Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain

by Phil Rickman

  A patch of silence and then one small voice.

  ‘Gomer?’

  Jesus. Lol’s feet threw him forward, stumbling for the doorway, whispering, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Barry grabbed his shoulder, spun him round and away.

  ‘It’s Jane—’ Lol stumbled round the digger’s caterpillar tracks to Danny’s door, under the open window. ‘Danny, it—’

  ‘Best for Jane, boy, if we don’t get killed.’

  ‘If this thing goes down them steps,’ Gomer was saying, ‘and there’s anybody in the way…’

  Lol saw Barry emerge on the other side of the digger, staying out of the lights, his back to the inside wall of the hut. A single sharp crack and its rapid echo and the headlight on Gomer’s side had gone out and Barry’s urgent hiss came out of darkness.

  ‘Geddown! Everybody! Down!’

  Lol slid onto hands and knees between the digger and the remains of one of the doors. Couldn’t just do nothing. He began creeping slowly forward. Ahead of him, a meagre ochre glow like a nursery night light wrapped in dusty muslin. A moment of waxy silence and then a long, torn cry, and that had to be Jane, and Lol was back on his feet, squeezing past the JCB, clambering up the broken wooden door.

  Then he stopped. A man about his own height was facing him, knees slightly bent, arms extended like short girders in front of his face.

  A spatter of impressions coming at Lol, questions answered almost as soon as they were formed, like, What’s that between his hands? Why are the hands wearing red gloves?

  He was halfway along the big wooden door now, and the door was hanging half over the steps, seesawing. Legs apart, battling for balance, he was going up and down, and the man’s extended arms were tracking his movements, and the man’s blank eyes, inside a red mask, found his for an instant, and Barry was screaming at him.

  ‘Down. Lie the fuck down!’

  And then something hit Lol and he did go down and, while he was falling, the arms of the man, his face glistening scarlet, swung round, away from him, and Lol registered Barry’s silhouette in rapid motion and a twitch from the man’s hands, then a small, gas-jet flash and the sound of a single massive handclap.

  The shot’s echo died.

  Lol turned sideways, his cheek against the wood. He saw Barry’s face twisting back.

  Barry sinking to his knees, a red halo misting around his head.

  ‘Oh… oh for God’s sake…’

  This was Danny Thomas’s voice from inside the JCB, all fractured, as Barry’s heavy body toppled back across the shovel’s blade.

  Part Seven

  GOOD FRIDAY

  They did not lose themselves, as did the other sects, in contemplative mysticism; for them the good dwelt in action.

  Franz Cumont

  The Mysteries of Mithra

  …the perfect soldier of Mithras, non-attached, passionless, disciplined, inured to hardship, sleeping for whole months on the frozen snow and hard earth; ambitious, cruel and ruthless, but possessed of immense personal courage…

  Esme Wynne Tyson

  Mithras, the Fellow in the Cap

  Nothing can be what it was

  But through the drifting mist of loss

  You hope to find a home.

  Lol Robinson

  Tanworth-in-Arden’

  79

  No Fuss

  UNCLE TED WOULD say call it off, but then Uncle Ted had been against it from the start, the whole idea of dumping Evensong and replacing it with this swami stuff. Uncle Ted was probably also suspicious of Mother Julian, a woman with a man’s name and torrid crucifixion fantasies, but he’d said nothing about that.

  Anyway… it was going on. Although a stand-in had been arranged for today’s early services, Merrily, striving for normality, was up while the early sun was still struggling in twisted ropes of cloud and the village was as silent as an empty film set.

  Standing in her dressing gown at the scullery window with Revelations of Divine Love open on the desk and Ethel curled between her feet. Watching a fox slide off home, the way Lol had half an hour ago, while it was still dark, another neurotic damsel-fly episode.

  Don’t have long to decide before something makes the decision for you. And that may not be the one you hope for.

  Not now, Athena.

  The Julian meditation would begin at two, and Jane would be there and Lol, where Merrily could see them. And she would do her best. Better than she had last night in the moonwashed churchyard at Brinsop while, less than a mile away, Jane… her daughter… eighteen… was watching men being killed.

