The Lamp of the Wicked mw-5

by Phil Rickman

  CANON T. H. B. DOBBS,

  DIOCESAN EXORCIST,

  HEREFORD.

  Merrily was unexpectedly impressed by Canon Dobbs’s general diligence and open-mindedness. OK, this hadn’t, unfortunately, extended to women priests – and women exorcists in particular. But he had done his best with what, to him, must have been a perplexingly contemporary kind of haunting.

  The idea of aliens as post-modern fairies was one she’d heard before. True, there was no suggestion of the demonic here, nothing for the Deliverance ministry to combat with traditional means. But who did you go to when you were convinced that something which you couldn’t resist had arrived in the night and taken you away for experimentation?

  Certainly not the police. If she showed this to Frannie Bliss, it would only put question marks over Melanie’s mental state. As for the doctor: bloody Valium, the universal panacea.

  Merrily recalled when Jane, approaching the peak of her New Age phase a year or two ago, had believed she was having nature spirit experiences in the orchards of Ledwardine.

  And she was startled by a pang of nostalgia, realizing that she very much preferred that fey, impressionable kid to the hard- bitten cynic who’d emerged around the approach to her daughter’s seventeenth birthday. She wondered what Eirion thought of the new Jane.

  She went back to the computer to e-mail her thanks to Sophie… and discovered that she couldn’t. The screen had frozen, but in a peculiar foggy way, and when she tried to restart the computer she found it wouldn’t.

  Bugger. Hard disk gone, or what? She’d have to ask Eirion who, she had to admit, was becoming an indispensable extension of this household.

  Meanwhile, she rang the Cathedral gatehouse. ‘Sophie, thanks for doing this.’

  ‘Do we have another case in this particular village?’ Sophie’s voice, which had once seemed severe, now conveyed this inimitable mixture of calm and capability.

  ‘Alien abduction? No, but Dobbs’s subject has since disappeared, and the police are worried about her.’

  ‘And you’ve been consulted?’

  ‘In a roundabout kind of way. Has there been anything on the radio about the discovery of a woman’s body early today, near Ross?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sophie, ‘that.’

  ‘No, this is not her. That’s… another one.’

  Oh well, at least this would delay having to take the sack to Ted. She told Sophie everything that had happened last night up to, but not including, the bin-sack incident, which was purely parish business.

  It was like unloading stuff on your older sister.

  ‘My God… what an appalling night for you,’ Sophie said. ‘Two of them. Two dead bodies.’

  ‘Possibly both victims of the same man.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard about Mr Parry’s fire. I’m so very sorry. He’s a wonderful man – and a good friend to you. Do you really think this person was insane enough to start that fire?’

  ‘Gomer’s in no doubt. And there’s definitely something wrong with Lodge. The bedroom wall was very… yuk. I mean, I can understand why Bliss is convinced Lodge has killed more women.’

  ‘And you say Mr Parry’s out there now, digging for more corpses?’

  ‘With Lol.’ Merrily fumbled a cigarette into her mouth.

  ‘Is this entirely wise of Inspector Bliss?’

  ‘Not in my view,’ Merrily said. ‘But who ever listens to me?’ Jenny Box, she thought. Jenny Box listens.

  17

  Expecting Confession

  MADE SENSE, SEE, Gomer told Lol, as the truck bumped down into the valley, under the big pylons. This place was on the edge of the Forest, and anything could happen in the Forest – full of old secrets never told. Perfect place for a killer to lurk undiscovered for years.

  Unlike Radnor Forest, that area of crowded green hills forty miles west of here where Gomer had grown up, the Dean was the real thing. Trees: oaks, chestnuts, sycamores, conifers. Miles of the buggers, wall-to-wall – twenty-five thousand acres, sure to be. Royal hunting ground in the Middle Ages, therefore operating according to separate rules, its own code.

