The Secrets of Pain mw-11

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Nobody. Swear to God. I was just fishing for information – about what happens at The Court.’

  ‘Bull shit. Kids your age, it’s just clothes and clubbing and baby booze. And the teen-witch bit in your case, though I’d’ve thought-’

  ‘I have never been a bloody teen-’

  ‘And your boyfriend, the big-time journalist. You think I didn’t ask people if you had a boyfriend? Yeah, yeah, she knocks around with some fat Welsh student.’

  ‘He knows a lot of journalists, and he’s not-’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’ Jane moved back into the lamplight. Not having this. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. You’re-’

  ‘ Shuddup! ’

  Jane flinched a little but didn’t move.

  ‘If it’s not cockfighting,’ she said, ‘what is it?’

  ‘Took my money, and they hung me out to dry.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘One of the other guys was washing in the Gents’ and he had his sleeves rolled up. I thought it was a tattoo. He’d been branded. Branded like a bull, and it was still fresh and livid. The pain of that, and he didn’t… he didn’t care. Pain works. It’s a man thing.’

  His teeth were gritted again. Jane recalled how, at the back of the Swan, the man with the ashy voice had told Cornel, It’s about manhood.

  ‘This is some kind of temple, right?’

  ‘I thought you knew all about it. But you don’t know shit, do you?’

  ‘Don’t know much about Roman stuff.’

  ‘Holy of holies. Just smashed the holy of holies, and it’s not over yet.’

  ‘ Why? ’

  ‘Made it to raven, and then it stopped.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Took me out to the top of a hill. Had to spend the night on the top, naked. All night. Alone, but I knew they were watching, so I couldn’t creep off. No food all day. They gave me something to drink so I stopped feeling the cold, and then I’m seeing things, fucking terrifying, but when the sun comes up… God… Next night, we go out lamping hares. It was spectacular. I’m wearing like…’ Cornel cupped his hands around his face, like a funnel. ‘The raven? Then ate raw meat, fresh-killed.’

  His body was vibrating again. He was grinding his teeth. Then his jaw fell to his chest.

  ‘And that was it. Covered truck still comes maybe twice a week, close to midnight. There might be fifteen guys on the course, but only two or three will go. And I’m, like, when’s it my turn? Why not me? Was that it? There’s higher degrees, another six. But it stops. It fucking stops.’

  Oh God, it was about frustration.

  It all came out. They wouldn’t let him move up to the next grade. They took his money, but they wouldn’t let him move on. He’d kept on at Kenny Mostyn who he’d thought was his mate – what did he have to do, what did they want? He’d gone around the countryside, demonstrating how hard he was, shooting at people’s pets, following Kenny one night, to a cockfight. Thinking back, Kenny must’ve been really pissed off when he turned up, but he congratulated him on his initiative, bought him drinks, helped him place his bets. Of course he lost, making a fool of himself, got into the car legless but made it back, trying to persuade Barry to cook the poor bird. He’d become half-mad with frustration, he really didn’t understand and, oh for God’s sake, Jane didn’t either.

  ‘Twenty-six.’ Cornel’s big jaw thrusting out, his face all sheeny. ‘Twenty fucking six, with a mortgage half the size of the national debt, a car that cost fifty K, not half paid for. I’m fucked!’

  He laid the hammer on the altar. Bent down to the rucksack and pulled something out. Like a folded jacket or something, Jane couldn’t see.

  ‘Got the push, girlie, did I tell you? Necessary rationalization. Had a message to ring my boss. He wasn’t even apologetic. Difficult times, old boy, difficult times. Then off to his villa in Tuscany, the bloated fucking toad.’

  Jane watched a fist rebunching out of the same hand that had held hers, knuckles shining with grease.

  ‘They shafted me. Mostyn. And Savitch and all the public-school cunts who were egging me on to give you one.’ Cornel reached down and tugged on something. ‘I followed the truck. Hired the van, so nobody would know it was me. Easy to follow people on these roads. And then I came back. Hey, but you know what was weird? Got in last night. Being really, really careful. And the police came. The actual police. I’m crouching there behind the altar, they flash their torches around very quickly and then bugger off. I creep up to the door, and they’ve nicked some other bloke. Couldn’t believe it. I felt-’ Cornel punched his left palm with his right fist. ‘Magic!’

