Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

She nodded. She didn’t really get this – too tired, maybe – but she nodded anyway.

‘Merrily,’ Bliss said. ‘You’re a woman.’

‘Yeah, I still like to think so.’ Suddenly, despite – or maybe because of – her fatigue and the sordid, sickening nature of the discussion, she felt a piercing need to be in Lol Robinson’s bed in the white room in the granary. She looked away, knowing she was blushing.

And a priest.’ Bliss sat up in his chair, facing her with both hands flat on the table, his voice becoming Scouse-nasal. ‘And you’ve been close to evil. Closer than most priests, I’d say, even if you’ve not been at it long. So I just want to ask you – off the record – about the kind of stuff that’s not in your statement. I want to know how you felt about Roddy. As a priest. As a woman.’

She met his gaze. His eyes were bright with caffeine and candid ambition. She liked Bliss, actually – more than she liked his boss DCI Howe, who was apparently away on something called an SIO Module course. But she wasn’t quite ready to say how she felt about Roddy Lodge.

You come and talk to me any time you want.

Thanks. I’d like that.

Yeah. You would indeed, my darlin’.

She said, ‘You’re leading the inquiry then, Frannie?’

‘So far,’ he said. ‘But I may not have long before somebody takes over, you know how it goes.’

‘So all that about being in no hurry…’

‘… Was bollocks. Yeah. Truth is, Merrily, I’m chasing a feeling about this feller. I’m supposed to’ve gone home for a kip ages ago, but I’ve been driving round thinking about it.’

‘Roddy?’

He nodded. ‘What I reckon…’ He took a breath and seemed to be swirling it around his cheeks before letting it out. ‘I reckon there could be more of them. More Lynseys.’

The problem was, Jane realized, that nobody really understood Gomer. They looked at this weedy little old guy in the bottle glasses and they somehow failed to see the rebel warrior crunching down the border clay on his grunged-up caterpillars, swinging the arm of his JCB like some huge broadsword. They couldn’t discern the elemental side of Gomer. Even Mum, who should have known better by now, had been like, Keep an eye on him… make sure he takes it easy… don’t let him overreact .

They didn’t understand. Overreaction was what kept Gomer fully alive.

He’d agreed finally to let Jane go to the chip shop, then he’d left half his lunch. All morning he’d kept phoning people, in a compulsive kind of way. No! he’d go. It don’t matter what you’ve yeard, it en’t over! Gimme a week, I’ll be back to you. Gimme ten days, max!

But there was a dullness in his glasses.

‘I’ve got my provisional licence now.’ Jane wrapped the congealing chips in their newspaper and dumped them in Gomer’s kitchen bin. ‘I could work for you weekends. I mean JCBs… it’s just a matter of experience and technique, right?’

‘And an HGV licence,’ Gomer said heavily.

‘Oh. That, too, certainly. I knew that.’

She also knew that, in some curious way, he wouldn’t feel free to mourn Nev until he’d secured the business. If he let it go, it would be a kind of betrayal. In the same way, the small, modern kitchen was amazingly clean and neat, everything shiny – the way Minnie had kept it, but not like a shrine, Jane thought. A shrine was static and frozen; in here you could still feel Minnie’s busy spirit, and Gomer needed that. Like he always needed to know the big diggers were out there, oiled and ready to move the earth.

The kitchen window overlooked the orchard, out of which the buttressed church spire rose like a rocket on its launching pad. Starship Mum. Soon to be transmitting soft porn, if Uncle Ted got his way.

Everything was getting out of proportion.

Jane said, ‘I suppose, if you could wipe off the jobs you’ve already got on the stocks, you could take some time to kind of reorganize things. Like, reduce the scale of the operation.’

Gomer looked up. ‘Ar. Mabbe you put your finger on it there, Janey. Gotter deal with the commitments first, ennit? I en’t given up hope. I know where I can rent a digger, and there’s a coupler fellers I know would likely help me out, but they won’t be in till tonight, see.’

‘I suppose it’s going to be an even smaller pool, now that this Roddy Lodge is going to be… whatever happens to him.’

Gomer’s glasses, she would swear, darkened. Jane could’ve punched herself for bringing this up again. This whole Lodge thing was very weird and sick. When Mum had told her, she’d felt obliged to feign disappointment at missing the excitement, but in reality she was glad she hadn’t been there. Awfully glad, too, that Mum had got herself and Gomer out of it, avoiding confrontation. Jane had learned that, in situations involving crime and death, only distance lent any kind of excitement. The fact that this Lodge, in all probability, had killed Fat Nev, who Jane had known – OK, not well, but she could picture him, could hear his voice, knew what a crappy life he’d had – made the guy repulsive, a monster.

But Gomer was different. Somehow, for Gomer, the discovery of the woman’s body in the truck had been almost a frustrating development, an intrusion coming between him and the man who’d murdered his nephew and wrecked his business. Did Gomer feel – maybe unconsciously – a certain resentment towards Mum for forcing him to take the easy way out, let the police handle it?

Unlikely, because Gomer’s affection for Mum was almost a father–daughter thing.

But there was something.

‘What are you doing this afternoon?’ Frannie Bliss said.

‘I… nothing vital.’

Lie down for half an hour, maybe. Go across to the church and say some prayers for Gomer and Nev. Phone Lol. Avoid Uncle Ted. Go back and talk to Gomer, see if there’s any way to help him through this.

‘Only, I’d like you to come and look at his place. At Underhowle. Take less than an hour to get there. You know me, Merrily, I don’t have too much faith in psychologists and profilers, but I’ve still gorra sneaking regard for priests.’ He gave a small smile. ‘Of whichever side of the fence.’

‘Frannie,’ Merrily said, ‘do you have any real concrete reason for suspecting he’s done it more than once?’

‘Just his attitude. And the fact that at least one other woman’s gone missing from that area in the past year.’

‘Oh.’

‘He likes women.’

‘It’s not a crime.’

‘I use the word “like”…’

‘OK.’ Merrily put out her cigarette. ‘I’ll tell you. He was heavily suggestive, I mean towards me. In an old-fashioned way, I suppose you’d have to say. I was standing a couple of yards away from a body he’d just exhumed and he was telling me I was… you know… It wasn’t exactly sophisticated and it wasn’t subtle: he actually used the word “sexy”. Here we are in the grounds of an empty house, he’s just been accused of murder by Gomer, and he’s talking like we’ve just met up in a singles bar and we’ve both had a bit to drink.’

‘Had he, do you think?’

‘I wouldn’t’ve thought so. His voice didn’t seem to be slurred and I couldn’t smell anything on him other than an awful lot of aftershave. He was still hyped-up, though.’

‘In what way?’

She thought about it. ‘At first, I thought he was nervous – Gomer had called him a murderer. However, as soon as he found out this was about the fire, he – as you said – kind of denied it. Laughed it off, anyway. That was about when I gave myself away – dropped the torch in the shovel, on the tarpaulin covering… Anyway, as soon as he saw I was a woman, maybe that was when he got cocky. He seemed quite relaxed, from then. I wasn’t, of course. I’d smelled… the smell. I just wanted us to get the hell out of there before he pulled a gun or a knife or something.’