Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the yard. Steps down, for the coal.’

  ‘Ta.’

  ‘But I’m tellin’ you… you go down there on your own, Mr Frannie, you’re fuckin’ dead, you are.’

  ‘I’m not planning to go down there, Goldie. That would alert your little friend outside. I’m assuming there’s a more discreet way in, from the house. Maybe more than one – must’ve been three cellars at one time.’

  ‘Please… go away…’

  But were her eyes saying, don’t go away?

  Well, well. Bliss folded his arms.

  ‘Tell you what, let’s both go down.’

  ‘Like fuck I will. You should’ve had her by now. Useless, the cops.’

  Bliss followed Goldie into the kitchen, with its big shiny chip fryer and globe lights that made your head ache, then through into a utility room with two washing machines and three steps down to a door at one end.

  ‘That’s it?’

  Goldie staying well back. Bliss sensed she wasn’t unhappy now. If anybody was listening they’d reckon she’d done everything she could to get rid of him, all the same knowing – as she would – that the harder she tried to get him out the more he wouldn’t want to go.

  The noise was like what you could hear coming out of Edgar Street when Hereford United were actually winning. Maybe more like Anfield, really. Anfield underground.

  ‘Put the lights out,’ Bliss said.

  ‘You don’t wanner do this. Not on your own.’

  It made sense. He stood watching his iPhone, waiting for Karen to call him back, or Darth Vaynor. Left messages for both. The bloating noise was making him physically irritated, like a rash, his palms hot but dry as dust, his head fizzing with static. A roar of what sounded like approval made the door shake and Bliss’s guts jitter.

  Goldie said, ‘You go back. Leave me your number. I’ll call when they’s leaving.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Bliss smiled. ‘Just so nobody gets nicked on your premises.’

  ‘Least you can do.’

  ‘Piss off, Goldie.’

  Bliss pocketed his phone, turned the key, eased the door open a crack, then slid out onto the top step where the fetid atmosphere picked him up like oven gloves.

  Five steps down there was a concrete platform, a bloke on it, hunched over a substantial videocam on a tripod, pointed down into the circle of light made by big lamps, like in a dope factory.

  Which it wasn’t. Nobody wanted to watch grass grow. This would be the kind of video you only found on the Internet, and maybe some gutter cable channel.

  Bliss flattened himself against a wet brick wall and saw that it was an actual circle down there, inside a metal barrier, waist-high, like a giant sawn-off-drum. Maybe sixty people around the metal ring. All men, as far as Bliss could see, except he could hear a woman’s voice, high and whiny, like a bandsaw when it first touched the wood.

  ‘Finish ’im, boy! Get fuckin’ stuck in, you bastard, we en’t got all night!’

  Now he saw her, taller than many of the men. Saw her black-gloss lips working.

  ‘Go for the eyes, go for the eyes, that’s it!’

  Was it his birthday?

  Bliss started to laugh, and then he was coughing on the smoke and the fumes of booze and sweat and nasty, twisted excitement at what was going on under the hot lights: the flapping and the stabbing, the spinning and circling, the darting head-to-head, peck-and-thrust, like some savage ballet in sandy dust and scattered twigs and roars and little jewels of flying blood. One of the cocks had the other one against the barrier, stabbing with its reddened beak. In his rattling beanbag head, Bliss heard that voice again.

  That’s a bugger, we’re… gonner have to do the other one now.

  The cameraman must’ve heard him coughing and turned, and Bliss raised a hand – ‘You’re all right, pal’ – and the man turned back to his camera, and it was all like slow-mo after that.

  Some bloke catching the movement from the floor and looking up and nudging his mate, and he was looking up, too, but that was all right, Bliss didn’t think he’d ever nicked either of them. Smiling kindly at them, wondering how he was going to stop this and contain them. Contain her. Probably needing to get back-up, get on his phone.

  It was only when more eyes were raised that it occurred to Bliss that, not only was he the only feller here in a suit and tie, he’d been doing – in this same suit and tie – a fair bit of telly these past couple of days. His was a face they all realized they knew from somewhere. So when the cameraman turned for a quick second glance, something inside Bliss snapped like old rotted elastic, and he pushed himself back against the wall, brought up his left knee and slammed the sole and heel of his shoe into the cameraman’s back.

