Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Do you think he detected you were scared, and that was what made him so forward?’

‘You mean, do I think he got off on that, a woman being blatantly nervous of him? Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘Where was Mr Parry at the time?’

‘Mr Parry was standing there, gobsmacked at me selling him down the river. I really don’t think… The impression I have, thinking back on it, was that Roddy had ceased to be aware of Gomer from the moment he became aware of me. He said, “a woman” – like, you know, “For me ?” ’ Merrily shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, that sounds – even to me, that sounds like the kind of thing you say in hindsight, when you know you’ve been face to face with a…’

‘It sounds about right, actually,’ Bliss said. ‘For instance, when the lads brought him in last night, he was rabbiting nonstop in the car, like they were his best mates. Like they were all on a coach coming back from an outing. He’s there, jammed up between two burly uniforms, and at one point he’s suggesting that if they ever fancy a one-nighter, with the trimmings, he can get them fixed up.’

‘Trimmings?’

‘I’ll spare you the details.’

‘Did he realize why they were arresting him?’

‘Oh yeh. Merrily, you say in your statement he told you he’d been to talk to the local vicar?’

She nodded. ‘That would be Jerome Banks. You spoken to him?’

‘Would I need to?’

‘Lodge claimed he scared the vicar. Told him about things he’d supposedly seen. “Spooky” was Lodge’s word.’

‘Didn’t go into detail?’

‘He seemed… I dunno… kind of proud of this – spooking the vicar. I said that sounded very interesting, and he said – in this heavily lecherous way – that I could go and talk to him any time I liked.’

‘And you said?’

‘I said that’d be nice, or something like that.’

‘Ah.’ Frannie Bliss rubbed his stubble-roughened jaw.

‘What?’

‘ Nice . Yes. That’s more or less what he said to us.’

‘Huh?’ She reached for the Zippo and the Silk Cut.

‘Like I say, they couldn’t shut the bugger up last night. And yet this morning, when we brought him out of his cell and into an interview room… he’s a very different man. Withdrawn. Sort of hunched up into himself. Like he’d been drunk last night and now he’s very badly hung-over. Didn’t want to know us any more. Kept muttering, “Not talking, not talking.” Kept wanting to go back to his cell. See, that’s a bit unusual. Normally they can’t wait to get out. We tried all the usual things.’

‘Good cop, bad cop.’

‘We’re a little more psychologically sophisticated nowadays, Merrily.’

‘Since when?’ She drew out a cigarette with her teeth.

‘Anyway, it wasn’t happening. We weren’t getting anywhere. He didn’t even ask for a solicitor. We offered him one, he said no. No to everything. No, no, no. Don’t wanner talk, leave me alone. Sinking further back into himself, complaining of headaches. Well, all right, we’ll have enough forensic by the end of the day to package him up, no problem. But I…’ He looked into Merrily’s eyes. ‘I know there’s a lot more to come out if we handle this right.’

‘And you want to be the one to uncover it, before they send Howe back from her course to take over.’ Merrily eyed him along the length of her cigarette.

‘Aw, please…’

‘Sorry.’

‘But eventually,’ Bliss said, ‘he just looks at me through his fingers and he says, “You get that little woman. I’ll talk to that little… woman.” ’

‘What?’

Bliss smiled a touch bashfully, not quite meeting her eyes.

‘You took a bloody long time to get round to that ,’ Merrily said.

‘Yeah. Sorry about that.’

‘No, you’re not.’

Bliss shuffled in his chair. ‘Merrily, how would you feel about talking to him? Might save us all some time.’

Help you get it wrapped before they bring in some flash DCI from headquarters or summon Ms Howe back.

‘By “talking to him” you mean either with you there or with a tape running.’ Something like that. But I wouldn’t like to have you going in there cold. That’s why I want you to see his place. Get an idea of what kind of bloke we’re dealing with. It won’t take long.’

‘Now?’

‘Wouldn’t mind.’

‘Look, I know the Bishop and the Chief Constable have had drinkies together—’

‘But you don’t work for the police. Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to cross any of your personal barriers. I just want a firmer idea of whether I’m talking to a sexual fantasist who got carried away one time, or to a real sexual predator – maybe somebody who started out degrading women and progressed to killing them. Them – plural.’

‘And as well as whatever he might disclose to me, you probably want to watch how he reacts to me as a woman, right?’

‘Well, you know, I hadn’t actually thought of that.’

‘Frannie, forget it.’

Bliss was silent for a moment. He waved away her smoke. ‘You’ve disappointed me, Merrily. I thought what you did was all about stopping the spread of evil.’

‘And suppose he’s in some way innocent? Suppose you’re getting carried away.’

‘I can show you—’

‘All right.’ She put out her cigarette. She’d have to admit that the possibility of Lodge’s innocence was remote. ‘I’ll talk to him, but I’ll warn him first that under the circumstances there could be things I would feel obliged to pass on to the police. Then he has the option of telling me to push off.’

Bliss didn’t look too unhappy about this.

‘And no tape, no video.’

‘Merrily…’

‘Or I could put your idea to the Bishop. He’d need about two days to think about it, the old worrier.’ She stood up. ‘Frannie, are you even fit to drive?’

Bliss squeezed shut his eyes and opened them again.

‘Wouldn’t have any more coffee in that pot, by any chance?’

THEY TRAVELLED DOWN the long, misted valley, with steel skeletons striding ahead of them.

This was where Herefordshire and Gloucestershire lay back- to-back on a lumpy mattress of tiered fields rising into old woodland of browning broadleaved trees and conifers high on the hillsides. But the valley didn’t look as if it belonged to either county as much as it belonged to the power industry.

‘You can’t believe they can still get away with this, can you?’ Merrily said.

‘Sorry?’ Frannie Bliss, driving, was somewhere else.

‘The pylons.’ They looked seriously hostile, like an army of the dead, bristling with obsolete weaponry. ‘I mean, would it be all that costly to run some of it underground?’

The joke was that there were so few homes in view that you could probably have electrified the lot with half a dozen windmills. Wreathed now in fog, the pylons were a primitive show of strength. Maybe one day they’d be industrial archaeology. Not yet.

Frannie Bliss glared at the countryside through the windscreen of his black Alfa, as though it was holding out on him. He was still a city cop at heart; you couldn’t accost pedestrians the same in country lanes: Where you off to, son? What’s in the rucksack?

They’d come in from the A40, the dual carriageway pumping heavy goods in and out of Newport and Cardiff and the West Country. Here, lorries lurched past the most voluptuous curves of the Wye Valley and that famous Ross-on-Wye skyline: the tall-steepled church crowning the town, above the river and the water-meadows and the mock-medieval sandstone walls. Dark wooded hills were the Ross backcloth, and those same hills were directly above them now, sunk into wet mist, a few miles beyond the town.