Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain

by Phil Rickman

  The Secrets of Pain

  PHIL RICKMAN was born in Lancashire and lives on the Welsh border. He is the author of the Merrily Watkins series, and The Bones of Avalon. He has won awards for his TV and radio journalism and writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf for BBC Radio Wales.

  PHIL RICKMAN

  ‘Phil Rickman is one of my all-time favourites. I love everything he’s done, from horror to mystery to supernatural thriller – often all in the same book’

  DIANA GABALDON

  ‘No-one writes better than Rickman about the shadow-frontier between the supernatural and the real world’

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  ‘Rickman writes mysteries in the classic sense, cleverly combining the supernatural and criminal elements to illuminate the darkest corners of our imaginations’

  JOHN CONNOLLY

  ‘I like Merrily. She’s got vices, she likes a smoke, she swears, she’s not easily fooled and she’s nobody’s pushover’

  BARBARA NADEL

  ‘A completely new approach to crime’

  BARRY NORMAN

  ‘A haunting quality beyond crime fiction’

  RUSSELL JAMES

  ‘First rate. We don’t praise our home-grown thriller writers enough. It’s high time we praised Phil Rickman’

  DAILY MAIL

  ‘Compassionate, original and sharply contemporary, one of the best crime series around’

  SPECTATOR

  ‘The clever combination of modern idiom and the timeless echo of history leaps from every page. You are there with poor Merrily every step of the way’

  DAILY EXPRESS

  ‘Feuds, intrigues and murder. A most original sleuth. Terrific’

  THE TIMES

  ‘A first class thriller with a difference’

  GUARDIAN

  ‘Conveys evil like no other writer… A major talent’

  SFX

  ‘Tough-minded, atmospheric mystery’

  BARRY FORSHAW

  ‘A dark no-man’s-land where murder mingles with superstition. Complex, absorbing, fascinating’

  ANDREW TAYLOR

  ALSO BY

  PHIL

  RICKMAN

  THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

  The Wine of Angels

  Midwinter of the Spirit

  A Crown of Lights

  The Cure of Souls

  The Lamp of the Wicked

  The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

  The Smile of a Ghost

  The Remains of an Altar

  The Fabric of Sin

  To Dream of the Dead

  The Secrets of Pain

  OTHER BOOKS

  The Bones of Avalon

  PHIL

  RICKMAN

  The Secrets of Pain

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus,

  an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Phil Rickman, 2011.

  The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84887-273-8

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-84887-274-5

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-474-8

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. White Hell

  Part One

  2. Longships

  3. Wet Cassock

  4. Talk About Paris

  5. Gangland

  6. Exhaust

  7. Old Evil

  8. Neglect

  9. Towards the Flames

  10. Male Thing

  Part Two

  11. Stable Doors

  12. Act of Sacrifice

  13. Killing Fields

  14. Not Going

  15. Dead Game

  16. The Rule

  17. Get the Drummer Killed

  18. An Island in the Night

  Part Three

  19. Icon

  20. Who We Are

  21. Liberal of the Old School

  22. Ground To Air

  23. Swab City

  24. Demons

  25. A Lovely Thing

  26. Bergen

  27. The Loser

  28. Like the Poet

  29. Impaler

  30. Share

  31. Blue Sparks

  Part Four

  32. A Soul in Camouflage

  33. Colleagues

  34. Burned

  35. Comper’s Bling

  36. The Having Done It

  37. Loaded

  38. The Energy of Sorrow

  39. Seer Takes Fire

  40. Magic Dragon

  41. Pain

  42. Don’t Go There

  43. Brazilian Decaff

  44. From the Killing House

  45. The Thorny Night

  46. Crucible

  Part Five

  47. Fizz

  48. Aggressor

  49. Spout

  50. Girlie Returns

  51. Criminal Damage

  52. Grassed

  53. Sideshow

  54. Hell’s Kitten

  55. Cutting Edge

  56. The Beast Within

  57. Arena

  58. Poultry Contest

  59. Cheated

  60. Cult

  61. Passed Away

  62. Blood Sugar

  63. Syd’s Candle

  64. Control

  65. The God of the Regiment

  Part Six

  66. Anything You Want

  67. Savage Ballet

  68. Punching at Smoke

  69. Law of the Hunt

  70. Pot… Kettle… Black

  71. Something Insane

  72. Sham

  73. Raven

  74. Sleeper

  75. Plug

  76. Night of the Last Supper

  77. Migraine Lights

  78. The Wafer and the Moon

  Part Seven

  79. No Fuss

  80. Slasher

  81. The Toxic Dilemma

  82. Revelations

  Credits

  The Secrets of Pain

  FEBRUARY

  They came for me in darkness

  They were black-eyed, grey and thin

  Lol Robinson, ‘Mephisto’s Blues’

  1

  White Hell

  THE HOUSE WAS right next to the road, wherever the road was.

