She had a cigarette half out of the packet and then pushed it back, in no mood to relax. She called Huw Owen. It took nearly half an hour to update him.
‘I think we can work this out,’ she said. ‘We have enough to work it out.’
‘Lass, go home, it’s dark, it’s cold…’
‘And it’s Good Friday tomorrow, and I’ll be locked into a meditation cycle. You don’t have to do anything. I just need you to listen. Could be selling myself a scenario. I’m just sitting here, no Bible, no Bergen, no cross. Just old jeans and trainers and a coat borrowed from an atheist.’
‘Hardly the time for a crisis of faith, lass.’
‘When would be a good time?’ Merrily coughed. ‘Sorry.’
‘Who’s the adversary?’
‘Does there have to be one?’
‘Did wi’ Spicer.’
Merrily looked around the empty car park as if there might be a shadow with horns and claws prowling the edge of her vision. Knowing that horns and claws wouldn’t scare her half as much as what she’d once seen in the eyes of an old, dying man on a hospital ward.
‘Start with elimination,’ Huw said. ‘Is it Mithras?’
‘A sun god consigned to a cellar by the Romans? I’m not sure he’s not one of the injured parties.’
‘What if she’s right, the Witch of Hardwicke, and the Roman Mithras is an insidious form of Antichrist? The mole. The sleeper inside the Church. What if the sleeper’s been awakened? Going after Spicer in the night? What does he see?’
Merrily stared into the moon.
‘He sees three men standing round his bed. One with blood where his teeth should be, one with shards of glass in his face. One with a rope around his neck and his tongue hanging out.’
Greg and Jocko and Nasal. It had to be.
‘He told you he was oppressed by the presence of someone who was known to him, a flawed person. He was just being careful. I’m guessing he meant three people. His gang. An SAS operational team are very close. Sharing their individual skills. A unit, a single entity. Now, add to that the chemistry of Mithras. According to Byron, it was Syd who got into it first, and Syd was the only survivor – because he went away and threw himself in the opposite direction.’
‘There’s another survivor, Merrily.’
‘Byron? Was he as close as the others? Was Byron ever on a mission with Syd? It’s a four-man team, usually. I think the other guys were – in Mithraic terminology – Syd’s brothers. Now all dead in bad ways, and Syd feels responsible.’
‘Unquietly dead? That’s what you’re saying?’
‘They are when he comes back to the Regiment. Sleeping in his army house under Credenhill. And then… the technicality. Which has to be Mithraism. He tells you about what he calls a strong, negative energy behind the apparitions, manifestations, whatever. These guys were his mates, his brothers, his gang. But one of them killed his own wife, and Syd doesn’t know, since Mithras, if Jocko, Greg and Nasal are at all benign any more.’
‘And the negative energy? The fuel?’
‘All around? Athena White called it a landscape quietly dedicated to war, but it’s also, at various points in its history, been dedicated to the Roman Mithras. I mean… more realistically, I think Syd discovered what Byron was doing. Selling Mithras? What could come of that but serious evil?’
Merrily gave in and lit a cigarette.
‘I think if Mithraism had still been spreading inside the SAS, he would’ve known about it. He’d have been watching and he had contacts – probably with the last chaplain. Whether he knew what Byron’s doing now, before he took the chaplain’s job, I don’t know. But when he was at Credenhill he must’ve had a powerful sense of something, horribly familiar. Amplified.’
‘And senses the old team back together. But not in a good way, eh?’
‘Bad nights, Huw. Racked with guilt, frightened for the future, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it. He thought he did. In the end, he turns, in desperation, to the chapel.’
‘Happen finding it easier because the chapel’s in the Beacons, the old SAS training ground.’
‘And even while he’s there, trying to arm himself, what happens? Back home, that same stormy night, a man gets murdered, in the true Mithraic manner. What kind of night’s sleep would you get after learning about that?’
There was a long, flat, mobile-phone silence.
‘He rings you,’ Merrily said. ‘Yielding a bit more information. If he can only get Nasal and co. out of his dreams – let’s call them dreams – he might feel sane enough to…’
The advice Huw had given him – how sane was that? Denzil Joy had been straightforward compared with this situation.
‘To do what?’ Huw said.
‘Take on Byron Jones, I suppose. Sooner or later he knows he has to take on Byron.’
75
Jane tasted cobweb and dead flies.
Came with the voice. The soft, ashy voice from the yard at the Swan. The mottled accent of a man from the Birmingham area who’d been living round Hereford for a long time.
‘I’m cool,’ Cornel said.
‘And this is all your work, is it? I’m impressed, mate.’
Kenny Mostyn. The famous Kenny Mostyn, of Hardkit. Had he followed them? Jane didn’t see how he could have, which meant he’d probably been nearby all along, and Cornel couldn’t have known that or he wouldn’t have laid down his sleeping bag.
And yet Cornel didn’t sound in any way dismayed. He sounded, if anything, pleased. Up for it. Cocaine. Good old Charlie.
Cornel said, ‘Seen what’s left of your idol, Kenny?’
Kenny sniggered. He’d switched off his flashlight, put it down somewhere. It was only the lamp now on the half-smashed altar.
‘Dust,’ Cornel said. ‘He’s dust.’
‘And that makes me feel gutted, does it?’
Cornel didn’t reply. No indication of either of them moving. Then there was another scornful noise in Kenny’s throat.
‘Know what, Cornel? Yow… are a wanker.’
‘And you are gonna…’ in the pause, you could hear Cornel’s rapid breath, could imagine his long body quivering ‘… gonna regret that, Kenny. Gonna regret a lot of things before too long.’
‘Found the petrol, Cornel.’
Huh?
‘Torch the place, was that it? On your way out?’
‘Fire’s good,’ Cornel said. ‘Fire destroys DNA.’
Another pause, then Kenny’s voice had changed its tone, somehow.
‘What’s that in your hand, mate?’
‘This?’ Cornel’s gleeful indrawn breath was overlaid by a crisp ratcheting sound. ‘What it is, to be exact, Kenny, is a Glock Gen4 Safe Action. Safe… Action. I like that, don’t you? Safe.’
Cornel’s voice all gleaming with excitement, like a kid with a new Xbox, but Jane knew what a Glock was. One of those brand names you didn’t forget. Oh, for God’s sake… She was frozen with the reality of it. This was what he’d had in his hand? What he’d had in his rucksack with the wire-cutters and the lump hammer?
Kenny wasn’t fazed.
‘Where’d that come from, Cornel?’
‘Got it in London weeks ago. Two and a half, cash, with four clips.’
‘Yow was robbed. Had a go on it yet?’
‘Saving it,’ Cornel said. ‘For somebody who told me to come back when my balls had dropped.’
Kenny laughed. It didn’t sound faked. Cornel didn’t join in.
‘You just laugh while you can, Kenny, ’cause your brains are going on the ceiling. How’s that sound? Mate.’
‘Childish.’
‘On your knees, I think.’
Jane stiffened. Kenny’s voice came back merely quizzical.
‘On me knees, to yow?’
‘See, if this was a shotgun, I could blow your head clean off at this range, but a head shot with a handgun’s riskier, so if you stay on your feet I’ll have to go for the body and that could take a bit longer, and a lot of pain. Make sense?’
Oh God. Jane was hugging herself tightly. He was kidding, right?
‘Best for you if you kneel down and close your eyes. Eh? Mate?’