Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain

by Phil Rickman

‘Pheasants. The rule.’

  ‘Did I mention pheasants? Did I?’

  Jane saw white moonlight rippling in the black plastic of a bin liner, bulging. Cornel was holding it up with both hands, something hanging out of it.

  ‘It deserves to be fucking eaten,’ Cornel said. ‘By me. That make sense to you?’

  Barry didn’t move. Cornel pulled the bin liner open at the top and held it out to him. Barry stayed in the doorway, very relaxed-looking, not touching the bag.

  ‘How’d you kill that? You all get together and beat it to death?’

  Jane couldn’t see what it was and didn’t want to. She felt herself going tight with hate.

  Cornel said, ‘You’re really not gonna—?’

  ‘Goodnight, son.’

  Barry at his most no-shit.

  ‘Wha’m I s’posed to do with it?’

  Almost screaming now.

  ‘I should put it back in your car boot, mate, and dispose of it very discreetly.’

  ‘You’re no fun, Barry. You’re no fucking fun.’

  ‘Actually,’ Barry said, ‘this is me at my most fun. You want to see me at my most no fun, you’ll leave that thing behind on these premises. You get where I’m coming from?’

  There was a scary kind of deadness in Barry’s voice. Jane had heard stories about what Barry had been known to do, the odd times it had got rough in the public bar. The yard went momentarily black as the door was shut, and – oh, shit – the mobile started vibrating in Jane’s hip pocket. She was gripping the phone through the denim as Cornel totally lost it, started snarling at the closed door.

  ‘This is not over. It’s not fucking over!’

  Just like the other night. I just want you to know it doesn’t end here. Only losers walked away. Limited repertoire. Tosser. Jane stayed tight between the perimeter wall and the toilet block, trying to breathe slowly in the stale-beery air, not wanting to think how Cornel might react if he found her here, witness to his humiliation. Again.

  The moon showed her Cornel’s foot coming back, maybe to kick the closed door, and then it got confusing.

  ‘Didn’t handle that very well, did we, Cornel?’

  Another voice. Someone had come into the yard from the alley.

  ‘Pick it up, eh?’

  An ashy kind of voice. Not Barry. A bit Brummy.

  ‘I thought you’d gone,’ Cornel said.

  ‘Thought? Yow don’t think, Cornel, that’s the problem. Now pick it up. Take it somewhere and bury it, then go and cry yourself to sleep.’

  Cornel’s voice came back, petulant.

  ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

  ‘Go home any time y’want, mate. No skin off my nose.’

  ‘You’re just a—’

  A movement. Not much of one. A chuckle. Then a short cry, more shock than pain.

  ‘Uhhh!’

  ‘Ah, dear, dear, you’re really not ready. Didn’t see that that coming either. Not as hard as we thought, eh? Long way to go, Cornel, still a long way to go, mate.’

  Jane breathed in hard, through her mouth, and the breath dragged in something gritty.

  ‘I’ve told you,’ Cornel said. ‘I’ll pay the extra.’

  ‘It’s not about money. It’s about manhood.’

  An indrawn breath, full of rage, a scuffling, like Cornel was finding his feet. Jane tasted something disgusting, realized she was inhaling a cobweb full of dead flies.

  Cornel was going, ‘You sanctimonious fucking… Awwww…’

  From the yard, a bright squeak of intense agony. Piercing violence lighting up the night like an electric storm, and Jane, choking, clawing at her mouth, was really scared now, sweat creaming her forehead. Trying to meld with the toilet wall, breathing through her nose, holding her jaw rigid, not even daring to spit.

  ‘Come and see me again, look, when your balls drop,’ the guy said.

  This kind of tittering laugh. A sound you’d swear was the guy clapping Cornel on the back in a don’t take it to heart kind of way.

  Departing footsteps, light and casual in the alley, but in the yard there was only retching and then Cornel going, ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit…’ like he was walking round in circles, while Jane clung to the jagged stones in the toilet wall, her head ballooning with a suffocating nausea.

  ‘…shit, shit, shit…’ from the alleyway now, receding.

  Cornel had gone.

  Jane sprang away from the wall, coughing out the cobweb and the flies, coughing and coughing, wiping her mouth on her sleeve as she went staggering out into the warm smell of new vomit in the yard.

