The Lamp of the Wicked (30 page)

‘I think not.’ James sniffed the air. ‘Never been a gossip. Anyway, told Alison I’d be back before one. I’ve said all I wanted to say. Question of watching your back, vicar. Watching your back.’

‘Thank you.’

James merely nodded and walked away with long strides. Merrily looked around the square, as if there might be small knots of people pointing at her and muttering. Maybe the angel sermon hadn’t been such a good idea. Maybe – if Jenny Box had told anyone else here about her vision – it was a very
bad
idea.

In fact, the square was empty except for Frannie Bliss leaning against one of the oak pillars of the little market hall, munching a Mars Bar.

Merrily sighed.

L
OL TOOK THE
call just before one on the kitchen phone at Prof’s. From the studio he could hear a playback of Moira’s ‘Lady of the Tower’, veined now with the seamless cello of Simon St John. Just Moira’s voice and Simon’s cello: experimental.

On the phone, he heard, ‘That you, boy? You know who this is?’

A warm voice, not quite American. Lol was momentarily baffled, before the voice threw up an image of the sepia sleeve of The Band’s second album, all beards and back porch.

‘Sam?’

‘Lol, I hope you don’t mind this intrusion. I got your number through talking to the cop… Bliss? Came over to see me a couple days back.’

‘Has he calmed down now?’

‘I guess you might say that,’ Sam Hall said, ‘though he doesn’t strike me as a man who can handle calm too well. Anyhow, we had a talk, and it, uh… it all came out about you and what you did when you weren’t up to your ass in mud.’

‘That Bliss,’ Lol said. ‘So discreet, it’s a wonder he never made the Special Branch.’ Behind him, Simon’s cello glided over the chasm left by Moira’s voice after the verse where the messenger climbed down from his horse and the night was in his eyes.

So in the afternoon I went on down to the village hall,’ Sam said. ‘They have a community computer room there, courtesy of Mr Cody, and I started to search the Web, and, hey, there you were, boy, all over the show – folks saying how come this guy is a footnote to so many other people’s careers? Where’d he go? Folks all over the world – America, Australia – asking questions about Lol Robinson.’

‘But you didn’t just ring up to scare me.’

Sam laughed. ‘Which, I concede, is the good side of the Web – people talking to each other, sharing enthusiasms. The payback, however, in phone lines, in power, that’s bad, bad,
bad
. But even a dangerous crank and a madman such as myself has to compromise sometimes… which is how I wound up at Ross Records, and they didn’t have the Hazey Jane albums, but they did have this collection by Norma Waterstone, with “The Baker’s Lament”. And… well, the up and down of it is, you’re good, boy. You… are… good.’

Lol was confused. ‘Thanks. That’s kind of you, but—’

‘I like how you write what are essentially new folk songs. “The Baker’s Lament”, that’s a new song sounds like it’s been around for ever till you really listen to the words, discover it’s a new take on an old theme, and it packs a strong message about what is happening to the countryside. So, the upshot, I wound up
buying
this Norma Waterstone album.’

‘Er… Waterson,’ Lol said.

‘Some voice, huh? Played it four times last night, used up all of my power ration. Listen, I’m gonna come to the point, Lol. You’re a guy feels strongly about the destruction of the country. You know my take on all that – and the power lines. But you don’t know it all. There is so… much… more.’

‘Well, I’m sure—’

‘And, listen, I don’t mean worldwide, I mean here. I’m talking Underhowle, I’m talking Lodge and I’m talking Melanie Pullman. I talk about this the whole time, and nobody listens to me ’cause I’m this old crank, this lunatic with a chip. I’m the fool on the goddam hill, man, and nobody listens. Wanna cut me off now?’

‘Go on,’ Lol said.

‘You wanna cut me off, you cut me off. Everybody cuts me off
sometime
. Anyhow, after the boy died the other night, I listened to all my neighbours walking home saying how it was all for the best, save the taxpayers having to keep him in jail for the rest of his miserable life, and I’m thinking, Hell, am I the only person in this whole village sees this as some kind of a tragedy? I’m always saying that – am I the only person in this whole valley knows what’s happening to us all? Anyhow, this time I went home and I started to write myself a poem. Sat up the whole night to finish it – a two-candle poem. And when Bliss told me about you, I started thinking, hey, this is more than coincidence. This is
meant to be
.’

