Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

Watched the guy go skidding down the steps, the camera flying up and then toppling into the ring where he saw both cocks going for it.

Couldn’t contain a big caffeine beam as he was pulled to the floor. He rolled away, his back finding the wall.

‘Bliss.’

‘How’s it going, Victoria?’

She came towards him through the crush.

‘On your own, is it?’

‘Do I look thick, Vickie? Wall of coppers halfway to Tesco.’

Victoria sniffed.

‘He’s on his own.’

She turned away, borrowing someone’s cigarette, and then they were on him, half the scum in the cellar, the first boot arriving like a log-splitter in his spine before they started on his face.

Victoria going, ‘Don’t arse about, boys. You don’t wanner get nicked. Just do what you gotter and clean it up.’

The inside of Annie Howe’s Audi was more chaotic than you might have imagined – maps and papers down the side of the passenger seat, a plastic sandwich wrapper on the floor. Merrily watched her driving quite aggressively through the diminishing evening traffic. Perhaps the only detective she’d ever seen in a trench coat, light grey, belted, the collar pulled up against the pale hair.

‘How do you know he’s going to be there?’

‘I had someone ring him, number withheld,’ Howe said, ‘and ask for Julie or somebody – wrong number. Fate’s on my side for once. I thought Mr Bull might have been at Savitch’s dinner, where he would have encountered Mr Jones, and I want to get at him first.’

Sollers Bull, brother of Mansel. Both men born to the county in the fullest sense, Merrily was thinking. Names swelling and flexing with the muscle and sinew of the land.

‘So he’s either on his own or with his girlfriend,’ Howe said.

‘Girlfriend?’

‘The official story is that his wife, Catriona, has picked up the two boys from their boarding school and they’ve all gone to stay with her parents. To keep the kids out of the glare of publicity. But she’s spent an implausible amount of time away lately. It’s either a marriage in meltdown or they’ve come to an understanding.’

Howe’s Audi had left the suburbs behind, and the night-time countryside was gathering them in. The amorphous vastness where the street lights ended. You could go in with a flashlight, but you’d better have a stack of batteries.

‘Sollers Bull,’ Howe said, ‘is not a man who likes to pass up on the fringe benefits of fame.’

‘How does he connect with Jones?’

‘For a start…’ Annie Howe played the washers over the blotched windscreen, applied the wipers. ‘I shouldn’t be doing this at all. As DCI, I’m an executive, an administrator. But tonight there aren’t many detectives unoccupied. Nobody I could trust with this, anyway.’

‘This, presumably, is to do with the murder of his brother.’

‘Oh, yes. I think we’re more or less convinced he didn’t kill his brother. He has a convincing alibi and there’s no DNA match at the crime scene. But… I’ll admit I’m punching at smoke, but there are some questions I’d like to ask him, and I’d like you to hear the answers. You did rather well, in the end, with Jones.’

‘Not from where I was sitting.’

‘You think against the grain,’ Howe said. ‘My grain, anyway.’

‘That sounds like a subtle way of saying I’m a licensed crank.’

Annie Howe didn’t deny it.

‘It may be that Jones has been in touch with Sollers Bull by now, and he knows what we’re moving towards. Or it may be that there’s no link between them at all. I don’t know. We’ll see.’

‘What does Frannie Bliss think?’

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Just that there seems to have been quite a concerted effort to discredit him over this. Sollers Bull and Countryside Defiance? Whoever they are.’

‘Most of the time,’ Howe said quietly, ‘Francis Bliss is his own worst enemy.’

‘He’s had a bad few months. Domestically.’

‘So I understand.’

The Audi was alone now on the Brecon road, where it sliced through invisible Magnis. Night clouds were gliding like flatfish in the aquarium of a big pale sky. The Easter full moon was up there somewhere. Merrily was remembering her first meeting with Annie Howe. The clinical interrogation of Jane in the search for a missing girl. A bad start, getting no better, as she’d conspicuously sided with Bliss through the years of attrition.

Howe took a left towards the Wye. One of those lanes that you never had cause to go down because it didn’t lead anywhere apart from farms. Howe slowed, keeping the headlights dipped. Merrily dragged herself out of drowsiness, peering through the windscreen, following the headlights as they opened up the road, bleaching the grass at the verges. Annie Howe was talking again.

‘… under no obligation to cover up what Jones and Mostyn have been doing, but I intend to take it slowly. If you see any indication that Sollers knows more than he should about unconventional religious practices, I’d be grateful if you kept it to yourself until we’re out of there. And, yes, I am aware that you don’t work for the police.’

‘God tends to take a dim view of murder,’ Merrily said.

If only to see Annie Howe wince. The car slowed. A private-looking sign on a right-hand bend said: Oldcastle.

‘ Was it a castle at one time?’

‘No idea,’ Howe said. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Just wondered how long-established the family was.’

‘Long enough. Even for this area.’

Merrily checked her mobile. She’d left messages for Lol and Jane. Lol said he’d be in the Swan. Jane, presumably, was out with Eirion.

Near the top of a wooded rise, the full moon sprang out between the tall chimneys of the lightless farmhouse. It looked like a shell. A dead house. Merrily thought, who could live, unconcerned, overlooking the yard where a previous owner had been slashed and hacked to death? How long before the stain faded into a historical talking point, a footnote in a tourist guide?

Annie Howe drove down beyond the house, between well-grown oaks.

‘Sollers lives in a converted coach house.’

‘But he inherits Oldcastle?’

‘Seems likely. Doubt he’ll live there, but nobody can see him selling it. More likely turn it into a hotel or some sort of conference centre. Maybe even the official citadel for the increasingly wealthy Countryside Defiance. Their website carries a photograph of him in hunting pink with all the trimmings. And handcuffs.’

‘Huh?’

‘The countryside in manacles – the foxhunting ban and other issues. Sollers Bull lives to hunt.’

A caged bulkhead light came on over the porch as Annie Howe parked in front of a metal gate next to a small car. By the time they got the gate open and reached the porch door, a woman was coming out, wearing a calf-length sheepskin coat, its collar held together over her chin and mouth. Annie Howe stood in silence and watched her.

‘Thank you, Mr Bull,’ the woman said, her back to them now, ‘and I’m sorry to have bothered you. Goodnight.’

As the woman got into the small car and its engine started up, a man appeared in the doorway.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Annie.’

‘I tried to call, Mr Bull,’ Howe said. ‘But you were engaged.’

‘Bewildering times, Annie. The phone only ever stops when I unplug it.’ His voice was pitched up higher than you expected; you could hear it lofted across the fields, over the melee of a hunt. ‘You got something to tell me?’

‘To ask you. If you can spare the time.’

‘Of course. Coffee?’

‘No, thank you, Mr Bull. I suspect we’ve had rather too much of that today.’