  She was at the top of the alley, where it came out onto the square, when she saw Cornel again.

  He was on his own, dragging the black bin sack across the cobbles like some vagrant. He was moving jerkily, his body arched. Jane saw him stop. She saw him pick up the plastic sack with both hands, his gangly body bending in pain like an insect which had been trodden on.

  Cornel dumped the sack into one of the concrete litter bins on the square, ramming it in hard before walking crookedly away.

  Jane didn’t move until he was long gone and the village centre was unusually deserted in the amber of the fake gas lamps.

  Beyond the glow, gables jutted, like Cornel’s chin, into a cold, windless night sky, and the church steeple was moon-frosted as Jane moved unsteadily across to the concrete bin.

  17

  Get the Drummer Killed

  ‘YOU DON’T HAVE to take that crap,’ Barry said. ‘There comes a point where you just… you realize you just don’t.’

  He’d come back from the kitchens looking dark-faced, angry, and that was rare. A few more customers had come in since, and Marion, the head barmaid, had taken over. Barry had poured himself a Guinness and come to sit with Merrily and Lol.

  ‘Behaving like a servant is one thing. Being treated like one is something else.’

  ‘He’d killed a pheasant?’ Lol said.

  ‘Don’t matter. None of it matters too much now, anyway. When the worst happens, I’m not going to be around.’

  He got up suddenly, unhooked a big black poker, turned over the last big apple log, and the flames were instantly all over it. Barry came and sat down, rubbing soot from his hands.

  ‘The worst?’ Merrily said.

  ‘I apologize.’ Barry drank some Guinness, wiped his lips almost delicately on a white pocket handkerchief. ‘There’s no reason at all for me not to tell you. Savitch is buying the Swan.’

  Pool balls plinked off one another in the Public. Lol put down his pencil.

  ‘When you think about it, it was only a matter of time,’ Barry said.

  ‘I didn’t…’ Lol’s voice was parched. ‘The Swan’s for sale?’

  ‘Way things are now, Laurence, any pub’s for sale. Every day, somewhere in Britain, another one shuts down.’

  Merrily stared into the fire. After Christmas, it had become known that the Black Swan’s elderly owner had handed it over to her son, who ran a building firm. The building trade would revive, but the future for pubs…

  ‘Savitch put in an initial offer last week.’ Barry’s voice was flat. ‘Ridiculously low, and it got turned down, of course. But that was just round one. He’ll be back.’

  ‘Why’s he doing this?’ Lol said. ‘Why not just, you know, live here?’

  ‘He’s a businessman. The place you live, you want it to look like an enterprise, not a loser’s refuge.’

  ‘This can’t happen,’ Lol said.

  ‘It could happen tomorrow, mate, if he doubles his bid. Which I’m sure he can afford to. But I think he’ll wait.’

  ‘What can we do?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Pray?’

  ‘What are his plans, exactly?’

  ‘Village is set to grow. Maybe he’s on a promise. All too friendly with Councillor Pierce these days.’ Barry leaned his chair back against an oak pillar where a wall had once divided the bar into two rooms. ‘End of the day, we’re just the little people. Thes
e things don’t happen on our level, do they? I mean, the word is he’ll ask me to stay on, but that’s… not for me.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Barry.’

  ‘Nah, I’ll be all right. Not sure about Ledwardine, though.’ Barry settled into his chair, evidently more relaxed now it was out. ‘So what’s the problem with Syd Spicer, then, Merrily?’

  ‘Didn’t think you wanted to talk about him.’

  ‘I didn’t. Now, suddenly, it seems like light relief. One of your lot now, last I heard.’

  ‘Actually, one of your lot again. Been made chaplain at Credenhill.’

  ‘Has he now?’

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘They don’t put out a newsletter. Chaplain, eh? Padre. Well, well.’

  ‘Barry, could I ask you something in general? About the Regiment?’

  Barry shrugged, his jacket tightening, a sleeve rising to expose a purplish scar snaking up his wrist from the palm of his left hand.

  ‘I’m sorry if it—’

  ‘Nah, nah, just it’s usually teenage boys. How many men you killed? How many times you been tortured? It can get wearing.’

