Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

Merrily closed the front door, locked it and barred it top and bottom.

She went to the bottom of the stairs. ‘ Flower! ’

No reply. It was after nine-thirty now; the kid had probably made herself something to eat earlier, although there were no signs of it in the kitchen. Merrily switched on the grill to warm it up, just in case. Then she went into the scullery, sat down with a sigh and the first of the three books about the West case. On the back it said,

How and why an evil psychopath was able to ensnare so many in a web of unseeing complicity.

Horrific, but there was no avoiding it any longer. Perhaps she should know. Everybody else in the county seemed to. It was part of the underside of Hereford history. Fred West still crouched like a spider in a corner of so many lives.

Even Gomer’s.

The videos he’d mentioned – the ones he’d only heard of, after the West murders had become public knowledge – were snuff videos. It was said that Fred had rigged up cameras and shot videos of himself doing what he’d done to girls and young women.

Gomer had wondered if maybe Roddy Lodge had somehow got hold of a copy.

The phone rang. Merrily looked at it, didn’t feel like speaking to anyone else tonight and let it go on ringing until the machine picked it up.

This is Ledwardine Vicarage. Sorry we’re not around, but please leave a message after the bleep.

Bleep.

Then, ‘ Bitch! ’

Merrily put the book down.

It was muffled – one of those tissues-over-the-phone voices. ‘ Bitch, if you do that funeral on Friday, you’re gonna regret it. You stay at home on Friday, you understand? You bitch .’

Jane let herself in very quietly by the side door and padded up the stairs to the attic, collapsing on her bed under the Mondrian walls.

This was killing her, and there was nobody to ring. Nobody at all.

She lay there, numbed by this shattering hyper-awareness, listening to parts of the past clunking into place like the pieces of one of those really obvious wooden jigsaws aimed at very small children.

Or the ratchets on some crude medieval engine of torture, squeezing your brain.

Dad.

Poor dead Dad. Why exactly did he go off with Karen, his secretary with whom he’d died in a ball of blazing metal on the M5? Jane remembered seeing Karen a couple of times in Dad’s office, and she wasn’t exactly to die for, was she? Maybe a bit younger than Mum but not as pretty. So what exactly was there missing from his marriage that drove Dad into Karen’s arms, Karen’s bed?

And why had Mum, instead of working to save her marriage, thrown herself into the arms of ‘God’?

Consider: it was a known fact that a huge percentage of male clergy were gay. OK, so maybe no figures had emerged on women priests yet, but looking at pictures of some of them in the papers you could soon draw your own conclusions.

Jane sat up. Opposite the bed, the longest Mondrian wall, with its garish red and yellow and blue emulsion, looked like a bad idea clumsily executed. She wished she was lying on Gareth Box’s hearthrug in the red glow of the apple-log fire. Please, Gareth, show me I’m normal.

Eventually, she got ready for bed. Sleep? No chance. And what was she supposed to say tomorrow over the breakfast table?

What was she supposed to say the next time she saw Lol?

Or maybe he knew . Oh yeah, it would certainly explain all that, wouldn’t it? All that keeping-up-appearances shit, Mum and Lol not being able to see one another very often. It was never a question of the relationship going stagnant – because it had never happened, had it? It was another lie.

Jane began beating her forehead into the pillow. Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies…

THE DOORS OF Roddy Lodge’s garage were painted dark green. Somebody had been at one of them with chalk. The message read:

Put him down a cesspit where he belongs

Merrily pulled into the verge just short of the village and took off her dog collar. No point in asking for confrontation on the street, though she might put it back on before meeting the Development Committee at ten.

When she went into the Post Office and Stores to buy some cigarettes and a paper, the fat man behind the counter asked if she was a reporter.

‘Pity,’ he said. ‘We want all the publicity we can get. We ain’t rolling over for this one, no way.’

London accent. Who did he mean by ‘we’?

She glanced at the paper rack. The story hadn’t made the front pages of the tabloids, but she glimpsed the name Fred West in a single-column headline halfway down the Daily Telegraph . She took the paper to the counter and said casually, ‘Why are people so worked up about this man being buried here? He’s local, isn’t he, whatever he’s done.’

‘So was Melanie Pullman,’ the fat man explained.

‘And how would you feel’ – a fiftyish woman in a yellow PVC jacket detached herself from a carousel of tights – ‘if your sister was lying under some cold field you didn’t even know where, and a man who called himself Satan gets a Christian burial?’ Birmingham accent this time: how would yow feel?

‘No way,’ the fat man said. ‘ No way . They should get him cremated on the quiet. Do what they like wiv the ashes, long as nobody knows. You got a situation where this place is finally getting on its feet at long last. Do we want connecting wiv a sicko? No way.’

‘You only got to look at this female priest.’ The woman was looking at Merrily without recognition. ‘We all know what that ’s about. That’s the woman who got herself made exorcist. Making a big thing out of it. Anything to make a name for yourself these days. Publicity mad.’

Merrily nodded. ‘So I’ve heard.’ She folded up the Telegraph .

On her way out, she heard the man say, ‘Exorcist? What’s that about, then?’

‘Making sure he don’t come back, Richard.’

‘Dump him somewhere else, and it ain’t a bloody problem!’

Laughter. Put him down a cesspit. Shove the fame-hungry bimbo priest in after him. Bitch .

But these two were both incomers. There had to be some sympathy for Tony Lodge and Cherry among indigenous villagers. Must be people here who’d known Roddy for years, drunk in the pubs with Roddy, been to school with Roddy, played on the hillside with him, nursed him as a baby – this poor kid with no mother in a house full of taciturn men. The poor kid who turned into a murderer. Who tomorrow gets buried – darkly, quietly, before his time.

You didn’t have to be here long to understand why the undertakers wanted to switch dates.