  When he started to laugh, it was like a yelping. He snapped on the torch and shone the beam at the ground, where he’d thrown down the bundle.

  ‘Strikes me you’re the first woman ever to come in here.’ His livery lips wet. ‘Or you will be.’

  Kicking the bundle on the ground, and Jane watched the sleeping bag slowly unroll.

  ‘Sacrilege.’ Cornel’s shadow was a momentary black bloom on the curved roof. ‘Think of it like that. We’re gonna have ourselves some sacrilege, girlie.’

  Jane’s recoil knocked one of the lamps off the altar, hot fat splashing up as it went out, and she bit her top lip so hard she felt the blood come.

  Cornel’s face, in the mean light, was creamy with sweat. Cornel was a mess, Cornel was a tosser. Keep telling yourself that. Jesus, tell him.

  ‘Cornel,’ Jane said – even though she knew it was the wrong, wrong thing to say, she said it. ‘You’re an educated guy. You ever think this could be making you just a little bit insane?’

  Don’t waste time looking for his reaction, look for a way out of here: those stepped concrete blocks, the seating, the back row seemed to be some distance from the wall. Would have to be, because this was a Nissen hut and more than half the wall was curved, part of the roof, so there had to be a space.

  ‘You’ll get another job.’ Stepping back, her raised voice gathering echoes. ‘Look at the totally bent, disgraced politicians who keep bouncing back. And they’re, like, old?’

  So there was likely to be a concealed channel – walkway, crawlway – around the perimeter. Follow that and you’d get back to the doors.

  Cornel said, ‘Don’t try to engage me in conversation, Jane – we’re way past that.’

  A two-one from the LSE: he wasn’t a complete idiot, was he? Jane saw him place something on the end of the concrete bench and pick up the hammer. Each time he smashed it down, with a dull, metallic splintering, she winced and jerked and backed a bit further away. It had to be her mobile.

  ‘Please, Cornel…’ Suddenly near to tears, and they were seeping into her voice. ‘You can’t rape me.’

  The word was out, pathetically, but carrying a long echo…ape me .

  Jane zipped her jacket all the way up as his voice came back at her, petulant, along with a spurt of torchbeam.

  ‘Doesn’t have to be that.’

  ‘Just because you feel sorry for somebody,’ Jane said steadily, ‘doesn’t mean you… doesn’t mean you can fancy them.’

  Well, she didn’t feel sorry for Cornel at all. He was a victim of his own greed, his own obsession. She hated him. She sank slowly down and fitted both hands under one of the shards of concrete which had flown off under the lump hammer. It was too heavy to throw at him, but she had nothing else; she held it against her stomach, letting her body take some of the weight as she backed away from the lamp.

  ‘And this place is horrible. It stinks and it’s not even a proper ancient site. It’s just cobbled together out of old… building supplies, and you know what? I… I think you’ve got this all wrong, Cornel. I think you’ve been conned. This is just a scam to make money out of guys like you.’

  Jane flattened herself against the rough bottom wall and began to drag herself along it, thinking maybe Cornel wanted this place to bring out a side of him he still wasn’t sure was there. As if just being h
ere, doing violent man things…

  ‘It’s just a scam, Cornel, to make money out of rich, gullible-’

  ‘Do you see what’s in my hand, girlie?’

  Jane screamed.

  ‘I’m not looking!’ Aware that he was pointing the torch at himself – oh please – down there. ‘You come near me, Cornel, I swear I’ll have your eyes out.’

  74

  Sleeper

  As they drove up towards the Brecon road, the clouds had fled. The still-wintry moonlight was spread like sour cream on the fields where the man who slaughtered the Bull might have gone running, his head floating inside the feral fury of his haoma high.

  Try explaining that to the Crown Prosecution Service, Annie Howe had said.

  ‘Even if Sollers had no hand in the killing, if he was there he did nothing to stop it. Then into his car and off to his restaurant to fix himself an alibi.’

  ‘What was he like when he arrived at the restaurant?’

