Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain

by Phil Rickman

  Back to the roots.

  Brinsop Church, however, was part of a different story. He remembered it now. Remembered a wet Sunday when he and Jane had been enthusiastically defacing another copy of this same map, circling every stone, mound, cross and old church, marking up every conceivable alignment of prehistoric sites and then checking them out to see if they’d found anything that Alfred Watkins had missed. Alfred Watkins of Hereford, the original Simple Trackway Man on whom Lol and Danny had based the song. Whom Jane claimed for an ancestor.

  Lol pulled down his copy of The Old Straight Track, Watkins’s masterpiece, the book which, long after his death, had sent generations of Brits – young hippies, old hippies, pre-hippies, post-hippies like Lol, post post-hippies like Jane out into the countryside, to find the stones and mounds and mysterious church formations that lit up an alternative Britain.

  OK, most archaeologists rubbished the idea, but it was still exciting to think of being surrounded by ancient landscape patterns, which also drew in churches because so many of them had been built on sites of prehistoric pagan worship. You saw church towers and steeples, you saw four thousand years of ritual.

  And, in the middle, the Romans.

  Alfred Watkins had suggested that the Roman roads had often followed the old straight tracks – in his view more by design than accident, as if the Romans had merely widened existing prehistoric routes. Lol felt a twitch of connection. He’d known that, of course. Even worked it into ‘The Simple Trackway Man’.

  From moat to mound we’ll mark the ground

  From barrow to camp we’ll carry the lamp

  From Roman road to trader’s track

  And over the pitch and all the way back.

  Interesting to think this guy Byron, a man who could rape a friend’s wife, might have been on the same trail, fascinated by the same magic landscape.

  He’d drawn lines across the aerial photos.

  Lol found a pencil and, using the edge of The Old Straight Track as a ruler, drew in three of the lines that he and Jane had found radiating from Brinsop Church, one linking it with four other medieval churches.

  Brinsop Church was on a site of some significance and, although it was only a few miles away, he’d never even seen it.

  The sun was low in the sky over Ledwardine, but there were a good two hours of daylight left to find what could be found. Lol picked up his car keys, went out to his truck.

  Two hours.

  40

  Magic Dragon

  BRINSOP CHURCH WAS locked now. Maybe the smoking ghost of Syd Spicer was inside, waiting there in motionless, crampless silence, the way the SAS could. Waiting for a signal.

  Lol moved among the graves through the soft light. The bell tower was crisp against the cooling sky, the giant conifer black, like a knobbly monolith.

  It didn’t matter that the church was locked. Outside, the landscape had revealed itself. The Ordnance Survey map was opened out in his head, the lines drawn in.

  At the end of the short grass, before the woodland began its march up Credenhill, you could see, like an entrance to the underworld, what the OS map identified as moat. Alfred Watkins thought some moats might have been dug not for protection but to mark the tracks by reflecting sunlight or beacon fire or lamplight.

  Lol had looked across the dark stain of the moat to the wooded thigh of Credenhill, imagining the pale essences of long-gone villagers walking the spirit paths that intersected here. Syd Spicer following some distance behind, cautiously adjusting to being dead.

  In the adjacent field, a stile gave access to a squat monolith on top of a circular stone slab with a metal drain cover set into it. On the stone it said The Dragon Well. As it was unlikely that a dragon had died here, what did it actually mean?

  Half an hour ago, standing at the side of the lane somewhere around Kenchester, Lol had gazed out over the fields which enclosed the ghost of the Roman town. He’d seen isolated farms and, further away, on the higher ground, the frames of this year’s polytunnels spreading like worm-casts.

  He’d driven past the SAS camp with its armed guards. A military base built close to, maybe even on top of, the buried remains of another. What could that mean? What could it mean to Byron Jones?

  A cyclist was bobbing along the lane, dipping periodically behind the hedge, heading this way. Lol waited. The man wheeled the bike to the dead end of the track. He was thin and bearded, maybe in his early sixties, wearing a scarf and a flat cap.

  ‘Nice truck,’ he said. ‘Animal or Warrior?’

  ‘Animal.’

