The Lamp of the Wicked

15 Holes

IT HAD TO be. Had to be. But now, on the steps of Chapel House, Merrily was sandbagged by second thoughts. How did you do this? How did you go about accusing someone of giving you eighty grand?

Tell me, Jenny Box had said the other night on the square, have you asked God? For the money? Have you asked God?

It was a very old house, as old as the vicarage but better kept. A narrow, cobbled alley now separated it from the timber- framed row that began with the Black Swan.

She’d always thought it was called Chapel House because it was across the street from the former Zionist chapel, now selling antique furniture. Obviously, the house was centuries older than the chapel, but she’d imagined it being renamed around the turn of last century, when Nonconformism was hot.

Beginning to feel conspicuous, Merrily lifted the knocker, let it fall and heard a long echo from inside the house. With any luck, Jenny Box would be out. This was a bad move. She wasn’t ready. Yet how could she not have come?

After breakfast, Jane had casually told her what she already knew – that Lol had elected to become an unskilled labourer for Gomer. And they’d stared at one another for a moment, Jane displaying hostility, like this was Merrily’s fault, while Merrily wondered if the kid could possibly know the worst of it – what it was likely to involve.

Evidently not. At about nine, Eirion had picked her up, and they’d said they were heading back into Wales for the day. If they’d secretly been going to join Gomer and Lol in the search for decaying bodies under waste tanks, Jane might have thrown up a smokescreen but Eirion wouldn’t.

When they’d gone, she’d tried to ring Lol, twice. No answer. Why did he still find it so hard to accept that someone might want him to be there? Spooked by the way the Lodge affair was starting to surround them all like a blanket of smog, she’d pulled the plastic sack from under the desk in the scullery, emptying it out again to make sure she hadn’t dreamed its contents and carefully counting it all this time.

Eighty thousand pounds exactly, for the church.

Right. OK. She’d knotted the neck of the sack and called the Deliverance office in Hereford, got the answering machine – Sophie must be down at the Palace with the bishop. Merrily had left a message asking if they happened to have the Melanie Pullman file and, if so, could Sophie e-mail it.

It had been then, stowing the bin sack under the desk, that she’d realized she’d finally run out of reasons for putting off a confrontation with Mrs Box.

Inevitably, the old oak door of Chapel House opened – not bumping and scraping like the front door of the vicarage, but gliding – and here was Mrs Box, carefully made-up. Or rather, made-down: her hair was brushed and shining and her face wore pale foundation, but no lipstick, no eyeshadow. She was wearing a simple black dress with a loose cord around the waist.

‘Why, Merrily.’ Smiling her gracious smile, this silky-voiced, willowy woman, the ex-model who would always make you feel graceless and untidy. ‘You couldn’t’ve timed it better. I was just off to my morning prayers. Now we can go together.’

‘Oh.’ She was waiting for me. She knew I’d come.

Merrily turned to descend the steps, thinking they’d be off to the church. But Jenny Box had already slipped back into the dimness of the old house.

‘Well, come on, then, Merrily. I’ve been dying to show this to someone who’d really understand.’

Gomer was standing up in the mini-JCB, leaning forward like a horseman on stirrups, to witness the uncovering. ‘Easy now, boy. Don’t you scratch him.’

As most of the tank had been buried and seemed to be coated with tough rubber, it was hard to imagine how a few scratches would matter. But this was Gomer’s show, Gomer’s world.

Lol eased up, using the tip of the spade like a trowel, teasing away shards of clay. This was how they’d unearthed the first Efflapure, a big rubber ball full of human waste – slow and careful, as though it was likely to explode like a giant landmine in a welter of shrapnel and shit. You couldn’t pull it out without emptying it first, and they hadn’t got a convenient tanker, so it was a question of digging down to it, getting underneath, and Lol was waist-deep in the hole, his jeans soaked through because he’d said no to plastic trousers.

Outside the hole, it was already late morning, but the sun was like a soft-boiled egg. Across the long field beyond the garden fence there were still woolly rolls of mist on the hill above Underhowle – Howle Hill this would be, hanging a literal name on a village that Lol had never heard of until today.

He didn’t know this area, and he’d never been to the Forest of Dean, which Andy Mumford said began the other side of the hill. He didn’t know it, and yet he was already inside it, feeling its juices, smelling its smell. Everything here was earthy and pungent, but it was also, thankfully, kind of unreal: Middle- earth. Gomerland.

