel didn’t feel it was part of his farm. An old-fashioned farmer. Instinctive. Meaning he followed his feelings. The implication was that he didn’t like that ground, even though he’d bought it himself. Was it just not productive… or what?’

  Annie Howe said, ‘You’ll need to explain, as if to an idiot.’

  ‘Everything here is built on or around the Roman town Magnis. There are superstitions connected with parts of the area. It’s unlikely that Mansel hadn’t heard the stories. A particular field gets a reputation for being unlucky. Crops failing, stock dying, tractor accidents…’

  Merrily sensed a dampening of the air between them.

  ‘It’s what I do, Annie. The alternative path. You get tired of being defensive in the face of the secular society. Even your copper down there…’

  ‘Didn’t trust the full moon.’

  ‘You get the same with paramedics and nurses in A and E. Night of the full moon, increased violence. Surveys prove it. Apparently. So tell me, where does irrational superstition begin? There’s an old farmer out at Bishopstone or somewhere who’s seen misty figures in the river mist, and some appear real and some don’t. He talks of one with a bird’s head. Followers of Mithras would wear masks to signify whichever grade they’d attained. One of the grades is the raven.’

  Men who had been reappearing.

  ‘So who was the hallucination drenched in blood?’ Annie said.

  When they reached the barn doors, two spotlights blazed into life high up on the house wall. As though a play was about to begin on the stage of weathered stone flags. Annie Howe fingered the police tape.

  ‘Around six forty-five p.m., on the night of the storm, Mansel Bull sets out for his parish council meeting, then receives a call on his mobile from the council clerk to say it’s been called off because of the weather. Mansel turns his Range Rover round and heads home. Who knew he’d be attending a council meeting? The other councillors and the clerk. And his brother, Sollers.’

  She moved to the double doors opposite the farmhouse.

  ‘In both these barns there were cattle. Herefords. Including, in a separate stall, one bull.’

  ‘You know that?’

  ‘From Sollers himself who initially was pointing us at rustlers. Now if – for the sake of argument – there was a plan to take some of Mansel’s cattle, the night of the parish council, which Mansel never missed, might be seen as the most appropriate time.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Sollers know if something on that scale was happening? It would take several people.’

  ‘The coach house is lower down the hill, screened by trees and reached by a different turn-off from the main drive. They could easily get up here without being seen. And, on a night like that, without being heard. Perfect conditions, in fact, for crow-barring a barn door.’

  ‘ Was the barn door forced?’

  ‘No. Perhaps because it didn’t get that far. Because Mansel returned in the middle of it.’

  ‘And they killed him?’

  ‘Could easily be that simple. If Jones and his Mithraism are irrelevant. Now give me your take on it.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Tell me something insane.’

  From the top of the farmyard you could make out, in the moonlight, the silver eel that was the River Wye. Always venerated, sometimes claiming sacrifices. Part of the landscape that the Romans knew.

  Oldcastle was part of it, too, a vantage point, perhaps built inside the long-flattened ramparts of a minor Iron Age hill fort. Or a Roman site, with Roman masonry now built into the foundations of this house. Sollers hadn’t been specific. Perhaps he didn’t know. Perhaps he did.

  Back at the edge of the police tape, Merrily bent and lit a cigarette. She was wearing Annie Howe’s checked woollen coat. The sleeves were too long, but it was a cold night.

  ‘In weather like that, most of us prefer to go home and bar the doors against the wind, but when you’re encouraged to go out and use its energy…’

  ‘Paganism again.’

  ‘Most kinds of paganism work with natural energy. If you’re in what might be considered a haunted landscape, or one that you believe to be conditioned by over a thousand years of military endeavour… I’m just giving you the received wisdom. Tell me to stop whenever you like. I was interested in Byron’s description of sacrificial ritual that doesn’t end in blood.’

  ‘This is the man who makes his own way here, camps in a field, goes on a fast… Is it necessary for the sacrifice to be done in the temple?’

