The Lamp of the Wicked

by Phil Rickman

  One of the police laughed uncertainly. ‘Got the biggest witness list of all time there, boss. When he’s in the dock—’

  Lol heard Sam Hall saying very quietly, ‘He won’t be, will he?’

  Gomer reached them, muttering.

  ‘We digs holes, is what we do. En’t no affair of ours now.’ His voice was shaking. Lol had never heard Gomer’s voice shaking before, not even with anger. ‘En’t up for no public execution. We just digs holes, ennit?’

  He kept on walking, along the alley by the side of the garage. Lol followed him, holding his spade. At the end of the alley he looked back once and saw Roddy Lodge standing halfway down the arm of the tower, with his hands reaching up, as though other hands were up there in the night sky, waiting to catch him.

  Lol didn’t think he either saw or heard what happened next; maybe his mind edited the moment, a jump cut. All he was fully aware of was the lights going out in Roddy’s bungalow.

  20

  Stadium Rock

  THEY SEEMED to have awoken at about the same time, in the still hollow of the early hours. Merrily sensed him becoming aware, by touch, that she was actually here, in this strange bed, in this unknown timber-framed chamber that was strange to her, too – she’d never slept in here before, the air was different, the sounds in the walls.

  And it was the first time they’d slept together with no sex. Not that they’d slept together many times. Pathetically few, in fact, since they’d first done it in the summer.

  Done it.

  Here she was, thirty-seven years old, actually thinking of it with that old teenage delight in the forbidden. An adventure: two kids in a small, secret room in an ancient house with timbers that creaked and grumbled in the late-October night. It felt deliciously out of time, a place you thought you could never re-enter, soft and sticky and warm and illicit. And in the vicarage… where the vicar might come in and catch you doing it…

  Doing it: more spontaneously thrilling than making love. That hint of…

  Sin?

  Shameful. Utterly. When she thought, It’s me… I’m the vicar, she couldn’t stop giggling and hid her shame under the duvet, because there really was nothing at all to laugh at tonight.

  ***

  Jane had gone off to bed with a book half an hour before Gomer had arrived at the back door. The kid must already have fallen asleep – if she’d heard him, she’d have been straight down.

  It was eleven-fifteen p.m. Gomer had been looking very tired, his glasses half-clouded. In fact, more than tired: perturbed, unhappy. He didn’t seem in the mood to talk.

  He had with him some wreckage dressed in Lol’s clothes.

  ‘Boy en’t in no fit state to drive home, vicar. Figured you might have a bed made up in one of the spare rooms. Being as how you’ve always been strong on the idea of sanctuary, see, for the weary.’

  Yes, Merrily had agreed, that was a possibility. Lol had smiled lopsidedly. There was a smear of dried mud on his forehead. A pocket of his jacket was hanging off. He stood there among the fallen apples, looking like a refugee who’d crossed Eastern Europe on foot. She’d wanted to laugh, and to touch him.

  Gomer said, ‘And I figured you’d wanner know, anyway.’

  Know?

  Evidently, this had not turned out as expected. Looking at Gomer now was reopening narrow channels of anxiety. Merrily hadn’t asked about anything, only offered him some tea and something to eat, which he’d declined, claiming that if he sat down, he wouldn’t get up till morning.

  She’d watched him tramping back to his truck, small and grey against the remaining lights of Ledwardine. There was only one other vehicle parked on the square. She’d gone back in and made some tea for Lol and left him to drink it while she slipped upstairs and quickly made up a bed – in the fifth bedroom, the small one at the back of the house, over the kitchen and therefore warmer than most of them. Also, well away from the stairs leading to Jane’s attic.

  ‘We’ll talk in the morning,’ Merrily had said.

  Lol had wanted to tell her everything now, but she’d slipped away to run a bath for him. He was here, in her home. What else mattered?

  A lot, but it would wait. While he was in the bathroom, she’d stolen most of his clothes and loaded them into the washing machine. When she came back upstairs nearly an hour later, dressed for bed, he was still wrapped in the towel, lying on his stomach on the single divan in the fifth bedroom.

