Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

The policeman said, ‘You’ve brought the vicar ?’

‘Little vicar brought me , Robbie.’

The policeman sniffed the air around Gomer and nodded, getting the message. Gomer would know most of the coppers around here, and their dads and grandads, too.

Merrily found the torch and climbed out of the van. Her legs felt weak. She’d never been to Gomer’s depot before. Looking around for the famous former aircraft shed, she saw only the harsh headlights of fire appliances and some other vehicles, and puddles swirling with beacon blue. A couple of firefighters were moving slowly around with hoses, amid eddies of smoke. They seemed to be spraying the earth, as if they were trying to stimulate growth, and she realized, shocked, that this was because much of the building must have fallen in around its contents. No flames were left anywhere; the firemen were just damping down, to make sure it didn’t reignite.

She saw the husk of a tractor or maybe a bulldozer, its windows all gone. Gomer spat his cigarette into a pool of rainbowed water and walked away from the policeman towards a pyramid of twisted galvanized roof-panels, about ten feet high and wreathed in stinking smoke. Merrily started to follow him, then gagged on a mouthful of the searing air – no autumn-bonfire scents here; this was chemical, astringent. She doubled up, coughing. Gomer looked back; she waved him on, pulling out some tissues to mop her flooded eyes.

When she was over it, she could see him talking to two coppers and a senior-looking fireman inside a steamy mesh of headlamp beams. There were other people around, another blue light. She straightened up, began to move towards them, and another fireman bawled at her.

‘Stay back !’

‘OK…’ Putting up her hands, backing off. The three-quarter moon gleamed off the flank of a digger lying tragically askew, like a great shire horse with a broken neck.

Gwynneth, or Muriel. Merrily felt close to tears. She saw the policemen leading Gomer back towards the van, the senior fireman following them, snapping questions.

‘… Oil tanks? Diesel?’

‘Tank was inside,’ Gomer said. ‘Locked up.’

‘Just the one?’

‘Ar. Locked up. Good locks.’

‘Who else had keys, Gomer?’ An older policeman: grey moustache and sergeant’s stripes.

‘ Nobody else had bloody keys, Cliff! Me and Nev, just me and Nev. You saying some bastard let ’isself in? ’Cause you’d need a bloody oxyacetylene torch to break in yere, take it from me.’

‘Far’s I can gather, Gomer, there was no sign of a break-in when the fire brigade got here. No doors hanging open, nothing like that, nothing obvious. However—’

‘When was this, Cliff?’

‘Two hours ago, round about. It was well away by then.’

‘’Cause if you boys reckons this was done deliberate’ – Gomer turned to the older policeman, a forefinger waving – ‘then I can give you a name, straight off.’

‘Gomer, listen, we en’t saying nothing like that at this stage.’

‘A bloody good name, Cliff.’

Merrily blinked, confused. How could he possibly give them a name? Was there something she didn’t know about, something Gomer hadn’t told her? It went quieter suddenly, and she realized the hoses had been turned off.

‘Gomer, listen to me,’ Cliff said quietly, ‘before you start throwing accusations around… you seen Nev tonight?’

‘Eh?’

‘ Nev .’

‘I never sees Nev at night.’ Gomer calmed himself down, bringing out his cigarette tin. ‘All right to smoke, is it?’

‘Rather you didn’t,’ the fireman said.

The younger copper, Robbie, put a hand over Gomer’s tin. ‘Because we can’t find him, see.’

‘He lives at Presteigne. Lot of pubs in Presteigne. You go round the bloody pubs, you’ll find him, all right.’

‘We know all that,’ Robbie said. ‘We know Nev’s been drinking heavy lately. Including tonight.’

‘Depends what you means by heavy,’ Gomer said guardedly.

‘The thing…’ The sergeant, Cliff, hesitated. ‘The thing is, Gomer… Nev got hisself thrown out of the Royal Oak earlier on. Been on the beer, gets into a barney with Clem Morris’s boy, Jordan, on account of Jordan thinks Nev’s after his girlfriend. Something and nothing, as usual, but it all gets overheated, and we get sent along to calm things down. And we strongly suggested to Nev that he oughter go home directly and sleep it off.’

‘Stupid fat bastard,’ Gomer said.

‘Only, we know Nev didn’t go home, see, or he didn’t stay home, because when we goes to his flat over the paper shop, after the fire was reported, Nev en’t there.’

‘What you saying?’ Gomer snapped a glance over his shoulder towards the pyramid of smoking debris, his fists clenching. Merrily saw that, behind the collapsed shed, a small building was still standing, probably because it was made of concrete blocks. In the distance, below the moon, she could see a conifered hillside, the view of which the aircraft shed must once have concealed.

‘What we want to ask you, Gomer,’ Cliff said, gently enough to make Merrily very worried, ‘is where might Nev’ve gone? A mate’s… a girlfriend’s?’

‘What you saying?’ Gomer turned slowly, the blue light flaring in his glasses. ‘What you bloody saying , Cliff Morgan?’

Some more people were gathering around, firemen with their helmets off, like a sign of respect. Gomer suddenly spun away and pushed through them, disappearing into a hollow of darkness beyond the milky confluence of vehicle lights.

Merrily found him standing outside the concrete building. The air smelled of oil and charred wood. She felt slightly sick. From behind, she heard Cliff saying wearily, ‘Don’t let the little bugger go in, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Lend me the torch, vicar.’

But it was only holding tight to the heavy, rubberized flashlight that kept Merrily’s hands from shaking. Drawing a long breath, she shone the light inside the building to where the water was still an inch deep, from the damping-down. And then the beam was all over the place as she pushed her sleeve into her face because of what the breath had brought in with it.

She started to cough again. Amid the diesel vapour and the wet wood-ash was an odour you could taste. The torch beam found its own way down scorched plasterboard walls, over a dented grey metal desk, a wooden chair that now looked like it was made of hollow columns of ash. The remains of a wooden partition hung in grotesquely ornate strands, like the rood screen in some abandoned church.

Biting down on her lip, Merrily shone the light back onto Gomer, standing there with his cap gone and his white hair springing up, an unlit roll-up between his teeth. As she watched, he seemed to sag, as if what she saw was just his clothes, and the living essence of Gomer was deflating inside them. She let the beam follow his gaze to what had been a mattress, reduced now to lumps of scorched fabric and exposed springs.

And Oh God. Oh, sweet Jesus . Like a prayer opening up.

Was that what she was supposed to do at this moment – offer up a prayer for what lay on the mattress, for the soul that had vacated the blistered, split skin, the flesh cooked in blue denim and left to congeal, the legs burned back to the bone, the feet fused into the Doc Martens by their melted rubber soles?

Merrily’s stomach lurched

Hands gripped her shoulders. Gomer was alive again and turning her around, snatching the torch from her, but even when she was away from the smell, standing in a puddle, letting the cold water seep into her shoes, she was still seeing the spindle of an arm thrown protectively across the swollen, football face so that all you could make out underneath was the grimace of teeth.