Mumford was standing well clear, saving his suit from mud- spurts. As if he’d picked up Lol’s thoughts on some mental police wavelength, he whispered loudly into the hole, ‘You see anything or smell anything apart from God’s earth, Mr Robinson, you come out of there quick, and we summon the white people.’

Meaning the forensic people – white coveralls. Until then, it would be just the three of them: two seasoned professionals and a wimpy little singer with muscles like sponge cake, guitar fingers delving in mud and slime. Gomerland. Maybe inches away from meddling with the dead.

Which would then be Merrilyland.

‘Smell?’ Mr Sandford, whose garden this was, had been peering in, quite intrigued, but now he jumped back, alarmed. ‘Smell?’ Here it came, the first shower of outrage. ‘I thought this was just a formality. That’s what Inspector Bliss told us on the phone. He said it was just—’

‘Yes, sir, I’m sure that’s right,’ Mumford said.

‘No, you’re not! You think there’s’ – the colour was flaking from Mr Sandford’s smooth face – ‘a dead flaming body down there!’

‘Mike?’ Here came the blonde wife tottering in unsuitable sandals at the edge of their bungalow’s colonial-style verandah. ‘Mike, oh, for God’s sake…’ Glossy lips retracting in revulsion. ‘It is this Melanie Pullman, isn’t it? They’re looking for Melanie Pullman’s body. Oh please, not here!’

‘You got some information you haven’t told us about?’ Sandford was waving his wife away and backing off from the hole like it might widen and swallow him. He was about Lol’s age, wearing sweats and trainers: suburban weekend-wear in an area of well-patched tweeds, overalls and waterproofs. He’d told them he’d taken half a day off work for this.

‘Please calm down, sir,’ Mumford said in his stolid, farmerly way. ‘We don’t know anything. Like I said, this is just one of a number of installations we’ll be checking out in the course of the day.’

In fact six, Lol had been told, in an area roughly bounded by the towns of Ross, Ledbury and Coleford. This was the first – recently installed and less than half a country mile from Underhowle where this Roddy Lodge lived. From Gomer, Lol had learned a lot about Lodge: liar, conman, incompetent installer of overpriced drainage systems. The man who murdered Nev. Also a woman.

They were here to look for number three; why deny it?

‘Don’t expect this, do you?’ Mr Sandford had returned nervously to the edge of the hole. His wife had gone back into the house; she’d be calming herself by phoning friends, Lol thought. This was how panic spread. The next house they arrived at, discretion would no longer be an option.

‘No,’ Lol said, ‘you don’t.’

‘Move out the bloody city to find a place where your kids can walk home from school in safety, and just when you finally think you’ve…’ Mr Sandford nodded at the exposed tank. ‘How long before you know?’

Lol shook his head. The pit Gomer had excavated on two sides of the Efflapure was wide enough now for him to move around the tank. He reversed the spade, holding it two-handed just above the blade, and began to scrape soil from the curved, rubbery casing, his arms already stiffening under sleeves of drying mud.

‘You’ve got a job locally?’ he asked Mr Sandford – talking only to cover his own nerves, because if there was something dead down here, he was likely to be getting very close to it. He was aware of a dark bib of sweat spreading over the front of his T-shirt.

‘Computers,’ Mr Sandford said.

‘Oh?’ Lol took a careful sniff at the earth: decay, yes – but vegetable, surely nothing more than that. Gomer had said grimly, You’ll know, boy, when you finds it. Like he was certain they were going to.

‘You’re not local?’ Mr Sandford said.

‘No, not very.’ Lol began to prod tentatively at the pea-gravel around the bottom of the tank.

‘In which case, you wouldn’t know this is Silicon Valley in the making.’

‘You’ve got a factory?’

‘Not me personally. Chris Cody’s the genius. Saved the whole village from a slow death. Seventeen new jobs this year, if you include part-time employment for cleaners and so on. That’s big-time here. And it’s just the start.’

What, software manuf—?’ Lol recoiled as his spade found something in the gravel. Black. Could be a shoe. He looked up at Gomer.

‘The lot.’ Sandford hadn’t noticed it. ‘We make computers. Right now, the big thing’s computers for kids.’

It was a pipe, just a thick, black pipe.

‘I thought…’ Lol collected some breath, unsure if this was relief because, of all the bits you might uncover first, a shoe would probably be the least distressing. ‘I thought kids could use anything. Eight-year-old hackers getting into the White House and… all that.’

