Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain

by Phil Rickman

Nobody spoke.

  ‘I felt unclean. Bad dreams. Night… sensations. Subjective, you might say, psychological. I’ve since encountered criminals, accepted as being disturbed, and this was just an ordinary old man. Yet Mr Joy was a notorious case in that hospital. Canon Dobbs had had dealings with him before and could have done so this time, but he set me up.’

  She didn’t want to go into the burning of garments, and no way was she going to tell them about the essential advice which had come not from Huw but from an old woman who’d lived in a care home and who’d been surrounded by some very dubious books. Wouldn’t help anybody. Although it had helped her.

  Maybe seeing she was floundering, Huw stood up.

  ‘The point being,’ he said, ‘that it might’ve been years before Merrily encountered owt as extreme as that – if ever. Make or break, and Dobbs is expecting break. I’d still say that were irresponsible of him.’

  Heads turned at a slow creaking sound from outside, some distance away but ominous.

  ‘Another tree coming down,’ Huw said. ‘Nowt we can do.’

  ‘It’s like a series of doors,’ Merrily said. ‘You start off opening the psychological door, and sometimes that’s as far as you need to go, and it ends with prayers and a blessing. But quite often, several doors down the line, you’ll come to one that a psychologist wouldn’t go through.’

  She drank some water.

  ‘I don’t know, to this day, whether Mr Joy was afflicted with some violent sexual anomaly which had more or less eaten away his humanity. Or whether that had opened him up to something else. But you don’t have to. That’s why we have the rituals and the liturgy. To an extent… just do it. Without it, you’d be off the rails.’

  The posh girl – did the card say Bethany? – had her hand up.

  ‘What happened finally? Were you there when he—?’

  The wind had started up again but now it was less ferocious, as if slightly dismayed at what it had done. The big gust which had brought down the tree had also driven clouds away from the moon. It flared suddenly in the lowest window and lit the face of the man at the back. Briefly, before he slid into the adjacent chair.

  The man at the back of the chapel had flat, grey hair and his eyes still looked like they’d been sewn on. No bags, no wrinkles. A soft-toy’s eyes.

  Bloody hell.

  ‘He died that night,’ Merrily said. ‘I was there, yes. Nurses will often tell you stories about the dying being… helped over. Claiming they can see the faces of people they’ve known. Parents, old friends, grannies. Brain chemicals, if you like, comfort visions. Lots of rational explanations, but it keeps happening. Someone to beckon you over.’

  ‘And was there someone waiting for Mr Joy?’

  ‘At the end, he was conspicuously disturbed. As if he could see something which… didn’t seem like his granny.’

  ‘Did you see anything?’

  ‘No. And I came away, as I’ve implied, with a quite acute sense of failure. Sat and smoked a cigarette with the ward sister. Both of us fairly shattered after watching an old man who’d scared us all… go out in a state of abject terror.’

  Shona said, ‘And when, subsequently, you felt that something of this man hadnae gone away… do you think this sense of failure might’ve been a contributory factor?’

  ‘Haunted by my own inadequacy?’

  Nobody followed up on this. Merrily glanced at Huw, sitting with his eyes half-closed. She had that sense of being set up, manoeuvred into place, as surely as she had with the late Canon Dobbs.

  ‘Were you afraid,’ the girl, Bethany, said, ‘when you thought something was coming for him?’

  ‘Hard not to be. He was.’

  ‘Afraid for your immortal soul? Or afraid that you weren’t going to be able to handle the job?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘And what did you do about that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s never gone away.’

  Huw was nodding.

  ‘You’re always afraid?’ Bethany said. ‘Whenever you’re asked to deal with…’ Her face, at last, showing dismay.

  ‘Pretty much,’ Merrily said.

  Glancing towards the guy at the back, half expecting to see a spiral of smoke. Remembering a summer afternoon in a big church in the Malvern Hills, the vicar there finishing off his cigarette, leaving little cylinders of ash at the foot of the lectern. Remembering what he’d said that day.

  Not a lot frightens me. I can deal with most physical pain, emotional pain, stress.

