The Lamp of the Wicked

by Phil Rickman

‘Look…’ Her voice felt warm and soothing, full of pulpit- projection. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him. The police… the police said Nev had been drinking heavily, and they think he probably started the fire himself, accidentally.’

  She didn’t look at Gomer, but she could feel it setting around him: a shabby concrete overcoat of bafflement and betrayal. She lowered her voice.

  ‘He’s an old man, Mr Lodge. He’s lost everything. When he wanted me to drive him here, I… I didn’t know anything about this… whatever history there is between you and him. I just assumed this place… that it held some memories for him and Nev, or something. I don’t know what he’s got against you or why it’s come up now, but I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Turned his mind, is it?’ Roddy said.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll come through this, with help. I’m just… I mean, I hope you’re not going to go to the police or anything. I promise you I’ll talk to him.’

  ‘Come and talk to me, you want, sweetheart.’ Roddy grinned. It was a wide engaging grin, but separate from his eyes, which seemed to have their own staccato light, like the sparks from her Zippo. ‘Vicar, eh? I goes and talks to our vicar sometimes. Nice feller.’ He unzipped a breast pocket of his leather jacket. ‘En’t as sexy as you, though. I reckon he’s a bit scared of me, tell the truth.’ He laughed, a high barking. ‘I scared him, I did. I scared the ole vicar.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Told him ’bout all the things I seen in the night. Spooky!’

  ‘Sounds… interesting.’

  ‘Well, then…’ Merrily didn’t move as Roddy pulled out a card and came right up to her. ‘You come and talk to me any time you want. Any time. And anything you want doing, I’m your man. Special rates for the Church, look.’

  He inspected her face, as though he was committing it, feature by feature, to memory.

  ‘Thanks.’ She took the card. ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Roddy said. ‘You would indeed, my darlin’.’

  Merrily walked away without once looking back, Gomer following behind like a beaten old dog. She didn’t look at him, either.

  She walked along the side of the big yellow digger without glancing at it or breathing in, walked out of the gateway and along the verge of the A49, with the long grass wet and cold around her ankles, sensing that Roddy Lodge was watching them and so not hurrying, not giving in to the urge to run, to the pushing in her chest. She walked around the bend in the road to where the van was almost embedded in the hedgerow. She unlocked the van and opened the door wide, so that Gomer could climb across to the passenger seat, where he sat in silence, sagging, as if all the life-energy had been vacuum-pumped out of him. She got into the van and turned the key in the ignition and for a moment was afraid it wasn’t going to start, but the engine caught on the second turn and she waited until there were no headlights in view before carefully reversing the van out onto the road. She drove for a mile or so in the direction of Ross before pulling off the road into the car park of a darkened pub. She switched off the engine but left the headlights on, illuminating a hanging sign featuring a rabbit or a hare, with a fluffy tail, seen from behind.

  Merrily needed light. She needed to see anything coming. She tossed her head back over the peeling vinyl of the driving seat and let the breath out of her mouth, and when it came out it was an enormous sob, her body slumping into shudders.

  ‘Vicar?’

  She held the wheel as if she was never going to let it go. ‘Couldn’t you smell it?’

  He didn’t reply. He didn’t understand.

  Merrily pulled herself up and found her phone. She couldn’t remember the number of Hereford Police. She’d have to ring 999 and see if they could put her through to anyone in CID.

  ‘I stum— stumbled, Gomer. Grabbed hold of this tarpaulin in the shovel of the digger, and it came away.’ She switched on the phone and turned to look at him. ‘I know… I know the smell now, you see. From when we found Barbara Buckingham. You remember. No mistaking it ever again, is there?’

  Gomer lurched to the edge of his seat. ‘In the shovel?’

  ‘Thought I was hallucinating at first. Thought it was the shock… you know, of seeing Nev and… But it wasn’t the same. This one was putrid. State of decay.’

  Merrily stabbed 9 three times. Later she would have to call Jane and explain why she might not be home until dawn, or later.

  Part Two

  His intelligence was born in the fields and woods on the very edge of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, honed in the thickets of the countryside, nurtured in a world where it was sometimes safer to kill a man than to kill a hare.