  ‘What you gotter remember, Lol, boy…’ Gomer’s eyes shrank shrewdly behind his telescopic glasses. ‘What you gotter remember ’bout the Forest is it’s wedged up between these two big rivers, the Wye by yere, and the Severn in the east. And the Severn’s real wide; the other side’s like another country, so you’re lookin’ across at neighbours you likely en’t never gonner talk to the whole of your life.’

  ‘Sounds like West London,’ Lol said.

  ‘Point I’m makin’, boy, if you wanner get the other side of that river, from yereabouts, you gotter drive miles and miles down to the big bridges in South Wales, else your only alternative’s all the way up to the city of Gloucester and struggling through the terrible bloody traffic you gets there. Now… in between Gloucester and South Wales, see, you got the Forest. Like a big island full o’ trees.’

  Trees were already thickening on both sides of the road and the cab of the truck was blue with Gomer’s smoke.

  ‘And if the Forest folk couldn’t easy get out, where do they go but down? Pits, see? Iron mines, it was, way back to Roman times, and coal mines. All closed down and covered over now, mostly, but the land’s still riddled with bloody ole shafts. Mines and secrets, boy, that’s the Forest. Mines and secrets.’

  Despite the cold and the shuddering of the truck, Lol’s body was sagging into sleep. He sat up, shaking himself like a dog. ‘How come you know so much about it, Gomer?’

  ‘Ar, well…’ Gomer’s voice went gruff. ‘My first wife, God rest her, her family comed from Cinderford. Used to have to go over at Christmas, times like that. Never felt accepted, mind. Suspicious devils, her family. Close. Interbred.’

  It was noticeable that Gomer had been talking more in the last five minutes than he had all day. He’d never mentioned his first wife before, not in Lol’s hearing. This was Gomer galvanized, sensing the closeness of a climax.

  Coughed on three: Lynsey, Melanie Pullman and the girl from Monmouth, Rochelle Bowen.

  Rochelle was the daughter of the couple who’d caught up with them when they were excavating the third Efflapure, at a brick cottage outside Pontshill. She was nineteen, a trainee dental nurse, missing for five months. Lol had felt heartsick; seeing in the faces of the parents this withering combination of resignation and cold dread, making it all searingly real. He hoped they weren’t going to be around when Bliss arrived with his prisoner.

  Gomer slowed at a sign pointing to Under Howle – two words, as though the village had no identity separate from the hill. Lol couldn’t see a village out of the truck windows, only close-growing trees with brown, frizzled leaves.

  ‘This actually counts as the Forest, Gomer? So close to Ross?’

  Gomer sucked on his ciggy. ‘This, boy, counts as a place even the Forest folk don’t know. Perfect hidey-hole for the likes of Lodge. Bastard goes out from yere, like them bloody ole raiders from centuries ago… cheatin’, philanderin’… killin’… He coughed. ‘Burnin’. Then crawls back to his lair, all snug.’

  They came down into the village, which looked muddled and haphazard, houses floating in the early dusk like croutons in a brown soup. They passed the hulk of a church, entering a street with – surprisingly – several shops, their lights coming on. Down through a disjointed crossroads, back into the trees.

  And then Lol saw, on his left, the first police car, the police tape and the tiered façade of the garage, like a concrete Lego garage from his childhood, with the pylon rearing behind it. Gomer turned in very slowly and deliberately, truck wheels grinding cinders.

  ‘All snug,’ he said.

  Merrily punched in the numbers of Lol’s phone.

  ‘I’m sorry, the mobile you are calling is—’

  She switched off again. It was so basic, Lol’s phone, that it hadn’t come with an answering service. In fact, he probably hadn’t even taken it with him. She pictured him diggin
g, willing but a little inept, in some muddy field, red-brown stains on the alien sweatshirt – her mind could still never find him without the alien sweatshirt. Once she’d insisted on bringing it home to mend a hole in the shoulder and had ended up sleeping with the faded item under her pillow: how sad was that? You wanted to be adult about these things, wanted to take it slowly, but your emotions operated at a different velocity: feelings on fast-track, playing the old Hazey Jane albums when you were alone in the car – his voice a little higher then, a little smoother; he’d been not much older than Jane at the time, and now nearly twenty years had passed and – Oh God.

