Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Not a loving relationship, then.’

‘With Lodge on the side?’ Frannie Bliss sniffed. Merrily, feeling chilly even inside her oldest roll-neck woolly, carried her ashtray to the table and slumped down opposite him. It was a day for despairing of people. Bliss’s excitement depressed her. But then, if everybody enjoyed their jobs that much, the sum of human happiness… She surrendered to confusion and lit a cigarette.

‘When you say “local”… ?’

‘Village called Underhowle. Backside of Ross-on-Wye, where it joins the Forest of Dean. I’d never been there before. Lodge has his depot on the outskirts, and a bungalow he’s built next to it. Lynsey Davies lived in a council house in Ross. She was thirty-nine, had four kids by three different blokes, and was apparently Roddy’s intermittent girlfriend. A fun-loving lady.’

‘So she was… identifiable, then.’

Frannie smiled thinly. ‘Ah… not strictly. The ex-partner, Paul Connell, reckons he doesn’t mind having a quick glance, but I’m not sure how useful that would be. It does help a bit that the body was dumped in pea-gravel rather than soil, with this big tank thing on top, so it’s not as badly eaten-up as you might expect after a couple of months underground. And the clothes tie in. We’ve sent for dental records, anyway.’

‘Lodge actually took it… her out of the ground?’

‘Dug down by the side of the tank, fished her out – probably manually. Dumped her in the shovel of the digger, tucked her in nicely.’

Merrily shuddered, recalling the mud drying on the front of Roddy Lodge’s leather jacket, on his trousers.

‘The, er, you know, the bodily fluids, they’d have gradually drained out through the gravel,’ Bliss said. ‘So although she was a big girl, the body wouldn’t’ve weighed that much. Wouldn’t’ve taken a great feat of strength for Roddy to roll her onto a couple of feed sacks and lift her out of the pit and into the shovel.’

Merrily thought of Roddy Lodge’s pungent aftershave, wondering if he’d plastered it on to combat the smell. Didn’t make too much sense; this was a man who installed foul drainage.

She and Gomer had seen the big digger go rumbling past while they were waiting for the police on the pub car park – the body presumably out in front, sunk into the raised-up shovel like an offering to the moon. Gomer had wanted to follow Lodge; Merrily had talked him out of it. Half an hour or so later, the police had cornered Roddy at his depot. The woman’s body was still under the tarpaulin. Not much room for denial.

‘How did she die?’

‘The PM should be taking place as we speak.’ Evidently, Frannie didn’t want to say how she’d died. He finished his coffee. ‘Can I go over a few points? According to your statement, you and Mr Parry went to this house because you had reason to think Roddy would be going there to retrieve this septic-tank unit. The, er…’

‘Efflapure. But we didn’t expect him to be there.’

‘Right.’ He lifted his cup. ‘Don’t suppose… ?’

‘Sure.’ She went to fetch the coffee pot, trying to recall what she’d said in her brief statement to a detective constable in Hereford in the early hours. ‘I know it all sounds unlikely, Frannie, but you have to remember we were both pretty hyped- up last night. There was no way Gomer was going to go home and sleep. But we really didn’t expect to find Lodge there.’

‘Actually, Merrily, it all sounds far enough off the wall to be true, given the circumstances, even if I didn’t know you well enough to think it unlikely in the extreme that you’d lie to the police.’ He beamed at her. ‘But in fact we’ve also spoken to Mrs Pawson in London, who confirms Lodge insisting that he should be the one who took the thing away. Which, of course, now makes perfect sense. Not a question of professional pride, as you assumed, but the fact that the bugger had a body buried underneath it, and he was panicking at the thought of it getting discovered by Gomer Parry. Makes a lorra sense, from Roddy’s point of view.’

It doesn’t really make sense to me that he should bury a body under a septic tank.’ Merrily poured Bliss more coffee and saw his wrist quiver; after a long night, he must be sizzling with caffeine. ‘I mean, OK, he might not have expected it to be dug up again within weeks, but surely there was always going to be a chance that some day it was going to be re-excavated. They don’t last a lifetime, do they?’

‘They can last a lifetime, apparently. But yeh, I do see what you mean. But you’ve gorra remember we’re not dealing with a fully rational person. A feller who drives through the night with a body held up in his bloody digger’s shovel…’

‘He did kill her, then? I mean, there’s no suggestion that he might have been getting rid of a body for someone else?’

‘An extension of his waste-disposal empire? He’s arrogant and daft enough, but I don’t see it, do you? My feeling is we’ll have a confession before dark. I’m leaving him to stew for a few hours. I’m not hurrying.’

This was not Merrily’s impression. She still wasn’t quite sure why Bliss was here. She’d expected a visit at some stage, but not so early in the investigation, and it wasn’t as if Ledwardine was on the Ross side of Hereford. This was a special trip.

‘Will you be talking to Gomer again? Because Jane’s round there at the moment. I don’t particularly want…’

Jane was making Gomer’s lunch. The kid had still been awake when Merrily had got in around 5.45 a.m. Neither of them had really slept after that.

‘Er… yeah.’ Frannie Bliss sounded doubtful. ‘We will be talking to Mr Parry again at some stage, obviously. Though I’ve gorra tell yer it might be less easy than he thinks to prove that Roddy Lodge torched his yard.’

‘And, besides, you’ve got something more important, now?’

Bliss looked pained. ‘Don’t put it like that . I know the lad’s dead, and I’m not saying it wasn’t down to Roddy. But while he’s still dodging around Lynsey Davies, he’s flatly denying the bloody fire. Says Parry’s three sheets in the wind, gorra grudge, professional rivalry, all this kind of shite. Roddy is indeed very ‘proud of his professional standing – among other things. Could be Forensics’ll find traces of combustibles on his clobber, but meanwhile, all I’m saying is, let’s get him sewn up on the easy one first, then see what else we can discuss with him. It’s been a long night, Merrily.’

‘What about DNA?’

‘After a fire?’

‘But you’ve charged him.’

‘Er… no. No, I haven’t. Not yet.’

‘Oh?’

‘I want it in the papers,’ Bliss said. ‘If he’s charged, it’s sub judice and the clamps go down. I want it splurged all over the papers, radio, TV, the lot, that we’ve found a woman’s body under a new-fangled septic tank and that a thirty-five-year-old man is helping with inquiries. I want people to think about it and talk about it. Not just in the village. I want the name Efflapure in the public domain.’

‘I’m sorry…’ She poured another coffee for herself, maybe thinking it would attune her to Bliss’s wavelength. ‘Why?’

‘’Cause Roddy works over a wide area.’

‘Yes.’ I done tanks for all the nobs all over the Three Counties and down into Wales. I done Prince Charles’s fuckin’ sewage over at Highgrove .

‘See, what I’m looking for, Merrily, is a full list of all the Efflapures or anything else he’s put in. We’ve got his books, but we all know that, with a bloke like Roddy, they won’t all be down on paper for the taxman. I want to know exactly where he’s been.’