by Phil Rickman
And Oh God. Oh, sweet Jesus. Like a prayer opening up.
Was that what she was supposed to do at this moment – offer up a prayer for what lay on the mattress, for the soul that had vacated the blistered, split skin, the flesh cooked in blue denim and left to congeal, the legs burned back to the bone, the feet fused into the Doc Martens by their melted rubber soles?
Merrily’s stomach lurched
Hands gripped her shoulders. Gomer was alive again and turning her around, snatching the torch from her, but even when she was away from the smell, standing in a puddle, letting the cold water seep into her shoes, she was still seeing the spindle of an arm thrown protectively across the swollen, football face so that all you could make out underneath was the grimace of teeth.
She heard Gomer saying hoarsely to Cliff, ‘You want that name? You want the name now, boy?’
5
Denial of the Obvious
IT WAS RAINING again, the moon hidden. Cliff Morgan said, ‘I know how hard this is, so if you’re not one hundred per cent certain then you should say so.’ His grey moustache covered most of his lips and his eyes suggested that he was more than ready for retirement. ‘And frankly, Gomer, I don’t see how you can be certain. I’m sorry. I think this is going to be a dentist job.’
He offered them shelter in the police car, holding open one of the back doors, but Gomer stood defiantly in the rain, rubbing hard at his glasses without taking them off. ‘You bloody write this down,’ he was insisting, as if he hadn’t heard anything Cliff had said to him. ‘You get it wrote down official, boy. I wannit in the report, black and white.’
‘I en’t writing anything down just now, Gomer. I think you’re very much in shock.’ Cliff looked at Merrily. ‘Mrs Watkins, right?’
She nodded. She didn’t think she’d seen him before, but he seemed to recognize her. Dyfed-Powys Police; maybe one of the cops involved in the Old Hindwell conflict last winter.
‘Gomer been with you all night, has he?’
Merrily was startled. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘I’m just pre-empting other people’s questions, Mrs Watkins. People who don’t know him as well as I know him.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Of course. Sorry.’ When a building on its own in the middle of the countryside got burned down at night, police inquiries were always going to start with the owner.
‘At this moment, it’s a suspicious death, Reverend. CID have been informed, the pathologist sent for, the scene-of-crime people. We don’t yet know whether we’ve got a crime, but procedures are stricter now. Infantrymen like us, we’re not allowed to touch anything any more. We’re not clever enough, see.’
‘All the same, you’ve obviously seen this… kind of thing before. Do you think… I mean, do you think he was dead before the fire?’ She swallowed; she was still feeling sick, was somehow still smelling that awful smell – like roast pork – as though grease and fumes were in her hair. She knew why Gomer didn’t want to come out of the rain.
The senior fireman said, ‘I would think… although he must’ve been close to the seat of the fire, I would say he was overcome with smoke before it got to him. I don’t think he would have suffered, if that’s what you’re asking.’ He turned to Gomer. ‘That mattress, Mr Parry – has that always been in the back room there?’
‘Ar.’ Gomer had his tin open and his fingers were at work on a new ciggy whether he knew it or not. ‘Boy used to sleep there sometimes when things was bad between him and Kayleigh.’
‘And sometimes not on his own, what I heard,’ Cliff said.
‘Mabbe. Her once locked him out best part of a week. Turned a blind eye, I did. He had enough problems back then. I never figured he was still kipping yere, mind. Mabbe there’d be nights when he’s walking into the ole flat, and it just comes down on him that her’d gone and left him for a biker and a bloody ole squat in Cornwall. And he just… he couldn’t stay there.’
Gomer stopped rolling the paper and tobacco, as if his fingers had gone numb, and he stared at the ground. Merrily wondered how often, since last January, he’d walked into his own bungalow and experienced that same cold dismay.
‘But if you was thinking…’ Gomer looked up at Cliff. ‘If you was thinking that mabbe Nev Parry come in yere tonight pissed out of his head, and set all this off by accident or bloody carelessness, you can forget it now, boy.’
‘Not my job to decide, Gomer.’
‘’Cause I’m giving you this other name now, and don’t you forget it.’
