Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain (49 page)

Annie Howe took the chair next to Merrily, opposite the two men. The first lights were coming on in the city below them. You could see the greying steeple of St Peter’s, where the late Frank Collins had been a curate.

Byron shook his head at Annie Howe’s offer of sugar for his coffee, turned to William Lockley.

‘Is there any suggestion that Syd’s death was suspicious?’

Before Lockley could reply, Howe said quickly that nothing had been ruled out, and Byron appraised her, thoughtful.

‘You think somebody might have killed him, Chief Inspector?’

‘We’re still examining the evidence.’

‘Or did he kill himself?’

Merrily said, ‘If he
had
killed himself, would that be a surprise to you, Mr Jones?’

Byron looked at her properly for the first time, and she felt able to study him. Older than she’d imagined. Older than Syd, although Syd had been the first to retire so he actually might be a little younger. He looked like… maybe like a cathedral canon, ascetically lean, with thick white hair. He looked… above all, he looked calm and distinguished.

‘Suicide’s hardly unprecedented among men who served in my former regiment,’ Byron said. ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder is far from fully understood.’

His teeth, unexpectedly, were jagged, with thin black lines down the front ones as if they’d been scored by a pencil. It made him look as if he had more teeth, as if he was smiling when he wasn’t. It made Merrily think of SAS men who were caught and tortured. Teeth and pliers.

She said, ‘Can you think of any good reason why Syd would be particularly stressed?’

‘How long you got?’

‘I was thinking, since leaving the army.’

‘We didn’t see much of one another.’

‘Any particular reason for that?’

‘Mrs… I’m sorry…?’

‘Watkins.’

‘I may be wrong here,’ Byron said, ‘but I think when a clergyman rejoins the army he’s no longer under the authority of the Diocese.’

‘He was a mate, Byron,’ Merrily said.

He turned his blue eyes on her again –
an emptiness – a hole where love and humanity should be
– and she fought against a blink. Instinctively putting a hand to her chest, where a pectoral cross would lie. Nothing; she’d left the vicarage too quickly this morning. She heard Annie Howe’s voice, flat and formal.

‘Mr Jones, perhaps you could tell us how you came to develop what we can only call a pagan sect inside the Special Air Service.’

B
YRON SCOWLED
.

‘Then how would you describe it?’ Annie Howe said.

‘I would call it,’ Byron said, ‘a discipline.’

Of course he would. Merrily was feeling hollow with fatigue, yet nursing a need to smoke this man out.

‘A discipline based on worship of a Roman god?’ she said.

‘I dislike the word worship,’ Byron said. ‘In the army we did not worship our officers.’

Merrily recalled that in the SAS only senior officers were addressed as
sir
. No lack of respect. The Regiment was informal; it was about mutual trust and reliance, practicalities.

‘You saw Mithras as your mate?’

If Byron was surprised that she knew about Mithras, he wasn’t showing it.

‘I would call him a device.’

‘Is it possible you could explain that for us?’

Byron said nothing. William Lockley pushed his chair back.

‘Not as if paganism’s against the law, Byron. We’ve moved on since witch-burning.’

‘In that case, why’s the Hereford Diocese here?’

Neat
.

‘She’s here because neither Annie nor I would know what the hell you were talking about, Byron,’ Lockley said.

‘Oh, I think you would, William. I think you’d have a better idea, to be honest. This is my business. My living. I’m hardly the
first veteran to use what he learned in the Regiment as the basis for a new career. But carry on, Mrs Watson.’

‘Erm… all this started back at the old Stirling Lines in Hereford, I think. When some Roman remains were discovered within the precincts?’

‘Coins, pottery. Not much.’

‘But enough to get you thinking.’

‘A few of us had an interest in military history. We’d be spotting things when we were out and about. Roman roads, Celtic forts. Having a bit of Welsh in the background, I thought I identified with the Celts. But the Celts were a bunch of drunken hooligans compared with the Romans. The Romans had a commitment which even today is unequalled.’

‘Except possibly by you,’ Merrily said. ‘By the Regiment.’

‘If you like.’

‘The last all-male corner of the army.’

Byron leaned back, stretching his legs under the table so that Merrily instinctively moved hers out of the way.

