Read The Lamp of the Wicked Online
Authors: Phil Rickman
Tags: #Fiction, #Women Sleuths, #Mystery & Detective, #General
The Lamp of the Wicked
PHIL RICKMAN
was born in Lancashire and lives on the Welsh border. He is the author of the Merrily Watkins series, and The Bones of Avalon. He has won awards for his TV and radio journalism and writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf for BBC Radio Wales.
ALSO BY
RICKMAN
THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES
The Wine of Angels
Midwinter of the Spirit
A Crown of Lights
The Cure of Souls
The Lamp of the Wicked
The Prayer of the Night Shepherd
The Smile of a Ghost
The Remains of an Altar
The Fabric of Sin
To Dream of the Dead
The Secrets of Pain
THE JOHN DEE PAPERS
The Bones of Avalon
OTHER TITLES
Candlenight
Curfew
The Man in the Moss
December
The Chalice
The Lamp of the Wicked
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Macmillan.
This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2011
by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Phil Rickman, 2003.
The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-85789-013-9
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-020-7
Printed in Great Britain.
Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
26-27 Boswell Street
London WC1N 3JZ
3. Something Ancient Being Lost
24. On the Sofa in Roddy’s Bar
41. A Rainy Night in Underhowle
The light of the righteous rejoiceth, but the lamp of the wicked shall be put out.
Proverbs 13.9
Just about every door on the top landing of that three-storey house had a hole bored in it, for crouching at and watching. Holes and watching. Watching through holes. It would always start like that.
‘You
still
doing it?’
He realized he’d shouted it down the valley, which was wide and shallow and ambered under the late afternoon sun.
It was a lovely place. It ought to be grim and stark, with scrubby grass and dead trees. The reality – the actual beauty, the total
serenity
of the scene – he couldn’t cope with that, didn’t want any kind of balm on the memories that had brought him out here.
Oh, aye, a lovely place to be buried, beneath the wide sky and within sight of the church tower. But not the way the two women had been buried, chopped like meat and stowed in vertical holes. Not, for God’s sake, like that.
And now he had to turn away, with the weary knowledge of how futile this was, because there was still too much hate in him.
What had happened – what had started him off – was spotting one of those neat holes that appeared sometimes in the clouds, as if the sun had burned through, like a cigarette through paper, and then vanished. He’d at once imagined a bright little bulging eye on the other side of it. And that was when he’d down the valley, this great mad-bull roar:
You
still screamed
doing it? You still watching?
Now he was looking all around, in case someone had heard, but there was nobody, only his own car in this pull-in area right by the field gate, near the fingerpost after which the field was named.
One of the signs on the fingerpost was light brown with white lettering, signifying a site of historic interest and pointing, up a narrow road to his left, towards a church that was not visible. The one that you could see, looking down the field, must be the village church, where the ashes of the monster had been scattered.
They should’ve been flushed down the bloody toilet.
He shut his eyes in anguish.
Get a grip!
The county boundary apparently ran through the field, but he didn’t know exactly where. Should’ve brought an OS map, but he wasn’t really sure what he was looking for. Didn’t really know why he’d come, except for the usual problem of not being able to settle, not being able to stop anywhere for long before it all caught up with him again. He’d be walking in and out of his house, driving to places and coming home without remembering where the hell he’d been, and then going into his own church and walking out of it again, uncomforted and fearful for his faith.
And still wanting
confrontation
. It was anger that brought him here, and he’d have to be rid of that before he could make any kind of start. If you were dealing with something that had been human, no matter how low, how depraved, it was incumbent upon you to operate in a spirit of consideration and sympathy and…
… love?
Oh, bugger
that
. He punched his own thigh in fury, thinking about old comrades – survivors and relatives of the war dead – who had made pilgrimages to battlefields aglow with poppies. How much love had
they
been able to summon for the bloody killers?
Not that this was really
like
that. The pity and the waste, oh aye. But the evil here had been slow, systematic, intimate and concentrated – some of it ending in this field, with the hacking and the dripping of blood and offal into the holes. The horror had been intensely squalid, and the hatred… well, there didn’t seem to have
been
any particular hatred.