‘Gomer—’
‘Roddy Lodge,’ Gomer said. ‘Roddy Lodge, plant-hire cowboy from up by Ross. You go over there and you talk to that bastard about this. Now. Tonight. ’Fore he can wash the bloody oil off his clothes. Roddy Lodge. You write that down.’
Cliff wasn’t writing anything down. Another car was pulling in behind the police car and Gomer’s van. ‘CID, I do believe,’ the younger copper, Robbie, said. ‘Just in time for breakfast.’
Merrily put a hand over her mouth.
What you said to the bereaved, usually in hospitals, was something like, Would you like me to say a prayer? Would you like us to pray together?
It was not always appropriate.
Merrily drove Gomer’s van for three or four miles before pulling into a lay-by, a mile or so over the hill from Kington Cemetery. Overhanging trees were dripping on to the bonnet, an all-night bulb was glowing outside a cottage across the empty road. As she killed the engine, a barn owl glided low, almost at windscreen level, seemed almost to hover for moment.
‘Why’ve you stopped, vicar?’ It was the first time Gomer had asked a question since they’d left the yard. He’d sat stiff-backed in the passenger seat, staring through his glasses and the windscreen.
‘Ought to ring Jane,’ she said.
‘Her’ll be in bed.’
‘I don’t think so, Gomer, somehow.’
‘You gonner tell her?’
‘I think so.’
She fumbled for her phone. Nev: she hadn’t really known him. Yet she had.
No problem, vicar, I’ll get Nev to do it, see…
That bloody Nev… digged a whole trench, got called away, come back and filled it in and forgot he en’t put the bloody pipes down…
Daft bugger. Bloody sweatshirts. Never live it down. Gotter laugh, though. You gotter laugh…
Be meeting Nev on the site at eight – say this for the boy, no matter what he’s put away the night before, he en’t never late…
Probably because Nev would have been sleeping on the premises.
There was nobody for them to tell immediately about Nev. His mum and dad – Gomer’s elder brother and his wife – were both dead. His ex-wife, Kayleigh, was presumably still in a squat in Cornwall with a biker. And the police had advised Gomer not to inform anyone more peripheral until there was confirmation.
Dentist job.
The quizzing of Gomer by a dishevelled detective constable had been brief and routine; they’d want to talk to him again tomorrow when they knew more. This time he hadn’t mentioned Roddy Lodge, whoever he was… perhaps just a name thrown up by the shock, a convenient focus for Gomer’s uncomprehending anguish, his denial of the obvious.
Merrily called up the vicarage number and was starting to get anxious when it rang six times before Jane picked up.
‘Sorry.’ The kid sounded muzzy. ‘Think I kind of fell asleep in the chair.’ A pause. ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’
Merrily told her most of it. No point in dressing it up. Jane was silent for a while, then she said, her voice pitched high and querulous, ‘Couldn’t it be like a tramp or something? I know that’s just as like— just as bad for somebody, but it…’
‘We have to wait for official confirmation, flower.’
‘I just like knew there’d be something like this. It’s that kind of year – anything that could possibly be bad is always worse. Starting with Minnie… What will you do now?’
‘Come home, I suppose.�
�
‘Mum…’ Another pause as the wider implications sank in. ‘This is going to screw him up completely, isn’t it? It’s not like he can revive that business on his own, not at his age. But if he doesn’t, he won’t know what to do with himself. He’ll just fade into—’
‘We won’t let that happen,’ Merrily said quickly. ‘Go to bed this time, flower, or you won’t be fit for school.’
‘It’s half-term.’
‘Of course it is.’
‘Holiday time,’ Jane said. ‘What fun.’
Merrily had been holding the phone tight to her ear and didn’t think Gomer had heard any of Jane’s side of the conversation at all. But when she pocketed the mobile and started the van’s engine, he turned to her, green dashboard lights reflected in his glasses. Whatever small amount of light was available, Gomer’s glasses always seemed to reflect it.
‘En’t gonner pack in, vicar. En’t gonner walk away.’
‘Never thought you would.’
‘Gotter put it all back together. Somehow.’
‘Yes.’
‘Kind of memorial would that be for the boy, the business went down the toilet?’
