The Lamp of the Wicked

9 Phobia

THE WOMAN IN Lol’s bed smiled sleepily. An arm came out, a long, warm forefinger touching his lips as he bent down.

‘Before you say a word,’ she said, ‘I will tell you right now, from the bottom of ma heart, that it was very, very good.’ Looking into his eyes now and slithering up in the rumpled bed like a mermaid breaking surface. ‘And also right. Right for this moment. What I so much needed. OK?’

Lol sighed.

‘OK, Laurence?’ She took away her finger but stilled him with her gaze, even though one eye was lost under this tumble of black hair with the long, pale streak, like a vein of silver in onyx.

‘Ah, well, you were good.’ Lol straightened up ‘You were wonderful. Me…’ He shrugged, spread his hands, did all this stuff that he was afraid was going to look deliberately self- deprecating. Uncomfortable now, he looked away, out of the left-hand window, where the mid-morning sky over Knight’s Frome was grey and shiny with unshed rain. It made the window seem like a square of tin plate in the wall of freshly plastered rubble-stone.

‘Aye, all right…’ She swung her legs out of bed. ‘If you push me, I’ll concede that “good” was maybe just faintly inappropriate. But “right” was… right. See, I was with this young guy before – doesnae matter who, these kids’re ten a penny, believe me: slick, cool, deft… and empty, you know? Awful proficient, sure, but proficiency isnae even halfway there, especially when it’s like received technique – out of Jansch, out of Thompson, John Fahey, whoever. In addition, I was getting well fed up with him trying to get into ma knickers.’

Like Merrily, she wore a long T-shirt in bed – this one worn thin from many washings; the faded figure on it with the top hat seemed, at one time, to have been Bugs Bunny.

‘Like I should be grateful to him for being fifteen years younger, you know?’ Moira said. ‘Jesus, the arrogance of these guys.’

She stretched and the T-shirt rode up and, through the thin cotton, Lol saw her nipples over the rabbit ears. He backed up, embarrassed, catching the edge of the tea tray, which rattled.

‘Like I’m some hag,’ Moira said. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hair almost reaching the duvet. She started rearranging the things on the tray. ‘This is entirely wonderful, Laurence, but faintly ridiculous. Why not just leave me a kettle?’

‘Prof’s orders,’ Lol said.

He’d awoken her with a call to her mobile, as arranged, at eight, and then carried the tray rapidly along two hundred yards of mud track before the teapot could cool, and then up fourteen stone steps to the granary. There’d be a small kitchen here eventually; meanwhile, Prof had said he wanted Moira Cairns looked after in the old-fashioned way. This apparently was something to do with memories of Moira bringing morning tea and toast to his room when they were recording, way back.

‘Ach,’ said Moira when Lol went on to remind her of this, ‘that was just to make sure the auld bastard didnae take anything stronger.’ She poured tea, steam rising. ‘Tell me, how’s he doing now, in that particular area?’

‘Carries this cappuccino machine around with him like a teddy bear. I don’t think there’s ever been anything stronger in the house.’

Moira nodded approvingly, sugaring her tea. Lol suspected she was sitting on a whole stack of horror stories about Prof’s drinking days.

‘And now you’re here as well, keeping an eye on him. Good arrangement, on the whole?’

Lol hesitated. He’d been here for several months now, since abandoning plans to become a psychotherapist; since Prof Levin had persuaded him to work on the long-awaited solo album that was not, in Lol’s view, long-awaited by as many people as Prof seemed to imagine. But now the album was virtually finished and Lol didn’t think he was doing enough around the studio to justify his de luxe accommodation. It was a good arrangement, certainly. Altogether too good.

‘Apart, that is, from when characters like me come down to strut our prima donna stuff and pinch your lovely wee apartment,’ Moira said. ‘Where are you sleeping yourself, meantime?’

‘Oh… in the loft over the end of the studio. I slept there most of the summer anyway. It’s fine.’

‘It’s no’ summer now, though. There’ll be no heating in there, will there, once the studio’s off?’

‘It’s fine, honestly.’

Moira smiled, crow’s feet developing, but it didn’t matter at all; this woman would be sexy at seventy. ‘This wee place, though, I have to say, is… totally magical. All those steps – like a tower house. You can stand at the window at night… the lights of Malvern in the distance. Would that be the town itself? Great Malvern?’

‘West Malvern. I think.’

‘Best not to know for sure,’ Moira said. ‘All distant lights at night should be the lights of fairyland. There to inspire us, but just out of reach.’ She looked at him over the rim of her cup. ‘Makes you uneasy, living here?’

‘Just a bit.’ Her level of perception was increasingly scary.

‘Why?’

‘Too perfect, I suppose. Paradise syndrome?’

The granary was on the edge of a field sloping down towards the Boswells’ place and well separated from the stable block housing the recording studio. Prof Levin had managed to buy it, along with adjacent outbuildings and two acres of land, when parts of the surrounding Lake estate had been sold off at the end of the summer.

‘But then,’ Moira said, ‘to a lot of people, this’d just be a high- level hovel in the middle of a muddy field, inconvenient to get to and too small to do anything decent with. It’s a personalized concept, paradise.’

‘Well… yeah…’ When Prof had suggested that he might like to move in here, Lol had suspected, although nothing had been said, that Prof was also thinking about Merrily, with whom Lol must never be seen.

‘I would say you’d become like a son to Prof,’ Moira said, ‘but possibly that would be overstating it just a tad. You’re somebody he feels he has to help because he knows you’re never gonnae help yourself. Like, if the whole ideology of this place is the Prof devoting the glorious sunset of his career to assisting – pardon me – the underdogs, like you, out of the money raised from the fat cats like me…’ She threw up her hands. ‘Whoops! Did that sound like charity?’

‘I’ve no illusions, Moira,’ Lol said. ‘It is charity.’

‘Unless, of course’ – she raised a forefinger – ‘he gets it all back on the album.’

‘Y–e–s.’

‘Although we all know that unless you’re immensely famous already, it’s bugger-all use making an album if you’re no’ gonnae tour it.’

‘Ah…’ He should’ve seen this coming.

‘Whereas a good tour’s almost guaranteed to put an album into profit.’

Lol sighed.

‘But, of course, we both know the Prof has no interest whatsoever in payback. Only, the way I see it, this is gonnae nag away at you, until you have to really do something about the whole… what? Allergy? Phobia?’

Lol went to look out of the window, over the Frome Valley. Across the meadow, he could see the Boswells’ beloved donkey, Stanley, browsing his paddock, taking it all for granted, like he was only collecting a little of what was due to his species after centuries of toil and maltreatment.

‘Obviously,’ Moira said, ‘when you’ve been out of it a long time, it’s bloody hard – especially on your own.’

‘Nearly twenty years. I was just a kid.’

‘Good long time for the fear to feed. Which is what fear does. Like I’ve got these ten dates provisionally fixed for the winter, and that’s gonnae start off being an ordeal, no question, even after two and a bit years.’

Lol turned back into the white room, where Moira Cairns was sipping her tea. His feeling was that the word ‘ordeal’ would not, in Moira’s thesaurus, carry any significant cross-reference to playing live in front of an audience.

‘OK, listen now. Laurence…’ She was watching him over her cup. ‘Bottom line: if this proposed tour goes ahead, how would you feel about being part of that?’

Lol went hot, then cold.

‘Aye, I know. All right, sunshine, don’t panic.’ Moira put down the cup and stood up, this beautiful, scary mature woman in faded Bugs Bunny nightwear. ‘Stay right there. I have to take a pee. You stay right there and consider all your get-out lines. But also… remember how it was last night.’

This morning was actually the first time he’d been alone with her. Last night in the studio, Prof had been there the whole time and also Simon St John, who was the vicar of Knight’s Frome and played bass and cello. Simon knew Moira Cairns from way back, when they were part of the same band, having its albums engineered, then produced, by Prof Levin. So this was in the way of a reunion, with Lol, the outsider, getting involved because he just happened to be here. Moira’s new album would be the first major-league product of Knight’s Frome Studio, where Prof wanted music to be made at leisure, songs laid down as and when, no pressure on anyone. Timeless.

Lol couldn’t remember which of them had suggested they should try one of his songs – as if Moira didn’t have enough of her own. The idea had just seemed to arise, and they’d wound up re-working his neo-traditional ballad about the changing face of the English village, ‘The Baker’s Lament’. At first Moira was singing, with Lol on guitar. And then – and he wasn’t sure how this had come about, either – Lol had taken over the vocal, Simon St John threading cello through it, sinuous and low-lying like the River Frome, and Moira contriving this incredible harmony.

Prof had recorded both versions, and it had been, like Moira said, kind of… interesting. Not technically terrific, but there was something going on, something organic, something visceral. Something a little wonderful. All those years since Hazey Jane folded, and Lol had felt like part of a band again.

Of course, it was just for amusement – a dream, a fantasy sequence. Who wouldn’t imagine they sounded good, recording with Moira Cairns? Moira, who now lived in seclusion most of the year on the Isle of Skye, coming out to perform only rarely, leaving deep tracks strewn with legends. Moira who had been born half-gypsy in Glasgow. Who was said to be possessed of ‘the sight’. A goddess of folk-rock. The vein of silver in the long black hair – how many pictures had he seen of that? Never before over a Loony Toons T-shirt, of course, but…

Why should she want to do this for someone she’d only known for a few hours? A favour to Prof? Laying all her hard- won credibility on the line as a favour to Prof? Last night it had seemed magical; now it was merely unreal.

‘Tell you what I’m thinking,’ she called from the bathroom. ‘Maybe we should do the one gig, to begin with. Just to see how it goes, yeah?’

Lol sat down on the edge of the bed.

Moira said, ‘Sorry, what was that? Couldnae hear with the taps on. See, what’s happening, I’m booked to play somewhere called The Courtyard in Hereford in… I think it’s a week on Wednesday. We could use that, for starters. As an experiment?’

Lol’s heel clinked on something under the bed.

‘Nothing formal, nothing on the posters – I mean, too late anyway. You just show up, drift in and out as you please. Then we toss in a couple of your own numbers, see how it feels.’

Lol already knew how it would feel. He could already sense his fingers sweating on the frets. With any more than three other people in the room, all the chords would crumble, he’d lose the tune, forget the words. And in any audience, there were always going to be two or three people who would remember…

He bent down. The item under the bed proved to be his kettle, its flex coiled up next to it. All that stuff about the morning-tea tradition never had made total sense – if Prof thought it was important to return old favours, why hadn’t he brought the tray?

A set-up.

Moira Cairns came out of the bathroom, looking fresh and composed in a lime-green kimono.

‘So,’ she said, ‘where do you wannae start?’

Well, naturally, Lol didn’t want to start at all. Hadn’t he done half a college course in psychotherapy, worked for a while with an analyst and counsellor in Hereford? He could deconstructit all very efficiently for himself, thank you, even down to the implications of his Nick Drake fixation: Nick Drake had made three classic albums but was always afraid to perform in public. Consequently, perhaps, the albums had undersold, and Nick Drake, undervalued, had died of an overdose of antidepressants.

‘But, Lol, the poor guy was mentally ill,’ Moira pointed out. ‘And you never were. You were just a victim of the system, with no support at all to fall back on when this… bastard bass-player very kindly gets you a conviction for having sex with a fifteen- year-old girl – to keep himself out of the shit – when you were – what, eighteen… nineteen?’

‘Thereabouts.’ She’d evidently been thoroughly briefed by Prof.

‘An innocent, all alone – your parents having become these totally insane religious maniacs, who disown you…’

The more Prof tells the story, the more insane my parents become.’

‘… So you fall into the system: unnecessary residential psychiatric so-called care – i.e. drugged senseless by the fucking state.’ Moira tossed back her hair – forked lightning in a night sky. ‘No way that’d happen now, with no damn beds to spare for the real loonies. Laurence, why aren’t you angry?’

Lol shrugged.

‘One day,’ Moira warned, ‘your shoulders are just gonnae freeze up. Let me get this right: if you reappear on stage now – nearly two whole decades later – the whole audience isnae gonnae be thinking, “Ah, here’s the awfully talented person from Hazey Jane, where the hell’s he been all this time?” It’s gonnae be like, “Hey, is that no’ the big sex offender of 1982 or whenever?” You really think that?’

‘No,’ Lol said too quickly. ‘Look…’ He turned to her. ‘I’m really grateful, Moira, and if I could do it I’d be – you know – I’d be incredibly proud. But we’re talking albatross here. Like what you don’t need around your neck.’

‘Now, listen, I’m a vulnerable wee creature behind the shell.’ She came and sat next to him on the side of the bed. ‘I need compatible support. I don’t need flash, I need sensitive and faintly flawed.’

‘You need somebody who can get the chords right and won’t just stand there in a pool of sweat.’

‘Laurence…’ She took him by the shoulders. ‘You can do this. You have to do this. Where’s your main income from?’

‘This and that. Royalties.’

