Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

Lol said after a while, ‘Is this a warning?’

‘Oh, Laurence,’ Moira said, ‘if it was all as simple and direct as, like, “Don’t get on any planes on the 18th”. What do I say to you here? I’m standing by the Plague Cross and this guy’s talking about people buried without coffins, and then I start thinking about you and your friend digging for dead people, and I get this rather loathsome curling sensation down in ma gut – which I believe I managed to conceal rather well. I don’t know what that means, do I?’

‘What should I say to Merrily?’

She let him drive in silence for a while.

‘Aye well,’ she said, ‘that’s a difficult one.’

That night Lol called Merrily on the mobile, from his loft.

‘Mmm,’ she said, ‘I met Sam Hall when I was in Underhowle with Frannie Bliss. He didn’t go out of his way to speak to me then. On the other hand, Bliss had introduced me as a DC. Which nobody seemed to question at the time.’

‘Maybe assuming there must have been a change in the height regulations,’ Lol said.

‘Ho ho. So am I supposed to go and see him?’

‘Why would you need to? I was just warning you he might try and get in touch. So you’d know what it was about, vaguely, if he did. And if I could just—’

Merrily said, ‘Only, I’ve been asked to bury Roddy Lodge, you see.’

‘Bury him?’

‘Not dig the hole – conduct the funeral.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a Christian tradition. But if you mean why me , it’s because a large number of people in Underhowle are saying, We don’t want this murderer in our churchyard, and the local minister’s got cold feet from sitting on the fence. And I’m like your Mr Hall. An established fruitcake.’

Lol said, ‘Do you have to do it?’

‘I don’t have to.’ A pause. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

Lol imagined her at her desk, shoes off, toes curled under the electric fire. He felt that, whatever she was getting into, she should not be left in there alone.

HE’D COME DOWN from the hill on his quad bike as soon as his wife had reached him on the mobile. ‘I can’t discuss this,’ she’d said miserably when she saw the dog collar. ‘You’ll have to speak to Mr Lodge.’ And went on talking about the rain and how much of it there was these days, until he was pulling off his wellies at the kitchen door.

Out of the plain, square kitchen windows, all Merrily could see was damp fog, greenish like mucus.

Mr Lodge: this defined him now. His father was dead, and he was the eldest brother. This was his farmhouse, brown-washed and hunched into the foggy hillside, and this was his name: Mr Lodge, the last one in the valley.

They looked at one another. By the frosted fluorescent tube on the kitchen ceiling, Merrily saw a fawn-haired man in a working farmer’s green nylon overalls, edging quietly towards sixty, lean and wary as a dog fox. He saw something that evidently worried him.

He coughed. ‘I’m sorry I, er, I didn’t expect you’d be a woman.’

Well now, wouldn’t she be running a wealthier parish, if she had a pound for every time someone had said that?

‘I’ll make some tea,’ Mrs Lodge mumbled.

‘Yes.’ He nodded at Merrily. ‘Well… thank you. Thank you for coming.’ He indicated a wooden chair with arms and a car cushion on it, near the Rayburn. ‘You have that one. In the warm.’

‘Thank you.’ She took off Jane’s duffel coat and hung it around the back of the chair. She was wearing the black jumper- and-skirt outfit and her fleece-lined boots. He looked away.

‘Tony Lodge,’ he said reluctantly.

‘Merrily Watkins. I’m… afraid I only heard about this last night. From the Bishop.’

‘Ah.’ He sat himself on a hard chair at the edge of the gatelegged table, leaving about seven feet of flagged floor between them. He sat with his cap on his knees. ‘So you en’t spoken to Mr Banks.’

‘Not about this, no. I’ll probably be seeing him later.’

‘If you’re lucky.’

She smiled, easing her chair to one side so that Mrs Lodge could put the kettle on the Rayburn, which Mrs Lodge accomplished without looking at her.

‘Not, er… not that I’m a churchgoing man any more,’ Tony Lodge said. ‘My parents were chapel, and I was raised to that. When the chapel went out of use my father, he started going to the church instead, because at least the church was still here, even if the services were few and far between. He wouldn’t go to Ross to worship. And he wouldn’t go to Ross to be buried. And that’s what this is about.’

Merrily said, ‘I gather there’s a long-standing agreement with the Church, on burials.’

‘Never been any other way, look. They reckon the chapel here was near as old as the church, and there’s only one graveyard in Underhowle – that’s up at the church, where the land’s better drained, more suitable for burial. And that’s where we goes, the Lodges.’ He paused. ‘That’s where my brother’s to go. Friday, we thought, if that’s all right for you. Funeral director’s Lomas of Coleford.’

‘Your father…’

‘Would not be happy if the sons were not around him and my mother. You understand that.’

‘Of course. Erm…’

Mr Lodge raised bony brown hands in a warding-off gesture. ‘No,’ he said calmly. ‘I don’t want to talk about what he’s done. My duty to my father, as eldest son, is to see my brother buried at Underhowle – not cremated. I would like there to be a proper service. If Mr Banks wants to throw in his hand with the newcomers, that’s his business.’

Merrily didn’t say anything. She might have known it would be something like this.

‘There was a deputation here last night,’ Mr Lodge said. ‘How much you know about that, I en’t sure.’

‘Deputation?’ All Sophie had told her was that the Rev. Banks had said the Lodges were not members of his congregation, whereas the family of the missing Melanie Pullman was, and therefore he would prefer it if an outside minister could handle Roddy’s funeral. It wasn’t an unusual procedure in cases like this.

‘Local people,’ Tony Lodge said, ‘and some not so local. Wanting me to have my brother cremated. Said it would be better for his ashes just to be scattered in the churchyard, that a grave would become a… “tourist attraction”. Not the sort they wanted for Underhowle. The new Underhowle.’ Bitterness tainting his tone now. ‘Not the image they wanted for the new Underhowle.’

‘I see.’

‘I doubt you do.’ Mr Lodge almost smiled. ‘I doubt you do, Reverend, but I don’t suppose that matters.’

‘I have met some of the people in the village: Mr Young, the headmaster. And… Ingrid Sollars?’

‘Mrs Sollars. Yes, I was surprised she was part of it, but there you are. They all have their own concerns. Things aren’t simple like they used to be. In the old days, you accepted responsibility for your village, in good times and bad. And the people there, good and bad. You kept together. Now it’s all about what you looks like to outsiders.’

‘True, I suppose.’ She was mainly worried about how she’d justify this to Gomer: leading prayers for the everlasting soul of the man he believed had murdered his nephew, incinerated his depot and his machinery, taken a pickaxe to the foundations of his life. She’d tried to reach him last night: no answer.

‘You’ll be wanting some personal information about my brother,’ Tony Lodge said. ‘I’ve written out a list – date of birth, where he went to school, that sort of detail.’