by Phil Rickman
Merrily heard the muffled clunk of the door latch and saw figures moving in the shadows. Gomer. And Frannie Bliss. Nobody else.
‘My feeling is that Melanie was good for Roddy. The evidence is that they had a close relationship. She was probably his first real girlfriend. There was nobody else in Roddy’s life at that time – as far as I can tell.’
‘It’s true.’ Cherry Lodge was leaning over the prayer-book shelf. Her face was flushed. ‘He was never any kind of a ladies’ man. He wasn’t smooth and he wasn’t that bright, if you want the truth. Never a girlfriend when he was young – Tony’ll tell you. Tell them.’
Tony grunted. ‘Embarrassed him, women did, when he was at home. Afterwards, he embarrassed us, all the tales. And the sports car. Nobody in our family ever had a sports car.’
‘What changed?’ Merrily said. ‘What made him… in a woman we call it promiscuous, but in a man it’s “a bit of a lad”. I mean, when he was with Melanie he wasn’t like that, was he?’
‘She was a nice girl,’ Tony said. ‘Quiet. Nice-looking – I never knew what she saw in him.’
‘A soulmate, perhaps?’
‘Then why did he… ?’ He turned his face away.
Merrily said quickly, ‘Sam Hall found out about Melanie and tried to help her – with some success, I think. And Melanie, in turn, tried to help Roddy. Maybe she encouraged him to go to the same alternative practitioner who’d given her a device to wear around her neck to ward off electromagnetism. But Roddy didn’t want to know. I wonder why not?’
Frannie Bliss slid into a pew halfway down the nave, where the shadows began. ‘I think we both know that, don’t we, Merrily?’
She nodded as the other heads turned. ‘What’s happening, Frannie?’
‘Nothing special,’ Bliss said coolly. ‘Thought I’d see how things’ve changed in the so-called Church of England before I made any kind of move.’
Merrily saw Piers Connor-Crewe bounce a disdainful glance from Bliss to her. ‘You two lovers or something? I think we should be told.’
‘Uncalled for, Piers,’ Fergus Young snapped.
‘Fergus, I’m so tired of these shallow, nit-picking people. Why do we even care about the mental state of the waste of space in that box? As for this bloody little woman trying to find a new role for the ailing Church in some sort of spiritual- criminal profiling…’
Merrily said, ‘What did Lynsey Davies say about Roddy Lodge, Piers? Did she think he was a waste of space? I suspect not.’
‘Get off my back, Mrs Watkins.’
‘I think Lynsey found him extremely interesting. Because of what he was – i.e. someone apparently in day-to-day contact with the dead… of whom he had no fear whatsoever. And because he was the owner of Underhowle Baptist chapel. Which for her had become a kind of shrine.’
She looked at Huw, but he didn’t react. The angel was almost burning in her hand.
‘There was a problem, of course: Roddy had a steady girlfriend, with whom he had a lot in common. And Melanie, who seems to have suffered for years from EH, was suddenly – thanks to Sam – discovering a possible cause. And a possible solution.’
She looked at Sam, guessing that she was reaching a conclusion he’d come to several minutes ago. He left his pew and went to stand in the aisle, slowly punching a fist into a palm.
‘She was trying to persuade Roddy to go to the same alternative practitioner, to understand what she was now convinced was the real nature of the problem. Maybe she would’ve succeeded. Maybe she’d have helped him, if…’ She opened her hand and let the angel dangle on its broken chain. ‘If…’
‘If Lynsey Davies hadn’t killed her first,’ Sam said.
Merrily looked down at her prayer book. ‘Or persuaded someone else to do it?’
48
The Make-over
‘AH YES,’ MOIRA Cairns said, like she’d just remembered something vaguely distasteful. ‘Hi, Jane.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Jane stepped away from the box office, dismayed. ‘This woman says Lol’s gone.’
Cairns was looking smaller and somehow younger in jeans and this big Hebridean sweater, her hair tied up, the make-up washed off.
‘Aye,’ she said. ‘He had to leave.’
Leave? The big star gone off with some major international promoter, some record company exec. Goodbye to the old life. Hello hotel rooms, hello groupies.