  He’d probably done his training up here in the Beacons, and the exercises prior to selection. It was said they had to run up to fifty miles with an eighty-pound pack and when they took their boots off their socks were thick with blood. I can achieve separation from the weakness of the body, he’d said that day in his church.

  It was fairly clear now that he hadn’t been expecting to see her here. Maybe hoping to slide away quietly when the session had ended, so they wouldn’t have to meet? The moon had screwed that.

  He looked up at last, and their eyes met, and his were small and almost flat to his head like a teddy bear’s, and his smile was tentative, wary.

  7

  Old Evil

  FALLEN TREES HAD restructured the landscape. Two of them were down on the hillside below the chapel, the biggest near the bottom of the track, just before it joined the main road. A crackling, skeletal mesh in the blurred moonlight.

  Huw Owen was standing on a crag with a lambing lamp. Like one of Holman Hunt’s rejected sketches for The Light of the World, Merrily thought. Below him, a bunch of the deliverance students stood staring dumbly at the tangle of branches, like this was an act of God. Huw smiling thinly, as if he knew that it was.

  Not that it would affect the students. They’d all walked up from the pub and the guest houses and B & Bs in the village, Huw from his rectory. Only someone who’d arrived late enough to have to park her old Volvo right outside the sodding chapel…

  Bugger.

  ‘What this probably means,’ Merrily said, ‘is that I won’t get home tonight.’

  The wind had died back to a murmur, like distant traffic. Huw came down from his crag.

  ‘Couple of lads’ll be up wi’ chainsaws, I expect.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon as it’s light. I’ll make you a bed up. Won’t be silk sheets or owt, mind.’

  She followed him across the rough and sodden grass, popping the studs on her waxed coat, not liking to think what kind of damage there might be back home in Ledwardine. Huw stopped and looked back at her.

  ‘Country life. Like town life, wi’ extra shite.’

  ‘Don’t like Jane being on her own in the vicarage. I know she’s eighteen, but in my mind she’s ten.’

  ‘She’s got Robinson just across the street.’ Huw came to a wooden stile, waited, patting Merrily on the shoulder as she drew level. ‘You did bloody well tonight. Wouldn’t’ve worked the same coming from me.’

  He balanced his lambing light on one of the stile’s posts and climbed over. She called after him.

  ‘You’re a bastard, Huw.’

  Huw picked up the lamp, and the lamp picked up a razored track leading down towards the stone rectory, a grey boulder with a scree of crumbling outbuildings. Merrily scrambled up on the stile, the wind whipping at her hair. This was nothing – an hour ago she’d’ve been on hands and knees.

  ‘You didn’t tell me Syd Spicer was on the course.’

  After the session was over, she hadn’t gone looking for the man with teddy-bear eyes, she’d waited for him to approach her. But he never had. She hadn’t seen him leave. Old skills.

  ‘He rang me up. Asking if he could sit in for one day.’

  Merrily looked down at him from the top of the stile.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘At the weekend.’

  ‘He say why?’

  ‘Not in any detail.’

  ‘Would I be right in thinking…’ Merrily cli
mbed over and sat down on the step of the stile ‘… that Syd no more expected to see me here than I expected to see him?’

  Huw stood gazing out, beyond the rectory, to where the moon had pewtered the hills.

  ‘I didn’t tell him I’d asked you to come, no. I figured… since you worked with him last year, I figured he’d trust what you had to say.’

  ‘In relation to what?’

  ‘Whatever problem he’s got.’

  ‘Which is…?’

  The step was soaked through; Merrily pulled her coat under her bum. This was obviously going to take a while. Across in the rectory, a light blinked on.

  ‘That’ll be Spicer now,’ Huw said.

  ‘He’s in your bloody rectory?’

  ‘He were stopping t’night here anyroad.’

  Two lights were on now in the rectory. Merrily folded her arms.

  ‘You see, what strikes me as odd is that when I was invited down to Syd’s parish in the Malverns, it was because he, basically, did not do this stuff. Had no time for any of it.’

  There are leaps I can’t make, he’d said to her.

  And Merrily had said, You’re worried by the non-physical.

  And he’d said, Samuel Dennis Spicer, Church of England.

