Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Mrs Box, I’m really sorry, OK? I should not have said that stuff.’

‘Jane—’

‘It’s not my place to be judgemental. I’m immature for my age and I’m probably becoming right-wing and moralistic and—’

‘Jane,’ Jenny Box said, ‘if you want to continue the conversation, fine.’

‘Do you want to… come back to the vicarage?’

Jenny Box looked around the square. ‘I think I’d rather walk, if you don’t mind. Sitting there facing each other across a table, that can be a little fraught. Besides, there’s less opportunity for me to try and seduce you out here on the street.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said, eyes still full of tears. ‘I don’t know what to believe any more. About anything.’

Merrily took the Walford road out of Ross, turning left when the headlight beams penetrated the tight steel compound that was the base of the first big pylon in the great chain.

‘I’ve never come into the Forest of Dean from this end,’ Huw said. ‘Always come down from Gloucester before.’

‘It’s strange. Like a frontier.’ She drove slowly along the narrow valley road, the full beams occasionally finding one of the pylons gripping the hillside like the skeletons of steel-clawed eagles. ‘The Forest’s a different country. You assume it must have different laws, and you wonder if you might be breaking one of them without knowing it.’

‘You feel insecure?’

‘Bit.’

She’d told him about Lisa Pawson’s unnerving encounter with Roddy Lodge and Lynsey Davies, expecting him to make some reference, as Frannie Bliss might have done, to the couple behaving like Fred and Rose West. But he’d said nothing. She

hadn’t told him about the postscript; she wanted to ask Bliss if they’d been able to ascertain roughly when Lynsey had died.

Merrily said, ‘I’m still not sure what we’re going for… what you’re chasing – peace-of-mind, redemption… or some kind of revenge.’

Huw did his small throaty laugh – a smoker’s laugh, which was odd in somebody who didn’t smoke. He didn’t reply. What a strange, unfocused job this was: no framework for measuring success. Not like Frannie Bliss, walking away with a conviction, a result . Most times, you just came away confused.

The headlights picked up the base of the lone Scots pine at the right turning for Underhowle. There’d be a big sign here next summer, perhaps: The Ariconium Centre .

‘I went over to Much Marcle once,’ Huw said, ‘one fine afternoon – October 1995, some weeks after Julia’s death. I went into the church – a white feeling inside, lots of marble, nothing there. Nothing for me, anyroad. And then I went and sat inside the hollow yew tree, in the churchyard, where I know he must have sat, because everybody has. Happen that were the problem: every bugger had sat there at some time or other. It was all smudged.’

‘You were looking for anything that might be left of West?’ ‘So I got back in the car and I drove up on the Kempley road, to the Fingerpost Field and the Letterbox Field, up near where the bugger lived. Where he buried two bodies – happen more, but two’s all they found. County boundary goes through there, and he knew exactly where it was and he buried ’em both on the Gloucester side because, when it come down to it, he never really liked Much Marcle, on account of everybody knows your business in a village. He liked the anonymity of the city. So he planted ’em on the Gloucester side, so they could look down on Marcle and nobody in Marcle’d ever know.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I know him ,’ Huw said, and under the flat ridge of his voice there was a kind of horror, like the bodies under the floor in Cromwell Street. ‘When the cops took him back to Marcle, he said he could see ghosts in the fields. Said they came to him in his cell: Rena, his first wife and Ann McFall – Anna, he called her. Said he saw their ghosts, but later he took it back, said he’d made that up.’

‘And you,’ Merrily said softly. ‘Did you see any ghosts?’

Huw sniffed. ‘Stood at the top of Fingerpost Field, thought what a lovely place it were, with the view down to Marcle church and across the valley to Ridge Hill. I had a… a rite in me pocket. In a notebook. A procedure… a formal…’

Merrily slowed right down. ‘An exorcism?’

‘Didn’t give it a title.’

‘For Fred West?’

‘Happen.’

‘But you can’t… can you?’ Roddy Lodge’s garage was on the right, across its cindered forecourt. She’d been planning to point it out to Huw, and the message chalked on the door – Put him down a cesspit where he belongs – but this was more important and she drove past. ‘You can’t exorcize Fred West. Because, however much evil there was, you can’t…’

Can’t exorcise a ghost , she was going to say. You could only exorcize a demonic presence. Anything that had once been human – an unquiet spirit – could only be directed back to its maker.

She shut up; it was, after all, Huw who’d taught her this stuff. ‘Sometimes…’ He leaned forward, scrubbing at the condensation on the windscreen. ‘Sometimes I think in the modern Church you can make it up as you go along. What’s this, Merrily? What are all these lights? Who the bloody hell are all these buggers?’

Merrily leaned on the brakes.

But they were already surrounded.

Lol’s pub crawl ended at an inn down by the River Wye, with a beer garden extending to the dark water’s edge. This was where he finally found the girl who had said her name was Cola French.

Down the far end of the bar was a group of people of varying ages but a shared self-conscious and slightly dated eccentricity. There was a woman of late middle age in a purple bolero and black lipstick, a bald guy in an elaborately torn biker jacket and bangles, and a small, round man with a long crimson beard who was doing the talking until Cola French, grinning, poked him in the chest. ‘Jaz, you’re a lying old bastard!’

‘And you are a whore,’ Jaz said mildly, and Cola cracked up laughing.

Then she saw Lol standing near the doorway – Lol, who didn’t drink much, never knew where to put himself and sometimes found the friendly English pub the loneliest place in the world.

‘Hey!’ Cola said. ‘Shit!’

Her hair was a dazzling white tonight with tiny gold stars in it. She wore the same black fleece top she’d had on the other day at the Old Rectory. It was not yet eight p.m. and she seemed to be moderately drunk: Cola French, the writer and occasional bookshop assistant whose TV play would have been perused by the great Dennis Potter himself, if he hadn’t snuffed it.

She unstitched herself from the Bohemian tapestry at the bottom of the bar, weaved right up to Lol and peered into his eyes.

‘This guy who was in, I dunno, some pub, said there was a bloke looking for me. Tell me it was you .’

‘Could’ve been,’ admitted Lol, whose quest had taken him to four other bars in Ross – soft drinks and suspicious looks that said, If you only want a small orange juice and you’re on your own, what are you really doing here, mate?

‘Which is like… serendi— serendipitous,’ Cola said. ‘Because you know what? I… know who you are .’

She prodded Lol once in the chest, making a big gesture of it and then stepping away like she’d identified him from a wanted poster. She bent forward, with a hand on each thigh, and began to sing softly:

And it’s always on the sunny days you feel you can’t go on. On rainy days, it rains on everyone.

And I’m running for the subway and I’m hiding under trees On fine days like these.