  She’d stood looking at him for quite a while, his compact body, his wet hair, before taking away the towel and covering him with the duvet. Then she’d set her alarm clock on the window sill, knelt and prayed silently, and then slipped in next to him, putting out the light.

  ‘So we… we went back,’ Lol said. ‘How could we not?’

  They had their arms around one another, holding themselves together in the narrow bed in the darkness.

  ‘Chaos. People screaming and pushing, as if they thought the whole area was in danger of becoming electrified. Couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’

  She was visualizing it, recalling the pylon standing over the bungalow in a whole valley polluted with pylons.

  ‘Bliss went crazy. Had everybody thrown out, except Gomer and me – and that was only because he wanted to give Gomer a bollocking.’ Lol stared into the dark. ‘Gomer was right. It turned into a public execution.’

  ‘He wasn’t still… up there?’

  ‘No, he fell off. When we got back to the field, he was lying at the foot of the pylon. Someone said he was still twitching, but I couldn’t…’

  ‘But you didn’t actually see it happen?’ Wanting him not to have. Detailed images lived for years in Lol’s head. Today had left multiple bruises and scratches on his body and his face, and that was enough.

  ‘I don’t know.’ His hand tightened around her upper arm, against the memory. ‘It’s all mixed up with what other people said they saw. There was a bang. A flash of light. He was all lit up for a moment, somebody said.’

  Merrily was picturing Roddy Lodge’s angular, jutting, puppet face jerking in spasms. She shuddered. Was this really where he’d wanted to end up, when he’d slipped quietly away from the police? She recalled him screaming at Gomer that night at the Pawson house: Chicken, then, is it? You chickenshit?

  ‘When we saw him afterwards,’ Lol said, ‘I didn’t know what to expect. Whether he’d be… burned to a crisp. But it doesn’t… this guy told me it’s like a microwave… cooks from the inside.’

  ‘But was he trying to kill himself? Did he know what he was doing?’

  She was feeling leaden inside now, with guilt and remorse, recalling that initial relief when she’d been spared a meeting with Roddy Lodge at Hereford Police Station – because of the intervention of his solicitor, who had insisted his client was mentally ill. Why had Lodge wanted to see her? What had he wanted to tell her that he was refusing, at least at that stage, to tell the police? And would it have made a difference?

  Lol said, ‘In the end, he was holding out his arms. Standing there, on the arm of the pylon, spotlit from all directions, and he’s suddenly flinging out his arms. Bliss had been shouting up to him about the dangers. He shouted back that he was electric already. This was some minutes before he… before the electricity jumped into him. There was this guy there, called Sam, and he’d said that was what might happen. Whether the wind or the rain made a difference, I don’t know, but he couldn’t’ve touched anything. His fingers must’ve been at least a couple of feet from this… hanging thing, the insulator, hanging down from the second arm, above him.’

  ‘This was just after he confessed?’

  She felt his face move against her hair – Lol nodding.

  ‘So Gomer…’

  ‘Bliss obviously blamed Gomer for pushing Lodge to the brink. The confession… obviously that was what Bliss wanted, but not in public. The way it happened, it was like Lodge was – I don’t know…’

  ‘Stealing his glory,’ Merrily said. ‘Stealing th
e case right out of his hands and giving it to everybody. Stealing the whole judicial process. Roddy Lodge having the last laugh, hijacking Frannie’s result. And Gomer…’

  ‘Gomer wasn’t laughing.’

  ‘He’d got what he wanted. Roddy did confess to the fire. And Nev? What about Nev?’

  ‘He said he… fried the fat bastard. So Gomer got his confession, too, finally. It was really odd. All the way back here, he said hardly a word. You’d expect some kind of cathartic reaction. But not a word. I think Gomer was seriously stunned.’

  ‘You travelled all the way back in silence?’ Merrily felt around on the oak-boarded floor for her cigarettes.

  ‘No, he talked about this and that – the tanks and why we hadn’t found any bodies underneath them. How that was one secret Lodge had taken to his grave. Which, of course, is another problem for Bliss. Nobody’s going to tell him where to look now. He could dig up half the county and still not get close.’