  Name, rank and number. You could pull out all his teeth and that was the most you’d get from the Rev. Syd Spicer, former sergeant with 22 SAS, the Special Air Service, Hereford’s finest.

  The UK’s finest, come to that. Some said the world’s.

  Huw sat down at the other end of the step.

  ‘Remind me about the time you worked with him. Briefly.’

  ‘Series of road accidents in the Malverns, near his rectory. All in more or less the same place. Survivors saying they’d swerved to avoid a man on a bike.’

  ‘Who wasn’t there. And Spicer didn’t believe that.’

  ‘Kept saying he had a problem with paranormal phenomena,’ Merrily said. ‘He wanted me to look into it, do the roadside blessing bit and reassure local people that it was sorted. Which led to—’

  ‘I know what it led to. Did he believe at the end? When it was over?’

  ‘Probably not. So if you’re asking whether I’m surprised to see him on a deliverance course, yes, I am.’

  Huw said, ‘I were also wondering why he hadn’t gone to you in the first place.’

  ‘Over what? What did he tell you?’

  ‘He said – and I quote – an old evil had come back into his life. And he needed to deal with it.’

  ‘Exhaust. That’s why you set me up to talk about Denzil Joy?’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, lass, I think it were a useful exercise for all of ’em. It’s the most explicit case of possible demonic possession I’ve heard of in a while, and I thought you’d tell it well, and you did. None of them buggers is going to forget about Denzil. But whatever it is it’s likely in your manor, and I thought you should know about it. And I thought he should be reminded about you.’

  ‘Syd isn’t expecting to see me again tonight, is he?’

  ‘Aye, well… he’ll think you’ve gone. He won’t know your car’s trapped behind a tree.’

  ‘Huw, you’re a—’

  ‘Bastard, aye.’

  Even the weather played into Huw’s hands.

  ‘I take it, Merrily, that when that business were on in the Malverns, Spicer wasn’t frightened.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t.’

  ‘He is now.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘A man who’s served in likely the hardest regiment in the entire history of the British Army.’ Huw stretched out his legs into the dark, greasy grass. ‘Now then, lass, what could possibly scare the shit out of him?’

  8

  Neglect

  BLISS HAD COME alone, parking outside a metal gate at the top of the drive, eventually having to climb over because he couldn’t work the bolt in the dark. A spotlight speared him as he hung astride the shivering tubular bar. At the top of the drive, a door had opened. A man stood there. Green gilet, high boots.

  ‘Police,’ Bliss said.

  Feeling like a twat as he came down from the gate, stumbling to his knees. The countryside could always bugger you up when it felt like it. He stumbled towards the bungalow, built of old brick like the big house – an outbuilding, possibly a converted coach house.

  ‘Mr Bull?’

  A nod, maybe.

  ‘Francis Bliss, Mr Bull. West Mercia CID.’

  Bliss pulled off his beanie, held up his ID. The guy in the doorway didn’t look at it.

  ‘You’re the man who married Chris Symonds’s daughter.’

  ‘I am, yes.’

  Bliss sighed. Maybe they’d met at one of the agonizing county functions Kirsty had dragged him to, some creaking conveyor belt of dinner jackets.

  ‘Chris is a friend,’ Mr Bull said. ‘I see him often.’

  Well, that could hardly be more explicit. A blast of wind caught Bliss as he stowed away his ID. Loose bits of his life getting blown in his face.

  ‘Mr Bull, can I say that I’m very sorry—’

  ‘For my loss?’

  Bliss said nothing.

  ‘You can take your routine commiserations, Inspector Bliss, and insert them into your rectum,’ Mr Bull said.

  Bliss nodded wearily and followed him into the house.

  Grief took many forms, aggression one of the commonest.

  Low-energy bulbs laid a mauve wash on the kitchen. It had costly customized fittings and strong new beams of green oak. When a phone started ringing, Sollers Bull unplugged the lead from the wall.

  ‘Everybody who needs to know knows.’

  ‘Next few days will be difficult,’ Bliss said.

  ‘Days?’