‘Nah, little kids, this is. Simple computers for four-year-olds, three-year-olds, two or younger. With games they can understand. By the time they get to school they’re computer-literate and most of ’em can read and write. Puts ’em a couple of years ahead of other kids. Fantastic. Might look run-down and primitive round here, but this place is the future, and that’s why—’

‘All right.’ Gomer jumped down from the digger, tossing his ciggy into the mud. ‘I’ll come in there now, boy.’

‘You sure, Gomer?’ Lol was already out of the pit, a shiver up his back.

‘But you do not expect this,’ Mr Sandford said, watching the Efflapure, as if they were excavating Hell itself in his half-acre garden.

‘Careful now.’ Jenny Box pulled back the rug in her oak-panelled hall, revealing the hatch in the crooked wooden floor.

‘Chapel House…’ Merrily said. ‘You mean… ?’

‘Even the estate agents didn’t try to make anything of it,’ Mrs Box said. ‘They thought ’twas just a little cellar – a “wine cellar” they called it – which they thought would sound more appealing to the kind of people they were expecting to buy the house.’ She pulled back a bolt and slipped slender fingers under a black cast-iron ring. ‘This hatch is Victorian, I’m guessing, and they’d have made a feature of it, but for most of last century it’d have been nothing but a storage space.’

The hatch came up easily. Jenny Box laid it down flat. She depressed a switch in the oak panelling. Stone steps were softly lit from below.

‘After you, Reverend,’ Mrs Box said.

Merrily put a toe on the first step. She was still wary of enclosed and windowless spaces after a harrowing night last Candlemas, in a private mausoleum in Radnorshire. Maybe she always would be.

‘There used to be a rail,’ Mrs Box said, ‘but it’d fallen off and I didn’t replace it. ’Twas always my feeling that, going down there, a certain sense of danger would be not inappropriate. Sometimes, if I’m feeling a little daring, I’ll go down in the dark and light a candle.’

‘You should be a bit careful,’ Merrily said. ‘What if you fell and got trapped?’

‘Tssk,’ Jenny Box said scornfully.

Merrily went down the steps, which curved. She was wondering: some kind of priest’s hole? Was the house old enough for that? As she came to the bottom step, she glanced back over her shoulder, trepidation lightly brushing her, as if the hatch might come crashing down, the bolt thrown, sealing her underground with… what?

There was an absurd moment of relief when she saw Jenny Box following her. She went forward, ducking – not something she had to do very often, even in the oldest cottages, but here the curved ceiling was, at its highest, only an inch or so above her head.

Mrs Box laughed lightly. ‘Kneeling room only, for most people today. I guess people were all a lot shorter when this was built.’

A round lantern, with an electric bulb, hung close to the wall, and Merrily saw she was in a short, narrow passage, its walls recently replastered and painted white. A smell. Incense? She didn’t move. She felt cold down here, despite still wearing her coat – the short woollen one, newish; she hadn’t wanted to look too poor this morning.

She wants me to know… is that possible?

‘Go on.’ Jenny Box was behind her, not quite touching her. ‘Go through.’

The passage opened out into a small white room lit by a second lantern and given focus by a low wooden altar. The atmosphere was suddenly so pervasive that, if she hadn’t been so unsettled, it might have brought Merrily instinctively to her knees.

‘I didn’t know this even existed.’

She’d been expecting something contrived, something fabricated, something faintly naff. But there were places where you could be brought in blindfold and you’d still be instantly aware of the energy of prayer.

The altar was of dark oak, its top a good four inches thick. It had on it a small golden cloth, a heavy gilt cross on a stand and two thick yellow candles in trays. Before it, a gold-coloured rug lay on the flagged floor and the ceiling was painted gold, like a chantry. There was an oak settle against the back wall. An incense-burner hung from what looked like a meat-hook in a corner and behind the altar was a tall picture involving a misty white figure with a down-pointing arm extending to form what could be a sword.

From a small alcove in the stone wall to their left, Jenny Box took down a box of cook’s matches, and moved to the altar.

‘When I contacted the previous owners… well, no, not them because they were only here two minutes, but the daughter of the people who’d owned Chapel House for about a half-century before that, she said they always knew there was something “funny” about this cellar, and in fact local people used to say it was haunted. The daughter said her parents just used it as storage space, for junk. They didn’t know its history – nobody seems to, but I don’t think that matters.’

‘No.’

