The Secrets of Pain mw-11

by Phil Rickman

  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 gun, 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 u
p 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.’

  By the time the call had come through from Danny, Barry was changed into his running kit, had his old Freelander waiting outside the Swan, leaving Marion in charge.

  ‘Tell me again,’ he said to Danny.

  ‘We come out onto the Credenhill road, and we done mabbe two hundred yards and Mostyn suddenly stops, and we gotter pass him, see? So we turns round and creeps back on sidelights, and he’s found this ole van in the bushes side of the road. And then he gets back in and he’s off along the lane like a bullet then, up this track.’

  No compromises on this track. It was steep and unmade. Without a four-by-four you’d be in trouble. Halfway up, that sign, black on white.

  THE COMPOUND TRAINING CENTRE TRESPASSERS UNWELCOME

  The moonlight was so bright on it this time that Lol made out a small amendment, half scrubbed-out. It actually said: TRESPASSERS UNWELCOME.’

  ‘Trespassers here seem to have had their uses,’ Lol said.

  He’d also told Barry on the way here about the smashed CCTV camera and the cut wire. How the police had thought it was him. Barry had said he was a stupid bleeder for even getting out of his truck.

  ‘ Gomer,’ he hissed now. ‘Stay in the trees.’

  ‘Looks like an ole JCB down there, boy, back o’ the big shed.’

  ‘Yeah, well, leave it alone for now. In the absence of poultry, the best thing is probably to get the hell out.’

  ‘He’s got a bloody cockfight somewhere,’ Gomer said. ‘Sure to. We was told.’

  ‘We’d hear something, would we not? And frankly I can’t see Byron permitting it. He don’t do entertainment, on any level.’

  ‘Might not start till later, boy. This en’t bingo. And he’s in yere. Mostyn.’

  ‘He works here. Bleedin’ hell, you never give up, do you, Gomer?’

  But it was clear they were going in.

  Lol wondered if it would feel any different entering the compound by what passed for an actual entrance. Going in mob-handed, unblooded. He checked his mobile to see if there was anything from Jane and found a short text from Merrily.

  This is getting weird. please don’t go anywhere

  ***

  It was on the way home, anyway.

  Almost.

  Still wearing the atheist’s coat, Merrily stood close to the grave of Jane Winder, whose potted history was spotlit by the moon.

  AND DIED AT BRINSOP COURT,

  IN THIS PARISH, OCTOBER 16, 1843.

  IN THE 43 YEAR OF HER AGE

  Poor Jane. A stranger. From Off. No age at all. By night, the stone was a monolith in front of the trees on the dark pond – which was labelled moat on the map – and all the mysterious humps in the moon-scratched fields below Credenhill. And you held on to it to steady yourself against what seemed like an irreversible madness.

  Brinsop Church was locked for the night, of course. Merrily had thought about calling the local team minister, Dick Willis, but she wouldn’t have got away this time without an explanation.

  She stood there, an arm around Jane Winder’s cold shoulder, and took in the long view to the right, where it was as though the whole wide area overshadowed by Credenhill had been stripped back by the full moon. Nothing but a skim of soil and rock and clay over what remained of the Romans. The men that have been reappear. A poet’s imaginative exercise, probably nothing more than that. Nothing about a brutalized religion reinvoked from the soil. But the poem had been there, in the book left out by Syd.

  A rabbit hopped across the graveyard and sat by the church porch, sniffing the night.

  No Bible, no Bergen, no cross, Merrily slipped away out of the churchyard and over the stile to the field where the Dragon’s Well lay in sodden grass, its round stone like a small cider wheel. A modern metal drain cover was embedded in the stone.

  Ewes and big lambs were watching her from the hedge. Round eyes like lamps. Could be innocence, could be cynicism. If you were looking for an adversary, it could be the dragon but was more likely, in this place, to be George.

  Merrily lit a cigarette.

  ‘Advice, Syd?’

