The Lamp of the Wicked (MW5)

by Phil Rickman

But there was something.

  ‘What are you doing this afternoon?’ Frannie Bliss said.

  ‘I… nothing vital.’

  Lie down for half an hour, maybe. Go across to the church and say some prayers for Gomer and Nev. Phone Lol. Avoid Uncle Ted. Go back and talk to Gomer, see if there’s any way to help him through this.

  ‘Only, I’d like you to come and look at his place. At Underhowle. Take less than an hour to get there. You know me, Merrily, I don’t have too much faith in psychologists and profilers, but I’ve still gorra sneaking regard for priests.’ He gave a small smile. ‘Of whichever side of the fence.’

  ‘Frannie,’ Merrily said, ‘do you have any real concrete reason for suspecting he’s done it more than once?’

  ‘Just his attitude. And the fact that at least one other woman’s gone missing from that area in the past year.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He likes women.’

  ‘It’s not a crime.’

  ‘I use the word “like”…’

  ‘OK.’ Merrily put out her cigarette. ‘I’ll tell you. He was heavily suggestive, I mean towards me. In an old-fashioned way, I suppose you’d have to say. I was standing a couple of yards away from a body he’d just exhumed and he was telling me I was… you know… It wasn’t exactly sophisticated and it wasn’t subtle: he actually used the word “sexy”. Here we are in the grounds of an empty house, he’s just been accused of murder by Gomer, and he’s talking like we’ve just met up in a singles bar and we’ve both had a bit to drink.’

  ‘Had he, do you think?’

  ‘I wouldn’t’ve thought so. His voice didn’t seem to be slurred and I couldn’t smell anything on him other than an awful lot of aftershave. He was still hyped-up, though.’

  ‘In what way?’

  She thought about it. ‘At first, I thought he was nervous – Gomer had called him a murderer. However, as soon as he found out this was about the fire, he – as you said – kind of denied it. Laughed it off, anyway. That was about when I gave myself away – dropped the torch in the shovel, on the tarpaulin covering… Anyway, as soon as he saw I was a woman, maybe that was when he got cocky. He seemed quite relaxed, from then. I wasn’t, of course. I’d smelled… the smell. I just wanted us to get the hell out of there before he pulled a gun or a knife or something.’

  ‘Do you think he detected you were scared, and that was what made him so forward?’

  ‘You mean, do I think he got off on that, a woman being blatantly nervous of him? Maybe. I don’t know.’

  ‘Where was Mr Parry at the time?’

  ‘Mr Parry was standing there, gobsmacked at me selling him down the river. I really don’t think… The impression I have, thinking back on it, was that Roddy had ceased to be aware of Gomer from the moment he became aware of me. He said, “a woman” – like, you know, “For me?” ’ Merrily shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, that sounds – even to me, that sounds like the kind of thing you say in hindsight, when you know you’ve been face to face with a…’

  ‘It sounds about right, actually,’ Bliss said. ‘For instance, when the lads brought him in last night, he was rabbiting nonstop in the car, like they were his best mates. Like they were all on a coach coming back from an outing. He’s there, jammed up between two burly uniforms, and at one point he’s suggesting that if they ever fancy a one-nighter, with the trimmings, he can get them fixed up.’

  ‘Trimmings?’

  ‘I’ll spare you the details.’

  ‘Did he realize why they were arresting him?’

  ‘Oh yeh. Merrily, you say in your statement he told you he’d been to talk to the local vicar?’

  She nodded. ‘That would be Jerome Banks. You spoken to him?’

  ‘Would I need to?’

  ‘Lodge claimed he scared the vicar. Told him about things he’d supposedly seen. “Spooky” was Lodge’s word.’

  ‘Didn’t go into detail?’

  ‘He seemed… I dunno… kind of proud of this – spooking the vicar. I said that sounded very interesting, and he said – in this heavily lecherous way – that I could go and talk to him any time I liked.’

  ‘And you said?’

  ‘I said that’d be nice, or something like that.’

  ‘Ah.’ Frannie Bliss rubbed his stubble-roughened jaw.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nice. Yes. That’s more or less what he said to us.’

