by Phil Rickman
‘Can’t tell you noffing about that, mate. That’s a mystery, that is.’
‘One of several, apparently,’ Merrily said.
‘Yeah.’ Bax massaged his whiskers. ‘I had a good long chat with Percy one night. A lot of the old funny baccy getting smoked, and he really opened up. All the other stories come out. The ones he still feels a bit aggrieved over, as a farmer.’
He fell silent.
‘Percy had dealings with Byron Jones?’ Lol asked.
‘Dear oh dear,’ Bax said.
It seemed that Percy and Walter had sold off the family farm and the buildings, for conversion. They were well-off now but still kept bits of ground, a few acres here, a few there. Mostly rented out for stock and grasskeep. But periodically Percy would invest in cattle and sheep again, just to keep his hand in.
At least, he used to, until the night when somebody stole a young bull from his herd of Herefords.
‘Percy’s about to report it to the police when this package appears in the back porch. Brown-paper parcel, ’bout this size…’ Bax opened his hands out, shoebox length. ‘Containing what you might call a considerable sum of money. No note, just the money.’
‘Compensation?’
‘Good compensation, but no compensation at all, far as Percy was concerned. But what could he do?’
‘I don’t get it,’ Lol said.
‘I fink we talked about the Sass helping themselves to stock?’
‘A bull?’
‘Whatever they do,’ Bax said, ‘it don’t get questioned too hard. Everybody supports them. You get used to their little ways.’
‘Except this probably wasn’t the SAS, was it?’ Lol said.
‘I wouldn’t fink so, no.’
‘Any idea what happened to the bull?’ Merrily asked.
‘Unlikely to’ve been nicked for breeding purposes.’
‘Mr Baxter, what did you think might have happened to Lol if you hadn’t called the rural crime line?’
Bax leaned forward in his spindly chair, inspecting a burn mark on the tabletop.
‘Two travellers show up one night in a van. This ain’t gossip, this is fact. Be not long after Jones moved in, so they didn’t know who he was. Looking for scrap, you know?’ Bax looked up warily. ‘Bear in mind this never come out, no cops involved. This geezer got systematically done over. While his mate’s still squirming around in the barbed wire. Fair play, they never fingered Jones. Too much to hide, ’spect. But, there you go… no police, no defence lawyers. Done and dusted.’
‘Jones beat up the guy?’
‘Maybe they was used for practice.’ Bax might have smiled. ‘This is how it’s done, boys.’
‘What boys?’
‘I dunno – whatever boys was on the training course at the time. These courses, they say it’s all a bit unorthodox. Blokes arrive like soldiers, back of a truck, back of a van. Posh blokes, usually. City blokes living the SAS life for a few days. Don’t ask me what that means. Folks make allowances. But the travellers, that was a bit of a sideshow.’
‘This widely known?’
‘Not widely known at all. Had it from a mate of mine in Hereford, scrap dealer who saw the state of them when they was back in business. Bad guys, in general, avoid the area. Don’t know whose place they might be breaking into. Who needs cops, all them rules and paperwork, when you got Mr Jones?’
‘What’s it like up there?’ Merrily asked him. ‘What’s there?’
‘Bit like a golf course. Manufactured landscape, pond size of small lake wiv a rope bridge across. Quite a few sheds. Jones’s new bungalow’s halfway up the hill, wiv a pool. ’Bout four wooden chalets, parking area. But you can tell it’s not your ordinary holiday place. No flowers, and most of the trees are pine and fir, so it’s screened off all year round. Functional.’
‘No women?’
‘Nah. They say Jones is seen around town wiv women, but he don’t bring them back. Look, I’m sorry. You mind if I ask what your interest is here?’
‘It’s the SAS chaplain who died on Credenhill. He was a friend, and… he had some past involvement with Byron. Sorry I can’t be more explicit.’
‘Only I’d rather you didn’t say noffing about me, wiv regard to Jones. The spooky stuff, that’s different. Percy always says he don’t like talking about it, but he loves it really. Some of it he exaggerates, some he don’t.’
