The Lamp of the Wicked (13 page)

Bliss didn’t look too unhappy about this.

‘And no tape, no video.’

‘Merrily…’

‘Or I could put your idea to the Bishop. He’d need about two days to think about it, the old worrier.’ She stood up. ‘Frannie, are you even fit to drive?’

Bliss squeezed shut his eyes and opened them again.

‘Wouldn’t have any more coffee in that pot, by any chance?’

T
HEY TRAVELLED DOWN
the long, misted valley, with steel skeletons striding ahead of them.

This was where Herefordshire and Gloucestershire lay back- to-back on a lumpy mattress of tiered fields rising into old woodland of browning broadleaved trees and conifers high on the hillsides. But the valley didn’t look as if it belonged to either county as much as it belonged to the power industry.

‘You can’t believe they can still get away with this, can you?’ Merrily said.

‘Sorry?’ Frannie Bliss, driving, was somewhere else.

‘The pylons.’ They looked seriously hostile, like an army of the dead, bristling with obsolete weaponry. ‘I mean, would it be all
that
costly to run some of it underground?’

The joke was that there were so few homes in view that you could probably have electrified the lot with half a dozen windmills. Wreathed now in fog, the pylons were a primitive show of strength. Maybe one day they’d be industrial archaeology. Not yet.

Frannie Bliss glared at the countryside through the windscreen of his black Alfa, as though it was holding out on him. He was still a city cop at heart; you couldn’t accost pedestrians the same in country lanes:
Where you off to, son? What’s in the rucksack?

They’d come in from the A40, the dual carriageway pumping heavy goods in and out of Newport and Cardiff and the West Country. Here, lorries lurched past the most voluptuous curves of the Wye Valley and that famous Ross-on-Wye skyline: the tall-steepled church crowning the town, above the river and the water-meadows and the mock-medieval sandstone walls. Dark wooded hills were the Ross backcloth, and those same hills were directly above them now, sunk into wet mist, a few miles beyond the town.

‘No, I was just wondering,’ Bliss said, ‘how many sewerage systems Roddy’s put in around here. Every farm needs one, doesn’t it? Every cottage.’

Merrily saw where this was heading. ‘You could start a terrible scare.’

Bliss nodded, didn’t seem too concerned.

‘You put this out in the media,’ she warned, ‘you get everybody for miles around wondering if they’ve got a dead body under their septic tank.’

In a pocket of her coat, she’d discovered the card that Roddy Lodge had given her last night.

Efflapure
R F Lodge
registered contractor
The Old Garage,
Underhowle,
Nr Ross-on-Wye.

It was in a plastic evidence bag now, locked in the boot of the Alfa. Frannie Bliss seemed close to becoming obsessive about Roddy Lodge.

‘I wouldn’t mind looking under, say, a few
selected
septics. Narrow it down a bit.’ He smiled. ‘We’ll see, anyway. How’s business? The Evil One doing much locally?’

‘You’d know better than me.’ He was changing the subject, but she could sense his anticipation and was unnerved by it.

He glanced at her. ‘How’s Lol?’ He’d encountered Lol during the summer, over the hop-kiln tragedy and the problems surrounding Allan Henry, the developer. Oddly, Bliss and Lol had seemed to understand one another, but that didn’t mean she could trust him with an update.

‘We’re still friends. And how’s
your
private life, Inspector Bliss?’

‘Not many private bits left.’

‘What’s that mean?’

He took a sudden right between a Scots pine and an untrimmed hedge. The car skidded on some mud, and Bliss narrowly avoided the hedge.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘just the usual police thing. Your married life suffers on account of the job, and then it gets so bloody messy at home the job becomes a refuge. Like that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t
want
us to be over, but it’s going down so fast now, I don’t really know how to stop it. And before you say “Do you wanna talk about it, Frannie?” – no, thank you, not now. Maybe when this is finished.’

‘I wonder how often you’ve said that. Maybe—’

‘All right,’ Bliss said, ‘probe over. We’re nearly there. Listen, when we get to the actual place, I’m not gonna force yer into a Durex suit, but try not to touch anything, eh?’

‘We’re just going to his house, aren’t we? It’s not as if it’s a murder scene…’ She registered his chilly half-smile. ‘Oh.’