Not one of Lol’s favourite phrases.
Meant to be
was a trap.

‘I’m gonna ask you straight out,’ Sam said, ‘I like to be direct. If there’s any way at all that you could find the time to turn this poem into a song – well, I don’t have the money to pay you, but you could keep the song, if you liked the idea. And the cause is good. It’s a world issue and a big one. It’s what my life’s been building towards.’ Sam paused. ‘You still there, boy? You hung up on me yet?’

When Eirion called, Jane was lying on her bed with Ethel the cat and a paperback. As soon as she heard his voice, she thrust the book under the pillow, as if he could see it down the line.

Eirion said, ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you she seems genuine, Jane. There is like no dirt
at all
on Jenny Driscoll – not on the Net anyway, and I searched hard. In fact, what I’ve read I rather like.’

Jane thought that, with this unnatural thing he was developing for once-good-looking old ladies, his opinion was hardly to be trusted, but she didn’t say anything.

‘Do you want to know now?’ Eirion said. ‘Or shall I print some of it out and fax it over or something?’

‘Can you give it to me potted? I’ll stop you if anything sounds interesting.’

OK.’ Eirion cleared his throat and started to enunciate like it was the voice-over on a TV biog. ‘She was born in County Wicklow into a respectable lower-middle-class family. Father was the manager of a small soft-drinks business. As a teenager, Jenny apparently got itchy feet and sent her picture to a model agency with an office in Dublin. It turned out she had the kind of looks that appealed at the time, and she wound up in London within a year. Someone said she “looked like a girl who bruised easily”. Evidently a famous quote. This was the post-punk New Romantic era, apparently. Terrible clothes, terrible music. And this element of sadomasochism.’

‘Mum was there – I’ve seen the pictures. She was briefly into Goth.’

‘Yes,’ Eirion said thoughtfully, ‘I know.’

‘
Lewis
…’ Jane gave it serious menace. ‘Kill that fantasy
right now
.’

Eirion chuckled.

‘OK, so New Romantic.’ Jane knew some of this, but there might be something new.

‘But romantic in a kind of
besmirched
way,’ Eirion said. ‘Because she looked so vulnerable, they were putting her into these Vivienne Westwood type of things, so that she came across like some kind of teenage streetwalker. Smudged lip gloss and mascara with dribbles, like she’d been crying. Tarnished before her time, you know? It was all a little bit pervy, I suspect.’

‘I’m so glad you recognize it.’

‘
She
seems to have recognized it, anyway,’ Eirion said. ‘She suddenly packed in modelling at the height of her career, washed off all the make-up and got a job in children’s television, on the production side.’

‘How saintly.’

‘Where she was soon found to have an aptitude for presenting.’

‘What do you know?’

‘And kids liked her because she still had this faintly risqué ‘reputation, so in no time she’s presenting this cult teenage show – she was out of her teens by then, but she didn’t look it. And she eventually became quite popular with parents and older people because there was obviously a genuinely nice person underneath. And, as she got older, she resurfaced, presenting these lifestyle kind of shows – this is the mid- to late nineties, when she was also offered a column on one of the papers – could’ve been the
Mail
or the
Express
, I forget, but that was how she met her husband, Gareth Box. A journalist.’

‘Wrote the column for her?’

‘Do you have to be disparaging
all
the time?’ Eirion said. ‘Box was an assistant editor in charge of features or something but, since she was making so much more money than him, he seems to have packed that in soon after they got married, to manage her career. Maybe she was being exploited.’

‘Hmm,’ Jane said sceptically.

‘Anyway, this was when private TV production was really taking off, and Jenny and her husband came a long way very rapidly and started creating these home make-over type of programmes, with heavy emphasis on
feng shui
– there was a series for Channel Four which I remember seeing a couple of and it was actually pretty good. And that was when they set up this shop called Vestalia, which very rapidly became a chain and seems to be worth… well, a lot of money.’

‘Never put a foot wrong, then.’

‘But then she backed out of the spotlight.’