Jane bit her lip, feeling isolated among the crowd in the foyer, probably the only one of them who was here alone and now would leave alone. Come to support Lol, and he’d triumphed and gone. She’d twice called Mum’s mobile to tell her about that call from Jenny Box, if she didn’t already know about it. Nothing – switched off.
‘I said I’d run you home,’ Cairns said, autographing the sleeve of an old vinyl album some sad git had brought along. ‘Sorry about the shaky bit,’ she said to the sad git. ‘Must be ma age.’
‘You look younger than ever,’ the sad git said, going off, and Cairns blew him a kiss.
Jane looked down at the poisoned blade of betrayal. ‘What?’ Give me five minutes, OK?’ Cairns said. Jane said tightly. ‘I can get a bus.’ Of course, there was no late bus to Ledwardine midweek, and
she caught herself making swift glances to either side. Maybe Eirion? He must still be around. He couldn’t really have dumped her. Just because she’d come on like somebody spoiled and bitchy. He wasn’t like that. He loved her.
Or what she used to be. He’d loved what she used to be. Eirion would have come here to see Lol and Moira, no reason to seek out Jane. It was over.
‘Or I can get a taxi. I’ve got enough money.’
Moira pulled a bunch of keys from her jeans and tossed them at Jane. ‘Grey BMW, right down by the bottom entrance. I’ll be there in about five minutes. I just have to see Prof, OK?’
And she turned and walked off, the smug bitch, leaving Jane standing there, holding the keys.
Jane spun away, with a semi-sob, and walked out of the building into the squally air, gulping it in. Looked up in despair at the night over Hereford, saw a faded cluster of stars, small holes in worn denim. Gas balls in a barren universe.
None of them wanted to know her now, not Eirion, not even Lol. She was spoiled and peevish and stupid; she was negative. She’d grown up a negative person in a negative world, this floating cyst of dying matter about which everything was known. A world that had peaked some time ago, and all scientists were doing about it was shrinking it more rapidly, while finding ways of keeping you alive longer so that you could go on and on being crapped on.
Halfway across the car park, seeing a couple of guys in their twenties watching her, she caught herself actually starting to think of the several individuals who would be twisted with guilt for the rest of their lives when she was found raped and murdered behind one of the warehouses off the Holmer Road or just killed, in a cursory way by some heroin addict, for her mobile.
In the end, she just found Moira’s BMW and let herself in and locked the doors to keep out the junkies and the rapists.
Then she made another fruitless attempt to call Mum and tell her about Jenny Driscoll, who had been so anxious to see her before the funeral on Friday, possibly because of something this guy Humphries had turned up in Underhowle. But the funeral had happened. It was all over. Mum should be home now.
Should be home.
Jane rang home, and listened to all the messages again, ending with Dear God, he’s coming back.
Like Gareth Box was some kind of rapist/slasher.
Poor Driscoll. She wasn’t crass and superficial, just damaged. And likeable, really, another emotional refugee, although it was still hard to know how much of what she said you could seriously believe. The angel stuff: I’m not claiming to be Bernadette. I don’t care whether anyone believes me. And then: I saw it, Jane. And she was beautiful. Was that the final confirmation that Mum was the angel?
Yet nothing sexual – could you believe that? You certainly believed it
when she said it last night; you grabbed it gratefully, squeezed it to your bosom: Oh thank you, thank you. But now? How did you feel about Jenny Driscoll, with hindsight?
Jane said, ‘Oh God.’
God who did not exist, who just served now as an all-purpose expression for dismay, confusion, exasperation, contempt – and fear.
By now, any semblance of a service had evaporated. There were eleven people and a corpse under the ice-cream lights, and no reason for anyone to be here any more, not even the corpse.
Yet nobody was trying to leave.
Merrily saw Frannie Bliss placing himself next to the church door, needing to contain everybody while he worked it all out, examining the cards in his hand, rearranging them, wondering which ones to throw away.
It was like this: if Lynsey Davies had killed Melanie Pullman, it threw up a new and plausible motive for Roddy to have killed Lynsey, a – God forbid – normal motive.
Arguably, a hot-blooded killing: Lodge had discovered that this warped and dangerous woman had murdered his girlfriend. The kind of killing, then, for which – had he lived to appear in court – he might well have ended up with no more than a couple of years in prison.
