Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘You don’t wanner take no notice of that ole fuck! He’s well past it, he is! He don’t know what he’s—’

In the choked silence, Lol was aware of the razory thrumming of the power lines.

Then a chuckle. One of the uniformed police fisted his palm in glee. Frannie Bliss, smiling in the lamplight like a freckled cherub, punched Gomer joyfully on the upper arm.

‘Thank you, Roddy. Thank you, God.’

Laughter. You could feel the current passing around the circle.

Bliss beckoned the policewoman. ‘Gomer, this merits a nice

‘plastic cup of tea, which Tiffany here will provide for you, if I’m not being sexist there. And an Eccles cake?’

‘Welsh cake, boss,’ the policewoman said.

‘Sorry, Tiff.’ Bliss was still smiling as he handed Lol the spade. ‘Take it slowly, son.’

Like he could take it any other way. Quite when he began to tremble, he wasn’t sure. He was just suddenly aware of doing it. It could’ve been the cold, because it was cold, and it was wet and the earth was clammy. But he knew it wasn’t that; he’d been cold and wet most of the day.

His head was full of rumbling: they’d brought two cars round the back, with their engines running and the headlights on full beam. He was caught in the lights, the star attraction, sweating under the scrutiny of a hyper-attentive audience – Lol Robinson on stage for the first time in nearly two decades, Lol Robinson performing live, digging up the dead.

He was directly under the power lines – heavy-gauge black strings on a fretboard of night cloud. The spade was about eighteen inches down now, raising a little hill of muddy soil and wedges of clay at the side of the hole. Lol’s glasses had misted up and the spade was feeling sledgehammer-heavy, pulling him down, the way the old solid-body electric guitar had done once, on stage with Hazey Jane – Lol sagging under the responsibility, the knowledge that all he had to do was touch a string with a fingernail – the wrong string, the wrong note, the wrong chord – and there would be this hall-filling blast. A power he didn’t want, the amplification of his inadequacy.

His head felt hot. The sweat on his face was like cream. Moira Cairns said smokily in his head, Let me get this right: if you reappear on stage now, the audience isnae gonnae be thinking, “Ah, here’s the awfully talented person from Hazey Jane, where the hell’s he been all this time?’ It’s gonnae be like, ‘Hey, is that no’ the big sex offender of 1982 or whenever?’

Lol hated it here. The half-imagined zinging of the power lines was like the panting of old amps on stage, and like every chord he played, every spadeful he dumped on the heap at the side of the hole, they landed on it, pulling it apart, mauling it: blurred figures in boots and uniforms. Spotlit from several angles, Lol had the clear sensation of digging his own grave, like some prisoner of war, surrounded by uniforms, and he didn’t even notice when the spade found something – something that was actually not softish – until Frannie Bliss, his Liverpool accent cranked up to distortion level, was bawling:

‘Stop! What’s dis? What’s dis, what’s dis…?’

A skull? A human skull caked in clay? Lol was out of there fast, gripping the spade with both hands.

‘Leave it,’ Bliss said, as if people were going to rush to the thing in the hole like it was a holy relic. He snatched a lamp and shone it down. ‘Spade, Laurence.’

Bliss grabbed the spade from him and stood astride the hole. Handing the lamp to Mumford, he started to probe with a corner of the blade. Lol found himself next to the lawyer, Mr Nye, who turned away from him, like Lol had flakes of dead flesh on his arms.

‘Hang on,’ Bliss said. ‘What the… ?’ Lol saw something in the hole that was dull and grey and blistered with earth. Bliss said, ‘Right. Fetch Roddy. Now.’

He got the spade under it and levered it half out.

It was not a skull.

‘Suitcase, boss?’ One of the police crouched down. The curved, shiny bit, Lol saw, was a metal corner-support.

‘Too small.’ Bliss looked down in disgust, like a kid on Christmas Day who didn’t get the bike after all. ‘Attaché case, more like. Feels like it’s bloody empty. I said, fetch Roddy !’

Lol, thinking he was maybe the only person here who was relieved, walked away from the lights towards the shelter of the garage.

Hands in leather seized his left arm and spun him around. White flashlight speared his eyes. All around him, there was heavy movement in the mud, scuffling, panting. Torch beams were intersecting erratically in the rain.

When they let him go without an apology, he realized something had happened.

‘Oh shit.’ Panic scraping a young copper’s voice. ‘I can’t bleeding believe this.’

The initial stampede had been constrained. Procedure now. They were fanning out, covering the ground, lamp and torch beams pooling.

Someone had gone into the bungalow and put on all its lights. The whole compound was lit up now, multiple shadows climbing the windowless back wall of the garage.

‘Somebody,’ Bliss said through his teeth, ‘is going down for this.’ The hoarsened edge to his voice suggesting that he was getting worried it was going to be him.

The hole in the grass lay abandoned. Someone had taken the case away. There was no stench of decaying flesh, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a body down there, somewhere. Lol stayed away from the hole. Only Roddy Lodge could explain this, and he wasn’t around. Roddy Lodge had taken a personal decision that his presence here was no longer essential. He’d just walked away into the darkness.

‘Can’t’ve got out of here,’ Mumford kept saying. ‘That’s for certain. I know this place now, end to end, and if everybody’s stayed in place, he can not have got out.’

‘You better be right, sunshine, for all our sakes.’ Bliss turned to the lawyer, ‘And if you —’

‘He was ill.’ Mr Nye had his arms folded and kept looking over his shoulder. Lol instinctively looked over his: how dangerous was Lodge? ‘He was ill ,’ the lawyer insisted. ‘There was no question at all that he was ill.’

‘I’m not feeling too marvellous meself, pal, and if I thought for one minute that when you asked for those handcuffs to come off—’

‘Don’t be absurd!’

This man’ – Bliss’s forefinger came out like a gun – ‘is a suspected multiple murderer . So don’t you go anywhere, Mr Nye.’

‘Is that a thr—?’

‘And who the fuck ,’ Bliss roared out, staring past Mr Nye, ‘let these bastards in?’

Maybe it was the kids driven away from the perimeter tape who’d spread the word. But it wasn’t just kids this time. Lol thought of a football crowd filing through turnstiles. Only with lamps and torches.

‘Jesus, it’s a fuckin’ circus !’

The group of people moving along the path on one side of the garage building was led by a tall woman in a long stock- man’s coat. A lone PC behind them spread his arms, helpless.

‘Sorry, sir, they—’

‘Get back to the entrance! Now! ’ Bliss walked up to the woman. ‘Mrs Sollars, you should know better than this. We’re not running a funfair here.’

‘Then what are you running?’ a man demanded. ‘You’ve spent the whole day digging up people’s gardens with abandon. I suppose you thought you were being discreet.’ He looked down at two children. ‘Miles… Ffion… home, please. I did ask you before.’

One of the kids said, ‘Aw, Fergus!’

‘Or there may have to be proportionately less time on line for the whole of next week,’ the man said calmly.