Lol said, ‘So those figures in the mist that Percy saw…?’
‘I’m not sure it’s all as easily explained as like, Oh it’s only Mr Jones and his course students. Odd fings happen, don’t they?’
‘Percy says he’s seen… figures,’ Lol said to Merrily. ‘Where the Roman town was. In the river mist. One had a bird’s head.’
‘He ain’t the only one, neither,’ Bax said. ‘But that’s neither here nor there. Less you got a weak heart, they ain’t gonna harm you. But you can get harmed. Which is why I set the cops on you. I’m sorry, squire.’
***
As they drove away, they could see the afforested hill from end to end, a rambling natural mansion with great wooded halls and conifered corridors and the earthen back-stairs where Syd Spicer had died.
‘Mithraism,’ Lol said, ‘I don’t know anything about that. Do you?’
‘Not much. It was mentioned once at college, by a visiting lecturer. Pagan religion curiously similar to Christianity. Neil Cooper recognized it immediately when I mentioned Byron Jones’s soldiers’ religion. I don’t think there’s ever been a suggestion that Caradog adopted a Roman god to improve his fighting prowess, but it obviously worked for Byron.’
‘He was practising it?’
‘It would answer a few questions. Why he was getting careless with other people’s lives. It might also explain the rift with Syd, who went into Christianity with the wimps and the women.’
Not a man’s religion, Byron Jones had told his wife. Certainly not a soldier’s religion.
‘What do I do with this, Lol?’
‘I keep saying this… perhaps you take it and dump it, in its entirety, on James Bull-Davies.’
‘James is not the most imaginative of men.’
‘Really, really not your problem.’
Merrily turned onto the Brecon Road, past fields scrubbed raw by winter, a landscape seldom noticed. No villages, no church towers, just a road that started on the edge of the city of Hereford and finished in Wales.
‘On the other hand,’ Lol said, more than a bit hesitantly, ‘Hardwicke’s… what… fifteen minutes away?’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘In that direction.’
‘I knew you were going to say that.’
‘If anybody can put a kind of perspective on this…’
‘Dear God. Do we need that kind of perspective?’
‘Of course, she might not be there any more,’ Lol said. ‘She might even be…’
‘We’d’ve heard,’ Merrily said tightly. ‘We’d know.’
‘OK,’ Lol said. ‘I didn’t want to say anything about this. I’m just a dreamy, whimsical songwriter, looking to pull tunes and textures and things out of the air. I don’t know why I went to that place last night. I just did. And it was a bloody awful place.’
Merrily slowed.
‘Awful how?’
‘I’m probably being subjective.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Tell me.’
‘It just… I don’t want to use emotive words, it just sounds like a cliché.’
‘This is no time for songwriter-pride, Lol.’
‘It was like it didn’t want to let me go. Like even the barbed wire was alive and hungry. Yeah, I know.’ Lol put up his hands in defence. ‘I know what that sounds like.’
‘Go on.’
‘So when the lights… when I found out it was only the police, I was so relieved I would’ve confessed to murder just to get the hell out of there.’
Merrily took the next left and turned the Volvo round clumsily in the mouth of the junction.
‘Hardwi
cke, then.’
54
Hell’s Kitten
IT WAS A shock, really. She was in a wheelchair.
Brenda Cardelow, proprietor of The Glades Residential Home, pushed her into a big lounge freshly painted in magnolia. Bright red cushions on four cream sofas, like big jammy-dodgers.
A bulky cardigan around her tiny shoulders, a blue woollen rug over her knees.
‘Of course, Cardelow’s entirely to blame for this,’ Miss White said in her little-girl voice. ‘Tries several times a week to kill me. Utterly psychotic.’
Mrs Cardelow, a large woman with bobbed white hair, said nothing, apparently still trying for dignity. It was never going to work.
‘But how little she knows.’ Miss White smiled, crinkling her malevolent mascaraed eyes. ‘The poor cow has no comprehension of what I shall do to this place when I’m dead.’
Mrs Cardelow sighed, stepping away from the wheelchair. Miss White turned her sooty smile on Merrily.