  A match flared. The guy applied it to a roll-up.

  ‘Used to have one meself. Comfy, for a truck.’

  He looked like an archetypal peasant, therefore obviously from Off.

  ‘On your own, mate?’

  ‘It’s what country churchyards are for,’ Lol said. ‘Being alone.’

  ‘Not so much these days. One of the finest St George churches in England, this, but who bovvers now?’

  The guy checked him out again, then took a step back.

  ‘Hang about… I fink… stone me! I was at your gig. In the floods? At Ledwardine? Hey… how cool is this?’

  Lol smiled, a bit bashful. This never used to happen at all, but it had occurred a dozen or so times since Christmas. Local recognition: a mixed blessing.

  ‘Forget what I said,’ the guy said. ‘This is exactly the right setting for you, Lol. There should be a soundtrack. Sunny Days?’

  The edges of his Londonish accent were rounded off, as if he’d been living here a good while.

  ‘Well, you know, that was a long time ago,’ Lol said.

  ‘Well, I had it first time around, I’m proud to say. Hazey Jane. First album I ever bought by a band a good bit younger than me. Big fing, that, when you first accept younger guys can get it right. Seventeen, was you?’

  ‘Another lifetime,’ Lol said.

  The guy put out a hand.

  ‘Arthur Baxter. Bax. I live a mile or so back there, over the pitch. Still come here most nights, on me bike. Meet the dragon.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You feel his breath?’

  ‘Like a blow-heater?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Bax grinned. ‘You know the story?’

  ‘Um… no. You got time?’

  ‘Got all night, mate – the missus is rehearsing a community play, down the leisure centre at Credenhill. Dragon’s drinking at the well, right? George comes down off of Credenhill, lookin’ for trouble. Slash, slash, spear downa froat, all over.’ Bax took a meditative drag. ‘You out here looking for inspiration, Lol? If you’re not, don’t spoil it for me. I wanna point to a song one day and go, I was there when he got that one.’ Bax drew deeply on his cigarette, offered it to Lol. ‘Try this? It ain’t bad.’

  A certain sweetness drifting up. More than one kind of dragon. Lol smiled, shook his head, nodded at the truck. Bax assured Lol that he’d been biking these lanes, pleasantly stoned, for the best part of two decades, never once been stopped.

  ‘Tell you how far back this all goes,’ Bax said. ‘If we could get into the church you’d see this old stone slab with a picture carved on it of St George and the dragon. Only George is wearing like a skirt? Which means somebody seen him either as a cross-dresser or a Roman soldier – you know the little whatsits they had, wiv the belt?’

  ‘St George is portrayed as a Roman?’

  ‘Well, that’s the answer, innit? That’s what it’s about. It’s the Romans slaughtering the Celts. You really here for inspiration?’

  Lol told Bax about ‘The Simple Trackway Man’. Which could use another verse. Bax was delighted, clapped his hands.

  ‘A lot of Roman stuff around here, too,’ Lol said. ‘Or there used to be. I was reading this poem by Wordsworth. “The men that have been reappear”.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know it. Often wonder… did he see them?’ Bax waved his spliff. ‘Bigger than they know, that Roman town. Me and the missus found maybe a dozen coins do
wn the years.’

  ‘And the men who reappear?’

  Bax shuffled around, prodded a tyre on his bike.

  ‘I live in hope.’

  Lol said, ‘Ever come across a bloke called Byron Jones?’

  ‘Round here? Should I have?’

  ‘I think he lives in a caravan. Or he did.’

  ‘Oh…’ Bax blew out smoke. ‘You mean Colin Jones?’

  ‘Probably do.’

  ‘He don’t live in the caravan no more. Got permission for a bungalow on the edge of his land. The Compound. Nice, too. Swimming pool.’

  ‘Compound?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like. All that high barbed-wire fencing. Don’t know him, exactly. We are acquainted. He does intensive fitness training. Got a gym in there and an assault course where you swing over a pond on a rope, that kinda caper. You know him?’

  ‘Know of him.’