‘From songs? From the old Hazey Jane albums? I wouldnae even like to ask how much that comes to. What’s your girlfriend say about it?’

Lol tensed. ‘Girlfriend?’

‘The wee priest?’ Moira said patiently. ‘I bet even the wee priest earns more in a year than you do.’

‘Who, er… who told you… ?’

‘Prof told me. Simon told me. Now, see, there’s something – I ‘mean, I shouldnae have to spell this out to an ex-loony who trained as a shrink, but that’s something you did overcome. Rejected by the born-again parents, and now here y’are in a close personal relationship with an Anglican priest. Major psychological breakthrough, or what?’

Lol stared down at the bedside rug. ‘They weren’t supposed to say anything about that.’ Which sounded a little pathetic.

‘Who?’

‘Prof… Simon.’

Moira blinked. ‘But you’re an item, right? You and the priest. You’re “going out together”.’

‘Well, we…’ Lol smiled ruefully. ‘We stay in together. Sometimes.’

Moira stared at him.

‘Or rather we just don’t go out anywhere very public. She’s… inevitably, like a lot of women priests, especially in a country parish, she’s insecure about some things… attitudes. I don’t want to make it any more difficult for her.’

It started to rain, a pattering on the east window.

‘Lol, what year is this?’

‘Yeah, I know, it sounds ridiculous. But when you consider that she also has this other… this other thing she does in the diocese.’

‘Exorcist. Yeah, I know… they don’t talk about it.’

‘She still tends to attract publicity,’ Lol said. ‘I mean, there still aren’t that many women priests in the UK, let alone women… Deliverance ministers. So if the press found out, even the local press…’

‘Ah.’ Moira contemplated this, supporting her chin with a hand, gnawing the side of a finger. ‘Right. I think I get the picture. Crazy woman who pursues evil spirits for a living takes up with ex-loony singer with a conviction for a sex offence.’

‘Not good, is it?’

Moira Cairns shook her head slowly. ‘Jesus, Laurence, you don’t go out of your way to make things easy for yourself, do you?’

Lol smiled his hopeless smile.

10 Caffeine

IN THE EARLY afternoon, with wind-driven rain coming in hard from Wales and the last of the apples down on the vicarage lawn, the police arrived.

Actually, just one of them: DI Francis Bliss, of Hereford CID, which was a relief; it meant this was informal. DI Bliss sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee greedily. He was unshaven, been up all night, couldn’t hide his excitement.

‘Merrily, we’ve gorra name.’

‘For the… ?’

‘Dead person.’

‘Oh.’

They had Merseyside in common, he and Merrily, if not synchronistically. She’d been a curate there, her first job in the clergy, her baptism of fire and acid, but good times, on the whole. By the time she’d arrived in Liverpool, Frannie Bliss – stocky, red-haired, raised a Catholic in Kirby – would already have left. It was unclear how he’d wound up in Hereford.

He folded his hands around his warm mug.

‘Lynsey Davies. Local woman. Reported missing back in the middle of August by her partner – I say “partner”… one of her partners. The father of two of her kids, anyway, which he reckons gives him first claim.’

‘Claim on what?’

‘On any compensation that might be due to the dependants of a murder victim, I imagine. Everybody talks compensation now. You don’t have a loss, you have an opening for gain.’

‘Not a loving relationship, then.’

‘With Lodge on the side?’ Frannie Bliss sniffed. Merrily, feeling chilly even inside her oldest roll-neck woolly, carried her ashtray to the table and slumped down opposite him. It was a day for despairing of people. Bliss’s excitement depressed her. But then, if everybody enjoyed their jobs that much, the sum of human happiness… She surrendered to confusion and lit a cigarette.

‘When you say “local”… ?’

‘Village called Underhowle. Backside of Ross-on-Wye, where it joins the Forest of Dean. I’d never been there before. Lodge has his depot on the outskirts, and a bungalow he’s built next to it. Lynsey Davies lived in a council house in Ross. She was thirty-nine, had four kids by three different blokes, and was apparently Roddy’s intermittent girlfriend. A fun-loving lady.’

‘So she was… identifiable, then.’

Frannie smiled thinly. ‘Ah… not strictly. The ex-partner, Paul Connell, reckons he doesn’t mind having a quick glance, but I’m not sure how useful that would be. It does help a bit that the body was dumped in pea-gravel rather than soil, with this big tank thing on top, so it’s not as badly eaten-up as you might expect after a couple of months underground. And the clothes tie in. We’ve sent for dental records, anyway.’

‘Lodge actually took it… her out of the ground?’

‘Dug down by the side of the tank, fished her out – probably manually. Dumped her in the shovel of the digger, tucked her in nicely.’

Merrily shuddered, recalling the mud drying on the front of Roddy Lodge’s leather jacket, on his trousers.

‘The, er, you know, the bodily fluids, they’d have gradually drained out through the gravel,’ Bliss said. ‘So although she was a big girl, the body wouldn’t’ve weighed that much. Wouldn’t’ve taken a great feat of strength for Roddy to roll her onto a couple of feed sacks and lift her out of the pit and into the shovel.’

Merrily thought of Roddy Lodge’s pungent aftershave, wondering if he’d plastered it on to combat the smell. Didn’t make too much sense; this was a man who installed foul drainage.

She and Gomer had seen the big digger go rumbling past while they were waiting for the police on the pub car park – the body presumably out in front, sunk into the raised-up shovel like an offering to the moon. Gomer had wanted to follow Lodge; Merrily had talked him out of it. Half an hour or so later, the police had cornered Roddy at his depot. The woman’s body was still under the tarpaulin. Not much room for denial.

‘How did she die?’

‘The PM should be taking place as we speak.’ Evidently, Frannie didn’t want to say how she’d died. He finished his coffee. ‘Can I go over a few points? According to your statement, you and Mr Parry went to this house because you had reason to think Roddy would be going there to retrieve this septic-tank unit. The, er…’

‘Efflapure. But we didn’t expect him to be there.’

‘Right.’ He lifted his cup. ‘Don’t suppose… ?’

‘Sure.’ She went to fetch the coffee pot, trying to recall what she’d said in her brief statement to a detective constable in Hereford in the early hours. ‘I know it all sounds unlikely, Frannie, but you have to remember we were both pretty hyped- up last night. There was no way Gomer was going to go home and sleep. But we really didn’t expect to find Lodge there.’

‘Actually, Merrily, it all sounds far enough off the wall to be true, given the circumstances, even if I didn’t know you well enough to think it unlikely in the extreme that you’d lie to the police.’ He beamed at her. ‘But in fact we’ve also spoken to Mrs Pawson in London, who confirms Lodge insisting that he should be the one who took the thing away. Which, of course, now makes perfect sense. Not a question of professional pride, as you assumed, but the fact that the bugger had a body buried underneath it, and he was panicking at the thought of it getting discovered by Gomer Parry. Makes a lorra sense, from Roddy’s point of view.’

It doesn’t really make sense to me that he should bury a body under a septic tank.’ Merrily poured Bliss more coffee and saw his wrist quiver; after a long night, he must be sizzling with caffeine. ‘I mean, OK, he might not have expected it to be dug up again within weeks, but surely there was always going to be a chance that some day it was going to be re-excavated. They don’t last a lifetime, do they?’

‘They can last a lifetime, apparently. But yeh, I do see what you mean. But you’ve gorra remember we’re not dealing with a fully rational person. A feller who drives through the night with a body held up in his bloody digger’s shovel…’

‘He did kill her, then? I mean, there’s no suggestion that he might have been getting rid of a body for someone else?’

‘An extension of his waste-disposal empire? He’s arrogant and daft enough, but I don’t see it, do you? My feeling is we’ll have a confession before dark. I’m leaving him to stew for a few hours. I’m not hurrying.’

This was not Merrily’s impression. She still wasn’t quite sure why Bliss was here. She’d expected a visit at some stage, but not so early in the investigation, and it wasn’t as if Ledwardine was on the Ross side of Hereford. This was a special trip.

‘Will you be talking to Gomer again? Because Jane’s round there at the moment. I don’t particularly want…’

Jane was making Gomer’s lunch. The kid had still been awake when Merrily had got in around 5.45 a.m. Neither of them had really slept after that.

‘Er… yeah.’ Frannie Bliss sounded doubtful. ‘We will be talking to Mr Parry again at some stage, obviously. Though I’ve gorra tell yer it might be less easy than he thinks to prove that Roddy Lodge torched his yard.’

‘And, besides, you’ve got something more important, now?’

Bliss looked pained. ‘Don’t put it like that. I know the lad’s dead, and I’m not saying it wasn’t down to Roddy. But while he’s still dodging around Lynsey Davies, he’s flatly denying the bloody fire. Says Parry’s three sheets in the wind, gorra grudge, professional rivalry, all this kind of shite. Roddy is indeed very ‘proud of his professional standing – among other things. Could be Forensics’ll find traces of combustibles on his clobber, but meanwhile, all I’m saying is, let’s get him sewn up on the easy one first, then see what else we can discuss with him. It’s been a long night, Merrily.’

‘What about DNA?’

‘After a fire?’

‘But you’ve charged him.’

‘Er… no. No, I haven’t. Not yet.’

‘Oh?’

‘I want it in the papers,’ Bliss said. ‘If he’s charged, it’s sub judice and the clamps go down. I want it splurged all over the papers, radio, TV, the lot, that we’ve found a woman’s body under a new-fangled septic tank and that a thirty-five-year-old man is helping with inquiries. I want people to think about it and talk about it. Not just in the village. I want the name Efflapure in the public domain.’

‘I’m sorry…’ She poured another coffee for herself, maybe thinking it would attune her to Bliss’s wavelength. ‘Why?’

‘’Cause Roddy works over a wide area.’

‘Yes.’ I done tanks for all the nobs all over the Three Counties and down into Wales. I done Prince Charles’s fuckin’ sewage over at Highgrove.

‘See, what I’m looking for, Merrily, is a full list of all the Efflapures or anything else he’s put in. We’ve got his books, but we all know that, with a bloke like Roddy, they won’t all be down on paper for the taxman. I want to know exactly where he’s been.’

She nodded. She didn’t really get this – too tired, maybe – but she nodded anyway.

‘Merrily,’ Bliss said. ‘You’re a woman.’

‘Yeah, I still like to think so.’ Suddenly, despite – or maybe because of – her fatigue and the sordid, sickening nature of the discussion, she felt a piercing need to be in Lol Robinson’s bed in the white room in the granary. She looked away, knowing she was blushing.

And a priest.’ Bliss sat up in his chair, facing her with both hands flat on the table, his voice becoming Scouse-nasal. ‘And you’ve been close to evil. Closer than most priests, I’d say, even if you’ve not been at it long. So I just want to ask you – off the record – about the kind of stuff that’s not in your statement. I want to know how you felt about Roddy. As a priest. As a woman.’

She met his gaze. His eyes were bright with caffeine and candid ambition. She liked Bliss, actually – more than she liked his boss DCI Howe, who was apparently away on something called an SIO Module course. But she wasn’t quite ready to say how she felt about Roddy Lodge.

You come and talk to me any time you want.

Thanks. I’d like that.

Yeah. You would indeed, my darlin’.

She said, ‘You’re leading the inquiry then, Frannie?’

‘So far,’ he said. ‘But I may not have long before somebody takes over, you know how it goes.’

‘So all that about being in no hurry…’

‘… Was bollocks. Yeah. Truth is, Merrily, I’m chasing a feeling about this feller. I’m supposed to’ve gone home for a kip ages ago, but I’ve been driving round thinking about it.’

‘Roddy?’

He nodded. ‘What I reckon…’ He took a breath and seemed to be swirling it around his cheeks before letting it out. ‘I reckon there could be more of them. More Lynseys.’

The problem was, Jane realized, that nobody really understood Gomer. They looked at this weedy little old guy in the bottle glasses and they somehow failed to see the rebel warrior crunching down the border clay on his grunged-up caterpillars, swinging the arm of his JCB like some huge broadsword. They couldn’t discern the elemental side of Gomer. Even Mum, who should have known better by now, had been like, Keep an eye on him… make sure he takes it easy… don’t let him overreact.

They didn’t understand. Overreaction was what kept Gomer fully alive.

He’d agreed finally to let Jane go to the chip shop, then he’d left half his lunch. All morning he’d kept phoning people, in a compulsive kind of way. No! he’d go. It don’t matter what you’ve yeard, it en’t over! Gimme a week, I’ll be back to you. Gimme ten days, max!

But there was a dullness in his glasses.

‘I’ve got my provisional licence now.’ Jane wrapped the congealing chips in their newspaper and dumped them in Gomer’s kitchen bin. ‘I could work for you weekends. I mean JCBs… it’s just a matter of experience and technique, right?’

‘And an HGV licence,’ Gomer said heavily.

‘Oh. That, too, certainly. I knew that.’