‘How charming you look, my dear. And Robinson, with a bandage to hide the needle marks. Hadn’t realized you people put it into the wrist nowadays. So long since I used to watch Crowley shooting up.’
Lol, smiling patiently, had wandered over to the window, which had a long view down the garden, over the Wye to the Radnorshire hills, pale as old mould. Lol had a jittery rapport, which Merrily found unsettling, with Anthea White, she who insisted on Athena.
‘You don’t mind if I leave you,’ Mrs Cardelow said. ‘One can only stand so much of this. She gives the other residents tarot readings and tells them when their friends are going to die.’
Miss White didn’t react, sat gazing placidly into the coal fire behind its guard, not looking up until there was the click of a closing door.
‘Has she gone?’
‘She’s gone,’ Merrily said.
Miss White tapped the arm of the wheelchair. ‘I keep a cyanide capsule in here, you know, to be used if ever I see a doctor approaching with a catheter.’
Lol said, ‘For him?’
‘Ah, how well you know me, Robinson.’
Miss White giggled, a sound like the chinking of old bones in an ossuary. Merrily coughed.
‘What, erm…?’
‘Hip. Common or garden. I’m apparently in the queue for a stretch in some frightful NHS hellhole where, if they don’t like your face, they slip you a fatal infection. Somewhere else to haunt. In the interim, I do rather like this chair – it allows one to move around in a perpetual meditative state. Would you like me to describe your aura?’
‘Not really.’
‘Jaundiced.’
‘What?’
‘A worrying amount of yellow. You’re afraid of losing control. In fear of your immortal soul again. Oh, dear God, keep her out, keep her out!’
Merrily moistened her lips, recalling the first time she’d been to The Glades, when there’d been reports of a presence on the third floor and the then proprietors had wanted an exorcist to calm the residents. Underestimating Miss White’s propensity for playfulness, like the elderly kitten she so resembled. A kitten with over fifty years’ experience of the techniques for personal growth circulating in the ruins of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Hell’s kitten.
‘But how strange to see the two of you in the same room at last. An item.’
Her eyes twitching from Merrily to Lol and back again.
‘Flitting in and out of one another’s energy fields, like neurotic damsel flies. Delightful in its way, but… it must not go on much longer, do you hear me?’
Arching suddenly out of her chair, expanding into so much more of a presence.
‘Sort yourselves out at once. You don’t have long to decide before something makes the decision for you. And that may not be the one you hope for.’
‘Thank you, Miss White,’ Merrily said lightly.
A constriction in the throat. Dear God, how stupid was it to have come here?
‘Now, remind me, Watkins, what was the name of the detritus that became briefly attached to you?’
Merrily hesitated, just like she had the first time. There were clergy she could name who’d have her defrocked for even talking to this woman.
‘No, don’t tell me,’ Miss White said. ‘How could I forget? It was delightfully appropriate. Joy. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Joie de vivre… Joie de morte. He’s back, is he?’
‘He isn’t back. It isn’t me, this time. It’s someone else.’
‘Someone who can’t come in person?’
‘Due to being dead.’
‘But not at rest.’
‘Athena, I don’t know.’
The Glades had a lift, and they went up in it to the exotic room on the third floor. Not much had altered. The same Afghan rugs on the walls, the same book cupboards, the same radiogram, although the whisky bottles inside would be several generations down the line.
Miss White sent her chair whining softly to the uncurtained sash window and turned her back on the view of Hardwicke Church, which was greystone, Welsh-looking like Brinsop, a small bell tower with the bell on show. Your church, she’d said that first night, is like some repressive totalitarian regime. Everyone has a perfectly good radio set, but you try to make sure they can only tune in to state broadcasts.
Signalling Merrily to the Parker Knoll armchair and Lol to the bed, her face became momentarily serious.
‘So it’s Mithras, is it?’
‘If you’d be so good,’ Merrily said.
‘Which one? The original Persian lord of light, who pre-dates Zoroastrianism… or his very much darker Roman descendant? Who may just spoil your day. Do you mind awfully?’
