The Secrets of Pain

52

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 Volvo, 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.