The Lamp of the Wicked (31 page)

Lol told her that Sam Hall appeared to live in a remote cabin on Howle Hill, generating his own electricity with a windmill while putting pressure on the power companies if not exactly to accept responsibility for all the health damage then at least to run more cables underground in rural areas.

‘He says he’s a crank and a loony and proud of it, and he admits to propositioning anyone he thinks might be able to publicize the cause. He says that seeing Lodge dying up there traumatized him into action – again. I mean, if he was asking Bruce Springsteen or Sting to write a song about it…’

Moira put her head on one side. ‘Perhaps he doesnae
know
Sting and Springsteen. Listen, loony or not, I wouldnae quarrel with the sentiments – I hate those things. There has to be a better way.’

‘Going round with Gomer, I got to see the whole valley. On environmental grounds alone, I’d
like
to help. Assuming he’s on the level. I mean, we don’t get to do much for anybody, do we, in this business? Not like some people.’

‘Not like your wee friend the Reverend, huh?’ Moira smiled. Lol stared at her in dismay. People always said she was psychic; they didn’t say she had the ability to uncover the hidden motives you hadn’t even admitted to yourself.

‘It’s so charming, the way you blush,’ Moira said. ‘So few guys today can still do that. Laurence, it’s perfectly fine for you to wannae be involved with the stuff in her life. Like I said the other night, a guy who understands the nature of madness…’

He let out a shallow, baffled sigh. ‘There was something else. It was when I was standing there watching this man climbing up towards… eternity. Knowing how it was going to end. And getting a strong feeling of people
wanting
it to happen.’

‘What, like the audience at the Colosseum or somewhere, willing the emperor to give the thumbs-down to the gladiator who came second?’

‘I don’t know. It was like there was something there to be… understood.’

‘What did you arrange with this guy?’

‘He said come and see him sometime. “Bring your lady,” he said.’

‘Will she go with you?’

‘I… can’t see her having time.’

‘Tell you what.’ Moira stood up. ‘Suppose I were to tag along, check out this guy. I can be quite intuitive, you know? That wouldnae bother you, if I came along?’

‘No, that would be—’

‘Call him, then.’

‘I can’t call him. He doesn’t have a phone. You leave a message for him at the village hall, and he calls you back. There are lots of things he doesn’t have.’

‘Interesting,’ Moira said.

‘T
HE WIFE
,’ Bliss said, ‘Kirsty…’ Shovelling a third sugar into his coffee, letting the spoon clang on the tabletop. ‘Aw, it’s dead difficult, Merrily, this
personal
shite.’

The first thing she’d noticed was that he hadn’t shaved. This wasn’t Frannie. Frannie was dapper, Frannie was tidy.

He drank some of the coffee, made a face.

‘I mean, I’ve gorra say I never really wanted a wife. In some ways it was that simple.’

Merrily rolled her eyes.

‘The police… It’s like you either go at it firing on all four cylinders, day and night, or it’s just a… just a job. Me, I never wanted just
work
. I’m like you, it had to be a vocation, a calling – and there was never gonna be a wife, not till I was pushing forty anyway, and I
certainly
never wanted kids.’ There were tears in his eyes now. ‘Needy little twats.’

‘Have you had anything proper to eat, Frannie?’ Merrily asked. He’d told her on the square that he’d give her an hour or so to get changed, get sorted – meaning get Jane out of the way, she guessed – and then he’d come and see her, if that was all right.

‘Nothing for me, thanks.’ He put up both hands. ‘Kirsty… she used to make me take a flamin’ yoghurt to work. She doesn’t bother any more. I miss that.’

He looked out of the window towards the ragged apple trees. There was silence, not even the mouse-scratch of Jane listening behind the door to the hall. Perhaps, Merrily thought, she’d grown out of that and therefore really had gone up to her apartment after lunch. She’d be back at school tomorrow.

‘So she’s a local girl,’ Merrily said. ‘Kirsty.’

‘Shit on her shoes soon as she could walk.’ Bliss made a desolate face. ‘All her family’s sunk into these bloody dead-end farms, all within about ten miles – ma and pa and her old bloody gran and about six thousand aunties. Jesus, they look so
normal
when you first meet them, country girls. She worked in the fashion department at Chadd’s. She was… very chic. So anyway, that’s why I’m still out here, chasing sheep-shaggers. Before we got married, West Mercia was gonna be strictly short-term. I was looking towards – I dunno…’

‘The Met?’

