Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘For starters,’ Bliss said through his teeth, ‘Lynsey Davies wasn’t in fact found naked.’

‘You wanted a national scare. Big, high-profile case to play with.’

‘But not now , for Christ’s sake! Will you just let me—?’

‘Will you both, for God’s sake, shut up?’ Merrily said quietly. ‘You’re scaring the cat.’ She came and sat down at the far end of the long table, away from both of them. ‘And me.’

‘Aye,’ Huw said, looking at her at last, as if realizing where he was. ‘I’m sorry.’

And she was shocked at the sight of him, at how much someone could change in six months or so. He was wearing his clerical shirt, the dog collar parchmented with age, under a patched tweed jacket. The effect was decrepit rather than casual. His long hair was dry and salted with dandruff, and there were lines she didn’t remember down each cheek, deep as sewn-up knife wounds. He was breathing hard.

‘Papers came same day for once. West, West, West . They all want him to be another West.’

‘And what do you want?’ Frannie Bliss’s face was maroon under the freckles. ‘We let it lie? We let the missing stay missing, the bodies stay buried?’

Huw had shut his eyes, was digging his knuckles into the table top. He stayed like that for several seconds before breathing out and opening his eyes, pulling out a rueful smile like an old handkerchief.

‘Hello, lass.’

‘Hello, Huw.’

‘That woman,’ Huw said to Bliss, as if the last few minutes had somehow been wiped. ‘Lynsey. Were there any bits of her missing?’

‘Bits?’ Bliss sat down again.

‘Bones. Fingers, toes.’

‘Like Fred did to them?’

‘Aye.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Merrily said.

‘All of the West victims,’ Bliss told her, ‘had several bones missing. Mostly fingers and toes, but sometimes shoulder bones. Like he was keeping souvenirs.’

‘Another of the reasons the Gloucester coppers suspected occult belief,’ Huw said. ‘A sense of ritual about it – always took the same bones.’

‘I’ve been reading as fast as I can,’ Merrily said. ‘I just haven’t got to this bit.’

‘Came to a lot of bones – well over a hundred. None of them have ever been found.’ Bliss turned to Huw. ‘No, Roddy didn’t go that far. Not with Lynsey. But then, she wasn’t your regular victim, was she?’

‘There were no regular victims, wi’ West.’ Huw’s voice was as flat as hardboard again. ‘Mostly they just ended up dead because there was nowhere else for them to go.’

Merrily winced.

‘What I mean is,’ Frannie Bliss said, ‘Roddy probably killed Lynsey because she found out about him – what he’d been up to. Not just as a result of getting his rocks off.’

‘West killed his own daughter, Heather, because she said she were leaving the happy home,’ Huw said. ‘Lost patience with her.’ He turned to Merrily. ‘Do you remember Donna Furlowe?’

‘No. Who was she?’

Huw mopped up some spilled coffee with his sleeve, possibly to hide the fact that he wasn’t replying. What the hell was the matter with him?

‘I’ll leave you to explain, Huw,’ Bliss said. ‘And then Merrily can tell you about this wonderful pseudo-scientific theory which argues that, far from being a psychotic serial killer, Lodge was actually a victim of his environment. Should comfort a lot of people.’

Huw looked up at Merrily. That old wolfhound look.

‘I’m going home now,’ Bliss said, ‘to try and get used to spending more time with me family, who hate me nearly as much as me colleagues.’

Merrily had put the lamp back on the window sill. It was all a little mellower in the room now. Huw was drinking tea, dunking chocolate digestive biscuits in it. His voice was softer.

‘A twenty-first-century plague village, eh? Would it worry you to live there?’

‘Actually,’ Merrily said, ‘I was only thinking earlier how much more exciting Underhowle was – more progressive, more alive than Ledwardine. But I suppose everything has its drawbacks. I mean, you can go on telling yourself it’s all overheated rubbish, but every time somebody dies prematurely after living for five years under high-voltage power lines you immediately forget about all the people who spent half a lifetime underneath and made it to ninety-six.’

‘And the apparitions? The hallucinations? The little grey men with big eyes?’

‘Used to be that electrical gadgets were affected by aliens. Now they’re saying electricity creates the aliens.’

‘I can buy it,’ Huw said. ‘I can also accept that electrical stimulation of the temporal lobes, whether it’s by a roomful of computers or whatever, simulates the sense of “presence” you get in a haunted house. But it’s not the whole story. It’s just another one of the rational explanations we have to be aware of. Another mine in the minefield.’

Merrily sat back, relieved. She might have guessed he’d know about it all: he subscribed to dozens of scientific and esoteric journals; his library filled four rooms of his rectory.

‘Superficially, it’s a fast-changing world, Merrily.’ He brushed crumbs from his shirt-front. ‘Your feller’s right: we’re surrounding ourselves wi’ transmitters and receivers. We’ve got CCTV in every town centre, scores of techno-industries competing to sell us bits of tat that do some meaningless trick the only point of which is that the last bit of tat couldn’t do it. And nobody really wants to tell us what it’s all doing to our brains, else that’s another industry gone to the wall. Oh aye, I’m perfectly willing to believe that a certain configuration of signals and electromagnetic fields in a small area is likely to set up a… what was it?’

‘Hot spot.’

‘However, once you start spreading these stories, the centuries drop away and you get into an essentially medieval situation. We’re every bit as impressionable as folk were then. This gets around, there’ll be five times as many people think they’ve got a brain tumour when it’s only a headache. Five times as many kids who think they’ve got company at night when it’s only a bad dream or headlights on the window pane. And if the rector’s as unapproachable as you say, who else do they go to with their fears?’

‘So why…’ She hesitated. ‘Why have you come, Huw?’

He dunked his biscuit. ‘Merrily, if you think I know what I’m doing, you’re wrong. If you think I’m a balanced, laid-back old bugger, wi’ a steady finger on the pulse, you’re wrong again. You don’t know owt about me, really.’

‘So tell me.’

‘Bag of nerves? Bubbling cauldron of hatred and regrets? Oh aye. I reckon I’ve had a hatred of God, sometimes, as strong as anybody alive.’

‘And Donna Furlowe?’ Merrily said. ‘Who is she?’

Silence.

‘You remembered the name,’ Huw said.

‘Only from when you said it earlier. Who is she?’

‘She isn’t,’ Huw said. ‘Any more.’

And Jane, listening at the door, crept away. Thrown by that sentence. I reckon I’ve had a hatred of God, sometimes, as strong as anybody alive .

The things the clergy said sometimes, usually only to other clergy. She didn’t know Huw Owen very well, suspected nobody did, really. She’d still been a kid when Mum had first met him, last year. Oh yeah, still a kid last year: she understood that now.

Jane went up to her apartment and sat on the bed. Probably Mum would be shouting up for her soon. Flower, I’m really sorry about this, but how would feel about going to the chippy? Always chips these days, since she’d got bogged down with this thing at Underhowle. And now Huw Owen was involved, which meant it was serious – something Huw didn’t think a woman could handle, because he was from Yorkshire.