The Lamp of the Wicked mw-5

by Phil Rickman

  ‘That’s because Rose was what she was.’

  ‘His soulmate – if he had a soul.’

  ‘And also found guilty of ten murders,’ Bliss pointed out. ‘And now in prison with a recommendation from the judge that she should never be released. Talk about star-crossed lovers – when you start to ask yourself what the chances are of two people that depraved finding each other within a small area of rural England…’

  ‘Yes.’ The aura of an almost alien abnormality lit the image of Fred and Rose, two people who’d formed into something that lived for physical gratification in its most twisted and degraded forms, mixing other lives at random into the bubbling sexual soup.

  ‘Lynsey might’ve put it about over the years,’ Bliss said, ‘and she might not’ve been on the shortlist for the Mothercare Trophy. But my guess is that when she posed for that picture she wasn’t aware of the true significance. So when she did become aware that she was posing as Rosemary West – well, how would you react?’

  ‘You’re saying he killed her because she found out and was threatening to shop him?’

  ‘Probably. We don’t know. We probably never will know.’

  ‘Who took the picture?’

  ‘Automatic exposure, I should think. There were two SLR cameras around the place, and a camcorder in the car. Lodge liked gadgets, just like Fred did. On the other hand, Roddy was different from Fred. He boasted more. Fred was talkative, but Roddy was loud. Yeh, it’s possible he got somebody else to take the picture – flaunting it a bit.’

  ‘Frannie, why did he go up that pylon?’

  ‘There was nowhere else to go. We’d got men on all the possible exits, he knew that. Maybe he stupidly thought we wouldn’t spot him up there in his orange overalls, and he could wait till we’d gone. He’d been up the pylon before, I reckon – somebody’d cut away the barbed wire they bind around the legs. Maybe he used to go up them as a kid. Like kids do – for a dare.’

  ‘You don’t think he intended to die?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I think he saw himself as invulnerable. Merrily, look, what I wanted to ask you… why do you think he buried all these West cuttings – together with the picture of him and Lynsey as Fred and Rose? If he was suddenly worried about them being found, why didn’t he just set fire to the lot? He was good at fire, if we accept Gomer’s viewpoint.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t get rid of the pictures of women in the bedroom, did he? What do Superintendent Fleming and his pet psychiatrist think?’

  ‘We didn’t exactly get around to discussing it.’

  Merrily shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t know, Frannie. I mean, you’ve established that he did have some kind of West fantasy, although how far he took it none of us can say for certain. As you say, if he wanted to put all that behind him, burning would be a quicker and safer option. Sealing the picture, together with the news cuttings, in the case – making it absolutely clear, by the context, what that picture was meant to convey – seems more of a… an affirmation, I suppose.’

  She found herself thinking of Gomer who, when Minnie had died, had buried both their watches, with new batteries, in her grave.

  ‘Go on,’ Bliss said.

  ‘Like it’s a way of binding them all together. Fred and Rose and Lynsey and Roddy.’

  ‘Binding together how?’

  ‘Sealed up together, underground. I don’t know.’

  ‘You see, he took us back there, leading us to think we were gonna find bodies. And there are no bodies buried there – only this little case, which Gomer found in the end, making Roddy bloody furious. And it was shortly after that that he did a runner.’

  ‘Perhaps that case was more important to him than bodies.’

  ‘He took us back to uncover something and then when we got there he changed his mind. What’s that tell us?’

  ‘Tells us he wasn’t thinking straight, Frannie. Look, I…’ Merrily didn’t see how she could help Bliss any more. From where he was sitting, his future in the police service depended on proving that he’d been right from the beginning about Roddy Lodge. It depended on finding bodies.

  Bliss stood up, put on his jacket. ‘Well, thanks, Merrily. You’re a pal.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything.’ She followed him out into the hall, where the jaded Jesus stood with his lantern.

  At the door, Frannie Bliss turned. ‘Fred and Roddy. Two self-employed contractors, who pride themselves on being methodical, efficient in what they do…’ Under the light, with those freckles, he looked like a schoolboy, and schoolboys would do anything. ‘Somewhere, Merrily, there are bodies.’