  She gripped the window sill until her fingers hurt.

  Jane had gone, finally, to her attic about four hours ago, and if Eirion was up there too, instead of in the guest room, that would be no bad thing. When they had finally got home, they’d found him asleep in his car on the square and, for the first time, Jane had wept. Catharsis? Well, it was a start. Even as a child, Jane had never been a weeper.

  Merrily watched the fox, a familiar visitor, creeping away between the church wall and the shed.

  And no, she wasn’t naive. She wasn’t expecting a warm radiance rising in the nave as they all welcomed Easter after tomorrow night’s vigil – beatific smiles, villagers embracing one another. That was Lark Rise to Candleford. This was Ledwardine, on the border.

  Jane had already been offered professional counselling, and Merrily had said, It wouldn’t be a sign of weakness, flower, these people—And Jane, stone-faced, had cut her off. You are kidding, right?

  The new jacket Jane had worn for the first time on her day out with Charles Cornel had been put out for the wash and was destined for the Oxfam shop. This was all going to take time, lots of it, but compared with any one of several things that might have happened last night to close your whole life down, time – weeks, months, years – didn’t matter at all.

  Mid-morning, Annie Howe came to the vicarage door, alone, her grey trench coat streaked with red mud and wrinkled as if she’d slept in it, although her eyes didn’t look as if she’d slept at all.

  ‘Some things I need to go over again,’ Annie said. ‘With Jane. I’m sorry about this.’

  ‘She doesn’t make things up,’ Merrily said irrationally. ‘She just sometimes sees them from… a different place.’

  ‘I won’t keep her long. This is not official.’

  So much that Annie Howe had done and said since yesterday evening that was not official – blindingly, uncharacteristically not official. One day there might be an explanation unconnected with the full moon.

  ‘Is Frannie Bliss…?’

  Merrily waited, kettle in hand. A sunbeam from the highest window was pale and coffin-shaped.

  ‘The Chief Constable’s on his way over. Have his picture taken going into the hospital, hold a press conference. Two results in one night. Well worth interrupting his holiday weekend for.’

  ‘So Frannie…?’

  ‘His voice is very slurred. He’s lost two teeth, his nose is broken and they think there may be brain-stem damage.’

  ‘Oh God. What’s that mean?’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he’ll be a cabbage, but functions like balance could be impaired. Speech, eyesight, coordination. It will all improve with time, they say, but Bliss isn’t noted for his patience. He—’ Annie Howe’s smile was swift and crooked. ‘He says that if the Chief shows up at his bedside he’ll strangle the, ah, twat, with the nearest drip tube. Or I may have mis—Oh.’ Annie glanced at the door. Jane had come in.

  Hair unbrushed, tied back. She had a deep scratch all down one cheek. At the refectory table, her sugary tea going cold, she described again what had happened when the managing director of Hardkit had cut a young man’s throat.

  ‘All my fault.’

  Jane said that twice.

  Gently – for her – Annie Howe said, ‘All you did was throw something which distracted Cornel before he could…’

  ‘He might not have. Might not have shot Mostyn. I think he just wanted to see h
im crawl.’

  ‘Jane, nobody carries a loaded firearm—’

  ‘You weren’t there,’ Jane said.

  Merrily flinched. Because Jane had been there. And Lol had been there, and so had Gomer Parry, wielding a digger like heavy artillery at the age of… whatever age Gomer was.

  While she had been faffing about in a churchyard, cutting up a communion wafer with nail scissors, trying to alter the spiritual balance. Just one slippage of a gear, one shift in the pattern of events, one stalling of momentum in that hellhole last night, and she could be burying Jane, raking out the last cold ash in Lol’s wood stove. She was worthless, a sham. Failing to see what she should have seen. Being someone who people didn’t want to worry because she was too busy unscrambling the thought processes of a man who was dead and hadn’t wanted her to know about it anyway. She wanted a cigarette.

  ‘He kept asking me to come out,’ Jane said.