‘I mean, I could tell straight off that there was something. I had it cleaned out completely, did most of it myself. Scrubbed for hours at the floor – the first time I’d scrubbed a floor in many, many years. It seemed like… an important thing to do. Like washing the feet of…’ She broke off and smiled almost bashfully. ‘It had obviously even been used as a coal cellar at one time. The walls were pretty filthy. So I started to scrub away at them, too. And that was when the cross appeared.’

Merrily looked around.

‘Oh, it’s not there now.’ Jenny Box struck a match. ‘It disappeared again, I’m afraid. There I was, scrubbing at the wall one day, and the plaster came off, and it left the exact, perfect shape of a cross, but when I came back the next morning all the rest of the plaster had fallen off. It wasn’t for anyone else, you see.’ Her faced tilted; she sought out Merrily’s eyes. ‘It was to show me,’ she said. ‘You know?’

Merrily said nothing. This was no place for scepticism. Although it was still cold, there seemed to be no intrusive air down here, and when Mrs Box lit the candles their flames rose elegantly and brought the painting behind the altar to flickering life. She saw a stormy sky over a church steeple and, parting the thunderclouds, the figure of white smoke with what was now clearly a naked sword.

‘It’s not exact,’ Jenny Box said. ‘A friend of mine did it in London. She’s a fashion designer, so I suppose the whole thing’s a bit glib and glossy, but she did her best with what I outlined to her.’

‘An angel?’

‘Well, someone said it must be the archangel Uriel, the one with the flaming sword, and perhaps there is something in that. I wish I could’ve painted it myself, but I’ve never been very good that way. ’Twas all I could do to paint the walls.’

It was hard to imagine Jenny Box sweating in overalls, collecting those unavoidable emulsion spots on her delicate skin.

‘Well, I couldn’t let anyone else in. Not after I realized what it had been before. I couldn’t have vulgar fellers smoking and swearing down here, now could I?’

Jenny Box smiled down at Merrily, arms by her sides, her black dress simple and monastic, except for the way its velvet cord hung loose just above her hips. In this moment, Merrily was entirely sure that this woman had left the money, unpretentiously in the black plastic bin sack. And in the next moment, she recognized the church steeple in the painting. And the wooded hills behind it.

‘It’s…’

‘Oh, that part’s exact,’ Mrs Box said. ‘I gave her a fine set of postcards to work from.’

Merrily took a good hard look at the picture. It was about two feet by four, in a plain, matt-white wooden frame. The paint was probably acrylic, and it looked surreal now, like a Magritte – the church hard-edged, an almost-photographic image, no brush strokes either in the clouds. Airbrush, probably – very professional. She turned to ask a simple question: What does it signify?

Jenny Box had gone to sit on the oak settle, her hands folded primly on her lap, her face lambent like some Rembrandt saint.

Merrily saw that the question wasn’t going to be needed.

Three tanks raised, and still nothing. Relief for the Sandfords and two other householders, frustration for Mumford. They’d moved almost in a circle around Underhowle but had never gone into the village itself. The last Efflapure had fallen back suddenly into its pit, and Lol had twisted his ankle hurling himself out of the way.

‘One more,’ Mumford said, ‘and then likely we’ll call it a day.’ Like he’d been doing the digging.

At the last place, there’d been a bunch of curious villagers and this pitiful middle-aged couple from Monmouth whose nineteen-year-old daughter had been missing for five months. A relative in Ross had told them about a man being arrested and the police digging for bodies.

Anything, they said, was better than not knowing.

It was heartbreaking. And probably unnecessary, Lol thought. He was aching all over by then. Earlier, he’d listened to Mumford talking to Bliss on the phone, arranging for the couple to meet him.

‘When do you decide this isn’t working?’ Lol asked Mumford as they were unloading the gear for the fourth time. No point in appealing to Gomer, for whom this was personal.

‘Isn’t for me to decide,’ Mumford said. ‘Likely, the boss’ll turn up in person at some point.’

They were on the gravel forecourt of a tall Victorian stone house with an ‘Old Rectory’ nameplate on the gate. A woman of about twenty-five with short fair hair and an eyebrow ring was standing watching, hands on her narrow hips. After a while, she sashayed over to Lol.

‘You don’t really think Roddy’s a mass murderer, do you?’

‘Don’t actually know the bloke,’ Lol said.

‘He’s just a little weird.’

‘Is he?’

‘You people, if somebody’s weird they’re automatically some raging psychopath, right?’

‘I’m not a copper,’ Lol said. ‘He’s the copper.’

She looked over at Andy Mumford and rolled her eyes. ‘Forget it.’

