Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

‘What do they think it might be?’

James didn’t reply.

‘Share means share, James. Two-way street?’

Merrily waited. James sat there for some moments, concrete-jawed. She guessed he often wondered where he’d be now if he hadn’t been dragged out of the army after the sudden death of his father, to pull what remained of the estate together. Not too successfully, as it had turned out. Savitch was the squire now.

She began to lose patience.

‘Maybe I need to consult my boss. Before this goes any further.’

James looked up sharply.

‘Who are we talking about?’

‘The Bishop?’

‘Oh.’ He looked relieved. ‘Dunmore. Well, yes, of course. Absolutely fine. Apparently.’

You could only take that one way. Small county with a long history of cooperation between Church and Military. It felt like the walls were closing in on her with a sinister splintering of old, brittle wattle.

‘Though we’d rather you said nothing to the other chap,’ James said. ‘Owen.’

Merrily let the mugs come down, clunk, on the table. James smiled ruefully, chin sinking into his tie.

‘Complicated times, Mrs Watkins. Even in our own little world. Savitch bidding to buy the Swan, heart of the community?’ He coughed. ‘Apart from the church of course.’

‘No, you were right the first time.’

‘Should talk again.’ James stood up, looking sorrowfully down at the spillage on the table. ‘But I think you understand where we’re coming from, broadly speaking. And, ah, perhaps it is a little late for coffee.’

After James had gone, Jane was still in the parlour, sitting on the sofa. But the TV sound was off, and she was talking into her mobile.

‘Yeah,’ she was saying, ‘I’ll consider it.’

When she came off the phone and didn’t ask who’d been here… well, absence of curiosity was often a sign that Jane had something of her own to conceal. And when it was weighted with a muted fury which couldn’t have been more apparent if the kid had been slashing the sofa…

‘That was Eirion,’ Jane said.

Tossing the phone onto a cushion, as CSI Miami played silently on the TV: shiny, flawless techno-puppets moving in digitized choreography against glass walls and orange skies.

‘How is he?’ Merrily said.

‘Bit bored.’

‘With university?’

‘He isn’t doing anything. Just learning stuff, most of which he isn’t going to need. His fifteenth year of learning. Weird, when you think about it, the whole university thing. Like, your mental energy levels are about as high as they’re ever going to be, and it just gets poured down the system.’

Was that what the rage was about? Some acrimony with Eirion?

‘And then you come out in serious financial debt,’ Jane said. ‘To them. With no guarantee of meaningful work. It’s a scam. Eirion reckons if they can get a stack of foreign students paying an arm and a leg they’re more than happy.’

On the box, a beautiful pathologist with uncovered glossy hair and perfect make-up wielded an electric handsaw, and a dead man’s brainpan was eased away like the top of a soft-boiled egg. Without appearing to notice what was on the screen, Jane switched it off.

‘I might get an early night.’

Merrily sat up in bed. The rain had stopped. No vehicles on the streets, only the occasional flattened notes of footfalls on the cobbles, the claw-patter of a dog on a lead. Townies talked about escaping to the country, but there was no escape out here. Everybody knew where to find you.

Too much had happened today, none of it good, but there was still work to do. Under the bedside lamp, she read Mother Julian’s account of changing skin colours on the dead Christ, half his face coated in dried blood.

Merrily marked the place with a Post-It sticker. There had to be a logical sequence for this meditation and it should be stored in her head. No sitting at the top of the nave with a clipboard. Just a low and steady voice, minimal inflection, not a preacher’s voice. Julian’s voice.

She worked with the book for an hour, until around midnight, applying more Post-Its. Syd hadn’t used them. Pages of his Deliverance handbook had been folded seemingly at random, as if simply to mark his place. The book was uncared-for, as though he’d carried it around in his pockets.

And then thrown it at the wall because he couldn’t find what he needed. You picked it up and you could almost feel the frustration. She’d left it downstairs. With Julian of Norwich, she’d been thinking, there would at least be distance.

Of course, there wasn’t. After six centuries, Mother Julian was up-close and breathing, resisting impulses to look away from the horror because she knew that while she gazed on the cross her soul was safe. Apart from the cross she had no assurance. Interesting.

Merrily stopped work, went to the window and prayed for the capacity to interpret and to understand what had driven Syd Spicer on that final exercise. Then the bedside phone rang.

‘Merrily. Me.’

‘Barry.’

‘You ain’t gone to bed or nothing? Only, I phoned Big Liz. She’ll be happy to talk to you on the understanding it’s off the record.’

‘Wasn’t planning to use it in a sermon, Barry. You, er… haven’t spoken to James Bull-Davies, by any chance?’

‘No. Not for a couple of days, anyway. Look, you’ll need to make it earlyish tomorrow. Liz’s got her first Easter guests arriving after lunch. Start of the season. Can you do nine prompt? And wear the vicar kit – that’ll impress her.’

Merrily dreamed of having to watch a post-mortem on Jesus Christ. Several of them in a gallery overlooking the table: James Bull-Davies, stooped and solemn, William Lockley behind his Lord Kitchener moustache and, in the darkest corner, Syd Spicer with his steady, soft-toy’s gaze.

She kept walking away from the metal table and out of the door, then finding herself walking back into the morgue through a different door. Watching and worrying because the wounds of Jesus Christ, as listed in the New Testament, did not include a circle of black stitches between the eyes and the halo, where the top of his skull had been sewn back on.

When the mobile whined, Bliss was camped in front of the massed ranks of CCTV monitors in the Big Telly room.

‘You talk?’

‘Yeh, give me five minutes.’

Annie Howe said, ‘If it’s not a good time…’

‘Good as any tonight.’

Looked like Rich Ford’s reasoning had been well off-beam. In the aftermath of the carnage, it was unnaturally quiet on the night streets of Hereford. They’d spotted a handful of blokes who roughly fitted the inexact descriptions given by Carly Horne and Joss Singleton but nobody worth more than a mild tug. Bliss signalled to Vaynor to keep tabs and went downstairs and out to the car park and called Annie back.

‘I was gonna give it another half-hour and then stagger off home. What’s your day been like?’

‘We’ve set up a phone line specifically for reporting rural crime – anything suspicious – anything. Which we may live to regret, as we pursue fly-tippers and kids stealing apples. On the positive side, we may actually have a response to the coded appeal for the guy who saw the man covered with blood. And I had to let Stagg go for a while, when this SAS chaplain was found.’

‘Anything in that?’

‘Looked borderline suspicious at first, but it doesn’t seem to be. Nothing much for us to do. They look after their own.’

It was spitting again. Bliss moved under the awning by the door.

‘Where are you?’

‘Home. Thought about staying with Dad, decided that wasn’t a good idea. Ah… the TV I saw, you handled it well.’