She also knew that, in some curious way, he wouldn’t feel free to mourn Nev until he’d secured the business. If he let it go, it would be a kind of betrayal. In the same way, the small, modern kitchen was amazingly clean and neat, everything shiny – the way Minnie had kept it, but not like a shrine, Jane thought. A shrine was static and frozen; in here you could still feel Minnie’s busy spirit, and Gomer needed that. Like he always needed to know the big diggers were out there, oiled and ready to move the earth.

The kitchen window overlooked the orchard, out of which the buttressed church spire rose like a rocket on its launching pad. Starship Mum. Soon to be transmitting soft porn, if Uncle Ted got his way.

Everything was getting out of proportion.

Jane said, ‘I suppose, if you could wipe off the jobs you’ve already got on the stocks, you could take some time to kind of reorganize things. Like, reduce the scale of the operation.’

Gomer looked up. ‘Ar. Mabbe you put your finger on it there, Janey. Gotter deal with the commitments first, ennit? I en’t given up hope. I know where I can rent a digger, and there’s a coupler fellers I know would likely help me out, but they won’t be in till tonight, see.’

‘I suppose it’s going to be an even smaller pool, now that this Roddy Lodge is going to be… whatever happens to him.’

Gomer’s glasses, she would swear, darkened. Jane could’ve punched herself for bringing this up again. This whole Lodge thing was very weird and sick. When Mum had told her, she’d felt obliged to feign disappointment at missing the excitement, but in reality she was glad she hadn’t been there. Awfully glad, too, that Mum had got herself and Gomer out of it, avoiding confrontation. Jane had learned that, in situations involving crime and death, only distance lent any kind of excitement. The fact that this Lodge, in all probability, had killed Fat Nev, who Jane had known – OK, not well, but she could picture him, could hear his voice, knew what a crappy life he’d had – made the guy repulsive, a monster.

But Gomer was different. Somehow, for Gomer, the discovery of the woman’s body in the truck had been almost a frustrating development, an intrusion coming between him and the man who’d murdered his nephew and wrecked his business. Did Gomer feel – maybe unconsciously – a certain resentment towards Mum for forcing him to take the easy way out, let the police handle it?

Unlikely, because Gomer’s affection for Mum was almost a father–daughter thing.

But there was something.

‘What are you doing this afternoon?’ Frannie Bliss said.

‘I… nothing vital.’

Lie down for half an hour, maybe. Go across to the church and say some prayers for Gomer and Nev. Phone Lol. Avoid Uncle Ted. Go back and talk to Gomer, see if there’s any way to help him through this.

‘Only, I’d like you to come and look at his place. At Underhowle. Take less than an hour to get there. You know me, Merrily, I don’t have too much faith in psychologists and profilers, but I’ve still gorra sneaking regard for priests.’ He gave a small smile. ‘Of whichever side of the fence.’

‘Frannie,’ Merrily said, ‘do you have any real concrete reason for suspecting he’s done it more than once?’

‘Just his attitude. And the fact that at least one other woman’s gone missing from that area in the past year.’

‘Oh.’

‘He likes women.’

‘It’s not a crime.’

‘I use the word “like”…’

‘OK.’ Merrily put out her cigarette. ‘I’ll tell you. He was heavily suggestive, I mean towards me. In an old-fashioned way, I suppose you’d have to say. I was standing a couple of yards away from a body he’d just exhumed and he was telling me I was… you know… It wasn’t exactly sophisticated and it wasn’t subtle: he actually used the word “sexy”. Here we are in the grounds of an empty house, he’s just been accused of murder by Gomer, and he’s talking like we’ve just met up in a singles bar and we’ve both had a bit to drink.’

‘Had he, do you think?’

‘I wouldn’t’ve thought so. His voice didn’t seem to be slurred and I couldn’t smell anything on him other than an awful lot of aftershave. He was still hyped-up, though.’

‘In what way?’

She thought about it. ‘At first, I thought he was nervous – Gomer had called him a murderer. However, as soon as he found out this was about the fire, he – as you said – kind of denied it. Laughed it off, anyway. That was about when I gave myself away – dropped the torch in the shovel, on the tarpaulin covering… Anyway, as soon as he saw I was a woman, maybe that was when he got cocky. He seemed quite relaxed, from then. I wasn’t, of course. I’d smelled… the smell. I just wanted us to get the hell out of there before he pulled a gun or a knife or something.’

‘Do you think he detected you were scared, and that was what made him so forward?’

‘You mean, do I think he got off on that, a woman being blatantly nervous of him? Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘Where was Mr Parry at the time?’

‘Mr Parry was standing there, gobsmacked at me selling him down the river. I really don’t think… The impression I have, thinking back on it, was that Roddy had ceased to be aware of Gomer from the moment he became aware of me. He said, “a woman” – like, you know, “For me?” ’ Merrily shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, that sounds – even to me, that sounds like the kind of thing you say in hindsight, when you know you’ve been face to face with a…’

‘It sounds about right, actually,’ Bliss said. ‘For instance, when the lads brought him in last night, he was rabbiting nonstop in the car, like they were his best mates. Like they were all on a coach coming back from an outing. He’s there, jammed up between two burly uniforms, and at one point he’s suggesting that if they ever fancy a one-nighter, with the trimmings, he can get them fixed up.’

‘Trimmings?’

‘I’ll spare you the details.’

‘Did he realize why they were arresting him?’

‘Oh yeh. Merrily, you say in your statement he told you he’d been to talk to the local vicar?’

She nodded. ‘That would be Jerome Banks. You spoken to him?’

‘Would I need to?’

‘Lodge claimed he scared the vicar. Told him about things he’d supposedly seen. “Spooky” was Lodge’s word.’

‘Didn’t go into detail?’

‘He seemed… I dunno… kind of proud of this – spooking the vicar. I said that sounded very interesting, and he said – in this heavily lecherous way – that I could go and talk to him any time I liked.’

‘And you said?’

‘I said that’d be nice, or something like that.’

‘Ah.’ Frannie Bliss rubbed his stubble-roughened jaw.

‘What?’

‘Nice. Yes. That’s more or less what he said to us.’

‘Huh?’ She reached for the Zippo and the Silk Cut.

‘Like I say, they couldn’t shut the bugger up last night. And yet this morning, when we brought him out of his cell and into an interview room… he’s a very different man. Withdrawn. Sort of hunched up into himself. Like he’d been drunk last night and now he’s very badly hung-over. Didn’t want to know us any more. Kept muttering, “Not talking, not talking.” Kept wanting to go back to his cell. See, that’s a bit unusual. Normally they can’t wait to get out. We tried all the usual things.’

‘Good cop, bad cop.’

‘We’re a little more psychologically sophisticated nowadays, Merrily.’

‘Since when?’ She drew out a cigarette with her teeth.

‘Anyway, it wasn’t happening. We weren’t getting anywhere. He didn’t even ask for a solicitor. We offered him one, he said no. No to everything. No, no, no. Don’t wanner talk, leave me alone. Sinking further back into himself, complaining of headaches. Well, all right, we’ll have enough forensic by the end of the day to package him up, no problem. But I…’ He looked into Merrily’s eyes. ‘I know there’s a lot more to come out if we handle this right.’

‘And you want to be the one to uncover it, before they send Howe back from her course to take over.’ Merrily eyed him along the length of her cigarette.

‘Aw, please…’

‘Sorry.’

‘But eventually,’ Bliss said, ‘he just looks at me through his fingers and he says, “You get that little woman. I’ll talk to that little… woman.” ’

‘What?’

Bliss smiled a touch bashfully, not quite meeting her eyes.

‘You took a bloody long time to get round to that,’ Merrily said.

‘Yeah. Sorry about that.’

‘No, you’re not.’

Bliss shuffled in his chair. ‘Merrily, how would you feel about talking to him? Might save us all some time.’

Help you get it wrapped before they bring in some flash DCI from headquarters or summon Ms Howe back.

‘By “talking to him” you mean either with you there or with a tape running.’ Something like that. But I wouldn’t like to have you going in there cold. That’s why I want you to see his place. Get an idea of what kind of bloke we’re dealing with. It won’t take long.’

‘Now?’

‘Wouldn’t mind.’

‘Look, I know the Bishop and the Chief Constable have had drinkies together—’

‘But you don’t work for the police. Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to cross any of your personal barriers. I just want a firmer idea of whether I’m talking to a sexual fantasist who got carried away one time, or to a real sexual predator – maybe somebody who started out degrading women and progressed to killing them. Them – plural.’

‘And as well as whatever he might disclose to me, you probably want to watch how he reacts to me as a woman, right?’

‘Well, you know, I hadn’t actually thought of that.’

‘Frannie, forget it.’

Bliss was silent for a moment. He waved away her smoke. ‘You’ve disappointed me, Merrily. I thought what you did was all about stopping the spread of evil.’

‘And suppose he’s in some way innocent? Suppose you’re getting carried away.’

‘I can show you—’

‘All right.’ She put out her cigarette. She’d have to admit that the possibility of Lodge’s innocence was remote. ‘I’ll talk to him, but I’ll warn him first that under the circumstances there could be things I would feel obliged to pass on to the police. Then he has the option of telling me to push off.’

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?’

11 Just How Funny It Gets

THEY 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.

Merrily turned to glance at the bed, keeping her hands in her coat pockets. The bed was king-size, unmade. Black shiny sheets – well, of course. There was a thick smell.

‘Makes you wonder how he ever got a woman to spend a night in here, doesn’t it?’ Bliss said.

‘I don’t think he’d get one for a second night.’

‘Ah, well…’ He came a little way into the room. ‘The answer, of course, is that he’s got another bedroom, along the passage. Red lights, pictures of Spanish dancers – nothing to offend, other than aesthetically, and I don’t imagine there’ve been too many cultural exchanges in there. So if we assume that’s where he takes the, er, young ladies, then this’ll be where he… enjoys his own company.’

Merrily shuddered. She recalled the shadow of Roddy Lodge standing immediately over her in front of the Pawson house, the birthday-boy look on his trowel-shaped face. A woman? he’d said.

Like: any woman. Another one for the wall.

Bliss stood there, hands in his pockets. They both had their hands in their pockets. Bliss was watching her, waiting.

Merrily met his eyes.

‘Er…’ He cleared his throat. ‘You’re not getting it, are you?’

‘Sorry… ?’

‘Take a closer look, would you, Merrily?’

She didn’t move. ‘I don’t see that—’

‘There’ll probably be some ladies you might not recognize – don’t know them all meself. But the one just to the left of the door, for instance, is Kelly Emerson, who was found raped and murdered in Swindon last year. That was the picture the family gave the police for the crime posters. It was widely used in the papers at the time.’

‘What?’

She followed his forefinger to a blurred black and white face, dark synthetic curls, big smile, naked body in shadow. She didn’t understand; the newspapers had used a nude photograph of a missing woman? She moved in closer, realizing that there was something wrong here, something skewed. Saw that the face of Kelly Emerson was in grainy black and white, but the naked body was studio quality and, on closer inspection, was slightly too big for the face.

Merrily backed rapidly away, aware of breathing harder.

‘Thing is, of course,’ Bliss said, ‘that he couldn’t’ve done that one. There’s a bloke doing life for Kelly. Feller from Bournemouth – they got him on DNA and then he pleaded guilty, no messing. It’s beyond any question.’

‘But…’

Lodge had pasted the cut-out face of a murdered woman onto the body of some anonymous pin-up from the Sun? Just another model… just another dead woman.

She made herself go back and examine both walls more closely. There were several faces she recognized now: celebrity murder victims, celebrity suicides. Also the most famous car- crash casualty of all time. All of them women, all of them now dead, their faces pasted onto cut-out nude bodies – tragic victims twisted, with scissors and paste and lighting, into profane pin-ups.

Merrily turned away from the wall. All the sensations of last night were coming back, from the feeling of grease and smoke in her hair at Gomer’s burned-out depot, to the waves of aftershave, to the cloying perfume of decay under the tarpaulin.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘I think you do, Merrily,’ Bliss said softly. ‘You’re looking at his inspiration. These are the ones he wishes he’d done. The ones he wishes he’d got to first.’

She stood in the dimness, staring no longer at the illuminated wall but into the very thin lines of grey and white between the blades of the Venetian blinds.

‘They’re all paste-ups?’

‘Not all of them. I think some were just piccies he got off on. Part of the mix-’n’-match. I expected to find one of Lynsey, but she’s not there. Maybe because she’s not had her picture in the papers, yet. There’ll be a reason. He…’ Bliss paused. ‘He might tell you what it is.’

It was as though he’d opened the door of a deep-freeze.

‘I can’t do it,’ she said.

‘That’s your decision, Merrily. I can’t force you to see him.’

‘He doesn’t want to talk to me. You know that. He just wants a woman in the room with him. Any woman. You know that.’

She remembered Roddy Lodge passing her his card, scrutinizing her as if taking a mental photograph, offering to tell her all the scary things he’d told the local vicar about what he’d seen in the night. She didn’t like to think now about what he might have seen in the night, inside or outside his own head.

Thanks, she’d said. I’d like that.

Yeah. You would indeed, my darlin’.

