Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Gomer—’

‘You don’t need to explain nothing, boy. Miserable Andy’s spelled it out. Keep Parry out of it. Don’t nobody mention Nev. You go with ’em. I’ll stay yere.’

‘It’s nothing personal,’ Lol said. ‘Just Bliss covering himself against any comebacks in court. If they do find anything and it was you who dug it up, a man with a grudge…’ He sighed; he didn’t want to operate the digger, either, even if he could be sure he knew how to. ‘Nobody’s going anywhere, it seems. Looks like they want to dig here. Maybe we should tell them they can do it themselves.’

‘Not with my bloody gear, they don’t. I’ve lent tools to cops before.’ Gomer pulled a single key on a chain from his overalls. ‘So don’t you let anybody else—’

‘Hang on to it,’ Lol said nervously. ‘It may not come to that.’

They watched Roddy Lodge flexing his arms, rubbing his freed wrists. Lol saw his face properly for the first time, and it was the colour and the texture of paving stone. His eyes seemed sunken, but somehow gleaming back there, like glass, like cat’s eyes in the road.

And then he started slowly shaking his head, a smile forming.

JANE SAID, ‘So you’re saying Jenny Driscoll saw an angel.’ She flinched slightly. ‘An actual… with like, wings?’

Merrily stood up, went to switch on the earthenware reading lamp on the wide window sill. It had been clear to her that if she was going to tell the kid about the money then a preliminary account of Mrs Box and the vision of the angel was probably unavoidable.

Besides, this had been, not too long ago, very much Jane’s kind of thing. Up in the apartment, against the Mondrian walls, two bookcases still bulged with pastel-spined paperbacks about contacting nature spirits, working with the elements, finding secret pathways to enlightenment.

Which had bothered Merrily quite a bit at one time; less so now. If, occasionally, it bordered on neo-paganism, it was still spirituality. Better than agnosticism.

Certainly better than the possible onset of atheism.

‘Let’s say a startling brightness formed out of the veins of light on the edge of clouds,’ Merrily said. ‘Resembling in this case, it seems, the Archangel Uriel. This is the lesser-known one usually portrayed with a sword, pointing down. It was very dramatic, Mrs Box says.’

‘And it was pointing at the steeple. Your steeple?’

‘This would be… you remember the huge, spectacular storm one Sunday last spring? Where we were standing here at the window and the whole of the orchard was lit up white, like a snowstorm? Well, Mrs Box parked her car and walked up onto Cole Hill. She was in a… an emotional state.’

‘Evidently,’ Jane said.

Eirion had dropped her off around four before having to go home for his step-grandmother’s eightieth birthday party. Now the day was closing down, the old Aga making its smug Aga noises without putting much heat into the kitchen. Merrily and Jane had mugs of tea for warmth.

The lamp laid a golden mist on the room. The kid had changed into white jeans and a sweater discarded by Merrily as terminally shapeless. It seemed to fit Jane better. She slid forward on her elbows, chin cupped in her hands, gazing into her mother’s eyes, very candid and calmed by something awesome that Merrily was seeing more frequently: a level of understanding that murmured adult .

Merrily’s hand tightened around her mug.

‘OK, just reassure me,’ Jane said, ‘that you don’t believe a word of this bollocks.’

The strengthening night-wind rattled the trees.

‘ Bastard! ’ Bliss was livid. He stormed over to where Lol and Gomer were standing, out of Lodge’s earshot.

‘Lawyer’s got it right for once, boss.’ Mumford was ambling behind like a pack pony. ‘Bloke’s mental.’

‘Andy, he’s mental when he wants to be.’ Bliss moved up to the barrier tape, clutched it with both hands, failed to snap it. ‘I’m buggered if I’m chauffeuring the crafty bastard back to his cell after this little works’ outing. I’d rather dig the whole site up and make him watch. Put him back in the cuffs.’

‘Look a bit peevish?’ Mumford said.

‘I’m a peevish person.’

‘En’t bein’ helpful n’more, then,’ Gomer said insouciantly through blue smoke.

‘No, he en’t.’ Bliss stared out across the lane into the trees, hands rammed into the pockets of his green and cream hiking jacket. ‘As you may have overheard, Mr Lodge appears to have had a lapse of memory and is now effectively saying he no longer recalls precisely why he brought us here.’

‘Ar.’ Gomer smiled through his ciggy. Relief seeped into Lol’s aching body like warm alcohol. It looked like this could be over before it started.

‘What’s he got here, Andy?’ Bliss said.

‘Boss?’

‘How much ground? Acreage. Roughly. What we looking at?’

‘I’d reckon… say two and a bit acres, all told. That’s including the yard and the bungalow and the triangular piece of land at the bottom with the pylon on it. Oh, and the other side of the main perimeter fence it seems Lodge owns a paddock, and then there’s about one and a half acres surrounding what used to be the Underhowle Baptist chapel. Lodge used to own that, too, but he’s now sold it to the Underhowle Development Committee.’

‘Proper little property speculator,’ Bliss said sourly. ‘We been in there?’

‘The chapel? Empty, boss. The Development Committee’s turning it into a museum for all the Roman finds.’

‘We’ll still put it on the list for the Durex-suits.’

‘He’s just had money to spare and a good accountant,’ Mumford said. ‘Property always makes sense, even derelict property. I bought the field next to us, with an old cowshed.’

‘Yeh, you would.’ Bliss hacked the heel of a cowboy boot into the cinders. ‘Wouldn’t know where to start here on our own, would we? Take days to dig up this lot, and I haven’t got days.’ He turned his back to the tape, looked across at Roddy Lodge standing motionless in his orange overalls. ‘I’m gonna look a right twat when this gets out.’

Lol noticed two kids hanging around at the far end of the tape, one apparently shielding the other who was bending over the tape – probably cutting himself a couple of feet of it as a souvenir.

Gomer cleared his throat, but Frannie Bliss didn’t look at him. A policeman advanced on the two kids, who ran off up the lane towards the village. Then one turned and gave him the finger. It began to rain very lightly.

There was a sigh of resignation from Bliss. ‘Yes, Mr Parry.’

‘Course’ – Gomer spat out the last millimetre of ciggy – ‘if I hadn’t been discharged from my duties, told to take a back seat, like…’

Lol became aware of just how cold it had become, how thin his old army jacket was, and how much night there was stretching ahead.

‘What you got in mind, Gomer?’ Bliss said.

Lol just hoped that whatever it was wouldn’t involve him or his frozen muscles.

Merrily said, ‘So I emptied out the sack, and waited for it to happen. And, sure enough, he metamorphosed before my eyes. Out goes the churchwarden, in comes the lawyer.’

‘Dr Jekyll and Mr—’

‘No, this is Ted,’ Merrily said. ‘Mr Hyde and Mr even-Hyder.’

Jane grinned fractionally. Merrily poured more tea, glad to be off the subject of angels. She was bewildered by Jane’s reaction to the report of a dramatic visionary experience on her own doorstep. Was this not the kid who had entered her middle teens with a fervent belief in fairies and the kind of elemental forces not covered by the Bible? There was a point where New Age philosophy and Christianity crossed over, and angels were it, and you didn’t just abandon all that virtually overnight – not even Jane.