  Geoffrey Wansell An Evil Love

  9

  Phobia

  THE WOMAN IN Lol’s bed smiled sleepily. An arm came out, a long, warm forefinger touching his lips as he bent down.

  ‘Before you say a word,’ she said, ‘I will tell you right now, from the bottom of ma heart, that it was very, very good.’ Looking into his eyes now and slithering up in the rumpled bed like a mermaid breaking surface. ‘And also right. Right for this moment. What I so much needed. OK?’

  Lol sighed.

  ‘OK, Laurence?’ She took away her finger but stilled him with her gaze, even though one eye was lost under this tumble of black hair with the long, pale streak, like a vein of silver in onyx.

  ‘Ah, well, you were good.’ Lol straightened up ‘You were wonderful. Me…’ He shrugged, spread his hands, did all this stuff that he was afraid was going to look deliberately self- deprecating. Uncomfortable now, he looked away, out of the left-hand window, where the mid-morning sky over Knight’s Frome was grey and shiny with unshed rain. It made the window seem like a square of tin plate in the wall of freshly plastered rubble-stone.

  ‘Aye, all right…’ She swung her legs out of bed. ‘If you push me, I’ll concede that “good” was maybe just faintly inappropriate. But “right” was… right. See, I was with this young guy before – doesnae matter who, these kids’re ten a penny, believe me: slick, cool, deft… and empty, you know? Awful proficient, sure, but proficiency isnae even halfway there, especially when it’s like received technique – out of Jansch, out of Thompson, John Fahey, whoever. In addition, I was getting well fed up with him trying to get into ma knickers.’

  Like Merrily, she wore a long T-shirt in bed – this one worn thin from many washings; the faded figure on it with the top hat seemed, at one time, to have been Bugs Bunny.

  ‘Like I should be grateful to him for being fifteen years younger, you know?’ Moira said. ‘Jesus, the arrogance of these guys.’

  She stretched and the T-shirt rode up and, through the thin cotton, Lol saw her nipples over the rabbit ears. He backed up, embarrassed, catching the edge of the tea tray, which rattled.

  ‘Like I’m some hag,’ Moira said. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hair almost reaching the duvet. She started rearranging the things on the tray. ‘This is entirely wonderful, Laurence, but faintly ridiculous. Why not just leave me a kettle?’

  ‘Prof’s orders,’ Lol said.

  He’d awoken her with a call to her mobile, as arranged, at eight, and then carried the tray rapidly along two hundred yards of mud track before the teapot could cool, and then up fourteen stone steps to the granary. There’d be a small kitchen here eventually; meanwhile, Prof had said he wanted Moira Cairns looked after in the old-fashioned way. This apparently was something to do with memories of Moira bringing morning tea and toast to his room when they were recording, way back.

  ‘Ach,’ said Moira when Lol went on to remind her of this, ‘that was just to make sure the auld bastard didnae take anything stronger.’ She poured tea, steam rising. ‘Tell me, how’s he doing now, in that particular area?’

  ‘Carries this cappuccino machine around with him like a teddy bear. I don’t think there’s ever been anything stronger in the house.’

  Moira nodded approvingly, sugaring her tea. Lol suspected she was sitting on a w
hole stack of horror stories about Prof’s drinking days.

  ‘And now you’re here as well, keeping an eye on him. Good arrangement, on the whole?’

  Lol hesitated. He’d been here for several months now, since abandoning plans to become a psychotherapist; since Prof Levin had persuaded him to work on the long-awaited solo album that was not, in Lol’s view, long-awaited by as many people as Prof seemed to imagine. But now the album was virtually finished and Lol didn’t think he was doing enough around the studio to justify his de luxe accommodation. It was a good arrangement, certainly. Altogether too good.

  ‘Apart, that is, from when characters like me come down to strut our prima donna stuff and pinch your lovely wee apartment,’ Moira said. ‘Where are you sleeping yourself, meantime?’

  ‘Oh… in the loft over the end of the studio. I slept there most of the summer anyway. It’s fine.’

  ‘It’s no’ summer now, though. There’ll be no heating in there, will there, once the studio’s off?’