  Watched the guy go skidding down the steps, the camera flying up and then toppling into the ring where he saw both cocks going for it.

  Couldn’t contain a big caffeine beam as he was pulled to the floor. He rolled away, his back finding the wall.

  ‘Bliss.’

  ‘How’s it going, Victoria?’

  She came towards him through the crush.

  ‘On your own, is it?’

  ‘Do I look thick, Vickie? Wall of coppers halfway to Tesco.’

  Victoria sniffed.

  ‘He’s on his own.’

  She turned away, borrowing someone’s cigarette, and then they were on him, half the scum in the cellar, the first boot arriving like a log-splitter in his spine before they started on his face.

  Victoria going, ‘Don’t arse about, boys. You don’t wanner get nicked. Just do what you gotter and clean it up.’

  68

  Punching at Smoke

  THE INSIDE OF Annie Howe’s Audi was more chaotic than you might have imagined – maps and papers down the side of the passenger seat, a plastic sandwich wrapper on the floor. Merrily watched her driving quite aggressively through the diminishing evening traffic. Perhaps the only detective she’d ever seen in a trench coat, light grey, belted, the collar pulled up against the pale hair.

  ‘How do you know he’s going to be there?’

  ‘I had someone ring him, number withheld,’ Howe said, ‘and ask for Julie or somebody – wrong number. Fate’s on my side for once. I thought Mr Bull might have been at Savitch’s dinner, where he would have encountered Mr Jones, and I want to get at him first.’

  Sollers Bull, brother of Mansel. Both men born to the county in the fullest sense, Merrily was thinking. Names swelling and flexing with the muscle and sinew of the land.

  ‘So he’s either on his own or with his girlfriend,’ Howe said.

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  ‘The official story is that his wife, Catriona, has picked up the two boys from their boarding school and they’ve all gone to stay with her parents. To keep the kids out of the glare of publicity. But she’s spent an implausible amount of time away lately. It’s either a marriage in meltdown or they’ve come to an understanding.’

  Howe’s Audi had left the suburbs behind, and the night-time countryside was gathering them in. The amorphous vastness where the street lights ended. You could go in with a flashlight, but you’d better have a stack of batteries.

  ‘Sollers Bull,’ Howe said, ‘is not a man who likes to pass up on the fringe benefits of fame.’

  ‘How does he connect with Jones?’

  ‘For a start…’ Annie Howe played the washers over the blotched windscreen, applied the wipers. ‘I shouldn’t be doing this at all. As DCI, I’m an executive, an administrator. But tonight there aren’t many detectives unoccupied. Nobody I could trust with this, anyway.’

  ‘This, presumably, is to do with the murder of his brother.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I think we’re more or less convinced he didn’t kill his brother. He has a convincing alibi and there’s no DNA match at the crime scene. But… I’ll admit I’m punching at smoke, but there are some questions I’d like to ask him, and I’d like you to hear the answers. You did rather well, in the
end, with Jones.’

  ‘Not from where I was sitting.’

  ‘You think against the grain,’ Howe said. ‘My grain, anyway.’

  ‘That sounds like a subtle way of saying I’m a licensed crank.’

  Annie Howe didn’t deny it.

  ‘It may be that Jones has been in touch with Sollers Bull by now, and he knows what we’re moving towards. Or it may be that there’s no link between them at all. I don’t know. We’ll see.’

  ‘What does Frannie Bliss think?’

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘Just that there seems to have been quite a concerted effort to discredit him over this. Sollers Bull and Countryside Defiance? Whoever they are.’

  ‘Most of the time,’ Howe said quietly, ‘Francis Bliss is his own worst enemy.’

  ‘He’s had a bad few months. Domestically.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  The Audi was alone now on the Brecon road, where it sliced through invisible Magnis. Night clouds were gliding like flatfish in the aquarium of a big pale sky. The Easter full moon was up there somewhere. Merrily was remembering her first meeting with Annie Howe. The clinical interrogation of Jane in the search for a missing girl. A bad start, getting no better, as she’d conspicuously sided with Bliss through the years of attrition.