  Merrily lit a cigarette. Her hand was shaking. It didn’t seem to take much to make her hands shake nowadays.

  Jane had also talked about the folk-rock singer, Moira Cairns, on whom Eirion had seemed to have developed a crush, although the kid had emphasized in disgust that the singer was old enough to be his mother. Merrily recalled a Moira Cairns album with a sleeve picture of Cairns trailing a guitar along an empty beach. Something special then; how special was she now? Last night, Prof Levin, according to Jane, had thrown an oblique glance at the lovely Moira in her slinky frock and had said they should ‘Let what happens happen.’ Was this Jane winding her up? Jane, who wanted a situation where Lol actually moved into the vicarage with his guitars, which… which was really not possible, at the moment, was it? What would they say about her in the village (whore!), the diocese, the press. And, of course, Uncle Ted…

  Merrily stared at the phone. Uncle bloody Ted.

  No real reason for putting this off any longer. She called him. She called Uncle Ted Clowes and arranged to meet him in the church in ten minutes. She put out the cigarette, got back into her best coat and pulled out the sack full of cash, its origins still uncertain.

  With the sun going right down, the wind getting up, and still no sign of the Hereford coppers arriving with Lodge, Gomer left young Lol Robinson rubbing his hands in the cold, tramped across the cinders and dragged miserable Andy Mumford over to one side, by the garage wall. Time to have this out.

  ‘You said three, right, Andy boy? You reckoned he’d confessed to three.’

  Andy Mumford looked over his shoulder. ‘I never said anything at all, Gomer, you know that.’

  ‘Three, that it? Just the three women?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Behind Mumford, coppers were moving through the dusk, unloading tackle from a blue van.

  ‘Don’t you give me that ole wallop!’ Gomer levelled a finger. He’d known this boy for years. Born to a big family over by Wigmore, and if ole Ma Mumford was yere, she’d have the truth out of the bastard. ‘What about torchin’ a certain plant- hire shed? What do he say about that, boy?’

  Miserable Andy looking frazzled. Coming up to retirement, didn’t need this. Well, too bloody bad! Gomer could feel the old fury coming to the boil. He’d worked all day for nothing much, seen his good friend young Lol Robinson reduced to a limp rag and now in all the excitement of Lodge shooting his mouth off, just the one serious crime gets very conveniently forgotten.

  ‘Not sexy enough – that it, Andy? Not got no spectac’lar headlines in it? Unknown Welsh Border drunk gets ’isself roasted?’

  ‘Look, Gomer,’ Andy said awkwardly, ‘we’ve been cooperating the best we can with Dyfed-Powys on this one, but it calls for a lot of forensic, and that’s not easy to come by after a big fire. I don’t know how much you know about DNA, but it doesn’t survive that kind of blaze. Anyway, proving that someone else other than Nev was involved is not gonner be a simple matter, take it from me.’

  ‘Ole wallop!’ Gomer was ramming his glasses up tight to his eyes. ‘In the ole days, they’d’ve bounced the bastard off the cell walls a few times till he told the truth.’ He was thinking of Wynford Wiley, the Radnor Valley sergeant – never liked the bugger, but he knew how to get the facts out of the lowlife.

  ‘Gomer’ – Andy sounding pained – ‘Lodge has a very smart young lawyer, I’m told. Going about it the old-fashioned way is the best way of not getting a conviction on anything these days, take it from—’

  ‘Ar, we all know what goes on nowadays – three-course dinner and tucked up with a hot-water bottle, all cosy. ’Spect he’d be getting a conjugal bloody visit if he hadn’t done for all his girlfriends.’

  Bad-taste thing to say and, fair play, Gomer was truly sorry for those girls and their families, but there’d been no woman in Nev’s life at the end, and nobody was going to stand up for that boy if Gomer didn’t do it now.

  Headlights blasting through the trees brought Andy Mumford out of his slump.

  ‘They’re here. Gotter leave this now, Gomer.’