If Lynsey Davies was the only one he’d done. If the serial killing was something happening only in the dark mind of Lynsey Davies.
Did you confess just to get it over, to get the police off your back, the heat from your brain? Merrily put her hands either side of the pine coffin, just where Roddy’s head would be, cooled at last. She saw him scaling that pylon, gripping the steel skeleton of his personal tormentor, swinging up into the rigid, spindly arms of Kali the Destroyer, with the killer candles in her fingers.
Sam Hall was at the foot of the coffin, and their gazes met: what now? She didn’t know. If Roddy was going to the crematorium, there didn’t even need to be a funeral.
From over by the door, Frannie Bliss called, ‘Do we want to take this further? I don’t think I’m in any position to demand that everybody stays, but if I phone my boss – which is what I ought to do – I can guarantee a long night for some of us.’
Piers Connor-Crewe’s big, pale body twitched. ‘Are you going to tell us exactly what you’ve found?’
‘Found, Mr Crewe?’
Sam Hall said, ‘Merrily, you just raised the possibility that Lynsey Davies had someone else kill Melanie. You want to explain that?’
‘Well…’ She moved away from the coffin. ‘I think if we look at what we know about Lynsey…’
‘I know a bit more now, in fact,’ Bliss said. ‘Andy Mumford finally called. It’s not much, but it might make you think.’ He moved away from the door, resting a foot on a pew seat, hands on his knee. ‘Some of it we knew, but there’s no harm in going over it again. Lynsey – like Roddy, actually – grew up in a Nonconformist household on the edge of the forest – Drybrook or Lydbrook, one of those places. Her old feller was a coalman – one of the blokes who carted the sacks about, rather than ran the yard – and he was also the caretaker at his chapel. There were four kids, and Lynsey was the eldest. And the old man used to make them go twice on a Sunday to chapel. Strict. Very strict.’
‘He still alive?’ Sam asked.
‘No, neither parent, but Mumford talked to a sister, who hadn’t seen Lynsey in years but did remember things like how she was once suspended from school for bullying. And how much she hated the chapel.’
‘Figures,’ Sam said.
‘Actually, it wasn’t that simple,’ Bliss said. ‘Funny, these are things you’d never bother going into when somebody’s just “the victim”. Even less important when you’re just a victim – one of several. When we say she “hated the chapel”, we mean the organization, the religion. The actual building – this stark old place with the Dr Phibes harmonium – she bloody loved that. Used to pinch her old man’s keys and go in with her mates at night, playing.’
Merrily said, ‘Presumably, you don’t mean the harmonium.’ Bliss did his acid smile. ‘I think the games got more adventurous the older she became. And then one day – the sister’s not sure what happened, it being a serious scandal at the time and a great embarrassment for the family – one day traces of these activities were found by the cleaner. As a result of which, Mr Davies lost his position as part-time caretaker. And he was not a happy man. And he held Lynsey responsible.’
Mumford wasn’t sure what Mr Davies did to Lynsey, but there was certainly a long period of fear and loathing in that household, Bliss said. The sister had told Mumford they didn’t see much of Lynsey once she got into her middle teens. But there was a teacher who thought she was an intelligent girl with prospects and suggested she’d be better away from home, persuading the parents to let her go to this commercial college in Gloucester – possibly even arranging a grant.
Either way, Mr Davies was probably glad to see her go,’ Bliss said. ‘And I think some of us know the rest. So there you have it: an intelligent girl raised in a strict household starts to rebel against it from quite a tender age. Though tender’s not the word for Lynsey, is it? The suspension for bullying, the hints of early sexual adventures… all hinting at the bad things to come.’
‘And the use of religious premises in a sexual context?’ Merrily said.
‘Dead right. And we’re all looking at you, Mr Crewe. ’Cause of all the people here, we’re thinking, nobody knew Lynsey as well as Mr Crewe.’
Connor-Crewe didn’t look back at him. ‘I’ve told you all I know.’
‘You said you didn’t know about Lynsey being at Cromwell Street. I wonder if that’s true.’
