The Secrets of Pain

72
Sham

The smell reached Jane first. Didn’t smell like any church or temple she’d ever been in or imagined. Not herbs, not incense. More like a meat store. The smell of raw meat always made her feel slightly sick now, and she thought about the beautiful dead cockerel with his golden mane.

Cornel shone his torch around for her. It was smaller than it had looked in the picture on his phone. Half the size of a chapel, one of those cold Welsh Nonconformist chapels. Jane could hear echoes of her own hyped-up breathing.

‘Go on,’ Cornel said. ‘Go down.’

‘Hold on.’

The torch opened up a panel of light in front of her. She was in the wide trench down the middle.

‘This is it?’ Carefully, Jane stood up. ‘This is where they hold the cockfights?’

It was like a car workshop, with a pit where the car was ramped up. There was a long rectangular gulley down the middle of the floor. On either side of it, rough ledges or benches like seating areas. Much of this below ground level, sunk into the foundations of the hut. So it was a Nissen hut built over a rectangular pit or a trench, as dug by archaeologists.

Cornel was jumping down the steps, pushing past her and strolling along the trench like he owned the place. Pretty clear now that he’d been snorting coke. Talking faster, moving weirdly. Eirion had done coke, just the once – well, as far as Jane knew. Eirion had said it was like ten minutes of cloud nine and then an hour or so all pumped up before you needed some more.

The knowledge that Cornel was on something… that was actually quite comforting. Like, inasmuch as there was any comfort to be had for a vegetarian woman down here. She called across to him.

‘So it’s happening later… or it’s already happened?’

‘What?’

‘The cockfighting.’

No doubt about that now. It stank of it. Somewhere down here there would be blood, there would be feathers. Jane pulled out her phone, checked the battery – still functioning but getting low, and the signal was down to one blob, which often meant you could manage to make calls but not receive them.

‘What are you doing, Jane?’

‘Pictures.’

A stone plinth jutted from the end wall of concrete blocks. Below the plinth, a rudimentary sink, like a font, but with more of a sense of altar about it. Above the plinth, a kind of stone plaque or tablet, quite big, with figures on it in relief.

‘Wait,’ Cornel said. ‘I’ll give you some better ones in a minute.’

He unslung his big rucksack, unzipped it, started taking things out. It was really cold in here, half in the earth.

Jane curled her hand around the phone in her jacket pocket and moved along the gulley. It was lined with stone. Some of the marks near her feet did look like patches of dried blood.

‘Can you shine the torch down there for a minute?’

Cornel didn’t move. In the ambient light, Jane tried to make out the marks on the stone benches.

‘They’re divided into segments, like individual seats. I suppose the… audience sits up here and, with both ends blocked so the birds can’t escape.’

There were chisel marks, carvings in the surface, figures like you saw in pyramids, only more crudely drawn into the concrete. Probably done before it dried, but chipped now. Some were in circles, like astrological symbols. It was actually pretty interesting. Or it would have been if she’d been here with Eirion rather than…

Jane limped up to the sink. A shallow pool in there. Dipped a finger into it, then held it up and sniffed. Looked like water, smelled of nothing much. There was a flake of something like mud on the edge of the sink; when she flicked it off it made brown liquid scribbles in the pool.

‘Could this actually have been a Roman cockpit?’

Her knowledge of Roman deities was fairly basic. As an archaeologist, she was a one-trick pony: stone circles, henges, Bronze Age burial mounds.

She brought out her phone again.

‘Could you just, like, shine the torch here for just a minute? I want to see if the light’s strong enough.’

Cornel made an impatient noise and came over with his torch, directed the beam at the plinth. Jane saw that one corner had been knocked off, and it was all powdery.

‘It’s concrete! It’s not stone at all.’ She tried to see his face behind the beam. ‘What is this place?’

‘Been rebuilt.’

‘It’s a sham!’

‘Absolutely.’ Cornel bent over her shoulder as she took a shot of the corner with her phone. ‘Thank you.’

‘What are you-’

He’d just lifted the phone out of her hand.

