The Lamp of the Wicked (27 page)

‘We could have telephone sex, if you like,’ Jane said. ‘I’m letting the towel slip slowly down my breasts. There are tiny bubbles of moisture…’

‘What is it you want?’ Eirion said tightly.

‘OK, I lied. I’m fully dressed. In fact, it’s so cold in this house that I’m wearing my fleece and leg warmers.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Listen, how far are you from the nearest computer?’

‘Decades,’ Eirion said obliquely.

‘Check someone out for me? On the Net? You remember Jenny Driscoll? All soft-voiced and drippy. Did these crappy daytime TV shows on fashion and decor and make-overs and stuff.’

‘Like the ones I always watch to find my feminine side.’

‘Irene, this is—’

‘Yeah, I do know who you mean. Nice-looking.’

‘You’re really into old ladies, aren’t you? There’s a word for it.’

‘And she lives in your village.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘You did.’

‘Christ, was I ever that sad? Irene, listen, this sounds… this is going to sound very stupid. But this woman, this Driscoll – or Mrs Box, as she now calls herself – she’s got her claws seriously into Mum.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘I can’t tell you, but it comes out of some middle-aged religious obsession. Or maybe it’s just attention seeking, or maybe she’s just a lonely old bag, I wouldn’t like to venture a hard opinion at this stage but, essentially, she’s claiming – this is what she’s told Mum, right? – that she’s had a mystical experience. Involving an angel. In the sky, over the church – our church. Don’t laugh. And she has a chapel in her house – this kind of shrine, under the floor, and she took Mum down there, and there was incense and candles and stuff. And of course Mum’s reacting in a suitably spiritually correct fashion.’

‘And you think
this
is another world,’ Eirion said.

‘It’s not actually a joke. It’s not actually funny, for at least one very bizarre reason that I’m not allowed to tell you about, so don’t ask me. But I do not believe this woman has had any kind of… experience, and— Irene, are you still there?’

Yeah. I… Jane, it’s still happening isn’t it? You’re still…’

‘Huh?’

‘Your… This whole dark-night-of-the-soul thing. A few months ago, if anybody claimed to have seen an angel within fifty miles of Ledwardine, you’d have been so excited you’d be up all night with a video camera.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m over it, all right? It was pitiful, and I’m finally over it. You can waste your life on that kind of shit.’

‘I don’t think you mean that, Jane.’

‘How would you know what I mean?’

Eirion sighed. ‘What do you want me to try and find out?’

‘Anything. What happened to her marriage. Why she got out of TV. Any of the kind of scurrilous flotsam that gets washed up on the Net.’

‘Surfing for shit?’

‘Just help me, Eirion.’

Silence.
I called him Eirion
, Jane thought in dismay.

‘You want any dirt I can find on Moira Cairns at the same time?’ he said.

‘That’s not fair.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Eirion didn’t sound sorry. He sounded disappointed, somehow.

A crowd had gathered, the way crowds did. Suddenly it was just there.

Lol didn’t know how many people lived around Underhowle, but at least seventy of them had to be here now. The ones who hadn’t broken through the police tape must have come across the fields on the other side of the pylon, by the edge of the woods fringing Howle Hill. Perhaps forty people were standing within twenty feet of the tower, like they’d bought tickets. Not enough police here to move them on – like the police didn’t have enough to think about.

Frannie Bliss was pacing around the base of the pylon, conspicuously uneasy now. Lol could make out people crouching ‘with their camcorders. Bliss stood back, hands cupped around his mouth. A sudden white light shone all around him – someone had brought along one of those long-distance spotlamps.

‘Roddy. Can you hear me, son? This is DI Bliss. Frannie Bliss.’

Roddy Lodge had pulled himself back on to the metal arm; he was braced against the tower’s skeletal spine. Clouds had dropped away from the wafery moon, and the girders gleamed white like bone.

‘Roddy, can you hear me?’

On the ground, Bliss was competing against the spectator buzz, but the voice from the pylon burst sharply in the air.

‘NO!’

Like a hole punched in a paper bag, making its own hush.

‘DON’T WANNER TALK TO NO MORE COPPERS!’

‘Roddy…’ Bliss bent backwards. ‘Let’s be sensible. You’re about six feet from enough juice to light up half the county. Just let yourself come down, and take it very carefully. You got nowhere else to go. You know that, son.’

‘THAT’S WHAT…’ A surprise blast of wind. Gasps from the crowd as Lodge clutched at a steel diagonal, caught it and clung to it. ‘THAT’S WHAT YOU RECKONS, IS IT, MR COPPER?’

