The Lamp of the Wicked (16 page)

‘Not in Underhowle. But I have friends in Ross. In some of the pubs there, Roddy was felt to be a nuisance, always trying to pick up girls.’

‘Sometimes succeeding?’

‘Aw hell, more than sometimes. Rebuffs bounced off him. If ‘there’s such a thing as what the Americans call a
retard
– only with a mental age of sixteen – then that’s what I guess you’re looking at here.’

‘Nicely put, sir,’ said Frannie Bliss. Merrily expected follow- up questions, tracing the directions Roddy’s new-found liberation might have taken him, but Bliss stood up. ‘Well, thank you all, very much. I think we’ve managed to exchange some useful information there. If you can think of anything else, I’ll leave a couple of cards on the bar here. Ring me.’

Outside, Bliss said to Merrily, ‘Next time I talk to those buggers, it’ll be individually. Like, the woman can obviously tell us a lot more, but she’s not gonna do it in front of the rest of the Underhowle Development Committee.’

‘What’s that
about
? What are they developing?’

‘Everything. Place has been going down the pan for years. Used to have three pubs, post office, bakery, all that. Used to be plenty of jobs in the Forest of Dean – mining and… forestry, obviously. Now, even farming’s in trouble, and a place this scrappy’s never going to make the tourist trail. All they had left was the school, and they had a hell of a battle to keep that going. That guy Fergus got a big campaign going, now he’s a local hero.’

They walked back along the lane. The rain had stopped again, but the wind was up, rattling like a flock of pigeons in the trees on either side.

‘And the other little bloke – Cody – the one who doesn’t say much, he’s the big industrialist. Builds computers.’

‘Here?’

‘Got a little factory. Doing very well, comparatively. Not exactly Bill Gates yet. More of a Bill Catflap – somebody called him that.’

Merrily laughed into the wind. Bliss looked at her. ‘They don’t pay you much, do they, the Church?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘The knackered old Volvo. That coat. I always thought maybe you got extra for being an exorcist.’ No, just the privilege of having only one parish, instead of about six, like the bloke who covers this patch.’ Merrily looked down at her coat. ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll have saved enough for a new one from the Oxfam shop before winter sets in.’

Bliss smiled, his mind already moving off somewhere else – she could almost see it racing ahead of them down the windy lane, a striker needing a swift score before somebody blew the whistle. She tried to intercept.

‘You learn anything back there, about Roddy Lodge and Lynsey Davies?’

‘Just threw up more questions. If he was suddenly getting his leg over half the girlies in Ross, why the older woman?’

‘Thanks.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘What’s
more
curious, I would’ve thought,’ Merrily said, ‘is why – if he’s doing so well with real live women – why the wall full of dead pin-ups?’

Ahead of them, she could see lights in the garage complex, where Andy Mumford would be working stolidly on, alone in the bungalow with Roddy’s gallery. She didn’t want to see that again and was worried that Bliss was going to ask her to.

‘And what’s Ariconium, Frannie?’

‘Eh?’

‘The word “Ariconium” was inscribed on a stone in the hall.’ ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen a few mentions of it around the village. Listen, are you up for this now? Roddy? You can ask him about the dead ladies.’

Merrily shivered. ‘Frannie, it’s a police station, not a wine bar. He’s going to be on his guard. He isn’t going to tell me anything that he wouldn’t tell you. I really can’t see that it—’

‘Merrily…’ He stopped at the edge of the garage forecourt, by the police tape. ‘Let me be the judge, eh?’

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

T
HE
C
AIRNS 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. ‘For
get
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.