‘I’ve told you I’ll give you some better ones. Stand back, girlie.’

His arm went back, and then there was the sound of something hitting the wall and bouncing off and…

‘That wasn’t my phone, was it?’

‘Probably wouldn’t work down here, anyway.’

‘ What’ve you done? ’

The echo came back at the same time as Cornel’s arm, and then it got lost in a bang and another bang and a splintering crunch, and then Cornel had hold of Jane’s arm and he was dragging her back, and she was shutting both eyes against a rising storm of grit, and the inside of her mouth was like in the yard at the Swan when she’d been choking on the cobweb full of flies.

Cornel pulled her away, screaming, down the aisle, pointing the torch ahead of them into a dust storm.

Jane erupted in coughs, only half aware of the stone tablet with the figures on it beginning to wobble. As she watched, it tilted slowly and began to topple towards them.

‘What’re you doing?’

Cornel was on his feet. He was laughing, the torch in one hand, its beam almost solid with dust, a short-handled lump hammer in the other.

‘Haven’t even started yet,’ he said. ‘Girlie.’

Engine noise.

‘Where are you?’

Lol shouting, the way you couldn’t help doing when the voice at the other end was faint and kept cutting out.

He was on the phone in Barry’s office, standing up. He heard Danny telling Gomer to slow down, and then Gomer’s voice saying they didn’t want to lose the bugger.

‘Who?’

‘-ostyn. Kenny Mostyn.’

Danny did some explaining. Lol kind of got the gist. He saw Barry in the doorway, standing very still, the way only Barry did.

‘Danny,’ Lol said, ‘listen to me. It’s not possible you’ve got Jane with you?’

No, it wasn’t.

Lol could’ve wept. When he came off the phone, Barry waved him to the swivel chair.

‘Slowly,’ he said.

‘Gomer and Danny,’ Lol said, ‘are in Gomer’s Jeep. They’re following Kenny Mostyn because they think he’s going to a cockfight.’

‘Where?’

‘Danny thinks they’re probably heading for the Stretton Sugwas route towards Hereford, but obviously he can’t be sure. Lots of tracks and old farm buildings.’

‘Let me get this right,’ Barry said. ‘The rock ’n’ roll farmer and a man well into his seventies…’

‘Why they think there’s a cockfight on and this Mostyn’s on his way to it, I don’t know. I suggested that when he stopped, they should just drive past and then call me back. Don’t go up any tracks.’

‘Good advice, Laurence.’

‘But then, this is Gomer,’ Lol said. ‘Like there aren’t enough problems with Jane missing.’

Cornel had his back to Jane now, fiddling with something. She heard the familiar repeat clicking of a stubborn cigarette lighter.

‘He wasn’t my mate after all,’ Cornel said.

He stepped away from the altar, where two curling flames were sending shadows coiling over the walls and up to the curved ceiling.

Two small bowl-shaped lamps – like twin miniature men’s urinals – were sitting on the edge of the altar

Jane backed away. There was still dust in the air,

‘Cosy, eh?’

‘You took my phone.’

‘In this world, girlie, you have to take what you want. Kenny taught me that. Kenny, my mate. Take it when you want it, where you want it. That’s what Kenny said, my mate. Taking pictures of me holding up the dead cock in the ring. My mate. Where do you think those pictures ended up?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know.’ Cornel’s face was fingered by shadows. ‘Well, you know I’m not sure about that. You know what I think? I think I haven’t actually got any mates.’ He threw something to the concrete. A bundle of something soft. ‘Least of all you, girlie. You were never my mate. You’re a slippery, duplicitous little slag.’

‘Look, I don’t know what you’re-’ Jane steadied her voice. ‘I’m not your mate, but I’ve got nothing… If you just give me the torch and the phone, I can take some pictures, and then, like, if you just give me a day or so to expose the cockfight situ-’

‘You stupidlittlefuckingbitch!’ A bright sprinkle of spit in the thin lamplight as his body arched at her. ‘There was never any cockfighting here! Never! You got that?’