  * * *

  Merrily shut the front door, went back into the kitchen, reached automatically for another cigarette, then tossed the packet down and went into the scullery office, where the light was flashing on the answering machine. She pressed play.

  ‘Oh, Merrily, I’m so sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but could you ring me at home? It’s twenty past five. Thank you.’

  Sophie.

  She rang back. ‘Something I’ve forgotten, or something I don’t yet know about?’

  ‘You sound gloomy, Merrily.’

  ‘Just trying to untangle some things, Soph. Sorry.’

  There was a short silence, and then Sophie said, ‘Merrily, I’ve been meaning to ask… Why don’t you and Laurence Robinson come for supper one night?’

  ‘Oh.’ She knew, of course. Nothing had ever been said, but Sophie had known maybe even before Merrily had known. ‘That’s… very kind of you.’

  ‘I don’t mean tonight or even this week. But sometime.’

  This was Sophie reaffirming that it was OK. She was not a priest – as the Bishop’s secretary, she didn’t need to be – but Sophie lived for the Cathedral, and if you knew it was OK with Sophie there seemed no immediately obvious reason why it shouldn’t be OK in the sight of God.

  ‘Thank you,’ Merrily said. ‘Was that what you wanted?’

  ‘Oh no. That would have waited until we met. This is rather more complicated. I understand you’ve been peripherally involved in the police investigation at Underhowle, of which we’ve all been reading.’

  ‘Who told you about that?’ She’d never thought to inform the Bishop; perhaps she ought to have.

  ‘You spoke, I think, on the phone to the Reverend Jerome Banks. Who, in turn, spoke to the Bishop. In connection with the late Mr Lodge.’

  ‘It wasn’t an official approach.’

  ‘He isn’t complaining, Merrily. According to the Bishop, he seemed not ungrateful for your interest. From what I understand, Mr Lodge dead is considered no less of a problem in the parish than was Mr Lodge alive.’

  ‘Mr Lodge wasn’t considered a problem alive. Nobody knew about his hobby.’

  ‘Well, they do now, and it’s put the Reverend Banks into what he perceives as a rather difficult situation. Merrily, we do realize your involvement here had no connection with the Church and that it isn’t your parish, obviously… but the Reverend Banks did have a suggestion to make which the Bishop has asked me to put to you, and that’s what I’m doing.’

  There was a movement at the door. Jane stood there, wiggling her fingers in a resigned hello again kind of way. Merrily smiled and did it back.

  ‘In relation to Mr Lodge,’ Sophie said, ‘I have to ask you… how you would feel about burying him?’

  25

  The Plague Cross

  THE SKYLINE HAD broken into a lushness of wooded hills and an elegant tiered town, the River Wye fronting it like a moat. In the late afternoon, a low, unexpected sun was burning across the dual carriageway, gilding the town and its tall steeple.

  Moira looked enchanted, Lol thought, as though the pattern had been laid out especially for her, the sun’s last curtain call timed for this moment. She wound down her side window.

  ‘Has quite a soft air, actually. That would be the sandstone walls, I’d guess.’

  Lol’s geriatric Astra rattled down the side of a traffic island and then
crossed a long bridge that became more like a causeway, with green parkland beside the river bank on the left, sandstone cliffs hanging over them on the right. There were no suburbs this end; you entered the town almost at its centre, expecting a fortified gateway. Instead, there was a single medieval-style round tower set into the red walls: Victorian Gothic, but it fitted.

  Moira nodded approval. ‘Somebody got this place right.’

  Lol glanced at her. Often, she talked like she was reacting to a sixth sense she no longer questioned. Moira had something of the threshold about her.

  According to Gomer Parry, the way the council had ballsed things up only disabled taxi-drivers could be guaranteed to get parked on the street in Ross. But this was Sunday and Lol found a space close to the top of the hill, before the first shops.

  He locked the car. Moira was waiting for him, leaning on a wall, peering down towards the twisting river, pulling a black woollen wrap around her shoulders. It was that time, just before the street lights came on, when the autumn air was thickening and the church, no more than a couple of streets away, seemed less solid than it had from across the river, the steeple a sepia spectre.

