Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain

by Phil Rickman

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Nicked a sack from a litter bin?’

  His lips were stretched, his big chin thrust out. The Porsche’s engine was muttering. She could, of course, get out now if she wanted to. Just climb out and walk off. He could hardly leave his Porsche in the middle of the road. Jane watched him warily.

  ‘What did you see, Jane?’

  ‘I… saw you put a sack in a bin. That’s… that’s it. I just… wanted to see what was in it.’

  ‘And then you took it.’

  ‘I just wanted to show it to somebody? My grandad?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘He breeds them.’ She had this bit all worked out. ‘And he’s always—’

  ‘Breeds what?’

  ‘You know…’

  ‘I don’t!’

  ‘Gamecocks!’ Jane backed hard against the car’s door. ‘And like he’s always going on about how great it was in the old days? With all the betting and how they used to feed the cocks special diets and like it wasn’t really cruel because they had a good life, and he… he still breeds them.’

  ‘What’s he do with them?’

  Cornel released the handbrake, let the Porsche creep along the lane like a hunting cat.

  ‘Well, that’s it,’ Jane said. ‘Nothing. He just breeds them and he’s like, Oh, I wish it was still going on. Like, Oh I’d give anything to put one of my birds in the ring again.’

  ‘So you told him, did you, where it came from?’

  ‘No. Like, I told him where I found it but not how it got there. And he had a good look at it, and he’s, like, yeah that’s been fighting.’

  ‘So what did you see before you took the sack?’

  ‘What was there to see?’ Could blow it all if he thought she’d listened to him getting humiliated by the Brummy-sounding guy. ‘I’m just coming up Church Street and I seen you toss the sack in the bin and walk off. I was, like, curious?’

  ‘Curious.’

  ‘When I seen it, I thought it was, like, one of his? My grandad?’

  Inspired. She was cruising. Just don’t sound too glib.

  ‘So, like, that’s why I took it to him. Thinking maybe somebody shot one of his birds? But it wasn’t one of his. But when he seen it he got all excited. And, like, it’s his birthday next week, he’s, like, seventy-eight? And I was thinking if I could like arrange for him to go to a cockfight one last time?’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘It was probably stupid.’

  ‘That’s why you came to the Ox last night, is it? Because your grandad wants to go to one last cockfight before he dies? What did you do with the bird?’

  ‘Got rid of it. In the river.’

  Cornel nodded. He let the Porsche pick up speed. The next time he spoke, it was kind of sadly.

  ‘Lies.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘They just come pouring out of you, don’t they, girlie?’

  51

  Criminal Damage

  MERRILY WAS READY to scream at Bliss until she saw the state he was in. Coming through the door from the stairs, his jacket trailed over a shoulder, out of breath, a harsh pallor on his face. He looked older and he looked barely in control, like a man feeling his life running away from him.

  ‘Frannie—’

  ‘No!’ Wiping his hands in the air, his voice sharp and shiny. ‘Where’s your car?’

  He followed her out and they sat in the Volvo on the Bath Street car park. He had his iPhone in one hand. She hadn’t seen him since Christmas. His face was damp and his eyes looked far back. He shut them for a moment.

  ‘I was gonna come round and see yer.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘A few times.’

  ‘But you were busy.’ Merrily was trying to hold on to that sense of twisted relief she’d felt when Danny had told her that Lol had been arrested for damaging a wire fence. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s in a cell, of course.’

  ‘Frannie, this is Lol…’

  ‘It’s not my case, Merrily, but if you can throw any light on the situation I’ll pass it on.’

  Bliss turned to her, head on one side. She sank back into the patched seat. She’d called Sophie at home, asking if she could find an emergency stand-in for the Maundy Service. It had happened before, never exactly endearing her to Uncle Ted. Maybe it was her life that was spinning away.

  ‘I don’t know what it’s about. Lol tried to ring me but I was on the phone. Probably a situation where he was only allowed one call, so he rang Danny Thomas instead, you know the guy—?’