‘It’s very dangerous, Roddy, that’s all I’m saying. There’s massive voltage up there, you know that.’

Silence.

‘Roddy, if you—’

‘NOT TO ME. EN’T NO DANGER TO ME, COPPER. I’M ELECTRIC ALREADY, LOOK!’

Frannie Bliss stared at the churned ground. Lol could feel him groping for viable words. High above him, washed by swirling lights, Roddy Lodge was glowing red like a pantomime demon – Lol willing him to give it up, come down from there, don’t raise the stakes.

Roddy suddenly reeled back, one arm locked around the cross bar, the other thrown across his face. His feet seemed to skate on the metal.

The light,’ Sam Hall said. ‘Light’s affecting him. Plus the shit coming off of the power lines. He’s gonna be disoriented by now. His balance’ll go completely, can’t they see that?’ Angrily, he strode down the field towards Bliss. Two uniformed police came out of the dark from two sides, restraining him. Sam turned on one of them. ‘
Not me
, you asshole! Get across there and tell some of those stupid bastards to switch off their lights if they don’t want to kill him.
Jesus!
’

‘Why’n’t you jump?’ A sudden, strident male voice in the crowd. ‘Why’n’t you take a bloody running jump, Lodge?’

They
do
want to kill him
, Lol thought, sickened. He was sweating and trembling with the cold but, at the same time, he was glad he was this side of the pylon, away from that crowd. It was an audience. Audiences wanted it all. He felt hollow inside, and his head was throbbing with fear for the man on the pylon, the performer in the spotlights.
You reappear on stage now
, Moira said softly in his ear,
it’s gonnae be like, ‘Hey, is that no’ the big sex-offender?
’ When he turned away, teeth clenched, he could still see the shining red figure projected like a hologram, vibrating in charged air.

‘Why’n’t you go for a swing on the high wire, Roddy?’ The same man’s voice. ‘Save the tax-payers havin’ to keep you the rest of your bloody useless life!’

A fragment of silence.

‘
Shaddup!
’ a woman shrieked. ‘You en’t lived here two minutes, it’s no damn business of yours!’

Bliss was tramping back up the field. ‘This is useless. How am I supposed to try and talk him down with these fuckin’ hayseeds—? Andy! Where’s…?
Right. Listen
. Get half a dozen uniforms, go across and get the lot of them out of there. It’s gorra be private land. Tell them they’re trespassing, they’re obstructing the police, whatever you want. But the first one objects, you
nick him
!’

He tore past Lol, making for the cars.

Sam Hall was back, brushing himself down, straightening his denim jacket. ‘This is not good.’

‘No.’

‘He looks down, all he sees now is row upon row of blinding lights. His head’s gonna be close to exploding.’

The lamps aimed up into the pylon made a white gauze in the rain mist. Lol sensed an ambivalence in the crowd.
He’s a murderer. He’s murdered one of our own. At least one
. Yet Lodge himself was one of their own.

The lights went in and out of focus. Lol looked down.

He saw a tiny red glow tracking across the field.

‘
Lodge!
’

The beams from the crowd swung down again, like they were voice-activated, and found –
Oh God
– found Gomer Parry, standing where Bliss had stood, his cap off, his white hair on end in the wind, like a hearth brush, a fresh roll-up in his teeth.

‘Lodge… Gomer Parry Plant Hire! You yearin’ me?

‘
Gomer!
’ Bliss went lurching back. ‘
No!
’

‘Where was it you set that fire, boy? Where’d you go? Where was it you went Monday night?’

‘YOU
KNOOOOOOOOW
!’ A roar of pain.

Gomer snatched out his ciggy. ‘Say it, boy! Say it again. Where’d you go exac’ly that night? Tell these folks.’

Silence. Beams intersecting like aircraft-spotting searchlights. Gomer waited, rocking back on his heels in the mud.

‘I DONE IT!’

Gomer bounced. ‘What? Where?’

‘I BURNED HIM!
I… F – FRIED HIM
.’ A shrill giggle, tremolo yelps. ‘
I FRIED THE FUCKING BASTARD IN HIS OWN FAT!
’

Bliss had hold of Gomer, was dragging him away. ‘Christ’s sake, what you trying to—?’

‘YOU
KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOW
!’

‘Tryin’ to get at the bloody truth.’ Gomer pulled away. ‘Which is more’n you done. And I’m tellin’ you, boy, it en’t—’

‘I… DONE…’ Roddy Lodge was shambling slowly along the down-sloping arm of the pylon, arms outstretched like a tightrope artist, a man on a high diving board. Not too far above him now hung one of the insulators from the second tier, its power- hugging glass discs gleaming cold green. Candle of death. ‘I DONE ’EM
ALL
!’