That, in some ways, was the worst thing of all: no hatred.
Except his own.
He’d left his car and climbed over the gate, near two black, rubberized tanks. There was a mature oak tree on his right. There’d been references in the statements to an oak tree. But was this one too near the road?
Now, he kept his eyes shut listening. It was said that no birds sang at Dachau, but the little buggers were singing away here. He’d never been able to identify types of birdsong, though, only the mewling of the buzzards in the rough country where he lived.
Where he lived, the countryside was scarred by hikers and by soldiers training. Not so very long ago, this field had been lacerated by police with spades. But it had healed now, was already back to being a beautiful place. Was that so bad?
Only for me.
He found himself patting his pocket, in case it had fallen out. He knew the words – ought to after all this time – but there was also a notebook in his pocket with it all written down, in case he got
resistance
, something bent on wiping it from his head, and he had to read it from the page, shouting it out into some dark wind.
But there was no wind. It wasn’t even cold. He wanted challenge, he
wanted
resistance, he wanted to see the gloating in those little glittering eyes. Feel the watching. Experience the demonic. It didn’t matter what else he’d become, at the bottom of it he was a man and he couldn’t cope with it any other way.
Finally, in his desperate need for discomfort, he actually sat down by the hedge, letting the dampness soak through his pants. Which was daft and childish, but it sent him spinning back into the pain. It did that, at least.
And it started the memory like a silent film, black and white, ratchet click-clicking in the projector, no stopping it now. Here he is raging into Julia’s bedroom, throwing himself down, sobbing, both hands on the bedclothes either side of where she’s lying, feeling the still, waxy atmosphere in the bedroom and smelling the perfumed air.
She obviously sprayed perfume around first, to make it less unpleasant for whoever found her, if her body betrayed her, relaxing into death.
Typical, that.
He feels dampness. The dampness by the side of her. What must have happened, she swallowed a couple of handfuls of the pills and then, maybe half asleep, thought
Not enough
, and took some more, another handful. She was likely so far gone by then that the glass simply fell from her hand, spilling the rest of the water on the quilt and rolling away into the corner of the room, where he finds it. And then his gaze is tracking slowly around the bedroom with its mid-blue walls and its Paul Klee prints, noting, in the well of the pine dressing table, the vellum envelope.
Picking up the glass first, though, and laying it on the bedside table, a few inches from Julia’s hair – she must’ve combed it first, you can tell.
Oh Christ, oh Christ
. Turning away, moving slowly towards the envelope until he can read his own name written on the front.
Inside, on the creamy notepaper she always used – her one constant luxury; she never could
abide
cheap notepaper – it says, in big looping handwriting that soon becomes blurred:
I’ll keep it short, Shep.
I’m so, so sorry about this. But I do believe there is somewhere else – you showed me that – and that Donna needs me there now. She so needs someone to comfort her, I feel this very strongly. I’m so very sorry, because I love you so much, Shep, you know I do, and it’s only thinking of you and sensing your arms around me that’s going to give me the last bit of strength I need for this, so please don’t take your arms away and please, please forgive me, and please go on praying for us. I’m so SORRY.
He’d no idea how long he’d been there, when the farmer found him: sitting with his back to the hedge, staring down the valley at the sunlight over the church tower. Sitting there up against the hedge like a bloody old tramp, with his eyes wet and his wet pants sticking to his arse.
Conceding afterwards that perhaps it was just as well the farmer did find him.
For now, anyroad.
Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
The First Epistle of Peter 5.8
Foul Water
I
T WAS A
crime, what he was doing, this Roddy Lodge, with his wraparound dark glasses and his whipped-cream smile.
The stories had kept filtering through, like foul water out of sludge, and Gomer Parry had felt ashamed to be part of the same profession. Plant hire was the poorer for shoddy operators like Roddy: wide boys, duckers and divers and twisters and exploiters of innocent people, rich and poor – mostly incomers to the county that didn’t know no better.