Mumford went to meet a man coming out of the house. ‘Mr Crewe?’

‘Connor-Crewe. Piers. How’s it going, Inspector?’

Big guy – well, overweight, certainly. Fiftyish, with luxuriant grey-speckled hair and a wide, easy smile. He wore a denim shirt overhanging baggy corduroy trousers.

‘Sergeant, sir,’ Mumford said, in the resigned way that told you sergeant was as high as he was going and even that had been unexpected. ‘That’s Mr Parry over there. He’s a professional drainage contractor, he won’t take long, and he’ll leave your ground without a blemish.’

‘I’m sure that’s true.’ Mr Connor-Crewe beamed, his big, round face like the friendly planet in a space picture book Lol had owned as a kid. ‘Just as sure as I am that you’re all wasting your time here. Not that it’s my place to offer an opinion.’

‘At this stage, sir,’ Mumford said, a very slight eye-movement conveying what Lol judged to be intense interest, ‘we’re open to anyone’s opinion. Did you know Mr Lodge?’

Well, obviously he installed this set-up for me, and it’s worked efficiently enough so far.’

Gomer sniffed in contempt.

‘And he had an assistant, like your man here,’ Mr Connor- Crewe said, ‘and they were both very civil, very obliging.’

Which must have saved Mumford a question. At each of the other places, he’d asked if there’d been anyone helping Roddy Lodge. In each case it had been someone different, and, no, they hadn’t been there all the time. Mumford had said Lodge was known to use cheap, casual labour, usually pulling someone from what he said was a bottomless local pool of fit blokes claiming sickness benefit.

‘Or, rather, not like your man,’ Mr Connor-Crewe said. ‘In this case, the assistant was the – I believe late – Lynsey Davies.’

The young woman stared at him. ‘You never told me she was helping.’

‘Aha,’ said Connor-Crewe. ‘Lots of things I haven’t told you, my sweet.’

‘Shit, Piers,’ she said. ‘He might have dumped her here.’

‘He certainly might have killed her here, the way they were carrying on – violent arguments one minute, practically shagging in the mud the next.’

Mumford got out his notebook. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s have a proper chat, shall we, sir? In the house.’

At first, Lol had thought she must be Connor-Crewe’s daughter. Evidently not. She stayed outside with him and Gomer, after Mumford and his notebook had followed Connor-Crewe into the Old Rectory, watching them mark out a circle around the Efflapure, which was sunk into a paddock behind the house.

‘That was a shock, mind,’ she said. ‘Lynsey.’ She looked out across the paddock and another couple of fields to the tops of some houses: Underhowle. ‘We all knew Lynsey, in Ross. Everybody’s saying she was a slag. Which is… yeah, I suppose, dropping babies everywhere, but that’s not the whole story. She was smart.’

‘Who’s looking after them babbies now?’ Gomer said, as Lol uncovered the top of the globular tank.

She shrugged. ‘Who’s always looked after them? Grannies, ex-boyfriends, ex-boyfriends’ mums. Having kids never held Lynsey back. Ace at palming them off on people. “Can you just mind him for a hour?” And then she don’t come back for six weeks. You had to admire it, in a way. She had this fierce determination to experience everything she could get out of life. Used to buy these heavy books from Piers’s shop, which was how I got talking to her. I mean, she wasn’t stupid. When she wasn’t around any more we just figured she’d gone off with some bloke – could be anywhere. You just… couldn’t imagine her being dead, that’s all.’

‘If her wasn’t stupid’ – Gomer slid an oily tow-rope under one of the thick rubberized loops on top of the tank – ‘how come her wound up with Lodge?’

‘Dunno. Probably because he had a fair bit of money – like a lot of money compared to Lynsey’s usual men – and a fast car. She did use people. Let’s be honest, she was good at men.’

‘You said Lodge was weird.’ Lol stepped back from the tank, started to cut into the turf around it with his spade. He was wondering how deeply involved in all this Merrily might have become, because of Bliss.

‘Yeah, well, he is. You talk to people round here, they’ll tell you like… how he works at night, that kind of thing.’

‘Ar?’ Gomer came over. He got out his tobacco tin. There was one cigarette already rolled in there, and he offered it to the girl.

‘Cheers.’ She stuck it in her mouth; Gomer lit it for her.

‘Works a lot at night then, do he?’

