Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

After breakfast, Jane had casually told her what she already knew – that Lol had elected to become an unskilled labourer for Gomer. And they’d stared at one another for a moment, Jane displaying hostility, like this was Merrily’s fault, while Merrily wondered if the kid could possibly know the worst of it – what it was likely to involve.

Evidently not. At about nine, Eirion had picked her up, and they’d said they were heading back into Wales for the day. If they’d secretly been going to join Gomer and Lol in the search for decaying bodies under waste tanks, Jane might have thrown up a smokescreen but Eirion wouldn’t.

When they’d gone, she’d tried to ring Lol, twice. No answer. Why did he still find it so hard to accept that someone might want him to be there? Spooked by the way the Lodge affair was starting to surround them all like a blanket of smog, she’d pulled the plastic sack from under the desk in the scullery, emptying it out again to make sure she hadn’t dreamed its contents and carefully counting it all this time.

Eighty thousand pounds exactly, for the church.

Right. OK. She’d knotted the neck of the sack and called the Deliverance office in Hereford, got the answering machine – Sophie must be down at the Palace with the bishop. Merrily had left a message asking if they happened to have the Melanie Pullman file and, if so, could Sophie e-mail it.

It had been then, stowing the bin sack under the desk, that she’d realized she’d finally run out of reasons for putting off a confrontation with Mrs Box.

Inevitably, the old oak door of Chapel House opened – not bumping and scraping like the front door of the vicarage, but gliding – and here was Mrs Box, carefully made-up. Or rather, made-down: her hair was brushed and shining and her face wore pale foundation, but no lipstick, no eyeshadow. She was wearing a simple black dress with a loose cord around the waist.

‘Why, Merrily.’ Smiling her gracious smile, this silky-voiced, willowy woman, the ex-model who would always make you feel graceless and untidy. ‘You couldn’t’ve timed it better. I was just off to my morning prayers. Now we can go together.’

‘Oh.’ She was waiting for me. She knew I’d come .

Merrily turned to descend the steps, thinking they’d be off to the church. But Jenny Box had already slipped back into the dimness of the old house.

‘Well, come on, then, Merrily. I’ve been dying to show this to someone who’d really understand.’

Gomer was standing up in the mini-JCB, leaning forward like a horseman on stirrups, to witness the uncovering. ‘Easy now, boy. Don’t you scratch him.’

As most of the tank had been buried and seemed to be coated with tough rubber, it was hard to imagine how a few scratches would matter. But this was Gomer’s show, Gomer’s world.

Lol eased up, using the tip of the spade like a trowel, teasing away shards of clay. This was how they’d unearthed the first Efflapure, a big rubber ball full of human waste – slow and careful, as though it was likely to explode like a giant landmine in a welter of shrapnel and shit. You couldn’t pull it out without emptying it first, and they hadn’t got a convenient tanker, so it was a question of digging down to it, getting underneath, and Lol was waist-deep in the hole, his jeans soaked through because he’d said no to plastic trousers.

Outside the hole, it was already late morning, but the sun was like a soft-boiled egg. Across the long field beyond the garden fence there were still woolly rolls of mist on the hill above Underhowle – Howle Hill this would be, hanging a literal name on a village that Lol had never heard of until today.

He didn’t know this area, and he’d never been to the Forest of Dean, which Andy Mumford said began the other side of the hill. He didn’t know it, and yet he was already inside it, feeling its juices, smelling its smell. Everything here was earthy and pungent, but it was also, thankfully, kind of unreal: Middle- earth. Gomerland.

Mumford was standing well clear, saving his suit from mud- spurts. As if he’d picked up Lol’s thoughts on some mental police wavelength, he whispered loudly into the hole, ‘You see anything or smell anything apart from God’s earth, Mr Robinson, you come out of there quick, and we summon the white people.’

Meaning the forensic people – white coveralls. Until then, it would be just the three of them: two seasoned professionals and a wimpy little singer with muscles like sponge cake, guitar fingers delving in mud and slime. Gomerland. Maybe inches away from meddling with the dead.

Which would then be Merrilyland.

‘Smell?’ Mr Sandford, whose garden this was, had been peering in, quite intrigued, but now he jumped back, alarmed. ‘ Smell? ’ Here it came, the first shower of outrage. ‘I thought this was just a formality. That’s what Inspector Bliss told us on the phone. He said it was just—’

‘Yes, sir, I’m sure that’s right,’ Mumford said.

‘No, you’re not! You think there’s’ – the colour was flaking from Mr Sandford’s smooth face – ‘a dead flaming body down there!’

‘ Mike? ’ Here came the blonde wife tottering in unsuitable sandals at the edge of their bungalow’s colonial-style verandah. ‘Mike, oh, for God’s sake…’ Glossy lips retracting in revulsion. ‘It is this Melanie Pullman, isn’t it? They’re looking for Melanie Pullman’s body. Oh please, not here !’

‘You got some information you haven’t told us about?’ Sandford was waving his wife away and backing off from the hole like it might widen and swallow him. He was about Lol’s age, wearing sweats and trainers: suburban weekend-wear in an area of well-patched tweeds, overalls and waterproofs. He’d told them he’d taken half a day off work for this.

‘Please calm down, sir,’ Mumford said in his stolid, farmerly way. ‘We don’t know anything. Like I said, this is just one of a number of installations we’ll be checking out in the course of the day.’

In fact six, Lol had been told, in an area roughly bounded by the towns of Ross, Ledbury and Coleford. This was the first – recently installed and less than half a country mile from Underhowle where this Roddy Lodge lived. From Gomer, Lol had learned a lot about Lodge: liar, conman, incompetent installer of overpriced drainage systems. The man who murdered Nev. Also a woman.

They were here to look for number three; why deny it?

‘Don’t expect this, do you?’ Mr Sandford had returned nervously to the edge of the hole. His wife had gone back into the house; she’d be calming herself by phoning friends, Lol thought. This was how panic spread. The next house they arrived at, discretion would no longer be an option.

‘No,’ Lol said, ‘you don’t.’

‘Move out the bloody city to find a place where your kids can walk home from school in safety, and just when you finally think you’ve…’ Mr Sandford nodded at the exposed tank. ‘How long before you know?’

Lol shook his head. The pit Gomer had excavated on two sides of the Efflapure was wide enough now for him to move around the tank. He reversed the spade, holding it two-handed just above the blade, and began to scrape soil from the curved, rubbery casing, his arms already stiffening under sleeves of drying mud.

‘You’ve got a job locally?’ he asked Mr Sandford – talking only to cover his own nerves, because if there was something dead down here, he was likely to be getting very close to it. He was aware of a dark bib of sweat spreading over the front of his T-shirt.

‘Computers,’ Mr Sandford said.

‘Oh?’ Lol took a careful sniff at the earth: decay, yes – but vegetable, surely nothing more than that. Gomer had said grimly, You’ll know, boy, when you finds it . Like he was certain they were going to.