  ‘Ex-Sass. And then he was a minder. Quite well fought of, in these parts.’ Bax sniffed. ‘As they are, the Sass.’

  ‘People like you… ever go on these courses?’

  ‘Me? Nah. Wouldn’t be able to afford it. Though occasionally Mr Jones offers a one-day crash-course sort of thing to local boys, for nothing. Excellent for local relations.’ Bax took a long, noisy pull on his spliff, now down to a fragment. ‘Blimey, that din’t last long, did it?’

  Lol smiled.

  ‘I was wondering if that wasn’t the dragon you came here to meet.’

  ‘The Magic Dragon. Poor ole thing, he ain’t too welcome at home no more, not since the missus joined the WI. When we first come here and she wore cheesecloth, we grew it in the dingle. Gotta pay for it now, in town. But, tell you one thing, Mr Lol… it ain’t slowed my brain enough that I can’t tell you’re fishing for som’ink? Nah, nah…’ Bax held up his hands like saucers. ‘I don’t wanna know, mate. You wanted me to know, you’d tell me, wou’n’cha?’

  Lol didn’t know what to say. It was an odd, dreamlike encounter, Brinsop Church snuggling into its shadows behind them, only its bell tower showing like a periscope.

  ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for. But a new verse for the song would make it worthwhile.’

  Bax said, ‘What about the fings what reappear?’

  ‘I thought you hadn’t seen them.’

  ‘I know a bloke who has,’ Bax said. ‘You interested?’

  41

  Pain

  IT WAS STILL fully light when Bliss reached the entrance to Chris Symonds’s farm, so he drove past, crawled around the lanes for a while. Needed to be sure the kids were in bed.

  He drove out towards Moreton-on-Lugg, through the flat-lands, towards the western horizon.

  Saw no way round this any more but to take her on. How the hell she’d found out about Annie he still had no idea, but if she knew, then she knew, and he was tired of playing games. He’d let her know that, yes, he was prepared to leave the division. He’d go on the transfer list directly after Easter. With the single proviso that the shit-stirring stopped.

  As from now, as from tonight, any more lies about physical abuse, any whispers about him and Annie Howe… anything… and he’d flog his car and give his last penny to the flashest lawyer he could find to trash her through the courts and anywhere else she showed her devious little face.

  Tell her now. On the doorstep. No discussion, no explanations, no attempts at self-justification. Then piss off back home, get the best night’s sleep he could manage and throw himself into nailing the killers of the poor bloody Marinescu Sisters before he left Hereford.

  Credenhill, rising like a crusty loaf across the shadowed fields, told him he was only a few miles from Magnis Berries, and he felt a pang of guilt about his behaviour there, the way he’d leaned on Vasile Bocean.

  And yet…

  Why did they leave, Vasile?

  I told you. They always seeing dead men, ghostmen.

  They were fired? Dismissed… for that?

  They was causing upset. Bad vibes. Praying out loud. Lighting candles. Is fire risk! Health and Safety!

  Vasile had said he thought they were, in the end, happy to take some money to go. Maybe they took the ghosts with them. Or maybe they didn’t, all the murmurings that went on afterwards.

  Bliss could hear Jeremy Berrows telling him about places where the air was loaded and Mansel’s sheepdogs had become uncontrollable. He’d thought of going back, alone, to talk to Vasile again, man to man. But the problem was that when people’s testimony bordered on the unlikely it negated everything else they’d told you, making them useless as witnesses. Guaranteed to get you laughed out of court.

  He turned the car at the next junction and headed back to his father-in-law’s farm.

  Jane lit a candle on the altar and sat down in the choirmaster’s chair.

  She was alone, hadn’t seen much of Mum tonight – parish meeting at the village hall, Uncle Ted, usual trivial crap, but at least it kept her out of the church.

  The full preparation now, systematic relaxation.

  Sitting upright, hands on knees, slowly sensing the body from the toes to the top of the head. It was getting a lot easier. Practice. Jane was finding she could almost slide into a relaxed state these days, without the tedious preliminaries.

  Meditation: probably the only procedure which actually transcended all the halfway-workable religions. Of course, Jane only did this in here when she was sure she wouldn’t be disturbed by Uncle Ted or some other tosser. Didn’t want anyone to think she’d found Mum’s God.