‘We should talk about that.’
‘Put me outer the picture,’ Gomer said. ‘It’s what he wanted.’
‘Who?’
‘Roddy Lodge.’
‘Well, we can talk about that, too.’ Merrily let out the clutch too quickly – the van lurched and the engine stalled. ‘When we’ve got clearer heads. When we’re not so—’
‘You’re bloody well fobbin’ me off, ennit?’
‘No, I’m not, but…’
‘Poor ole bloody Parry! Shock of it turned his mind, done his ole brain in! Won’t face up to the truth: the boy had a drink problem. Comes in out of his bloody head, sets light to the mattress. Always been a liability. Accident waitin’ to happen. That’s what they’re gonner say, ennit?’
‘No.’ Merrily restarted the engine. ‘No, they’re not. Everybody liked Nev. Everybody who knew him.’ Ar. Well, that’s true. That’s dead right. But it weren’t Nev he was after. Me he wanted to get at, see. Poor bloody Nev, he just got in the way.’
‘Gomer—’
‘Can’t back away from this, vicar. Gotter take my piece o’ the blame. I never thought, see. Even after what I yeard in the Swan tonight, I never thought anybody in his right mind would…’ He shook his head. ‘But he en’t, see. That’s the point. En’t in his right mind. I never really reckoned on that.’
It was something about his voice this time. And the realization that he must have been going over this, in a kind of mental mist, all the time she’d been talking at him. Merrily switched off the engine and then the lights, watching the green glow fade from Gomer’s bottle glasses.
She slid a hand under her hair, undid her dog collar, pulled it off and put it on top of the dashboard.
She lit a cigarette.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Who’s Roddy Lodge?’
6
Demonizing Roddy
GOMER BORROWED MERRILY’S mobile and rang his home number. He wanted her to hear a message on his machine, which, if you didn’t use the skip signal, would relay everything recorded since you last wound back the tape. He sat there for about four minutes with the mobile at his ear before thrusting it back at her.
‘Listen…’
The moon was back in the sky, two of them back in Gomer’s glasses: animation.
Merrily listened.
‘Mr Parry, it’s Lisa Pawson. I’m back in London. Listen, I’m afraid I’ve had Lodge on the phone…’
Private drainage: for serious country-dwellers there was no other kind; you had a septic tank, and when the smell got too bad you had it emptied. For some incoming city types, however, having to take responsibility for your own waste could be a perpetual source of fear. What if it overflowed? What if it all started oozing back up your lavatory, in the middle of a dinner party?
It was the fear of sewage that kept firms like the Birmingham- based Efflapure in business. After meeting Lisa Pawson, Gomer had spent a couple of hours on Sunday evening making inquiries about the firm. Apparently, an Efflapure was an overpriced, overcomplicated, high-maintenance piece of junk that was supposed to turn your liquid waste into something you could safely add to your whisky. It would be smoothly and expensively installed for you by any one of a number of teams of so-called skilled subcontractors all over the country.
Mostly cowboys, Gomer said. Like Roddy Lodge, of down by Ross-on-Wye.
‘… And somehow, he knew you’d been to see me. It was awful. I really think he must be slightly off his head. He insists there’s absolutely nothing wrong with his positioning of the Efflapure and that you and the surveyor are “in it together”, trying to discredit him. Naturally, I don’t believe a word of this… but please will you call me as soon as you return.’
Bleep.
Merrily passed the phone back to Gomer. ‘How on earth did this Lodge know you’d been to see the woman?’
‘Somebody seen the van, sure t’be.’ Gomer put the mobile to his left ear and carried on listening to the sequence of messages. ‘No big surprise. It’s so near the main road, that place. Scores of motors going past, anybody could’ve seen me, even Roddy Lodge ’isself. Anyway, vicar, shouldn’t surprise you how fast word d’get around in this county.’
‘No. I suppose not.’
‘Also, see, there’s a lot o’ folk…’ His voice faded; she saw the moons beginning to shake in his glasses.
‘What’s wrong?’
Gomer handed her the mobile again. He took off his glasses, turned away.
