by Phil Rickman
‘What did he do?’
‘Nothing. That was the point. Thick fog. Young guy falls some distance down a slope, bangs his head on a rock, dies a week or so later in hospital. Byron was lying in the bracken, watching, when it happened. It was suggested he could’ve warned the boy he was close to the edge. He didn’t.’
‘They were on opposite sides?’
‘For the day. And it would’ve drawn attention to his position.’
‘Byron didn’t know when to stop?’
‘It was… according to what we heard, it was like he’d forgotten you had to stop. Couldn’t understand why anybody was even questioning his attitude. I believe there were other occasions when his… common humanity was called into question.’
‘How?’
‘Not going any further down that road. The guys on the end of it, they’re mainly still around. And it wasn’t like he was the only one.’
‘Can you explain that a bit more?’
‘I can’t explain it at all, Merrily.’
‘You said before that even the Regiment couldn’t alter a man’s personality. Something did.’
‘Yeah,’ Barry said. ‘Something did. What it meant, of course, was that nobody in his right mind wanted to be in Byron’s gang any more. Which was causing a bit of upset so, in the end, he had to go. He was given an admin post. And then he went.’
‘Where did Syd come into this?’
‘He didn’t. Syd had gone before it got tense.’
‘Because I’m wondering if this could be a reason for the rift between Syd and Byron. Liz and Fiona both think it was something to do with Syd getting ordained, but they could be wrong.’
‘All I can tell you, Merrily, is Byron wasn’t popular, the last years.’
A wary stillness around him now. Merrily had the feeling that while he’d been talking he’d worked something out. Something he was still unsure about. It was becoming clear that anything she pulled from this was going to have to be worked for. She looked around the bar. James Bull-Davies had come in, with Alison. Amanda Rubens and her partner, Gus. Still no sign of Lol.
‘In view of all this,’ she said, ‘it seems more than a bit odd that Byron should want to come back and live near the new camp at Credenhill.’
‘You asking me if he had a grievance to work out? No way. That don’t happen. More likely it’s just business. If he’s running an adventure centre for SAS-fantasists, nowhere better to put it than near the SAS.’
Merrily shook her head, had a drink of water.
‘He seems to have virtually cleaned out his bank account just buying the land.’
‘Well, it’s paid off if he’s bringing in the punters.’
‘Syd was in this history club that Byron started, right?’
‘Was he?’
‘Do you know any of the others – who might be prepared to talk to me?’
‘No.’
Too quick, too casual.
‘But you must know a bit about the history club, Barry, because it was you who first told me about it.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So you know who was in it – at least some of them.’
Barry took a long resigned breath.
‘I knew them, yeah.’
‘Knew them.’
‘Yeah,’ Barry said. ‘Knew. You satisfied now?’
45
The Thorny Night
THE CLOUDS HAD sunk to the horizon in layers of brown, like the sediment in cough mixture. An early yellow moon was floating free, very close to full. The night was saying, just do it.
Lol had driven slowly along what the map had identified as a Roman road, right through the centre of Magnis, where you turned right for Kenchester and then back towards Brinsop Common. He’d reversed the truck tight up against a field gate, the kind of place you’d never leave a vehicle in the daytime, but at least it was out of sight.
Bax was right, you couldn’t see the place from the road, only the recently planted woodland, a black cake of conifers at the top of a slow rise, Credenhill hard behind it like a prison wall.
There was an entrance with a cattle grid but no barrier except, about thirty paces in, a galvanized gate, ordinary farm-issue, closed, with a padlock hanging loose. Nothing to suggest private land.
Except the sign. Quite a modest sign, black on white, mud around the edges.
THE COMPOUND TRAINING CENTRE
TRESPASSERS UNWELCOME
The night that had said just do it went quiet.
Lol stood and looked around.
He’d put on his walking boots. He had the mini-Maglite in his jeans, but there was still enough light to see where you were going, so he left it there. He didn’t have a jacket. His sweatshirt was worn thin; he had to push up the sleeves because he could feel the cold through a hole in one elbow.
