Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain

by Phil Rickman

  ‘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 Credenhill. 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 th
em 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.’

  75

  Plug

  JANE TASTED COBWEB and dead flies.

  Came with the voice. The soft, ashy voice from the yard at the Swan. The mottled accent of a man from the Birmingham area who’d been living round Hereford for a long time.

  ‘I’m cool,’ Cornel said.

  ‘And this is all your work, is it? I’m impressed, mate.’

  Kenny Mostyn. The famous Kenny Mostyn, of Hardkit. Had he followed them? Jane didn’t see how he could have, which meant he’d probably been nearby all along, and Cornel couldn’t have known that or he wouldn’t have laid down his sleeping bag.

  And yet Cornel didn’t sound in any way dismayed. He sounded, if anything, pleased. Up for it. Cocaine. Good old Charlie.

  Cornel said, ‘Seen what’s left of your idol, Kenny?’

  Kenny sniggered. He’d switched off his flashlight, put it down somewhere. It was only the lamp now on the half-smashed altar.

  ‘Dust,’ Cornel said. ‘He’s dust.’

  ‘And that makes me feel gutted, does it?’

  Cornel didn’t reply. No indication of either of them moving. Then there was another scornful noise in Kenny’s throat.

  ‘Know what, Cornel? Yow… are a wanker.’

  ‘And you are gonna…’ in the pause, you could hear Cornel’s rapid breath, could imagine his long body quivering ‘… gonna regret that, Kenny. Gonna regret a lot of things before too long.’

  ‘Found the petrol, Cornel.’

  Huh?

  ‘Torch the place, was that it? On your way out?’

  ‘Fire’s good,’ Cornel said. ‘Fire destroys DNA.’

  Another pause, then Kenny’s voice had changed its tone, somehow.

  ‘What’s that in your hand, mate?’

  ‘This?’ Cornel’s gleeful indrawn breath was overlaid by a crisp ratcheting sound. ‘What it is, to be exact, Kenny, is a Glock Gen4 Safe Action. Safe… Action. I like that, don’t you? Safe.’

  Cornel’s voice all gleaming with excitement, like a kid with a new Xbox, but Jane knew what a Glock was. One of those brand names you didn’t forget. Oh, for God’s sake… She was frozen with the reality of it. This was what he’d had in his hand? What he’d had in his rucksack with the wire-cutters and the lump hammer?

  Kenny wasn’t fazed.

  ‘Where’d that come from, Cornel?’

  ‘Got it in London weeks ago. Two and a half, cash, with four clips.’

  ‘Yow was robbed. Had a go on it yet?’

  ‘Saving it,’ Cornel said. ‘For somebody who told me to come back when my balls had dropped.’

  Kenny laughed. It didn’t sound faked. Cornel didn’t join in.

  ‘You just laugh while you can, Kenny, ’cause your brains are going on the ceiling. How’s that sound? Mate.’

  ‘Childish.’

  ‘On your knees, I think.’

  Jane stiffened. Kenny’s voice came back merely quizzical.

  ‘On me knees, to yow?’

  ‘See, if this was a shotgun, I could blow your head clean off at this range, but a head shot with a handgun’s riskier, so if you stay on your feet I’ll have to go for the body and that could take a bit longer, and a lot of pain. Make sense?’

  Oh God. Jane was hugging herself tightly. He was kidding, right?

  ‘Best for you if you kneel down and close your eyes. Eh? Mate?’

  What did you do? What could you do when he was, quite plainly, preparing to go through with it? What did you do? Which of these was the least-bad guy? Which of them wouldn’t rape you? What was the right thing to do?

  Very quietly, Jane stood up, her hair brushing the curved metal where wall became roof. The air was fogged, the light meagre from the single smelly lamp on the altar and the torch between Cornel’s feet directing a beam too narrow to reach her.

  Kenny Mostyn stood in the gulley, his back to her. A shortish, dapper-looking guy. He wore a leather jacket and a watch cap, and his jeans were tucked into leather boots.

  While Cornel… Standing on the concrete bench with his legs apart and both hands swaddling the grey pistol, Cornel just looked demonic in a ravaged kind of way, with his sagging, fleshy mouth, his hair spiked with sweat. Like a big puppet, some mindless voodoo doll being worked by someone else.

  It seemed entirely likely that he’d forgotten Jane was here. She slid down, lifted up the lump of concrete, fingertips finding two smooth depressions, and stood up again as Kenny spoke.

  ‘Yow been snorting again, Cornel?’

  ‘Doesn’t exactly slow me up.’

  ‘Just don’t do anything rash, eh?’

  ‘Hey, you’re really scared!’ Little whoop from Cornel. ‘You’re scared shitless, aren’t you, Mr Mostyn? Now tell me you don’t deserve it – taking my money, never serving up the goods, just leading me on, sending pictures to my boss, feeding all kinds of poison up the line to London? How many other guys you do that to?’

