The Lamp of the Wicked mw-5

by Phil Rickman

  She glanced at the paper rack. The story hadn’t made the front pages of the tabloids, but she glimpsed the name Fred West in a single-column headline halfway down the Daily Telegraph. She took the paper to the counter and said casually, ‘Why are people so worked up about this man being buried here? He’s local, isn’t he, whatever he’s done.’

  ‘So was Melanie Pullman,’ the fat man explained.

  ‘And how would you feel’ – a fiftyish woman in a yellow PVC jacket detached herself from a carousel of tights – ‘if your sister was lying under some cold field you didn’t even know where, and a man who called himself Satan gets a Christian burial?’ Birmingham accent this time: how would yow feel?

  ‘No way,’ the fat man said. ‘No way. They should get him cremated on the quiet. Do what they like wiv the ashes, long as nobody knows. You got a situation where this place is finally getting on its feet at long last. Do we want connecting wiv a sicko? No way.’

  ‘You only got to look at this female priest.’ The woman was looking at Merrily without recognition. ‘We all know what that’s about. That’s the woman who got herself made exorcist. Making a big thing out of it. Anything to make a name for yourself these days. Publicity mad.’

  Merrily nodded. ‘So I’ve heard.’ She folded up the Telegraph.

  On her way out, she heard the man say, ‘Exorcist? What’s that about, then?’

  ‘Making sure he don’t come back, Richard.’

  ‘Dump him somewhere else, and it ain’t a bloody problem!’

  Laughter. Put him down a cesspit. Shove the fame-hungry bimbo priest in after him. Bitch.

  But these two were both incomers. There had to be some sympathy for Tony Lodge and Cherry among indigenous villagers. Must be people here who’d known Roddy for years, drunk in the pubs with Roddy, been to school with Roddy, played on the hillside with him, nursed him as a baby – this poor kid with no mother in a house full of taciturn men. The poor kid who turned into a murderer. Who tomorrow gets buried – darkly, quietly, before his time.

  You didn’t have to be here long to understand why the undertakers wanted to switch dates.

  Merrily took the newspaper back to the car on the main street of Underhowle: exposed at last in fog-free, rain-free daylight. She’d left the Volvo where the road shuffled uphill by the primary school and the new village hall that had once been a barn. The school was utility Victorian Gothic; she hadn’t even noticed it in the dark when she’d walked up with Bliss and the locals, but now there were lights on inside and the windows were lurid with finger-painting and the severity of the main building was mocked by the yellow panels of a mobile classroom in the yard.

  It was coming up to nine-fifteen. There might just be time, before the meeting with the Development Committee, to check out the church and the Lodge family graves. Lay him to rest before anyone sees. Bury him with dignity, if you must, but essentially with speed, because…

  Oh God – Lol’s gig! It was Lol’s gig tomorrow night. There’d just be time to get home, get changed, get up to Hereford…

  She leaned against the car. Behind the school, the village was crumbling down the hillside, in all the dull multicolours of broken dog biscuits. Close to the centre was the rusty-brown bell tower of the church and the green areas between graves; on the outskirts the blue smoked-glass roof lights of the computer factory fitted into the gap between two small housing estates: one in pink brick, one rendered a drab, sub-Cotswold ochre.

  And bestriding all, like the watchtowers of a concentration camp against the forest and the sky, the lines of pylons.

  One of them a killer. Why should anyone worry about a single stone marking the spot where Roddy’s body lay when you had only to look up to see the massive instrument of his execution, the real Lodge Memorial, sculpted in grey steel?

  It stood defiant, gleeful as a guillotine. But right now nobody else seemed to be looking up. The initial trauma was over and the community was functioning again – happening on the ground in the unforced way it never seemed to in perfect, pickled Ledwardine. Underhowle in motion: vehicles drawing up and moving off, from Land Rovers to a vintage American car with tail fins, people slipping in and out of the few shops with shouts of greeting, hands raised. Soft lights coming on in a unisex hairdressers’ called Head Office.

  Finally getting on its feet. How many ways had she heard that expressed? Prospered more in the past five years than in the previous forty. And they make it all sound so exciting for the future.

