Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘All snug,’ he said.

Merrily punched in the numbers of Lol’s phone.

‘I’m sorry, the mobile you are calling is—’

She switched off again. It was so basic, Lol’s phone, that it hadn’t come with an answering service. In fact, he probably hadn’t even taken it with him. She pictured him digging, willing but a little inept, in some muddy field, red-brown stains on the alien sweatshirt – her mind could still never find him without the alien sweatshirt. Once she’d insisted on bringing it home to mend a hole in the shoulder and had ended up sleeping with the faded item under her pillow: how sad was that? You wanted to be adult about these things, wanted to take it slowly, but your emotions operated at a different velocity: feelings on fast-track, playing the old Hazey Jane albums when you were alone in the car – his voice a little higher then, a little smoother; he’d been not much older than Jane at the time, and now nearly twenty years had passed and – Oh God.

Merrily lit a cigarette. Her hand was shaking. It didn’t seem to take much to make her hands shake nowadays.

Jane had also talked about the folk-rock singer, Moira Cairns, on whom Eirion had seemed to have developed a crush, although the kid had emphasized in disgust that the singer was old enough to be his mother. Merrily recalled a Moira Cairns album with a sleeve picture of Cairns trailing a guitar along an empty beach. Something special then; how special was she now? Last night, Prof Levin, according to Jane, had thrown an oblique glance at the lovely Moira in her slinky frock and had said they should ‘Let what happens happen.’ Was this Jane winding her up? Jane, who wanted a situation where Lol actually moved into the vicarage with his guitars, which… which was really not possible, at the moment, was it? What would they say about her in the village ( whore! ), the diocese, the press. And, of course, Uncle Ted…

Merrily stared at the phone. Uncle bloody Ted .

No real reason for putting this off any longer. She called him. She called Uncle Ted Clowes and arranged to meet him in the church in ten minutes. She put out the cigarette, got back into her best coat and pulled out the sack full of cash, its origins still uncertain.

With the sun going right down, the wind getting up, and still no sign of the Hereford coppers arriving with Lodge, Gomer left young Lol Robinson rubbing his hands in the cold, tramped across the cinders and dragged miserable Andy Mumford over to one side, by the garage wall. Time to have this out.

‘You said three, right, Andy boy? You reckoned he’d confessed to three.’

Andy Mumford looked over his shoulder. ‘I never said anything at all, Gomer, you know that.’

‘Three, that it? Just the three women?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Behind Mumford, coppers were moving through the dusk, unloading tackle from a blue van.

‘Don’t you give me that ole wallop!’ Gomer levelled a finger. He’d known this boy for years. Born to a big family over by Wigmore, and if ole Ma Mumford was yere, she’d have the truth out of the bastard. ‘What about torchin’ a certain plant- hire shed? What do he say about that, boy?’

Miserable Andy looking frazzled. Coming up to retirement, didn’t need this. Well, too bloody bad! Gomer could feel the old fury coming to the boil. He’d worked all day for nothing much, seen his good friend young Lol Robinson reduced to a limp rag and now in all the excitement of Lodge shooting his mouth off, just the one serious crime gets very conveniently forgotten.

‘Not sexy enough – that it, Andy? Not got no spectac’lar headlines in it? Unknown Welsh Border drunk gets ’isself roasted?’

‘Look, Gomer,’ Andy said awkwardly, ‘we’ve been cooperating the best we can with Dyfed-Powys on this one, but it calls for a lot of forensic, and that’s not easy to come by after a big fire. I don’t know how much you know about DNA, but it doesn’t survive that kind of blaze. Anyway, proving that someone else other than Nev was involved is not gonner be a simple matter, take it from me.’

‘Ole wallop!’ Gomer was ramming his glasses up tight to his eyes. ‘In the ole days, they’d’ve bounced the bastard off the cell walls a few times till he told the truth.’ He was thinking of Wynford Wiley, the Radnor Valley sergeant – never liked the bugger, but he knew how to get the facts out of the lowlife.

‘Gomer’ – Andy sounding pained – ‘Lodge has a very smart young lawyer, I’m told. Going about it the old-fashioned way is the best way of not getting a conviction on anything these days, take it from—’

‘Ar, we all know what goes on nowadays – three-course dinner and tucked up with a hot-water bottle, all cosy. ’Spect he’d be getting a conjugal bloody visit if he hadn’t done for all his girlfriends.’

Bad-taste thing to say and, fair play, Gomer was truly sorry for those girls and their families, but there’d been no woman in Nev’s life at the end, and nobody was going to stand up for that boy if Gomer didn’t do it now.

Headlights blasting through the trees brought Andy Mumford out of his slump.

‘They’re here. Gotter leave this now, Gomer.’

Two cars… three.

‘Do one thing for me, Gomer.’

Gomer kept quiet.

‘I’ll admit I warned the boss about hiring you for this,’ Andy said. ‘But he was in a hurry, and I reckon he thought you’d have a bit more of an incentive than most digger-men.’

Boy had that right.

‘But don’t – just don’t … When you see Lodge, don’t say nothing, don’t do nothing. Soon as we nail this psycho on the women, we’ll talk about Nev, I promise. Just you keep in the background, meantime, and dig where you’re told. Don’t do nothing else, you understand me?’

‘You knows me, boy.’

‘Exactly,’ Andy says grimly.

The first car’s pulling up just a few yards from Gomer. It’s not a police car. The boy Bliss gets out first. He stands there, hands in his pockets, waiting, as the second car fits itself in behind.

Three uniform coppers in this one. And Lodge, bent drainage operator and likely the biggest serial killer in these parts since bloody Fred West.

Gomer fired up a ciggy in the fading light and waited too.

Stepping warily into the gloom of the vestry, Merrily found that Uncle Ted had already moved the wardrobe into a corner and folded up the card table, and was now brushing the dust from his sleeves, obviously envisaging the gift shop.

‘I thought the main counter about here … and perhaps a second display stand under the window?’

Merrily said, ‘Perhaps if we brick up the window altogether, we could have an even bigger display stand.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ Ted said, ‘because when you add up the cost of extra lighting…’

He dried up, realizing – lips twisted in annoyance – that his niece, the vicar, was taking the piss. His face went a deep and petulant red. ‘I very much hope,’ he said, ‘that you aren’t going to backtrack on this. We do need the income.’

Backtrack? She didn’t recall ever agreeing. ‘Well…’ She carefully re-erected the card table in the middle of the small, drab room and placed the black bin sack on it. ‘Maybe we can now afford to postpone the decision for a while.’

She was still dreading telling him about the money. Obviously, they’d have to put it out that there’d been an anonymous donation, without necessarily revealing how it had arrived. The gossip, anyway, would be considerable.

Ted frowned. ‘I admit the mobile-phone mast would bring in a regular income, but…’

‘You haven’t mentioned that in a while.’

‘No, I… to be honest, I’ve been a trifle perturbed by what I’ve been reading about possible health risks. Particularly to, ah, elderly people, it seems. Nothing proven, but it might be wise to, ah…’