Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

‘When?’

‘Soon as it’s light. I’ll make you a bed up. Won’t be silk sheets or owt, mind.’

She followed him across the rough and sodden grass, popping the studs on her waxed coat, not liking to think what kind of damage there might be back home in Ledwardine. Huw stopped and looked back at her.

‘Country life. Like town life, wi’ extra shite.’

‘Don’t like Jane being on her own in the vicarage. I know she’s eighteen, but in my mind she’s ten.’

‘She’s got Robinson just across the street.’ Huw came to a wooden stile, waited, patting Merrily on the shoulder as she drew level. ‘You did bloody well tonight. Wouldn’t’ve worked the same coming from me.’

He balanced his lambing light on one of the stile’s posts and climbed over. She called after him.

‘You’re a bastard, Huw.’

Huw picked up the lamp, and the lamp picked up a razored track leading down towards the stone rectory, a grey boulder with a scree of crumbling outbuildings. Merrily scrambled up on the stile, the wind whipping at her hair. This was nothing – an hour ago she’d’ve been on hands and knees.

‘You didn’t tell me Syd Spicer was on the course.’

After the session was over, she hadn’t gone looking for the man with teddy-bear eyes, she’d waited for him to approach her. But he never had. She hadn’t seen him leave. Old skills.

‘He rang me up. Asking if he could sit in for one day.’

Merrily looked down at him from the top of the stile.

‘When was this?’

‘At the weekend.’

‘He say why?’

‘Not in any detail.’

‘Would I be right in thinking…’ Merrily climbed over and sat down on the step of the stile ‘… that Syd no more expected to see me here than I expected to see him?’

Huw stood gazing out, beyond the rectory, to where the moon had pewtered the hills.

‘I didn’t tell him I’d asked you to come, no. I figured… since you worked with him last year, I figured he’d trust what you had to say.’

‘In relation to what?’

‘Whatever problem he’s got.’

‘Which is…?’

The step was soaked through; Merrily pulled her coat under her bum. This was obviously going to take a while. Across in the rectory, a light blinked on.

‘That’ll be Spicer now,’ Huw said.

‘He’s in your bloody rectory?’

‘He were stopping t’night here anyroad.’

Two lights were on now in the rectory. Merrily folded her arms.

‘You see, what strikes me as odd is that when I was invited down to Syd’s parish in the Malverns, it was because he, basically, did not do this stuff. Had no time for any of it.’

There are leaps I can’t make, he’d said to her.

And Merrily had said, You’re worried by the non-physical.

And he’d said, Samuel Dennis Spicer, Church of England.

Name, rank and number. You could pull out all his teeth and that was the most you’d get from the Rev. Syd Spicer, former sergeant with 22 SAS, the Special Air Service, Hereford’s finest.

The UK’s finest, come to that. Some said the world’s.

Huw sat down at the other end of the step.

‘Remind me about the time you worked with him. Briefly.’

‘Series of road accidents in the Malverns, near his rectory. All in more or less the same place. Survivors saying they’d swerved to avoid a man on a bike.’

‘Who wasn’t there. And Spicer didn’t believe that.’

‘Kept saying he had a problem with paranormal phenomena,’ Merrily said. ‘He wanted me to look into it, do the roadside blessing bit and reassure local people that it was sorted. Which led to-’

‘I know what it led to. Did he believe at the end? When it was over?’

‘Probably not. So if you’re asking whether I’m surprised to see him on a deliverance course, yes, I am.’

Huw said, ‘I were also wondering why he hadn’t gone to you in the first place.’

‘Over what? What did he tell you?’

‘He said – and I quote – an old evil had come back into his life. And he needed to deal with it.’

‘Exhaust. That’s why you set me up to talk about Denzil Joy?’

‘Don’t get me wrong, lass, I think it were a useful exercise for all of ’em. It’s the most explicit case of possible demonic possession I’ve heard of in a while, and I thought you’d tell it well, and you did. None of them buggers is going to forget about Denzil. But whatever it is it’s likely in your manor, and I thought you should know about it. And I thought he should be reminded about you.’

‘Syd isn’t expecting to see me again tonight, is he?’

‘Aye, well… he’ll think you’ve gone. He won’t know your car’s trapped behind a tree.’

‘Huw, you’re a-’

‘Bastard, aye.’

Even the weather played into Huw’s hands.

‘I take it, Merrily, that when that business were on in the Malverns, Spicer wasn’t frightened.’

‘No, he wasn’t.’

‘He is now.’

‘You reckon?’

‘A man who’s served in likely the hardest regiment in the entire history of the British Army.’ Huw stretched out his legs into the dark, greasy grass. ‘Now then, lass, what could possibly scare the shit out of him?’

Bliss had come alone, parking outside a metal gate at the top of the drive, eventually having to climb over because he couldn’t work the bolt in the dark. A spotlight speared him as he hung astride the shivering tubular bar. At the top of the drive, a door had opened. A man stood there. Green gilet, high boots.

‘Police,’ Bliss said.

Feeling like a twat as he came down from the gate, stumbling to his knees. The countryside could always bugger you up when it felt like it. He stumbled towards the bungalow, built of old brick like the big house – an outbuilding, possibly a converted coach house.

‘Mr Bull?’

A nod, maybe.

‘Francis Bliss, Mr Bull. West Mercia CID.’

Bliss pulled off his beanie, held up his ID. The guy in the doorway didn’t look at it.

‘You’re the man who married Chris Symonds’s daughter.’

‘I am, yes.’

Bliss sighed. Maybe they’d met at one of the agonizing county functions Kirsty had dragged him to, some creaking conveyor belt of dinner jackets.

‘Chris is a friend,’ Mr Bull said. ‘I see him often.’

Well, that could hardly be more explicit. A blast of wind caught Bliss as he stowed away his ID. Loose bits of his life getting blown in his face.

‘Mr Bull, can I say that I’m very sorry-’

‘For my loss?’

Bliss said nothing.

‘You can take your routine commiserations, Inspector Bliss, and insert them into your rectum,’ Mr Bull said.

Bliss nodded wearily and followed him into the house.

Grief took many forms, aggression one of the commonest.

Low-energy bulbs laid a mauve wash on the kitchen. It had costly customized fittings and strong new beams of green oak. When a phone started ringing, Sollers Bull unplugged the lead from the wall.

‘Everybody who needs to know knows.’

‘Next few days will be difficult,’ Bliss said.

‘ Days? ’

Sollers Bull stood gazing into wide windows that looked to be triple-glazed. Nothing much to see but the reflection of himself and Bliss and a double-oven Aga in tomato red. Sollers had told Stagg he’d spent the early evening at a staff meeting at his farm shop. It checked out.

‘Chris says you consistently neglected your wife, Inspector,’ Sollers Bull told Bliss’s reflection. ‘Neglect seems to be your force’s forte.’

‘Where’s your wife, Mr Bull?’

‘Not your concern.’

‘Well, you know, actually it is,’ Bliss said quietly. ‘With an extremely violent killer on the loose.’