Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

Merrily nodded. ‘Looks like it, I’m afraid. Who are her nearest relatives?’

‘Her parents moved six months ago, into Ross. There’s an aunt over at Ryford. Was this still around her neck?’

‘It was lying on her chest. Whoever buried her evidently put it there. You can see the chain’s broken.’ Did it snap when she was being strangled?

‘Well, that’s the end of it, far as I’m concerned.’ Tony Lodge looked at the coffin with contempt, then down at his feet. ‘Let him be cremated. Empty his bloody ashes in the gutter.’

Huw Owen said quietly, ‘You can do what you like after the requiem. But finish it now, before you leave him in here for the night. Before the place is swarming wi’ coppers.’ He looked at Merrily. ‘Take it from me, lass, you mustn’t do half a job on this.’

Her heart sank. He was right. She turned to Gomer. ‘Do me one last favour? Frannie Bliss is probably down in one of the pubs. If you could give us, say, twenty minutes and then go and find him, put him in the picture, and…’

Make his night.

Gomer nodded, opened one of the double doors and stopped. There was a group of people packed into the porch. Seven or eight of them.

Merrily closed her eyes. Maybe they would go away.

‘This is so utterly contemptible,’ Fergus Young said. ‘Who would have thought the Church would lie and cheat and conspire ?’

Lol didn’t know if it was any good, but he’d done it. As his eyes adjusted, he could again see Jane in the front row, and he was convinced at one point that she was crying – during the song he’d written about her mother when the longing was becoming acute.

Did you suffocate your feelings

As you redefined your goals

And vowed to undertake the cure of souls?

It was somewhere between this song and the next that he caught the mothlike thought that had glided past him in the Green Room, and he held it fluttering in his mind along with something Mephisto Jones had said: What happened, I was getting blackouts more frequently, and they’re not ordinary black-outs – you come round and you’re out of synch, don’t know where you are or what you’ve done .

It was like a song already: ‘Mephisto’s Blues’. The idea rocked him so hard that he muffed the tidy bit of Elizabethan finger- style at the end of ‘Cure’. A signal that it was time to go.

‘Thank you,’ Lol said, bemused. ‘I mean… you know… thanks for having me.’ He nodded to the audience, turned and left.

They were stamping furiously by the time he reached the wing of the stage. Stamping for Moira, probably.

Moira was hugging him. ‘ Back .’

‘What?’

‘One more.’

‘I’ve got to go , Moira. I’m so grateful to you for this, but—’

‘Yeah, yeah, now get back out there. This is how it’s done – don’t you remember anything? And you forgot “Kivernoll”.’

He shook his head. His whole life had changed, but tonight that wasn’t very important. He had to find Cola French.

‘It’s organized,’ Moira said. ‘One more, then you can go.’

Something else hit him. ‘I need to collect Jane.’ Dismay. ‘She’s got no way of getting home.’

‘ I ’ll see to Jane, God help me.’

Moira turned him round and pushed him hard in the small of the back ‘ Go! ’

When Lol went back, it was like he’d won the war. He picked up the Boswell, of which he was unworthy. ‘Right,’ he told them. ‘Local-knowledge time.’ The Boswell eased her curvy back into his stomach. He did the unsurprising A-minor finger- style intro. Exorcizing Alison Kinnersley.

Under mountains of winter

Where the river of gold defines the valley

Something delicate splintered there…

He glanced over to where Alison sat with James Bull-Davies, but couldn’t make either of them out. This was a song that had come out of the Alison period, towards the end, when James was making his move. Lol and Alison had driven up to the Black Mountains on the Welsh border and there’d been an outburst and crying and, somehow, a reconciliation as they were motoring back down into the Golden Valley, and Lol had seen a name on a sign in a nowhere kind of place, with flat fields and a roadside barn-conversion in progress, and the place was called Kivernoll.

Approaching the chorus, he heard a rustling behind him, and Moira was there, a graceful ghost in midnight blue, and the response to this from the audience was like a wall of heat.

Kerry’s Gate the tears abated,

Cockyard found her smiling,

From Abbey Dore to Allensmore

By Kiverno—

And then Moira’s voice was lifting the line from under him: ‘—oh… oll.’ Dropping away, leaving Lol to sing, unaccompanied, ‘We were on a roll…’

He knew that she was introducing magic to an undistinguished little song and that this was approaching the best he would ever achieve, and when it was over, he just shouted into the mike, ‘Moira Cairns!’ and ducked out.

It was over this time, and Moira was mouthing Good luck and Lol was out of there, leaving the guitars on stage. Down the stairs and into the huge glassed area, all lit up. A bar to one side, a bunch of people in there. He needed to get into the auditorium, find—

‘Cannot wait for the album.’ Cola French had come up behind him. ‘Give me a lift home?’

She’d evidently been waiting for him; Moira had organized her. She followed him out into the blustery night to where the battered Astra was parked, the way he always left it, close to an entrance, vaguely pointing outwards.

‘ This … is yours?’

‘It’s quite safe.’

‘Jesus.’

Lol was fitting his car key into the door when a man said, ‘Lol Robinson?’ The night blared white, three times. He was blinded. He stumbled against the car. ‘Sorry about that, mate,’ the man said. ‘Thanks a lot. All the best.’

Cola said, ‘Does this mean we’re an item?’

Lol stared after the photographer, fifty yards away by now, walking fast. He thought he could rule out the Hereford Times .

It couldn’t even be mistaken identity; the guy had known his name.

In

They got into the Astra; he drove to the roundabout and then over Greyfriars Bridge, on to the Ross road.

Cola said, ‘I’m not even called Cola French, it’s just the name I write under. But if your name was Tracey Gilbert, how would you play it?’

‘You said you’d lied when you said you weren’t involved.’ Lol drove south from the city. Not too many suburbs this side; you were soon out of the street lights. ‘What did you mean?’

‘She’s pretty,’ Cola said, stepping over the question. ‘She’s not what I imagined.’

‘No. What did you mean? Not involved in what?’

‘All right. That copper, the Liverpool guy, he asked Piers what kind of people went to his parties. Like, what kind of people would do sex magic? Like he thought it was all black robes and manacles and blood sacrifice. Well, yeah, some of that. Though you don’t realize when you start. You think it’s just games. Risky games, but still games.’

‘And you were involved in that?’

‘It was like, how can you be a writer if you haven’t lived? At first. And then you think, do I really want to be that kind of writer? And that’s when you know it’s bad. I don’t mean bad, I mean evil. There’s a difference, isn’t there? I mean I’ve been bad lots of times, but I don’t think I’ve ever been evil. Because that’s a thing in itself, isn’t it? A commitment. No going back.’