  ‘Merrily, I’ve got till this phone goes off, which could be four or five minutes. We’ve suspects being brought in for questioning about the Marinescu murders.’

  ‘You’re getting somewhere on that?’

  ‘Yes. Tell me about Lol.’

  ‘There were things he probably couldn’t say to Danny in the time he had, so I really don’t know what he was doing at Brinsop.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Bliss said, ‘I know me memory isn’t what it was, but did I mention Brinsop?’

  ‘Frannie, for God’s sake, you know him—’

  ‘All I know is there are two smashed CCTV cameras and a hole cut in a wire fence. Nothing stolen, so it could just be criminal damage or—’

  ‘That’s insane!’

  ‘No, hang on… my guess is, unless they’ve found a big pair of wire-cutters in his truck, with Lol’s prints all over them, he’ll get police bail and he’ll be out within an hour. And if the owner of the property doesn’t wanna take it any further it’ll disappear.’

  ‘Who’s in charge?’

  ‘Be Annie Howe.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And I think the owner’s coming in himself later. We’ll have to see if he wants to press charges.’

  ‘Colin Jones?’

  Bliss looked up. Merrily watched curiosity pushing through the weariness like a baby bird’s head in an old nest. Then the phone in his hand began to bleep, and he shouldered the car door open.

  ‘Merrily, this conversation may not be over.’

  When Bliss was back in the station, Merrily stood on her own at the edge of the police forecourt, across the road from the red-brick magistrates’ court. How many other women had waited here for their boyfriends to be bailed? How many vicars?

  She started to laugh. It sounded discordant, a bit manic. She left a message on Danny’s phone, saying the situation now seemed less fraught. Lol would probably be bailed. Dear God. When the mobile chimed and she brought it to her ear, she found that her cheek was wet.

  ‘Danny?’

  ‘Neil Cooper, Mrs Watkins. County Archaeologist’s Department? Jane said you might want to talk to me about Magnis. Do I have that right?’

  ‘Magnis, yeah. Sorry, Neil, you’ve caught me on the—’

  Merrily sat down on the car-park wall.

  ‘Military base, on the Welsh border road from Caerleon,’ Neil said. ‘Built in the late first century, in the time of Claudius, when the occupying army was having trouble with rebellious Celts. Anything specific you’re looking for?’

  ‘Well… religion, I suppose. A warrior’s religion? Nothing meek and mild. Something that might put the Celts, if they’d adopted it, in a state of mind to beat the Roman army on its own terms.’

  ‘You’re talking about Caradog here?’

  ‘Probably.’

  A door under the police awning had opened and Lol was coming out quite slowly, the way a discharged patient walked out of hospital.

  ‘You see, if you’re talking about this area,’ Neil said, ‘most of the soldiers defending Roman Britain were probably not Romans at all, just a ragbag of recruits from all over Europe. They’d been absorbed into this great disciplined military structure and taught the basics. So Caradog’s success isn’t that extraordinary. He wouldn’t exactly have been taking on the cream of Rome. Where did this religion idea come from?’

  ‘A no
vel, actually. So it didn’t exist.’

  Merrily stood up, and Lol saw her, the sun finding the first strands of silver in his hair. He stood facing her, as if slightly bewildered by the fresh air and the traffic. It felt as though the whole city was watching them, as she walked across, the phone at her ear.

  ‘Well, of course it existed,’ Neil Cooper said. ‘It’s a Roman religion favoured by the military elite. It’s Mithraism.’

  ‘Neil… can I call you back? I have to… go.’

  52

  Grassed

  THE EDGES OF the bandage were pink. Lol pulled his sweatshirt sleeve back over it.

  ‘Five stitches. The cops took me straight to the hospital.’

  Merrily had pulled off the road a few miles out of the city, where the suburbs leaked into the countryside. She let go of Lol’s hand, relief and compassion turning to an irritation she didn’t want to feel.

  ‘I still don’t see why you did it… what you expected to find.’

  ‘I know. It was stupid. I can see that now. It just seemed like I was being pointed at something. If I went there something significant would jump out.’