  Sollers Bull stood gazing into wide windows that looked to be triple-glazed. Nothing much to see but the reflection of himself and Bliss and a double-oven Aga in tomato red. Sollers had told Stagg he’d spent the early evening at a staff meeting at his farm shop. It checked out.

  ‘Chris says you consistently neglected your wife, Inspector,’ Sollers Bull told Bliss’s reflection. ‘Neglect seems to be your force’s forte.’

  ‘Where’s your wife, Mr Bull?’

  ‘Not your concern.’

  ‘Well, you know, actually it is,’ Bliss said quietly. ‘With an extremely violent killer on the loose.’

  ‘Then why aren’t you out there looking for him?

  Mr Bull turned at last to Bliss. A wedge of stiff dark hair was razored clear of his ears, a tiny diamond stud winking out of one of them – the one that TV cameras always caught when, with his handsome head held high, Sollers was striding in and out of court.

  Bliss said, ‘Your brother reported intruders on his land.’

  ‘We both did. On separate occasions. Did you know that?’

  ‘I… no.’

  ‘Doesn’t particularly surprise me, Inspector Bliss, because preventing crime—’

  ‘Look…’ Bliss held up both hands. ‘I understand your distress and your anger, but alleged trespass isn’t necessarily police business at all, let alone CID business. For a start, it has to be trespass with intent—’

  ‘And preventing crime is low-priority stuff nowadays, isn’t it? Counts for nothing in the target culture. Nil points.’

  You got this every day now, every little twat nicked for a minor offence accusing you of using him to make the figures tally.

  ‘Mr Bull, we don’t like the target culture any more than you, and I try not to let it get in the way of being a good copper. I’m not saying if I’d heard about your intruders we’d’ve come rushing over with a chopper and an armed response unit, because our resources are limited at the best of times but…’ Bliss drew out a chair from under the kitchen table but didn’t sit down ‘…I think I need to know about it now, sir. Don’t you?’

  Sollers Bull crossed the room, switched off the main bulbs, as if to dim his anger. The moon was in and out, now that the storm was over. Through the wi
ndow you could see poplars waving blackly, like they were fanning away shreds of cloud.

  Mr Bull, sharp face scarred with shadows, told Bliss he’d seen two of them, around the end of last week, Thursday, perhaps. Two men and a vehicle. ‘Wasn’t quite dark. I could quite easily have shot one.’

  ‘Probably as well you didn’t, though,’ Bliss said patiently. ‘You don’t know this was down to the people you saw. Whom I’m presuming you didn’t recognize… or did you?’

  ‘I don’t know who they are, but I know what they are.’

  ‘Who did you speak to, Mr Bull, when you rang the police?’

  ‘Rang what I thought was Hereford police and it turned out to be some anonymous call centre… might as well have been in fucking Delhi, like the rest of them. Sometime later, I actually received a call back to ask if the intruders were still in the vicinity because the police were rather busy…’

  ‘Yeh, well,’ Bliss said. ‘We both know that’s not satisfactory, and if I was Chief Constable I might well talk to the Home Office about things being done a bit differently. But I’m just a lowly foot soldier. What exactly did your brother see?’

  ‘Is he still there? Still lying out there in his yard?’

  ‘When I left, but probably not now. There’ll be a post-mortem in the morning.’

  There was a bottle of single malt on the table. Sollers Bull pushed it at Bliss. Bliss shook his head. Not falling into that trap.

  ‘Tell me about the vehicle.’

  ‘Pickup truck. White or light blue. Mansel saw it on the track two nights together. Raced away when they saw him. I’ve told all this to your sergeant—’

  ‘Which is why the whole area’s taped off. In case there are tyre tracks and footprints.’

  ‘We’ve both been over it several times since then. And delivery vehicles.’

  ‘We can eliminate them. It’s still worth it.’

  Sollers Bull eyed him over his glass.

  ‘Wasn’t worth it when we had a quad bike stolen last year, was it? Or when Gerry Morgan’s chain-harrow took a walk the week after Christmas. I bet you don’t even know what a chain-harrow is, do you, Inspector?’

  Bliss moved on. Might know what it was, but he was buggered if he knew what it looked like.