  ‘Lot of explaining ahead for Frannie, I’d imagine.’ She thought about Bliss and his ‘messy’ home life and the Job – only the police gave it a capital J – becoming his refuge. It wasn’t going to be much of one now. His superiors would want to know exactly how he came to mislay his prisoner, why he’d sat on the case, kept it to himself, hired the volatile Gomer Parry to dig up septic tanks installed by a man Gomer believed had murdered his nephew.

  She wondered how much of a basis Bliss had really had for bringing Roddy Lodge out to Underhowle, how much Lodge had actually told him in the interview room. Evidently he’d admitted to several killings, but had he given any indication of why? Serial killers had become a species, their motives taken for granted. They were male predators, and that was it, jungle carnivores, bringing down young women like gazelles, to be pawed and raked at leisure.

  Leave it. Merrily peered at the old luminous alarm clock in the window; she didn’t want to oversleep and have Jane find them here in the morning… even though the kid would probably be delighted.

  Hell it was the morning. In three minutes’ time it would be Hell, four a.m.

  Lol said suddenly, ‘I felt sorry for him.’

  ‘Bliss?’

  ‘Lodge.’ His voice sounded distant, detached. His arm went slack around her. ‘That’s not right, is it? How can anybody feel sorry for a man who killed women?’

  Merrily said, ‘It’s a… Christian thing.’

  Trite.

  ‘Empathy,’ Lol said. ‘I saw him up there, and I seemed to feel what he was feeling. Or it translated itself. It was like stadium rock. All the lights. Pink Floyd or something. Crazy.’

  Or something. Merrily said, ‘When’s the gig?’

  ‘Oh. Next week. Wednesday.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I… In case…’

  ‘You mean you’re considering not doing it.’

  ‘It’s a Moira Cairns concert. That’s all it says on the posters. Nobody would be the wiser.’

  ‘I’m going to order some tickets.’

  ‘Don’t do that. I can get you some. She’ll be worth seeing.’

  She.

  ‘I want to buy them,’ she said, ‘out of my meagre stipend.’

  ‘Merrily—’

  ‘Shush.’

  They’d agreed that in the morning he would stay up here until Jane wasn’t around, and then he’d slip quietly away through the orchard to pick up his car at Gomer’s. No one would know. Merrily felt tearful.

  ‘Why did you do it? Why did you offer to go with Gomer?’

  ‘I like Gomer.’

  She reached for his hand; it felt like half-set concrete. ‘Feels like you won’t be able to pick up a guitar for days.’ She stiffened. ‘Is that why? Is it?’

  He kissed her naked shoulder. ‘And I sensed people wanting him to die. I was sure I sensed people wanting to see him die.’

  Lol sighed, as if this was something he needed to get out of himself. Merrily was about to say something when she realized he was asleep.

  She kissed his forehead and wondered if he was dreaming about Roddy Lodge. Or Moira Cairns.

  Part Four

  I am glowing radioactive

  We draw

  Beams around the world

  Super Furry Animals

  ‘Rings Around the World’

  21

  Icon

  IT WAS DURING her sermon the following Sunday that Merrily realized it wasn’t over – that Roddy Lodge, though dead, wasn’t out of her life.

  This morning, she’d awakened at five a.m., or thereabouts, after the return of that old recurring dream: the one where she suddenly discovered she was living in a house with three floors, after thinking there were only two. And on the third floor was something dreadful, and she knew that she’d have to go up there and face it alone.

  She was moving very slowly up the second staircase, the fear of reaching the top intensified by the inability to turn back – in dreams, turning back never seemed to be an option – when the dark upper landing suddenly came into view, and then she was at the top, and the first strange door was just above her and beneath it was a thin grin of icy, violet light.

  This was enough. Ejecting in terror from the dream, Merrily had rolled over, with an urgent need to be held. But the bed was wide and empty and outside the uncurtained window the boughs of old apple trees were creaking in the sour October wind.

  Alone.

  For two nights after Lol had gone, she’d gone back to the fifth bedroom, slept in the single bed they’d shared, before returning despondently to her own, bigger room. Sad, huh?