  ‘Stagg talked to the staff. They were agreed that Sollers was in one of his reorganizing moods. Calling the team together – we should do this, we need to do that. Busy, busy.’

  ‘Hyper. That figures.’

  ‘Then, after a suitable period of time, he comes back and, according to his statement, hears the cattle making a noise in the sheds, walks up with his shotgun and discovers the carnage.’

  ‘Shotgun?’

  ‘Common enough reaction for a farmer at night. Especially in an area portrayed by Countryside Defiance as the badlands. Expect the worst. Be ready. Don’t expect any help from the police.’

  ‘How did it all go sour?’

  Merrily sank back against the headrest, thinking of Arthur Baxter and his smallholding. The good life, eh? Where did all that go? The Baxes, in their shapeless home-made sweaters replaced by the Mostyns in killer camouflage.

  ‘And where’s Mansel’s murderer now?’

  ‘Conceivably in some London nightclub or the theatre,’ Annie said. We’d need a list of Jones’s clients, present and past. It’ll take work, liaison with the Met, manpower, overtime… money. Even before we try to penetrate the well-protected, lawyer-lined heart of the City.’

  ‘Will that be so much harder than penetrating the old farming families of Herefordshire?’

  The car climbed the last hill to the Brecon road.

  ‘You know why he explained in detail – Jones – how the candidate came alone and slept in a tent and fasted for a day? You know why he told us all that, instead of delivering his need to know line? That’s just in case this guy really did do it. Killed Mansel.’

  ‘So Jones could say he was on his own? Nothing to do with me, guv.’

  ‘You could be in the wrong job.’

  ‘I thought the entire clergy was in the wrong job as far as you were concerned.’

  Annie Howe laughed and drove out onto the Hereford road, put her foot down. Before leaving Oldcastle, she’d rung the hospital. Frannie Bliss had come round for about five seconds.

  It was enough.

  Annie Howe had smoked one of Merrily’s cigarettes.

  The lump of ridged concrete was too heavy, and it was hard for Jane to think how she could smash it down on Cornel if he came for her. But he hadn’t, he’d gone quiet and she’d lugged the slab with her into the gap behind the seating blocks, sinking down there, feeling like a rabbit hiding from a rabid fox.

  The space was narrower than she’d expected; maybe Cornel wouldn’t fit in here. She packed herself into it and waited in silence, hearing him moving around and then a double grunt as if he was heaving himself up on something.

  She heard a muted thuck, thuck.

  Oh Christ, he was barring the doors.

  Jane let the slab slide down between her feet, shut her eyes and prayed for help, but when Cornel spoke again his voice was quieter.

  ‘Wherever you are, girlie… don’t move. If you don’t want to get hurt.’

  But there was a kind of anticipation, his voice like the whisper before a performance. Jane said nothing in case he was still just trying to find out where she was. She hunched herself up, back against the curving metal, arms around her knees, the chunk of concrete between her feet. Could see the top of the long concrete bench above her, black against a grey haze. If she stood up, she’d be able to see over it. But if she stood up, Cornel could reach her, get his arms around her.

  She shrank into herself, and there was more silence. She could hear him breathing, one long gritty… snort.

  Oh God, more coke. Jane grabbed the opportunity to squirm a little further down. Heard Cornel moving around on the concrete bench, breath coming in little spurts now. All pumped up, Superman. Oh please, please, please, please…

  A creak from the top end of the building, where the doors were, and Cornel went quiet. Nothing for a while, and then, unmistakably, soft footfalls on the steps.

  What?

  Jane saw the torchbeam bouncing erratically across the metal roof, and she didn’t think it was Cornel’s.

  The torchbeam steadied.

  ‘Evening, Kenny,’ Cornel said.

  Merrily unlocked her car in Gaol Street and sat behind the wheel, discovering that she was no longer tired. Perhaps the relief: Bliss, nothing life-threatening. She called Lol and then Jane. No answer from either. She left messages.

  She had a cigarette half out of the packet and then pushed it back, in no mood to relax. She called Huw Owen. It took nearly half an hour to update him.

  ‘I think we can work this out,’ she said. ‘We have enough to work it out.’