‘We don’t know for certain,’ Bliss said. ‘But he had to’ve done it somewhere. And we do know he brought women back here, and when you see inside the place… well, you’ll probably
want
to wear a Durex suit.’

This was where Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean looked to be stealthily pinching bits of Herefordshire. The lane narrowed between wild saplings growing on the verges. And then, within fifty yards of a sign announcing Underhowle, but before any evidence of a community, they were there: a clearing and a short cindered track opening into a forecourt fronting a building of grey concrete – a classic garage from the 1950s, sectional temple to the motor car, with a white metal sign: R. F. LODGE. In front, the stumps of petrol pumps, behind one of the towering pylons that looked as though it had just walked down from the conifered hillside.

Either side of the garage with its high, twin entrances, shuttered now, stood newer concrete buildings. Frannie Bliss parked the Alfa between a police car and a white van on the forecourt, lowering his window as a uniformed constable came over.

‘Sir, there’s been a deputation of local people demanding to know what’s going on here. DS Mumford didn’t want to speak to them, so I just told them I wasn’t authorized to make a statement, it’d be up to the SIO. Just to put you in the picture. I think they’ll be back.’

‘I do not doubt it, son. Andy’s up at the house, is he?’ Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘I’ve had Andy going through Roddy’s books, phoning his fantasy clients.
Is
he known at Highgrove, you reckon?’

‘You’re really building this up, aren’t you?’

‘Merrily, I’m a detective inspector who would like to be a detective
chief
inspector. I’m thirty-six years old, and I think I’m
worth
it.’

She grinned and stepped out into the peppery breeze. Bliss ushered her along a flagged pathway down the side of the garage, and there, within ten yards of the rear of the grey building, was the bungalow. It had been invisible from the front. Maybe just as well, as it wasn’t pretty: multicoloured bricks assembled in no particular pattern, flat roof, no garden, no flower tubs, just a concrete surround and the tiled pit of a drained swimming pool near the back wall of the garage.

‘And in summer you can float on your back and watch the sun sizzling through the power lines,’ Merrily said.

‘Apparently he got the land cheap. Built the bungalow himself, more or less.’

‘You don’t say.’ Down in a parallel field she could see half of what looked like a stone chapel.

‘Be worth quite a bit now. It’s actually quite well built, according to Mumford who knows about these things.’

‘Maybe it just lacks the feminine touch.’

Bliss glanced at her. ‘How true that is,’ he said.

Roddy Lodge’s office was at the rear of the bungalow, to the right of the back door. Its walls were only half plastered, and its rectangular window looked into the brackeny hillside, through the steel bones of the pylon.

Merrily saw a filing cabinet and a metal desk with a bright red computer and a phone on it. Also, a bulky middle-aged man in a shapeless dark suit sitting in a vinyl-backed executive swivel chair. Bliss bent down to him, cocking his head on one side.

‘So was the Prince cooperative, Andy? Was he as nice as he always seems on the telly?’

‘Good afternoon, Reverend.’ Mumford carefully folded up his mobile phone and placed it on the desk. ‘Nice to see you again.’

‘Hello, Andy.’ Merrily wondered, not for the first time, what kind of vocation this was turning out to be, when she seemed to encounter more coppers than priests.

Mumford looked at the mobile. ‘Boss, I’m just waiting for a call back from Mrs Jilly Cooper’s secretary. They do seem to remember being approached by Lodge sometime last year, but had no need of his services.’

‘How wise,’ Bliss said.

‘And… Highgrove came back to me to confirm getting repeated letters and leaflets from him. I asked if they’d kept any, but apparently they didn’t. I’ve also found a pile of press cuttings in the filing cabinet, mostly relating to famous people who’ve moved to this area… in fact, anywhere within a fifty- or sixty-mile radius.’

‘What does that tell you,’ Merrily wondered, ‘apart from that he’s enterprising?’

‘And a terrible celebrity-stalker,’ Bliss said.

‘He’s very upfront for a stalker.’

‘He’s certainly not efficient.’ Mumford nodded at the scarlet computer, which had yellow speaker grilles and looked like a toy. ‘At one time he seems to have tried doing his bills and stuff on that thing, but the last one I can find on the hard disk seems to be over a year old. He’s all over the place after that, and the computer’s gathering dust.’

‘Other things on his mind, Andy?’

