The Lamp of the Wicked

by Phil Rickman

  ‘That’s one of the things I’m worried about,’ Merrily said.

  13

  The Tower

  THE CAIRNS WOMAN was sitting alone in the glass-sided recording booth, cradling this curved-backed Ovation guitar. She wore this long, dark blue dress, and the white streak in her tumbled hair was like a silk ribbon that had come undone.

  From up in the darkness of the gallery, about ten feet above the half-lit studio floor, she looked… yeah, OK, impossibly romantic. Made you want to puke. Jane, in her tight little woollen top, directed a resentful glare at Eirion – besotted, the bastard – as the goddess Moira put on her headphones, and began adjusting the tuning on the Ovation.

  On the other side of Jane, in the tiny gallery, was Lol, who wasn’t playing on this track; it was going to be a traditional folk song, stripped down. Jane was relieved to see how Lol kept looking away from the lovely Moira to where Prof Levin was hovering over his mixing board like a bald eagle.

  Earlier, while Eirion had been drooling around the Cairns woman, she’d told Lol and Prof all about Gomer and the hateful pendulum of fate, and the impossible fix the poor little guy was in. And the dilemma: should he even be going back into a really back-breaking job, working alone, at his age? But what would become of him, mentally and emotionally, if he didn’t?

  Prof Levin, who was not that much younger than Gomer, had said that if this plant-hire thing was what the man did, age was a meaningless consideration.

  But he would say that, wouldn’t he, here in his cosy studio?

  Later, Jane had privately conveyed to Lol as much as she knew about the even more grisly sequel to the fire, involving this Roddy Lodge – stuff she hadn’t even passed on to Eirion because Mum had told her not to. But there were going to be no secrets from Lol, right? Nothing to make him feel insecure in the relationship, and therefore open to—

  A low-level fingered riff started up on the guitar, in the drumtight ambience, and then the voice came in: a voice that was low and heavy with dark magic and loaded with this beckoning sexuality.

  Bitch.

  Jane snatched a glance at Lol, noticing that he was looking less than relaxed, maybe wondering – and with reason – why Mum herself hadn’t phoned to explain why she hadn’t been able to see him just lately. He was wearing one of his sweatshirts with the Roswell alien face on the chest and his hair was nearly long enough again for the old ponytail. He was sitting very still. There was more Jane wanted to say but you weren’t allowed even to whisper up here, or the wrath of Prof would come down on everyone, and she couldn’t do that to Eirion, for whom this place was a bloody temple.

  Other people: tact and consideration, walking on eggshells. Life was getting like some fragile little comedy of manners.

  Jane sighed and leaned back in her canvas chair and listened to the song: predictable tragic-ballad stuff about a lady who waited in her tower room, watching every day at the window for her unsuitable suitor – and secret lover – to return from the wars. The way you did. Eirion was nodding, hands on his knees, so impressionable. She glanced at Lol. He was biting his lower lip, the way Mum would when something worrying was taking shape.

  In a traditional narrative ballad, there were no wasted words and no sentiment. Long years passed and the hair of the Lady in the Tower was starting to go grey. Her father was bringing would-be suitors to her door, but of course she wasn’t interested and refused even to see them. Jane thought of Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, waiting for Odysseus to return from Troy.

  As the seasons turned she moaned and cried

  To the moon and the sinking sun.

  And the flowers grew and the flowers died.

  How long can a war go on?

  And then suddenly, in this moment of, like, startling telepathy, Jane began to hear what she was sure Lol must be hearing: the awful subtext of the song. The realization just flew over her, like a ghostly barn owl, and she was sure she must actually have flinched.

  The song was a mirror image of Lol’s own situation. The tower was the granary on the edge of Prof’s land, and the person in the tower was Lol himself – the Lol who would wait for long hours… days… weeks for Mum to come to him… she having to come to him, because of the covert nature of their affair. And it was she who was out there, following a vocation that, for two thousand years, had been the exclusive preserve of men… and working in its darkest places.

  It was Mum who was away at the war.

  Moira’s voice had grown thin with despair. This was a voice that killed the cliché of the form, invoking not so much beery folk clubs as the smoky jazz cellars of another era. A voice laden with doomed love.