  And out in front there was a woman.

  Not exactly dressed for the weather, thin cardigan all lumpy with snow. Stumbling about in Bronwen’s lights and the blinding white hell, waving her arms. And they were going to run her down, cut her in half.

  ‘Gomer!’ Danny roared. ‘No!’

  The snow was coming down like rubble now, h
ad been this past four hours, and if Danny couldn’t see through it there was no chance that Gomer could. When Bronwen lurched and the snow sprayed up, Danny was thinking, Oh Christ, it’ll be all blotched red.

  Then they’d stopped. Apart from Bronwen’s grumpy chuntering, there was silence. The front door of the house was wide open, yellow light splattered over the snow like warm custard on ice cream. Some of it reaching Gomer, sitting at the wheel in his old donkey jacket, with his cap and his sawn-off mittens and his muffler and the snowlight in his glasses.

  ‘What we done?’ Danny heard his own voice, all hollow. ‘What we done, Gomer?’

  Oh God. Leaning on his side door, breaking through the crispy layer of snow. New tractor, out for the first time with the snowplough. This superhero routine of Gomer’s, coming out in the dark to clear – for free – the roads that Hereford Council wouldn’t go near… well, you learned to live with that, but how long before he was a danger to other folks and hisself?

  You ask Danny, it was starting to look like the time had come.

  A slapping on the door panel, Gomer’s side.

  ‘Who’s that in there?’

  Danny went, ‘Woooh.’

  Sagging in blind relief. It was her. Gomer, meanwhile, totally relaxed, was letting his window down, the ciggy glowing in his face.

  ‘We help at all?’

  ‘… dies of frostbite, what do he care? Long as he’s bloody warm!’ The woman, entirely alive, glaring up at the cab, hair all white and wild. ‘Not you. Him in there, look.’

  Glancing behind her just as the front door of the farmhouse got punched shut from inside and the warm light vanished.

  ‘En’t that typical? He won’t do nothin’, ’cept toss another bloody block on the fire. Serve the buggers right. Let ’em get theirselves out. Then back to his beer.’ She was standing back, snow over the tops of her wellies, squinting, then she went, ‘Gomer?’

  ‘Ah,’ Gomer said. ‘Sarah, is it?’

  ‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire! Thought you was long retired, boy!’

  Danny was too cold to smile. Gomer had an angry puff on his roll-up. Long as the ole boy had his ciggies, the cold never seemed to bother him. Least, not as much as the idea of folks thinking he was too advanced in years to be driving heavy plant through a blizzard. His voice was distinctly gruffer as he drew out the last half-inch of ciggy.

  ‘Problem, is it, girl?’

  ‘Some fool in a car, it is,’ this Sarah said. ‘Come whizzin’ clean off the road on the bend back there. Slides across, crashes through the gate and straight down the bloody hill!’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Sure? I was at the bedroom window, Gomer, couldn’t hardly miss him. Straight through! Headlights all over the snow, then they’ve gone, look. Well, there en’t no way out of there. Ends in forestry.’

  ‘So, let’s get this right, girl,’ Gomer said. ‘There’s a car or some’ing gone down over this yere hill, and he’s vanished?’

  ‘Likely buried already, and we en’t got no gear to haul him out. Can you get through in that thing. Gomer?’

  It was like the whole cab was bulging with Gomer’s outrage.

  ‘This thing?’

  Danny sighed.

  ‘Gomer, mabbe we should call the—’

  ‘En’t nowhere…’ Gomer tossing the last millimetre of ciggy into the snow ‘… on God’s earth this girl can’t get through.’

  Danny, defeated, looked up at the falling sky. Snow and ice had come hard and bitter after Christmas, right after the floods. Over a month of running out of oil, on account of the tankers couldn’t get through, and starving rats raiding your vehicle from underneath, dining on your electrics. A brief respite early in February and then, just when you thought you’d seen the end of winter, the bastard was back with both fists bunched, and Gomer Parry had got hisself a big new JCB tractor called Bronwen and something to prove.

  Danny climbed down and found the car hadn’t gone crunching through the gate after all.

  ‘Some fool left him open.’

  He climbed back in, slammed the door. No warmer in here. Bronwen had a cracking heater, only Gomer wouldn’t use it in case he nodded off at the wheel and some bastard magistrate had his HGV licence off him.

  ‘Shouldn’t be no gate there at all,’ Gomer said. ‘No fence, neither. Common land, it is. Bridleway. Only Dickie, see, he reckons if he d’keep fencin’ it off, one day folks is gonner forget it don’t belong to him.’

  He lowered the plough: tracks in the headlights, but Danny saw they were filling up fast. Gomer set about clearing the field entrance in case they came back with something on tow.

