Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘How would it be if I had a chat to Kirsty?’

‘And let her know I’ve been telling yer all this? Look… I’ve gorra fair bit of leave owing, as you can imagine. It’s been suggested that I take it now. Kirsty thought it might be a good idea if we left the kids with her ma and went away for a week to try and get ourselves sorted.’

That was a very good idea, Merrily thought.

‘That was what the row was about,’ Bliss said.

Merrily closed her eyes in despair. ‘Oh, Frannie, you clown.’

‘I can’t leave it like this, Merrily. I’ve gorra know .’

‘Know what , for heaven’s sake?’

‘If I was right !’ Bliss leaned heavily on the table, spilling sugar, making his mug and spoon rattle. ‘You know what they’re saying now? You know what Fleming’s saying? He’s saying that what we’re looking at with Roddy Lodge is a one- off, bog-standard, common-as-muck domestic. That he strangled his girlfriend during a drunken barney, figuring he could cover it up with no fuss, but when we pulled him, being the kind of cocky sod he was, he gets carried away with the big-killer image. That was Fleming’s first assessment of the situation. In other words, he’s saying Roddy Lodge, serial killer, was created by me .’

‘Oh.’

‘And then he talks to Roddy’s GP, and then he consults Moffat, the forensic shrink who confirms that Roddy was exhibiting absolutely classic symptoms of advanced manic depression. You see where that’s going?’

‘It…’ Merrily hesitated. Lol would know for sure, but she had ‘a good idea, and it fitted all too well. ‘They lie, don’t they?’ she said glumly. ‘Manic-depressives lie on an industrial scale.’

‘Exactly.’ Bliss smiled icily. ‘In the manic phase, they may tell extravagant lies, which can be very convincing because they half believe it themselves. If it isn’t the truth, they believe it ought to be. In other words, they boast about things they haven’t actually done.’

I done tanks for all the nobs all over the Three Counties and down into Wales. I done Prince Charles’s fuckin’ sewage over at Highgrove.

Bliss said, ‘Fleming’s pointing to one thing in particular that Roddy came out with when he was up the pylon. He said he was gonna kill Madonna – we have all this on tape, of course, thanks to some local smart-arse with a video camera. You yourself said he claimed to have done Madonna’s drainage in the Cotswolds. And of course, Madonna doesn’t even live in the Cotswolds – he got that wrong. Her place is down in bloody Somerset or somewhere. Roddy Lodge never got closer to Madonna than pictures in the News of the World .’

‘But what about the other two? Melanie Pullman and the girl from Monmouth.’

‘They’re saying I offered those names to him and he went for them with his tongue out. They say my style of questioning was antiquated and inept, given that we’ve no proof that either of the women are even dead. To deal with it once and for all, Fleming’s hired another firm with five diggers. They’d excavated about fifteen more Efflapures by yesterday.’

‘Nothing?’

He didn’t even answer. Merrily didn’t know what to say. If Roddy Lodge in fact hadn’t been a serial killer at all, if there weren’t any more bodies buried, then that was surely the best possible outcome… except that Frannie would be seen as an ambitious but misguided detective who’d driven a man to his death – a man who, if hardly innocent, was certainly guilty on a far lesser scale than… Oh hell.

Bliss put his hands behind his head and stretched out his legs, talking flat-voiced to the ceiling.

The last thing Fleming said, yesterday afternoon, was that if I’d suggested to Roddy that he’d killed Lord Lucan’s nanny he’d have gone for that, too. He said I was dangerously naive. He said that in my craving for fame and glory, I was probably only slightly less manic than Lodge himself. He said the combustible combination of Lodge and me had created something it was gonna take West Mercia a long time to live down. He said – finally, he said that if he didn’t see me again for the rest of his career he’d consider himself a very fortunate man.’

His hands fell away from his head and he slumped in his chair, his lips compressed into the kind of smile you put on to ward off weeping. He didn’t need a Catholic priest; this was his confession. Merrily wondered if he’d told any of it to his wife; she feared not.

‘Which I thought spelled it out very nicely,’ he said after a while. ‘Pastures new, Frannie, and don’t expect a reference.’

She didn’t even like to ask what Fleming was saying about the incineration, allegedly by Lodge, of Nevin Parry.

Bliss stood up and walked across to the window. ‘Another option, of course, is for me to quit the Service altogether.’

‘Frannie, this is just one man. He might move on himself.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Marked me card now. No, I’ll do exactly as advised: take two weeks off. Use them as best I can.’ He turned away from the window and came up to where she was sitting. She could smell dried sweat on him. She could smell anxiety and frustration, a toxic mix. ‘I’m telling you he did it , Merrily. He did Melanie Pullman and he did Rochelle Bowen. And maybe some more. I could see it in his eyes, I could feel it in me chest. Somewhere, there are bodies .’

‘Oh.’ It was what she’d been afraid of. If the maverick loner cop was history, the suspended cop determined to clear his name was movie history. Anyway, Frannie’s situation was, in a way, worse than suspension: his conduct would not be investigated, the investigation would simply continue without him. An investigation that was no more now than a tying-up of loose ends. Nobody was in danger; the beast was dead, and perhaps he hadn’t been that much of a beast after all.

‘I’m gonna find them, Merrily.’

‘What – commandeer Gomer and Lol again?’

‘I’d pay them.’

‘Frannie, you’re bonkers. You don’t even have anything to go on, do you? You wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘Well, I would, actually,’ Bliss said. ‘If, for instance, we talk about the piccies on the walls—’

‘Part of his fantasy. Despite all this chatting up in pubs, making a fool of himself when he was in his manic phases, he was actually afraid of real live women; he only felt truly safe with dead ones.’

‘Aw, you’re just—’

‘I’m just saying what the shrink’s going to say. I don’t recall you had much to say about Lodge throwing his weight around in the police station. Subdued… uncommunicative… sick… didn’t want to leave his cell. “Hunched up into himself” – I think that’s what your phrase was at the time. The word depressive somehow springs to mind.’

‘All right, then.’ Bliss sat down again. ‘Let’s go back. Put yourself back in that bedroom for a minute. Look at the bed with the nasty black sheets. Sniff the air. Now look at the pictures in half-light from the low-wattage bulbs, so that they’re not like pictures any more; they’re actual shadowy women, right there in the room with you. Flickering about. Moving in the dark. And you know they’re all dead.’

‘But he didn’t kill them.’

‘Tell me you couldn’t feel the evil in there, Merrily. Tell me you couldn’t feel it. As a priest.’

‘I don’t… I don’t know what I felt.’

‘I know what I felt.’

‘It still doesn’t make too much sense, Frannie. You don’t have any kind of scenario for Roddy Lodge as a mass murderer. You don’t even know why and in what circumstances he killed Lynsey Davies, do you? What happens if you don’t find anything to support the theory you don’t yet have? What happens if you go blundering about and you don’t find anything at all?’