  ‘Huh?’ She reached for the Zippo and the Silk Cut.

  ‘Like I say, they couldn’t shut the bugger up last night. And yet this morning, when we brought him out of his cell and into an interview room… he’s a very different man. Withdrawn. Sort of hunched up into himself. Like he’d been drunk last night and now he’s very badly hung-over. Didn’t want to know us any more. Kept muttering, “Not talking, not talking.” Kept wanting to go back to his cell. See, that’s a bit unusual. Normally they can’t wait to get out. We tried all the usual things.’

  ‘Good cop, bad cop.’

  ‘We’re a little more psychologically sophisticated nowadays, Merrily.’

  ‘Since when?’ She drew out a cigarette with her teeth.

  ‘Anyway, it wasn’t happening. We weren’t getting anywhere. He didn’t even ask for a solicitor. We offered him one, he said no. No to everything. No, no, no. Don’t wanner talk, leave me alone. Sinking further back into himself, complaining of headaches. Well, all right, we’ll have enough forensic by the end of the day to package him up, no problem. But I…’ He looked into Merrily’s eyes. ‘I know there’s a lot more to come out if we handle this right.’

  ‘And you want to be the one to uncover it, before they send Howe back from her course to take over.’ Merrily eyed him along the length of her cigarette.

  ‘Aw, please…’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘But eventually,’ Bliss said, ‘he just looks at me through his fingers and he says, “You get that little woman. I’ll talk to that little… woman.” ’

  ‘What?’

  Bliss smiled a touch bashfully, not quite meeting her eyes.

  ‘You took a bloody long time to get round to that,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Yeah. Sorry about that.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  Bliss shuffled in his chair. ‘Merrily, how would you feel about talking to him? Might save us all some time.’

  Help you get it wrapped before they bring in some flash DCI from headquarters or summon Ms Howe back.

  ‘By “talking to him” you mean either with you there or with a tape running.’ Something like that. But I wouldn’t like to have you going in there cold. That’s why I want you to see his place. Get an idea of what kind of bloke we’re dealing with. It won’t take long.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Look, I know the Bishop and the Chief Constable have had drinkies together—’

  ‘But you don’t work for the police. Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to cross any of your personal barriers. I just want a firmer idea of whether I’m talking to a sexual fantasist who got carried away one time, or to a real sexual predator – maybe somebody who started out degrading women and progressed to killing them. Them – plural.’

  ‘And as well as whatever he might disclose to me, you probably want to watch how he reacts to me as a woman, right?’

  ‘Well, you know, I hadn’t actually thought of that.’

  ‘Frannie, forget it.’

  Bliss was silent for a moment. He waved away her smoke. ‘You’ve disappointed me, Merrily. I thought what you did was all about stopping the spread of evil.’

  ‘And suppose he’s in some way innocent? Suppose you’re getting carried away.’

  ‘I can show you—’

  ‘All right.’ She put out her cigarette. She’d have to admit that the possibility of Lodge’s innocence was remote. ‘I’ll talk to him, but I’ll warn him first that under the circumstances there could be things I would feel obliged to pass on to the police. Then he has the option o
f telling me to push off.’

  Bliss didn’t look too unhappy about this.

  ‘And no tape, no video.’

  ‘Merrily…’

  ‘Or I could put your idea to the Bishop. He’d need about two days to think about it, the old worrier.’ She stood up. ‘Frannie, are you even fit to drive?’

  Bliss squeezed shut his eyes and opened them again.

  ‘Wouldn’t have any more coffee in that pot, by any chance?’

  11

  Just How Funny It Gets

  THEY TRAVELLED DOWN the long, misted valley, with steel skeletons striding ahead of them.

  This was where Herefordshire and Gloucestershire lay back- to-back on a lumpy mattress of tiered fields rising into old woodland of browning broadleaved trees and conifers high on the hillsides. But the valley didn’t look as if it belonged to either county as much as it belonged to the power industry.

  ‘You can’t believe they can still get away with this, can you?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Sorry?’ Frannie Bliss, driving, was somewhere else.

