Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Huw, I…’ Blinking back the tears; that wouldn’t help.

‘God?’ His voice was down on the flagstones. ‘I went into me own church that night and screamed obscenities at God for the best part of an hour. Close as I’ve ever been to chucking it in. They say it makes your faith stronger in the end, and happen they’re right, but you can’t possibly know that at the time. It’s not a time when faith makes any kind of bloody sense.’

No.’

She had to put the paper down. Wondering if he’d brought it tonight specially to show her, or if he carried it with him all the time, in his inside pocket next to his heart, the suicide note of a woman he’d never really had and perhaps was already losing when she died. ‘

‘AND YOU KNOW the joke?’ Huw said.

‘There’s a joke?’

With the lights of Hereford city centre clustered in the rear- view mirror, Merrily headed left by the Belmont roundabout, finding the Ross road. They were going to make a surprise call on the Reverend Jerome Banks. Huw’s idea. Huw sat placidly in the passenger seat, wearing his donkey jacket, hands clasped on his knees, no seat belt on. Wears his scar tissue like a badge. No, not like a badge at all. Like scar tissue, the kind that was never less than inflamed. She was glad she no longer had to look into his stricken eyes.

‘The joke, Merrily, was that it’s possible Donna wasn’t down to West after all. ‘The bones – aye that matched. Otherwise, a few differences. The Home Office pathologist were the first to question it. He knew the West style by then, see.’

‘What kind of differences?’

‘Well, there were nowt wrong with the hole. West used to bury them in holes that were deeper than they were wide. They weren’t graves , they were holes. Practical. Like you’d have for dead sheep.’ Huw’s voice was as flat as the road ahead. ‘Nobody had ever just stumbled on one of Fred’s bodies. He’d cut them up, then bury them neatly. Efficient butchery, economical disposal.’

‘Thank you, I’ve read about that.’

And Donna had been cut up, but with no great skill. The head… hacked off, the legs broken. The hands, too. One foot mutilated, bones removed. But not Fred’s way, was how the pathologist saw it. Too rough, he figured, therefore too frenzied.’

But after Donna had been in the ground for the best part of two years, Huw said, there was no strong forensic evidence either way – not much more than the pathologist’s feeling that this wasn’t down to Fred.

‘You can bet most of the coppers wanted it to be him, mind. You don’t want more than one of these buggers, do you? Not on the same patch. So whatever investigation there was must’ve been cursory, wi’ over seventy per cent of the team convinced the case was already solved. Always somebody to say, Oh, happen Fred were in a hurry this time, not his usual self… especially under the circumstances.’

‘Circumstances?’ Down the Callow pitch now, and off into the country, reminding her of that night with Gomer, when it all began, experiencing again that feeling of being drawn in .

‘He’d just had a rather difficult year, Merrily. One of his kids had told a schoolfriend about the domestic arrangements at 25 Cromwell Street, and Fred had found himself in Gloucester court facing charges of tampering with a daughter. Three counts of rape, one of buggery. Rose next to him, accused of cruelty and complicity. Police and social services walking all over the beloved home, kids taken into care. So then Fred has to discuss his married life in detail with the coppers – “My wife and I, we leads a very full sex life.” Nudge bloody nudge.’

‘They got off, though, didn’t they?’

‘Aye. So near and yet so far. In the end, the victim wouldn’t give evidence. Nobody would. Nobody wanted to break up the happy home. So they got off, the pair of ’em – embracing in the dock, picture of bloody innocence.’

But the police had been inside number 25, seen all the signs – the sex aids, the pornographic home-videos. And, while the other children were in care, the social workers had heard the ‘family jokes about Heather, who was missing (run off with a lesbian, Fred said), being buried under the patio. It was the beginning of the end. Within nine months they’d arrested him for the murder of Heather, buried more or less where she was said to be buried. Not a very good joke any more.

So did Fred realize the clock was ticking? Was he determined to get a last one in before the bells went off? Or did he just happen to run into Donna in Cheltenham and couldn’t resist?

Or did somebody else kill her?

‘You think Donna might’ve been killed by Roddy Lodge, don’t you? That was what you told Bliss. And it’s no wonder Frannie’s excited. Because if this was down to Lodge, it proves that we’re not just looking at another copycat,’ Merrily said.

‘No.’

‘Because, while it might not have been a perfect match, it was still very close to West’s modus operandi , including the bones. And when poor Donna was buried, two years before the arrest and all the publicity, the only way anyone could possibly have known about West’s modus operandi would have been by actually knowing West .’

‘There we are, then,’ Huw said placidly.

So Huw had come to take over, AGENDA written now in neon capitals between the lines on his forehead. Huw was running a crusade on behalf of the parents of all them dead and missing girls, lying awake night after night wondering precisely what were done to their kids and how many times.

Or just for one parent, one girl.

Or just – God forbid – for his own redemption.

Now Huw wanted to talk to the Reverend Jerome Banks, to whom Roddy Lodge had gone with his haunted-bungalow stories and been turned away. Why? And why had Banks offloaded the funeral so fast? Why had he really done that? Huw wanted answers. Huw Owen, with his wolfhound hair and his slow-burn stare.

Scary.

Before they left, Merrily had gone up to the apartment, with the chip money in one hand – Jane, at seventeen, was becoming what in Liverpool they used to call a latchkey kid. This couldn’t go on.

‘Flower, Huw and I have… someone to see.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said in her most bored tone. ‘Really?’

‘Shouldn’t take long, but—’

‘Yeah, yeah, chips’ll be fine.’

‘Unless you want to come along? We could call somewhere for a meal afterwards.’

Jane had turned down the stereo and stared at Merrily, with that awful twisted little smile. ‘Let me get this right. You’re offering me a night out with a couple of vicars talking shop. Discussing like God’s Work .’ The kid had sighed, shaking her head in slow motion. ‘Merrily, if you only knew how distressingly patronizing that sounded.’

‘You used to be quite interested in… aspects of the job.’

‘Interests change,’ Jane said. ‘Or maybe we get people wrong. Like, for quite a while, I thought my mother had a normal interest in men.’

‘Now what does that mean?’

Jane had shrugged.

They passed a pub on the Ross road called, with an awful irony, The Axe and Cleaver.

‘If there ever is evidence that Lodge killed Donna,’ Merrily said, ‘what could that mean? It would seem to me to suggest there really might have been a group of them.’

‘Aye. The cult that Fred talked about, and everybody thought he were just trying to spread the blame. However, when all’s said and done, if Roddy Lodge killed Donna he didn’t kill Julia. Fred killed Julia.’

‘You mean just the thought of…?’