  ‘I don’t know. If this was a Roman site, part of the extended Magnis… then they might find some justification for doing it right here. Leave quite a mess though, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Rustlers have been known to butcher animals in the fields,’ Annie said. ‘That’s what it would look like – butchery. For the meat. All right. So, developing the idea that there was a plan to take Mansel’s bull and have it slaughtered…’

  ‘The candidate arrives at the height of the storm. Maybe accompanied, maybe not. Part of the challenge? You have to imagine someone who’s been through all the grades – the heat and the cold and the near-death, whatever – has now reached the point where he’s ready to take on, for a short time, the role of the god himself. He’s on fire.’

  ‘But these are…’ Tension creases in Annie Howe’s spotlit face illustrating the hard time she was having with all this. ‘These are educated men?’

  ‘Annie, high-level Freemasons, ritual magicians… they’re all educated men. Businessmen, financiers, guys in massively competitive industries, powered by testosterone, not known for their sensitivity… And right now they’re angry and disillusioned, reeling under accusations of collapsing the Western economy and walking away with their massive unde-served bonuses.’

  ‘Fallen masters of the universe. OK, I’ll buy it for the moment. How might this escalate to the murder of a man? Anybody can be a killer if there’s enough anger, greed, ambition, repressed sexuality. How about the candidate?’

  ‘You get drawn into something and if it’s changing your life for what seems like the better, you’re not going to jump off when it starts to get… extreme. Artificial stimulants might also be involved. The Romans seem to have used something called, I think, haoma.’

  Miss White’s drug of war. Combined with dogma and ritual and a physical regime built around commitment to a deity, real or symbolic. Could it be recreated? Bull’s blood and magic mushrooms.

  ‘Nothing like a brew.’ Merrily smiled wearily. ‘As they say in the Regiment.’

  Chemically-enhanced excitement in the middle of a raging wind where you could hardly hear yourself think.

  Annie said, ‘Suppose Sollers knew about this. Told them what night his brother’s going to be out, what time he leaves, what time he usually comes back from the council. Or was actually there, when his brother was killed? There’s time. All we know is that he was at his restaurant at seven-thirty and he wasn’t covered with blood. What if Sollers was here to see it? Extreme blood sport.’

  Male model in hunting pink, Merrily thought. Ridiculously vain. A figurehead for Countryside Defiance, which he both supported and despised.

  ‘And then Mansel’s back unexpectedly,’ Annie said, ‘and here’s his beloved little brother and a man with a large knife.’

  Merrily closed her eyes, watched Mansel Bull’s headlights blasting between the bars of the gate, Mansel barrelling towards them through the wind-whipped night.

  Who’s this?

  It’s Mansel. Mansel Bull.

  The Bull. The Bull in his citadel.

  The symbolism was both insane and inescapable.

  Annie Howe was standing at the high point of the farmyard, looking down between the bare trees at the moonlit Wye. Her face latticed with white light and shifting shadows.

  ‘He has to come through this.’ Barely a whi
sper. ‘Bliss.’

  ‘Yes.’

  72

  Sham

  The smell reached Jane first. Didn’t smell like any church or temple she’d ever been in or imagined. Not herbs, not incense. More like a meat store. The smell of raw meat always made her feel slightly sick now, and she thought about the beautiful dead cockerel with his golden mane.

  Cornel shone his torch around for her. It was smaller than it had looked in the picture on his phone. Half the size of a chapel, one of those cold Welsh Nonconformist chapels. Jane could hear echoes of her own hyped-up breathing.

  ‘Go on,’ Cornel said. ‘Go down.’

  ‘Hold on.’

  The torch opened up a panel of light in front of her. She was in the wide trench down the middle.

  ‘This is it?’ Carefully, Jane stood up. ‘This is where they hold the cockfights?’