  ‘Just that Syd once told me… he said there was a kind of mysticism in the Regiment. His word.’

  ‘Oh, I see. This is about the things you do on the side.’

  Much of the time, Barry’s broad face was smooth and bland, but his eyes were the eyes of a far thinner, warier man. Maybe a colder man. He sucked some froth from his Guinness.

  ‘Not quite sure what you mean by mysticism. There’s a lot of myths.’

  Merrily waited. The old apple log was well alight and it felt warmer in here now, almost like old times. But this was the last good log.

  ‘What can I tell you?’ Barry said. ‘There’ve been geezers I knew, up against a wall, who’ve prayed their hearts out and the wall never moved, know what I mean? And there’s a bloke I know survived against all the odds, and he’s seen it as a miracle and gone hallelujah, praise the Lord, born-again.’

  ‘What about superstition?’

  ‘Rabbits’ feet? Not treading on the cracks in the minefield?’ Barry shook his head minimally. ‘Small obsessions can get you hurt.’

  ‘Fear of the unknown?’

  ‘You don’t give in to it. If you’re in a tight situation, personal fears take a back seat because you’re concentrating on how to deal with it.’

  ‘What if it’s something a man knows he can’t get at? I’m wondering at what stage he would think he was going mad.’

  ‘Blimey,’ Barry said. ‘What’s this about? Only, generally speaking, we don’t do mad. All right. What I’d say is you might start by eliminating the possibility of there being, say, something in the water – practical stuff.’

  ‘And when you’ve eliminated the rational, the hallucin- atory…?’

  ‘We talking about Syd here? Only he’s a bleedin’ vicar.’

  ‘Not all vicars feel able to take the funny stuff on board. Don’t all take God on board any more. At what stage do you think he might seek help?’

  ‘On a mission, you rely on your mates, your gang. The circumstances would have to be very special for you to venture outside. You read Frank’s book? Frank Collins?’

  ‘Should have, shouldn’t I?’

  Frank Collins: former curate at St Peter’s, Hereford. Ex-SAS. Occasionally spoken of among Hereford clergy, warily.

  ‘Wish I’d known him,’ Merrily said. ‘But he was dead before I came here.’

  By his own hand. Gassed himself in his car. She’d heard it said that he’d become depressed after writing the book about his time in the SAS and his conversion to Christianity. It hadn’t been well received – by the Regiment, not the clergy.

  ‘Some weird stuff in that book,’ Barry said. ‘How God spoke to him through the radio. There’s one tale in there of a guy who knows his best mate’s bought the farm in the Falklands on account of he’s appeared to him in his house, thousands of miles away, all dripping wet. Made me shiver a bit, that. I served with them both. Frank, too. Blondie, we called him.’

  ‘I’ll read it. Did start it once, but life intervened. Did, erm… did Frank Collins find the same level of support in the Church as he had in the SAS?’

  ‘Evidently not,’ Barry said.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘In the Regiment, you rely on your mates not only because they’re your mates but because each of you’s got special skills. Abilities the others respect.’ He looked at Lol. ‘Like in a band. Only a band where, if you forget your chords, you might get the drummer killed.’

  ‘Good analogy,’ Lol said. ‘I’m guessing.’

  ‘We don’t like to rely on guesswork,’ Barry said.

  Some nights, Lol would just go back to the vicarage with Merrily for coffee or hot chocolate.

  This wasn’t going to be one of them. They both knew that, as they walked out onto cobbles already slick with black ice. Almost touching, not quite. They never publicly held hands in Ledwardine, not even after dark.

  A few icy stars were out over Cole Hill, a wreath of them above the church steeple. Merrily shivered with cold and unease, watching Lol beside her, head down, the lyrics pad under an arm, a hole in an elbow of his Gomer Parry sweatshirt. The Ledwardine village musician, one day playing music, the next following a JCB down to the riverbank with a hand shovel. She could almost hear his thoughts echoing across the cobbles: what kind of fantasy is this?

  Lol had never really been much of a pub guy. Didn’t drink much, didn’t play darts or pool, didn’t have mates. It was only after his Christmas concert at the Swan that he’d achieved a degree of openness in Ledwardine. After he’d been lured out to play his music in front of his neighbours. And now…

  I’ve agreed with Barry to do a few more gigs. Here at the Swan. And maybe something outside in the summer.

