The Secrets of Pain

74
Sleeper

As they drove up towards the Brecon road, the clouds had fled. The still-wintry moonlight was spread like sour cream on the fields where the man who slaughtered the Bull might have gone running, his head floating inside the feral fury of his haoma high.

Try explaining that to the Crown Prosecution Service, Annie Howe had said.

‘Even if Sollers had no hand in the killing, if he was there he did nothing to stop it. Then into his car and off to his restaurant to fix himself an alibi.’

‘What was he like when he arrived at the restaurant?’

‘Stagg talked to the staff. They were agreed that Sollers was in one of his reorganizing moods. Calling the team together – we should do this, we need to do that. Busy, busy.’

‘Hyper. That figures.’

‘Then, after a suitable period of time, he comes back and, according to his statement, hears the cattle making a noise in the sheds, walks up with his shotgun and discovers the carnage.’

‘Shotgun?’

‘Common enough reaction for a farmer at night. Especially in an area portrayed by Countryside Defiance as the badlands. Expect the worst. Be ready. Don’t expect any help from the police.’

‘How did it all go sour?’

Merrily sank back against the headrest, thinking of Arthur Baxter and his smallholding. The good life, eh? Where did all that go? The Baxes, in their shapeless home-made sweaters replaced by the Mostyns in killer camouflage.

‘And where’s Mansel’s murderer now?’

‘Conceivably in some London nightclub or the theatre,’ Annie said. We’d need a list of Jones’s clients, present and past. It’ll take work, liaison with the Met, manpower, overtime… money. Even before we try to penetrate the well-protected, lawyer-lined heart of the City.’

‘Will that be so much harder than penetrating the old farming families of Herefordshire?’

The car climbed the last hill to the Brecon road.

‘You know why he explained in detail – Jones – how the candidate came alone and slept in a tent and fasted for a day? You know why he told us all that, instead of delivering his need to know line? That’s just in case this guy really did do it. Killed Mansel.’

‘So Jones could say he was on his own? Nothing to do with me, guv.’

‘You could be in the wrong job.’

‘I thought the entire clergy was in the wrong job as far as you were concerned.’

Annie Howe laughed and drove out onto the Hereford road, put her foot down. Before leaving Oldcastle, she’d rung the hospital. Frannie Bliss had come round for about five seconds.

It was enough.

Annie Howe had smoked one of Merrily’s cigarettes.

The lump of ridged concrete was too heavy, and it was hard for Jane to think how she could smash it down on Cornel if he came for her. But he hadn’t, he’d gone quiet and she’d lugged the slab with her into the gap behind the seating blocks, sinking down there, feeling like a rabbit hiding from a rabid fox.

The space was narrower than she’d expected; maybe Cornel wouldn’t fit in here. She packed herself into it and waited in silence, hearing him moving around and then a double grunt as if he was heaving himself up on something.

She heard a muted thuck, thuck.

Oh Christ, he was barring the doors.

Jane let the slab slide down between her feet, shut her eyes and prayed for help, but when Cornel spoke again his voice was quieter.

‘Wherever you are, girlie… don’t move. If you don’t want to get hurt.’

But there was a kind of anticipation, his voice like the whisper before a performance. Jane said nothing in case he was still just trying to find out where she was. She hunched herself up, back against the curving metal, arms around her knees, the chunk of concrete between her feet. Could see the top of the long concrete bench above her, black against a grey haze. If she stood up, she’d be able to see over it. But if she stood up, Cornel could reach her, get his arms around her.

She shrank into herself, and there was more silence. She could hear him breathing, one long gritty… snort.

Oh God, more coke. Jane grabbed the opportunity to squirm a little further down. Heard Cornel moving around on the concrete bench, breath coming in little spurts now. All pumped up, Superman. Oh please, please, please, please…

A creak from the top end of the building, where the doors were, and Cornel went quiet. Nothing for a while, and then, unmistakably, soft footfalls on the steps.

What?

Jane saw the torchbeam bouncing erratically across the metal roof, and she didn’t think it was Cornel’s.

The torchbeam steadied.

‘Evening, Kenny,’ Cornel said.

Merrily unlocked her car in Gaol Street and sat behind the wheel, discovering that she was no longer tired. Perhaps the relief: Bliss, nothing life-threatening. She called Lol and then Jane. No answer from either. She left messages.