  ‘Mostyn?’

  ‘He said it was OK, Cornel had just tripped and fallen and hurt his head and they needed to call an ambulance.’

  ‘And what did you say?’ Annie asked.

  ‘I didn’t say anything. I knew he was just trying to find out where I was. I went down on hands and knees again. I thought, even if he finds out where I am he can’t come in after me, it’s too narrow, but he can… he can climb up and look down on me and just… shoot me. I was just lying on the floor and covering my head with my hands. For all the use that would’ve been.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘There was this… you know, the noise of a big engine outside the doors? Like a JCB?’

  ‘That was what you actually thought?’

  ‘I know what a JCB sounds like. And then both doors just came in with this massive crash and that’s when I stood up, and I saw Gomer straight away. And Lol and…’ Jane smiled feebly. ‘It was like the best moment of my entire life. For about two seconds.’ The smile turning wintry. ‘Before it was the worst.’

  ‘When did you first see Mr Bloom?’

  ‘Barry – I heard him first. He was calling to everybody, telling them to keep down. And then I saw Lol. I was, like… going insane because Kenny Mostyn… I saw him standing up with the gun levelled and I could see he was pointing the gun at Lol, and I just… lost it. I started climbing over the top of the concrete bench, and the next thing I saw was Barry, just falling back, and half his face was…’

  ‘All right. In your first statement, you said you saw another man where Lol Robinson had been standing. Had he been there all the time?’

  ‘I don’t know. Lol was, like, standing on one of the doors that Gomer had smashed in, and this guy just… he just came out of nowhere and rammed Lol out of the way. All in dark clothes and this balaclava with just a slit for the eyes?’

  ‘What did Mostyn do?’

  ‘I’ve told you all this once…’

  ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘Nothing. He did nothing. He had the gun by his side. Just standing with his legs apart, kind of… relaxed. And the gun by his side.’

  ‘As if he knew the man? Saw him as an ally rather than an adversary?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Merrily could see it all in her head. The balaclava to hide the giveaway white hair and the cold intent in his blue eyes.

  How sure were they that this was Byron Jones?

  Annie sipped her tea, casual, unofficial.

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘I didn’t see exactly… I was looking for Lol. The next thing I saw, Kenny didn’t have the gun any more, the other guy did. I’d been looking straight into the JCB lights, so when I turned round I couldn’t see properly.’

  No one else had seen it, Merrily knew that. Not Lol, nor Gomer, nor Danny. Barry had told them all to get down, before…

  Annie said, ‘You’re sure there wasn’t more than one gun?’

  ‘Pretty sure.’

  ‘What happened next, Jane… is something we need to be absolutely sure about because only you—’

  ‘Every time I close my eyes I’m still seeing it. He was standing behind Kenny, then it was like pieces of Kenny’s head came flying out. And his knees were, like, buckled and he just… you know like they say someone was dead before he hit the ground. That’s how it was.’

  ‘How many shots?’

  ‘Two. And then this other guy slipped the gun in his jacket pocket and walked out. He stopped for a moment and bent over Barry, and then he turned away and he was… gone. He was just, like… no fuss, you know? He just did what he did and walked out. Like, the way I’m telling it, it must sound like it took ages, but it was just… barely seconds. He was so sure of what he was doing. Like he didn’t have to think?’

  ‘No struggle for the gun or anything like that? I’m sorry to keep going over these points, but it’s impor—’

  ‘I keep telling you,’ Jane said, eyes wide. ‘Kenny Mostyn wasn’t expecting it. There was no struggle. It was like an execution?’

  They left Jane in the kitchen. Annie Howe stood at the door in the hall, next to Holman Hunt’s Light of the World.

  ‘They, ah… they’re still trying to save Barry Bloom’s right eye. They’re not hopeful. Made a mess of one side of his face but the bullet didn’t enter his brain. At that range he was, I suppose, very lucky.’

  ‘Lucky,’ Merrily said dully.

  The worst could have happened, and it hadn’t. Not quite.

