Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘I failed her,’ Merrily said. ‘Don’t let anybody say otherwise. I did not get any of this right.’

‘You didn’t know,’ Jane said. ‘You couldn’t have known.’

‘All the praying I do, you’d think there’d’ve been a little divine intervention,’ Merrily said bitterly.

‘ Don’t ,’ Jane said sharply.

‘No. I’m sorry.’ Maybe there had been. How could any of them know?

Jane said, ‘Just because you’re a priest, it doesn’t have to happen through you. The other thing happened through Lol. I mean, didn’t it? It was Lol who exposed that guy.’

‘Yes.’ Merrily smiled. ‘And Lol hated every minute of it.’

Merrily had watched Fergus – or had seemed to – in that frigid flicker of transition between man and monster. Yet he was not a monster. He was the best head teacher they’d ever known in Underhowle; he treated kids like equals and he was endlessly enterprising and affable with everybody, only occasionally displaying the steel cord under the velvet, which was so essential to a good school director .

Yet already, according to Frannie Bliss, the stories were filtering through, including the rumours about why Fergus’s marriage had failed – not because his wife had found out about his evenings of recreational release, but because of what he’d become between the sheets at home: a gradual diminishing of tenderness, the parallel escalation of sexual violence. This indictment had come from Fergus’s mother-in-law, who had thought him such a wonderful man that at first she’d accused her daughter of simply being inadequate to his healthy, masculine needs.

How easily and efficiently he’d lied, exactly the way West had lied, revealing nothing until it had already been found out.

Bliss said that if the killing of Lynsey Davies had not happened exactly as Lol had suggested, he couldn’t have been far out. The way Frannie saw it, the three of them had probably agreed to wait for Roddy’s next blackout and then go for it.

Lol had told Merrily about Lynsey’s resonant instruction to the three of them: Fuse your dreams inside me .

It would be important for all three of them to kill her, fusing the guilt. But when it came to it, Frannie reckoned, Cody and Connor-Crewe would have chickened out. Maybe they didn’t have quite enough to lose.

Frannie wanted Fergus for this one. He’d said on the phone that they’d now be turning major heat on Cody and Connor-Crewe.

He was confident that, before the day was out, one of them would have pointed the finger. And then he’d start on Fergus.

Huw had gone home to the Beacons. But he and Merrily had arranged to return to the Baptist chapel tomorrow, possibly with Jerome Banks and a chalice of Harvey’s Spanish Red and some white wafers. A full exorcism of place would not be underplaying it.

Meanwhile, Huw had been learning more about Lynsey Davies’s past and was wondering how much of a coincidence it was that Donna Furlowe’s body had been found close to the hamlet where Lynsey had been born, near Lydbrook, in the Forest.

Had Donna been killed by Lynsey and Fred? West had, after all, known the girl. Or was it, as the police had suspected, too late in his murderous career for it to be down to Fred? Lynsey and somebody else, then? Not Roddy Lodge, that was more or less certain now.

Lynsey on her own? Or with another of her old Cromwell Street friends?

Not long after Huw had left, Gomer had arrived with a man who was as close to a cube as anyone Merrily had seen.

Jumbo Humphries had parked his blue and white Cadillac on the square, parallel to the Market Hall, the only spot where it was unlikely to cause an obstruction. Jumbo had curly hair and stubble and he talked a lot. He was from the southern end of the Beacons or the top end of the Valleys, however you wanted to look at it, and he talked fast and emotionally.

‘A wond erful lady, she was, Mrs Watkins. A de light ful woman. I cannot bring myself even to think about it. Asked myself a thousand times, I have, since I yeard: what could I have done? How could we have helped her, any of us? How could we have saved her?’

Jenny Box.

Jane said now, ‘I’m not sure anyone could have saved her. Really, I’m not just saying that. I’ve been thinking about it all day. She never told you anything straight out , did she? She was like so diffuse – is that the word? I mean, sometimes you looked at her and it was like part of her had already left the building. You know what I mean?’

‘Yes.’ Diffuse. Gone with the fairies. Flying with the angels. Merrily blinked back tears. ‘Oh God, if I’d only gone to see her yesterday morning…’

‘Instead of what? You couldn’t do everything. Maybe if I ’d gone to see her… I mean, you’ve hardly slept this week as it is.’ Jane leaned over the table, both hands around her mug. ‘Mum, it was so strange, so unearthly, being in that room and her laid out like the Lady of Shalott. I can’t…’

When she’d come out of Chapel House with Moira Cairns, Eirion had been there on the square, having discreetly followed them back, planning only to hand Jane the Daughters of Uriel printout and see what happened then. In the end, he’d stayed all night, had been with Jane when DCI Annie Howe had arrived with the ubiquitous Andy Mumford and the scenes-of- crime investigators – a big overtime night for the Durex suits.

They’d all listened to the message on the vicarage answering machine. He’s defiled my chapel . The only interpretation they could put on this was that the chapel had been defiled by Gareth Box’s body and his blood. Why he’d gone down there, why he’d even returned from London, remained a mystery. All that was known for sure was that Jenny had smashed him savagely around the head and face with the heavy gilded iron cross that had stood on the altar.

They’d found Jenny’s bloodstained clothes in a bathroom. She’d evidently stripped off everything, taken a shower and then dressed in that long white Edwardian nightdress and gone to lie on the bed with her prayer book, her Bible, a carafe of water and two bottles of sleeping pills.

Andy Mumford had called back, at the end of his extended shift, and Merrily had told him about the woman from the Mail on Sunday who’d wanted to speak to her about Jenny Box. Mumford already knew about it. The Mail had been cooperative. It seemed that Gareth Box had supplied them with a large package of background information and a long, unattributable interview with himself. The proposed end product: a definitive profile of Jenny Driscoll demonstrating conclusively that Jenny Driscoll had become mad. The paper had been told of her gift of eighty thousand pounds to a woman vicar with whom she had become obsessed – a vicar who, incidentally, was having a secret affair with a rock musician who had ‘history’.

Box apparently had said that while this little detail might not turn out to be appropriate to the story, it might, if mentioned, make the vicar more amenable to a frank discussion of Jenny’s ‘stalking’ of her.

‘And Jenny found out about this?’ Merrily had said. ‘She killed him and then herself because she found out he was trying to destroy her in the press, for whatever commercial reasons…? That’s why ?’

‘We don’t know,’ Mumford had said. ‘But it’s not the weakest motive I’ve ever come across.’

But then there was the other thing.

‘Reason I’ve called, see, Mrs Watkins,’ Jumbo Humphries had said, ‘is I thought I ought to let you know this small thing.’

‘Bugger means I thought he oughter let you know,’ Gomer said, ‘on account of all that stuff about you he pumped out of me unbeknownst, for this lady.’