Merrily pushed her fists hard into the pockets of Jane’s duffel coat, determined not to shiver. ‘You’d better tell me what you know,’ she said to Bliss. ‘How did he kill Lynsey Davies?’

He shrugged. ‘Strangled her. The PM should confirm it. Roddy told the lads in the car he’d “throttled” her. He just hasn’t said it for the tape yet. Probably not bare hands, we think something was used – possibly a belt.’ He paused. ‘You can probably understand now why I want to dig up a few more Efflapures.’

‘Yes.’ Bliss was probably right to want to dig up every Efflapure that Roddy Lodge had ever planted.

‘I didn’t want to say too much in advance. Open the blinds now, if you’re feeling a bit oppressed.’

She tugged on the cord and grey daylight made the room look merely tawdry. The view, sliced horizontally by the blinds, was further slashed and diced by the great steel legs of the pylon at the edge of Roddy’s garden.

‘Would it offend the crime-scene people overmuch if I had a cigarette?’ Merrily said.

12 Dark Lady

EIRION SUBJECTED JANE to this sideways perusal she didn’t care for. They were heading out of Hereford on the darkening Ledbury road, bound for Knight’s Frome.

‘Like what?’ Jane demanded. ‘Go on, say it!’

They’d been dissecting her mother’s love life to discover precisely why it was going nowhere. From the lofty plateau of a relationship that was actually working – OK, within the restrictive parameters of herself and Eirion being still at school and stuff like that – Jane figured this was legit, her duty even. After all, it had taken her over a year to engineer the Mum/Lol thing.

‘Jane’ – Eirion did this exaggerated sigh – ‘you didn’t, though, did you?’

‘What?’

‘Engineer it. It was nothing to do with you. In fact, if you’d kept your nose out completely, it would probably actually have happened before it did.’

‘Thanks!’

‘Well, it’s true. You can’t leave anything alone.’

‘You totally smug fat git!’

She glared out of the window at the newly stripped hopframes around Perton. When Eirion had picked her up at five p.m., she’d noticed he’d put on a bit of weight, a big Welsh problem.

‘It’s because of all this driving to pick you up,’ Eirion said. ‘Maybe I should stay in and do sit-ups and weight training.’

I’m sorry,’ she said gruffly, not looking at him. ‘I didn’t mean fat… exactly.’

He didn’t respond. They drove in silence for a mile or so. They were in Eirion’s new old car, a little grey Peugeot with one of those CYM stickers identifying the driver as a resident of Wales who’d taken the vehicle abroad, if only to England. In fact, usually only to England.

And everything – like everything – was irritating Jane tonight. Obviously, she loved to talk and theorize about Mum and Lol, but right now – she realized this, she wasn’t stupid – it was also an escape from the aura of manic desperation surrounding Gomer. She wished there was something she could do for him, but even Eirion didn’t have an HGV licence, probably wasn’t old enough. Besides, it would take more than dealing with a backlog of digging contracts to put Gomer back together this time. The big pendulum had taken him down once too often this year. Anxiety began to inflate in her chest; she folded her arms over it.

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter who engineered it if it was meant to happen, if it’s the right thing for her – and for Lol, obviously – and it quite clearly is. But because of what she does she’s got to be sure it’s the right thing by… Him. Like He deserves that kind of deference. If He exists.’

‘It’s a big responsibility, being a priest,’ Eirion said lamely.

‘The truth is,’ Jane said, ‘they’re both basically wimps. Neither of them had the confidence to commit. They were just kind of moving warily around one another, like cats.’

‘That’s not being wimpish, it’s what you do when you’re an adult,’ Eirion said, the trite bastard. ‘You’ve made a few mistakes before, and you don’t want to jump into anything without being sure of the territory… especially when there’s additional baggage.’

‘You mean me?’

‘No, you egomaniac – emotional baggage! History.’

‘Well,’ Jane said, ‘it’s not like they’re still not making a complete bollocks of it – all this about everything having to be kept under wraps… which is like totally ridiculous.’

‘It’s not, totally, when you think about it.’

Jane leaned back against the passenger door. ‘What’s to think about? If you look at the Anglican Church as a whole, about half the priests are gay, right? And they’re not hiding their private life any more, are they? They’re practically announcing it from the pulpit.’

‘Dearly beloved brethren…’ Eirion did this reedy voice. ‘This morning, I have to impart to you all that the big black guy living with me at the vicarage is not really a Nigerian theological student, as originally announced in the parish magazine. In fact, he’s my special friend.’

Jane fought back the grin. ‘But I mean, with a gay vicar you’ve got an ordained minister who’s having sex with one or more partners with no possibility of any of them ever becoming the vicar’s wife, in the traditional sense, so why can’t two heterosexuals—?’

‘Because, right now,’ Eirion said in his explaining-to-the- child tone, ‘neither of them needs the shit. She’s had more publicity than she ever wanted just lately. Plus, Lol’s got a lot to work out, with this album and the chance of a comeback after, well, a very long time. Be bad enough for someone who hadn’t had… the kind of problems he’s had.’

‘I’ll tell you one thing, Irene, if Mum had walked away, he wouldn’t’ve been able to finish that album. If you listen to the new songs, most of them are actually about her. Which has got to be just the most incredible turn-on, hasn’t it? Like being the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.’

‘Jane, with all respect and everything—’

‘OK, hyper. But if I was his Muse…’

Eirion stopped for the traffic lights at Trumpet. ‘You still fancy him, don’t you?’

She stared at him, resentful again. He’d refused to let her drive, claiming the car wasn’t insured for a learner. Which was bollocks, probably. The truth was he was afraid.

‘But what this is really… Jane… ?’

‘What?’ she said sulkily.

What this is really about is Moira Cairns, isn’t it?’

‘That’s crap. Moira Cairns is really old.’

‘And really beautiful and charismatic.’

‘Moderately attractive, I believe. If you like that kind of thing and you can put up with the grating accent.’

‘And – what – possibly five years older than your Mum?’ His patronizing lilt was back. ‘That’s not very old, really, is it? And Moira and Lol have the same musical background. And Lol’s going to be playing on her album. And she’s doing one of his songs? And they’re under the same roof, miles from anywhere, recording well into the night.’

‘That is total, absolute, complete bollocks,’ Jane said, furious.

It was getting dark now, and some of them were carrying torches or lamps. About a dozen people, men and women, with a few teenagers lurking on the fringes. From a distance, it looked like a group of very early carol-singers but, close up, Merrily could tell they weren’t going to be bought off with mince pies.

A man came forward, his voice preceding him across the cindered forecourt of Roddy Lodge’s garage.

‘We’d like, if we may, to speak to the Senior Investigating Officer?’

Frannie Bliss turned to Merrily, raised an eyebrow and then walked out to them – a poised and dapper figure despite the loss of sleep and all the coffee. A pro, an operator.

‘That would be me. DI Francis Bliss. How can I assist?’

‘Well, I hope that, for a start, you can tell us exactly what’s going on.’ The man was half a head taller than Bliss. He wore jogging gear, luminous orange. He put out a hand. ‘Fergus Young. Chair of the Underhowle Development Committee. Also head teacher at the school.’

He and Bliss shook hands, while Merrily stayed in the shadow of the concrete building, hoping on one level that all this wasn’t going to take too long and on another – because of what lay ahead for her – that it would take half the night.

‘Mr Young,’ Bliss said. ‘I’m happy to tell you what I can, but I’m afraid it’s not going to be much.’

‘Well, to begin with, if I may ask this, where is Mr Lodge?’

‘Ah.’ Bliss put his head on one side. ‘Mr Lodge – to use a phrase which I only wish we’d been able to improve on over the years, but we somehow never have – is helping us with our inquiries.’

A woman shouted, ‘Please don’t patronize us. We know the kind of questions you people have been asking in the village.’

‘Yeh, I’m sure you do.’ Bliss peered cautiously into the assembly. ‘The press aren’t here, are they?’

‘Of course not,’ Fergus Young said. ‘We’re all local people, and we’re here because we’re quite naturally concerned about what appears to be intensive police activity around the community in which we’ve chosen to invest our lives. And if that sounds pompous I’m very sorry.’

It certainly didn’t sound local. He was about Merrily’s age, and had a bony, equine head with tough and springy dull gold hair. He looked like the kind of evangelical head teacher who did an hour’s fell-running before morning assembly.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can assure you that anything you say to us will be treated with sensitivity and discretion.’

Bliss looked pointedly at the teenagers.

‘Or,’ Fergus Young said, ‘if you’d prefer to talk to just a few of us, in a less public place, I’m sure—’

‘That might be a better idea, sir, yes.’

Young turned to the group to discuss it. Frannie Bliss moved away, hands in his trouser pockets. Merrily murmured, ‘Shall I wait in the car?’

‘Not unless you really want to. I might need back-up, with some of these plummy bastards.’

And so they all wound up walking, almost single file, into the village of Underhowle in the blustery dusk. The lane was slick with wet leaves. Nobody spoke much. Merrily knew that Bliss was working out how to turn this around, milk the villagers while telling them nothing they didn’t already know and making it sound like he was taking them into his confidence. Walking a couple of yards behind the delegation, she had the feeling of being towed into something she was going to regret.

Underhowle: she didn’t know what to expect. The village, though still in Herefordshire and close to the most expensive curves of the Wye Valley, was also on the fringe of the Forest of Dean, the less affluent part of rural Gloucestershire – former mining area, high unemployment, a fair bit of dereliction. It wasn’t only the River Severn that separated the Forest from the Cotswolds, and it probably wasn’t only the Wye separating Underhowle from the posher parts of South Herefordshire.

Bliss dropped back to take a call on his mobile. ‘Yeh.’ Then he listened for a while. ‘So that bears out? Good, good…’

The trees dwindled, lights appeared.

‘Lovely job. Ta very much, George.’

Bliss snapped his phone shut, dropped it into his jacket pocket and quietly punched his left palm with his right fist. Fergus Young glanced back at him sharply. Merrily wondered if Bliss had been given the post-mortem result, but he didn’t enlighten her. She caught up with the others.

‘Never seems to stop raining these days, does it?’ she said to nobody in particular, reaching for her hood.

‘Aspect of global warming,’ a white-bearded man growled. ‘We only have ourselves to blame.’

‘I suppose so.’

There was a solitary street lamp at a staggered crossroads, a signpost pointing through the rain to Ross in the west, Lydbrook in the east. Ahead of them, Merrily saw sporadic cottages and modern houses edging warily up a stubbly hillside with the pylons marching behind. In the dusk, with few lights, it looked stark, like a big, sloping cemetery.

‘We’ll use the village hall, I think,’ Fergus Young said.

Not what Merrily was expecting, given the bleakness of the village. Nor, after the abattoir ambience of Ledwardine parish hall, what she was used to.

It had evidently been a barn, left over from the days when the village centre had formed around old farms. Now it was the classiest kind of barn conversion: chairs with tapestry seats, tables of antique pine. Wall lights shone softly on unplastered rubblestone, open beams and rafters.

A sandstone lintel, above a window in the end wall, had one word carved into it: ARICONIUM.

There was also a coffee bar. A dark, wiry guy with a shaven head went behind it, flicking switches. ‘Gotta be espresso, I’m afraid. That all right for everyone? Inspector?’ London accent.

‘Lovely,’ Frannie Bliss said. Merrily wondered how long before he succumbed to caffeine poisoning. She took a seat near the door, glad she was wearing civvies.

Most of the villagers, including all the kids, had dropped away at the entrance. Now there were only four locals in the hall: the shaven-headed guy, the man with the white beard, a weathered woman in her fifties wearing a tan riding jacket. And Fergus Young, lean and rangy and looking more relaxed in here, briskly unzipping his orange tracksuit top.

‘I’ll introduce everyone very quickly, OK? Ingrid Sollars, who runs our visitor centre; Chris Cody making the coffee – Chris is also on the Development Committee – and, er… Sam Hall.’

‘Not on the Development Committee.’ The bearded man was sitting on the edge of one of the tables. He had thin white hair dragged back into a ponytail, was maybe in his mid-sixties. Merrily had the feeling he’d invited himself to the party.

‘And… I’m sorry.’ Fergus Young turned to Frannie Bliss. ‘Inspector… ?

‘Bliss.’

‘Of course. And your colleague… Sergeant, is it?’

‘One day maybe, if she keeps her nose clean.’ Bliss smiled blandly at Merrily. ‘This is DC Watkins.’

Merrily smiled back fractionally, saying nothing. Yeah, well, it probably made sense; the truth would only provoke questions they could do without right now.

She sat quietly, like a minion. In the civilized warmth, she was aware of her thoughts being sucked back into Roddy Lodge’s necro-erotic grotto. This wasn’t something she felt qualified to analyse; it needed a forensic psychiatrist more than a priest. In fact, specialist advice was essential before Bliss took this any further – although obtaining it would mean alerting his superiors to the possibility of something far more extensive, more labyrinthine, than a one-off domestic killing. Which was why he was counting on her to soften Lodge. And she wasn’t going to be up to that, was she?