  ‘Like half the Hereford police?’

  ‘Five of them,’ Lol said. ‘All because of the truck, apparently. There were sightings of a pickup truck near Oldcastle the night Mansel Bull was killed.’

  He told her how, after his wrist had been stitched, they’d put him in a cell in Gaol Street. Banged up. Instant flashback: eighteen again, slammed into the system. Fear had flared inside him. He knew how easy it was to get yourself convicted of something you hadn’t done, through being in the wrong place. The wrong vehicle.

  They’d put him into a little grey interview room that stank of guilt. He’d kept telling them exactly where he was the night Mansel Bull was murdered, giving them a list of people they could call – Danny Thomas, Barry, James Bull-Davies. DS Stagg didn’t seem to be interested. Lol had met him before and he’d seemed OK, but now he was a predatory stranger, a schoolyard bully swollen with ignorance and conceit.

  ‘He kept looking at my hands and the stains on my sleeves. He said, did I like that – the feel of blood all over me? He asked me that twice, like he’d thought of something really clever. Still…’ Lol leaned his head back over the top of the seat, where the headrest had broken off. ‘The other cops, in general, were OK. One went out and brought me some chips.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘I said I’d been working on some songs, went out to soak up some atmosphere. It sounded bonkers, even to me, but then they found the ley map in the truck, so obviously I was bonkers. They still took a swab for DNA.’

  ‘You see Annie Howe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right. Let’s just get back home.’ Merrily started up the car. ‘You need sleep.’

  ‘Uh…’ Lol shook himself. ‘I need – if you’ve got time, I need to get something sorted.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Brinsop.’

  The wide fields were opening out before them into what remained of Magnis, which was nothing you could see.

  Merrily switched off the engine.

  ‘Aren’t we both too tired for humour?’

  This wasn’t good. They were parked where a rutted mud track finished inside a wood, near the top of a hill which Jane didn’t know, except that it was nearer Leominster than Hereford and therefore not where she wanted to be. Trees, mostly conifers, were dense on three sides, a mesh of branches overhead.

  Jane’s left hand was already behind her, groping for whatever passed for a door handle.

  ‘For a start,’ Cornel said, ‘how about you drop the hokey accent? Your mother’s the vicar of Ledwardine, and you haven’t lived here that long.’

  Jane thumped back against the door. Which of them had betrayed her: Lori from the Ox or Dean Wall, who hated her from way back?

  Cornel’s tongue tickled his top lip.

  ‘You want to take a walk, Jane?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Maybe she could manage to get out, and maybe she could run. But Cornel’s legs were a lot longer than hers and he was clearly a fit guy, despite all the drink. There were things you couldn’t easily do in a Porsche, if one party was unwilling, that would be so much easier on a lonely wooded hillside, so best not to move.

  ‘What do you want?’ Cornel said.

  Half-turned towards her, one hand on his thigh. Jane looked him in the eyes.

  ‘Like I’m supposed to feel threatened up here? It’s a small county. All I have to do is scream.’

  ‘What are you like?’ Cornel shook his narrow head, then tipped it back and let out a roar. ‘Help! Help! This girl keeps grabbing my cock!’

  A crow replied from somewhere. Flashes of hard white sunlight were splintered by the still-wintry trees.

  Jane was shocked into silence.

  ‘What do you want?’ Cornel said.

  She didn’t feel scared any more, just stupid.

  ‘If you’re this big, successful banker, why are you staying at the Ox?’

  Even to her, it sounded sulky, a bit childish.

  ‘I like the Ox,’ Cornel said. ‘It’s full of sad oafs who live with their mothers and wear wide wellies. To stick the sheep’s hooves down while they’re…?’

  ‘We all knows that one,’ Jane said in a small voice. ‘Round yere.’

  ‘Where you really from?’

  ‘All over. Cheltenham, Liverpool… but this is where I belong.’

  ‘Where’s your dad?’

  ‘Dead. Car crash, years ago.’