‘Yeh, maybe the Met. Or even back to Merseyside, with a bit of rank to stand on. But Kirsty, she’d just die in a big city, just curl up and… I’m not kidding, I’m not exaggerating.’

‘I know.’

‘I hate that in her. It’s not how wives are supposed to be, is it? She’s supposed to want to follow me to the ends of… wherever.’

‘Except that wherever
you
go, you’ve always got your family around you,’ Merrily said. ‘Because your family’s coppers – the Job. And she knows that. And she knows that if she’s stuck in some city suburb and all she has is you and you’re not there half the time…’

‘Very slick, Reverend. Very psychologically acute.’

‘True, though?’

‘Probably,’ Bliss said.

‘Tell me if this is not what you came for. I mean, you could always go to your long-suffering priest for five Hail Marys and a—’

‘Yeh, all right, it’s what I came for. Shuffling round the village square like a stray dog on a Sunday morning. It’s finally come to this.’

Merrily poured herself some black tea. ‘So you made a martyr of yourself. You put your career on the back shelf for love.’

‘Tugging me forelock to fast-track floozies like Annie Howe. Grovelling on me knees to po-faced jobsworth gits like Fleming. Listen, I might not be university-educated, Merrily, but I was doing all right. I’ve had… approaches, you know? You get enough results, it’s still possible to make your own fast track.’

‘Until you fall off it.’

‘Yeh.’ Bliss looked at her. ‘You fall off, you go down the flamin’ embankment so fast, you break both legs. So I’ve gorra simple choice: stay here and rot in an office or bugger off. What a waste. Either way, what a fuckin’
waste
.’

‘OK.’ Merrily reached for her cigarettes. ‘Let’s look at the facts. After what happened in Underhowle, this Luke Fleming comes over from Headquarters and decides that you mishandled the case from the start. If you hadn’t kept it all to yourself, played all these wild cards, including Gomer, Roddy Lodge would be safely tucked up in his cell instead of on the slab.’

‘I took a risk.’ Bliss leaned on an elbow, hand cupped around his unshaven jaw. ‘Several risks.’

‘Even I could’ve told you that.’

‘You did.’

‘Mmm, well…’

When you thought about it, he was actually lucky his conduct hadn’t been the subject of an internal inquiry. In fact, with an inquest pending, he wasn’t out of the disciplinary shadows yet.

And yet Merrily couldn’t help thinking that the last time she’d been aware of him bending the rules was when, last summer, he’d passed information to Lol that might well have prevented Annie Howe hanging her out to dry on a very public washing line. Did she still owe him? Did it matter, anyway?

‘I mean, it could have been worse, Frannie.’

‘Suspended. Bumped down to sergeant But that would’ve been a
public
admission that we fucked up. Still comes down to the fact that I’ve no future in West Mercia now, and the normal thing would be to go on the transfer list. And we know what that means.’

Have you asked her?’

‘Indirectly. We had a big row last night. Ended with me driving off and sleeping in the car. My fault… as usual. When the job’s going well, I’m not there; when it’s not, I’m there but I’m flamin’ unbearable. I could stay on in Hereford, work me shifts, gradually mature into the mellow – but secretly bitter and twisted – old DI who lets the youngsters buy him pints and passes on his wisdom.’

‘How would it be if I had a chat to Kirsty?’

‘And let her know I’ve been telling yer all this? Look… I’ve gorra fair bit of leave owing, as you can imagine. It’s been suggested that I take it now. Kirsty thought it might be a good idea if we left the kids with her ma and went away for a week to try and get ourselves sorted.’

That was a
very
good idea, Merrily thought.

‘That was what the row was about,’ Bliss said.

Merrily closed her eyes in despair. ‘Oh, Frannie, you clown.’

‘I can’t leave it like this, Merrily. I’ve gorra
know
.’

‘Know
what
, for heaven’s sake?’

‘If I was
right
!’ Bliss leaned heavily on the table, spilling sugar, making his mug and spoon rattle. ‘You know what they’re saying now? You know what Fleming’s saying? He’s saying that what we’re looking at with Roddy Lodge is a one- off, bog-standard, common-as-muck domestic. That he strangled his girlfriend during a drunken barney, figuring he could cover it up with no fuss, but when we pulled him, being the kind of cocky sod he was, he gets carried away with the big-killer image. That was Fleming’s first assessment of the situation. In other words, he’s saying Roddy Lodge, serial killer, was created by
me
.’

