The Lamp of the Wicked (MW5)

by Phil Rickman

  ‘And assuming it doesn’t?’

  Merrily shrugged. ‘Goes into the parish coffers. End of story, everybody happy. We just don’t spend any for a while, to be on the safe side.’

  ‘It’s a lot of money, Mum,’ Jane said soberly. ‘Take a whole canteen of collection plates to accommodate that lot.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Merrily was remembering a row she’d had with Uncle Ted when she’d decided to abolish the time-honoured practice of sending round collection plates during the final hymn. Let’s not make an exhibition of it, Ted. They can put something in the box on the way out. Ted had insisted this wouldn’t work; people never shelled out unless they were publicly shamed into it. It even emerged that the old bugger had sometimes taken twenty-pound notes from parish funds, placing one on each plate prior to its circulation, setting an example.

  ‘And Jenny Driscoll didn’t come close to admitting it was her?’ Jane said.

  ‘Maybe I didn’t push her hard enough, but… I suppose it’s actually quite a considerate thing to do. If it had been a cheque with her name on it, we’d both have felt uncomfortable. Like she owned the place or… me.’

  ‘Yeah, but secretly you know it’s her. And she knows you know. And nobody else does – just you and her. That makes it altogether more subtle, don’t you think?’

  ‘Too subtle for me, flower.’

  For a few moments neither of them spoke. The only sound was Ethel the cat at her bowl, crunching dried food.

  ‘You know your problem, don’t you?’ Jane was carefully inspecting her nails. ‘You’re becoming unworldly.’

  reared up. ‘Me?’

  Merrily

  ‘Obvious side effect of Deliverance.’ Jane put her hand down and met Merrily’s stare across the table. ‘Like, in the job, if you’re exorcizing some house or something, it has to be that it’s not you doing it, it’s God. You’re just the vehicle. If in doubt, butt out. God will find a way.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Think about it,’ Jane said. ‘She’s targeted you. All that bollocks about seeing an angel over your church. And then she bungs you eighty grand. She wants something. You’re in the cross-hairs, vicar.’

  Merrily took in the kid’s serious face, the hair – darker now – pushed back behind her ears. A face she hadn’t seen before? She felt a stirring of panic, very glad now that there were some aspects of that unnerving couple of hours in the incense air below Chapel House that she hadn’t told Jane about.

  She finally flared a little. ‘Somehow, I just can’t help being a little surprised at hearing the rational, not to say cynical argument from someone who used to stand on the lawn on nights of the full moon and solemnly utter ritual incantations.’

  ‘I was a kid then!’

  ‘It was last year!’

  ‘Look…’ Jane planted both palms flat on the table, leaning across. ‘Doesn’t this worry you in the slightest? She might look like a wilting snowdrop, but what you have here is an ex-TV person, a top businesswoman with shops all over the place who’s probably never been known to do anything that wasn’t for publicity…’

  ‘The money’s for the church, not me.’

  ‘Your church.’

  ‘What – you think I should take it back?’

  Jane shook her head helplessly. ‘I don’t know. But I should be really, really careful, if I were you.’

  Merrily said nothing. She was hearing Jenny Box from the square, the other night. It isn’t over, you see… those things aren’t over… those things have hardly begun. No, she didn’t know what that meant either.

  ‘Because, if you think God’s going to see you right, protect you from whatever devious shit—’

  ‘Jane—’

  ‘Like he protected Gomer. Like he protected Nev.’

  Merrily closed her eyes. Not tonight, please. ‘All right.’ She breathed in and out slowly. ‘All right, I didn’t do very well, did I? There were things I should have asked her that I didn’t. Maybe I had a lot on my mind, with this… police thing. Which is probably all over now, anyway.’

  ‘All over? Not for Gomer it isn’t! Not for Lol either, who probably wouldn’t have got involved at all if you—’

  ‘What?’

  Jane shrugged sulkily. ‘Just something else you’re letting slip away, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ This is not going to become a row. ‘I’ve tried to ring him several times.’

  ‘Maybe you’ve got more problems than you know, Reverend. Maybe Uncle Ted’s actually right—’

  ‘I do not—’

  ‘—when he says Deliverance is taking over your life. And he doesn’t even know what it’s done to your basic common sense.’

