Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘I’m so glad you recognize it.’

‘ She seems to have recognized it, anyway,’ Eirion said. ‘She suddenly packed in modelling at the height of her career, washed off all the make-up and got a job in children’s television, on the production side.’

‘How saintly.’

‘Where she was soon found to have an aptitude for presenting.’

‘What do you know?’

‘And kids liked her because she still had this faintly risqué ‘reputation, so in no time she’s presenting this cult teenage show – she was out of her teens by then, but she didn’t look it. And she eventually became quite popular with parents and older people because there was obviously a genuinely nice person underneath. And, as she got older, she resurfaced, presenting these lifestyle kind of shows – this is the mid- to late nineties, when she was also offered a column on one of the papers – could’ve been the Mail or the Express , I forget, but that was how she met her husband, Gareth Box. A journalist.’

‘Wrote the column for her?’

‘Do you have to be disparaging all the time?’ Eirion said. ‘Box was an assistant editor in charge of features or something but, since she was making so much more money than him, he seems to have packed that in soon after they got married, to manage her career. Maybe she was being exploited.’

‘Hmm,’ Jane said sceptically.

‘Anyway, this was when private TV production was really taking off, and Jenny and her husband came a long way very rapidly and started creating these home make-over type of programmes, with heavy emphasis on feng shui – there was a series for Channel Four which I remember seeing a couple of and it was actually pretty good. And that was when they set up this shop called Vestalia, which very rapidly became a chain and seems to be worth… well, a lot of money.’

‘Never put a foot wrong, then.’

‘But then she backed out of the spotlight.’

‘Or she saw when the spotlight was about to move on. Or they were making so much money that she didn’t need all that bullshit any more.’

‘There was some speculation at this time that the marriage was cracking up,’ Eirion said, ‘although she was never linked with anyone else.’

‘Staying together for the sake of the business?’

‘I don’t know, Jane. They were worth quite a lot by then, because Vestalia was into major cities, and also changing direction. One article I found, from the Telegraph , at the end of last year, was about how she was increasingly into personal development and meditation and spirituality, and he wasn’t particularly, but he went along with it. And it was then that the shops started to really specialize in creating a spiritual home environment. They’d stopped using the phrase feng shui , though, because that was seen as a passing fad.’

‘This is quite good, actually,’ Jane said. ‘We’re getting closer.’

In fact, this was moving nicely in the direction of home chapels.

She slid the paperback book out from under the pillow. It was called Working with Angels, Fairies and Nature Spirits . About a year ago – OK, she would admit this – she’d been finding it seriously inspirational, entirely sensible in its evocation of a complex world with all these different layers of existence, all these forces and incorporeal intelligences you could call on to improve and focus your own life.

Now, however, as a more balanced person, she was simply consulting the book to establish where the Box woman was coming from. Obviously, it helped that not too long ago Jane herself had been just as loopy, but there was method in Jenny’s particular madness; her so-called spiritual development always seemed to run parallel with an increase in material wealth.

The bottom line: this didn’t sound like a woman who gave away eighty grand without some underlying purpose unconnected with her immortal soul.

‘You actually did OK here, Irene.’

‘How very kind,’ Eirion said.

‘No, really, I mean… thanks.’

Maybe she and Eirion, approaching this from different directions – his investigative skills, her background esoteric knowledge – could nail the duplicitous bitch to the wall before Mum got stitched up.

‘What do you do now? How do you respond to this?’ Prof Levin advanced on Lol across the studio floor. ‘What you do now, Laurence, is not respond. That is, you decline… rapido . Because the one thing you, of all people, do not need at this stage is to get in with crazies. So what you do is you call him back and you put it very politely and very firmly. You don’t ask any more questions, you resist all his attempts to make you read the lyric, and you never ever write a song or the merest line of a song that reflects this proposed theme in any way.’

‘Except…’ Lol backed up against the glass-sided recording booth, ‘I kind of—’

‘You then make sure to avoid having dealings of any kind with this person, ever again.’

‘Only I kind of like him,’ Lol said.

‘Jesus.’ Prof feigned an intention to put his foot through the golden weave fronting the Guild Acoustic amp. ‘Of course you liked him. These people, they’re oh so very nice and humble and they tell you you’re Lennon and Dylan and Paul Simon all rolled into one, and they would consider it an honour to, in some small way, serve your art. Pah! Two years later, five, ten… whenever it seems like you’re finally doing OK for yourself, along comes the exceedingly unfriendly letter from their lawyer.’

‘He actually dealt with that,’ Lol said. ‘He said he was prepared to sign the whole thing over to me. Draw up whatever document you like, he said, and I’ll sign it. He said this wasn’t about money.’

‘Laurence, everything, at some stage, is about money. However, this is your funeral.’ Prof turned away, shaking his head, and mooched off towards the kitchen and his cappuccino machine. ‘Make it a noisy one.’

When he’d gone, Moira Cairns leaned back against the outside wall of the recording booth. She wore very tight jeans and a black top, her hair loosely tied behind with a crimson ribbon.

‘So,’ she said, ‘what is the great world issue this guy feels so strongly about?’

‘Electricity,’ Lol said. ‘Pylons, dangers of.’

‘Ah. So this would be a person you met at the, ah, execution.’ Moira came to sit on the amp opposite. ‘Tell me about it. Where’s the guy coming from exactly?’

‘Strong aura of old hippy,’ Lol said. ‘He’s very proud that some elements in the US government and the power companies were glad to get him off their backs. He talks about extensive scientific research linking overhead power lines with everything from brain tumours to leukaemia clusters – research that is constantly ignored.’

‘There’ll be background. There always is.’

Lol told her that Sam Hall appeared to live in a remote cabin on Howle Hill, generating his own electricity with a windmill while putting pressure on the power companies if not exactly to accept responsibility for all the health damage then at least to run more cables underground in rural areas.

‘He says he’s a crank and a loony and proud of it, and he admits to propositioning anyone he thinks might be able to publicize the cause. He says that seeing Lodge dying up there traumatized him into action – again. I mean, if he was asking Bruce Springsteen or Sting to write a song about it…’

Moira put her head on one side. ‘Perhaps he doesnae know Sting and Springsteen. Listen, loony or not, I wouldnae quarrel with the sentiments – I hate those things. There has to be a better way.’