  And puzzled and unhappy, because now she actually was living in an old house with three floors, and Jane was in possession of the attics. She thought she’d dealt with the third floor.

  Here in church, there were more stairs she preferred to avoid: the polished wooden steps to the pulpit. She knew she should really be up there this morning: little woman, big congregation, even for October when they tended to increase because there were no lawns to mow and the kids had stopped demanding days out. Here, close to the front, sat Big Jim Prosser from the Eight-till-Late, which reduced its Sunday opening hours at the end of the tourist season. Here even was Kent Asprey, heart-throb, jogging GP, back with his wife after a midlife-crisis fling. A penitent Kent, with Mrs Asprey – one week only, probably.

  Merrily put a tentative foot on the first pulpit step, then backed down again. What she’d been doing during the summer and early autumn, when congregations were smaller and cosier, was to sit on a hassock on the carpeted chancel steps, under the apple screen, and not preach but chat. Sometimes, a few members of the congregation would join in, and there was a sense of warmth and unity. She found it exciting, was never sure where it would lead. One Sunday it had spontaneously opened out, like a flower, into communal meditation.

  It was hardly going to happen today. The congregation was like the bed: too big, too cold, too quiet. And swollen by too many comparative strangers whose presence could only be explained by curiosity over rumours of Merrily’s links, through Gomer, with the Roddy Lodge sensation – an electric death still pulsing in Herefordshire like a snaking naked wire.

  This was a small county; everybody knew somebody related to the Lodge family or the families of girls and women missing from home – one was from a farm near Staunton, just a few miles from Ledwardine – or at least someone who had considered having an Efflapure system installed. Everyone had been exposed to radio and TV reports and centre-spreads with the same grisly sequence of pictures and tasteless variations on the Daily Star’s:

  Villagers watch in horror as man boasts:

  ‘I’m the biggest serial killer ever’, then is

  FRIED IN THE SKY

  Underhowle itself was reported to be in a grey state of communal shock. Nearly a hundred people, including children as young as five and six, had heard Roddy Lodge confess, then watched him die. Many were being treated and counselled for the trauma.

  And the shock wa
ves radiated outwards.

  TRACKS OF THE BORDER BEAST.

  On the third day, most of the headlines were variations of this one from the Mail. Where had Roddy Lodge been? Where might he have interred the bodies – Is there a corpse under YOUR septic tank? the Mail asked. The speculation now was that this was a false trail: cold-storing the body of Lynsey Davies in the pea-gravel under the Efflapure had been a one-off emergency measure – maybe Lodge had felt in danger of discovery at the time. Anyway, there would surely have been better options open to a killer with his own JCB.

  So the other bodies could be anywhere.

  All over Herefordshire and the Forest of Dean, this particularly was a live issue, and Merrily had felt obliged to address it, had assembled a sermon around the life and death of Roddy Lodge. Why did such people exist? Why had God created serial killers?

  A difficult one. Why exactly?

  It was certainly not a question voiced by the grateful papers, as the search for bodies went on, as police interviewed and reinterviewed the relatives of missing women and girls across five shires, as press and TV cameramen prowled Underhowle, reporters free to speculate now that the killer who had confessed so publicly was never going to face trial.

  And the police, in this case, were… who exactly? No mention in the papers of Bliss. Or indeed of DCI Annie Howe. All the press briefings had been given by a Detective Superintendent Luke Fleming. Merrily had never heard of him – must have been from Headquarters. She noticed that there was nothing in any of the papers about Roddy’s taste in bedroom decor. Given that he was dead, why not?

  Every day she’d expected her own involvement in the discovery of Lynsey Davies to be disclosed by the police, but despite the local gossip – inadvertently fuelled by Gomer, she suspected, as he pursued the truth about the fire – nobody had approached her.

  This morning, preparing for Holy Communion in the early light, she’d decided to dump the Roddy Lodge sermon. It had seemed unnecessary, gratuitous.

  Sermon B, then.

  She didn’t sit on the hassock, but she didn’t go into the pulpit either; she stood at the side of the lectern.