  In her darkest moments she thought that, if exorcism hadn’t found her, she might not have stuck this job. How feeble was that, if the only way you could convince yourself that you were more than just another badly paid professional carer was by re-enacting medieval rituals and seeing what happened? The psychic son et lumiere and the bangs and whistles that real mystics discounted as foreplay.

  ‘But that wasn’t you, Syd. You didn’t want any of it. Came out of the army, looked back in horror.’

  Leaps I can’t make, he’d said to her, smoking in his church. Aspects I can’t face.

  ‘Any more,’ Merrily said. ‘ “Can’t face any more” – that was what you meant.’ She sat down on the wellhead, watched the smoke rising from her fingers towards the moon.

  ‘The Bible in the Bergen, Syd. This is what I think. A reminder of which side you were on now. Well, sure. But going up Credenhill with that on your back, it’s like Christ carrying his cross. A constant reminder, every step you take – the tug of the pack, the weight of the book, brass-bound, bulky, uncomfortable. Every step you take up that hill, you feel it. Who you are, what you’re about. The weight of responsibility.’

  She felt Syd moving up Credenhill, like Thomas Traherne in the blazing stained glass. Bump, bump of the Bible on the spine. Total consciousness.

  Why, if he wanted to confront the shadow of Mithras, had he gone up Credenhill rather than come here? Perhaps he didn’t know. Hadn’t worked it out.

  Whatever, something had found him. Death had found him.

  Idiopathic Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.

  Merrily stood up, folded her arms, looked down at them, swaying a little, then looking up at the moon in its halo of pagan complacency. She felt profoundly empty inside, like a sucked-out seashell. The night before Good Friday, the night of the Last Supper. Always tainted with the sour odour of failure and betrayal.

  Bending to pick up her bag from the well-cover, she thought for a moment that it wasn’t there, that the well water was exposed and the full moon, a perfect pale disc, was reflected in it.

/>   Merrily straightened up, gazed down for some time and then nodded, remembering. She slipped a hand down one of the back pockets of her jeans and found splinters. Crumbs of faith.

  Always a rational explanation.

  Slowly, she bent and retrieved the moon.

  77

  Migraine Lights

  The piece of concrete fell short. Inevitably. Even desperation hadn’t produced the necessary strength.

  Jane watched it landing on the edge of the bench, rolling into the gulley at the same time as the torch rolled off and died, and the only light was from the Roman lamp on the altar, the air thick and fetid with hot animal fat. One small lamp had done that.

  But Jane was bone-achingly cold, looking down at Cornel lying in the gulley with his knees drawn up, foetal.

  Kenny Mostyn was standing slightly away from Cornel, quite calm with his arms by his side. But loosened up, springy, watching as Cornel began to roll away, and his hand came out and even Jane could tell what he was trying to reach and knew he wouldn’t make it.

  Kenny’s knee rose up and his foot cracked down on the clawed hand, and Cornel screamed hideously, rolling helplessly onto his back as Kenny kicked something away.

  ‘We don’t need this, do we, mate? We’re men.’

  ‘I was just-’

  ‘What?’ Squatting down. ‘Tell your Uncle Kenny.’

  ‘Just trying to scare you, that’s all. That’s all it was.’

  ‘Course it was,’ Kenny said softly.

  Cornel was sobbing. Jane hated anybody sobbing. A sob was not something you could fake, and she could feel his fear.

  ‘Kenny, listen, it really was just a joke. Like one of your tests, one of your exercises, where you’re thinking you’re gonna die, and at the last second…?’

  ‘Sure.’ Kenny crouched down next to Cornel. ‘You’re all right, mate. I understand.’

  Jane saw Kenny’s face for the first time – actually, not for the first time; she realized she’d seen him several times in Hereford, maybe among the Saturday scrum in High Town or sitting outside one of the pubs where they had tables. Short, round-faced guy with a moustache and the hint of a beard which made a dark circle around his mouth.