He climbed over the gate, but left the track, stepping into a thicket of low spruce. There was a caravan at the side of the track. Derelict, long abandoned, a coating of mould, rags at the windows. Further along, an old cattle trailer, its tyres long gone, was held up on concrete blocks.
A little scared? Maybe. But fear wasn’t the worst of emotions. Fear could be a stimulant, while shame and regret could destroy you. Letting things slide, forgetting what was important.
Lol walked close to the hedge. Couldn’t see far ahead now, and then something splintered under his boot. He patted his pockets in case he’d dropped the torch, but no, it was there. He turned the top to switch it on, shielding the beam with a hand. Something made of grey metal lay between his boots. He bent down. A grey panel, the words Digital Interface printed along it.
Part of a CCTV camera, smashed. He looked up and saw a pole from which it might have fallen. He picked up the camera. Metal. Sturdy, professional. Industrial-quality. No need to worry about showing up on a monitor in Byron Jones’s study, then. Lol carried on up the side of the track. Wasn’t going to be stupid about this. He’d go as far the wire fence and just…
‘Uh…!’
The pain had come from several places almost simultaneously.
It ripped up through both legs, and Lol stumbled to his knees, then lost his balance, fell over, threw out a hand to push himself up, and it was snatched and stabbed all over.
He tried to roll away, and dragged his hand free and made it to his pocket and the Maglite. Its light showed rusting metal tendrils wound around his lower legs like a manacle of thorns. Oh God, this was the fence.
Had been. He looked up and saw double strands of barbed wire stretched between poles like arched lamp-posts. Between the strands he could see where a hole, man-sized, had been cut. Where he’d walked into the wire cuttings coiled on the ground, brutal metal brambles.
Someone had done this. Someone had been and smashed the CCTV cameras and then taken wire-cutters to the fence. Someone had broken into Jones’s training facility.
Breathing through his teeth, Lol began to unwind the wire, barb by barb, until he could stand up. He stayed there for a while, as though if he moved it would go for him again. Slowly, he pushed his hands down his legs: damp jeans fused to the skin by warm blood and cold dew. His hands hurt: he found three more deep cuts on fingers that wouldn’t be holding down a chord for a while. Danny would be furious.
He found a ragged tear in the wrist. A dark cord of blood unravelling into his palm. As he stepped away from the barbed wire, a severed strand whipped past his eyes and he realised that, without wanting to be, he was now inside Byron Jones’s compound, bleeding all over it.
Lol crouched behind a bush. Everything here seemed to come with spikes and barbs and thorns, and the metal had seemed more alive than the winter-brittle foliage. A filmy moonlight exposed a space surrounded by conifer woodland, like the exercise yard in some old POW camp. Half-cindered, huts around the perimeter, an oil tank on concrete blocks. Close to the centre, a barn-sized building of galvanized metal with no windows. Nearest to him, a Nissen hut, half buried in bushes and brambles.
When a small, t
ight creak came from the hut, Lol almost threw himself back into the wire.
One of the doors. One of the doors had moved. He sank down again, breath slamming into him like a punch. He waited… must’ve been five minutes. Nothing happened, nobody came out. But he knew the doors were open. Someone had left the doors open.
Out. This is not good. Get out.
Not that it was going to be easy driving home with this hand. He touched it tentatively with the other one. The blood was coming faster. His palm was full of blood.
Lol felt his wrist, and the flap of skin that came up under his probing thumb was the size of a plectrum. He made a shameful, strangled noise, turned away towards the hole in the wire. Into a hot, white, blinding blaze and the quiet shadowy movement of men all around him in the thorny night.
46
Crucible
MERRILY WENT DIRECTLY round to Lol’s, but the lights were out. She fumbled in her bag for the key, went inside. The door to the living room hung open, the Boswell guitar on its stand, the draught sending shivers through the strings. If Lol had gone over to Kinnerton to rehearse with Danny, wouldn’t he have taken the Boswell?