  Merrily’s lips tightened. Bloody teenagers. What a great shame it was that there wasn’t some kind of hormone-reduction therapy.

  ‘So how did you leave it with the Driscoll woman?’ Jane said. ‘Like, thanks for the cakes and see you in church?’

  ‘She…’ Merrily stared into her cooling tea. ‘She asked me to do something for her. She wanted me to formally reconsecrate her private chapel. In the cellar.’

  Jane’s smile was three parts sneer. ‘And?’

  ‘No consecrations. But a blessing, yes. Probably.’

  The kid’s exhaled breath was like a slow puncture. The kitchen seemed bigger and felt colder.

  ‘Well, what was I supposed to say, Jane? It’s what I do!’

  And of course what you do is of major spiritual, like cosmic significance. Even though it’s all f— fantasy. Whereas, us down here… I bet… I bet you don’t even know about Lol’s first gig in twenty years.’

  ‘Lol?’ Merrily whispered. ‘Gig?’

  The rain fell steadily on the field at the back of the bungalow. Lol held the rubber-covered lambing lamp over a spot just off- centre, lighting up a circle of green and yellow. He could hardly flex his fingers any more. He thought that if he were to lie down now in the cold, wet grass, he’d probably be asleep within a few seconds.

  ‘Yere.’ Gomer bent down, pushing his fingers through the grass. ‘Just about yere. Sure t’be.’

  Where Gomer’s hands were, you could see the soil level was lower, the grass a slightly different shade. Before locating this spot, Gomer had spent no more than twenty minutes scouring the site as if he was dowsing for water – sometimes pulling back bushes and brambles, getting Lol to shift piles of building rubble.

  A circle of police was forming around them, as Gomer came triumphantly to his feet alongside Lol and the lamp.

  ‘’Bout last spring, I reckon, this was dug up. No later’n that. Try it, anyway, I would. You’ll know soon enough.’

  Bliss was sauntering up, looking less than impressed, when a howl of outrage exploded over the heads of the circle of cops.

  ‘You don’t wanner take no notice of that ole fuck! He’s well past it, he is! He don’t know what he’s—’

  In the choked silence, Lol was aware of the razory thrumming of the power lines.

  Then a chuckle. One of the uniformed police fisted his palm in glee. Frannie Bliss, smiling in the lamplight like a freckled cherub, punched Gomer joyfully on the upper arm.

  ‘Thank you, Roddy. Thank you, God.’

  Laughter. You could feel the current passing around the circle.

  Bliss beckoned the policewoman. ‘Gomer, this merits a nice

  ‘plastic cup of tea, which Tiffany here will provide for you, if I’m not being sexist there. And an Eccles cake?’

  ‘Welsh cake, boss,’ the policewoman said.

  ‘Sorry, Tiff.’ Bliss was still smiling as he handed Lol the spade. ‘Take it slowly, son.’

  Like he could take it any other way. Quite when he began to tremble, he wasn’t sure. He was just suddenly aware of doing it. It could’ve been the cold, because it was cold, and it was wet and the earth was clammy. But he knew it wasn’t that; he’d been cold and wet most of the day.

  His head was full of rumbling: they’d brought two cars round the back
, with their engines running and the headlights on full beam. He was caught in the lights, the star attraction, sweating under the scrutiny of a hyper-attentive audience – Lol Robinson on stage for the first time in nearly two decades, Lol Robinson performing live, digging up the dead.

  He was directly under the power lines – heavy-gauge black strings on a fretboard of night cloud. The spade was about eighteen inches down now, raising a little hill of muddy soil and wedges of clay at the side of the hole. Lol’s glasses had misted up and the spade was feeling sledgehammer-heavy, pulling him down, the way the old solid-body electric guitar had done once, on stage with Hazey Jane – Lol sagging under the responsibility, the knowledge that all he had to do was touch a string with a fingernail – the wrong string, the wrong note, the wrong chord – and there would be this hall-filling blast. A power he didn’t want, the amplification of his inadequacy.

  His head felt hot. The sweat on his face was like cream. Moira Cairns said smokily in his head, Let me get this right: if you reappear on stage now, the audience isnae gonnae be thinking, “Ah, here’s the awfully talented person from Hazey Jane, where the hell’s he been all this time?’ It’s gonnae be like, ‘Hey, is that no’ the big sex offender of 1982 or whenever?’

