Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

But you think you can help me ?’

‘Maybe we can help each other.’ Sam got down on his knees, opened up the stove and fed it a log that looked to have been sawn to size. ‘OK, I’m gonna condense this – I’d rather have derision any day than pity. Yeah, you’re right, of course. I lost my only kid to leukaemia in the States and, yeah, we lived directly under power lines and, sure, I became fanatical about the whole issue, drank too much, destroyed my marriage. And now I’m back in England and I’m still angry and I figure this is still a small enough country to make an impact. And yeah, you’re sorry for my loss – thank you – so that’s all that dealt with. How much did Lol tell you?’

‘He told me what you’d said about hot spots and the symbolism of the plague cross. And he said there was a spiritual side to it that he thought you weren’t inclined to discuss with him.’

‘The spiritual side, yeah. I guess he and I caught more than a hint of all that the night Roddy died. When we met in Ross, Lol had this other lady with him who I thought was gonna be you, and it threw me when she turned out to be another singer, so I kind of clammed up.’

‘Moira Cairns,’ Merrily said neutrally.

‘I think I was supposed to have heard of her. I guess I was away too long.’

‘The spiritual side…?’ Merrily prompted.

‘Sure. I tried to talk to the Reverend Banks one time, but if you’ve ever had anything to do with that guy…’

Merrily nodded. Sam Hall, bulked out with an Icelandic sweater, waved her to a big, overstuffed armchair and put himself into another. He’d untied his ponytail and salty hair framed his bearded face.

‘When I was a kid we lived for a while in the village. My dad was a friend of old man Lodge and I was a few years older than Tony Lodge, and Roddy was just a small kid when I left for the States. So I knew the family well enough to recognize the changes when I came back.’

‘What did you do out there?’

‘Oh, I was a film cameraman for some years – industrial, nothing glamorous, no movies. Then I got into some stills work for the underground press, who paid peanuts in the early days, though it improved when magazines like Rolling Stone took off. And that got me into radical politics – I was kind of an old hippy even when hippies were young. Which was fun. I wound up in this commune with my wife on the edge of the Nevada Desert – under power lines, as it happened. And then our daughter, Delawney, got sick and died and it all got serious. I guess I… became a little crazy for a while – paranoid. Became convinced the power industry had a contract out on me – hell, maybe they did, those bastards. When the wife walked out on me, I decided it was time to make plans to come back to the green and pleasant land.’

‘Only to find the power industry had beaten you to it?’

‘Yeah, and what was worse’ – Sam walked over to the window and looked down the valley – ‘the village had come out to meet the pylons. They must’ve been some distance away at first, with only the Baptist Chapel and the old garage up close. But then they built the council estate, with some houses right under the damn cables. Nobody gave a shit in those days, and of course some developers and local authorities still don’t. I was so mad when I saw that. It ignited all the old rage, and I thought, this time, this time , I’m really gonna do something about it.’ He turned around. ‘Hell, Mrs Watkins, this wasn’t gonna be about me, I was gonna give you the science.’

‘I’m not that good at science.’

‘And I found out one thing about the British media – you only get one chance. They come and they do one serious story on you and after that you either succeed or you become a joke. I became a joke very quickly. The Fool on the Hill – that’s my sig tune. By the time I had something worth saying, nobody was hearing me.’

‘And that was?’

‘Roddy Lodge, of course. And Melanie Pullman. Fellow sufferers, but it was Melanie I was most concerned about – maybe a mistake.’

‘Sufferers from what?’

‘Let me start at the beginning – which isn’t too long ago. Not quite three years. Just around the time my honeymoon with the media was coming to an end. The day Melanie Pullman told me about the lights in the night.’

Gomer climbed down from the digger. It was not yet lunchtime.

‘Done?’ Lol was surprised: it was already over and he could still walk? In fact, the ground frost, the wintry friction in the air, had put an edge on his senses.

‘At a quarter of the bloody Efflapure price,’ Gomer said, ‘and no fancy dials to check. Now, if you go up the house, get her to flush every toilet they got – upstairs, downstairs, en suite, the lot. Wanner make sure it’s coming through proper, see.’

Gomer beamed; he knew it would. On the way here, he’d talked about his mistake concerning Lodge and the fire and how the vicar had helped him get that into perspective. Gomer seemed very relieved this morning, like a Jack Russell unleashed.

Walking up the leaf-matted lawn, past the Gomer Parry Plant Hire truck, Lol saw smoke coming from one of the chimneys of what was a nice old stone house built at a time when nothing heavier than a horse would be moving along whatever had pre-dated the A49. Through a front window, as he passed, he saw Mrs Pawson hunched close to a wood-burner in the inglenook. She rose quickly, had the front door open before he reached it.

‘Is it finished?’ She looked pinched and starved.

‘Gomer thinks so. He’d like you to flush all the loos. Could I… help?’

She hesitated. ‘All right.’ A bit snappy. ‘The downstairs one’s just there, off the hall. I’ll do upstairs.’

He flushed the downstairs cloakroom toilet and went back outside to wait for her. He noticed the front door had two new locks, big-city style. When she came down, she was wearing a thick green woollen jacket and still looked shivery.

He smiled. ‘It should be fine. Anyway. Gomer won’t leave until it’s all perfect.’

‘Oh…’ Mrs Pawson shook her head absently, as if he’d said something unnecessarily technical. ‘I just want it to be working, that’s all. Then I can get out of here.’

‘For good?’

‘What do you think?’ She looked at Lol as though she wouldn’t expect someone like him really to understand. ‘Look, if you need me for anything, I’m booked into the Royal in Ross for tonight, to see estate agents. Then I’m going back to London. Mr Parry has my address, for the bill.’

‘You feel personally unsettled by all this?’

She’d turned away, as if to go back into the house. She turned back. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Well, he’s dead. And she…’ It wasn’t as if she was murdered here, was what he meant.

Mrs Pawson looked away from him, along the drive towards the road. ‘There was a morning paper in the hotel lounge, which I was silly enough to pick up. They now think he had a sick fascination with Frederick West, they don’t know how many other women he killed, and his neighbours don’t want him to be buried at their church. Is it so hard to see why this house is blighted for me?’

Gomer had talked about West on the way here, telling Lol about what had been in the attaché case they’d dug up at the back of the bungalow.

Mrs Pawson looked at Lol. ‘Did you know Lodge?’

‘Only by… by sight.’

‘He was a nightmare,’ she said. ‘A nightmare person.’ She was holding the lapels of her jacket together across her throat. ‘And so was the woman.’

‘She was with him, when…?’

Mrs Pawson didn’t reply and started to walk away then, but he sensed a very real distress that didn’t seem to fit in with the kind of woman she was. And afterwards he talked to Gomer about this, and Gomer agreed.