She would have called him on his mobile but – this happened all too often – there it was on the table under the window.
Bugger. She came out into the usual sensation of being watched – neighbours at their windows just happening to notice the vicar slipping round to her boyfriend’s cottage, her boyfriend’s bed, under cover of darkness. She felt a rush of angry despair, wishing, hardly for the first time, that she was living here with Lol. Wishing she was normal. Thinking about what she might do if she left the Church to choke to death on its own tangled politics.
Walking across the corner of the square to the vicarage, Merrily wondered what she actually could do?
Sod all. There was nothing else here for her, just as there’d be nothing for Lol – nothing he could live with – if Savitch was in virtual control of a bijou tourist village. What if they were both to get out? Would he want her to go with him?
Leaving Jane, who wanted to go nowhere else.
When she got home, Jane had gone bed. She evidently did not want to talk any more. Merrily fed Ethel, then went into the scullery and sat down under the anglepoise lamp and switched on the laptop.
Dead. All dead now.
Barry could remember three of the other members of the history club. Merrily pulled over the sermon pad and wrote down the names before she forgot them. Mostly nicknames.
Jocko: killed in a car crash near Bristol. He’d been drunk.
Greg: kicked to death in a fight outside a bar in Madrid. He’d been on holiday.
The third one, known as Nasal, Merrily easily found on the Net by Googling Nasal, SAS, murder.
Sunday Times, April 11, 2004.
A former SAS man serving a life sentence for the murder of his girlfriend has been found hanged in his prison cell. Rhys Harran, 43, was said by friends yesterday to have been unable to cope with incarceration. He had been involved in several fights with other inmates of London’s Pentonville prison. Harran, known as ‘Nasal’ because of a sinus abnormality, was jailed two years ago, after being convicted of strangling his long-term girlfriend Cassie Welsh at their home in Fulham. The court heard he had been suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome after service in Western Iraq and had failed to adjust to civilian life. Harran, who left the SAS in 2002, was described by a former colleague last night as ‘a real tiger of a bloke’. His army career included operations in the Falklands, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland.
Abruptly, Merrily switched off the computer and rang Big Liz at Allensmore.
Liz said. ‘I went into the tower room tonight. Alone. In the dark.’
‘Was that a good idea?’
‘I don’t know. In some ways, Colin feels closer now than he did before you came, but perhaps that’s because I was forced to go over old ground. I’m starting to see the bad things I’d turned a blind eye to. Just, you know, small things, intimate things that I didn’t realize weren’t… I was a virgin, you see. I didn’t know… some things.’
‘Where’s your husband?’
‘Paul? I haven’t told him. He doesn’t even know you’ve been.’
‘I think you should tell him everything,’ Merrily said. ‘You’ve kept it to yourself too long. And, Liz, when you next go into the tower room – humour me – say the Lord’s Prayer, if you can remember it. And discuss it with your husband. All of it. Tell him I’m a crank. Listen, could I check something? When Syd came to see Byron, what year was that?’
‘Oh… dear. I’m not good on…’
‘Same year as the first publication of Caradog? That would be 2004?’
‘I expect. Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. Liz, one more thing. You remember you told me about Byron’s publisher coming on the phone once? A woman? Do you remember her name?’
‘Ah. I do know this one. Alexandra… Alexandra… Bell. I remember it put me in mind of Alexander Graham Bell.’
‘Same publisher still?’
‘I’m not sure. You want to speak to her? I’ll try and find the number, if you can hang on…’
‘It’ll do tomorrow. But if I could mention your name to her that would be useful.’
‘She might not even remember me.’
‘I suspect she will, Liz.’
All one-time members of Syd’s team, his gang. Working together in Bosnia and operations during the Colombian cocaine war, over twenty years ago. Then the history club.