‘Or she saw when the spotlight was about to move on. Or they were making so much money that she didn’t need all that bullshit any more.’

‘There
was
some speculation at this time that the marriage was cracking up,’ Eirion said, ‘although she was never linked with anyone else.’

‘Staying together for the sake of the business?’

‘I don’t know, Jane. They were worth quite a lot by then, because Vestalia was into major cities, and also changing direction. One article I found, from the
Telegraph
, at the end of last year, was about how she was increasingly into personal development and meditation and spirituality, and
he
wasn’t particularly, but he went along with it. And it was then that the shops started to really specialize in creating a spiritual home environment. They’d stopped using the phrase
feng shui
, though, because that was seen as a passing fad.’

‘This is quite good, actually,’ Jane said. ‘We’re getting closer.’

In fact, this was moving nicely in the direction of home chapels.

She slid the paperback book out from under the pillow. It was called
Working with Angels, Fairies and Nature Spirits
. About a year ago – OK, she would admit this – she’d been finding it seriously inspirational, entirely sensible in its evocation of a complex world with all these different layers of existence, all these forces and incorporeal intelligences you could call on to improve and focus your own life.

Now, however, as a more balanced person, she was simply consulting the book to establish where the Box woman was coming from. Obviously, it
helped
that not too long ago Jane herself had been just as loopy, but there was method in Jenny’s particular madness; her so-called spiritual development always seemed to run parallel with an increase in material wealth.

The bottom line: this didn’t sound like a woman who gave away eighty grand without some underlying purpose unconnected with her immortal soul.

‘You actually did OK here, Irene.’

‘How very kind,’ Eirion said.

‘No, really, I mean… thanks.’

Maybe she and Eirion, approaching this from different directions – his investigative skills, her background esoteric knowledge – could nail the duplicitous bitch to the wall before Mum got stitched up.

‘What do you do now? How do you respond to this?’ Prof Levin advanced on Lol across the studio floor. ‘What you do now, Laurence, is
not
respond. That is, you decline…
rapido
. Because the one thing you, of all people, do not need at this stage is to get in with crazies. So what you do is you call him back and you put it very politely and very firmly. You don’t ask any more questions, you resist all his attempts to make you read the lyric, and you never
ever
write a song or the merest line of a song that reflects this proposed theme in any way.’

‘Except…’ Lol backed up against the glass-sided recording booth, ‘I kind of—’

‘You then make sure to avoid having dealings of
any
kind with this person, ever again.’

‘Only I kind of like him,’ Lol said.

‘Jesus.’ Prof feigned an intention to put his foot through the golden weave fronting the Guild Acoustic amp. ‘Of
course
you liked him. These people, they’re oh so very nice and humble and they tell you you’re Lennon and Dylan and Paul Simon all rolled into one, and they would consider it an honour to, in some small way, serve your art. Pah! Two years later, five, ten… whenever it seems like you’re finally doing OK for yourself, along comes the exceedingly unfriendly letter from their lawyer.’

‘He actually dealt with that,’ Lol said. ‘He said he was prepared to sign the whole thing over to me. Draw up whatever document you like, he said, and I’ll sign it. He said this wasn’t about money.’

‘Laurence, everything, at some stage, is about money. However, this is your funeral.’ Prof turned away, shaking his head, and mooched off towards the kitchen and his cappuccino machine. ‘Make it a noisy one.’

When he’d gone, Moira Cairns leaned back against the outside wall of the recording booth. She wore very tight jeans and a black top, her hair loosely tied behind with a crimson ribbon.

‘So,’ she said, ‘what
is
the great world issue this guy feels so strongly about?’

‘Electricity,’ Lol said. ‘Pylons, dangers of.’

‘Ah. So this would be a person you met at the, ah, execution.’ Moira came to sit on the amp opposite. ‘Tell me about it. Where’s the guy coming from exactly?’

‘Strong aura of old hippy,’ Lol said. ‘He’s very proud that some elements in the US government and the power companies were glad to get him off their backs. He talks about extensive scientific research linking overhead power lines with everything from brain tumours to leukaemia clusters – research that is constantly ignored.’

‘There’ll be background. There always is.’