  ‘Never done that to nobody, Cornel.’

  ‘You’re a liar!’

  ‘I ripped you, off, yeah, ’cause I was owed that money. Fair’s fair. And no way was you going further than raven. Not after I found out where you were from.’

  ‘Don’t get you, Kenny.’ Cornel was bobbing, the pistol shaking. ‘Make it quick.’

  ‘Sod’s Law. Just one of them things, look, just another casualty of the recession. I was likely just one of a hundred small businessmen they pulled the plug on that week.’

  ‘Who? What are you saying?’

  ‘Nothing Landesman’s don’t know about lies and false promises. Yeah, we’ll help you, you stick with us, Mr Mostyn, we’ll see you right. Until the help’s needed, then yow don’t see the knife go in, just feel it come out, and there’s your friendly financial adviser wiping the blade on his pinstripes and asking if you’ve thought about bankruptcy. So don’t yow … go talking to me about getting led on with false flamin’ promises.’

  Pulled the plug. Jane remembered the phrase from the article on Savitch in Borderlife. How the bank was close to pulling the plug when Savitch stepped in to save Hardkit. So all this was…

  … just a kind of scapegoat situation? Cornel paying for what some loans manager had done to Kenny Mostyn? Just a male-pride thing, a petty vengeance trip turned toxic?

  The stinking air was suddenly thick with a sour alien insanity. Jane brought the lump of concrete up to her chest. It was round and smooth on one side, but heavy like a cannonball, and her arms were aching already.

  ‘You piece of shit! They’re never gonna get me for this. Likes of you, low-life scum made good, it could be anybody. Spoiled for choice, Mostyn.’

  Cornel’s hands throbbing around the gun. Kenny shrugged.

  ‘I’m only human, Cornel. En’t the holy man here, just the help. You can go back to London, tell them what I did, why I did it, and no harm done, just a few red faces, and they might even remember my name this time.’

  ‘I’ve lost my fucking job. I’ve lost everything. You think I’m going to start again, go in as some little high-street fucking bank clerk? That what you think? On your knees, you little piece of shit. Now! On your fucking knees!’

  The whole place suddenly seemed brighter, as if Cornel was generating his own electricity, shining, his slack lips parted to reveal those gritted teeth, all his resentment and bitterness pouring down those rigid, outstretched arms, and the stink from the lamp was putrid as Kenny Mostyn, almost in slow motion, went down on one knee on the stained floor of the gulley.

  No choice now. Panting so hard that she was afraid they could hear her, Jane sucked in her stomach and lifted the ball of concrete, hands underneath, thrust it up over her head, watching Cornel bringing up the gu
n, his long bony hands together, as if in prayer, around it. As if – for just a moment – as if he was relenting, and Jane held back, swaying under the weight of the concrete.

  Then realized that, although she was deep in shadow, the concrete between her hands was gleaming palely in the lamplight, and Cornel looked up and saw it, looking for a moment puzzled, confused.

  As Kenny Mostyn’s knee lifted from the floor and Kenny’s arms shot out, fingers clawing the air as if to throw himself forward. Like he was finding himself again, Cornel backed up and brought the barrel of the gun down in direct line with Kenny’s half-bowed head.

  Jane pushed herself forward, and her pathetic little arms gave way and she had to let go of the concrete.

  76

  Night of the Last Supper

  THE CLOUDS HAD cleared and the moon lay cold as rock salt over an alley of conifers. Barry stood inside the wire, looking at the three of them, shaking his head.

  ‘How your life turns on its head. Not much more than a kid, and you’re out in the field with a handful of crack professionals, all with special skills – linguistics, engineering, advanced first-aid, bomb disposal. None of them much more than kids. Or that’s how it looks to me now, at the age of fifty-eight.’

  ‘Fifty-eight, eh?’ Gomer said. ‘So what point you tryin’ to make yere, boy?’

  ‘Forget it,’ Barry said.

  Doing his recce, Lol thought. Standing among close-packed conifers on the edge of the compound, with its buildings and footpaths, taking his time. Lol was very agitated now, but Barry wouldn’t be hurried.

  ‘Four big sheds, one concrete, no windows, so I’d guess equipment in there. Three caravans, say two for staff accommodation, and the other one looks like a canteen. Two tents in that sloping field up towards the woods – might be people in there, can’t rule it out. Small toilet block.’

  They’d started talking in whispers now, Lol noticed. The air among the conifers was sharp and damp and acrid. The surface of a big pond, off-centre, was shining dully like tinplate under the non-committal moon.

  ‘No cockfight here,’ Barry said. ‘That’s for sure.’