  Well, good luck to them. Merrily got into the Volvo, opened out the paper on the passenger seat and found that the story was straightforward and more restrained than she’d expected.

  FRED WEST LINK IN BORDER MURDER INQUIRY

  by Eric Birchall

  Crime Correspondent

  THE SELF-CONFESSED ‘serial killer’ Roderick Lodge, who was electrocuted after climbing a pylon to escape from police, had an obsession with the mass-murderer Fred West, detectives said last night.

  An extensive collection of news cuttings about the West killings has been found hidden at Lodge’s Herefordshire home, along with what West Mercia CID describes as

  ‘substantial evidence that he saw Fred West as a role model’.

  West, 53, hanged himself in his cell in 1995, while awaiting trial for the murder of twelve young women and girls, many of whom were found buried in the cellar and garden of his house at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester – 15 miles from Lodge’s home in the village of Underhowle, near Ross-on-Wye.

  Lodge’s only confirmed victim, Lynsey Davies, a 39-year-old mother of four, was buried under one of the septic tanks he installed over a wide area of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire. But police have not ruled out the possibility that he may have murdered at least two other women.

  ‘Without bodies, we can’t establish how much of this was sick fantasy,’ said Det. Ch. Supt. Luke Fleming, who is leading the inquiry.

  ‘Lodge operated over a very wide area, using heavy plant equipment. We’ve been able to trace many of his recent customers but it’s clear that not all of them were recorded in his accounts, and we’d like to talk to anyone who has employed him in the last five years or so.

  ‘I would stress that this man was a known fantasist, with possible psychiatric problems, and the last thing we want is to create any kind of unnecessary panic.

  ‘Lynsey Davies was Lodge’s girl-friend and it is quite possible that what we are looking at is a one-off domestic murder by an inadequate who liked to identify himself with the most notorious mass murderer of recent years, who happened to have lived and committed his murders in a neighbouring area.’

  Meanwhile, a row has broken out in Underhowle village, where many residents are objecting to Lodge being buried in the local churchyard.

  They say his grave would become ‘a sick tourist

  attraction’, especially if more bodies are unearthed.

  The local rector, the Rev. Jerome Banks, has declined to conduct the funeral service. The Diocese of Hereford said a priest from outside the area would be taking it over.

  Taking it over. Oh yes, in the capable hands of the Deliverance Consultant what could possibly go wrong? Merrily leaned back in the driving seat, wearily closing her eyes and glimpsing Jane at her most sullen at the breakfast table this morning before leaving for school with hardly a word, and Merrily too droopy with insufficient sleep to make a thing of it.

  A tapping on the window made her jerk back, crumpling the Daily Telegraph against the wheel.

  The face sideways at the glass was a long face, with a wide mouth, springy yellow hair.

  Fergus Young, head teacher and chair of the Development Committee.

  Merrily wound down the window.

  ‘Tough night, detective constable?’ Fergus Young said.

  What Merrily noticed first was all the red computers, pushing out everywhere, like the heads of wild poppies. She was wondering where she’d seen one before and then realized.

  ‘Roddy
Lodge’s office. Roddy Lodge had one of these.’

  ‘No surprise in that,’ Fergus Young said in his deep, easy voice. ‘Most households in the village have one now. Not only small children use them but also elderly people who’d never imagined they could operate a computer. And, yes, people like Roddy, I suppose, for the same reason.’

  He showed her into his office, a little friendlier now, his long, bony features more relaxed. When she’d felt forced to re-identify herself, he’d closed up, visibly pondering the earlier deception – why had Bliss had introduced her as a colleague? Fergus didn’t get the joke, and why should he?

  But, OK, if she was already being widely condemned as some self-publicizing clerical bimbo, she was going to sit this one out, very quietly.

  There were two more computers in the headmaster’s high- ceilinged office, another red one and a more conventional model. It was central government’s declared aim, Fergus had told her, to provide one computer for every secondary school student in Britain. The primary kids here had two each, one at school, one at home.

  There was a knock on the door and a boy of about eight stuck his head round it. ‘Would you and your visitor like some coffee, Fergus?’