  It was like a car workshop, with a pit where the car was ramped up. There was a long rectangular gulley down the middle of the floor. On either side of it, rough ledges or benches like seating areas. Much of this below ground level, sunk into the foundations of the hut. So it was a Nissen hut built over a rectangular pit or a trench, as dug by archaeologists.

  Cornel was jumping down the steps, pushing past her and strolling along the trench like he owned the place. Pretty clear now that he’d been snorting coke. Talking faster, moving weirdly. Eirion had done coke, just the once – well, as far as Jane knew. Eirion had said it was like ten minutes of cloud nine and then an hour or so all pumped up before you needed some more.

  The knowledge that Cornel was on something… that was actually quite comforting. Like, inasmuch as there was any comfort to be had for a vegetarian woman down here. She called across to him.

  ‘So it’s happening later… or it’s already happened?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cockfighting.’

  No doubt about that now. It stank of it. Somewhere down here there would be blood, there would be feathers. Jane pulled out her phone, checked the battery – still functioning but getting low, and the signal was down to one blob, which often meant you could manage to make calls but not receive them.

  ‘What are you doing, Jane?’

  ‘Pictures.’

  A stone plinth jutted from the end wall of concrete blocks. Below the plinth, a rudimentary sink, like a font, but with more of a sense of altar about it. Above the plinth, a kind of stone plaque or tablet, quite big, with figures on it in relief.

  ‘Wait,’ Cornel said. ‘I’ll give you some better ones in a minute.’

  He unslung his big rucksack, unzipped it, started taking things out. It was really cold in here, half in the earth.

  Jane curled her hand around the phone in her jacket pocket and moved along the gulley. It was lined with stone. Some of the marks near her feet did look like patches of dried blood.

  ‘Can you shine the torch down there for a minute?’

  Cornel didn’t move. In the ambient light, Jane tried to make out the marks on the stone benches.

  ‘They’re divided into segments, like individual seats. I suppose the… audience sits up here and, with both ends blocked so the birds can’t escape.’

  There were chisel marks, carvings in the surface, figures like you saw in pyramids, only more crudely drawn into the concrete. Probably done before it dried, but chipped now. Some were in circles, like astrological symbols. It was actually pretty interesting. Or it would have been if she’d been here with Eirion rather than…

  Jane limped up to the sink. A shallow pool in there. Dipped a finger into it, then held it up and sniffed. Looked like water, smelled of nothing much. There was a flake of something like mud on the edge of the sink; when she flicked it off it made brown liquid scribbles in the pool.

  ‘Could this actually have been a Roman cockpit?’

  Her knowledge of Roman deities was fairly basic. As an archaeologist, she was a one-trick pony: stone circles, henges, Bronze Age burial mounds.

  She brought out her phone again.

  ‘Could you just, like, shine the torch here for just a minute? I want to see if the light’s strong enough.’

  Cornel made an impatient noise and came over with his torch, directed the beam at the plinth. Jane saw that one corner had been knocked off, and it was all powdery.

  ‘It’s concrete! It’s not stone at all.’ She tried to see his face behind the beam. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘Been rebuilt.’

  ‘It’s a sham!’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Cornel bent over her shoulder as she took a shot of the corner with her phone. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What are you-’

  He’d just lifted the phone out of her hand.

  ‘I’ve told you I’ll give you some better ones. Stand back, girlie.’

  His arm went back, and then there was the sound of something hitting the wall and bouncing off and…

  ‘That wasn’t my phone, was it?’

  ‘Probably wouldn’t work down here, anyway.’

  ‘ What’ve you done? ’

  The echo came back at the same time as Cornel’s arm, and then it got lost in a bang and another bang and a splintering crunch, and then Cornel had hold of Jane’s arm and he was dragging her back, and she was shutting both eyes against a rising storm of grit, and the inside of her mouth was like in the yard at the Swan when she’d been choking on the cobweb full of flies.

  Cornel pulled her away, screaming, down the aisle, pointing the torch ahead of them into a dust storm.