  ‘The pylons.’ They looked seriously hostile, like an army of the dead, bristling with obsolete weaponry. ‘I mean, would it be all that costly to run some of it underground?’

  The joke was that there were so few homes in view that you could probably have electrified the lot with half a dozen windmills. Wreathed now in fog, the pylons were a primitive show of strength. Maybe one day they’d be industrial archaeology. Not yet.

  Frannie Bliss glared at the countryside through the windscreen of his black Alfa, as though it was holding out on him. He was still a city cop at heart; you couldn’t accost pedestrians the same in country lanes: Where you off to, son? What’s in the rucksack?

  They’d come in from the A40, the dual carriageway pumping heavy goods in and out of Newport and Cardiff and the West Country. Here, lorries lurched past the most voluptuous curves of the Wye Valley and that famous Ross-on-Wye skyline: the tall-steepled church crowning the town, above the river and the water-meadows and the mock-medieval sandstone walls. Dark wooded hills were the Ross backcloth, and those same hills were directly above them now, sunk into wet mist, a few miles beyond the town.

  ‘No, I was just wondering,’ Bliss said, ‘how many sewerage systems Roddy’s put in around here. Every farm needs one, doesn’t it? Every cottage.’

  Merrily saw where this was heading. ‘You could start a terrible scare.’

  Bliss nodded, didn’t seem too concerned.

  ‘You put this out in the media,’ she warned, ‘you get everybody for miles around wondering if they’ve got a dead body under their septic tank.’

  In a pocket of her coat, she’d discovered the card that Roddy Lodge had given her last night.

  Efflapure

  R F Lodge

  registered contractor

  The Old Garage,

  Underhowle,

  Nr Ross-on-Wye.

  It was in a plastic evidence bag now, locked in the boot of the Alfa. Frannie Bliss seemed close to becoming obsessive about Roddy Lodge.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind looking under, say, a few selected septics. Narrow it down a bit.’ He smiled. ‘We’ll see, anyway. How’s business? The Evil One doing much locally?’

  ‘You’d know better than me.’ He was changing the subject, but she could sense his anticipation and was unnerved by it.

  He glanced at her. ‘How’s Lol?’ He’d encountered Lol during the summer, over the hop-kiln tragedy and the problems surrounding Allan Henry, the developer. Oddly, Bliss and Lol had seemed to understand one another, but that didn’t mean she could trust him with an update.

  ‘We’re still friends. And how’s your private life, Inspector Bliss?’

  ‘Not many private bits left.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  He took a sudden right between a Scots pine and an untrimmed hedge. The car skidded on some mud, and Bliss narrowly avoided the hedge.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘just the usual police thing. Your married life suffers on account of the job, and then it gets so bloody messy at home the job becomes a refuge. Like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t want us to be over, but it’s going down so fast now, I don’t really know how to stop it. And before you say “Do you wanna talk about it, Frannie?” – no, thank you, not now. Maybe when this is finished.’

  ‘I wonder how often you’ve said that. Maybe—’

  ‘All right,’ Bliss said, ‘probe over. We’re nearly there. Listen, when we get to the actual place, I’m not gonna force yer into a Durex suit, but try not to touch anything, eh?’

  ‘We’re just going to his house, aren’t we? It’s not as if it’s a murder scene…’ She registered his chilly half-smile. ‘Oh.’

  ‘We don’t know for certain,’ Bliss said. ‘But he had to’ve done it somewhere. And we do know he brought women back here, and when you see inside the place… well, you’ll probably want to wear a Durex suit.’

  This was where Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean looked to be stealthily pinching bits of Herefordshire. The lane narrowed between wild saplings growing on the verges. And then, within fifty yards of a sign announcing Underhowle, but before any evidence of a community, they were there: a clearing and a short cindered track opening into a forecourt fronting a building of grey concrete – a classic garage from the 1950s, sectional temple to the motor car, with a white metal sign: R. F. LODGE. In front, the stumps of petrol pumps, behind one of the towering pylons that looked as though it had just walked down from the conifered hillside.

  Either side of the garage with its high, twin entrances, shuttered now, stood newer concrete buildings. Frannie Bliss parked the Alfa between a police car and a white van on the forecourt, lowering his window as a uniformed constable came over.

