Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

‘Ah, Watkins, so much for you to dwell upon. That dark seam of masculine aggression, the spinal fluid of the Church. What might it represent? This insidious flaw in the very foundations of your poorly fabricated faith.’

‘I’m not talking about the Church, I’m talking about an individual practising a religion created in the days when he’d be expected to stroll through a village, torching dwellings and hacking the limbs off babies. Where would that level of aggression take him now? What kind of training would he need to control it?’

Down in the bowels of The Glades, a gong was banged.

‘Heavens,’ Miss White said. ‘Lunchtime already?’

Before the lift doors opened on the ground floor, she said, ‘Radical corruption of a religion… there’s always fall-out. It’s corrosive. A maxim worth remembering is if the worse can happen, the worst will.’

In the gilded opulence of Brinsop Church, they confronted the early-medieval sandstone tympanum. The mounted St George with his Roman soldier’s skirt, thrusting his spear between the dragon’s jaws.

‘More like a big snake than most dragons.’ Merrily stepped back. ‘But no way is it a bull.’

‘No, but…’ Lol pointed, with his good hand, to the frieze at the top of the slab ‘… that looks like a bull, doesn’t it?’ He bent, feeling the sandstone with both hands. ‘And these are definitely lions. Another of Athena’s degrees of Mithraism? Also the crow, raven…?’

‘Yes.’ There was also astrological symbolism here and there in the fabric of the church. ‘Are we suggesting there’s an element of Mithras embedded in this landscape?’

‘Maybe literally. It could be simply that the early-medieval artisans who made this slab copied images from Roman artwork that they’d found in the ground – in the remains of Magnis. Must’ve been quite a lot left in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.’

That made sense. Unfortunately, what also made sense was that if you wanted an aspect of Mithras acceptable to the Church, you might look no further than St George.

That was the trouble with churches. Full of Green Men and Sheela-na-gigs and all the wall-eyed mutants in the pagan directory. And now maybe a killer in saint’s armour.

Merrily watched Lol’s gaze panning slowly around the stained-glass light show. George was everywhere, even though much of it was down to Sir Ninian Comper working as recently as the 1920s. A window in memory of the ornithologist Herbert Astley, of Brinsop Court, had been signed by Comper with his emblem.

‘A strawberry plant,’ Lol said. ‘How prescient of him.’

‘Huh?’

‘Polytunnels?’

‘Oh… right.’

How much more of this? Merrily sat down in a chair at the end of the back row, feeling as though she’d been mugged. Fragments of faith scattered like credit cards in the gutter.

Early afternoon, Cornel found a slot for the Porsche on Corn Square in Leominster, and Jane followed him down the street and across to the Blue Note cafe bar. All period jazz and blues posters. Cellar-club darkness all day long, except it wasn’t in a cellar.

The wood where they’d parked was no more than four miles from the town and they’d come most of the way in silence, just one word stopping Jane from walking off to the bus station and never looking back.

The word was Savitch.

‘I thought everybody loved him in these parts.’ Cornel sugared his coffee. ‘Thought he was the village’s salvation. Brought the dump alive. Fairy godfather.’

‘Grim reaper’s closer.’

‘But then, I also thought you fancied me a little bit,’ Cornel said.

‘I have a boyfriend.’

Who, in a couple of hours, would be waiting for her in Hereford, under the clock in High Town. Actually, the last time she’d been in the Blue Note was with Eirion and they’d sat under a vintage Blind Lemon Jefferson poster, killing themselves laughing making up tasteless names for damaged old British blues singers, like Quadriplegic Cyril Hewlett and Morbidly-obese Dilwyn Lloyd-Williams. It was like a different lifetime, when she was young and free, and now she was thinking she might never get back to that.

‘I find it quite distressing, actually,’ Cornel said, ‘that you actually thought I might be planning to rape you.’

‘You were trying to take me upstairs the other night!’

‘Jane, I was legless… and you played along. We all thought you were up for it. Anybody would. They were taking bets on it, for-’

‘ Bets? ’

‘Men out on a jolly tend to get childish.’

‘Cockfighting’s a jolly, is it?’

‘There was no cockfight that night. And anyway, if you don’t enjoy a good cockfight you’re hardly going to be up for the rest of it.’

‘The rest of what?’

‘Don’t totally trust you yet, Jane. Would you really expect me to?’

Even though Cornel’s face looked grey and creased in the dimness, she realized for the first time that he actually wasn’t that much older than her. Maybe twenty-four? She felt a rush of determination. For some reason he was no longer a supporter of Savitch, and she needed to roll with that. She brought her coffee cup to her lips, then put it down again.

‘OK, I told you a bunch of lies. My grandad… I lied about that. My grandads, one lives abroad, I don’t hear from the other. Neither of them breed gamecocks, far as I know. I got all that from a mate I took the cock to and he told me how he thought it had died. I hate cruelty, OK?’

He sat looking at her with… not respect, obviously, but he was probably more comfortable with this admission. In Cornel’s world, women would always have to be a bit shocked at what men did.

Jane picked up the coffee cup again, took a long, slow sip, considering the evidence: he was no longer staying either at Savitch’s place or the Swan. No longer hanging out with his mates – maybe they’d gone back to London. But he’d stayed. On his own. And he wasn’t happy. Look at the mindless way he’d been driving, like he didn’t care if he crashed. He peered at her in the gloom.

‘So you think I’m going to tell you about the cockfights. And help you tie Ward Savitch into it.’

‘Somebody’s got to stop him, before he buys up the entire village.’

‘And you’d expose him how? Being as how Savitch is ring-fenced and lawyered to the gills.’

‘My boyfriend,’ Jane said. ‘He’s a journalist?’

‘Is he really.’

‘He can get the story out. All we need to know is where it’s happening, where he’s doing it.’

Cornel had started to laugh.

‘You don’t know me,’ Jane said. ‘I can do this.’

‘And you think I’m going to tell you what I know?’

‘You don’t have to be implicated. We don’t have to name you.’

A silence. Holding her hands together under the table.

‘Which paper’s your boyfriend work for, then?’

‘He freelances for the Sunday Times. You might’ve seen his name. Eirion Lewis?’

She was on safe ground here. A big fat paper, and nobody ever remembered reporters’ names, only columnists.

‘So what’s in it for me?’ Cornel said.

She didn’t know what to say.

‘Jane, you just don’t know who you’re messing with, do you? You just don’t fuck with these guys for the sake of a few bloody chickens and some flea-riddled badgers.’

‘Badgers?’

Jane stared at him.

‘Badgers are vermin,’ Cornel said. ‘They cause TB in cattle.’

‘That’s… debatable. You’re saying they go after badgers as well? With dogs? Where you dig out the badgers and set dogs on them, and the dogs and the badgers both get ripped to-’

‘Keep your voice down.’