  ‘Thanks, Barney, I think we probably would. And if you see Chris and Piers Connor-Crewe, send them through, would you, mate?’

  The kid nodded, vanished. Merrily raised an eyebrow. ‘First- name terms?’

  ‘It kind of phased itself in.’ Fergus motioned Merrily to a green leather sofa under the window and settled himself on the arm at the other end. He was wearing jeans and a yellow tracksuit top. ‘Some of them were getting so enthusiastic I realized they were beginning to see us as friends.’

  ‘And is that, erm, good for discipline?’

  Fergus tossed his stallion head. ‘Surprisingly so. After a while you find that most of the actual disciplining of antisocial elements is handled by their peers. They’re inclined to take a harder line with disruptive behaviour than the staff ever would. Disruptive behaviour being anything that gets between them and what they’re trying to achieve.’

  ‘You mean between them and having fun.’

  ‘Well, sure, having fun is how they see it at first. But by the time they get to nine or ten, it’s serious. I mean, we’re not regarded as teachers, we’re advisers… enablers. They want to know something, we’re here to help them. It’s simply a question of awakening that desire to learn, and that usually happens before they start school. If we put a computer into every home as soon as a child can walk, then another child, a bit older, shows the youngster how to operate it. And by the time they’re four, they can’t wait to get here to meet the people they’ve already seen on screen.’

  ‘Blimey,’ Merrily said. ‘How do you afford it?’

  ‘Chris – Chris Cody? – he’s been very good, starting us off. Which, of course, is paying off for him now, in orders from all over the country. Word of mouth so far, and I’ve got a book on the Underhowle experience coming out next year so it’s likely to rocket. I’ve also been on the scrounge. Part of a school- director’s job, nowadays, is to go out and involve the local community, and then the wider community… and also discover where the grants are.’

  ‘It all sounds… Utopian.’ And it did. The school at Ledwardine had just quietly closed because it was too small to survive. There hadn’t been much resistance; Ledwardine had an ageing population, and it was starting to show.

  ‘Look,’ Fergus said, ‘there are problems, of course there are. We’ve got a hell of a social mix here, from families where a book’s something you use to balance the table legs to the offspring of downshifting high-flyers who came here for the air quality. Sometimes I’m beating my head against a wall and saying, “Why the hell did I start all this?” But I have to tell you there are far, far more of those fist-in-the-air moments.’

  His face burned with fervour. It was difficult, in here, not to feel the heat of progress, a community on the turn. Merrily wondered why she hadn’t read about this anywhere – possibly because Underhowle was on the extreme fringe of the circulation areas of most of the local papers, the Hereford Times, the Ross Gazette, The Forester. The way it was moving, it would soon be national press and TV.

  ‘Occasionally,’ Fergus said, ‘we’ll get some sniffy education officer coming over from Hereford, trying to put a wire in the cogs. If you’ve managed it without them, they hate you. But we’ve reached the stage where we don’t need those pygmies. Five years ago, they were ready to close the school down through lack of numbers. Now, if they tried to mess with us, we could go it alone, and they know it. Look there.’ Fergus pointed at a tray full of letters held down by a classical statuette on a plinth. ‘I actually get applications now from people in the cities prepared to move here just to get their kids into this school. I could probably fill it twice over… but I don’t want people like that. I want a proportion of those kids whose own parents can barely read. I want the mix.’

  ‘Except in the graveyard?’ Merrily said. It just slipped out.

  A pause, Fergus frowning.

  Then he grinned. ‘OK.’ He stood up, went over to his desk and switched on the red Cody computer. ‘Take a look at this.’ There was a tap on the door. ‘Yes, come in.’

  It was the kid, Barney, with a tray of coffee things, and two men. Shouldn’t Barney be in class? Maybe the class system had become outdated here.

  ‘Perfectly timed,’ Fergus said. As if they hadn’t met before, he introduced Merrily to Chris Cody, the dark, shaven-headed twenty-something who’d made coffee for them at the village hall. Then he presented a bulky, cheerful-looking older man in a baggy cream suit. ‘And this is Piers – the scholar and gentleman who gave us this.’

