Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain (37 page)

‘When you say the luck of the draw…?’

‘They just pulled the boys from the Killing House. It’s all in the public domain now. There’s this training building they call the Killing House, where we practised how not to shoot the good guys by mistake. Word comes through there’s a job in London, they pick the boys who’ve just completed that aspect of their counter-terrorism training. Driven out of Hereford, down to London in the white Range Rovers.’

‘Frank Collins was one, wasn’t he?’

‘Did the smoke bombs.’

‘Why did Byron think he’d been passed over?’

‘Because maybe he was. I don’t know what happened, I wasn’t there, but he might’ve made some small error of judgement in the Killing House or elsewhere. Situation like that, you can’t afford the smallest mistake. A guy who was closer to him than me, he reckoned Byron was convinced he’d been dropped because they thought he didn’t have the bottle for it. That was how he seemed to have translated it.’

‘I thought you weren’t even selected for the SAS unless your courage—’

‘He’s the kind of guy gets fixations. Even the Regiment can’t alter your personality. Something drove him further into himself and into his training. Personal training. He never stopped. No more social life for Byron. When he got married, we’re thinking, where’d
she
come from?’

‘Syd wasn’t in the embassy operation, was he? Even peripherally?’

‘No, he wasn’t. And, before you ask, most of the embassy boys are still alive.’

‘Can you think why Byron might have wanted to live near Credenhill?’

‘Don’t make much sense to me. He never served there.’

Merrily poured out more spring water.

‘Barry, what are you not telling me?’

‘Blimey, vicar… Look… all right… it would be silly to say no psycho ever got into the Regiment… although selection does weed them out.’

‘You think he’s psychotic?’

‘I’m not qualified to make a mental-health assessment. It’s my understanding – and for Christ’s sake, keep this
totally
to yourself – he was later seen by army psychiatrists.’

‘You know why?’

‘Um… yeah, I do, more or less. Same rules?’

‘Of course.’

‘I wasn’t there when this happened, either, but it was an exercise in the Beacons, where you’re divided into two opposing sides. It’s about fitness and tactics and ingenuity – thinking on your feet. In reality you’re on the same side. You know where it stops. Or you should do.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Nothing. That was the point. Thick fog. Young guy falls some distance down a slope, bangs his head on a rock, dies a week or so later in hospital. Byron was lying in the bracken, watching, when it happened. It was suggested he could’ve warned the boy he was close to the edge. He didn’t.’

‘They were on opposite sides?’

‘For the day. And it would’ve drawn attention to his position.’

‘Byron didn’t know when to stop?’

‘It was… according to what we heard, it was like he’d forgotten you
had
to stop. Couldn’t understand why anybody was even questioning his attitude. I believe there were other occasions when his… common humanity was called into question.’

‘How?’

‘Not going any further down that road. The guys on the end of it, they’re mainly still around. And it wasn’t like he was the only one.’

‘Can you explain that a bit more?’

‘I can’t explain it at all, Merrily.’

‘You said before that even the Regiment couldn’t alter a man’s personality. Something did.’

‘Yeah,’ Barry said. ‘Something did. What it meant, of course, was that nobody in his right mind wanted to be in Byron’s gang any more. Which was causing a bit of upset so, in the end, he had to go. He was given an admin post. And then he went.’

‘Where did Syd come into this?’

‘He didn’t. Syd had gone before it got tense.’

‘Because I’m wondering if this could be a reason for the rift between Syd and Byron. Liz and Fiona both think it was something to do with Syd getting ordained, but they could be wrong.’

‘All I can tell you, Merrily, is Byron wasn’t popular, the last years.’

A wary stillness around him now. Merrily had the feeling that while he’d been talking he’d worked something out. Something he was still unsure about. It was becoming clear that anything she pulled from this was going to have to be worked for. She looked around the bar. James Bull-Davies had come in, with Alison. Amanda Rubens and her partner, Gus. Still no sign of Lol.

‘In view of all this,’ she said, ‘it seems more than a bit odd that Byron should want to come back and live near the new camp at Credenhill.’