  ‘It’s fine, honestly.’

  Moira smiled, crow’s feet developing, but it didn’t matter at all; this woman would be sexy at seventy. ‘This wee place, though, I have to say, is… totally magical. All those steps – like a tower house. You can stand at the window at night… the lights of Malvern in the distance. Would that be the town itself? Great Malvern?’

  ‘West Malvern. I think.’

  ‘Best not to know for sure,’ Moira said. ‘All distant lights at night should be the lights of fairyland. There to inspire us, but just out of reach.’ She looked at him over the rim of her cup. ‘Makes you uneasy, living here?’

  ‘Just a bit.’ Her level of perception was increasingly scary.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Too perfect, I suppose. Paradise syndrome?’

  The granary was on the edge of a field sloping down towards the Boswells’ place and well separated from the stable block housing the recording studio. Prof Levin had managed to buy it, along with adjacent outbuildings and two acres of land, when parts of the surrounding Lake estate had been sold off at the end of the summer.

  ‘But then,’ Moira said, ‘to a lot of people, this’d just be a high- level hovel in the middle of a muddy field, inconvenient to get to and too small to do anything decent with. It’s a personalized concept, paradise.’

  ‘Well… yeah…’ When Prof had suggested that he might like to move in here, Lol had suspected, although nothing had been said, that Prof was also thinking about Merrily, with whom Lol must never be seen.

  ‘I would say you’d become like a son to Prof,’ Moira said, ‘but possibly that would be overstating it just a tad. You’re somebody he feels he has to help because he knows you’re never gonnae help yourself. Like, if the whole ideology of this place is the Prof devoting the glorious sunset of his career to assisting – pardon me – the underdogs, like you, out of the money raised from the fat cats like me…’ She threw up her hands. ‘Whoops! Did that sound like charity?’

  ‘I’ve no illusions, Moira,’ Lol said. ‘It is charity.’

  ‘Unless, of course’ – she raised a forefinger – ‘he gets it all back on the album.’

  ‘Y–e–s.’

  ‘Although we all know that unless you’re immensely famous already, it’s bugger-all use making an album if you’re no’ gonnae tour it.’

  ‘Ah…’ He should’ve seen this coming.

  ‘Whereas a good tour’s almost guaranteed to put an album into profit.’

  Lol sighed.

  ‘But, of course, we both know the Prof has no interest whatsoever in payback. Only, the way I see it, this is gonnae nag away at you, until you have to really do something about the whole… what? Allergy? Phobia?’

  Lol went to look out of the window, over the Frome Valley. Across the meadow, he could see the Boswells’ beloved donkey, Stanley, browsing his paddock, taking it all for granted, like he was only collecting a little of what was due to his species after centuries of toil and maltreatment.

  ‘Obviously,’ Moira said, ‘when you’ve been out of it a long time, it’s bloody hard – especially on your own.’

  ‘Nearly twenty years. I was just a kid.’

  ‘Good long time for the fear to feed. Which is what fear does. Like I’ve got these ten dates provisionally fixed for the winter, and that’s gonnae start off being an ordeal, no question, even after two and a bit years.’

  Lol turned back into the white room, where Moira Cairns was sipping her tea. His feeling was that the word ‘ordeal’ would not, in Moira’s thesaurus, carry any significant cross-reference to playing live in front of an audience.

  ‘OK, listen now. Laurence…’ She was watching him over her cup. ‘Bottom line: if this proposed tour goes ahead, how would you feel about being part of that?’

  Lol went hot, then cold.

  ‘Aye, I know. All right, sunshine, don’t panic.’ Moira put down the cup and stood up, this beautiful, scary mature woman in faded Bugs Bunny nightwear. ‘Stay right there. I have to take a pee. You stay right there and consider all your get-out lines. But also… remember how it was last night.’

  This morning was actually the first time he’d been alone with her. Last night in the studio, Prof had been there the whole time and also Simon St John, who was the vicar of Knight’s Frome and played bass and cello. Simon knew Moira Cairns from way back, when they were part of the same band, having its albums engineered, then produced, by Prof Levin. So this was in the way of a reunion, with Lol, the outsider, getting involved because he just happened to be here. Moira’s new album would be the first major-league product of Knight’s Frome Studio, where Prof wanted music to be made at leisure, songs laid down as and when, no pressure on anyone. Timeless.