  They all turned to look at the computer which, Merrily noticed, had booted up in less than half the time it took hers and Jane’s. Kids liked instant. Fergus zapped an icon. A blue sky shimmered. A word formed out of white cloud, hardening up slowly.

  ARICONIUM

  The screen began to cloud again, around the word. ‘You heard about this, Merrily?’ Fergus asked, and she had the sensation of being drawn into the screen and what it represented, absorbed into this all-pervading enthusiasm.

  ‘Heard a bit about it. It’s a Roman town originally thought to be further down the valley, but new finds apparently have indicated it was actually… here?’

  ‘Bugger-all to see on the ground, unfortunately,’ Piers said, ‘although we think an excavation would be illuminating – and one day, not too far in the future, we’re going to have the money for it. Might persuade the Channel Four Time Team lot to start us off – that’s how we usually work… or Fergus does.’

  ‘The point about Ariconium,’ Fergus said, ‘is that it was as wealthy and successful – as unified – as this area’s ever been.’

  On the screen a picture of Underhowle village had faded up – an overview, seen, presumably, from Howle Hill, with most of the pylons below the eye-line. There was a dull sky, duller than today’s, but it began slowly to lighten and the random scree of Underhowle’s architecture faded into a regular pattern of simpler buildings of stone and wood and a straight road along the valley.

  Merrily said, ‘This is a vision of the future?’

  ‘You’ve got it, m’dear.’ Piers nodded, beaming. He had a football head, a loose-lipped smile. ‘Wealth. Growth.’

  ‘Out of iron in those days,’ Fergus said. ‘The Silures – the local Iron Age Celtic tribe – had it first. You can still see the sites of old iron workings and, of course, the hill forts above here and on Chase Hill above Ross, and into the Forest. Then the Romans crushed the Silures and Ariconium arose on the back of the iron industry, on the main road to Glevum – Gloucester – and Monmouth in the west.’

  ‘Iron was smelted here, big time,’ Piers said. ‘Big business. Plenty of work.’

  Fergus levelled a forefinger at the screen. ‘I want the next generation to identify with that. Not with twentieth-century decay.’

&nb
sp; We’re building this Website to chronicle the project,’ Chris Cody said in his quiet cockney accent. ‘And the school’s actively involved, along wiv the Development Committee’ – he bowed his head to the other two men – ‘in creating a visitor centre in the old Baptist chapel. There’ll be displays of the latest finds, plus reconstructions, models, computer enhancements.’

  A menu had appeared. Fergus clicked on finds, and the screen filled up with a section of what looked like mosaic floor.

  ‘We’re expecting confirmation of a Lottery grant any day now. And then we’ll make a start. Building a tourist industry for the first time. New life, new blood, more jobs. There’s a fantastic surge of energy going through this place which you must have been able to feel.’

  It certainly looked as if it was flowing through Fergus. He hit the mouse with the heel of a hand, bringing up shards of pottery, some coins, then turned to Merrily on the sofa. All three of them standing over her now, defying her to deny the energy.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can see what you’re trying to do. It’s… exciting.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Piers Connor-Crewe said. ‘It’s bloody exciting. However, we had a taste, at the weekend, of a different kind of tourism.’

  Fergus nodded grimly. He clicked on an icon bringing up the Ariconium homepage, clicked again and then the screen went blank. ‘I was about to get to that when you guys arrived.’

  Of course, the point was that getting any kind of tourism here was a coup. Not only was Underhowle not a pretty place but it had the misfortune to be surrounded by places that were: riverside Ross and Symonds Yat, Goodrich with its medieval castle, Weston-under-Penyard with its hilltop Norman church. Underhowle wasn’t in the Wye Valley and it wasn’t, strictly speaking, in the Forest of Dean. There would be people over in Ledwardine who’d suggest Underhowle should be grateful for whatever it could get.

  ‘They’ve been coming down from Gloucester,’ Fergus Young said. ‘Over from Hereford. Up from South Wales, even. Unbelievable. Scores of them. Clogging the lane, parking on all the verges.’