Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

Had to be done right.

Getting off the school bus, she’d run into Gomer outside the Eight Till Late. He’d looked embarrassed. Admitting, as they walked down Church Street together, that he was getting nowhere. Talked to everybody he could think of, either side of the border, and, while some could remember when there were illegal cockfights, nobody knew of any happening hereabouts at present. Gamecocks were still being bred, but for collectors, poultry buffs, not for fights.

En’t gived up, mind, Gomer had said. Jane didn’t think he was optimistic. But, look, that was OK. That was actually good. It meant local people weren’t involved. Now the finger of suspicion could only be pointing one way.

She knew a lot about cockfighting, now. Not something she’d ever wanted to study, but this was not a responsibility she could walk away from. She’d sat down in her apartment and spent nearly two hours on the Internet, downloading everything except the cockfight videos. Fights had been staged for over two thousand years and were still happening, mainly in the Far East, South America. Less publicly in the UK, where they’d first been introduced by Roman invaders.

Bastards. She couldn’t stop thinking about the bird with the lion’s mane.

But mainly she couldn’t stop replaying what she’d heard last night, outside the kitchen door.

James Bull-Davies.

Complicated times, Mrs Watkins… what, with Savitch bidding to buy the Swan…

Dear God, the final insult. The oak-panelled Jacobean core of the community. How many people knew? Mum had obviously known already and taken a decision not to tell the kid. Hey, let’s not have Jane doing something stupid. But she wasn’t a bloody kid any more and whatever she did wouldn’t be stupid.

Jane concentrated on her breathing, taking the air down to the solar-plexus chakra.

Preparation.

Curved bars of blackening cloud made the western sky look like an old ribcage as Bliss turned, like he had hundreds of times, along Chris Symonds’s farm track.

In a glow of excitement, once upon a time, at the thought of seeing Kirsty, in tight black jeans and a straining top, waiting for him where the track forked by an ancient oak tree with a trunk wider than his car.

A dirt track in those days. Now it was tarmac. The real thing, not one of your itinerant-gang jobs that cracked up in weeks; this one was in better nick than the county roads. Possibly even quietly laid by a few of the same fellers, Bliss had heard. The word was that Chris was putting himself up for the council next time.

He turned left at the fork, driving slowly without lights, following the track leading to the stone outbuildings converted into classy stone holiday cottages, one of them currently occupied by Kirsty and the kids. Bliss slowed, did a tight three-point turn and parked on the grass verge a good distance away. Didn’t want her looking out and recognizing his Honda and not answering the door.

Just as well. When he got out of the car, not fully closing the door to avoid the noise, he saw another vehicle, a light-coloured Discovery, half hidden on the edge of the pair of fat leylandii which separated the holiday cottages from the farmhouse and threw their front doors into evening shade.

No sign of Kirsty’s Ka. Chris Symonds drove a Discovery; maybe she’d borrowed it to cart stuff around. Worst scenario would be that Chris and Pat were in there, in which case a mere exchange of bitter words would be the least he’d get away with.

Bliss was about four paces from the door when there was muffled click and then he was standing like a social-club compere in overlapping circles of garish lemon light.

He backed off sharpish. Who the hell had installed security spots?

A shadow crossed the upstairs window and he heard a muffled biffing – the heel of a hand repeatedly hitting a jammed window frame. And then, as it gave way, a voice from up there.

‘… bloody thing. See, told you it was nobody. Not even the paparazzi.’

…trailed by a sound he hadn’t heard in a good long while: Kirsty’s little shocked-but-thrilled, plumped-out giggle.

Bliss crouched in the damp grass at the edge of the track until the security lights reached the end of their cycle and went out, and he could see the figure in the window, out of shadow up there.

The shock and the pain came sudden and vicious, like a knife-thrust in some clammy alleyway, as the setting sun showed him that the parts of Sollers Bull visible above the window frame were unclothed.

It took a while to come out – it always did around here. The two brothers had been introduced by Bax as Percy and Walter. They lived in a small red-brick cottage, nineteenth-century, at the end of a row of modern houses and bungalows near Kenchester. They travelled in the slow lane. The silent Walter, who was probably over ninety, wore an apron and made the tea. Percy had never heard of anybody called Lol before.

‘Short for Laurence,’ Lol said.

He’d crawled up from Brinsop in the truck, behind a man on a bike.

‘Well, well,’ Percy said.

Walter handed Lol tea in a china cup. A low-wattage bulb, its brown flex hanging over a blackened beam, had probably been on all day. Coal was burning in an iron range. There was a TV set that had to be fifty years old and probably didn’t work any more. The room smelled of… well, it smelled of old blokes.

‘Lol writes songs,’ Bax told Percy.

‘Too many bloody songs, now. All sounds the same.’

Percy was a few years younger than Walter. His hair was white and curly.

‘No, proper songs,’ Bax said. ‘Folk songs. Songs about life. And songs about things what goes on…’ he winked at Lol ‘… that people don’t talk about much no more.’

‘Talk? They wanted me to give a talk, look,’ Percy said. ‘Women’s Institute. Some woman comes round, asks me to give a talk.’

‘That was my missus, Percy.’

‘Wasn’t gonner talk to a load o’ women. They spreads stuff all over, women does. And they gets it wrong.’

‘Always a problem with women,’ Bax admitted.

‘En’t I don’t like to talk.’ Percy nodded at Walter. ‘ He don’t like to talk much, never has, look. I likes to talk, long as folks gets it right, what I tells ’em. Half the buggers, they don’t listen proper, n’more.’

Bax nodded.

‘Talks back, don’t listen,’ Percy said.

After a while he seemed to notice Lol, sitting on a stool by the door. Lol was listening. Percy nodded approvingly.

‘Tell Lol what you seen in the long field that night,’ Bax said.

In the feeble light, the already muted colours in the room had died back into a sombre sepia. Percy did some thinking.

‘Wouldn’t ’appen to ’ave any more o’ that scenty baccy, would you, boy?’ he said eventually.

Halfway down Church Street, Jane began to feel cold and a little stupid in the sawn-off white hoodie that she’d worn in the Swan the night she’d met Cornel. But he’d been pissed then and she needed him to recognize her.

Ready for this now. Knew exactly how she’d handle him. Sure he’d come out of the Ox at some point. Maybe he was here with his cockfighting mates. Eventually she went in and had a glance around.

Mistake.

‘Watkins!’

Slobby Dean Wall at one of the gaming machines.

‘Don’t get excited, Wall,’ Jane said calmly. ‘I’m only looking for somebody.’

‘Yeah.’ Wall looked at her bare bits, sucking in his breath. ‘It looks like you bloody are, too.’

Jane took a couple of steps inside. Stink of stale beer. Only the Ox could sell beer that smelled stale when it was fresh out of the pump. Men’s eyes were flickering her way from all corners of the cramped bar with its tobacco beams and stained flags. A barmaid was clearing glasses from a table. Six pint glasses in two hands, fingers down in the dregs, clinking. She looked up, and it was Lori Jenkin, who worked part-time in the Eight Till Late. Jane leaned over, lowered her voice.