Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

Merrily said, ‘Mrs Lodge, this is one of the hardest situations anyone has to go through. When it’s not of your making but you’re dragged into it and you don’t know where your loyalties are supposed to lie.’

‘Cherry,’ Mrs Lodge said. ‘My name’s Cherry. Like the fruit, not Mrs Blair.’

The run up the track had reddened her cheeks, as if to underline the point. She told Merrily she’d known Sam Hall wasn’t at home, had seen him walk past, towards the village, over an hour ago, and when her husband had climbed back on his quad bike and gone back to finish his fencing in the top field, she’d grabbed her chance to say what she couldn’t say in front of him.

‘Not that we’re not close.’ She stared through the windscreen into the fog. ‘Not that we haven’t been close, I should say. The bad things that happen on a farm – even the money problems – are things you can discuss. This—’ She sniffed and dragged out a clutch of tissues to wipe her nose. ‘This is beyond everything.’

Merrily said, ‘Do you mind if I smoke… if I were to open the window an inch or two?’

‘Of course.’ Cherry almost smiled, seeming grateful for this sign of human weakness. Merrily lit a Silk Cut.

‘He’s changed, of course,’ Cherry said. ‘He doesn’t think he’s turning into his father, because the old man was always so religious, but he is.’ She put away the tissue and turned in her seat to face Merrily. ‘Still, there are worse things. Lord knows what Roddy was turning into. All in all, I can’t help thinking, God help us, that it’s as well it ended the way it did. If we could say it had ended. If we’re ever going to be able to say that.’

‘Were you there?’

‘No. Neither of us was there. I remember I went out to fill the coal scuttle about teatime and I thought I could hear something from down the hill, but I thought it was just kids. It was about ten o’clock before the police even came and told us he was dead. We didn’t know what to do. Nobody else came. We didn’t know everybody had seen him… electrocuted. We just… Tony and me, we just sat there and talked about it until the early hours. But then the next day he didn’t want to know, and that’s how it’s been since. That’s how the old man would’ve been. And then it was in the papers and on the telly – the videos people’d taken. Our neighbours, so-called.’

‘How long’ve you been married?’

Wanting to take her away from those images. The car, swaddled in fog, was warming up inside now and Cherry was talking freely. It emerged that she and Tony had met through a dating agency for farmers. Born in Newport, where her parents had a shoe shop, she’d always dreamed of life on a farm. They’d been married twenty years, since she was twenty-seven, and had two sons, both now working in Cardiff and loving it. If Tony Lodge left them the farm, it would only be sold off. He had a decision to make and fairly soon. He didn’t need this on top of it all, his wife said.

And when they’d turned up at the door last night, the villagers, the new villagers, telling him he ought to do the decent community thing and have Roddy tidily cremated…

‘I don’t think I’m quite understanding this,’ Merrily said. ‘All this talk of the “new” Underhowle. Would this be something to do with the Development Committee?’

‘They don’t even like to call it Underhowle any more. “Oh, it’s a nowhere sort of name,” one of them said once, when they had a public meeting about it. “A neither here-nor-there name”.’

‘Meeting about what?’

‘Ariconium. That’s what they call the project. Ariconium was an old Roman town that was supposed to be further down the valley towards Weston, but Mr Crewe, who bought the Old Rectory, he reckons it was more this way, and he found a little statue of a Roman god and they all got excited, and that’s how it started, really. I can’t see it myself – I mean, there’s nothing there. It’s not like as if there were walls and ruins, things you can walk round. It’s just marks in the ground.’

‘I saw a stone plaque thing in the village hall, with the word Ariconium carved into it.’

‘They wanted to put it on the signs at the entrance to the village, but some historical organization objected because they said it wasn’t proved, but they’re fighting that. They’re setting up a museum of things people’ve found and maps and audiovisual stuff – in the old chapel. They’ve had a grant from the Lottery, lots of things like that.’

‘ “They”?’

‘Well, Mr Crewe and Mr Young at the school and the chap who has the computer factory. People like that. Seem to be more of them every day. But they’ve done a lot for the village, kind of thing, put a lot of people in work, so everybody’s going along with it. And they make it all sound so exciting for the future – more tourism, more jobs. They’re planning this big launch next Easter, with leaflets and articles in the papers and television and that. The last thing they want is for the village to be associated with a mass murderer. Oh, dear God, no, not now .’

‘Pretty tactless, however, coming to your husband, so soon afterwards.’

‘Had to come in good time for the funeral. They were nice enough about it, I suppose. Said they’d help keep it discreet. Keep the press away. How it was in everybody’s interests to develop an upmarket tourist economy kind of thing and until that was established we had to be conscious of our public profile.’

Merrily shook her head at the crassness of it. ‘Not, even in normal circumstances, the best thing to say to a traditional farmer.’

Cherry Lodge managed a smile. ‘That’s true.’ She was actually quite pretty; there had probably been a time, before the reality of it all started to wear her down, when Tony Lodge hadn’t been able to believe his luck. ‘All tourism means to my husband is people tramping across his land, leaving gates open. That’s what he’s doing up there now – repairing fences, tightening the barbed wire. Battening down the hatches.’

‘That’s not good, is it?’ Merrily said carefully, and collected another grateful look.

‘Like he’s accepted that we’re supposed to be hermits now, for the rest of our lives. Not show our faces down there ’cause we’re going to be tarred with it for ever.’ A glimmering of tears. ‘And this family’s been here longer than any of them. Longer than any of them.’ She leaned forward in the seat. ‘You know what I ’d like to do – sell our story to the papers. We had the reporters here, loads of them, and Tony was ready to get his gun out to them. But I’d like to get them back, tell everybody what he was really like, how weird he really was – that’d teach—’ She blinked. ‘I keep forgetting you’re a vicar. I don’t get to talk to many women. You must think—’

‘No. Not at all.’ Merrily focused rapidly, glad that Jane’s duffel was still toggled over the dog collar. ‘What would you tell them, Cherry? What would you tell them about Roddy? Weird how?’

‘Oh…’ Cherry looked uncomfortable again. Too eager. Blown it . ‘All sorts of things. Tony used to talk about him a lot at one time – all the things he couldn’t understand. There’s always somebody in a family you talk about, isn’t there? Somebody you always despair of. Always, “Oh what’s he gone and done now?” Black sheep kind of thing.’

‘What kind of things did he do?’

Cherry’s hazel eyes flickered. ‘You’ve put me on the spot now. I’m not sure I should—’

‘It’s OK.’ Merrily nodded quickly, pushing her cigarette into the ashtray. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve asked.’