Bliss’s head went back. His fists were clenched tight. Gomer just stood there and stared down at the ground. Both of them in shadow, all the lights trained on the pylon. Roddy stopped. Even from where Lol stood he could see Lodge was grinning.

‘I DONE…’ He shuffled, swayed. ‘I DONE ALL THEM WOMEN! I DONE LYNSEY! I DONE… I DONE MEL! YOU YEARIN’ ME? I DONE ’EM ALL! I DONE THAT WELSH GIRL! I DONE… I DONE MORE’N YOU KNOWS. ’CAUSE…’

Bliss stood there, ramming his fists into the sides of his thighs. Roddy reached up like he was trying to clasp the wind and the night.

‘’CAUSE I’M THE DEVIL! I’M SATAN! I’M THE BIGGEST FUCKIN’ SERIAL KILLER EVER LIVED!
YOU HEAR ME?
I WAS GONNER DO FUCKIN’… FUCKIN’
MADONNA
!’ ’CAUSE I’M NUMBER ONE, LOOK…
I’M NUMBER FUCKIN’ ONE!
’

Silence fell like a canopy. Lol was suddenly and horrifically aware of something in the crowd that was less apprehension than a kind of active anticipation.

And yet he also actually heard someone beginning to weep, a hoarse, bubbling sound as the rain came down harder.

A distant siren – the ambulance or the fire brigade. Lol watched Gomer walking slowly away from the pylon, looking at the ground. The wind had reined itself in. There was a dense, waxy stillness to the air.

One of the police laughed uncertainly. ‘Got the biggest witness list of all time there, boss. When he’s in the dock—’

Lol heard Sam Hall saying very quietly, ‘He won’t be, will he?’

Gomer reached them, muttering.

‘We digs holes, is what we do. En’t no affair of ours now.’ His voice was shaking. Lol had never heard Gomer’s voice shaking before, not even with anger. ‘En’t up for no public execution. We just digs holes, ennit?’

He kept on walking, along the alley by the side of the garage. Lol followed him, holding his spade. At the end of the alley he looked back once and saw Roddy Lodge standing halfway down the arm of the tower, with his hands reaching up, as though other hands were up there in the night sky, waiting to catch him.

Lol didn’t think he either saw or heard what happened next; maybe his mind edited the moment, a jump cut. All he was fully aware of was the lights going out in Roddy’s bungalow.

T
HEY SEEMED
to have awoken at about the same time, in the still hollow of the early hours. Merrily sensed him becoming aware, by touch, that
she
was actually here, in this strange bed, in this unknown timber-framed chamber that was strange to her, too – she’d never slept in here before, the air was different, the sounds in the walls.

And it was the first time they’d slept together with no sex. Not that they’d slept together many times. Pathetically few, in fact, since they’d first done it in the summer.

Done it.

Here she was, thirty-seven years old, actually thinking of it with that old teenage delight in the forbidden. An adventure: two kids in a small, secret room in an ancient house with timbers that creaked and grumbled in the late-October night. It felt deliciously out of time, a place you thought you could never re-enter, soft and sticky and warm and illicit. And in the
vicarage
… where the vicar might come in and catch you
doing it
…

Doing it
: more spontaneously thrilling than
making love
. That hint of…

Sin?

Shameful. Utterly. When she thought,
It’s me…
I’
m the vicar
, she couldn’t stop giggling and hid her shame under the duvet, because there really was nothing at all to laugh at tonight.

***

Jane had gone off to bed with a book half an hour before Gomer had arrived at the back door. The kid must already have fallen asleep – if she’d heard him, she’d have been straight down.

It was eleven-fifteen p.m. Gomer had been looking very tired, his glasses half-clouded. In fact, more than tired: perturbed, unhappy. He didn’t seem in the mood to talk.

He had with him some wreckage dressed in Lol’s clothes.

‘Boy en’t in no fit state to drive home, vicar. Figured you might have a bed made up in one of the spare rooms. Being as how you’ve always been strong on the idea of sanctuary, see, for the weary.’

Yes, Merrily had agreed, that was a possibility. Lol had smiled lopsidedly. There was a smear of dried mud on his forehead. A pocket of his jacket was hanging off. He stood there among the fallen apples, looking like a refugee who’d crossed Eastern Europe on foot. She’d wanted to laugh, and to touch him.