  ‘Lass, go home, it’s dark, it’s cold…’

  ‘And it’s Good Friday tomorrow, and I’ll be locked into a meditation cycle. You don’t have to do anything. I just need you to listen. Could be selling myself a scenario. I’m just sitting here, no Bible, no Bergen, no cross. Just old jeans and trainers and a coat borrowed from an atheist.’

  ‘Hardly the time for a crisis of faith, lass.’

  ‘When would be a good time?’ Merrily coughed. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Who’s the adversary?’

  ‘Does there have to be one?’

  ‘Did wi’ Spicer.’

  Merrily looked around the empty car park as if there might be a shadow with horns and claws prowling the edge of her vision. Knowing that horns and claws wouldn’t scare her half as much as what she’d once seen in the eyes of an old, dying man on a hospital ward.

  ‘Start with elimination,’ Huw said. ‘Is it Mithras?’

  ‘A sun god consigned to a cellar by the Romans? I’m not sure he’s not one of the injured parties.’

  ‘What if she’s right, the Witch of Hardwicke, and the Roman Mithras is an insidious form of Antichrist? The mole. The sleeper inside the Church. What if the sleeper’s been awakened? Going after Spicer in the night? What does he see?’

  Merrily stared into the moon.

  ‘He sees three men standing round his bed. One with blood where his teeth should be, one with shards of glass in his face. One with a rope around his neck and his tongue hanging out.’

  Greg and Jocko and Nasal. It had to be.

  ‘He told you he was oppressed by the presence of someone who was known to him, a flawed person. He was just being careful. I’m guessing he meant three people. His gang. An SAS operational team are very close. Sharing their individual skills. A unit, a single entity. Now, add to that the chemistry of Mithras. According to Byron, it was Syd who got into it first, and Syd was the only survivor – because he went away and threw himself in the opposite direction.’

  ‘There’s another survivor, Merrily.’

  ‘Byron? Was he as close as the others? Was Byron ever on a mission with Syd? It’s a four-man team, usually. I think the other guys were – in Mithraic terminology – Syd’s brothers. Now all dead in bad ways, and Syd feels responsible.’

  ‘Unquietly dead? That’s what you’re saying?’

  ‘They are when he comes back to the Regiment. Sleeping in his army house under C
redenhill. And then… the technicality. Which has to be Mithraism. He tells you about what he calls a strong, negative energy behind the apparitions, manifestations, whatever. These guys were his mates, his brothers, his gang. But one of them killed his own wife, and Syd doesn’t know, since Mithras, if Jocko, Greg and Nasal are at all benign any more.’

  ‘And the negative energy? The fuel?’

  ‘All around? Athena White called it a landscape quietly dedicated to war, but it’s also, at various points in its history, been dedicated to the Roman Mithras. I mean… more realistically, I think Syd discovered what Byron was doing. Selling Mithras? What could come of that but serious evil?’

  Merrily gave in and lit a cigarette.

  ‘I think if Mithraism had still been spreading inside the SAS, he would’ve known about it. He’d have been watching and he had contacts – probably with the last chaplain. Whether he knew what Byron’s doing now, before he took the chaplain’s job, I don’t know. But when he was at Credenhill he must’ve had a powerful sense of something, horribly familiar. Amplified.’

  ‘And senses the old team back together. But not in a good way, eh?’

  ‘Bad nights, Huw. Racked with guilt, frightened for the future, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it. He thought he did. In the end, he turns, in desperation, to the chapel.’

  ‘Happen finding it easier because the chapel’s in the Beacons, the old SAS training ground.’

  ‘And even while he’s there, trying to arm himself, what happens? Back home, that same stormy night, a man gets murdered, in the true Mithraic manner. What kind of night’s sleep would you get after learning about that?’

  There was a long, flat, mobile-phone silence.

  ‘He rings you,’ Merrily said. ‘Yielding a bit more information. If he can only get Nasal and co. out of his dreams – let’s call them dreams – he might feel sane enough to…’

  The advice Huw had given him – how sane was that? Denzil Joy had been straightforward compared with this situation.

  ‘To do what?’ Huw said.

  ‘Take on Byron Jones, I suppose. Sooner or later he knows he has to take on Byron.’