  Lol couldn’t remember which of them had suggested they should try one of his songs – as if Moira didn’t have enough of her own. The idea had just seemed to arise, and they’d wound up re-working his neo-traditional ballad about the changing face of the English village, ‘The Baker’s Lament’. At first Moira was singing, with Lol on guitar. And then – and he wasn’t sure how this had come about, either – Lol had taken over the vocal, Simon St John threading cello through it, sinuous and low-lying like the River Frome, and Moira contriving this incredible harmony.

  Prof had recorded both versions, and it had been, like Moira said, kind of… interesting. Not technically terrific, but there was something going on, something organic, something visceral. Something a little wonderful. All those years since Hazey Jane folded, and Lol had felt like part of a band again.

  Of course, it was just for amusement – a dream, a fantasy sequence. Who wouldn’t imagine they sounded good, recording with Moira Cairns? Moira, who now lived in seclusion most of the year on the Isle of Skye, coming out to perform only rarely, leaving deep tracks strewn with legends. Moira who had been born half-gypsy in Glasgow. Who was said to be possessed of ‘the sight’. A goddess of folk-rock. The vein of silver in the long black hair – how many pictures had he seen of that? Never before over a Loony Toons T-shirt, of course, but…

  Why should she want to do this for someone she’d only known for a few hours? A favour to Prof? Laying all her hard- won credibility on the line as a favour to Prof? Last night it had seemed magical; now it was merely unreal.

  ‘Tell you what I’m thinking,’ she called from the bathroom. ‘Maybe we should do the one gig, to begin with. Just to see how it goes, yeah?’

  Lol sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Moira said, ‘Sorry, what was that? Couldnae hear with the taps on. See, what’s happening, I’m booked to play somewhere called The Courtyard in Hereford in… I think it’s a week on Wednesday. We could use that, for starters. As an experiment?’

  Lol’s heel clinked on something under the bed.

  ‘Nothing formal, nothing on the posters – I mean, too late anyway. You just show up, drift in and out as you please. Then we toss in a couple of your own numbers, see how it feels.’

  Lol already knew
how it would feel. He could already sense his fingers sweating on the frets. With any more than three other people in the room, all the chords would crumble, he’d lose the tune, forget the words. And in any audience, there were always going to be two or three people who would remember…

  He bent down. The item under the bed proved to be his kettle, its flex coiled up next to it. All that stuff about the morning-tea tradition never had made total sense – if Prof thought it was important to return old favours, why hadn’t he brought the tray?

  A set-up.

  Moira Cairns came out of the bathroom, looking fresh and composed in a lime-green kimono.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘where do you wannae start?’

  Well, naturally, Lol didn’t want to start at all. Hadn’t he done half a college course in psychotherapy, worked for a while with an analyst and counsellor in Hereford? He could deconstructit all very efficiently for himself, thank you, even down to the implications of his Nick Drake fixation: Nick Drake had made three classic albums but was always afraid to perform in public. Consequently, perhaps, the albums had undersold, and Nick Drake, undervalued, had died of an overdose of antidepressants.

  ‘But, Lol, the poor guy was mentally ill,’ Moira pointed out. ‘And you never were. You were just a victim of the system, with no support at all to fall back on when this… bastard bass-player very kindly gets you a conviction for having sex with a fifteen- year-old girl – to keep himself out of the shit – when you were – what, eighteen… nineteen?’

  ‘Thereabouts.’ She’d evidently been thoroughly briefed by Prof.

  ‘An innocent, all alone – your parents having become these totally insane religious maniacs, who disown you…’

  The more Prof tells the story, the more insane my parents become.’

  ‘… So you fall into the system: unnecessary residential psychiatric so-called care – i.e. drugged senseless by the fucking state.’ Moira tossed back her hair – forked lightning in a night sky. ‘No way that’d happen now, with no damn beds to spare for the real loonies. Laurence, why aren’t you angry?’