  Jane thought, in horror, It has to change, doesn’t it? It can’t go on. She knew that Lol considered his music trivial next to Mum’s spiritual work. He probably felt as confined and helpless, as furious and… impotent, as he once had in periods between medication. Like, outside of a recording booth, he had no reality. It would never occur to him, the way it occurred to Jane, that Mum – and the Church, too – might just be wallowing in self-deception. For Lol, it wouldn’t be the validity of what Mum was doing that mattered as much as her having the nerve to go out and do it.

  One bright morning, the lady in the song is looking out from her tower and sees a lone horseman, and her heart takes a great leap. At this point Moira’s voice rose about an octave, and Jane saw Prof’s bald head nodding in satisfaction.

  She didn’t actually know how the song was going to end, but she knew a bit about traditional music, and she recognized the fearful shrillness of false hope, as Moira Cairns sang:

  It was the springtime of the year

  And the sun was in the sky,

  But the messenger climbed down from his horse

  And night was in his eyes.

  Right. So next time her lover appeared in the tower, it would be as a ghostly apparition. It was always as a ghost. Last night he came to me… my dead love came in…

  When the next verse didn’t come, Jane looked down and saw that the Cairns woman’s fingers had fallen away from the strings. She stood for a moment, as if she’d forgotten the words, and then Jane heard her call across the studio, ‘Listen, Prof, can we leave this one for tonight, huh?’

  Prof said something that Jane didn’t hear. Eirion, clutching the wooden railing at the edge of the narrow gallery, exhaled a word that might have been ‘Awesome.’

  ‘Aye,’ Moira replied to Prof, ‘goose over ma grave. Let’s move on.’

  DI Frannie Bliss, at the wheel again, said, ‘If you ask me, those people, those villagers – the real locals, not the white settlers – they bloody know. They know at gut level that he’s done it before. They’ve more or less given us another name: Melanie Pullman.’

  ‘You’re still naturally suspicious of country people, aren’t you, Frannie?’ Merrily said. ‘You don’t understand them, so they scare you a bit.’

  ‘Balls.’ Bliss drove past the pub with the hare on the sign where, only last night, Merrily and Gomer had huddled over a mobile, waiting for Roddy to drive past with his… cargo. ‘No… all right, they do scare me. They have a different morality. It’s a fact, is it not, that country people kill, without too much thought. Farmers, hunting types – they don’t even question it.’

  ‘It’s still a big step to hunting people.’ She pushed her cold hands into the opposite sleeves of her coat, Chinese style. The car heater wasn’t doing anything for her. Basically, she didn’t want to go to Hereford Police Station to absorb confidences from a killer; she wanted to go home.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bliss said. ‘And unless Lodge opens up to you tonight, we’ll be fighting for every scrap of the picture. And that’s why I want to get into lifting some more septic tanks. Tomorrow, soon as it’s light, if I can.’

  ‘On your own? You’re going to sign out the West Mercia police shovel?’

  ‘Ah, well…’ Bliss speeded up the wipers. ‘As it happens, you’ve put your finger on a minor logistical problem there,
Merrily. I want to lift a couple of Efflapures, right? Now, I could get onto headquarters, obtain the necessary chitties and have a nice, professional JCB team out here… accompanied by a bunch of nice Regional Crime Squad boys with a detective superintendent in green wellies. And it’s bye-bye, Francis, thanks for all your help.’

  ‘Modern policing,’ Merrily said. ‘You can’t get around it.’

  ‘But think what that would cost… and suppose I’m wrong? Also, they’d make a mess of a lorra nice gardens, specially with all this rain we’ve been having. So what I’m saying… how much better, how much more discreet, how much less likely to cause a panic, if we have a small operation conducted by a feller who really knows his Efflapures.’

  ‘It’s an argument, I suppose.’

  ‘Good man, your Mr Parry,’ Bliss said. ‘A very able contractor, everybody says that.’

  Merrily rose up against her seat belt. ‘Forget it!’

  ‘Listen, it makes a lorra sense – feller who can whip ’em out, put ’em back, no mess. Might even make a better job of it.’ But Gomer’s got a personal axe to grind on Roddy Lodge!’

  ‘Which is why I thought he might be happy to do it.’