‘Oh.’

‘And then he talks to Roddy’s GP, and then he consults Moffat, the forensic shrink who confirms that Roddy was exhibiting absolutely classic symptoms of advanced manic depression. You see where that’s going?’

‘It…’ Merrily hesitated. Lol would know for sure, but she had ‘a good idea, and it fitted all too well. ‘They lie, don’t they?’ she said glumly. ‘Manic-depressives lie on an industrial scale.’

‘Exactly.’ Bliss smiled icily. ‘In the manic phase, they may tell extravagant lies, which can be very convincing because they half believe it themselves. If it isn’t the truth, they believe it
ought
to be. In other words, they boast about things they haven’t actually done.’

I done tanks for all the nobs all over the Three Counties and down into Wales. I done Prince Charles’s fuckin’ sewage over at Highgrove.

Bliss said, ‘Fleming’s pointing to one thing in particular that Roddy came out with when he was up the pylon. He said he was gonna kill Madonna – we have all this on tape, of course, thanks to some local smart-arse with a video camera. You yourself said he claimed to have done Madonna’s drainage in the Cotswolds. And of course, Madonna doesn’t even live in the Cotswolds – he got that wrong. Her place is down in bloody Somerset or somewhere. Roddy Lodge never got closer to Madonna than pictures in the
News of the World
.’

‘But what about the other two? Melanie Pullman and the girl from Monmouth.’

‘They’re saying I offered those names to him and he went for them with his tongue out. They say my style of questioning was antiquated and inept, given that we’ve no proof that either of the women are even dead. To deal with it once and for all, Fleming’s hired another firm with five diggers. They’d excavated about fifteen more Efflapures by yesterday.’

‘Nothing?’

He didn’t even answer. Merrily didn’t know what to say. If Roddy Lodge in fact
hadn’t
been a serial killer at all, if there
weren’t
any more bodies buried, then that was surely the best possible outcome… except that Frannie would be seen as an ambitious but misguided detective who’d driven a man to his death – a man who, if hardly innocent, was certainly guilty on a far lesser scale than…
Oh hell.

Bliss put his hands behind his head and stretched out his legs, talking flat-voiced to the ceiling.

The last thing Fleming said, yesterday afternoon, was that if I’d suggested to Roddy that he’d killed Lord Lucan’s nanny he’d have gone for that, too. He said I was dangerously naive. He said that in my craving for fame and glory, I was probably only slightly less manic than Lodge himself. He said the combustible combination of Lodge and me had created something it was gonna take West Mercia a long time to live down. He said – finally, he said that if he didn’t see me again for the rest of his career he’d consider himself a very fortunate man.’

His hands fell away from his head and he slumped in his chair, his lips compressed into the kind of smile you put on to ward off weeping. He didn’t need a Catholic priest;
this
was his confession. Merrily wondered if he’d told any of it to his wife; she feared not.

‘Which I thought spelled it out very nicely,’ he said after a while. ‘Pastures new, Frannie, and don’t expect a reference.’

She didn’t even like to ask what Fleming was saying about the incineration, allegedly by Lodge, of Nevin Parry.

Bliss stood up and walked across to the window. ‘Another option, of course, is for me to quit the Service altogether.’

‘Frannie, this is just one man. He might move on himself.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Marked me card now. No, I’ll do exactly as advised: take two weeks off. Use them as best I can.’ He turned away from the window and came up to where she was sitting. She could smell dried sweat on him. She could smell anxiety and frustration, a toxic mix. ‘I’m telling you he
did it
, Merrily. He did Melanie Pullman and he did Rochelle Bowen. And maybe some more. I could see it in his eyes, I could feel it in me chest. Somewhere, there are
bodies
.’

‘Oh.’ It was what she’d been afraid of. If the maverick loner cop was history, the suspended cop determined to clear his name was
movie
history. Anyway, Frannie’s situation was, in a way, worse than suspension: his conduct would not be investigated, the investigation would simply continue without him. An investigation that was no more now than a tying-up of loose ends. Nobody was in danger; the beast was dead, and perhaps he hadn’t been that much of a beast after all.