Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

Merrily took the newspaper back to the car on the main street of Underhowle: exposed at last in fog-free, rain-free daylight. She’d left the Volvo where the road shuffled uphill by the primary school and the new village hall that had once been a barn. The school was utility Victorian Gothic; she hadn’t even noticed it in the dark when she’d walked up with Bliss and the locals, but now there were lights on inside and the windows were lurid with finger-painting and the severity of the main building was mocked by the yellow panels of a mobile classroom in the yard.

It was coming up to nine-fifteen. There might just be time, before the meeting with the Development Committee, to check out the church and the Lodge family graves. Lay him to rest before anyone sees. Bury him with dignity, if you must, but essentially with speed, because…

Oh God – Lol’s gig! It was Lol’s gig tomorrow night. There’d just be time to get home, get changed, get up to Hereford…

She leaned against the car. Behind the school, the village was crumbling down the hillside, in all the dull multicolours of broken dog biscuits. Close to the centre was the rusty-brown bell tower of the church and the green areas between graves; on the outskirts the blue smoked-glass roof lights of the computer factory fitted into the gap between two small housing estates: one in pink brick, one rendered a drab, sub-Cotswold ochre.

And bestriding all, like the watchtowers of a concentration camp against the forest and the sky, the lines of pylons.

One of them a killer. Why should anyone worry about a single stone marking the spot where Roddy’s body lay when you had only to look up to see the massive instrument of his execution, the real Lodge Memorial, sculpted in grey steel?

It stood defiant, gleeful as a guillotine. But right now nobody else seemed to be looking up. The initial trauma was over and the community was functioning again – happening on the ground in the unforced way it never seemed to in perfect, pickled Ledwardine. Underhowle in motion: vehicles drawing up and moving off, from Land Rovers to a vintage American car with tail fins, people slipping in and out of the few shops with shouts of greeting, hands raised. Soft lights coming on in a unisex hairdressers’ called Head Office.

Finally getting on its feet . How many ways had she heard that expressed? Prospered more in the past five years than in the previous forty. And they make it all sound so exciting for the future .

Well, good luck to them. Merrily got into the Volvo, opened out the paper on the passenger seat and found that the story was straightforward and more restrained than she’d expected.

FRED WEST LINK IN BORDER MURDER INQUIRY

by Eric Birchall

Crime Correspondent

THE SELF-CONFESSED ‘serial killer’ Roderick Lodge, who was electrocuted after climbing a pylon to escape from police, had an obsession with the mass-murderer Fred West, detectives said last night.

An extensive collection of news cuttings about the West killings has been found hidden at Lodge’s Herefordshire home, along with what West Mercia CID describes as

‘substantial evidence that he saw Fred West as a role model’.

West, 53, hanged himself in his cell in 1995, while awaiting trial for the murder of twelve young women and girls, many of whom were found buried in the cellar and garden of his house at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester – 15 miles from Lodge’s home in the village of Underhowle, near Ross-on-Wye.

Lodge’s only confirmed victim, Lynsey Davies, a 39-year-old mother of four, was buried under one of the septic tanks he installed over a wide area of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire. But police have not ruled out the possibility that he may have murdered at least two other women.

‘Without bodies, we can’t establish how much of this was sick fantasy,’ said Det. Ch. Supt. Luke Fleming, who is leading the inquiry.

‘Lodge operated over a very wide area, using heavy plant equipment. We’ve been able to trace many of his recent customers but it’s clear that not all of them were recorded in his accounts, and we’d like to talk to anyone who has employed him in the last five years or so.

‘I would stress that this man was a known fantasist, with possible psychiatric problems, and the last thing we want is to create any kind of unnecessary panic.

‘Lynsey Davies was Lodge’s girl-friend and it is quite possible that what we are looking at is a one-off domestic murder by an inadequate who liked to identify himself with the most notorious mass murderer of recent years, who happened to have lived and committed his murders in a neighbouring area.’

Meanwhile, a row has broken out in Underhowle village, where many residents are objecting to Lodge being buried in the local churchyard.

They say his grave would become ‘a sick tourist

attraction’, especially if more bodies are unearthed.

The local rector, the Rev. Jerome Banks, has declined to conduct the funeral service. The Diocese of Hereford said a priest from outside the area would be taking it over.

Taking it over. Oh yes, in the capable hands of the Deliverance Consultant what could possibly go wrong? Merrily leaned back in the driving seat, wearily closing her eyes and glimpsing Jane at her most sullen at the breakfast table this morning before leaving for school with hardly a word, and Merrily too droopy with insufficient sleep to make a thing of it.

A tapping on the window made her jerk back, crumpling the Daily Telegraph against the wheel.

The face sideways at the glass was a long face, with a wide mouth, springy yellow hair.

Fergus Young, head teacher and chair of the Development Committee.

Merrily wound down the window.

‘Tough night, detective constable?’ Fergus Young said.

What Merrily noticed first was all the red computers, pushing out everywhere, like the heads of wild poppies. She was wondering where she’d seen one before and then realized.

‘Roddy Lodge’s office. Roddy Lodge had one of these.’

‘No surprise in that,’ Fergus Young said in his deep, easy voice. ‘Most households in the village have one now. Not only small children use them but also elderly people who’d never imagined they could operate a computer. And, yes, people like Roddy, I suppose, for the same reason.’

He showed her into his office, a little friendlier now, his long, bony features more relaxed. When she’d felt forced to re-identify herself, he’d closed up, visibly pondering the earlier deception – why had Bliss had introduced her as a colleague? Fergus didn’t get the joke, and why should he?

But, OK, if she was already being widely condemned as some self-publicizing clerical bimbo, she was going to sit this one out, very quietly.

There were two more computers in the headmaster’s high- ceilinged office, another red one and a more conventional model. It was central government’s declared aim, Fergus had told her, to provide one computer for every secondary school student in Britain. The primary kids here had two each, one at school, one at home.

There was a knock on the door and a boy of about eight stuck his head round it. ‘Would you and your visitor like some coffee, Fergus?’

‘Thanks, Barney, I think we probably would. And if you see Chris and Piers Connor-Crewe, send them through, would you, mate?’

The kid nodded, vanished. Merrily raised an eyebrow. ‘First- name terms?’

‘It kind of phased itself in.’ Fergus motioned Merrily to a green leather sofa under the window and settled himself on the arm at the other end. He was wearing jeans and a yellow tracksuit top. ‘Some of them were getting so enthusiastic I realized they were beginning to see us as friends.’