  ‘Frannie, you are so irresponsible.’

  ‘Aw, Merrily, what’s he gonna do? Plant evidence? Bring his own bodies?’ Bliss drove placidly through the scattered lights of the village of Much Birch. ‘I’m assuming not all Gomer’s plant was destroyed. I mean, he’ll be able to put his hands on a digger of sorts?’

  ‘I’m not even going to answer that.’

  ‘You just did,’ Bliss said. ‘Thank you, Reverend.’

  She scowled. ‘I can’t help feeling that something here’s swallowing us up. Me and Gomer.’

  ‘Let’s not be melodramatic, Merrily.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just you,’ she said, ‘and your voracious ambition.’

  Bliss laughed. Presently they crested a hill, and there was the city of Hereford laid out before them like an illuminated pinball table.

  Post-session, they were all – except for Lol – crammed into the scruffy kitchen behind the studio, where Prof Levin had his cappuccino machine going. Pinned to the wall over the sink was the proposed cover for Lol’s album. He was shown in black and white in an empty field, wearing his Roswell alien sweatshirt. Someone had made him take off his glasses, so that he looked totally disorientated, which was quite a smart move actually, in Jane’s view. The album title was stamped diagonally across the photo in stencilled, packing-case lettering.

  ALIEN

  Which was cool. It was a very cool cover altogether. Like Lol had been taken away and brought back but not to the place he’d been taken from. It wouldn’t have his name on the front, so that the punters would have to take it out of the rack to find out who it was by.

  She asked Prof Levin, ‘Is it actually going to happen for him this time, do you think?’

  ‘Jane, what can I say? It’s a strange and lovely album. It needs word of mouth.’

  ‘People say I’ve got an awfully big mouth.’

  ‘Well, there you go.’

  ‘And Eirion’s very good at manipulating the Net.’

  ‘It all helps.’ Prof Levin wore an oversized King of the Hill T-shirt. His off-white beard was freshly trimmed. He was The Man, Eirion said.

  Right now, Eirion was chatting up The Woman, having done his innocent, nervous approach, all pink-cheeked and lovable, the smarmy git, assuring her he had all her albums. For heaven’s sake, he was too young to have all of Moira Cairns’s albums. Lol, meanwhile, had disappeared.

  ‘So what’s on your mind, Jane?’ Prof said.

  ‘Oh, I… Well, I was just thinking that it would be like seriously useful if Lol was to become mega very soon. I mean, not for the money or the fame, as such.’

  Prof Levin inclined his head, over-conveying curiosity. Behind him, the cappuccino machine was making impatient noises. ‘Give me a moment, darling, and I’ll be with you,’ Prof said to the machine.

  Jane said, ‘Like, if he was so big, so famous… well, we all know it wouldn’t go to his head because… because it just wouldn’t.’

  ‘I agree totally.’

  ‘I mean, if he was famous enough that people would be like, hey, can it really be true that Lol Robinson is going out with some little woman vicar? Does that make sense?’

  Prof Levin considered. ‘Some.’

  ‘See, it’s not as if she thinks she’s any kind of big deal, but he does. He thinks she’s spiritually over his head – like too good for him, I suppose, literally. When in fact he’s probably been to places we can’t even imagine. Mixing with really mad people on a level that even most psychiatrists never reach.’

  Prof said gently, ‘I think perhaps she understands that, Jane. But maybe they have one or two things to work out before they consider going public.’

  ‘I still think it’d be useful if he was out there… up there, recognized, you know? I think he thinks that, too, though he’d never—’

  ‘Give me a break!’ Prof Levin spread his hands. ‘I agree.’

  ‘So is there anything else we can do?’

  Prof shook his head. ‘I think what we do, Jane, just for the moment, is nothing. I think we butt out and let what happens happen.’

  Jane saw him lift his gaze across the room towards the Cairns woman. She heard Eirion asking the Scottish siren something about a man who played the Pennine Pipes, whatever they were. Moira was smiling politely, but her attention was on the doorway – Lol coming in.

  ‘So where’s your mother now, Jane?’ Prof Levin said.

  ‘She’s, er, working, I think.’