‘You asking me if he had a grievance to work out? No way. That don’t happen. More likely it’s just business. If he’s running an adventure centre for SAS-fantasists, nowhere better to put it than near the SAS.’

Merrily shook her head, had a drink of water.

‘He seems to have virtually cleaned out his bank account just buying the land.’

‘Well, it’s paid off if he’s bringing in the punters.’

‘Syd was in this history club that Byron started, right?’

‘Was he?’

‘Do you know any of the others – who might be prepared to talk to me?’

‘No.’

Too quick, too casual.

‘But you must know a bit about the history club, Barry, because it was you who first told me about it.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So you know who was in it – at least some of them.’

Barry took a long resigned breath.

‘I knew them, yeah.’

‘
Knew
them.’

‘Yeah,’ Barry said. ‘
Knew
. You satisfied now?’

T
HE CLOUDS HAD
sunk to the horizon in layers of brown, like the sediment in cough mixture. An early yellow moon was floating free, very close to full. The night was saying,
just do it
.

Lol had driven slowly along what the map had identified as a Roman road, right through the centre of Magnis, where you turned right for Kenchester and then back towards Brinsop Common. He’d reversed the truck tight up against a field gate, the kind of place you’d never leave a vehicle in the daytime, but at least it was out of sight.

Bax was right, you couldn’t see the place from the road, only the recently planted woodland, a black cake of conifers at the top of a slow rise, Credenhill hard behind it like a prison wall.

There was an entrance with a cattle grid but no barrier except, about thirty paces in, a galvanized gate, ordinary farm-issue, closed, with a padlock hanging loose. Nothing to suggest private land.

Except the sign. Quite a modest sign, black on white, mud around the edges.

THE COMPOUND TRAINING CENTRE
TRESPASSERS UNWELCOME

The night that had said
just do it
went quiet.

Lol stood and looked around.

He’d put on his walking boots. He had the mini-Maglite in his
jeans, but there was still enough light to see where you were going, so he left it there. He didn’t have a jacket. His sweatshirt was worn thin; he had to push up the sleeves because he could feel the cold through a hole in one elbow.

He climbed over the gate, but left the track, stepping into a thicket of low spruce. There was a caravan at the side of the track. Derelict, long abandoned, a coating of mould, rags at the windows. Further along, an old cattle trailer, its tyres long gone, was held up on concrete blocks.

A little scared? Maybe. But fear wasn’t the worst of emotions. Fear could be a stimulant, while shame and regret could destroy you. Letting things slide, forgetting what was important.

Lol walked close to the hedge. Couldn’t see far ahead now, and then something splintered under his boot. He patted his pockets in case he’d dropped the torch, but no, it was there. He turned the top to switch it on, shielding the beam with a hand. Something made of grey metal lay between his boots. He bent down. A grey panel, the words
Digital Interface
printed along it.

Part of a CCTV camera, smashed. He looked up and saw a pole from which it might have fallen. He picked up the camera. Metal. Sturdy, professional. Industrial-quality. No need to worry about showing up on a monitor in Byron Jones’s study, then. Lol carried on up the side of the track. Wasn’t going to be stupid about this. He’d go as far the wire fence and just…

‘
Uh…!
’

The pain had come from several places almost simultaneously.

It ripped up through both legs, and Lol stumbled to his knees, then lost his balance, fell over, threw out a hand to push himself up, and it was snatched and stabbed all over.

He tried to roll away, and dragged his hand free and made it to his pocket and the Maglite. Its light showed rusting metal tendrils wound around his lower legs like a manacle of thorns. Oh God, this
was
the fence.

Had been. He looked up and saw double strands of barbed
wire stretched between poles like arched lamp-posts. Between the strands he could see where a hole, man-sized, had been cut. Where he’d walked into the wire cuttings coiled on the ground, brutal metal brambles.

Someone had done this. Someone had been and smashed the CCTV cameras and then taken wire-cutters to the fence. Someone had broken into Jones’s training facility.