  ‘Where’s he gonnae be, this guy?’

  Lol almost said, Where do you want him to be? This woman seemed to persuade things to happen. When he’d rung the village hall at Underhowle to leave a message for Sam Hall, Sam himself had answered the phone as though he’d been waiting around for Lol’s call. Sure, let’s do this right now. But let’s not do it here. Let’s meet in town. Hour and a half, say?

  ‘He said he’d find us in the churchyard.’ Lol looked towards the steeple, along a narrow, uphill street where everything was Sunday-silent. There was no wind, and the dusk was forming like coppery smoke around them.

  And Moira said, ‘So you’re definitely up for the gig, right?’

  They walked up some steps to the churchyard, their footsteps echoing from the buildings of brick and stone on either side.

  ‘So the offer’s still, er…’

  ‘Open, yeah.’ Moira, who persuaded things to happen, took his arm, hugging it to her. ‘What a difference a death makes, eh?’

  Something like a pebble landed in Lol’s gut.

  ‘Directly under your feet,’ Sam Hall said, ‘are hundreds of dead people. Buried in their clothes – no shrouds, no coffins.’

  Sam had found them at the edge of The Prospect, a plateau behind the church with a view of the river and, beyond it, twenty-five miles of darkening countryside rising to the slopes of the Black Mountains on the Welsh border.

  He’d explained that there used to be a bishop’s palace up here, a second home for the bishops of Hereford who, for centuries, had been the biggest landowners hereabouts. Now The Prospect was mainly public space, a high garden sloping down to the sandstone walls and the Royal Hotel.

  Moira had looked around, tossing an end of her wrap over a shoulder. ‘No sign of power lines.’

  ‘Oh, they’re around,’ Sam had said. ‘Come with me. I’d like to show you something.’ Turning away abruptly and setting off back along the path with a seasoned walker’s easy gait, a small knapsack hanging from his shoulder like just another crease in his plaid jacket. They went back into the churchyard under mature trees still heavy with dark foliage, where a straight path led from the church itself down towards the centre of the town.

  Near the end of the path, opposite a shadowy street of houses and offices, was this stone cross on a hexagonal plinth with steps. Now Sam Hall had a foot on the lowest one.

  ‘This is the Plague Cross. In 1637 the Great Plague took out more than three hundred people, putting Ross into quarantine. All the trading with the outside world was done down by the bridge, and they washed the money in the river. Even the church services here were suspended. And the dead…’

  Lol glanced at Moira, who was standing very still, the white streak in her black hair gleaming in the last of the light as she watched Sam climb to the third step and put a hand up to the stem of the cross.

  ‘The dead were buried in pits right here,’ Sam said. ‘At night. Buried, according to a local account, “in their wearing apparel”. The bodies were brought up here on carts, and dumped… while the minister stood here, right where I’m standing now, and gave the last blessings by torchlight. Can you imagine that?’

  Moira said nothing. Lol thought she probably could – in full colour, with agonized suppurating faces and the stench of disease. Suddenly, in the stillness, he saw it all too, was aware of people in a state of exhaustion, beyond despair, beyond pity, beyond both fear of death and expectation of life. The images were so dense and complete that it felt as though Moira was sending them to him.

  This is the same Great Plague that swept through London?’ he asked.

  ‘Only it came to Ross first. Prosperous-looking place, even then, but the streets were thick with filth and packs of rats. Most of the rich folk left town. But the minister stayed, to bless the sick and the dying.’ Sam turned to Moira. ‘You’d have heard of this man, maybe?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Name was the Reverend Price. At the height of the plague, the darkest hour, he had all the townsfolk that could make it to their feet join him in a procession – all walking with this desperate dignity through the town streets at five a.m. chanting a litany, a solemn appeal to the Lord for deliverance.’

  A light came on in one of the houses across the street, making it seem darker in the churchyard.

  ‘And his faith was rewarded. When the sun rose that day, it was said, the plague went on the run.’ Sam Hall stepped down from the cross. ‘And you’re wondering why I’m showing you this, right? Well, see, a plague is how I think of it. The Great Plague of the Twenty-first Century. I have an engraving of this cross as the motif on my notepaper.’