  ‘Sir, there’s been a deputation of local people demanding to know what’s going on here. DS Mumford didn’t want to speak to them, so I just told them I wasn’t authorized to make a statement, it’d be up to the SIO. Just to put you in the picture. I think they’ll be back.’

  ‘I do not doubt it, son. Andy’s up at the house, is he?’ Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘I’ve had Andy going through Roddy’s books, phoning his fantasy clients. Is he known at Highgrove, you reckon?’

  ‘You’re really building this up, aren’t you?’

  ‘Merrily, I’m a detective inspector who would like to be a detective chief inspector. I’m thirty-six years old, and I think I’m worth it.’

  She grinned and stepped out into the peppery breeze. Bliss ushered her along a flagged pathway down the side of the garage, and there, within ten yards of the rear of the grey building, was the bungalow. It had been invisible from the front. Maybe just as well, as it wasn’t pretty: multicoloured bricks assembled in no particular pattern, flat roof, no garden, no flower tubs, just a concrete surround and the tiled pit of a drained swimming pool near the back wall of the garage.

  ‘And in summer you can float on your back and watch the sun sizzling through the power lines,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Apparently he got the land cheap. Built the bungalow himself, more or less.’

  ‘You don’t say.’ Down in a parallel field she could see half of what looked like a stone chapel.

  ‘Be worth quite a bit now. It’s actually quite well built, according to Mumford who knows about these things.’

  ‘Maybe it just lacks the feminine touch.’

  Bliss glanced at her. ‘How true that is,’ he said.

  Roddy Lodge’s office was at the rear of the bungalow, to the right of the back door. Its walls were only half plastered, and its rectangular window looked into the brackeny hillside, through the steel bones of the pylon.

  Merrily saw a filing cabinet and a metal desk with a bright red computer and a phone on it. Also, a bulky middle-aged man in a shapeless dark suit sitting in a vinyl-backed executive swivel chair. Bliss bent down to him, cocking his head on one side.

  ‘So was the Prince cooperat
ive, Andy? Was he as nice as he always seems on the telly?’

  ‘Good afternoon, Reverend.’ Mumford carefully folded up his mobile phone and placed it on the desk. ‘Nice to see you again.’

  ‘Hello, Andy.’ Merrily wondered, not for the first time, what kind of vocation this was turning out to be, when she seemed to encounter more coppers than priests.

  Mumford looked at the mobile. ‘Boss, I’m just waiting for a call back from Mrs Jilly Cooper’s secretary. They do seem to remember being approached by Lodge sometime last year, but had no need of his services.’

  ‘How wise,’ Bliss said.

  ‘And… Highgrove came back to me to confirm getting repeated letters and leaflets from him. I asked if they’d kept any, but apparently they didn’t. I’ve also found a pile of press cuttings in the filing cabinet, mostly relating to famous people who’ve moved to this area… in fact, anywhere within a fifty- or sixty-mile radius.’

  ‘What does that tell you,’ Merrily wondered, ‘apart from that he’s enterprising?’

  ‘And a terrible celebrity-stalker,’ Bliss said.

  ‘He’s very upfront for a stalker.’

  ‘He’s certainly not efficient.’ Mumford nodded at the scarlet computer, which had yellow speaker grilles and looked like a toy. ‘At one time he seems to have tried doing his bills and stuff on that thing, but the last one I can find on the hard disk seems to be over a year old. He’s all over the place after that, and the computer’s gathering dust.’

  ‘Other things on his mind, Andy?’

  ‘Shows a lot of nerve, in a way,’ Merrily said. ‘I mean, a small operator making a direct approach to Prince Charles?’

  ‘And Princess Anne at Gatcombe,’ Mumford said. ‘At least, she’s down here on his list. When I phoned, I wasn’t able to talk to anybody who might know about him, so I’ve arranged to call back in an hour or so. As for Sting’s place – no answer at all. A couple of other people you won’t’ve heard of, boss, seem to remember getting leaflets from Roddy as well as individual letters.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Frannie Bliss, ‘but have any of these nobs actually hired the bastard?’

  Mumford shrugged.