  ‘If Savitch can’t get it cheap enough, he might not bother,’ Merrily said at the entrance to Church Street. ‘I mean, what’s he going to do with it anyway, to make it show a decent profit… on his scale?’

  Wishing, as soon as it was out – like with a lot of things she’d said tonight – that she’d kept quiet.

  ‘You know exactly what he’ll do,’ Lol said. ‘He’ll make it into some kind of après-shoot retreat for his corporate clients… and for all the wives and girlfriends who don’t want to stay in a chalet, however luxurious, on a muddy farm. He’ll build up the restaurant and double the prices. It’ll just… regularize things.’

  They stood and contemplated the clutch of lights down Church Street, where the holiday homes – sixteen at the last count – would be in darkness until Easter weekend. One of the For Sale notices had acquired a cross-strip saying sold. Had Savitch bought that, too?

  Merrily saw Lol bent over his guitar in a corner, his music drowned out by the laughter of loud-voiced, faux-rural thugs.

  ‘They look out from their penthouses across all the lights,’ Lol said. ‘And they can’t see it but they know it’s there… all those thousands of square miles of it, all dark and empty. It just… it starts to irritate them. They’re thinking, what’s it doing? We’re the masters of the universe, why isn’t it giving us anything?’

  Merrily was nodding gloomily. Had it ever been otherwise, since Norman kings designated thousands of acres as hunting ground? Great slabs of it going to the barons, who settled and grew, in their brutal way, to love it and eventually became the old squirearchy.

  The Bulls and the Bull-Davieses.

  Until they, in turn, started to lose it under the weight of inheritance taxes, leaving it prey to the new money. Savitch.

  Cycles of exploitation.

  The last fake gas lamp on the square was behind them now. A merciful mesh of shadows claiming them for its own. Lol brought out the keys to the terraced cottage where Lucy Devenish used to live. The folklorist. The guardian of the soul of the village. Jane’s first mentor.

  ‘I suppose what gets me,’ Lol said, ‘is that most people don’t seem t
o mind. The first time somebody off the TV comes to stay at the Swan, bit of glamour, they’re all in favour of it. It’s brought the village alive… but not in the right way.’

  ‘A bit of glamour,’ Merrily said. ‘Maybe we all need that.’

  Her eyes felt damp.

  Lol held open the front door for her. Inside, the wood stove was burning a surprising terracotta red.

  Merrily’s black woollen top was off before they reached the sofa.

  18

  An Island in the Night

  ‘ACTUALLY, I do think he did it,’ Bliss said. ‘What’s wrong with that? It’s me job to suspect people.’

  Staring up at the plaster moulding around the bedroom ceiling. The curtains were undrawn; you could see blurry lights in the big houses on the hillside across the road.

  Cosy. An upstairs flat in a classy Victorian villa set back from the main road out of Great Malvern. Bliss liked it here – at the moment, more than anywhere, especially his crappy semi on the flat side of Hereford. OK, if he was called out in the night it’d take him maybe forty minutes to get back, and he’d need to leave at seven a.m., anyway. But it was worth it. Wasn’t it?

  ‘Francis, you…’

  Annie Howe peering at him, her eyes all soft and woolly and useless without her contacts. It was worth it just for that.

  ‘… you can’t simply accuse a man of murder because he doesn’t like you. Sometimes I don’t like you. You can be an intensely annoying person.’

  ‘Part of me appeal, Annie.’

  Bliss watched a light go out across the road, and then the hillside was as blank as those years of mutual blind distrust. Fast-track Annie, man-hating bitch, daughter of Councillor Charlie Howe, ex-copper, bent. All the poison darts Bliss had aimed at her back. Why should she like him?

  He felt, unexpectedly, flimsy. What was she supposed to see in a twat who couldn’t hold anything together, not his job, not his family? Like Kirsty said, You never did put yourself out much, did you, Frank?

  True, in a way. He and Annie had fallen into bed within days of Kirsty leaving, both coasting on the euphoria of a crucial result, a key arrest. A cop thing. How much staying power was there in that?