Barry had said stubbornly, Car crash, bar-fight, hanged in prison. There’s no connection. It don’t mean anything. Three ex-Regiment dead, not of natural causes. All their deaths are different. It means nothing. How could it?
He was right, of course. These were men for whom violence had been a way of life, who found it hard to adjust when they came out of the army, who were often emotionally damaged. It was no big deal, except that they were all mates.
Syd’s mates. Assume that his visit to Byron at Allensmore had coincided with Nasal’s death. Maybe he’d even read this same account in the Sunday Times. Gone to tell Byron that another member of the club was history.
Merrily began to make notes on the sermon pad, under the anglepoise, but she was too tired to construct a logical framework. And, anyway, there was something missing. Something which almost certainly related to Byron’s reasons for coming to Brinsop, where the church, with its celebration of necessary violence, was a kind of spiritual crucible.
She sprinkled some dried cat-food in Ethel’s bowl, put out the lights and crawled off to bed, pausing to look out from the landing window where she could see, across Church Street through the wintry trees, Lol’s house, still in darkness.
She awoke at two. Back to the landing window. Still dark at Lol’s, but perhaps he’d come in, gone to bed. A vehicle crossed the square, but it was a light-coloured van. She’d rung Lol’s landline twice, finally leaving a message, just asking him to ring her back, whatever time he got in. Now she wanted to ring Danny, but it was far too late; Greta at least would be in bed, and Greta had to work in the morning and…
…oh God, the Maundy service.
The next time she awoke she was in a corridor.
Sporadically lit, lumpy with pipes and the smell was of antiseptic and bleach, and there were double doors and an old leathered bench, and the need for a cigarette.
I’m afraid you can’t smoke in here.
Breathing. The uneven respiration of the chronically sick. A dim and wobbly light. Grey-white sleepers.
We’ve always had him in a side ward.
An iron bed. Tubes.
Brace yourself…
Lowering herself into a clammy vinyl-covered bedside chair, summoning reserves of compassion as she peered below the hair dyed black, into the reptilian eye-slits. Green tubes curling up either side of the nose like a smile. Hands out of the sheets, rubbery snaking hands, and the smell…
Don’t wake up
, don’t wake up, see it through, don’t wake up, and Jesus, don’t let him touch Jane with his…
Curling nail on yellowed finger. Scritch, scratch…
The air rushed through the corridor like a hollow scream, trailing an awakening into half-light and… exhaust.
Merrily sat up to find the dawn gleaming like raw meat in the bedroom window.
Part Five
…they’re all mad in one way or another. There’s Kev, who knows he’s a reincarnated Viking. There’s Si, who only reads books about the paranormal… Only a few of the boys are normal, but they’re so normal that they’re weird. What a bunch of crazies we are. And we go out with our lethal weapons every day.
Frank Collins
Baptism of Fire (1997)
47
Fizz
IT WAS NEARLY light but not quite, the sun still below the Tesco clock turret, when Bliss raided the Plascarreg Hilton.
DC Vaynor with him and three of Rich Ford’s uniforms, two of them women. No enforcer, they just rang the bell, and a worried-looking Asian lady let them in, and then Goldie was there, halfway up the reduced baronial stairway in a yellow kimono with pink dragons on it and matching turban.
‘Wassis, wassis? You won’t find no drugs yere, Mr Francis, and that’s a damn fact! We en’t never had no drugs, and anybody yere who says we ’ave—’
‘Norra problem, Goldie.’ Bliss opening out his arms with transparent generosity. ‘We find any dope, you can keep it for those quiet nights in.’ Turning now to his team. ‘Colleen, ground floor with Darth. Kath and I will accompany you to your boudoir, Goldie, while PC Timlin will hang around the hall in case any of the guests try to leave without settling the bill.’
Goldie stood her ground, arms folded like a very mature geisha, as Bliss mounted the stairs.
‘Come on now, Goldie, how much more considerate could Her Majesty’s filth be to a respected senior citizen?’
