The Secrets of Pain

53

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?’

‘Can’t tell you noffing about that, mate. That’s a mystery, that is.’

‘One of several, apparently,’ Merrily said.

‘Yeah.’ Bax massaged his whiskers. ‘I had a good long chat with Percy one night. A lot of the old funny baccy getting smoked, and he really opened up. All the other stories come out. The ones he still feels a bit aggrieved over, as a farmer.’

He fell silent.

‘Percy had dealings with Byron Jones?’ Lol asked.

‘Dear oh dear,’ Bax said.

It seemed that Percy and Walter had sold off the family farm and the buildings, for conversion. They were well-off now but still kept bits of ground, a few acres here, a few there. Mostly rented out for stock and grasskeep. But periodically Percy would invest in cattle and sheep again, just to keep his hand in.

At least, he used to, until the night when somebody stole a young bull from his herd of Herefords.

‘Percy’s about to report it to the police when this package appears in the back porch. Brown-paper parcel, ’bout this size…’ Bax opened his hands out, shoebox length. ‘Containing what you might call a considerable sum of money. No note, just the money.’

‘Compensation?’

‘ Good compensation, but no compensation at all, far as Percy was concerned. But what could he do?’

‘I don’t get it,’ Lol said.

‘I fink we talked about the Sass helping themselves to stock?’

‘A bull?’

‘Whatever they do,’ Bax said, ‘it don’t get questioned too hard. Everybody supports them. You get used to their little ways.’

‘Except this probably wasn’t the SAS, was it?’ Lol said.

‘ I wouldn’t fink so, no.’

‘Any idea what happened to the bull?’ Merrily asked.

‘Unlikely to’ve been nicked for breeding purposes.’

‘Mr Baxter, what did you think might have happened to Lol if you hadn’t called the rural crime line?’

Bax leaned forward in his spindly chair, inspecting a burn mark on the tabletop.

‘Two travellers show up one night in a van. This ain’t gossip, this is fact. Be not long after Jones moved in, so they didn’t know who he was. Looking for scrap, you know?’ Bax looked up warily. ‘Bear in mind this never come out, no cops involved. This geezer got systematically done over. While his mate’s still squirming around in the barbed wire. Fair play, they never fingered Jones. Too much to hide, ’spect. But, there you go… no police, no defence lawyers. Done and dusted.’

‘Jones beat up the guy?’

‘Maybe they was used for practice.’ Bax might have smiled. ‘ This is how it’s done, boys.’

‘What boys?’

‘I dunno – whatever boys was on the training course at the time. These courses, they say it’s all a bit unorthodox. Blokes arrive like soldiers, back of a truck, back of a van. Posh blokes, usually. City blokes living the SAS life for a few days. Don’t ask me what that means. Folks make allowances. But the travellers, that was a bit of a sideshow.’

‘This widely known?’

‘Not widely known at all. Had it from a mate of mine in Hereford, scrap dealer who saw the state of them when they was back in business. Bad guys, in general, avoid the area. Don’t know whose place they might be breaking into. Who needs cops, all them rules and paperwork, when you got Mr Jones?’

‘What’s it like up there?’ Merrily asked him. ‘What’s there?’

‘Bit like a golf course. Manufactured landscape, pond size of small lake wiv a rope bridge across. Quite a few sheds. Jones’s new bungalow’s halfway up the hill, wiv a pool. ’Bout four wooden chalets, parking area. But you can tell it’s not your ordinary holiday place. No flowers, and most of the trees are pine and fir, so it’s screened off all year round. Functional.’

‘No women?’

‘Nah. They say Jones is seen around town wiv women, but he don’t bring them back. Look, I’m sorry. You mind if I ask what your interest is here?’

‘It’s the SAS chaplain who died on Credenhill. He was a friend, and… he had some past involvement with Byron. Sorry I can’t be more explicit.’

‘Only I’d rather you didn’t say noffing about me, wiv regard to Jones. The spooky stuff, that’s different. Percy always says he don’t like talking about it, but he loves it really. Some of it he exaggerates, some he don’t.’

Lol said, ‘So those figures in the mist that Percy saw…?’

‘I’m not sure it’s all as easily explained as like, Oh it’s only Mr Jones and his course students. Odd fings happen, don’t they?’

‘Percy says he’s seen… figures,’ Lol said to Merrily. ‘Where the Roman town was. In the river mist. One had a bird’s head.’

‘He ain’t the only one, neither,’ Bax said. ‘But that’s neither here nor there. Less you got a weak heart, they ain’t gonna harm you. But you can get harmed. Which is why I set the cops on you. I’m sorry, squire.’

As they drove away, they could see the afforested hill from end to end, a rambling natural mansion with great wooded halls and conifered corridors and the earthen back-stairs where Syd Spicer had died.

‘Mithraism,’ Lol said, ‘I don’t know anything about that. Do you?’

‘Not much. It was mentioned once at college, by a visiting lecturer. Pagan religion curiously similar to Christianity. Neil Cooper recognized it immediately when I mentioned Byron Jones’s soldiers’ religion. I don’t think there’s ever been a suggestion that Caradog adopted a Roman god to improve his fighting prowess, but it obviously worked for Byron.’

‘He was practising it?’

‘It would answer a few questions. Why he was getting careless with other people’s lives. It might also explain the rift with Syd, who went into Christianity with the wimps and the women.’

Not a man’s religion, Byron Jones had told his wife. Certainly not a soldier’s religion.

‘What do I do with this, Lol?’

‘I keep saying this… perhaps you take it and dump it, in its entirety, on James Bull-Davies.’

‘James is not the most imaginative of men.’

‘Really, really not your problem.’

Merrily turned onto the Brecon Road, past fields scrubbed raw by winter, a landscape seldom noticed. No villages, no church towers, just a road that started on the edge of the city of Hereford and finished in Wales.

‘On the other hand,’ Lol said, more than a bit hesitantly, ‘Hardwicke’s… what… fifteen minutes away?’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘In that direction.’

‘I knew you were going to say that.’

‘If anybody can put a kind of perspective on this…’

‘Dear God. Do we need that kind of perspective?’

‘Of course, she might not be there any more,’ Lol said. ‘She might even be…’

‘We’d’ve heard,’ Merrily said tightly. ‘We’d know.’

‘OK,’ Lol said. ‘I didn’t want to say anything about this. I’m just a dreamy, whimsical songwriter, looking to pull tunes and textures and things out of the air. I don’t know why I went to that place last night. I just did. And it was a bloody awful place.’

Merrily slowed.

‘Awful how?’

‘I’m probably being subjective.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Tell me.’

‘It just… I don’t want to use emotive words, it just sounds like a cliche.’

‘This is no time for songwriter-pride, Lol.’

‘It was like it didn’t want to let me go. Like even the barbed wire was alive and hungry. Yeah, I know.’ Lol put up his hands in defence. ‘I know what that sounds like.’

‘Go on.’

‘So when the lights… when I found out it was only the police, I was so relieved I would’ve confessed to murder just to get the hell out of there.’

Merrily took the next left and turned the Volvo round clumsily in the mouth of the junction.

‘Hardwicke, then.’