  Lol hated it here. The half-imagined zinging of the power lines was like the panting of old amps on stage, and like every chord he played, every spadeful he dumped on the heap at the side of the hole, they landed on it, pulling it apart, mauling it: blurred figures in boots and uniforms. Spotlit from several angles, Lol had the clear sensation of digging his own grave, like some prisoner of war, surrounded by uniforms, and he didn’t even notice when the spade found something – something that was actually not softish – until Frannie Bliss, his Liverpool accent cranked up to distortion level, was bawling:

  ‘Stop! What’s dis? What’s dis, what’s dis…?’

  A skull? A human skull caked in clay? Lol was out of there fast, gripping the spade with both hands.

  ‘Leave it,’ Bliss said, as if people were going to rush to the thing in the hole like it was a holy relic. He snatched a lamp and shone it down. ‘Spade, Laurence.’

  Bliss grabbed the spade from him and stood astride the hole. Handing the lamp to Mumford, he started to probe with a corner of the blade. Lol found himself next to the lawyer, Mr Nye, who turned away from him, like Lol had flakes of dead flesh on his arms.

  ‘Hang on,’ Bliss said. ‘What the… ?’ Lol saw something in the hole that was dull and grey and blistered with earth. Bliss said, ‘Right. Fetch Roddy. Now.’

  He got the spade under it and levered it half out.

  It was not a skull.

  ‘Suitcase, boss?’ One of the police crouched down. The curved, shiny bit, Lol saw, was a metal corner-support.

  ‘Too small.’ Bliss looked down in disgust, like a kid on Christmas Day who didn’t get the bike after all. ‘Attaché case, more like. Feels like it’s bloody empty. I said, fetch Roddy!’

  Lol, thinking he was maybe the only person here who was relieved, walked away from the lights towards the shelter of the garage.

  Hands in leather seized his left arm and spun him around. White flashlight speared his eyes. All around him, there was heavy movement in the mud, scuffling, panting. Torch beams were intersecting erratically in the rain.

  When they let him go without an apology, he realized something had happened.

  ‘Oh shit.’ Panic scraping a young copper’s voice. ‘I can’t bleeding believe this.’

  The initial stampede had been constrained. Procedure now. They were fanning out, covering the ground, lamp and torch beams pooling.

  Someone had gone into the bungalow and put on all its lights. The whole compound was lit up now, multiple shadows climbing the windowless back wall of the garage.

  ‘Somebody,’ Bliss said through his teeth, ‘is going down for this.’ The hoarsened edge to his voice suggesting that he was getting worried it was going to be him.

  The hole in the grass lay abandoned. Someone had taken the case away. There was no stench of decaying flesh, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a body down there, somewhere. Lol stayed away from the hole. Only Roddy Lodge could explain this, and he wasn’t around. Roddy Lodge had taken a personal decision that his presence here was no longer essential. He’d just walked away into the darkness.

  ‘Can’t’ve got out of here,’ Mumford kept saying. ‘That’s for certain. I know this place now, end to end, and if everybody’s stayed in place, he cannot have got out.’

  ‘You better be right, sunshine, for all our sakes.’ Bliss turned to the lawyer, ‘And if you—’

  ‘He was ill.’ Mr Nye had his arms folded and kept looking over his shoulder. Lol instinctively looked over his: how dangerous was Lodge? ‘He was ill,’ the lawyer insisted. ‘There was no question at all that he was ill.’

  ‘I’m not feeling too marvellous meself, pal, and if I thought for one minute that when you asked for those handcuffs to come off—’

  ‘Don’t be absurd!’

  This man’ – Bliss’s forefinger came out like a gun – ‘is a suspected multiple murderer. So don’t you go anywhere, Mr Nye.’

  ‘Is that a thr—?’

  ‘And who the fuck,’ Bliss roared out, staring past Mr Nye, ‘let these bastards in?’

  Maybe it was the kids driven away from the perimeter tape who’d spread the word. But it wasn’t just kids this time. Lol thought of a football crowd filing through turnstiles. Only with lamps and torches.

