Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Yes.’ Merrily thought of Cherry Lodge and her IBM and her spreadsheets. Tony Lodge slumped in front of the TV, and his wife ostensibly at work on the accounts in another room, dealing with DEFRA forms on the Net, in the night when it was cheaper… while secretly entering the bigger world, the limitless virtual world.

Merrily started to go through the printout for a second time, pencil-marking key paragraphs.

The police took me and my husband to Roddy’s bungalow, and we were both shocked because we’d not been there much. They didn’t mix, Tony and his brother, him being so much younger, and we’d certainly never been in the bedrooms before. Well, I was not as shocked as Tony because I thought, well, he was just a lad, even though he was thirty-five, and him being single and everything it didn’t shock me that much. I mean the black sheets and everything. We all knew how much he’d changed since he went on his own, how much more confident he was, perhaps through being in business. But then when we saw the pictures of women Tony squeezed my arm to say nothing, and when they asked us if we knew he collected pictures like that, all of famous women who were dead now, with nude bodies of page three girls pasted onto them, Tony said it didn’t make any sense to him at all, and he was just disgusted and he hoped it wasn’t going to be talked about publicly or told to the papers because things were bad enough.

‘I saw those pictures when I went to the bungalow with Frannie Bliss. He was hoping I might be able to throw some light on it, but it was as much a mystery to me. I mean, without knowing the full background I’d never have been able to come up with anything as bizarre as this.’

His father was very religious and he wouldn’t even think about it and so obviously it wasn’t to be talked about in the house, but there’s no doubt in my mind it comes back to the death of Roddy’s mother when he was so young. She was well over 40 when she had him, and never very fit, always ailing, they never thought she’d make old bones. Well she was dead before the baby was 3 years old. It was all so unexpected, and it must have taken a toll on her.

You’d have thought he’d feel resentment towards Roddy, the old man, because of that, instead of him being his favourite, but he was very religious, he always saw Roddy as a gift from God for which there was a price to pay and that was the loss of his wife. I never understood the logic of that, but Roddy was always special. If anyone was resentful I suppose I would have to say it was Tony and his brother Geoff who had lost the mother they knew and loved and got Roddy instead.

‘Merrily, what do you suppose she means by that?’ Sophie fingered the phrase gift from God . ‘All right, it was unexpected, a fluke – but is she actually saying that he believed his ailing wife had been preserved by God just long enough to give birth to this…?’

‘Monster?’ Merrily shuddered.

The farm was doing quite well in those days and the old man was able to employ a woman to look after the child in the daytime and stay over when he wasn’t well, but they never became substitute mothers, because they never stayed in the job long enough. It was a male household with a bit of help with the meals and the cleaning and childcare on top of that. My husband has told me how Roddy was always asking about his mother, what she looked like and so on, and one day Marilyn Monroe was on the telly and the old man laughed and said That’s what she looked like and although there must have been pictures of his mother around the house Roddy seemed to get fixated on this idea and he started collecting pictures of Marilyn Monroe to put up in his bedroom. When one of his brothers said something about it, Roddy said it was all right because she was dead. And then he’d find other pictures of women he liked the look of and if they were dead he’d say he’d have them for his mother and he’d put them up too and he seemed to find comfort in it so nobody thought anything of it.

‘You heard of anything like that before?’ Merrily asked. ‘Be interesting to talk to one of the nannies, wouldn’t it?’

‘Perhaps the police already have.’ Sophie picked up the electric kettle to refill it. ‘Reinventing his mother: not some worthy but possibly rather dowdy middle-aged farmer’s wife in some fairly dour farmhouse, but in fact something world-shakingly beautiful, with glittery dresses and glossy lips.’

‘Making a goddess of her.’

‘A sex goddess,’ Sophie said quietly.

‘That came later,’ Merrily said. ‘Let’s do the child-psychology stuff first. A boy with no mother, an all-male household. He’s quite lonely at home; his brothers are grown men with work to do; his father’s well into middle age and strict in all kinds of ways. It’s an altogether rigid regime. So here’s a child desperately in need of a mother’s love, jealous of all the other kids he sees being taken to school by their mums.’

‘What you would call a projection, then?’ Sophie offered.

‘Or a simple invention? Some kids have imaginary friends, Roddy has an imaginary mum. But is he looking for maternal love or a situation where he feels, to some extent, in control – the way he doesn’t, normally, in that house? The dead don’t push him around. He doesn’t feel quite so small and insignificant with the dead.’

‘Quite touching, in a child.’ Sophie took the kettle into the adjacent washroom. ‘But it can only get unhealthy, can’t it, as he approaches the dread years of puberty and all his burgeoning urges become fixated upon… well, I think we can both see where this is going. It’s very hard to understand why they allowed it.’

‘Household of working men. If it kept him quiet at night…’

Sophie’s voice came thinly from the washroom, over the rattle of water on metal. ‘Not if the rest is true.’

Roddy was always seeing people who were not there, so he said. He didn’t seem to be afraid of them. At first it seemed like just his imagination, but when they heard him talking to them in his bedroom at night, the dead, well, this was a very stiff God-fearing house and talk of ghosts and spirits was thought of as sinful in the extreme! Roddy got into a lot of trouble with his father. Of course, in most homes today they would have him to a psychiatrist but there was still a stigma attached to that kind of thing then even though it doesn’t seem so very long ago to me.

When he was older it seemed to stop. But Tony reckoned it was only that he stopped talking about it. They never said anything to the old man, knowing it would distress him, but it was definitely going on well into Roddy’s teens. Tony said you could still hear him talking and giggling in his room in the dead of night and you would swear, listening to it, that he was not alone in there. He said he and Geoff tried to laugh it off but there was something frightening about it too and they just tried to put it out of their minds and not hear it and get on with their lives. He said it was because they didn’t want to worry their father but I am not sure this was a good attitude to take, especially now obviously. I am also sure that Tony himself saw or heard more than he will talk about to me or anyone but there’s farmers for you. Head in the sand!

‘ Was he psychic? Is that what we’re looking at, Sophie?’

Sophie sat down opposite Merrily, with her back to the window and the lights of Broad Street, reached for a pencil and her shorthand pad. ‘What do you know that would reinforce that theory?’

‘Not much. Told me he’d been to see the vicar and scared him. After talking to Jerome Banks myself, I’d say the scaring bit was wishful thinking, but Banks did admit Roddy had been to see him – claiming his bungalow was haunted. The usual poltergeist effects were mentioned, but that was probably Banks being dismissive. So either Roddy was genuinely experiencing something or he wanted to give people the impression he was. And this is in a new bungalow, don’t forget. No history apart from his own.’