  ‘My dad lives in LA now,’ Cornel said. ‘Got out while he could. My stepfather’s a maths teacher at a comp in Middlesex. Last year his entire salary came to so much less than my bonus. Pretended he was pleased for me, but anybody could see how totally pissed off he was really.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s moments like that make it all worthwhile – the day you watch your pompous little stepfather eat shit.’ Cornel leaned back, hands behind his head. ‘There’s my confession. Now it’s your turn. Why were you looking for me? And don’t say you weren’t, you were in the Ox twice.’

  ‘Cockfighting. I told you.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Cornel’s head shaking. ‘That was girlie’s reason.’

  ‘Yeah, well it’s my—’

  ‘Seems to me girlie wouldn’t’ve come near me again after that distressing incident in the Swan.’

  ‘No… no, listen, I’m telling you the truth. If Savitch is running cockfights, I want him exposed. I want it in all the papers, so he can never hold his head up here again and has to… leave.’

  ‘Savitch? The vicar’s daughter takes on Ward Savitch?’

  ‘You don’t know me. This used to be a good place – I mean Ledwardine. Seeing it become the New Cotswolds was bad enough, all these women hugging each other in the street, How are yoooo, mwah, mwah… but having it turned into some bloody hunting resort for bastards who think you can get away with anything if you can afford to pay people to look the other way…’

  ‘I see.’ Cornel tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘I see.’

  ‘You see what?’

  ‘Where you’re coming from.’

  ‘You did go to a cockfight?’

  ‘Oh yeah. It’s one of those things they make you do. Prove how hard you are.’

  ‘Savitch?’

  ‘Let’s get some lunch,’ Cornel said.

  Lol seemed to know exactly where he wanted to go. Merrily was wary, experiencing a fleeting fear that he might have lost it and he was actually taking them to Byron Jones’s place. The fields looked wide and bright and open. Sporadic woodland, isolated dwellings, a clear grey border of small mountains. The fox-brown soil and the bones of Magnis.

  Over a rise, a small timber-framed farmworker’s cottage had appeared. A ramshackle porch, peeling render. A man on his knees inside a circle of spanners and a spilled socket set, tinkering with a quad bike. When Lol got out of the Vo
lvo, he came to his feet, wiping oily hands on his jeans.

  ‘Fawt you might come back.’

  ‘If only to find out why you grassed me up,’ Lol said.

  53

  Sideshow

  A BRASS OIL lamp, obviously still in use, hung low over the table. The underside of the central beam was blackened. Two chocolate Labradors prowled around, watched by a ginger cat on the window sill, but only the Rayburn growled.

  ‘Yeah, I heard he was friends with a lady vicar,’ Bax said. ‘That’s nice.’

  Just the three of them around the table, in chairs painted in primary colours. Bax’s wife was at work, at the farm shop owned by Sollers Bull.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Bax said, ‘but anybody could see that no way was this boy going home till he’d had a peek over Mr Jones’s fence. Didn’t want him hurt, was all. What else can I say?’

  ‘You could’ve told me,’ Lol said.

  ‘Told you what?’

  ‘Whatever you didn’t tell me that made you think I might get hurt.’

  Bax shook his head slowly.

  ‘Don’t do that, mate. Even if you fink you know a guy from his music.’

  Merrily understood. Bax belonged to an established sub-category of incomer: the old hippie good-lifer who’d made a go of it, eventually winning the respect of the native farmers but knowing, all the same, that if he put a foot wrong they’d turn on him: bloody Londoner, give them an acre of ground and a few sheep and they think they know it all.

  He’d learned the rural virtues of caution, circumspection and some other word beginning with c that meant you kept your head down and didn’t spread gossip if you wanted to survive.

  ‘To actually get somebody arrested,’ Merrily said, ‘you’d have to be very worried about what might happen to them.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Bax nodded at Lol’s bandage. ‘What happened there?’

  ‘Barbed wire.’ Lol pulled his sleeve down. ‘Wire which had already been snipped. Presumably by the same person who brought down the CCTV camera?’