  ‘Jesus, it’s a fuckin’ circus!’

  The group of people moving along the path on one side of the garage building was led by a tall woman in a long stock- man’s coat. A lone PC behind them spread his arms, helpless.

  ‘Sorry, sir, they—’

  ‘Get back to the entrance! Now!’ Bliss walked up to the woman. ‘Mrs Sollars, you should know better than this. We’re not running a funfair here.’

  ‘Then what are you running?’ a man demanded. ‘You’ve spent the whole day digging up people’s gardens with abandon. I suppose you thought you were being discreet.’ He looked down at two children. ‘Miles… Ffion… home, please. I did ask you before.’

  One of the kids said, ‘Aw, Fergus!’

  ‘Or there may have to be proportionately less time on line for the whole of next week,’ the man said calmly.

  The woman said, ‘If you’d had the common decency, Inspector, to keep the community informed—’

  ‘Oh, pardon me,’ Bliss snarled. ‘I’ll have a special flyer pushed through everybody’s door next time. Look, I don’t have time for this. You’d better go over and stand by that wall, all of you, and stay together, you understand me? Because if any of you gets in my way, I’m gonna do you for obstruction, and that’s not—’

  ‘You’ve mislaid him, haven’t you?’ a man with a white beard said. ‘You don’t have Roddy right now.’

  ‘I’m telling you not to come any further. Stay together. And

  ‘don’t let anyone else in here. Can you do that? Can you do that for the sake of the community?’ Bliss began to walk away.

  The bearded man said, ‘You don’t look very far, do you?’ He had a vaguely transatlantic accent. He wore a loose denim jacket and a plaid cap, and he had a canvas bag hanging from a shoulder strap. Also good night-vision, Lol figured; although he didn’t have a torch, he was peering around into the dark areas.

  Bliss continued for a couple of paces and then stopped.

  Lol saw exactly where the bearded man was gazing.

  Up.

  19

  On Angels

  JANE HAD GONE upstairs for a bath, leaving Merrily hunched by the sitting-room fire, feet in woolly socks, cardigan buttoned to the top, but still feeling cold. She pulled St Thomas Aquinas from the shelf: Aquinas on Angels. Intellectual exercise could sometimes deflate anxiety.

  She opened the paperback, immediately shut it again, snatched up the cordless and tried Lol’s phone. It was now over a week sin
ce she’d seen him, and, OK, it felt very much longer – really, what kind of relationship was this? To Jane, for whom two nights without a call from Eirion was cause for sleep-loss, it must look like a trial separation.

  Merrily felt angry, frustrated, losing her grip – a marionette with its strings pulled in different directions by Jenny Box, Uncle Ted, Frannie Bliss and… Jane? Like, what had happened suddenly to turn the kid into the self-appointed voice of rationality in this household?

  ‘The phone you are calling is switched off…’

  Inevitably.

  Nearly two hours into darkness, now. Were they still out there digging for Frannie’s corpses on the windy fringe of the Forest? Merrily tapped in Gomer’s home number, on the off chance that they were out of there.

  ‘This yere is Gomer Parry Plant Hire. We en’t in, but that don’t mean we en’t available, so you be sure and leave your number.’

  Damn.

  Merrily hit end and tossed the phone on the sofa. Slumping down with the book, she found St Thomas Aquinas no more accessible.

  It is not necessary that the place where an angel is should be spatially indivisible; it can be divisible or indivisible, greater or less, according as the angel chooses, voluntarily, to apply his power to a more or less extended body. And the whole body, whatever it be, will be as one place to him.

  She read the paragraph twice more. You could always rely on Thomas to make you feel totally thick. Hard to imagine a mind this colossal functioning within a society of bows and arrows, boiling oil, trial by ordeal… but then, inside grey walls in the thirteenth century, with no TV or radio or phones or kids, only a solitary circle of candlelight, a trained intellect powered by spiritual energy might well acquire laserlike focus.

  In the dog grate, a mix of coal and apple logs burned with an intensity that she could neither feel nor find in herself. To be a serious student of Aquinas, theology was not enough. You also needed to be Stephen Hawking.

  An angel is in contact with a given place simply and solely through his power there. Hence his movement from place to place can be nothing but a succession of distinct power contacts.