  Two cars… three.

  ‘Do one thing for me, Gomer.’

  Gomer kept quiet.

  ‘I’ll admit I warned the boss about hiring you for this,’ Andy said. ‘But he was in a hurry, and I reckon he thought you’d have a bit more of an incentive than most digger-men.’

  Boy had that right.

  ‘But don’t – just don’t… When you see Lodge, don’t say nothing, don’t do nothing. Soon as we nail this psycho on the women, we’ll talk about Nev, I promise. Just you keep in the background, meantime, and dig where you’re told. Don’t do nothing else, you understand me?’

  ‘You knows me, boy.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Andy says grimly.

  The first car’s pulling up just a few yards from Gomer. It’s not a police car. The boy Bliss gets out first. He stands there, hands in his pockets, waiting, as the second car fits itself in behind.

  Three uniform coppers in this one. And Lodge, bent drainage operator and likely the biggest serial killer in these parts since bloody Fred West.

  Gomer fired up a ciggy in the fading light and waited too.

  Stepping warily into the gloom of the vestry, Merrily found that Uncle Ted had already moved the wardrobe into a corner and folded up the card table, and was now brushing the dust from his sleeves, obviously envisaging the gift shop.

  ‘I thought the main counter about here… and perhaps a second display stand under the window?’

  Merrily said, ‘Perhaps if we brick up the window altogether, we could have an even bigger display stand.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ Ted said, ‘because when you add up the cost of extra lighting…’

  He dried up, realizing – lips twisted in annoyance – that his niece, the vicar, was taking the piss. His face went a deep and petulant red. ‘I very much hope,’ he said, ‘that you aren’t going to backtrack on this. We do need the income.’

  Backtrack? She didn’t recall ever agreeing. ‘Well…’ She carefully re-erected the card table in the middle of the small, drab room and placed the black bin sack on it. ‘Maybe we can now afford to postpone the decision for a while.’

  She was still dreading telling him about the money. Obviously, they’d have to put it out that there’d been an anonymous donation, without necessarily revealing how it had arrived. The gossip, anyway, would be considerable.

  Ted frowned. ‘I admit the mobile-phone mast would bring in a regular income, but…’

  ‘You haven’t mentioned that in a while.’

  ‘No, I… to be honest, I’ve been a trifle perturbed by what I’ve been reading about possible health risks. Particularly to, ah, elderly people, it seems. Nothing proven, but it might be wise to, ah…’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Sorry to toss a spanner in the works.’ He stood with his back to the door, hands across his belly, the last man in Ledwardine habitually to wear a Paisley cravat down the front of his Viyella.

  ‘No, that’s… very public-spirited of you, Ted,’ Merrily said. ‘Listen, there’s something I have to tell you. Something’s happened.’

  He peered at her. ‘Why are you all dressed up?’

  ‘Because I’m leaving for Barbados tonight,’ Merrily said. ‘I’ve come into money.’

  She emptied the contents of the bin lin
er on to the table.

  Ted picked up one of the bundles of notes and then moved rapidly to the door and flung on all the lights.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he said.

  Lol saw them bringing Lodge out, couldn’t easily miss him. In direct contrast to the dark blue uniforms on either side, he was wearing orange overalls, probably police-issue while they ran tests on his clothes. His head hung, so you couldn’t see his face, and his hands were cuffed in front of him. He let the two coppers move him around in the greying light, like a bendy doll.

  A mist-blurred, listless moon was skulking in the trees. The wind brushed fallen leaves into heaps against the closed doors of Roddy’s garage, and the police clustered in front. Nobody was doing much talking, but Lol was aware of an excitement he guessed they wouldn’t want to show – you could hear it in the agitated jostling of the leaves and the tense, metallic thrumming in the overhead power lines.

  There were about eight police visible, among them DI Frannie Bliss who Lol had met during the summer – a brief liaison founded on the need to pull Merrily out of a threatening situation. There’d been a degree of self-interest then, but you felt you could trust him, up to a point.