‘And what’s the Development Committee, exactly?’ Bliss said.

There was laughter from Chris Cody with the shaven head, the youngest of them – probably mid-to-late twenties. He and Ingrid Sollars were laying out bright red cups and saucers on the bar top.

‘It’s what we’re obliged to call ourselves to attract lots of terribly useful grants from various organizations,’ Fergus Young explained. ‘But it’s all rather more casual than it sounds.’

‘Brings results, however.’ Merrily recognized the voice which had earlier accused Bliss of being patronizing. ‘I was born here,’ Ingrid Sollars said, ‘and I can tell you this community has prospered more in the past five years than in the previous forty. We don’t intend to let it slip back, and that’s why we don’t need any of the more unsavoury kind of publicity.’

‘Man’s only doing his job, Ingrid,’ Sam Hall said mildly.

‘Notoriety we can do without.’

‘Lot of things we can do without.’

‘Let’s stick to the point, shall we?’ Fergus Young glanced at Sam and then at Bliss, smiled and shook his head, as though implying this was a little local conflict, nothing to worry the police. Sam Hall wrapped his arms around his knees and stared at the ceiling. Chris Cody and Ingrid Sollars began to hand out coffees.

‘Ta very much.’ Bliss sipped contentedly, glancing from face to face. ‘So, how well do we all know Mr Lodge?’

Ingrid Sollars frowned. ‘Well enough not to say another word until you tell us what he’s supposed to have done.’ She had grey-brown hair pulled back into a tight bun.

‘All right.’ Bliss sat down and stretched out his legs. ‘I can tell you this much, some of which you’ll know already. We’re investigating the suspicious death of a thirty-nine-year-old woman whose body was found on Mr Lodge’s… property. It’s now been confirmed by a pathologist that this woman was strangled.’

‘Oh, shit.’ Chris Cody sat down.

Sam Hall swung his trainered feet to the floor. ‘You’re saying you’ve charged Roddy with murder?’

‘We’ve not charged him with anything yet.’

‘But you’re going to?’

‘Would you advise me not to, sir?’

There was silence, except for noises from the coffee machine and rain on the window. It was quite dark outside now.

‘Poor Roddy,’ Fergus Young said.

Bliss tilted his head, inviting him to expand.

‘I…’ Young sighed. ‘All right, I’m the local head teacher – at the primary school. If you’d told me that one of the kids had committed a murder, my reaction would be much the same. I’m not saying he’s in any way retarded – well, maybe emotionally, and I’m not qualified to give an opinion on that. But the idea of Roddy Lodge as a murderer… it’s just hard to—’

‘This woman.’ Ingrid Sollars was still on her feet. ‘The dead woman. Who is she?’

‘Sorry. Can’t tell you that until she’s been formally identified.’

‘Is she local?’

‘Depends what you mean by local. I’m sorry.’

‘Because questions were being asked in the village about a woman who… who’s been missing for some time.’

Bliss nodded. Merrily recalled his mention of another missing woman.

‘Inspector Bliss, have you found the body of Melanie Pullman?’ Ingrid Sollars stood in front of him, her back arched. ‘Is Melanie Pullman dead?’

Bliss folded his arms. Merrily tried to catch his gaze; this wasn’t fair.

‘Did you know Miss Pullman?’ Bliss asked.

‘She worked weekends for me when I was running a riding school. Then she started going out with Roddy Lodge and I didn’t see her so often.’

‘Why did she break up with Roddy?’

‘I assume because he took up with another woman.’

‘Which nobody could understand,’ Sam Hall said. ‘Melanie was a nice girl and pretty, whereas the other woman looked, uh…’ He glanced at Ingrid Sollars, smiled and shook his head.

‘What?’ Bliss asked.

‘OK, good-looking, but older and… kind of a hard bitch, you want the truth.’

Sam Hall had a curious hybrid accent: the Gloucester roll you found east of Ross made more fluid by something transatlantic. Ingrid Sollars stared at him like he’d already said far too much.

‘So who’s the other woman?’ Bliss said casually.

‘Aw hell, Ingrid,’ Sam Hall said, ‘this is all gonna come out – why waste time? Name’s Lynsey Davies, Inspector. When she’s not in residence at Roddy’s place, she lives over in Ross, which is where he picked up most of his, uh, companions.’

‘So that’s where we could expect to find Ms Davies at the moment, then, is it, sir?’

‘I guess. Though there is another— OK!’ Sam put up his hands to field Ingrid’s glare. ‘No gossip. I’ll stick with the facts. Yeah, someplace in Ross. Personally, I haven’t noticed her around the last couple weeks.’ He raised an eyebrow at Bliss, then looked away to show he wasn’t going to follow up on this.

Ingrid Sollars moved towards a chair, then turned back to Bliss. ‘When Melanie Pullman disappeared, some of us thought you – the police – ought to have looked harder. But you abandoned her.’

‘I don’t think “abandoned” is quite the right word,’ Bliss said. ‘But, yeh, there are hundreds of adult missing persons, and not that many police. We have to prioritize and, unless we think someone’s in immediate danger, we can’t always devote the resources we’d like to. However… I can say I’d be very surprised if this turned out to be Miss Pullman’s body. And not only because it’s about two years since she disappeared.’

‘Oh.’ Ingrid Sollars sat down, expressionless. ‘Thank you.’ ‘Nonetheless,’ Bliss said thoughtfully, ‘since you mention it, in the light of what’s happened, the circumstances of Melanie’s disappearance might warrant another look, do you think?’

‘Oh, now just a minute.’ Fergus Young sat up. ‘This situation’s fraught enough—’

‘I’m just asking the question, Mr Young. How long after breaking up with Roddy Lodge did Miss Pullman disappear? Is it possible she disappeared before breaking up with Roddy? If you see what I mean.’

Sam Hall said, ‘I’d say not. But around this time Roddy Lodge’s love life would’ve been a little hard to chart. Boy seems to have gone through what you might call a delayed adolescence – like he’d discovered sex for the first time in his thirties. I guess you’d say no woman was safe. Although by safe, that’s not to say…’

Fergus Young nodded regretfully. ‘In a way Sam’s right, I suppose that’s what I meant earlier about Roddy being a big kid. His overtures to women were always so obvious, so unsophisticated – so immature, really – that we perhaps didn’t appreciate how often he… you know.’

‘Stop it!’ Ingrid Sollars shouted. ‘You’ve no grounds, neither of you…’

Fergus looked embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry. It’s true that most of us haven’t been here long enough to give you a reliable opinion.’ He looked at Ms Sollars. ‘You were born here, of course.’

‘And brought up not to gossip, Mr Young.’

‘Well, I was born here, too.’ Sam Hall lowered himself into a chair opposite Bliss. ‘And I think this is a situation where the famous Forest caution can do more harm than good. I know the Lodge family reasonably well. Solid, traditional farmers, made a good living, looked after their money, regulars at the Baptist Church before it closed.’

And Roddy was the baby, right?’ Bliss said.

Sam Hall nodded. Merrily noticed he was drinking not coffee but spring water from a bottle. ‘Mother dead, so it was an all- male household: Harry Lodge and the three sons, of which Roddy was the youngest by almost a quarter-century. Harry never remarried, and whatever happened, he tended to accept it as the will of God. Personally, I don’t know too much about Roddy’s life when he was growing up, being as I was away for some years, but I guess it was kinda… constrained?’

He stopped and glanced at Ingrid, who presumably had been here during those years, but she wouldn’t be drawn and looked away.

‘Don’t give up on us, Mr Hall,’ Bliss said.

Sam shrugged. ‘Well… when I came back from the States, Harry Lodge had just died and left Roddy the money to start a business, give himself a direction in life. To everyone’s surprise – not least Roddy’s, I guess – it took off, and… and so did Roddy. After this confined, God-fearing life on the family farm, where earnings tended to be conserved, were certainly never flaunted, he suddenly had more money than he knew what to do with. I guess it went straight to his head.’

‘There’s this little sports car in the garage, along with the diggers,’ Bliss said.

‘Yeah, a red one. And some pretty expensive weekend wear in his wardrobe, I’d guess. Sure, with his flashy car and a place of his own, he found he’d become suddenly attractive to a certain kind of woman. I guess he was getting to think he could have just about any woman he wanted – or a good proportion, anyway. Lynsey Davies didn’t seem to mind – least, she stuck around. Maybe she liked the sports car.’

‘And were the other women around, too, at the same time?’

‘Not in Underhowle. But I have friends in Ross. In some of the pubs there, Roddy was felt to be a nuisance, always trying to pick up girls.’

‘Sometimes succeeding?’

‘Aw hell, more than sometimes. Rebuffs bounced off him. If ‘there’s such a thing as what the Americans call a retard – only with a mental age of sixteen – then that’s what I guess you’re looking at here.’

‘Nicely put, sir,’ said Frannie Bliss. Merrily expected follow- up questions, tracing the directions Roddy’s new-found liberation might have taken him, but Bliss stood up. ‘Well, thank you all, very much. I think we’ve managed to exchange some useful information there. If you can think of anything else, I’ll leave a couple of cards on the bar here. Ring me.’

Outside, Bliss said to Merrily, ‘Next time I talk to those buggers, it’ll be individually. Like, the woman can obviously tell us a lot more, but she’s not gonna do it in front of the rest of the Underhowle Development Committee.’

‘What’s that about? What are they developing?’

‘Everything. Place has been going down the pan for years. Used to have three pubs, post office, bakery, all that. Used to be plenty of jobs in the Forest of Dean – mining and… forestry, obviously. Now, even farming’s in trouble, and a place this scrappy’s never going to make the tourist trail. All they had left was the school, and they had a hell of a battle to keep that going. That guy Fergus got a big campaign going, now he’s a local hero.’

They walked back along the lane. The rain had stopped again, but the wind was up, rattling like a flock of pigeons in the trees on either side.

‘And the other little bloke – Cody – the one who doesn’t say much, he’s the big industrialist. Builds computers.’

‘Here?’

‘Got a little factory. Doing very well, comparatively. Not exactly Bill Gates yet. More of a Bill Catflap – somebody called him that.’

Merrily laughed into the wind. Bliss looked at her. ‘They don’t pay you much, do they, the Church?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘The knackered old Volvo. That coat. I always thought maybe you got extra for being an exorcist.’ No, just the privilege of having only one parish, instead of about six, like the bloke who covers this patch.’ Merrily looked down at her coat. ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll have saved enough for a new one from the Oxfam shop before winter sets in.’

Bliss smiled, his mind already moving off somewhere else – she could almost see it racing ahead of them down the windy lane, a striker needing a swift score before somebody blew the whistle. She tried to intercept.

‘You learn anything back there, about Roddy Lodge and Lynsey Davies?’

‘Just threw up more questions. If he was suddenly getting his leg over half the girlies in Ross, why the older woman?’

‘Thanks.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘What’s more curious, I would’ve thought,’ Merrily said, ‘is why – if he’s doing so well with real live women – why the wall full of dead pin-ups?’

Ahead of them, she could see lights in the garage complex, where Andy Mumford would be working stolidly on, alone in the bungalow with Roddy’s gallery. She didn’t want to see that again and was worried that Bliss was going to ask her to.

‘And what’s Ariconium, Frannie?’

‘Eh?’

‘The word “Ariconium” was inscribed on a stone in the hall.’ ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen a few mentions of it around the village. Listen, are you up for this now? Roddy? You can ask him about the dead ladies.’

Merrily shivered. ‘Frannie, it’s a police station, not a wine bar. He’s going to be on his guard. He isn’t going to tell me anything that he wouldn’t tell you. I really can’t see that it—’

‘Merrily…’ He stopped at the edge of the garage forecourt, by the police tape. ‘Let me be the judge, eh?’

‘That’s one of the things I’m worried about,’ Merrily said.

13 The Tower

THE CAIRNS WOMAN was sitting alone in the glass-sided recording booth, cradling this curved-backed Ovation guitar. She wore this long, dark blue dress, and the white streak in her tumbled hair was like a silk ribbon that had come undone.

From up in the darkness of the gallery, about ten feet above the half-lit studio floor, she looked… yeah, OK, impossibly romantic. Made you want to puke. Jane, in her tight little woollen top, directed a resentful glare at Eirion – besotted, the bastard – as the goddess Moira put on her headphones, and began adjusting the tuning on the Ovation.

On the other side of Jane, in the tiny gallery, was Lol, who wasn’t playing on this track; it was going to be a traditional folk song, stripped down. Jane was relieved to see how Lol kept looking away from the lovely Moira to where Prof Levin was hovering over his mixing board like a bald eagle.

Earlier, while Eirion had been drooling around the Cairns woman, she’d told Lol and Prof all about Gomer and the hateful pendulum of fate, and the impossible fix the poor little guy was in. And the dilemma: should he even be going back into a really back-breaking job, working alone, at his age? But what would become of him, mentally and emotionally, if he didn’t?