‘You know much about Mithraism, Mrs Watson? Or maybe think you do. Maybe you’re someone who’s looked at it from the Christian perspective, thinks she knows what it represents and misses the whole point.’

‘Mithraism was a soldiers’ religion. You could see parallels.’

‘For a start, I dislike the word religion. But yeah, we were young men. Full of energy. You’d have to be dull not to recognize some of it.’

‘You mean like initiation rites. Out of darkness into light. Through barriers. Skirting the boundaries of death.’

‘Mind games. William knows.’

Lockley said, ‘If I’m getting this right, I suppose the best and most widely known example would be the one where the chaps are taken up in a helicopter, blindfolded and ordered to jump out without a parachute. Not realizing the chopper’s only a few metres above the ground. Is that what you mean?’

‘Mind games. The Romans didn’t have that kind of terminology, but they understood.’

‘The twelve tortures?’ Merrily said.

‘Yeah, we found good parallels there. In physical and mental endurance of hardship. I could give you names of historians and psychologists that we consulted. The aim being to develop a progression of exercises, linked to the Mithraic grades, that would lead to a level of… resilience. Courage, essentially. Attributes of manhood which some people think have been allowed to lapse.’

Lockley was nodding, encouragingly.

‘My students come out of this fundamentally
altered
,’ Byron said. ‘Better men. More successful men, in every respect. If they’ve got the balls to see it through.’

‘And the money,’ Lockley said. ‘Presumably.’

‘We’re not a charity, William. It costs. A lot. But you ask the guys we’ve trained if they think it was worth it.’

‘We? That’s you and Mostyn?’

‘He mainly provides and maintains the hardware.’

‘And has he been initiated?’ Merrily asked.

‘Not one of my words. We don’t even use the term Mithraism to the students. Not until they’re able to understand what it means.’

‘But Mr Mostyn would’ve been your first civilian… whatever the word is – neophyte?’

Byron winced.

‘I’d also like to stress that the students choose how far to take it. Some will drop out.
Most
of them will drop out at some stage. But a small number will cross a threshold and begin to revel in it.’

‘An elite.’

‘I’ve no quarrel with that word. We encourage levels of excellence.’ Byron looked up, narrowing his eyes. ‘Do we need all these lights? It’s not very green, is it? Also a bit like an interrogation. That what this is, William? An interrogation?’

An edge of impatience, now. William Lockley looked at Annie Howe. She stood up, went to the switches on the wall and killed all the lights except for two at the top of the room. The reflections of the conference table vanished from the window and the
early glow of the city came up under the long beach of the evening sky.

‘Thank you,’ Byron said. ‘I find light pollution offensive.’

Annie Howe sat down again, next to Merrily.

‘You seem to be saying this is all pure psychology rather than religion.’

‘Finally sinking in, is it?’ Byron looked pained. ‘I mean, do I look like a fantasist? We analysed Mithraism, took it apart, found out how it worked, then reconstructed it for our purposes. The Romans weren’t hippy-dippy
spiritual
types. They were practical and pragmatic. This is a system for self-development. The only one of us who ever talked about religion was Syd Spicer.’

Merrily said, ‘For confirmation, Syd was a member of the original history club?’

‘Oh, yeah. You could say that.’

‘Along with, erm… Jocko and Greg. And Nasal.’

Annie Howe pushed her chair back, curious. The names would mean nothing to her, but Lockley would know.

‘All dead,’ Merrily said. ‘Like Syd.’

‘What’s your point?’ Byron looked irritated, nothing more. ‘What conclusion could you possibly be drawing from that?’

‘What conclusions was Syd drawing?’

They were all looking at her now, Byron smiling, but not really.

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘You were presumably practising this form of self-development when you were still in the army.’

‘To the extent of our knowledge. We were learning about the use of meditation and visualization to achieve focus.’

‘And it carried on when Syd left.’

‘Sure.’

‘Sometime after you’d
both
left the army and gone your separate ways, Syd possibly had reason to think it had… escalated? And the other guys, Jocko, Greg… and finally Nasal… had all died. Which he thought—’

‘You baffle me, Mrs Watson. One was a drink-driving smash, one a drunken brawl and the third topped himself in the wake of a distressing domestic incident. What’s your point?’