  Coming down from the gallery, Jane had said to Lol, I’m sure Mum was going to call you tonight. She’s just been kind of… overburdened. Lol had merely nodded and then gone outside on his own into the night, the alien, Oh God.

  Prof called to Lol, ‘Jane was just telling me she thinks you should get out more.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Jane felt the blush coming, turned her head away. She heard Lol saying, ‘I wouldn’t argue.’ He came over. ‘Prof, would it be feasible for you to spare me for the odd day? I’ve kind of… I’ve just agreed to maybe take on this kind of part-time job.’

  ‘Job?’ Prof said mildly. ‘What kind of job?’

  ‘Manual.’ Lol looked down at his guitarist’s fingers. ‘I’ll wear gloves, obviously.’

  ‘Sure, whatever.’ Prof turned to attend to his cappuccino machine, casually assembling mugs. ‘Manual is fine. Maybe you could also do bingo calling at night, to help destroy your voice.’

  Lol explained to Jane, ‘I called Gomer. I haven’t got an HGV licence or anything, but I can do the hand-digging and things.’

  Jane blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘Just to clear the backlog. Keep the business going until he can get things reorganized.’

  ‘You’re…’ Jane stared at him in dismay. He was sweating lightly, his hair roughed up. ‘You’re going to work with like… shit?’

  Of all the people she’d thought might be able to step in and help Gomer – even considering Eirion, for heaven’s sake. Jane felt herself going deeply red. Humiliated. Conspired against.

  The Cairns woman tossed back her lovely hair and started to laugh her croaky Glaswegian laugh. ‘Aye,’ she said, ‘the therapeutic power of shit – that’s been overlooked for years.’

  On the other hand, it would at least get Lol away from this bitch.

  Pulling into the car park at Hereford Police Station, Bliss said, ‘I’m not even going to attempt to compromise you. This is down to your own conscience, Merrily. No tapes, no video, no tricks, no water glasses up against the door. Just let him talk, and then you can tell me as much or as little as you want to.’

  When Merrily got out of the car, her legs felt as unsupportive as they had last night when she was taking her first steps into the ruins of Gomer’s yard. Bliss joined her under the lighted entrance on the Gaol Street side.

  ‘There’
ll be an alarm you can sound if he makes any kind of move. I’ll show you all that. And we’ll be directly outside.’

  Merrily pushed a hand through her damp hair. ‘Could I go to the loo, first?’ Prayer for guidance. You forgot how many toilet cubicles had served as emergency chapels.

  Please get me through this. They walked up a ramp to the modest entrance. Inside: utility seating under Crimestoppers posters. A man sitting in the window, briefcase by his feet.

  A white-haired sergeant appeared and raised a hand to Bliss. ‘Francis – a moment?’

  ‘Two minutes, Douglas, and I’ll be with you.’ Bliss led Merrily through a door and then through a couple of offices, both unoccupied. ‘You want the lavvy now?’

  Maybe you could show me the room where we’re going to do it?’

  ‘Sure. One of the interview rooms, I thought.’ He smiled tightly. ‘You want to bless it first or something?’

  When she saw the interview room, she thought a blessing wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Claustrophobic was too friendly a word. It was below ground level, a bunker almost opposite the cells, a windowless cube no more than nine feet square, with fluorescent lights and air-conditioning vents. The air felt like very old air, re-conditioned.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Merrily said.

  Bliss shrugged. ‘It’s not the flamin’ Parkinson show, Merrily. Now, do you want the bog or do you want to stay here and purify the place while I fetch Roddy?’

  There were two chairs, one small table. A microphone for the tape was plumbed into one of the brown-fibred walls. Merrily sat down in one of the chairs and said glumly, ‘Whatever you like.’

  The white-haired sergeant was in the doorway. ‘Francis…’

  ‘Douglas, can’t this wait?’

  The sergeant said, ‘When you came in, did you happen to notice a young man with a briefcase?’

  ‘Does he concern me?’

  ‘That,’ the sergeant said, ‘was Mr Lodge’s solicitor.’

  Bliss stared at him. ‘Douglas, Mr Lodge hasn’t gorra fuckin’ solicitor. He refused a solicitor. You were there.’

  ‘You go and explain that to this kid, then,’ Douglas said.