  Danny said. ‘Dickie who?’

  ‘On the pop half the time. Dickie Protheroe. Her’s gotter hold it all together, ennit?’

  ‘Ah, so that’s Dickie Protheroe’s new wife, is it? Never seed her before.’

  ‘Course you en’t. On account of Dickie’s in the pub and her’s back yere holdin’ it all together.’

  ‘Aye,’ Danny said. ‘Fair play to her.’

  Pulling snow out of his beard, thinking whoever was down there could be badly hurt, or worse. Could’ve hit a tree or a power pole.

  ‘Land Rover, them tracks,’ Gomer said. ‘Long wheelbase. Only one set o’ tracks so he en’t out.’ He sniffed. ‘Right, then. We go for it?’

  Ten minutes from midnight when they went in, and the windscreen was near-opaque. Like being inside a washing machine when somebody’d overdone it with the powder. Hoping to God this wouldn’t end in no pink snow, Danny dug his hands into his pockets. Warming himself inside with thoughts of the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on a hot night at the end of June, coloured lights in rippling sequence, the strobes going, the ole Strat hard against his thigh as he went sailing off into the solo from ‘Mephisto’s Blues’.

  Well, it could be, if only Lol would realize how much he had to offer… if the boy could just overcome that persistent low self-esteem.

  What the hell, life was good.

  Had been good.

  ‘You all right, Gomer?’

  ‘Course I’m all right.’

  Bronwen went grinding on between leafless trees turned into great white mushrooms. Humpy, glistening ground and a teeming sky, the countryside like a strange new-made bed, all the familiar creases filled in.

  A slow, downward slope, now, the snow-level rising either side of them. Not going to be that easy getting back up.

  ‘Oh, hell!’

  Patches of grey stone in the lights.

  ‘All right, boy, I seen him.’

  ‘What the hell is it, Gomer?’

  ‘Looks like an ole sheep-shelter.’

  Gomer brought Bronwen grunting to a stop and Danny made out the roof of a vehicle behind the broken wall, a wedge of thick snow on top. How the hell did he get behind the bloody wall? Danny lowered his window.

  ‘You all right there?’

  No reply. He glanced behind. The incline they’d just come down would look dangerously steep on the way back. He turned back to find shadows moving silently on either side, just beyond the lights. Danny stiffened. How many of the buggers were in this yere Land Rover, and why wasn’t they calling out? Like, Thank God you come, kind o’ thing.

  ‘En’t bein’ funny, Gomer, but I don’t altogether like the looks of this, to be honest.’

  The shadows were spreading out, circling and crouching like a pack of wolves. Five of them at least, murky grey now in the swirling night.

  A sudden massive bang on Danny’s side of the tractor.

  One of them was there. All black, no face.

  BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! on the panel.

  The man was in camouflage kit. Gloves, balaclava. No glint of eyes behind the slit.

  Danny got his window up to just a bit of a crack. Looked at Gomer across the grey light in the cab. In the past year, two JCBs had been nicked from this area. All right, not hijacked, just stolen out of their sheds, but there was big money in a brand new tractor an
d a first time for everything.

  ‘Don’t wanner make a thing ’bout this, Gomer, but how about we don’t get out till we finds out a bit—No! Gomer!’

  ‘Balls!’ Gomer was leaning across Danny, mouth up to the crack at the top of the window. ‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire. You all right, there?’

  Oh Jesus… Like these were the magic words, the key to not getting dragged out into the snow and having the shit beaten out of you while the lovely new tractor you’d called Bronwen and had blessed by the vicar got shipped out to Lagos.

  Danny was going, ‘Look, pal, we—’

  When the voice came out of the snow.

  ‘Yow know who we are.’

  Aye, that kind of voice. Full of clouds and night and a bit of Birmingham, and now Danny could see two solid shadows, either side of the camouflage man. Gomer coughed, a bit hoarse.

  ‘This a hexercise, pal?’

  Silence. Then a short, little laugh.

  ‘Give the ole man a coconut.’

  ‘What I figured,’ Gomer said. ‘Only, Sarah back there, see—’

  ‘… so yow just turn this bus around, yeah, and bugger off.’

  All the breath went out of Danny in a steam of relief.

  ‘I should just do it, Gomer. These guys, they don’t make a habit of flashin’ their ID.’

  ‘Put your lights out, now,’ the camouflage man said. ‘Then fuck off and forget you seen anything.’

  Danny shifted uncomfortably in his seat. You wanted cooperation, you didn’t talk quite like this to Gomer Parry. Five foot four and well past seventy, but you just didn’t. Everybody knew that.

  ‘And you might find it easier if you put that filthy cigarette out.’

  ‘Now listen, boy—’