Merrily sat down.
‘We had a one-off lecture at theological college. It was about dealing with the smart-arses who’ll tell you Jesus was just another permutation of the pagan archetype. Wasn’t Mithras born on December 25th?’
‘Indeed. And his mother was a virgin, and he never had sex. His crib was visited by adoring shepherds. His followers were baptized and worshipped on a Sunday. They represented holy blood with wine and, at this time of year, ate hot cross buns.’
‘And all this half a millennium before the birth of Jesus,’ Merrily said. ‘What’s left to spoil?’
Miss White frowned. Always encouraging.
‘They’re just patterns, Athena. Death and rebirth, all that. Early Christianity slipped into the time-honoured seasonal rituals so people could begin to see them in a new light – now that the world was finally ready to learn about the unifying chemistry of love. There you are – a quiet revolution and no blood shed but His. How’s that?’
‘Glib.’
‘I prefer succinct,’ Merrily said.
Never entirely comfortable with all this, though. The candles of faith flickering feebly under the arc lights of history and scholarship. The nights when you couldn’t get to sleep and doubts hovered in the shadowed corners, challenging you to snap on the bedroom lights and discover there was really nothing there… nothing at all…
Except Athena White showing her little teeth.
‘If you know all this, Watkins, what do you want from me?’
‘Well… that’s all I know about Mithras and Mithraism. Although I think I recall old pictures of him in one of those caps like a beanie.’
‘The Phrygian cap. I’ll accept that the little chap was less handsome than Christ, with that… perpetual petulance. But then, the Roman Mithras was all about finding spiritual fulfilment through killing. An ancient sun god adopted by Roman emperors, hailed as the protector of soldiers. A sun god worshipped in darkness… in underground chambers stinking of blood. Now, what exactly are you looking for?’
‘Don’t know how it works, basically. Only that it was eventually supplanted by Christianity.’
‘Supplanted. That’s what you think, is it?’
‘Well, it certainly came off second best. Even at the time.’
‘Did it?’
M
iss White hunched herself up, coquettishly, like a venomous bushbaby in the fork of a tree.
‘I imagine you’re familiar with the missives of St Paul? Who instructed the Ephesians to put on the whole armour of God… the breastplate of righteousness… the helmet of salvation… the sword of the Spirit…’
‘What a thug that guy was,’ Merrily said uncertainly.
‘And where did he get it? Where did all that military imagery come from? His home town, of course. Tarsus. A veritable hotbed of Mithraism. Onward, Christian Soldiers. Mithraism wasn’t supplanted by Christianity at all – they existed side by side for centuries and one fed the other. Scholars ask why Mithraism suddenly disappeared. It didn’t, of course.’
Merrily sat shaking her head. Whatever you got from Athena White you had to pay for, big time.
‘Consider, Watkins. It’s not merely the military imagery that’s seeped into the churches, it’s the whole ethos. Think of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition… the ghastly Bush and that grinning shit Blair who took us to war and then had the audacity to turn Catholic.’ Miss White’s eyes lit up. ‘Now there was an interesting coincidence! The bloody thread of the true Roman religion. Does he even know, do you think?’
‘Not for me to say.’
‘Hold up your bloodied cross, and what do you see? The handle of the sword of Mithras. The sword which now forms what some might think of as the spine of Christianity.’
‘Well, that’s not quite—’
‘Tell me this, Watkins… how do you know that you yourself are not, to some degree, a child of Mithraism?’
Merrily smiled.
‘Because, Athena… I’m a woman.’
Miss White clapped her tiny hands.
‘Excellent reply. Now we can begin.’
55
Cutting Edge
DANNY LOOKED up at the black iron gates which would’ve replaced a standard wooden five-bar, the wall of dressed stone where it used to be chicken wire.
‘What we gonner be looking for, then, Gomer? Blood? Feathers? Empty lager cans?’
He had his new phone with him. Supposed to be a decent camera in there with a shedload of pixels. Should do the job. Shading his eyes, he looked out over the shining roofs of all the cars to the high ground behind the Court.
