Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Gomer wasn’t laughing.’

‘He’d got what he wanted. Roddy did confess to the fire. And Nev? What about Nev?’

‘He said he… fried the fat bastard. So Gomer got his confession, too, finally. It was really odd. All the way back here, he said hardly a word. You’d expect some kind of cathartic reaction. But not a word. I think Gomer was seriously stunned.’

‘You travelled all the way back in silence?’ Merrily felt around on the oak-boarded floor for her cigarettes.

‘No, he talked about this and that – the tanks and why we hadn’t found any bodies underneath them. How that was one secret Lodge had taken to his grave. Which, of course, is another problem for Bliss. Nobody’s going to tell him where to look now. He could dig up half the county and still not get close.’

‘Lot of explaining ahead for Frannie, I’d imagine.’ She thought about Bliss and his ‘messy’ home life and the Job – only the police gave it a capital J – becoming his refuge. It wasn’t going to be much of one now. His superiors would want to know exactly how he came to mislay his prisoner, why he’d sat on the case, kept it to himself, hired the volatile Gomer Parry to dig up septic tanks installed by a man Gomer believed had murdered his nephew.

She wondered how much of a basis Bliss had really had for bringing Roddy Lodge out to Underhowle, how much Lodge had actually told him in the interview room. Evidently he’d admitted to several killings, but had he given any indication of why ? Serial killers had become a species, their motives taken for granted. They were male predators, and that was it, jungle carnivores, bringing down young women like gazelles, to be pawed and raked at leisure.

Leave it . Merrily peered at the old luminous alarm clock in the window; she didn’t want to oversleep and have Jane find them here in the morning… even though the kid would probably be delighted.

Hell it was the morning. In three minutes’ time it would be Hell, four a.m.

Lol said suddenly, ‘I felt sorry for him.’

‘Bliss?’

‘Lodge.’ His voice sounded distant, detached. His arm went slack around her. ‘That’s not right, is it? How can anybody feel sorry for a man who killed women?’

Merrily said, ‘It’s a… Christian thing.’

Trite.

‘Empathy,’ Lol said. ‘I saw him up there, and I seemed to feel what he was feeling. Or it translated itself. It was like stadium rock. All the lights. Pink Floyd or something. Crazy.’

Or something . Merrily said, ‘When’s the gig?’

‘Oh. Next week. Wednesday.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I… In case…’

‘You mean you’re considering not doing it.’

‘It’s a Moira Cairns concert. That’s all it says on the posters. Nobody would be the wiser.’

‘I’m going to order some tickets.’

‘Don’t do that. I can get you some. She’ll be worth seeing.’

She.

‘I want to buy them,’ she said, ‘out of my meagre stipend.’

‘Merrily—’

‘Shush.’

They’d agreed that in the morning he would stay up here until Jane wasn’t around, and then he’d slip quietly away through the orchard to pick up his car at Gomer’s. No one would know. Merrily felt tearful.

‘Why did you do it? Why did you offer to go with Gomer?’

‘I like Gomer.’

She reached for his hand; it felt like half-set concrete. ‘Feels like you won’t be able to pick up a guitar for days.’ She stiffened. ‘Is that why? Is it?’

He kissed her naked shoulder. ‘And I sensed people wanting him to die. I was sure I sensed people wanting to see him die.’

Lol sighed, as if this was something he needed to get out of himself. Merrily was about to say something when she realized he was asleep.

She kissed his forehead and wondered if he was dreaming about Roddy Lodge. Or Moira Cairns.

IT WAS DURING her sermon the following Sunday that Merrily realized it wasn’t over – that Roddy Lodge, though dead, wasn’t out of her life.

This morning, she’d awakened at five a.m., or thereabouts, after the return of that old recurring dream: the one where she suddenly discovered she was living in a house with three floors, after thinking there were only two. And on the third floor was something dreadful, and she knew that she’d have to go up there and face it alone.

She was moving very slowly up the second staircase, the fear of reaching the top intensified by the inability to turn back – in dreams, turning back never seemed to be an option – when the dark upper landing suddenly came into view, and then she was at the top, and the first strange door was just above her and beneath it was a thin grin of icy, violet light.

This was enough. Ejecting in terror from the dream, Merrily had rolled over, with an urgent need to be held. But the bed was wide and empty and outside the uncurtained window the boughs of old apple trees were creaking in the sour October wind.

Alone.

For two nights after Lol had gone, she’d gone back to the fifth bedroom, slept in the single bed they’d shared, before returning despondently to her own, bigger room. Sad, huh?

And puzzled and unhappy, because now she actually was living in an old house with three floors, and Jane was in possession of the attics. She thought she’d dealt with the third floor.

Here in church, there were more stairs she preferred to avoid: the polished wooden steps to the pulpit. She knew she should really be up there this morning: little woman, big congregation, even for October when they tended to increase because there were no lawns to mow and the kids had stopped demanding days out. Here, close to the front, sat Big Jim Prosser from the Eight-till-Late, which reduced its Sunday opening hours at the end of the tourist season. Here even was Kent Asprey, heart-throb, jogging GP, back with his wife after a midlife-crisis fling. A penitent Kent, with Mrs Asprey – one week only, probably.

Merrily put a tentative foot on the first pulpit step, then backed down again. What she’d been doing during the summer and early autumn, when congregations were smaller and cosier, was to sit on a hassock on the carpeted chancel steps, under the apple screen, and not preach but chat. Sometimes, a few members of the congregation would join in, and there was a sense of warmth and unity. She found it exciting, was never sure where it would lead. One Sunday it had spontaneously opened out, like a flower, into communal meditation.

It was hardly going to happen today. The congregation was like the bed: too big, too cold, too quiet. And swollen by too many comparative strangers whose presence could only be explained by curiosity over rumours of Merrily’s links, through Gomer, with the Roddy Lodge sensation – an electric death still pulsing in Herefordshire like a snaking naked wire.

This was a small county; everybody knew somebody related to the Lodge family or the families of girls and women missing from home – one was from a farm near Staunton, just a few miles from Ledwardine – or at least someone who had considered having an Efflapure system installed. Everyone had been exposed to radio and TV reports and centre-spreads with the same grisly sequence of pictures and tasteless variations on the Daily Star ’s:

Villagers watch in horror as man boasts:

‘I’m the biggest serial killer ever’, then is

FRIED IN THE SKY