‘Shows a lot of nerve, in a way,’ Merrily said. ‘I mean, a small operator making a direct approach to Prince Charles?’

‘
And
Princess Anne at Gatcombe,’ Mumford said. ‘At least, she’s down here on his list. When I phoned, I wasn’t able to talk to anybody who might know about him, so I’ve arranged to call back in an hour or so. As for Sting’s place – no answer at all. A couple of other people you won’t’ve heard of, boss, seem to remember getting leaflets from Roddy as well as individual letters.’

‘Yeah,’ said Frannie Bliss, ‘but have any of these nobs actually
hired
the bastard?’

Mumford shrugged.

Merrily said, ‘This is like one of those old Ealing comedies.’

Bliss didn’t smile. ‘Right.’ He opened the office door. ‘Come with me, Merrily. I’ll show you just how funny it gets.’

The focus of the living room was a big mahogany cocktail bar, brand new but well out of fashion. There were tall stools, optics, dozens of bottles and a neon sign:
Roddy’s Bar
. The low seating was arranged around it: a couple of sloppy dark leather chairs and a sofa behind a long, glass-topped coffee table with copies of
Loaded
and
Front
on it.

‘This is clearly a man who knows all the best discount warehouses,’ Bliss said.

On one wall, a bullfight poster had Roddy’s name added to the list of contenders. There was a Bang & Olufsen sound system with speakers on wall brackets, and a CD pyramid with one CD lying on top:
Ibiza Nights, Vol 2
. But the stereo was unplugged, as was the wide-screen TV, as if Roddy didn’t use them much any more, didn’t spend much time here.

‘It’s all very clean,’ Merrily observed.

‘He has a Mrs Wellings, from the village, comes in once a week. But she says this, and the kitchen and a couple of other rooms, are about as far as she’s allowed to go.’

Bliss led her back into the passage. This was a plain corridor bungalow, doors to left and right, two of them still unpainted. It reinforced the feeling Merrily was getting of a man who moved around like a moth, never settling to anything for very long.

‘How long has he lived here?’

‘Built it about four years ago from money his old man left him. He’s got two older brothers – like twenty years older. One’s living in Oz, one has the family farm up the valley – both quite respectable, by all accounts. Roddy was a bit of a difficult boy, but not in the sense that he’d be known to us… and he wasn’t. I don’t know the full circumstances, but you had a situation where the father bequeaths him a wodge of cash on the proviso that he uses it to set himself up in business. The brother up the valley says he seemed to have knuckled down to it.’

Bliss had stopped outside a door at the end of the passage with a conspicuous metal lock screwed to the outside. The lock was conspicuously broken.

‘That’s us. Most coppers are frustrated burglars.’ He opened the door. ‘After you. This is where you don’t touch anything, but I don’t suppose I’ll need to emphasize that.’

It was dark inside, except for a shape like the screen of one of the old black and white TVs she remembered from when she was a little kid – when you had to fiddle with a switch labelled
horizontal hold
because all you could get were black, white and grey lines.

She blinked and realized it was only a window with Venetian blinds, their blades not quite fully closed. ‘Oh, sorry,’ Bliss said ingenuously, once she was fully inside the room. ‘Lights. I forgot.’

Merrily was starting to feel annoyed. He’d been setting this up for her, so she’d be in the best viewing position to get the full effect when his hand crept around the door jamb and found the switch.

… and all the women came out of the shadows.

It didn’t seem unusually disturbing at first. They were centre- folds mostly; you could even see the little holes and rips left by the staples. They were pasted on two white emulsioned walls.The other two walls were black or a very deep purple.

She hardly needed to screw up her eyes against the light. The only illumination came from shielded spotbulbs just above skirting-board level, and it was subdued, serving only to reveal the photos and deepen clefts between breasts and thighs.

Of which there were quite a lot. Could be as many as a hundred pictures? Merrily wondered. They were soft-porn poses, mostly, colour and black and white. A scattered few were harder core, a couple featuring women using vibrators. The weakness of the lights and the clouding shadows added the illusion of movement –
that
was disturbing, in an eerie way. The rest, Merrily decided, was just sad for a man twenty years out of his middle teens.

‘Like some repressed schoolboy’s fantasy den, isn’t it?’ Frannie Bliss stood in the bedroom doorway.