  The Easter holiday had begun tonight. Tomorrow would be the first day of what was, in effect, the last school holiday she’d ever have. When the big summer holiday began, it wouldn’t count because she’d have left school. Not a break, but a springboard into adult life. Whatever that was about.

  Jane listened to her breathing. She’d brought along the copy of Revelations of Divine Love from Mum’s desk. Mum had marked a section where Mother Julian was welcoming the sickness she’d contracted at the age of thirty, wanting it to bring her as close as possible to death. To know the reality of dying, in the hope this would cleanse her and bring about a spiritual rebirth. OK, a touch masochistic but this was not a woman who messed around. Maybe knowing there were some secrets you could only learn through pain. Jane went into some chakra breathing, a kind of energy conveyor belt, but soon lost the cycle. The body was still, but the mind wouldn’t switch off.

  She’d seen Cornel again tonight. He’d parked his Porsche on the square but, instead of going into the Swan, he’d followed his jutting chin down Church Street, like some zombie on the prowl, and she’d watched him enter the Ox, where the serious drinkers went. She’d almost gone after him – Mum would be in the village hall for at least two hours – but wasn’t sure she was ready to handle it.

  Had to be done right.

  Getting off the school bus, she’d run into Gomer outside the Eight Till Late. He’d looked embarrassed. Admitting, as they walked down Church Street together, that he was getting nowhere. Talked to everybody he could think of, either side of the border, and, while some could remember when there were illegal cockfights, nobody knew of any happening hereabouts at present. Gamecocks were still being bred, but for collectors, poultry buffs, not for fights.

  En’t gived up, mind, Gomer had said. Jane didn’t think he was optimistic. But, look, that was OK. That was actually good. It meant local people weren’t involved. Now the finger of suspicion could only be pointing one way.

  She knew a lot about cockfighting, now. Not something she’d ever wanted to study, but this was not a responsibility she could walk away from. She’d sat down in her apartment and spent nearly two hours on the Internet, downloading everything except the cockfight videos. Fights had been staged for over two thousand years and were still happening, mainly in the Far East, South America. Less publicly in the UK, where they’d first been introduced by Roman invaders.

  Bastards. She couldn’t stop thinking
about the bird with the lion’s mane.

  But mainly she couldn’t stop replaying what she’d heard last night, outside the kitchen door.

  James Bull-Davies.

  Complicated times, Mrs Watkins… what, with Savitch bidding to buy the Swan…

  Dear God, the final insult. The oak-panelled Jacobean core of the community. How many people knew? Mum had obviously known already and taken a decision not to tell the kid. Hey, let’s not have Jane doing something stupid. But she wasn’t a bloody kid any more and whatever she did wouldn’t be stupid.

  Jane concentrated on her breathing, taking the air down to the solar-plexus chakra.

  Preparation.

  Curved bars of blackening cloud made the western sky look like an old ribcage as Bliss turned, like he had hundreds of times, along Chris Symonds’s farm track.

  In a glow of excitement, once upon a time, at the thought of seeing Kirsty, in tight black jeans and a straining top, waiting for him where the track forked by an ancient oak tree with a trunk wider than his car.

  A dirt track in those days. Now it was tarmac. The real thing, not one of your itinerant-gang jobs that cracked up in weeks; this one was in better nick than the county roads. Possibly even quietly laid by a few of the same fellers, Bliss had heard. The word was that Chris was putting himself up for the council next time.

  He turned left at the fork, driving slowly without lights, following the track leading to the stone outbuildings converted into classy stone holiday cottages, one of them currently occupied by Kirsty and the kids. Bliss slowed, did a tight three-point turn and parked on the grass verge a good distance away. Didn’t want her looking out and recognizing his Honda and not answering the door.

  Just as well. When he got out of the car, not fully closing the door to avoid the noise, he saw another vehicle, a light-coloured Discovery, half hidden on the edge of the pair of fat leylandii which separated the holiday cottages from the farmhouse and threw their front doors into evening shade.