Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

Connor-Crewe flipped the book shut and glanced at the cover. ‘Ah. Of course.’

Bliss smiled like a wintry sun. ‘You remember.’

‘Poor woman,’ said Connor-Crewe.

‘What exactly was your relationship with the late Lynsey Davies?’

‘Bookseller and customer.’

‘Sleep with many of your customers, sir?’

Connor-Crewe sighed. ‘Some.’

Merrily blinked.

‘Inspector, a bookseller is not like other retailers. A good book-seller will very quickly develop an intimacy with his regular clients, based on his feeding of their intellectual desires. And if it should progress beyond that level, well… if there’s an element of misconduct that might apply in the case of, say, a doctor and patient, then I’m afraid I’m not aware of anything similar concerning the book trade.’

‘You’re a slippery bastard, aren’t you, sir?’ Bliss said.

Connor-Crewe frowned.

Bliss said, ‘Lynsey sometimes lived with you at The Old Rectory, is that correct?’

‘Occasionally stayed with me would be more correct. Overnight.’

‘Quite a formidable woman?’

‘That’s fair comment.’

‘Been around.’

‘I wouldn’t doubt it.’

Bliss tapped the book. ‘Who taught who about this stuff?’

Connor-Crewe thought about it. ‘When she first came to me for magical literature, I would say her knowledge was, at best, rudimentary. But she had the persistence and, it would seem, the time to devote to the subject. After a year or two, I would say that her knowledge – certainly her practical ability – far out-weighed mine.’

‘Practical ability,’ Merrily said. ‘Mmm.’

Connor-Crewe smiled at her, with indulgence. ‘We may be getting into areas, Merrily, that you, as a Christian, would find repugnant. Let me remind you, however, that magic is an entirely legal discipline that functions these days all over the free world, largely unhampered by the secrecy that stifled it for centuries. Yes, I have practised magic. It’s a wonderful mental exercise. It expands the being.’

Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘That’s put you in your place, vicar.’ ‘It’s no big secret, inspector. There are even a number of further-education seminars on ritual magic at various colleges.’

‘But what you’re saying,’ Merrily said, ‘is that, while you have an extensive theoretical knowledge of esoteric practices, Lynsey Davies was what you might call a natural.’

Connor-Crewe looked pained. ‘She was a strong-willed woman who was able to summon, to an enviable degree, the kind of concentration required for the visualization exercises that are crucial to the successful practice of magic.’

‘By successful,’ Bliss said, ‘you mean actually making things happen.’

‘I would say, rather, helping to move events towards the most satisfactory conclusion.’

Frannie Bliss nodded doubtfully. ‘But to go back to my earlier question – where did she get it from? Did she suddenly show up at your shop and say, “Here, Piers, I fancy a go at that – you gorra couple of basic primers on the shelf?” ’

‘Now look…’ Connor-Crewe leaned back, arms folded across his chest. His normally generous mouth had shrunk into an expression of petulance. ‘I’ve been patient with you, Inspector Bliss, but I think that, before I answer any more of these questions, I have a right to ask you what this is all about.’

‘Mr Crewe, I thought this was understood. I’m investigating a murder.’

‘Whose?’

‘You tell me,’ Bliss said. ‘Maybe there are some I don’t know about.’

Lol had been aware of Prof Levin watching him for some minutes.

‘You’re beginning to worry me,’ Prof said.

Lol put the electric tuner back in its case. The Washburn was now in tune with the Boswell. He’d keep tuning them through the day.

‘It’s the fear,’ Prof said.

Lol had run through three songs in the studio – ‘The River Frome Song’, ‘Kivernoll’ and the acidic rocker ‘Heavy Medication Day’. He figured that was going to be enough. This, after all, was a Moira Cairns concert. He thought the songs, which nobody would ever have heard before, had sounded acceptable – just.

‘Where’s the fear?’ Prof demanded. ‘What have you done with the fucking fear?’

Lol looked up. He was alone on the studio floor. Prof was up behind the mixing board. Moira had gone into Ledbury to buy some things and bring back some lunch for them. Lol had been running through the songs and, at the same time, wondering what correlation there might be between magic and the side effects of electricity experienced by people like Mephisto Jones and Roddy Lodge.

‘This will do you no good, Laurence.’

‘What won’t?’

‘Popping pills so far in advance. I was hoping you might make it without them. But eight, nine hours before you go on… believe me, this is not professional.’

Lol contemplated the ceiling.

‘Then what’s the matter with you?’ Prof came down to the studio floor. He was wearing his King of the Hill T-shirt with a cardigan over the top. ‘It’s twenty years, give or take, since you last did this. You were a boy then, now you’re a man approaching middle age. My advice – and I’ve seen this before, with other people, although not in such an extreme situation as yours – is to do the screaming now – but not so hard you damage your voice. Because, if you bottle it up until just before you go on, you’re gonna balls this big time… throw it all away… pouf! Hey, you listening to me?’

Lol said, ‘Prof… Mephisto Jones… You think he’d mind if I phoned him?’

Frannie Bliss said, ‘I don’t know much about sex magic, but I do know that Lynsey had quite a reputation locally as a bit of a goer. Which might explain what attracted her to this particular discipline, as distinct from, say, Transcendental Meditation or the Jehovah’s Witnesses.’

‘Stupid and simplistic assumption,’ Connor-Crewe said.

Bliss nodded. ‘Do you know much about Lynsey’s early life? Did you know, for instance, that she went to college in Gloucester and then dropped out after less than six months and became a prostitute in the city?’

‘I do a certain amount of business in Gloucester,’ Connor- Crewe said. ‘Not that kind.’

‘Not a career prostitute, as such,’ Bliss said. ‘But she needed money and somewhere dry to sleep and eventually, like many other hard-up young folk in Gloucester in the 1970s and 1980s, she found this dead convenient place not far from the centre. Cheapest in the city, it was said.’

Merrily was aware of movement behind the shelves: either there were mice, or Cola French was listening.

‘Specializing in accommodation for… shall we say, liberal- minded young things,’ Bliss said. ‘The Gloucester fun palace. Perfect refuge for a big girl who liked trampling on taboos.’

‘Inspector, what are you—?’

‘We don’t know how long she was living there, but she seems to have fitted into the domestic arrangements all too well. Really took to it, you know? The atmosphere of tolerance.’

Merrily said, ‘You could form meaningful friendships there, with one another and also with the proprietors. If you didn’t like the idea of that, you probably left quite soon, or—’

‘Or you stayed until someone dug you out,’ Bliss said. ‘Sorry, uncalled for. But if you don’t know what we’re talking about now, you must’ve been so stuck into the old books that you never read a single newspaper in the mid-1990s.’

Connor-Crewe’s football face darkened. ‘If you’re telling me that Lynsey Davies spent some time at 25 Cromwell Street—’

‘No,’ Bliss said, ‘I’m asking if you knew she’d been at 25 Cromwell Street.’