  Howe took a left towards the Wye. One of those lanes that you never had cause to go down because it didn’t lead anywhere apart from farms. Howe slowed, keeping the headlights dipped. Merrily dragged herself out of drowsiness, peering through the windscreen, following the headlights as they opened up the road, bleaching the grass at the verges. Annie Howe was talking again.

  ‘… under no obligation to cover up what Jones and Mostyn have been doing, but I intend to take it slowly. If you see any indication that Sollers knows more than he should about unconventional religious practices, I’d be grateful if you kept it to yourself until we’re out of there. And, yes, I am aware that you don’t work for the police.’

  ‘God tends to take a dim view of murder,’ Merrily said.

  If only to see Annie Howe wince. The car slowed. A private-looking sign on a right-hand bend said: Oldcastle.

  ‘Was it a castle at one time?’

  ‘No idea,’ Howe said. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Just wondered how long-established the family was.’

  ‘Long enough. Even for this area.’

  Merrily checked her mobile. She’d left messages for Lol and Jane. Lol said he’d be in the Swan. Jane, presumably, was out with Eirion.

  Near the top of a wooded rise, the full moon sprang out between the tall chimneys of the lightless farmhouse. It looked like a shell. A dead house. Merrily thought, who could live, unconcerned, overlooking the yard where a previous owner had been slashed and hacked to death? How long before the stain faded into a historical talking point, a footnote in a tourist guide?

  Annie Howe drove down beyond the house, between well-grown oaks.

  ‘Sollers lives in a converted coach house.’

  ‘But he inherits Oldcastle?’

  ‘Seems likely. Doubt he’ll live there, but nobody can see him selling it. More likely turn it into a hotel or some sort of conference centre. Maybe even the official citadel for the increasingly wealthy Countryside Defiance. Their website carries a photograph of him in hunting pink with all the trimmings. And handcuffs.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The countryside in manacles – the foxhunting ban and other issues. Sollers Bull lives to hunt.’

  A caged bulkhead light came on over the porch as Annie Howe parked in front of a metal gate next to a small car. By the time they got the gate open and reached the porch door, a woman was coming out, wearing a calf-length sheepskin coat, its collar held together over her chin and mouth. Annie Howe stood in silence and watched her.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Bull,’ the woman said, her back to them now, ‘and I’m sorry to have bothered you. Goodnight.’

  As the woman got into the small car and its engine started up, a man appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Annie.’

  ‘I tried to call, Mr Bull,’ Howe said. ‘But you were engaged.’

  ‘Bewildering times, Annie. The phone only ever stops when I unplug it.’ His voice was pitched up higher than you expected; you could hear it lofted across the fields, over the mêlée of a hunt. ‘You got something to tell me?’

  ‘To ask you. If you can spare the time.’

  ‘Of course. Coffee?’

  ‘No, thank you, Mr Bull. I suspect we’ve had rather too much of that today.’

  The overhead light made a twinkling star in an ear stud as Sollers Bull turned to examine Merrily. She saw a man of a little over medium height. A keenly pointed face, with deep bevelled cheeks. He was wearing tight black jeans and a red T-shirt with a message on it in black: Not a fox-hugger. The small car pulled away, headlights on full beam. Maybe the woman was a journalist.

  ‘This is Merrily Watkins,’ Annie Howe said.

  Didn’t explain further. She had her mobile out; it had evidently been on vibrate.

  ‘Excuse me.’ She took a step back on to the path, speaking into the phone. ‘DCI Howe.’ And then, after a silence, her voice low and deliberate, ‘When was this, Karen?’ before moving further away.

  ‘Erm…’ Merrily looked up at Sollers Bull. She was cold. ‘Would you mind if I had a coffee?’

  ‘I’ll put some on.’

  She followed him into a very classy designer kitchen.

  ‘This an old house, Mr Bull?’

  ‘Not particularly. Nineteenth-century and fortunately not listed so I’ve been able to do what I like with it.’

  ‘The farmhouse must be listed, though.’

  ‘Grade Two. Starred.’

  ‘Was it a castle?’