  Jane erupted in coughs, only half aware of the stone tablet with the figures on it beginning to wobble. As she watched, it tilted slowly and began to topple towards them.

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  Cornel was on his feet. He was laughing, the torch in one hand, its beam almost solid with dust, a short-handled lump hammer in the other.

  ‘Haven’t even started yet,’ he said. ‘Girlie.’

  Engine noise.

  ‘Where are you?’

  Lol shouting, the way you couldn’t help doing when the voice at the other end was faint and kept cutting out.

  He was on the phone in Barry’s office, standing up. He heard Danny telling Gomer to slow down, and then Gomer’s voice saying they didn’t want to lose the bugger.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘-ostyn. Kenny Mostyn.’

  Danny did some explaining. Lol kind of got the gist. He saw Barry in the doorway, standing very still, the way only Barry did.

  ‘Danny,’ Lol said, ‘listen to me. It’s not possible you’ve got Jane with you?’

  No, it wasn’t.

  Lol could’ve wept. When he came off the phone, Barry waved him to the swivel chair.

  ‘Slowly,’ he said.

  ‘Gomer and Danny,’ Lol said, ‘are in Gomer’s Jeep. They’re following Kenny Mostyn because they think he’s going to a cockfight.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Danny thinks they’re probably heading for the Stretton Sugwas route towards Hereford, but obviously he can’t be sure. Lots of tracks and old farm buildings.’

  ‘Let me get this right,’ Barry said. ‘The rock ’n’ roll farmer and a man well into his seventies…’

  ‘Why they think there’s a cockfight on and this Mostyn’s on his way to it, I don’t know. I suggested that when he stopped, they should just drive past and then call me back. Don’t go up any tracks.’

  ‘Good advice, Laurence.’

  ‘But then, this is Gomer,’ Lol said. ‘Like there aren’t enough problems with Jane missing.’

  Cornel had his back to Jane now, fiddling with something. She heard the familiar repeat clicking of a stubborn cigarette lighter.

  ‘He wasn’t my mate after all,’ Cornel said.

  He stepped away from the altar, where two curling flames were sending shadows coiling over the walls and up to the curved ceiling.

  Two small bowl-shaped lamps – like twin miniature men’s urinals – were sitting on the edge of the altar

/>   Jane backed away. There was still dust in the air,

  ‘Cosy, eh?’

  ‘You took my phone.’

  ‘In this world, girlie, you have to take what you want. Kenny taught me that. Kenny, my mate. Take it when you want it, where you want it. That’s what Kenny said, my mate. Taking pictures of me holding up the dead cock in the ring. My mate. Where do you think those pictures ended up?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know.’ Cornel’s face was fingered by shadows. ‘Well, you know I’m not sure about that. You know what I think? I think I haven’t actually got any mates.’ He threw something to the concrete. A bundle of something soft. ‘Least of all you, girlie. You were never my mate. You’re a slippery, duplicitous little slag.’

  ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re-’ Jane steadied her voice. ‘I’m not your mate, but I’ve got nothing… If you just give me the torch and the phone, I can take some pictures, and then, like, if you just give me a day or so to expose the cockfight situ-’

  ‘You stupidlittlefuckingbitch!’ A bright sprinkle of spit in the thin lamplight as his body arched at her. ‘There was never any cockfighting here! Never! You got that?’

  73

  Raven

  He’d done it all. Cut the wire, smashed the CCTV camera. He’d been here before. Well, of course he had.

  There was a horrible smell from the lamps. Like rancid, molten butcher’s-shop fat. Cornel was leaning against the altar, the lump hammer still in his hand, the rucksack at his feet.

  ‘Thing is, girlie – and I’ve thought about this a lot – the night you humiliated me in the pub, I do believe that’s when it all started going wrong. Me standing there with my trousers soaked, as if I’d pissed myself. And all my mates laughing. You started it. You could’ve walked away anytime, and you didn’t. Well in the frame for a shag. Who put you up to it, girlie? Which of my mates?’