Prof Levin, who was not that much younger than Gomer, had said that if this plant-hire thing was what the man did, age was a meaningless consideration.

But he would say that, wouldn’t he, here in his cosy studio?

Later, Jane had privately conveyed to Lol as much as she knew about the even more grisly sequel to the fire, involving this Roddy Lodge – stuff she hadn’t even passed on to Eirion because Mum had told her not to. But there were going to be no secrets from Lol, right? Nothing to make him feel insecure in the relationship, and therefore open to—

A low-level fingered riff started up on the guitar, in the drumtight ambience, and then the voice came in: a voice that was low and heavy with dark magic and loaded with this beckoning sexuality.

Bitch.

Jane snatched a glance at Lol, noticing that he was looking less than relaxed, maybe wondering – and with reason – why Mum herself hadn’t phoned to explain why she hadn’t been able to see him just lately. He was wearing one of his sweatshirts with the Roswell alien face on the chest and his hair was nearly long enough again for the old ponytail. He was sitting very still. There was more Jane wanted to say but you weren’t allowed even to whisper up here, or the wrath of Prof would come down on everyone, and she couldn’t do that to Eirion, for whom this place was a bloody temple.

Other people: tact and consideration, walking on eggshells. Life was getting like some fragile little comedy of manners.

Jane sighed and leaned back in her canvas chair and listened to the song: predictable tragic-ballad stuff about a lady who waited in her tower room, watching every day at the window for her unsuitable suitor – and secret lover – to return from the wars. The way you did. Eirion was nodding, hands on his knees, so impressionable. She glanced at Lol. He was biting his lower lip, the way Mum would when something worrying was taking shape.

In a traditional narrative ballad, there were no wasted words and no sentiment. Long years passed and the hair of the Lady in the Tower was starting to go grey. Her father was bringing would-be suitors to her door, but of course she wasn’t interested and refused even to see them. Jane thought of Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, waiting for Odysseus to return from Troy.

As the seasons turned she moaned and cried

To the moon and the sinking sun.

And the flowers grew and the flowers died.

How long can a war go on?

And then suddenly, in this moment of, like, startling telepathy, Jane began to hear what she was sure Lol must be hearing: the awful subtext of the song. The realization just flew over her, like a ghostly barn owl, and she was sure she must actually have flinched.

The song was a mirror image of Lol’s own situation. The tower was the granary on the edge of Prof’s land, and the person in the tower was Lol himself – the Lol who would wait for long hours… days… weeks for Mum to come to him… she having to come to him, because of the covert nature of their affair. And it was she who was out there, following a vocation that, for two thousand years, had been the exclusive preserve of men… and working in its darkest places.

It was Mum who was away at the war.

Moira’s voice had grown thin with despair. This was a voice that killed the cliché of the form, invoking not so much beery folk clubs as the smoky jazz cellars of another era. A voice laden with doomed love.

Jane thought, in horror, It has to change, doesn’t it? It can’t go on. She knew that Lol considered his music trivial next to Mum’s spiritual work. He probably felt as confined and helpless, as furious and… impotent, as he once had in periods between medication. Like, outside of a recording booth, he had no reality. It would never occur to him, the way it occurred to Jane, that Mum – and the Church, too – might just be wallowing in self-deception. For Lol, it wouldn’t be the validity of what Mum was doing that mattered as much as her having the nerve to go out and do it.

One bright morning, the lady in the song is looking out from her tower and sees a lone horseman, and her heart takes a great leap. At this point Moira’s voice rose about an octave, and Jane saw Prof’s bald head nodding in satisfaction.

She didn’t actually know how the song was going to end, but she knew a bit about traditional music, and she recognized the fearful shrillness of false hope, as Moira Cairns sang:

It was the springtime of the year

And the sun was in the sky,

But the messenger climbed down from his horse

And night was in his eyes.

Right. So next time her lover appeared in the tower, it would be as a ghostly apparition. It was always as a ghost. Last night he came to me… my dead love came in…

When the next verse didn’t come, Jane looked down and saw that the Cairns woman’s fingers had fallen away from the strings. She stood for a moment, as if she’d forgotten the words, and then Jane heard her call across the studio, ‘Listen, Prof, can we leave this one for tonight, huh?’

Prof said something that Jane didn’t hear. Eirion, clutching the wooden railing at the edge of the narrow gallery, exhaled a word that might have been ‘Awesome.’

‘Aye,’ Moira replied to Prof, ‘goose over ma grave. Let’s move on.’

DI Frannie Bliss, at the wheel again, said, ‘If you ask me, those people, those villagers – the real locals, not the white settlers – they bloody know. They know at gut level that he’s done it before. They’ve more or less given us another name: Melanie Pullman.’

‘You’re still naturally suspicious of country people, aren’t you, Frannie?’ Merrily said. ‘You don’t understand them, so they scare you a bit.’

‘Balls.’ Bliss drove past the pub with the hare on the sign where, only last night, Merrily and Gomer had huddled over a mobile, waiting for Roddy to drive past with his… cargo. ‘No… all right, they do scare me. They have a different morality. It’s a fact, is it not, that country people kill, without too much thought. Farmers, hunting types – they don’t even question it.’

‘It’s still a big step to hunting people.’ She pushed her cold hands into the opposite sleeves of her coat, Chinese style. The car heater wasn’t doing anything for her. Basically, she didn’t want to go to Hereford Police Station to absorb confidences from a killer; she wanted to go home.

‘I don’t know,’ Bliss said. ‘And unless Lodge opens up to you tonight, we’ll be fighting for every scrap of the picture. And that’s why I want to get into lifting some more septic tanks. Tomorrow, soon as it’s light, if I can.’

‘On your own? You’re going to sign out the West Mercia police shovel?’

‘Ah, well…’ Bliss speeded up the wipers. ‘As it happens, you’ve put your finger on a minor logistical problem there, Merrily. I want to lift a couple of Efflapures, right? Now, I could get onto headquarters, obtain the necessary chitties and have a nice, professional JCB team out here… accompanied by a bunch of nice Regional Crime Squad boys with a detective superintendent in green wellies. And it’s bye-bye, Francis, thanks for all your help.’

‘Modern policing,’ Merrily said. ‘You can’t get around it.’

‘But think what that would cost… and suppose I’m wrong? Also, they’d make a mess of a lorra nice gardens, specially with all this rain we’ve been having. So what I’m saying… how much better, how much more discreet, how much less likely to cause a panic, if we have a small operation conducted by a feller who really knows his Efflapures.’

‘It’s an argument, I suppose.’

‘Good man, your Mr Parry,’ Bliss said. ‘A very able contractor, everybody says that.’

Merrily rose up against her seat belt. ‘Forget it!’

‘Listen, it makes a lorra sense – feller who can whip ’em out, put ’em back, no mess. Might even make a better job of it.’ But Gomer’s got a personal axe to grind on Roddy Lodge!’

‘Which is why I thought he might be happy to do it.’

‘Frannie, you are so irresponsible.’

‘Aw, Merrily, what’s he gonna do? Plant evidence? Bring his own bodies?’ Bliss drove placidly through the scattered lights of the village of Much Birch. ‘I’m assuming not all Gomer’s plant was destroyed. I mean, he’ll be able to put his hands on a digger of sorts?’

‘I’m not even going to answer that.’

‘You just did,’ Bliss said. ‘Thank you, Reverend.’

She scowled. ‘I can’t help feeling that something here’s swallowing us up. Me and Gomer.’

‘Let’s not be melodramatic, Merrily.’

‘Maybe it’s just you,’ she said, ‘and your voracious ambition.’

Bliss laughed. Presently they crested a hill, and there was the city of Hereford laid out before them like an illuminated pinball table.

Post-session, they were all – except for Lol – crammed into the scruffy kitchen behind the studio, where Prof Levin had his cappuccino machine going. Pinned to the wall over the sink was the proposed cover for Lol’s album. He was shown in black and white in an empty field, wearing his Roswell alien sweatshirt. Someone had made him take off his glasses, so that he looked totally disorientated, which was quite a smart move actually, in Jane’s view. The album title was stamped diagonally across the photo in stencilled, packing-case lettering.

ALIEN

Which was cool. It was a very cool cover altogether. Like Lol had been taken away and brought back but not to the place he’d been taken from. It wouldn’t have his name on the front, so that the punters would have to take it out of the rack to find out who it was by.

She asked Prof Levin, ‘Is it actually going to happen for him this time, do you think?’

‘Jane, what can I say? It’s a strange and lovely album. It needs word of mouth.’

‘People say I’ve got an awfully big mouth.’

‘Well, there you go.’

‘And Eirion’s very good at manipulating the Net.’

‘It all helps.’ Prof Levin wore an oversized King of the Hill T-shirt. His off-white beard was freshly trimmed. He was The Man, Eirion said.

Right now, Eirion was chatting up The Woman, having done his innocent, nervous approach, all pink-cheeked and lovable, the smarmy git, assuring her he had all her albums. For heaven’s sake, he was too young to have all of Moira Cairns’s albums. Lol, meanwhile, had disappeared.

‘So what’s on your mind, Jane?’ Prof said.

‘Oh, I… Well, I was just thinking that it would be like seriously useful if Lol was to become mega very soon. I mean, not for the money or the fame, as such.’

Prof Levin inclined his head, over-conveying curiosity. Behind him, the cappuccino machine was making impatient noises. ‘Give me a moment, darling, and I’ll be with you,’ Prof said to the machine.

Jane said, ‘Like, if he was so big, so famous… well, we all know it wouldn’t go to his head because… because it just wouldn’t.’

‘I agree totally.’

‘I mean, if he was famous enough that people would be like, hey, can it really be true that Lol Robinson is going out with some little woman vicar? Does that make sense?’

Prof Levin considered. ‘Some.’

‘See, it’s not as if she thinks she’s any kind of big deal, but he does. He thinks she’s spiritually over his head – like too good for him, I suppose, literally. When in fact he’s probably been to places we can’t even imagine. Mixing with really mad people on a level that even most psychiatrists never reach.’

Prof said gently, ‘I think perhaps she understands that, Jane. But maybe they have one or two things to work out before they consider going public.’

‘I still think it’d be useful if he was out there… up there, recognized, you know? I think he thinks that, too, though he’d never—’

‘Give me a break!’ Prof Levin spread his hands. ‘I agree.’

‘So is there anything else we can do?’

Prof shook his head. ‘I think what we do, Jane, just for the moment, is nothing. I think we butt out and let what happens happen.’

Jane saw him lift his gaze across the room towards the Cairns woman. She heard Eirion asking the Scottish siren something about a man who played the Pennine Pipes, whatever they were. Moira was smiling politely, but her attention was on the doorway – Lol coming in.

‘So where’s your mother now, Jane?’ Prof Levin said.

‘She’s, er, working, I think.’

Coming down from the gallery, Jane had said to Lol, I’m sure Mum was going to call you tonight. She’s just been kind of… overburdened. Lol had merely nodded and then gone outside on his own into the night, the alien, Oh God.

Prof called to Lol, ‘Jane was just telling me she thinks you should get out more.’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Jane felt the blush coming, turned her head away. She heard Lol saying, ‘I wouldn’t argue.’ He came over. ‘Prof, would it be feasible for you to spare me for the odd day? I’ve kind of… I’ve just agreed to maybe take on this kind of part-time job.’

‘Job?’ Prof said mildly. ‘What kind of job?’

‘Manual.’ Lol looked down at his guitarist’s fingers. ‘I’ll wear gloves, obviously.’

‘Sure, whatever.’ Prof turned to attend to his cappuccino machine, casually assembling mugs. ‘Manual is fine. Maybe you could also do bingo calling at night, to help destroy your voice.’

Lol explained to Jane, ‘I called Gomer. I haven’t got an HGV licence or anything, but I can do the hand-digging and things.’

Jane blinked. ‘What?’

‘Just to clear the backlog. Keep the business going until he can get things reorganized.’

‘You’re…’ Jane stared at him in dismay. He was sweating lightly, his hair roughed up. ‘You’re going to work with like… shit?’

Of all the people she’d thought might be able to step in and help Gomer – even considering Eirion, for heaven’s sake. Jane felt herself going deeply red. Humiliated. Conspired against.

The Cairns woman tossed back her lovely hair and started to laugh her croaky Glaswegian laugh. ‘Aye,’ she said, ‘the therapeutic power of shit – that’s been overlooked for years.’

On the other hand, it would at least get Lol away from this bitch.

Pulling into the car park at Hereford Police Station, Bliss said, ‘I’m not even going to attempt to compromise you. This is down to your own conscience, Merrily. No tapes, no video, no tricks, no water glasses up against the door. Just let him talk, and then you can tell me as much or as little as you want to.’

When Merrily got out of the car, her legs felt as unsupportive as they had last night when she was taking her first steps into the ruins of Gomer’s yard. Bliss joined her under the lighted entrance on the Gaol Street side.

‘There’ll be an alarm you can sound if he makes any kind of move. I’ll show you all that. And we’ll be directly outside.’