‘… never woulder believed it, Gomer. Wanted one and a half mile of track clearin’, right up to the top of the Garth, and would we do it for two hundred? Bloody hell, I says, there’s at least five days’ work there, Mr Pugh!’
Nev.
‘I says he could argue it out with you, he wanted to. So if you hears from Frankie Pugh, that’s what it’s about, all right?’
Bleep.
Gomer coughed and looked out through the windscreen. Now that the sky had cleared again, you could see the lights of Eardisley village. Merrily put a hand on his arm. He’d become almost his old self, telling her about Efflapure and Roddy Lodge.
Now Mrs Pawson’s angsty voice was back in her ear.
‘… I’m sorry, this is getting ridiculous. He’s just phoned again. This time he says he doesn’t want any trouble and, while he isn’t admitting that it was wrongly positioned, he says he’s now prepared to come and take it away and return our money in full. In fact he… he was absolutely insisting that he should be the one to take it away. I’m sorry, one moment…’
Muted voices: Mrs Pawson in hurried conversation with someone in the room. Then she was back.
‘My husband agrees that no way should that man be allowed back on the premises, so I’m hoping that you’re going to be able to keep to the schedule and remove the… appliance tomorrow, as we arranged. I propose to telephone Lodge and tell him that you’ll be handling everything. If there’s a problem, please call me as soon as you can. Thank you, Mr Parry.’
Bleep.
Merrily lowered the phone. ‘Both these calls were this morning?’
‘Last one ’bout two this afternoon, I reckon,’ Gomer said. ‘No problem about lifting the unit. Me and Nev, we was gonner go over there first thing. But I still wanted to call her back, see. Some’ing puzzling me – why didn’t her take him up on this offer to shift the thing ’isself? Save ’em paying me to do it. Save me trying to flog it for ’em second-hand. Didn’t make no sense.’
‘Unless she wasn’t convinced Lodge would give them their money back.’
Gomer shook his head. ‘More’n that.’
‘What did she say when you called her back?’
‘Her wasn’t in. So after tea I gets on the phone to young Darren Booth – that’s the local surveyor called me in in the first place – and Darren… well, you e
ver met Darren, you’d know he’s terrible loud – rugby club, male-voice choir, that’s Darren. But today, the boy’s gone dead quiet on me. “Gomer,” he says, “my advice is, leave it a while. Let it lie. Likely her’ll change her mind, you know what these Londoners is like.” Now is that funny, or what, vicar?’
‘It’s odd.’
‘Ar. “What kind of ole wallop is this, Darren?” I says. He says, “He en’t right, that’s all.” ’
‘Lodge?’
‘ “En’t stable,” Darren says. “Very protective of his business,” he says. And wouldn’t say n’more. Comes on about how he has a hurgent appointment, rings off. Soon as I puts the phone down, it rings again. Voice goes, “Gomer Parry?” I says, “Ar, that’s me.” Voice says, “We don’t like the” – pardon my French, vicar – “we don’t like the fuckin’ Welsh… we don’t like the fuckin’ Welsh pinchin’ our business. You’re gettin’ a warnin’ tonight. You comes south of Hereford, you’re finished, Gomer Parry, you’re a dead man.” Then the line cuts off.’
‘That was him – Lodge?’
‘Held back his number, so I looks him up in the phone book, calls the number and nobody picks up. I reckon he wasn’t calling from home, see – that’s how it seems to me now. I reckon he was on a bloody mobile from down by my bloody depot, figuring out how he was gonner torch it. You’re gettin’ a warnin’ tonight – how much clearer you wannit?’
Merrily sighed. ‘If he was on a mobile, it might not be that easy to trace the call. And unless you have it on tape…’
‘Course, I din’t think that much about it – only made me more determined to do the job. Anyway, a bit later, I was gonner go to the parish meeting, thinking you might be in need of a spot of back-up, see, and I’m going across the square when Jumbo Humphries rolls up in his Caddy, says how about a quick one in the Swan, and I’m figuring if anybody know about Lodge it’ll be him, so—’
‘Jumbo?’
‘Humphries. Drives this ole Caddy?’
‘Ah.’ Merrily got out another cigarette. ‘I did notice this big, long American car on the square.’