Phil Rickman: The Lamp of the Wicked

Huw knelt and, clasping the picture to his heart, held it there behind his hands as he put them together to pray.

With the bulbs out, there was a vague ball of light around them; Merrily could barely see anyone else.

‘Our Father…’

She said the Lord’s Prayer, the old exorcism, for the second time, slowly, and she could hear the others joining in, a grounded echo. She saw that Fergus was mouthing some of the words but not all of them, as if finding them difficult to remember. He looked briefly puzzled.

Merrily said, ‘Deliver us, merciful Lord, from all evils, past and present and to come, and grant us peace in our day. Keep us free from sin and safe from all distress…’

Fergus knelt with his heavy, proud head raised up like the prow of a Viking longboat, his eyes closed. Where was he? Where were his thoughts taking him?

Merrily floundered, sought out Huw’s shadow, couldn’t see him anywhere, but she thought she heard his whisper: ‘Confession.’

Yes , she thought, of course .

‘Almighty God, in penitence we confess that we have sinned against you, through our own fault, in thought, word and deed…’

No penitence, no regrets, course there wasn’t. He was what he was, no getting round that. He’d scratched it out on the wall of his cream-painted cell at Winson Green:Freddy the mass murderer from Gloucester.

Gloucester, not Hereford, them days was long gone. He’d picked Gloucester; made his home there, made it hisself, filled it full of hisself and what he’d took – bringing bits of Gloucester home .

Some nights he’d go back to Number 25 – not to the place it was now, look, emptied and gutted by the bloody coppers, but what it used to be, full of sweat and heat… vibrating with it .

Him too. He was strong then, at his peak, ready for anything: work hard, play hard, that was him .

Now he’d lost a lot of weight, didn’t feel too good no more. Not here in this shithole, no privacy, nothing to see, nothing to watch. Nothing to watch here but him – people looking at him all the bloody time, having a laugh, the laughs echoing across the exercise yard – ‘Build us a patio, Fred? Ho ho!’

Days fading into more days, going nowhere, never going nowhere again. Never working for hisself again, no more building things with his hands. Nothing to do with his hands no more .

No women, no more women ever. No wife. When they was in court, she wouldn’t look at him – after all he’d done for her, trying to keep her out of it, telling the coppers she didn’t know nothing. And she en’t talking to them neither. And him… he’s talked enough. All he’s got left now’s his secrets – the who and the when and the where. The how-many-times. They don’t know next to nothing, when you works it out, en’t got the half of it and that’s all right by him – Freddy the mystery man. Freddy the mass murderer from Gloucester .

And Huw stood there in the gutted chapel, and he could hear the voice well enough, but he couldn’t feel anything. No energy. All he was getting was the husk in the prison cell on New Year’s Day, 1995. The day the prison officer couldn’t get the cell door open because of what was hanging behind it from a rope made out of – versions differed – a prison blanket, or prison shirts.

This was the very worst crime to be committed against the relatives of every missing girl in Britain: allowing him to do it – letting Fred escape, with all his secrets.

Why hadn’t they – the police, the prison authorities – put the psychology together, realized just how depressed he was likely to become without the anticipation of gross and grosser sexual excesses to heat his blood? Had nobody guessed he’d become empty, a husk, insubstantial enough to hang?

Maybe they had. Maybe they just bloody had . He’d heard of coppers who’d cheered when they’d heard about the death at Winson Green. A banner going up: Nice one, Fred – something as inane as that.

And now nobody would know the who, the where, the how- many. Lynsey had written her secrets down, in the Magickal Diary , but amiable, garrulous Fred had been barely literate, and Rose was saying nowt.

Freddy, the man of mystery, and those who followed him: Lynsey and the others, the unknown others who’d lived in Cromwell Street or had just dropped in for an hour or two, and would never be identified now. Out there, with the virus inside them.

Huw stared into the darkest corner of the chapel, listening for the remains of the laughter and the sniggers, the sound of a hammer, thrown from a ladder, clanging on the flags.

He heard nothing but the drone of Merrily’s ad hoc ritual, useless in itself.

It was all useless. There was nobody watching, nothing worthy of a fight.

Huw held the pastel drawing of Donna, by Julia, close to his aching heart, thinking of all the relatives and friends and lovers of long-missing girls and women who did something like this every night. And he broke down.

At some point, Fergus’s eyes opened, and Merrily came in at once with the ritualized question, ‘What do you want from God in his Holy Church?’

Fergus, unprepared, made no reply at first. While she waited, she could hear the wind outside, coming down off Howle Hill. Sam Hall’s line came into her head: insidious wind . Where was Sam? She couldn’t see him. Where was Lol? All she could see were Fergus’s eyes, looking into hers.

‘I want,’ Fergus said, ‘what I deserve.’ He smiled at her.

Merrily felt a hollowness in her stomach. She gripped the angel pendant and felt the weight of her pectoral cross.

‘Do you renounce the Devil and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?’

Fergus kept smiling. ‘Sure.’

‘Do you renounce all the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy what God has created?’

‘I… yes,’ Fergus said. ‘Of course.’

‘Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you away from the love of God?’

When he hesitated, Merrily saw that he was looking at her breasts. Then he looked up.

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

The heat from the pendant went right up her arm. She looked into his eyes, then, and knew.

What a cliché that was: seen it in his eyes, windows of the soul – all that stuff.

In Fergus’s eyes, she saw nothing at all. A void. An absence. It was like opening the doors of a lift and finding that you were looking directly down the shaft. The absence that could now only be filled with life and energy when his hands were exploring you, when the eyes were lighting up like little torch bulbs. When he was swimming towards you through a pool of liquid lust.

Merrily knew that she was seeing what Lynsey Davies had seen, been surprised and probably delighted by, in the second before he came for her with… what?

A thin belt was the pathologist’s suggestion, according to Bliss, but no belt had ever been found. Perhaps it was Roddy’s – Fergus bending over the unconscious Roddy, as if to help him, sliding the belt out of his trousers. And then subduing Lynsey with his fists. She saw blood jetting from Lynsey’s nose and then the image cut to the belt, each end wrapped around one of Fergus’s hands and then its length pulled tight around Lynsey’s throat.

Silence soaked her head and then, over it, she heard, quite clearly and crisply:

Show you what’s what, where the bits goes, you little smart bitch …

‘Do you renounce—?’

‘Yes, of course. I renounce everything.’ Fergus smiled. ‘Is that it?’

‘That’s up to you,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m sure that will do.’ Fergus stood up. ‘Thank you, Merrily. I imagine we all feel so much better for that.’