Merrily pushed a hand through her damp hair. ‘Could I go to the loo, first?’ Prayer for guidance. You forgot how many toilet cubicles had served as emergency chapels.

Please get me through this. They walked up a ramp to the modest entrance. Inside: utility seating under Crimestoppers posters. A man sitting in the window, briefcase by his feet.

A white-haired sergeant appeared and raised a hand to Bliss. ‘Francis – a moment?’

‘Two minutes, Douglas, and I’ll be with you.’ Bliss led Merrily through a door and then through a couple of offices, both unoccupied. ‘You want the lavvy now?’

Maybe you could show me the room where we’re going to do it?’

‘Sure. One of the interview rooms, I thought.’ He smiled tightly. ‘You want to bless it first or something?’

When she saw the interview room, she thought a blessing wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Claustrophobic was too friendly a word. It was below ground level, a bunker almost opposite the cells, a windowless cube no more than nine feet square, with fluorescent lights and air-conditioning vents. The air felt like very old air, re-conditioned.

‘Bloody hell,’ Merrily said.

Bliss shrugged. ‘It’s not the flamin’ Parkinson show, Merrily. Now, do you want the bog or do you want to stay here and purify the place while I fetch Roddy?’

There were two chairs, one small table. A microphone for the tape was plumbed into one of the brown-fibred walls. Merrily sat down in one of the chairs and said glumly, ‘Whatever you like.’

The white-haired sergeant was in the doorway. ‘Francis…’

‘Douglas, can’t this wait?’

The sergeant said, ‘When you came in, did you happen to notice a young man with a briefcase?’

‘Does he concern me?’

‘That,’ the sergeant said, ‘was Mr Lodge’s solicitor.’

Bliss stared at him. ‘Douglas, Mr Lodge hasn’t gorra fuckin’ solicitor. He refused a solicitor. You were there.’

‘You go and explain that to this kid, then,’ Douglas said.

The solicitor was on his feet, waiting for them. He wore black- framed Jarvis Cocker glasses under glossy dark hair streaked with gold. He looked all of twenty-four, but he had to be older to have qualified.

‘He’s a new one.’ Bliss peered through the glass.

‘Office in Ross,’ Douglas said. ‘Ryan Nye. High-flyer.’

‘He’s hardly out the fuckin’ nest.’

‘I did try to warn you, Francis, but your phone was turned off.’

‘‘Yeh.’ Bliss walked out into the reception area. ‘Mr Nye? DI Francis Bliss. How can I help?’

Ryan Nye smiled affably, if a little nervously, shaking hands. ‘Mr Bliss, this isn’t my usual sort of thing, so I hope you’ll excuse my naivety, but I was rather hoping you could either charge my client or release him. He’s not well, is he?’

‘Not well in what way, exactly, sir?’

‘I rather thought you’d have been informed. Headache, nausea, disorientation.’

‘It can be a very disorientating experience, sir, getting arrested for murder. And I’m afraid I don’t see him being charged tonight.’

‘Then I really think he should see a doctor, or— Look, I’m trying to be helpful here… have you thought about a psychiatrist?’

Bliss folded his arms. ‘Are you an expert on mental health, Mr Nye?’

‘Of course I’m not. I’m trying to be helpful.’

‘You have reason to think he might harm himself, sir?’

‘His behaviour’s erratic, that’s all I’m saying.’

Bliss was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘As a matter of fact – and I don’t know whether he’s mentioned this to you, sir – he has asked to see a priest.’

‘What – for the last rites?’ Ryan Nye’s face expressed pained disbelief. ‘Look, Inspector, it’s my impression that Mr Lodge doesn’t want to see anybody at all, and I certainly wouldn’t advise—’

‘Would you like us to go and ask him again, sir?’

‘No, I wouldn’t, actually. He certainly didn’t say anything to me about a priest. I really do think you should consider quite carefully what I’ve been saying. My client is not a well man.’

Outside, Bliss went off like an inexpensive firework, storming into the night then fizzling out, next to a lurid traffic car at the front of the station, looking like he wished he had the energy to put his fist through its windscreen. Or into the face of Roddy Lodge’s solicitor, Mr Ryan Nye, spoiling his glossy, streaked coiffure, dislodging his Jarvis Cocker glasses.

‘You know what this means?’ He leaned against the traffic car. ‘Means we’ve gorra leave the light on in Roddy’s cell, have an officer peeping in at him all night. Also means I’ve gorra get onto the Stonebow unit at the hospital and drag a psychiatric nurse over here. And if anything happens to him I’m up the Swanee.’

Merrily said, ‘You don’t really want him to be mentally ill, do you?’

‘He’s not mentally ill. He’s a crafty sod. Fuckin’ Nora, where do these leeching bastards come from? Is this lad an ambulance chaser, or did somebody engage him on Roddy’s behalf?’

‘Frannie…’ Merrily looked over a traffic queue to the new magistrates’ court that the planners had allowed to eat up a useful car park. ‘Be careful, OK?’

Merrily went home by taxi. She hung her coat over the post at the foot of the stairs and fed the cat. Alone in the vicarage, she felt edgy and unclean, and also guilty at being grateful to Roddy Lodge’s flash young lawyer for sparing her an intimate session with a man who kept eroticized pictures of dead women on his bedroom walls.

It was nearly nine p.m. To get this out of the way, she rang the Reverend Jerome Banks, Rural Dean for Ross-on-Wye. She remembered him as a wiry man with an abrupt manner, an ex-Army officer who’d once served alongside James Bull-Davies at Brecon. If Roddy Lodge had been mentally unstable, he ought to have spotted the signs. She got his answering machine and left her name, would try again tomorrow.

She had a shower, washed her hair, thinking of Jane at Knight’s Frome with Lol, wishing she was there. After putting on a clean alb, she still felt uncomfortable, a little clammy. She was pulling her black woollen shawl around her shoulders, ready to walk over to the church for some further cleansing, when the phone rang.

It was the Reverend Jerome Banks. ‘Mad?’ he said. ‘Oh yes. Absolutely barking, I’d say.’

14 Recognizing Madness

HAD SOMEONE FOLLOWED her in?

If it was a footstep, it was a light one. It might be a cat. Sometimes cats came into the church, and once there’d been a badger. But badgers weren’t stealthy; they clattered and rummaged.

Merrily was sitting in the old choirmaster’s oaken chair with her hands on her knees, a single small candle lit on the altar fifteen feet away, a draught from somewhere bending the flame, making shadows swirl and dip and rise to the night-dulled stained-glass window at the top of the chancel.

Ledwardine Church was locked soon after dark, nowadays, unless a service or a meeting was scheduled. She’d let herself in through the side entrance, which at least had a key you didn’t need both hands to turn. Against all advice, she hadn’t locked the door behind her. It was fundamentally important to feel she had protection in here, inside this great medieval night-dormant engine, or else what was the point?

Probably hadn’t been a footstep at all. After a day like this, the world seemed riddled with tunnels of obsession. For a cold moment, Merrily held before her an image of the frozen smiles of all the dead women on Roddy Lodge’s bedroom walls as they writhed in other women’s bodies, and then she let it fade, whispering the Lord’s Prayer. Apart from having to give evidence at the inquest on Lynsey Davies, her role in this particular police investigation was probably over.

And yet – shifting restlessly in the choirmaster’s chair – how could it be over when she was still attached via Gomer, who would never back off until Lodge had been convicted for Nev? Plus, here was Frannie Bliss about to exploit Gomer in the interests of keeping the case in his pocket: bad, selfish policing, and he knew it. Maverick cops were for the movies, and Frannie was on a narrowing tightrope. Meanwhile, Roddy Lodge…

‘Barking, of course,’ the Reverend Jerome Banks had said at once. ‘A complete fantasist. Wanted to tell me about the ghosts he’d been seeing all over the place. Well, isn’t as if you and I haven’t met lots of people like this, all the clergy do… They seek us out, expecting tea and cakes and a sympathetic ear that also happens to be entirely uncritical. Hardly dangerous, in the normal… I mean, not even to themselves, not in the normal course of things. Well, hardly going to spew out all this to the detective chappie, was I? What was I supposed to say? Boy didn’t seem deranged in a psychotic sense. I had absolutely no reason at all to suspect he might ever do what he’s done – well, of course I hadn’t.’

‘So you just offered him a sympathetic ear.’

‘No, I said that was what these people expected. Personally, I’ve never been one to play the jolly old dim-witted vicar. That’s what’s got the Church into its present enfeebled condition, if you ask me. Public starts to think we’re all half-baked. And this chap was getting on my nerves, to be quite honest. Bumptious? Full of himself? Never seen the like. I wasn’t entirely sure, to tell you the truth, if he wasn’t taking the piss.’

‘You said he came specifically to tell you about the ghosts he said he was seeing?’

‘Look…’ Jerome Banks had made an exasperated rumbling noise. ‘He was asking me how his property could possibly be haunted. How this could happen when it wasn’t an old house? Just built it himself – so how could it be haunted? I said had he put the pipes in properly? Had he had the wiring checked by experts?’

‘He was hearing strange noises, you mean? Lights were going on and off, that kind of—?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what usually happens, isn’t it? Look, Mrs Watkins, I’m not awfully ashamed to admit I’ve never really been into that kind of malarkey. Don’t know how you people manage to keep a straight face half the time. And anyway, this was rather before your time, so the only alternative would’ve been to refer him to your predecessor, old Dobbs – who was completely bloody barking, in my view… well, in everybody’s view, really. So I was rather relieved when Lodge reared up aghast, said no, he didn’t want any of that, thank you very much.’

‘Any of what?’

‘You know… prayers for the Unquiet Dead.’

‘Then why did he come to see you? His family was Baptist, anyway, surely?’

‘No idea at all. Never met the chap before.’

‘So did he say what kind of… manifestation… he’d been experiencing?’

‘Oh, it was probably all washing over me by then. I didn’t take detailed notes. You know as well as I do that we could spend all our time listening to all kinds of complete nonsense, but when you’ve got half a dozen parishes to organize you have to adjust your patience-level accordingly.’

‘When exactly was this?’

‘Probably in my diary somewhere but, off the cuff, two years ago? Three?’

She hadn’t pushed him any further, but she guessed there was quite a lot he wasn’t saying.

Not her business, anyway. Merrily let her head roll, shoulder to shoulder, with tiny cracklings like the beginnings of fire in kindling. Her woollen shawl was a distraction; she let it slip over the back of the chair and began to relax her body, starting with her toes – tightening muscles, letting go. Warmth would come.

For a while, she’d resisted Eastern-influenced meditation – the awakening of the chakras – as vaguely unChristian and also very Jane. But the demands of Deliverance, especially, had brought out a need for experience on a deeper level, a need to find moments of knowing. There were still too many times when she was appalled at her own weakness and ignorance, the frailty of her faith – a woman of straw. OK, humility was crucial, but so was a small, hot core of certainty. Some kind of retreat might have helped restore her inner balance, but there’d never been time for that – hadn’t even been time for a holiday. This job was smothering her; it was everywhere, like fog.

Lose thoughts. Concentrate on the breathing. It had taken her some time to realize that this was not about breathing consciously but becoming conscious of your breathing, simple things like that.

Gradually, the fabric of the church faded: the stonework, the stained glass, the rood-screen with its carved apples, the pulpit where she tried to preach while hating the word ‘preach’ with all its connotations, the entrance to the Bull Chapel with its eerily sleepless effigy. After a time, the church ceased to be its furniture, its artefacts. Now came the space, the atmosphere, the charged air – this was the church.

Her spine straightened from what she hadn’t realized had been a slump; there was a warmth in her chest, her breathing was deepening. There was a moment when the warmth aroused an underlying pleasure that was close to sexual; she had a glimpse of Lol and let it go at once… you just let it go, without guilt or self-recrimination. You let the breath become the Spirit and the Spirit filled you, pouring down to the stomach, with that strange, active relaxation of the solar plexus – separation, breath of God… God breathes me – and, at some stage, entered prayer.

Thack.

Merrily’s eyelids sprang back. The building seemed to shudder, as though the pews, the pulpit, the stone tombs had been brutally hurled back into place.

She knew at once what it was, knew every little noise this church made after hours.

The latch. When you were used to it, you could let the iron latch on the side door slip silently back into place. When you weren’t, the latch came down hard: thack.

Someone had been in here with her for a while, and then gone out.

Or wanted her to think they’d gone out.

The draught had died; the candle flame was placid now, making a nest of light on the altar. Merrily rose quietly, stood under the rood-screen and listened intently for more than a minute, staring down the central aisle.

Rat eyes in the dark? Anyway, she refused to be intimidated. If they’d gone, they’d gone. If they hadn’t, she was safer up here, close to the altar. She hadn’t finished, anyway. She knelt in the centre of the chancel and prayed for Gomer. And for Roddy Lodge. And for Frannie Bliss, who confused police work with poker, his cards up against his shirt-front, always raising the stakes.