She had a cigarette half out of the packet and then pushed it back, in no mood to relax. She called Huw Owen. It took nearly half an hour to update him.

‘I think we can work this out,’ she said. ‘We have enough to work it out.’

‘Lass, go home, it’s dark, it’s cold…’

‘And it’s Good Friday tomorrow, and I’ll be locked into a meditation cycle. You don’t have to do anything. I just need you to listen. Could be selling myself a scenario. I’m just sitting here, no Bible, no Bergen, no cross. Just old jeans and trainers and a coat borrowed from an atheist.’

‘Hardly the time for a crisis of faith, lass.’

‘When would be a good time?’ Merrily coughed. ‘Sorry.’

‘Who’s the adversary?’

‘Does there have to be one?’

‘Did wi’ Spicer.’

Merrily looked around the empty car park as if there might be a shadow with horns and claws prowling the edge of her vision. Knowing that horns and claws wouldn’t scare her half as much as what she’d once seen in the eyes of an old, dying man on a hospital ward.

‘Start with elimination,’ Huw said. ‘Is it Mithras?’

‘A sun god consigned to a cellar by the Romans? I’m not sure he’s not one of the injured parties.’

‘What if she’s right, the Witch of Hardwicke, and the Roman Mithras is an insidious form of Antichrist? The mole. The sleeper inside the Church. What if the sleeper’s been awakened? Going after Spicer in the night? What does he see?’

Merrily stared into the moon.

‘He sees three men standing round his bed. One with blood where his teeth should be, one with shards of glass in his face. One with a rope around his neck and his tongue hanging out.’

Greg and Jocko and Nasal. It had to be.

‘He told you he was oppressed by the presence of someone who was known to him, a flawed person. He was just being careful. I’m guessing he meant three people. His gang. An SAS operational team are very close. Sharing their individual skills. A unit, a single entity. Now, add to that the chemistry of Mithras. According to Byron, it was Syd who got into it first, and Syd was the only survivor – because he went away and threw himself in the opposite direction.’

‘There’s another survivor, Merrily.’

‘Byron? Was he as close as the others? Was Byron ever on a mission with Syd? It’s a four-man team, usually. I think the other guys were – in Mithraic terminology – Syd’s brothers. Now all dead in bad ways, and Syd feels responsible.’

‘Unquietly dead? That’s what you’re saying?’

‘They are when he comes back to the Regiment. Sleeping in his army house under Credenhill. And then… the technicality. Which has to be Mithraism. He tells you about what he calls a strong, negative energy behind the apparitions, manifestations, whatever. These guys were his mates, his brothers, his gang. But one of them killed his own wife, and Syd doesn’t know, since Mithras, if Jocko, Greg and Nasal are at all benign any more.’

‘And the negative energy? The fuel?’

‘All around? Athena White called it a landscape quietly dedicated to war, but it’s also, at various points in its history, been dedicated to the Roman Mithras. I mean… more realistically, I think Syd discovered what Byron was doing. Selling Mithras? What could come of that but serious evil?’

Merrily gave in and lit a cigarette.

‘I think if Mithraism had still been spreading inside the SAS, he would’ve known about it. He’d have been watching and he had contacts – probably with the last chaplain. Whether he knew what Byron’s doing now, before he took the chaplain’s job, I don’t know. But when he was at Credenhill he must’ve had a powerful sense of something, horribly familiar. Amplified.’

‘And senses the old team back together. But not in a good way, eh?’

‘Bad nights, Huw. Racked with guilt, frightened for the future, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it. He thought he did. In the end, he turns, in desperation, to the chapel.’

‘Happen finding it easier because the chapel’s in the Beacons, the old SAS training ground.’

‘And even while he’s there, trying to arm himself, what happens? Back home, that same stormy night, a man gets murdered, in the true Mithraic manner. What kind of night’s sleep would you get after learning about that?’

There was a long, flat, mobile-phone silence.

‘He rings you,’ Merrily said. ‘Yielding a bit more information. If he can only get Nasal and co. out of his dreams – let’s call them dreams – he might feel sane enough to…’

The advice Huw had given him – how sane was that? Denzil Joy had been straightforward compared with this situation.

‘To do what?’ Huw said.

‘Take on Byron Jones, I suppose. Sooner or later he knows he has to take on Byron.’