Breathing through his teeth, Lol began to unwind the wire, barb by barb, until he could stand up. He stayed there for a while, as though if he moved it would go for him again. Slowly, he pushed his hands down his legs: damp jeans fused to the skin by warm blood and cold dew. His hands hurt: he found three more deep cuts on fingers that wouldn’t be holding down a chord for a while. Danny would be furious.

He found a ragged tear in the wrist. A dark cord of blood unravelling into his palm. As he stepped away from the barbed wire, a severed strand whipped past his eyes and he realised that, without wanting to be, he was now inside Byron Jones’s compound, bleeding all over it.

Lol crouched behind a bush. Everything here seemed to come with spikes and barbs and thorns, and the metal had seemed more alive than the winter-brittle foliage. A filmy moonlight exposed a space surrounded by conifer woodland, like the exercise yard in some old POW camp. Half-cindered, huts around the perimeter, an oil tank on concrete blocks. Close to the centre, a barn-sized building of galvanized metal with no windows. Nearest to him, a Nissen hut, half buried in bushes and brambles.

When a small, tight creak came from the hut, Lol almost threw himself back into the wire.

One of the doors. One of the doors had moved. He sank down again, breath slamming into him like a punch. He waited… must’ve been five minutes. Nothing happened, nobody came out. But he knew the doors were open. Someone had left the doors open.

Out. This is not good. Get out
.

Not that it was going to be easy driving home with this hand. He touched it tentatively with the other one. The blood was coming faster. His palm was full of blood.

Lol felt his wrist, and the flap of skin that came up under his probing thumb was the size of a plectrum. He made a shameful, strangled noise, turned away towards the hole in the wire. Into a hot, white, blinding blaze and the quiet shadowy movement of men all around him in the thorny night.

M
ERRILY WENT DIRECTLY
round to Lol’s, but the lights were out. She fumbled in her bag for the key, went inside. The door to the living room hung open, the Boswell guitar on its stand, the draught sending shivers through the strings. If Lol had gone over to Kinnerton to rehearse with Danny, wouldn’t he have taken the Boswell?

She would have called him on his mobile but – this happened all too often – there it was on the table under the window.

Bugger
. She came out into the usual sensation of being watched – neighbours at their windows just happening to notice the vicar slipping round to her boyfriend’s cottage, her boyfriend’s bed, under cover of darkness. She felt a rush of angry despair, wishing, hardly for the first time, that she was living here with Lol. Wishing she was normal. Thinking about what she might do if she left the Church to choke to death on its own tangled politics.

Walking across the corner of the square to the vicarage, Merrily wondered what she actually
could
do?

Sod all. There was nothing else here for her, just as there’d be nothing for Lol – nothing he could live with – if Savitch was in virtual control of a bijou tourist village. What if they were both to get out? Would he want her to go with him?

Leaving Jane, who wanted to go nowhere else.

When she got home, Jane had gone bed. She evidently did not want to talk any more. Merrily fed Ethel, then went into the
scullery and sat down under the anglepoise lamp and switched on the laptop.

Dead. All dead now
.

Barry could remember three of the other members of the history club. Merrily pulled over the sermon pad and wrote down the names before she forgot them. Mostly nicknames.

Jocko: killed in a car crash near Bristol. He’d been drunk.

Greg: kicked to death in a fight outside a bar in Madrid. He’d been on holiday.

The third one, known as Nasal, Merrily easily found on the Net by Googling
Nasal, SAS, murder
.

Sunday Times
, April 11, 2004.

A former SAS man serving a life sentence for the murder of his girlfriend has been found hanged in his prison cell. Rhys Harran, 43, was said by friends yesterday to have been unable to cope with incarceration. He had been involved in several fights with other inmates of London’s Pentonville prison. Harran, known as ‘Nasal’ because of a sinus abnormality, was jailed two years ago, after being convicted of strangling his long-term girlfriend Cassie Welsh at their home in Fulham. The court heard he had been suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome after service in Western Iraq and had failed to adjust to civilian life. Harran, who left the SAS in 2002, was described by a former colleague last night as ‘a real tiger of a bloke’. His army career included operations in the Falklands, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland.