by Phil Rickman
Lol shrugged.
‘One day,’ Moira warned, ‘your shoulders are just gonnae freeze up. Let me get this right: if you reappear on stage now – nearly two whole decades later – the whole 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?” You really think that?’
‘No,’ Lol said too quickly. ‘Look…’ He turned to her. ‘I’m really grateful, Moira, and if I could do it I’d be – you know – I’d be incredibly proud. But we’re talking albatross here. Like what you don’t need around your neck.’
‘Now, listen, I’m a vulnerable wee creature behind the shell.’ She came and sat next to him on the side of the bed. ‘I need compatible support. I don’t need flash, I need sensitive and faintly flawed.’
‘You need somebody who can get the chords right and won’t just stand there in a pool of sweat.’
‘Laurence…’ She took him by the shoulders. ‘You can do this. You have to do this. Where’s your main income from?’
‘This and that. Royalties.’
‘From songs? From the old Hazey Jane albums? I wouldnae even like to ask how much that comes to. What’s your girlfriend say about it?’
Lol tensed. ‘Girlfriend?’
‘The wee priest?’ Moira said patiently. ‘I bet even the wee priest earns more in a year than you do.’
‘Who, er… who told you… ?’
‘Prof told me. Simon told me. Now, see, there’s something – I ‘mean, I shouldnae have to spell this out to an ex-loony who trained as a shrink, but that’s something you did overcome. Rejected by the born-again parents, and now here y’are in a close personal relationship with an Anglican priest. Major psychological breakthrough, or what?’
Lol stared down at the bedside rug. ‘They weren’t supposed to say anything about that.’ Which sounded a little pathetic.
‘Who?’
‘Prof… Simon.’
Moira blinked. ‘But you’re an item, right? You and the priest. You’re “going out together”.’
‘Well, we…’ Lol smiled ruefully. ‘We stay in together. Sometimes.’
Moira stared at him.
‘Or rather we just don’t go out anywhere very public. She’s… inevitably, like a lot of women priests, especially in a country parish, she’s insecure about some things… attitudes. I don’t want to make it any more difficult for her.’
It started to rain, a pattering on the east window.
‘Lol, what year is this?’
‘Yeah, I know, it sounds ridiculous. But when you consider that she also has this other… this other thing she does in the diocese.’
‘Exorcist. Yeah, I know… they don’t talk about it.’
‘She still tends to attract publicity,’ Lol said. ‘I mean, there still aren’t that many women priests in the UK, let alone women… Deliverance ministers. So if the press found out, even the local press…’
‘Ah.’ Moira contemplated this, supporting her chin with a hand, gnawing the side of a finger. ‘Right. I think I get the picture. Crazy woman who pursues evil spirits for a living takes up with ex-loony singer with a conviction for a sex offence.’
‘Not good, is it?’
Moira Cairns shook her head slowly. ‘Jesus, Laurence, you don’t go out of your way to make things easy for yourself, do you?’
Lol smiled his hopeless smile.
10
Caffeine
IN THE EARLY afternoon, with wind-driven rain coming in hard from Wales and the last of the apples down on the vicarage lawn, the police arrived.
Actually, just one of them: DI Francis Bliss, of Hereford CID, which was a relief; it meant this was informal. DI Bliss sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee greedily. He was unshaven, been up all night, couldn’t hide his excitement.
‘Merrily, we’ve gorra name.’
‘For the… ?’
‘Dead person.’
‘Oh.’
They had Merseyside in common, he and Merrily, if not synchronistically. She’d been a curate there, her first job in the clergy, her baptism of fire and acid, but good times, on the whole. By the time she’d arrived in Liverpool, Frannie Bliss – stocky, red-haired, raised a Catholic in Kirby – would already have left. It was unclear how he’d wound up in Hereford.
He folded his hands around his warm mug.
‘Lynsey Davies. Local woman. Reported missing back in the middle of August by her partner – I say “partner”… one of her partners. The father of two of her kids, anyway, which he reckons gives him first claim.’
‘Claim on what?’
‘On any compensation that might be due to the dependants of a murder victim, I imagine. Everybody talks compensation now. You don’t have a loss, you have an opening for gain.’
‘Not a loving relationship, then.’
‘With Lodge on the side?’ Frannie Bliss sniffed. Merrily, feeling chilly even inside her oldest roll-neck woolly, carried her ashtray to the table and slumped down opposite him. It was a day for despairing of people. Bliss’s excitement depressed her. But then, if everybody enjoyed their jobs that much, the sum of human happiness… She surrendered to confusion and lit a cigarette.
‘When you say “local”… ?’
‘Village called Underhowle. Backside of Ross-on-Wye, where it joins the Forest of Dean. I’d never been there before. Lodge has his depot on the outskirts, and a bungalow he’s built next to it. Lynsey Davies lived in a council house in Ross. She was thirty-nine, had four kids by three different blokes, and was apparently Roddy’s intermittent girlfriend. A fun-loving lady.’
‘So she was… identifiable, then.’
Frannie smiled thinly. ‘Ah… not strictly. The ex-partner, Paul Connell, reckons he doesn’t mind having a quick glance, but I’m not sure how useful that would be. It does help a bit that the body was dumped in pea-gravel rather than soil, with this big tank thing on top, so it’s not as badly eaten-up as you might expect after a couple of months underground. And the clothes tie in. We’ve sent for dental records, anyway.’
‘Lodge actually took it… her out of the ground?’
‘Dug down by the side of the tank, fished her out – probably manually. Dumped her in the shovel of the digger, tucked her in nicely.’
Merrily shuddered, recalling the mud drying on the front of Roddy Lodge’s leather jacket, on his trousers.
‘The, er, you know, the bodily fluids, they’d have gradually drained out through the gravel,’ Bliss said. ‘So although she was a big girl, the body wouldn’t’ve weighed that much. Wouldn’t’ve taken a great feat of strength for Roddy to roll her onto a couple of feed sacks and lift her out of the pit and into the shovel.’
Merrily thought of Roddy Lodge’s pungent aftershave, wondering if he’d plastered it on to combat the smell. Didn’t make too much sense; this was a man who installed foul drainage.
She and Gomer had seen the big digger go rumbling past while they were waiting for the police on the pub car park – the body presumably out in front, sunk into the raised-up shovel like an offering to the moon. Gomer had wanted to follow Lodge; Merrily had talked him out of it. Half an hour or so later, the police had cornered Roddy at his depot. The woman’s body was still under the tarpaulin. Not much room for denial.
‘How did she die?’
‘The PM should be taking place as we speak.’ Evidently, Frannie didn’t want to say how she’d died. He finished his coffee. ‘Can I go over a few points? According to your statement, you and Mr Parry went to this house because you had reason to think Roddy would be going there to retrieve this septic-tank unit. The, er…’
‘Efflapure. But we didn’t expect him to be there.’
‘Right.’ He lifted his cup. ‘Don’t suppose… ?’
‘Sure.’ She went to fetch the coffee pot, trying to recall what she’d said in her brief statement to a detective const
able in Hereford in the early hours. ‘I know it all sounds unlikely, Frannie, but you have to remember we were both pretty hyped- up last night. There was no way Gomer was going to go home and sleep. But we really didn’t expect to find Lodge there.’
‘Actually, Merrily, it all sounds far enough off the wall to be true, given the circumstances, even if I didn’t know you well enough to think it unlikely in the extreme that you’d lie to the police.’ He beamed at her. ‘But in fact we’ve also spoken to Mrs Pawson in London, who confirms Lodge insisting that he should be the one who took the thing away. Which, of course, now makes perfect sense. Not a question of professional pride, as you assumed, but the fact that the bugger had a body buried underneath it, and he was panicking at the thought of it getting discovered by Gomer Parry. Makes a lorra sense, from Roddy’s point of view.’
It doesn’t really make sense to me that he should bury a body under a septic tank.’ Merrily poured Bliss more coffee and saw his wrist quiver; after a long night, he must be sizzling with caffeine. ‘I mean, OK, he might not have expected it to be dug up again within weeks, but surely there was always going to be a chance that some day it was going to be re-excavated. They don’t last a lifetime, do they?’
‘They can last a lifetime, apparently. But yeh, I do see what you mean. But you’ve gorra remember we’re not dealing with a fully rational person. A feller who drives through the night with a body held up in his bloody digger’s shovel…’
‘He did kill her, then? I mean, there’s no suggestion that he might have been getting rid of a body for someone else?’
‘An extension of his waste-disposal empire? He’s arrogant and daft enough, but I don’t see it, do you? My feeling is we’ll have a confession before dark. I’m leaving him to stew for a few hours. I’m not hurrying.’
This was not Merrily’s impression. She still wasn’t quite sure why Bliss was here. She’d expected a visit at some stage, but not so early in the investigation, and it wasn’t as if Ledwardine was on the Ross side of Hereford. This was a special trip.
‘Will you be talking to Gomer again? Because Jane’s round there at the moment. I don’t particularly want…’
Jane was making Gomer’s lunch. The kid had still been awake when Merrily had got in around 5.45 a.m. Neither of them had really slept after that.
‘Er… yeah.’ Frannie Bliss sounded doubtful. ‘We will be talking to Mr Parry again at some stage, obviously. Though I’ve gorra tell yer it might be less easy than he thinks to prove that Roddy Lodge torched his yard.’
‘And, besides, you’ve got something more important, now?’
Bliss looked pained. ‘Don’t put it like that. I know the lad’s dead, and I’m not saying it wasn’t down to Roddy. But while he’s still dodging around Lynsey Davies, he’s flatly denying the bloody fire. Says Parry’s three sheets in the wind, gorra grudge, professional rivalry, all this kind of shite. Roddy is indeed very ‘proud of his professional standing – among other things. Could be Forensics’ll find traces of combustibles on his clobber, but meanwhile, all I’m saying is, let’s get him sewn up on the easy one first, then see what else we can discuss with him. It’s been a long night, Merrily.’
‘What about DNA?’
‘After a fire?’
‘But you’ve charged him.’
‘Er… no. No, I haven’t. Not yet.’
‘Oh?’
‘I want it in the papers,’ Bliss said. ‘If he’s charged, it’s sub judice and the clamps go down. I want it splurged all over the papers, radio, TV, the lot, that we’ve found a woman’s body under a new-fangled septic tank and that a thirty-five-year-old man is helping with inquiries. I want people to think about it and talk about it. Not just in the village. I want the name Efflapure in the public domain.’
‘I’m sorry…’ She poured another coffee for herself, maybe thinking it would attune her to Bliss’s wavelength. ‘Why?’
‘’Cause Roddy works over a wide area.’
‘Yes.’ I done tanks for all the nobs all over the Three Counties and down into Wales. I done Prince Charles’s fuckin’ sewage over at Highgrove.
‘See, what I’m looking for, Merrily, is a full list of all the Efflapures or anything else he’s put in. We’ve got his books, but we all know that, with a bloke like Roddy, they won’t all be down on paper for the taxman. I want to know exactly where he’s been.’
She nodded. She didn’t really get this – too tired, maybe – but she nodded anyway.
‘Merrily,’ Bliss said. ‘You’re a woman.’
‘Yeah, I still like to think so.’ Suddenly, despite – or maybe because of – her fatigue and the sordid, sickening nature of the discussion, she felt a piercing need to be in Lol Robinson’s bed in the white room in the granary. She looked away, knowing she was blushing.
And a priest.’ Bliss sat up in his chair, facing her with both hands flat on the table, his voice becoming Scouse-nasal. ‘And you’ve been close to evil. Closer than most priests, I’d say, even if you’ve not been at it long. So I just want to ask you – off the record – about the kind of stuff that’s not in your statement. I want to know how you felt about Roddy. As a priest. As a woman.’
She met his gaze. His eyes were bright with caffeine and candid ambition. She liked Bliss, actually – more than she liked his boss DCI Howe, who was apparently away on something called an SIO Module course. But she wasn’t quite ready to say how she felt about Roddy Lodge.
You come and talk to me any time you want.
Thanks. I’d like that.
Yeah. You would indeed, my darlin’.
She said, ‘You’re leading the inquiry then, Frannie?’
‘So far,’ he said. ‘But I may not have long before somebody takes over, you know how it goes.’
‘So all that about being in no hurry…’
‘… Was bollocks. Yeah. Truth is, Merrily, I’m chasing a feeling about this feller. I’m supposed to’ve gone home for a kip ages ago, but I’ve been driving round thinking about it.’
‘Roddy?’
He nodded. ‘What I reckon…’ He took a breath and seemed to be swirling it around his cheeks before letting it out. ‘I reckon there could be more of them. More Lynseys.’
The problem was, Jane realized, that nobody really understood Gomer. They looked at this weedy little old guy in the bottle glasses and they somehow failed to see the rebel warrior crunching down the border clay on his grunged-up caterpillars, swinging the arm of his JCB like some huge broadsword. They couldn’t discern the elemental side of Gomer. Even Mum, who should have known better by now, had been like, Keep an eye on him… make sure he takes it easy… don’t let him overreact.
They didn’t understand. Overreaction was what kept Gomer fully alive.
He’d agreed finally to let Jane go to the chip shop, then he’d left half his lunch. All morning he’d kept phoning people, in a compulsive kind of way. No! he’d go. It don’t matter what you’ve yeard, it en’t over! Gimme a week, I’ll be back to you. Gimme ten days, max!
But there was a dullness in his glasses.
‘I’ve got my provisional licence now.’ Jane wrapped the congealing chips in their newspaper and dumped them in Gomer’s kitchen bin. ‘I could work for you weekends. I mean JCBs… it’s just a matter of experience and technique, right?’
‘And an HGV licence,’ Gomer said heavily.
‘Oh. That, too, certainly. I knew that.’
She also knew that, in some curious way, he wouldn’t feel free to mourn Nev until he’d secured the business. If he let it go, it would be a kind of betrayal. In the same way, the small, modern kitchen was amazingly clean and neat, everything shiny – the way Minnie had kept it, but not like a shrine, Jane thought. A shrine was static and frozen; in here you could still feel Minnie’s busy spirit, and Gomer needed that. Like he always needed to know the big diggers were out there, oiled and ready to move the earth.
The kitchen window overlooked the orchard, out of which the buttresse
d church spire rose like a rocket on its launching pad. Starship Mum. Soon to be transmitting soft porn, if Uncle Ted got his way.
Everything was getting out of proportion.
Jane said, ‘I suppose, if you could wipe off the jobs you’ve already got on the stocks, you could take some time to kind of reorganize things. Like, reduce the scale of the operation.’
Gomer looked up. ‘Ar. Mabbe you put your finger on it there, Janey. Gotter deal with the commitments first, ennit? I en’t given up hope. I know where I can rent a digger, and there’s a coupler fellers I know would likely help me out, but they won’t be in till tonight, see.’
‘I suppose it’s going to be an even smaller pool, now that this Roddy Lodge is going to be… whatever happens to him.’
Gomer’s glasses, she would swear, darkened. Jane could’ve punched herself for bringing this up again. This whole Lodge thing was very weird and sick. When Mum had told her, she’d felt obliged to feign disappointment at missing the excitement, but in reality she was glad she hadn’t been there. Awfully glad, too, that Mum had got herself and Gomer out of it, avoiding confrontation. Jane had learned that, in situations involving crime and death, only distance lent any kind of excitement. The fact that this Lodge, in all probability, had killed Fat Nev, who Jane had known – OK, not well, but she could picture him, could hear his voice, knew what a crappy life he’d had – made the guy repulsive, a monster.
But Gomer was different. Somehow, for Gomer, the discovery of the woman’s body in the truck had been almost a frustrating development, an intrusion coming between him and the man who’d murdered his nephew and wrecked his business. Did Gomer feel – maybe unconsciously – a certain resentment towards Mum for forcing him to take the easy way out, let the police handle it?
Unlikely, because Gomer’s affection for Mum was almost a father–daughter thing.
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.