  ‘This new plague is about power lines?’ Lol said.

  ‘The power towers are the enemy we can see.’ Sam stared up into the sepia sky. ‘If we could see all the TV and satellite signals, all the radio waves serving mobile phones, police communications, cab fleets, air networks, the sky would be this kind of poisonous black the whole day long. If we could smell them like exhaust fumes, we’d all choke to death. But it’s a whole lot more subtle than that. They zip unseen and unfelt through our atmosphere and through our bodies and our brains. They are the insidious wind that blows right through us all – through flesh and tissue, through bones.’

  It sounded like a speech he’d made before. Sam was back on the path.

  ‘You’ll notice I came down off of the cross before I said all that. I’m no preacher, just a guy who seethes inside whenever ‘he sees some twelve-year-old kid in the street, calling up her pal on a piece of pink plastic that burns brains.’

  ‘Which is always gonnae be denied,’ Moira murmured.

  ‘Oh, sure. The bigger the investment, the stronger the denial. Like the electricity industry denied the report that came out of Bristol University a couple years ago linking overhead power lines to leukaemia, skin cancer, lung cancer – you name it.’

  ‘A plague on all humanity, huh?’

  ‘Sure. And we’re all of us guilty to some extent, even me. I won permission for a windmill to generate clean power for my place up on Howle Hill. I don’t have a phone, let alone a mobile. But if I want to get on the Web, I’ll still go down the hall, use one of Cody’s community computers. Act of plain hypocrisy, with the guy hell-bent on turning Underhowle into the hot spot to end all hot spots.’

  ‘Hot spots?’ Lol said.

  ‘ “Hot spot” is the term for a dangerous configuration of transmitters, pylons, what-have-you which renders an area… let’s say difficult to reside in. Cody’s computer plant came to the area on account of a development grant and a derelict site going for peanuts, and now they want to… but you know all this.’

  ‘I’m a stranger,’ Moira said. ‘I don’t know any of it.’

  Sam Hall looked hard at her in the dimness. Moira folded her arms in her wrap.


  ‘We have a complex situation,’ Sam said. ‘The small industries which once built up Underhowle into a community with three, four pubs, a bunch of shops and its own school went to the wall long ago. By the mid-nineties, the shops had all gone out of business, the school was threatened with closure, and the village wasn’t pretty enough to attract the cottage-hunters from London – specially with these damn pylons like watchtowers around Belsen and Auschwitz.’

  It was almost night now and growing cold. Somewhere at the back of his mind Lol could hear Prof Levin saying, The one thing you, of all people, do not need at this stage is to get in with crazies.

  Biggest disease in Underhowle, when I came back from the States, was apathy,’ Sam Hall said. ‘I didn’t mind. I just wanted a place I could afford and where I’d be left alone to be a crank and a pain-in-the-ass idealist, sustain my fantasy that we could live without the goddam mains services run by fat cats who’d watch us die one by one, to stave off wasting-disease of the wallet.’

  Lol wondered if Sam saw himself as the new Reverend Price, who’d chosen to live and fight in the plague hot spot.

  ‘At first, I was as pleased as anyone,’ Sam said, ‘when, like the recipient of a touch of magic, Underhowle began to undergo a small revival.’

  Two things happened, almost simultaneously, he told them. Two new elements of growth that fed one another, two men with compatible dreams. Fergus Young, a teacher with real vision, took over a dying primary school, down to fourteen pupils. And Chris Cody, this computer whizz, brought in enough employees with young families to fill it up again.

  ‘I like Fergus. He’s evangelical, like me. Gave up a lot for that school – even his marriage, in the end. Hell, I even like Chris. Fergus knows how to inspire kids, he was getting incredible results very quickly, but I guess it was the computer input that revolutionized everything.’

  ‘They provided computers for the school?’ Lol recalled the Efflapure owner, Mike Sandford, telling him about the children’s computers they were manufacturing – for four-year-olds, three-year-olds, two… younger.