Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Yeah,’ said Frannie Bliss, ‘but have any of these nobs actually hired the bastard?’

Mumford shrugged.

Merrily said, ‘This is like one of those old Ealing comedies.’

Bliss didn’t smile. ‘Right.’ He opened the office door. ‘Come with me, Merrily. I’ll show you just how funny it gets.’

The focus of the living room was a big mahogany cocktail bar, brand new but well out of fashion. There were tall stools, optics, dozens of bottles and a neon sign: Roddy’s Bar . The low seating was arranged around it: a couple of sloppy dark leather chairs and a sofa behind a long, glass-topped coffee table with copies of Loaded and Front on it.

‘This is clearly a man who knows all the best discount warehouses,’ Bliss said.

On one wall, a bullfight poster had Roddy’s name added to the list of contenders. There was a Bang & Olufsen sound system with speakers on wall brackets, and a CD pyramid with one CD lying on top: Ibiza Nights, Vol 2 . But the stereo was unplugged, as was the wide-screen TV, as if Roddy didn’t use them much any more, didn’t spend much time here.

‘It’s all very clean,’ Merrily observed.

‘He has a Mrs Wellings, from the village, comes in once a week. But she says this, and the kitchen and a couple of other rooms, are about as far as she’s allowed to go.’

Bliss led her back into the passage. This was a plain corridor bungalow, doors to left and right, two of them still unpainted. It reinforced the feeling Merrily was getting of a man who moved around like a moth, never settling to anything for very long.

‘How long has he lived here?’

‘Built it about four years ago from money his old man left him. He’s got two older brothers – like twenty years older. One’s living in Oz, one has the family farm up the valley – both quite respectable, by all accounts. Roddy was a bit of a difficult boy, but not in the sense that he’d be known to us… and he wasn’t. I don’t know the full circumstances, but you had a situation where the father bequeaths him a wodge of cash on the proviso that he uses it to set himself up in business. The brother up the valley says he seemed to have knuckled down to it.’

Bliss had stopped outside a door at the end of the passage with a conspicuous metal lock screwed to the outside. The lock was conspicuously broken.

‘That’s us. Most coppers are frustrated burglars.’ He opened the door. ‘After you. This is where you don’t touch anything, but I don’t suppose I’ll need to emphasize that.’

It was dark inside, except for a shape like the screen of one of the old black and white TVs she remembered from when she was a little kid – when you had to fiddle with a switch labelled horizontal hold because all you could get were black, white and grey lines.

She blinked and realized it was only a window with Venetian blinds, their blades not quite fully closed. ‘Oh, sorry,’ Bliss said ingenuously, once she was fully inside the room. ‘Lights. I forgot.’

Merrily was starting to feel annoyed. He’d been setting this up for her, so she’d be in the best viewing position to get the full effect when his hand crept around the door jamb and found the switch.

… and all the women came out of the shadows.

It didn’t seem unusually disturbing at first. They were centre- folds mostly; you could even see the little holes and rips left by the staples. They were pasted on two white emulsioned walls.The other two walls were black or a very deep purple.

She hardly needed to screw up her eyes against the light. The only illumination came from shielded spotbulbs just above skirting-board level, and it was subdued, serving only to reveal the photos and deepen clefts between breasts and thighs.

Of which there were quite a lot. Could be as many as a hundred pictures? Merrily wondered. They were soft-porn poses, mostly, colour and black and white. A scattered few were harder core, a couple featuring women using vibrators. The weakness of the lights and the clouding shadows added the illusion of movement – that was disturbing, in an eerie way. The rest, Merrily decided, was just sad for a man twenty years out of his middle teens.

‘Like some repressed schoolboy’s fantasy den, isn’t it?’ Frannie Bliss stood in the bedroom doorway.

Merrily turned to glance at the bed, keeping her hands in her coat pockets. The bed was king-size, unmade. Black shiny sheets – well, of course. There was a thick smell.

‘Makes you wonder how he ever got a woman to spend a night in here, doesn’t it?’ Bliss said.

‘I don’t think he’d get one for a second night.’

‘Ah, well…’ He came a little way into the room. ‘The answer, of course, is that he’s got another bedroom, along the passage. Red lights, pictures of Spanish dancers – nothing to offend, other than aesthetically, and I don’t imagine there’ve been too many cultural exchanges in there. So if we assume that’s where he takes the, er, young ladies, then this’ll be where he… enjoys his own company.’

Merrily shuddered. She recalled the shadow of Roddy Lodge standing immediately over her in front of the Pawson house, the birthday-boy look on his trowel-shaped face. A woman? he’d said.

Like: any woman. Another one for the wall.

Bliss stood there, hands in his pockets. They both had their hands in their pockets. Bliss was watching her, waiting.

Merrily met his eyes.

‘Er…’ He cleared his throat. ‘You’re not getting it, are you?’

‘Sorry… ?’

‘Take a closer look, would you, Merrily?’

She didn’t move. ‘I don’t see that—’

‘There’ll probably be some ladies you might not recognize – don’t know them all meself. But the one just to the left of the door, for instance, is Kelly Emerson, who was found raped and murdered in Swindon last year. That was the picture the family gave the police for the crime posters. It was widely used in the papers at the time.’

‘What?’

She followed his forefinger to a blurred black and white face, dark synthetic curls, big smile, naked body in shadow. She didn’t understand; the newspapers had used a nude photograph of a missing woman? She moved in closer, realizing that there was something wrong here, something skewed. Saw that the face of Kelly Emerson was in grainy black and white, but the naked body was studio quality and, on closer inspection, was slightly too big for the face.

Merrily backed rapidly away, aware of breathing harder.

‘Thing is, of course,’ Bliss said, ‘that he couldn’t’ve done that one. There’s a bloke doing life for Kelly. Feller from Bournemouth – they got him on DNA and then he pleaded guilty, no messing. It’s beyond any question.’

‘But…’

Lodge had pasted the cut-out face of a murdered woman onto the body of some anonymous pin-up from the Sun ? Just another model… just another dead woman.

She made herself go back and examine both walls more closely. There were several faces she recognized now: celebrity murder victims, celebrity suicides. Also the most famous car- crash casualty of all time. All of them women, all of them now dead, their faces pasted onto cut-out nude bodies – tragic victims twisted, with scissors and paste and lighting, into profane pin-ups.

Merrily turned away from the wall. All the sensations of last night were coming back, from the feeling of grease and smoke in her hair at Gomer’s burned-out depot, to the waves of aftershave, to the cloying perfume of decay under the tarpaulin.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘I think you do, Merrily,’ Bliss said softly. ‘You’re looking at his inspiration. These are the ones he wishes he’d done. The ones he wishes he’d got to first.’