Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘He and West were both obsessed with deviant sex,’ she said. ‘The difference is that Crowley was an intellectual who had consciously made himself into what he was – embracing the dark. Whereas West, like Lynsey, was a natural. A man with absolutely no moral sense. A man who didn’t even recognize what was taboo. As long as… he got off on it, it was all right.’

‘Didn’t philosophize about it, just did it,’ Bliss added. ‘And it was West, we have to assume, who enabled Lynsey to, to—’

‘Free her dark side,’ Merrily said.

‘Exactly. Filthy mind, filthy hands, perverse and insatiable,’ said Bliss. ‘And here he was again, ten years on, working on his own in this magical place, obviously with the keys to the premises. And now here’s Lynsey in there with him. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about that, Piers.’

‘I swear…’ Connor-Crewe was pale now, but it might simply ‘have been outrage. ‘I swear to God I did not know that man had even been in Underhowle. And I did not know about him and Lynsey.’

‘What sort of people came to your parties, Piers?’

‘Certainly nobody like him .’

‘So you don’t know what went on in the chapel while it was being converted into a bottling plant?’

‘As I’ve already stated.’

‘When the water venture failed, the chapel was sold to Roddy Lodge. And then Lynsey started “going out” with Roddy, while still giving her address as the home of Paul Connell, father of two of her children. And while maintaining a friendship with you, and even working here sometimes.’

‘She was easily bored. Enjoyed variety.’

‘Why do you think she became interested in Roddy Lodge?’

‘Presumably because he was quite well off. How should I know? She’d often latch on to men.’

‘Oh, Piers, please . She was initially interested in Lodge because he was the new owner of the chapel which was now more important than ever to her – after whatever she and Fred did there.’

‘All right,’ Connor-Crewe said, as if suddenly weary. ‘She did ask me if I knew Lodge and whether he had anything in mind for the building. I understood he’d simply bought it as part of the deal for the old garage.’

Bliss was silent, thinking.

Merrily said, ‘Whose idea was it to buy the chapel from Lodge and turn it into a museum?’

‘We… we all thought it was a good idea, but I imagine it was Cody who said why don’t we buy it? Both he and Lodge were enjoying their wealth, the ability to buy and sell. And as Cody’s solicitor was now representing the Development Committee, it made it—’

Bliss looked up. ‘Mr Nye?’

‘It simplified things,’ Connor-Crewe said.

‘Something here stinks like the inside of an Efflapure,’ Bliss said. ‘But we’ll let that go for the present. What were Roddy and Lynsey doing in the chapel?’

‘I wouldn’t know that. I never went in there. I did ask Lodge’s permission once to do some minor excavation of the area immediately around the chapel. This was after I’d made some small finds – coins and things – in nearby fields.’

‘And was Roddy accommodating?’

‘He even lent me his small digger to put in a couple of trenches.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘I found the statue of Diana, as we like to call it. Eight inches long, headless, not terribly well preserved, but what it tells us about the site is significant.’

‘Right.’ Abruptly, Bliss stood up. ‘Thank you very much, sir – for the moment.’

Merrily could almost feel the heat coming off Bliss as he stood on the edge of the raised area around the Market House in the heart of Ross, with traffic edging past down the hill and the rain starting. He was stabbing at his mobile as if it was a detonator.

‘Frannie,’ she said, ‘why don’t you just tell Fleming? If you’re right, he’ll see it as a selfless gesture from someone he thought wasn’t capable of one. But if you’re wrong, and he finds out…’

He stared at her like she’d suggested that he throw himself under a truck. He put the phone to his ear and waited for nearly half a minute before snapping it shut in irritation.

‘Yeh, yeh, I’m dog meat. I’m already dog meat. Now, where’s Gomer, Merrily? Where can I try? Does he have a mobile?’

Merrily sighed. ‘He could be on his way to Underhowle. As the local gravedigger was refusing to dig one for Lodge, I thought I’d better make provision. He’s meeting Huw over there about… now-ish.’

The tip of Bliss’s tongue crept to a corner of his mouth.

‘You little beauty, Merrily.’

‘So what happened with Kirsty?’

‘First things first,’ Bliss said coldly.

‘NOW WE’RE MOVING,’ Frannie Bliss said.

In fact, Gomer was the only one of them moving – walking slowly, head down, across the acre of land that ran parallel to the paddock behind Roddy Lodge’s bungalow. Like he was dowsing, but without the divining rod: plant-hire instinct.

Merrily and Bliss were standing up against a rotting five-bar gate, snatching lunch from a bag of vegetable pasties she’d bought from a health-food shop in Ross. The rain had stopped, but the wind was rising. The sky was sepia and flecked with shrivelled leaves. It was 1.25 p.m. The stone chapel stood in front of them, like a beached hulk, against the light.

In front of the chapel stood Gomer’s truck with the mini-JCB on the back. Piers Connor-Crewe had grudgingly given them permission to excavate here – no real choice, with Bliss in this mood – yet had elected not to join them.

‘Which I find very odd,’ Merrily said when Bliss mentioned it in passing.

‘Smug public-school twat.’ Bliss finished his pasty in a small, triumphant cloud of crumbs. ‘Probably gone to alert Mr Nye.’

‘Think about it,’ Merrily said. ‘If you were any kind of serious student of archaeology and the police were coming to dig up your prime site, if you couldn’t stop it you’d at least want to watch, wouldn’t you? So you could jump in the trench and check out anything that looked interesting in the way of archaeology, prevent anything being despoiled. Wouldn’t you?’

Bliss watched Gomer bending down, patting the grass. ‘So?’

‘So why isn’t he here? Did you hear him once asking you to be very careful with that digger?’

‘Maybe he assumes he’s exhausted the site.’

‘Well, yeah, that’s one possibility.’ She looked over at the back fences of the houses in Goodrich Close, about two hundred yards away, the village sloping up behind them to the parish church, which was actually only a couple of fields away. ‘The other is that he couldn’t care less because there never was a site.’

‘Not quite following you,’ Bliss said.

‘I think Merrily’s implying an element of fabrication, lad.’

Huw Owen drank spring water from a small plastic bottle. He hadn’t eaten. Merrily felt guilty about this, although Huw had insisted she should eat.

‘The site of Ariconium was always said to be at Weston- under-Penyard, right?’ She pointed down the valley. ‘I mean, they haven’t found all that much there, either, but that was where the evidence always pointed. Now, when I was talking to Sam Hall this morning, he said Piers was not popular in Weston. Which Piers would always laugh about – saying Weston was a pretty place that had never deserved Ariconium anyway. Underhowle, however…’

‘He faked it?’ Bliss stood away from the gate. ‘How would that be possible? What about all the bits of pottery, the statue, the—?’

‘Bits of Roman pottery and mosaic are not that hard to come by. Lots of them about, and not too expensive. Piers does antiquarian books and he’s surrounded by antique dealers. Not too much of a problem to pick up a few odds and ends, then either pretend to have found them or bury them for someone else to find. Not much of a problem convincing people, either, when everybody local wants to believe.’