‘I think Syd was suggesting – to you – that the regime they’d been following had made them… reckless… prone to seeking out violent situations.’

Byron’s expression conveyed an element of pity. Merrily struggled on.

‘Maybe he felt they’d let in something they couldn’t control. Nothing gained without sacrifice, and in this case the sacrifice was their humanity.’

Byron looked at Lockley.
How long do I have to suffer this shit?

Merrily looked away and tried again.

‘You never wondered why Syd left the Regiment and immediately threw himself into Christianity?’

‘Syd was religious. He had to think that what we were doing was spiritual, and when he realized it wasn’t he went cold on it.’ Byron smiled. ‘Or did he?’ He sat looking at Merrily. The lines in his lean face were like hieroglyphics in sandstone.

‘Syd was fascinated by all the places where Mithraism overlaps with Christianity. How you could appear to be practising one religion but it was really the other. And nobody would ever know. We used to talk about that.’

‘Oh no.’ Merrily shaking her head, too quickly. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t, eh? You claim to have known him. You never think there were times when his behaviour wasn’t strictly priestlike? I heard he once beat the living shit out of a street dealer who sold his daughter pills.’

‘I—’

Merrily was hit by a memory of what she’d once seen Syd do to a young guy in the Malverns, when they’d needed information in a hurry. His famous evocation of the SAS buzz.
The rush you get… when you convince yourself it’s not only justified but necessary. When you know that a difficult situation can only be resolved by an act of swift, efficient, intense and quite colossal violence
.

‘We were soldiers,’ Byron said. ‘We knew about immediate action. We didn’t do turning the other cheek.’

Annie Howe stood up.

‘You’ll have to excuse me. I’m afraid I’ve been drinking too much coffee today. Ms Watkins?’

Howe looked at the door and back at Merrily.

‘Oh.’ Merrily rose out of a fugged image of Syd Spicer smoking in his church on a summer’s day, knowing that his deity was entirely OK with that. ‘I’ll come with you.’

Byron leaned back, arms hanging down, limp as empty sleeves, so relaxed. The state of his teeth gave him a dark grin.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Mithras. He really lit Syd’s candle.’

‘T
HIS ISN’T WORKING
, is it?’ Howe said. ‘He’s tying you in knots.’

‘Sorry. Tired. Complicated day.’ Merrily backed off towards the top of the stairs. A wreck in sweater and jeans, no make-up, a woman who’d left home too quickly, a long time ago. ‘But I can certainly see why Byron agreed to be interviewed.’

‘
Agreed?
’

Annie Howe moistened her lips, took a long breath, Merrily thinking that, despite the softening effects of early middle-age, they were never going to be friends. Too much rancid history.

‘It’s a set-up,’ Howe said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You’re here to look like a fool, I’m here to witness that. And Jones, quite clearly, is only here because it was suggested to him – presumably by Lockley – that it would be very much in his best interests to get his defence in first.’

‘Defence against what?’

‘With a view to pre-empting any possible police investigation of his activities. Damage limitation. And it’s working, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Well, it…’

Out of Byron’s presence, the flaws in his argument were beginning to show. Here was Fiona:
He told me Sam was making
a terrible mistake in going into the church, that he was throwing away his life and damaging his country
. Was that coming from a man who knew that Syd hadn’t forsaken Mithras?

But what the hell would any of that matter to Howe or Lockley? This wasn’t about theology.

A door opened, and DI Frannie Bliss appeared, cradling a mug of coffee.

Annie Howe didn’t quite look at him.

‘No arrest yet, Francis?’

Bliss said, ‘Good evening, Reverend.’

He looked worse than this morning. A sweat-sheen on his freckled cheeks, feverish eyes.

‘We’re covering all the nightclubs, I suppose?’ Howe said.

‘Young coppers looking faintly ridiculous in clubbing kit. We’re also doorstepping all her so-called mates. As if anybody’s ever grassed Victoria up.’

‘Apart from your friend on the Plascarreg.’

Bliss came out of the doorway like he was about to say something smart, then he shrugged.