She waited for two or three minutes before coming to her feet, bowing her head, gathering her shawl from the back of the choirmaster’s chair and going to the altar to snuff out the candle.

She listened again. There was nothing to be heard inside, not even the skittering of mice. Only the wind from outside. The row of high, plain, diamond-paned windows was opaque – no moon to light her way down the aisle. She always thought she could find her way blindfold around this church, but twice she collided with the ends of pews. Nerves.

At the bottom of the aisle, Merrily walked into something that should not have been there and fell hard onto the stone flags.

The original plan had been to return to the studio, to carry on working until midnight. But after Jane and Eirion had left, Moira had said she was tired, so Prof had suggested they wind up.

Soon after this, Gomer had phoned, the familiar old buzz under his voice.

How you fixed for ten o’clock, boy?’

‘Tomorrow?’ The mobile had halted Lol at the door, Maglite in hand, about to guide Moira back along the track to the granary. He’d been thinking maybe he’d have a week or so – at least until after Nev’s funeral – to get himself a little fitter before Gomer summoned him to make a fool of himself laying field drainage under the sardonic gaze of some Radnor Valley sheep farmer.

‘Police, it is, see. Can’t say too much on the phone, but anything that’ll help bury that bastard, I’ll do it, they knows that.’

‘We’re working for the police?’

‘Can’t say too much. Ten o’clock, boy?’

‘Early night for you, too, then,’ Moira said when he folded up the phone. ‘Hand me the torch, Laurence, I can see m’self back.’

‘You’ll need someone to run for help if you get attacked,’ Lol said.

Moira rolled her eyes, taking down her black cloak from one of the hooks inside the stable door. The cloak was well worn, he noticed, and its hem was frayed. She walked outside and waited for him. The night was dry now and the wind seemed to have pulled back into the west, leaving a thin breeze.

They followed the pool of torchlight along the track, between two old oaks, avoiding the puddles.

Moira said, ‘Jane’s mother, your… friend – how’d she come to be doing that job?’

‘You don’t believe in a calling?’

‘No, becoming a priest, I can understand that part. In other circumstances I might’ve gone that way, too, who can say? I was meaning the exorcism side of it. I don’t know how many women priests would be doing that job, but I’d guess not many.’

‘No. How it happened was, a year or two ago she was faced with something she couldn’t explain, a… well, a haunting. And the Church wasn’t helpful, and she made some comments at a particular conference about the lack of any kind of real advice for the clergy on the paranormal. And there was a guy there who was about to become the new bishop of Hereford, and he had this old-style exorcist he wanted to get rid of.’

‘He tossed her in there cold?’

‘There was a training course.’

‘Oh right, a training course. So that’s all right, then.’

He looked at Moira, her cloak billowing a little as if it was responding to her annoyance.

She said, ‘Were there no’ some… aspects of herself she needed to resolve, perhaps? Just that I’ve talked to a couple of exorcists over the years, and they both got into this particular ministry to try and understand certain experiences or abilities they’d discovered they possessed – precognition… clairvoyance… mediumship.’

‘Common ground there for you?’

‘Oh, aye, it’s all been pretty much normal with me since I was a wee girl. Hereditary – from ma mother.’ She stopped, pulling the cloak around her. ‘I suppose what always bothered me most was not that I was sensing stuff that just seemed to go flying past other people, but why? Why me, y’ know? What was I supposed to do with it? Was there some wider purpose, or was it just there to give me a hard time – penance from another life or some shit like that? I just wondered if this was how it was with your friend – if she had personal stuff to come to terms with.’

Lol shook his head. ‘She wouldn’t claim to be psychic. She realizes she was brought in because she was a woman, youngish, personable… new image. That’s it, really. And she’s trying really hard to live up to it.’

‘Jesus.’ Moira ducked as more trees locked branches overhead. ‘These guys have some things to answer for, don’t they just? The administrators, the politicians, the power people with their meaningless degrees and their cheesy Tony Blair smiles, who think finding their sensitive side is learning how to change nappies and slice the fucking quiche. They never appoint people they believe can actually do anything, in case they do it too well. Just the ones they’re pretty sure they can control.’

‘He’s gone now, anyway.’ Lol stopped at an old footbridge over the narrow River Frome, which had seeped through the summer and now was racing with the rains of autumn. ‘You think that, as a normal person, with no obvious special… attributes, she maybe shouldn’t be doing what she’s doing?’

Moira leaned against the bridge’s damp wooden railing. ‘It bother you, what she does?’

‘Well, it’s not really my place—’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘It’s just that she was doing it before we—’

‘Does it scare you?’

‘Maybe not as much as it should.’ He pointed the Maglite vertically so that it made a white cone in the air. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Or maybe you’re more afraid of what’s in here’ – Moira pointed to the side of her head – ‘than what just might be out there.’ She levered herself away from the rail. ‘Well, more often than not, in my experience, Laurence, they are one and the same. Seems to me…’ She crossed the footbridge. ‘Ach, this is none of my—’

‘No, go on.’

A single light gleamed ahead of them. She’d taken his advice and left a light on in the granary, so that when they came out the other side of the trees they could see it in the middle distance.

‘It would be lovely,’ Moira said, ‘to think that the Holy Church confers protection. But I cannae help thinking that the awful mess that is modern Anglicanism is now becoming so far removed from the source that being an Anglican exorcist—’

‘Deliverance Consultant.’

‘Maybe it’s a wee bit like going into an unknown tropical jungle without your injections, carrying a road map of the Home Counties. Deliverance Consultant. Jesus, the weak-kneed bastards can’t even say what they mean.’

Lol stopped on the bridge. Beneath it, the swollen Frome foamed and spat; it wasn’t the river he thought he knew.

From the far bank, Moira said, ‘So I was lunching today with your not-invariably-amiable local clergyman, the Reverend Simon St John. A serious psychic, dogged all his life by premonitions, apparitions, all the bloody itions you can name. Still thinking of it as a kind of sickness, and the Church of England as his sanatorium. Guy who’ll run a mile from the unexplained.’

Lol joined her on the bank, uneasy. The torch beam showed the frayed hem of Moira’s cloak trailing in the mud; she didn’t seem concerned.

‘Simon and I were discussing your problem – the need to keep up appearances. In truth, we couldnae see you at the heart of village life – in your alien sweatshirt, handing round the vol- au-vents at the vicarage garden party, then stepping up on the podium with the Boswell guitar to perform a couple of angsty numbers for the parishioners. Simon said if it was him in Merrily’s shoes they could all go eat their lace curtains. But then, he’s a guy.’

The kind of guy, Lol reflected, who never worried about appearances and got away with it. Merrily tended not to get away with anything.

‘In the end, though, we couldnae come up with an easy answer, although Simon said it’d be a terrible shame if you didnae come through, the two of you. Not least, he said, because of what she’s doing… this lonely path, full of doubt and soul- searching and wondering whether you’re going clean out of your mind. She needs somebody around her who’s up to recognizing madness.’

‘Thanks.’

‘As for the wee girl…’

‘Jane?’

They came to the granary, the light from the window outlining the steps. ‘Some problem there, Laurence, my impression. Not a happy kid. I may be wrong; I don’t think so.’

Merrily limped into the vicarage, dragging the black sack after her – an ordinary Herefordshire Council medium-quality plastic bin liner. Under the security light over the church porch, she’d taken one look inside and then closed the top quickly, spinning the sack round and round.

She shut the front door and stood with her back to it, panting. She felt as if something was making circles of madness around her. She didn’t know whether to call the police tonight or…

Tomorrow. She’d call them tomorrow. She needed to sleep on this. Needed to sleep full stop.

Except Jane wasn’t back yet. She was late – she’d expected to be home by eleven, because Eirion would then have to head back to Abergavenny, and it was already twenty past. OK, not over-late; maybe she should wait ten minutes before ringing Lol at the studio to see what time they’d left.

She left the bin sack in the hall, went into the kitchen and found the Germolene, pulling up her alb to expose the kind of cut knees that Jane was always bringing home as a kid. Rubbed some on, couldn’t be bothered with plasters. She went to put the kettle on, lit a cigarette and stood for a few moments staring through the open door at the print of Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, the house-warming gift from Uncle Ted. A tired and disillusioned middle-aged Jesus doing this sorrowful simper: I’ll hold up the lamp but I don’t really expect any of you to follow.

She thought, Sod it, went into the hall and brought back the sack that someone had left at the bottom of the aisle. Someone who had entered the church while she was praying, left the bin liner and crept away, leaving her to fall over it. Afterwards, she’d sat there on the stone flags, which also served as memorials, feeling the lumps in the sack, thinking of Roddy Lodge and dead bodies.

Now she emptied the contents onto the kitchen table. She stared at the heap again and tried to laugh. This was beyond insane.

Merrily sat down at the table, picked up one bundle, pulled off the rubber band and counted out the notes slowly and meticulously: £2,000 in fifties. There must be forty or fifty similar bundles. On the top of one there was a printed note on a quarter-folded sheet of A4 copier paper:

For maintenance of the Church at Ledwardine without the need for commercial enterprise. A donation.

She heard a car pull up outside, a door slam, Eirion’s familiar parting tap on the horn. She swept the bundles into the bin liner. Rapid footsteps on the path, then Jane’s key jiggling around in the lock. As she pulled the bag into the scullery, the phone began to ring.

‘How did it go?’ Huw Owen said.

‘Huh? Sorry, Huw, I…’

‘The meeting, lass. The mobile-phone mast?’

‘Oh.’ God, was that this year? ‘Sorry, quite a lot’s happened since then. No, Ted didn’t raise it in the end. However…’ Merrily pulled out the chair, slumped into it, stretched out her sore legs and suddenly felt like talking.

Not about the bundled money; she wasn’t up to discussing that, not until she’d puzzled out a few things. She told him instead about Roddy Lodge, from Gomer’s fire and the death of Nev to the discovery of the body on the truck, from the visit to Lodge’s bungalow to the interview-room session that didn’t happen. It took about twenty-five minutes. After half a day with manic Frannie and the shock of the bin bag, laying out the Lodge affair for the stoical Huw was almost relaxing.

‘Underhowle, eh?’ he said.

‘Not a place I’d ever been to before.’

‘Dobbs went,’ Huw said.

‘Sorry?’

‘The late Tommy Dobbs, your esteemed predecessor. He were in Underhowle a few years ago.’

‘Not at the invitation of the rural dean he wasn’t, unless I’ve been misled.’

‘Who’s the RD?’

‘Banks.’

‘Happen before his time. Five, six years ago? Summat like that. Haunting job, sort of. Reason I remember it, Dobbs did summat he’d never been known to do before.’

‘Mmm?’

‘He rang me for advice. In the normal way, his consultative procedure would begin and end with God.’

‘Flattering.’ Merrily was thinking this couldn’t involve Lodge’s bungalow because it wasn’t even built then. ‘Were you able to assist?’

‘I, er… no. He were right in this instance – not our usual thing. Alleged case of what I’m afraid you’d have to call “alien abduction”.’

‘Yes, that would’ve fazed him.’

‘ “Mr Owen,” he says – always one for formality, was Dobbs – “Humanoid entities in silver suits: what does this convey to you, Mr Owen?” Course Dobbs didn’t have a telly. Bugger-all use referring him to Star Trek.’

‘This was in Underhowle? Someone in Underhowle was claiming to have had a close encounter?’

‘Several, as I recall. Several encounters, not several people. Only one person – young woman, late teens. I believe Dobbs did a report on it, for the record, to cover himself. Sent me a copy. I could probably find it for you, but I expect Sophie’ll have it on the files up at the Cathedral, if you’re interested. Dobbs found it disturbing because he didn’t think the girl was lying or mentally ill, but he still couldn’t do owt with it. I’ve heard of alleged alien cases where blessings or minor exorcisms have helped, mind. Which makes you wonder if there isn’t a spiritual dimension to some of these so-called close encounters. Not this time, though.’

Merrily yawned. ‘OK, perhaps I’ll have a glance at the records. You never know, do you? You wouldn’t remember the name of the girl – for the file reference?’

‘Aye, vaguely. Summat like yours. Melissa? No, Melanie. Pullford. Melanie Pullford.’

Merrily stiffened. ‘Couldn’t have been Pullman?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Because if she’s been abducted by aliens again, this time they forgot to bring her back. Been missing two years. Bliss thinks Lodge might have killed her. You have any thoughts on that?’

‘Aye – tell the bugger.’

‘If it was confidential, between the girl and Deliverance, that might not be entirely ethical.’

‘Tell him anyroad. I don’t like coincidence. He won’t do owt, mind. He’s a copper. If even the likes of us are suspicious of alien abduction…’

On the whole, not the best thing to say late at night to Merrily, who always felt responsible, especially if nobody else did. Sometimes your most appealing quality, Jane had said once. But most of the time your worst fault.

She sighed and made a note on the sermon pad to call Sophie, first thing.

And then Gomer phoned and told her what he was doing in the morning, he and Lol.

Merrily went anxiously to bed that night, and anxiously to sleep. Had anxious dreams.