  ‘No. Older than that. The site was known as Oldcastle because of what was there before. Don’t know what it was, but the stones are probably in the foundations. ’

  ‘I see.’

  Through a window, Merrily saw Annie Howe, in the light grey trench coat, up against a ranch-style fence, listening to the phone. When she came back, her face was paler than the coat, but no less grey.

  ‘Meant to ask you, how’s Charlie these days?’ Sollers said.

  Sitting with his back to the red Aga, stretched out almost diagonally, feet under the hardwood table, hands behind his head. Charlie? This would explain him addressing Howe as Annie. It very much figured that the Oldcastle Bulls would be familiar with her dad.

  ‘I’ll come straight to the point, Mr Bull. Colin Jones – how well do you know him?’

  Sollers looked blank. Genuinely so, Merrily thought, studying him: younger than he looked in the papers and not so distinguished: too flash for that.

  ‘Byron Jones?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Oh, well, I know him,’ Sollers said. ‘Though not particularly well.’

  ‘Have you ever done business with him?’ Howe asked.

  ‘Kind of business?’

  ‘Cattle, for example. Ever sold any cattle to Mr Jones?’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that Mr Jones was even in the livestock business. Or the meat trade, come to that.’

  ‘That’s not quite answering the question, is it, sir?’

  Annie Howe began unbuckling the belt of her coat, unhurried, like she was prepared to stay until she got what she’d come for. Only Merrily, sitting next to her, opposite Sollers, saw that her fingers were unsteady, fumbling it.

  Sollers straightened up in his chair. His sleek, pointy face looked… foxy.

  ‘No, I’ve never sold any beasts to Mr Jones.’

  ‘Or maybe given him one?’

  ‘Do you know what Hereford cattle are worth?’ Sollers glanced from Howe to Merrily and back to Howe. ‘What exactly is this about?’

  ‘Just so that we have this clear, Mr Bull,’ Howe said, ‘you’re saying that, as far as you’re aware, no animal bred at Oldcastle has ever been sent to Colin Jones’s establishment.
Sent either to Jones or his business partner, Kenny Mostyn.’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘As far as you’re aware.’

  ‘I think you’d better explain.’

  ‘I don’t have to explain anything,’ Howe said.

  Her skin looked cold as bone.

  She hadn’t said what the phone call had been about. But then, police business, why would she?

  69

  Law of the Hunt

  ‘THANK CHRIST,’ DANNY said.

  Kenny Mostyn, and he was on his own and no longer wearing a dinner jacket.

  Dressed for action, in fact: dark jeans, black fleece. Likely his suit was in the overnight bag over one shoulder; Danny had been worried that Mostyn might be staying the night at The Court and they’d still be sitting here when the sun come up, stiff as corpses. But mabbe Mostyn wasn’t overnight-guest material.

  ‘Looks like you was right then, Gomer.’

  They had the old Jeep parked under a willow tree, edge of the parking area. Only a couple of dozen vehicles left. This was a select dinner party. Gomer had ID’d Councillor Lyndon Pierce, fellers on that level, usual suspects.

  ‘Mostyn just showin’ his face,’ Gomer said, ‘but he got business elsewhere to see to.’

  ‘Don’t switch on yet, let him get clear of the gate.’

  ‘En’t daft, boy. Keep our distance all the way.’

  ‘Only thing worries me,’ Danny said, ‘is what if the Scotch bloke’s told him about a feller lookin’ for him with a cock to put in the ring. Best I could think of at the time, see.’

  ‘Too late to get fussed about that.’

  There was a furry growl under Gomer’s voice now. Likely due to seeing Mostyn dressed much the same as he had been that night in the snow. Everything coming back, and the worst of it was that – for just a short while, surrounded by these lithe, prowling young guys – he’d felt just a bit scared. And even worse than that…

  … mabbe like an old man.

  Gomer was gonner hold that against Kenny Mostyn for ever.

  It was like Cornel was gobbling up the night, wildly excited as he guided Jane, limping, through the gap in the high wire fence. Holding her hand inside his, which was big and dry. The moon lit an open space, with army-type huts, metal gates leading to fields and woodland.