‘If you want to accuse me of anything—’
Huw Owen said, ‘As Francis has raised the issue of Cromwell Street, I think we can all agree that his original theory of Lodge as a West obsessive has been turned on its head. It was Lynsey who was obsessed.’
Bliss shrugged.
‘Thank you, lad.’ Huw went to stand at the lectern. ‘Nobody likes to think of anybody, especially a woman, becoming so corrupted inside as to find inspiration and energy in a situation as foul as that. But we have to face it. Just as we had to face the fact that the number of lives destroyed by twenty years of carnage in Cromwell Street far exceeded the number of lives lost. Which itself may be a lot bigger than the list read out at the trial of Rosemary West.’
‘I’m sorry…’ Fergus Young looked like a man who’d been containing himself for as long as he reasonably could. ‘I don’t see the relevance of this. It’s frankly obscene. There’s no proven link between Underhowle and anything connected with West, and I really don’t think we should manufacture one. Lodge and Davies are both dead… gone… finished.’
‘No, lad. Nowt’s finished. If you don’t see the living darkness at the heart of this—’
‘Living darkness!’ Fergus stood up, his hair springing. ‘That is such nonsense! That’s defamatory nonsense.’
Huw held tight to the wings of the brass eagle. ‘See, I don’t usually talk like this to lay folk. It doesn’t help. But I’m looking at a woman who was drawing energy from a black hole, a place from which all kindness, tenderness, pity and moral awareness had been sucked out. Drawing energy from that. Can you understand?’
Merrily said softly, ‘I think we should look at what she was creating. With Melanie out of the way, she’d begun to reorganize Roddy’s life. Perhaps starting with something fairly innocent like setting up his sitting room as Roddy’s Bar – like the one at Cromwell Street. And then redecorating his bedroom.’
Cherry Lodge whispered, ‘Yes.’
‘There were two bedrooms in that bungalow – the one Roddy set up for himself, which was a bit old-fashioned. And the one I think Lynsey created for him, with black sheets and eroticized pictures of beautiful women who also happened to be dead. Reflecting the connection he was perhaps already making between sex and death, but… brutalizing it, I suppose. Like she was trying to turn him into… somebody else.’
Fergus said, ‘Somebody else?’
‘Work it out, lad,’ Huw Owen told him.
‘It’s preposterous!’
‘She also revamped his social calendar,’ Merrily said. ‘Poor Jerome Banks thinks he was the one who encouraged Roddy to go out and find some real girls. In fact, Lynsey was building up his confidence… and also turning him into a predator. Like people train hawks.’
She looked up at the sound of Piers Connor-Crewe edging out of his pew, making for the door. ‘I’ve heard enough.’
Bliss stood in his path. ‘I don’t think so, Piers.’
‘Are you actually attempting to detain me?’
I have some questions.’
‘Up your arse with them, inspector. I’ve had quite enough of you for one day.’
‘It’s just that I’ve been wondering: if Lynsey – or somebody else, other than Lodge – killed Melanie Pullman, who buried her? I’ve just recalled you saying this morning that Roddy lent you his digger, to put in some trenches near the chapel. Only, I was watching my good friend Mr Parry today. You could take a digger – as I presume Roddy often did – from his garage to this churchyard, along the path through the fields, in… what? Ten minutes? Bit longer at night?’
‘You’re insane.’
‘It’s just a thought, Piers. Neither you nor Lynsey would want Melanie buried near the Baptist chapel, if there was ever any chance of a real archaeological dig. Nowhere safer for a body than a graveyard. And who’d be next in there – Tony Lodge? Well, not in the near future, we all trust and hope. And anyway, as soon as they saw bone down there, it’d be, whoops… that’s another one slid down the hill, better move on a couple of yards.’
‘Unless they found this.’ Merrily held up the angel. ‘Bit of a give away. Was to us, anyway.’
The angel shone with a coppery light, brighter somehow than the lighting globes.
‘Yeh, that’s odd,’ Bliss said. ‘I can’t explain why they didn’t take that off her, dispose of it.’
A discreet cough from Gomer. ‘Likely di’n’t see him, ennit? If her weared him under her clothes, next to the skin, like, mabbe he wouldn’t be visible. At night, if they was in a hurry. But then the clothes starts to rot… up he comes.’