  ‘I…’ Annie took her hand off the doorknob. ‘I’m not sure why Jane feels in some way responsible. I don’t know her particularly well, but it seems… slightly odd. We can still arrange some professional counselling. Sometimes it helps to unload it all on a stranger.’

  ‘I’ll ask her again, but I’m not optimistic.’

  ‘But then again,’ Annie said, ‘I suspect you might have an idea why she blames herself. Is there something I should know?’

  ‘If I tell you, you’ll wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘I’ll chance it.’

  ‘She seems to feel she was the instrument which brought all this together. If she hadn’t become obsessed with tying Savitch into cockfighting. Which led—’

  ‘Ah, yes…’ Annie Howe raised a hand. ‘Just so you know. In a storeroom behind one of Mostyn’s shops we found a consignment of what you might call cockfight gift-sets – leather cases containing a selection of polished spurs. Brand new. Originally prized, apparently, by cockers in the travelling community. Now finding a new market, it seems.’

  ‘So that links Mostyn to it.’

  ‘There’s also the established fact that Victoria Buckland, the woman charged in connection with the Marinescu murders, used to work for Mostyn when he was running canoeing and mountaineering courses for young people. Buckland’s believed to have been organizing periodic cockfights at the Plascarreg Hilton for a couple of years. It’ll all come out at some stage.’

  ‘And Savitch?’

  ‘Savitch is now attached like a Siamese twin to his London solicitor. He denies all knowledge of Mithraism, cockfighting, badger-baiting or any other illegal country pursuits. Appalled to discover the truth about Mostyn, who was contracted purely as an instructor and a supplier of equipment. Horrified that some of his own clients were into these foul practices.’

  ‘Hanging it on the dead.’

  ‘Don’t they always. So Jane…?’

  ‘Jane thinks that if she hadn’t pursued Cornel with a view to nailing Savitch they would never have wound up in the mithraeum.’

  ‘And yet Cornel went tooled up. He’d lost his job, he’d been humiliated, he was at the end of his rope. He went prepared to kill somebody, and Mostyn’s the most likely candidate. From Jane’s version of what was said, it seems likely that Cornel was hoping Mostyn would appear. He certainly seems to have believed he’d get away with it.’

  ‘Yes, but what about Jane? Jane would’ve seen everything.’

  ‘You might want to think, in retrospect,’ Annie said, ‘that the heavy object Jane threw down might, in th
e end, have saved her life. Now, what were you going to tell me?’

  Jane had said that instinctively she hadn’t liked the face. She hadn’t even known then whose face it was supposed to represent. She’d said that raising up the rounded shard of concrete, she must have had her fingers in its supercilious eyes, below the remains of its cap. Jane had picked up an image of Mithras and taken him with her, away from Cornel. The kind of stupid detail that lodged in your mind and inflated itself into a crazy significance.

  ‘Annie, maybe you could tell me something first. Why were you asking Jane if there was a struggle for the gun between Mostyn and the man you think was Byron? Why didn’t you want it to be… an execution?’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’ Annie thought for a few moments. ‘All right. But not here.’

  80

  Slasher

  SHE CLIMBED INTO Annie’s Audi on the edge of the square. The shops had opened into gold bars of welcome sunlight and – even more welcome – Easter tourists.

  Lol was walking up Church Street from the river, with Jane and Eirion, Merrily felt momentarily disconnected, as if this might be a mercy-dream softening the truth: dead Lol lying across from dead Barry on a mortuary trolley. Jane awakening, stiff and raw, to the memory of a night in the rape suite. Athena White was right.It must not go on much longer, do you hear me?

  Annie parked the Audi at the bottom of Old Barn Lane, half on the grass verge. Her mood was hard to read.

  ‘So you’re saying Savitch is in the clear?’ Merrily said.

  ‘You studied law. Tell me what he’s done wrong.’

  ‘What about Sollers Bull?’

  Annie Howe stared uninterested at conical Cole Hill, straight ahead and looking almost volcanic, wreathed in smoke-ring clouds.

  ‘The last thing certain prominent people want is for Sollers to go down. I’d have to number my father amongst them.’