‘It’s what people say. Bound to get all blown up now, so like suddenly he’s become like this vampire.’ She took a long, needy drag and let the smoke out. ‘Piers and me were in the pub last night, in Underhowle. Nobody was talking about anything else, obviously, but the place was divided between the people who couldn’t believe he’d done a murder and the ones who’d always known he was a psycho. Like when he did Mike Sandford’s sewerage Lorna was uptight ’cause he was out there most of the night. They could see him prowling under the full moon, digging.’

‘That’s it for weird?’ Lol said. ‘He works nights?’

‘Well, you know, mood changes. Up in the clouds one day – drinks-are-on-me, chasing all the women. Next day he’s slinking around like he don’t want to know you or anybody.’

‘Like manic depression?’ Lol said.

‘Oh, sorry.’ She peered closely at him. ‘I didn’t realize you were a psychologist.’

Lol smiled sadly.

‘Sure you’re not a copper? I mean, you don’t look like a copper, but you don’t look like… whatever he is, either.’

‘No?’ Lol was disappointed; he hadn’t been this muddied-up in years. Not physically.

‘I do like to suss people – as a writer. Short stories, plays. Poetry, when I’m moved. Dennis Potter was going to look at my TV play – he lived in Ross, you know? But then he snuffed it.’

‘And your… has a bookshop?’

‘Piers? Yeah, in Ross. Second-hand, antiquarian. I work there couple of days a week, more in summer. Piers phoned me, said I might want to come up this afternoon – as a writer – because you were digging for bodies. He’s thoughtful like that.’ Something caught her eye. ‘Oh, look, the poor police can’t get a signal.’

Lol turned and saw Mumford had come out of the house, was backing away, staring at his mobile held at arm’s length. He ended up next to Gomer’s truck, the phone now tight to his ear.

‘Ariconium,’ the young woman said. ‘Last defensive outpost against the techno-invasion.’ She came right up to Lol. She wore a black fleece, the zip pushed halfway down apparently by the pressure of her breasts. ‘I’m Cola French.’

‘Gosh.’ Lol didn’t move. ‘Really?’

‘All names are real. What’s yours?’

‘Lol.’

‘There you go.’

‘What’s Ariconium?’ Lol said.

‘Roman town. On the old iron road between Glevum and Blestium – that’s Gloucester and Monmouth to you. The historians say it was down the valley, where Weston-under-Penyard is now, but Piers reckons most of it was where Underhowle is now. It’s his new buzz-thing. Piers gets obsessions, then there’s no stopping him.’

Mumford came over. ‘Leave that a moment, boys.’

‘Woooh!’ said Cola French. ‘Something came up. Go, go, go!’

Mumford ignored her, jerked his chins towards the house. Lol and Gomer trudged after him to the edge of the paddock, Cola French watching them from behind her writer’s knowing smile.

‘Let’s just quietly pack up the gear,’ Mumford said. ‘We’re on standby to meet Mr Bliss.’

‘Oh we are, are we?’ Gomer said.

‘Bear with us, Gomer,’ Mumford said tiredly.

‘Been bearin’ with you all morning, boy, and we en’t found a bloody thing. Your gaffer wants to check his information ’fore he gets carried away, ennit?’

‘My gaffer,’ Mumford said, ‘says that Roddy’s finally talking.’

‘Ar? Talked about what he done to Nev yet, has he?’

‘I don’t know, Gomer.’

‘They ever tell you anything, Andy boy?’

Mumford, maybe sensing mutiny, said, ‘All right. This goes no further.’

Gomer looked scornful.

‘Looks like he’s coughed on three,’ Mumford said. ‘Lynsey, Melanie Pullman and the girl from Monmouth, Rochelle Bowen.’

Lol turned away. The sky was shabby and sunless now, and only the line of pylons gleamed.

‘Soon as he decides to remember where they’re buried,’ Mumford said, ‘they’re bringing him out to show us. That good enough for you?’

Gomer clapped his hands together, producing a sharp echo from the direction of conifer-clad Howle Hill.

16 The Glory

‘WHEN I FIRST came here,’ Mrs Box said, ‘I’d spent the whole day looking for somewhere to live. An agent had sent me the particulars of a place in the country out past Hereford that was far too big and had all this land – what was I supposed to do with seven and a half acres, buy myself a tractor? Besides, the local church was ugly and the minister was a disinterested auld devil.’

‘I won’t ask which one it was.’ Merrily stood with her back to the candlelit altar and the long painting.

‘Doesn’t matter, I can see that now.’ Jenny Box was demure on the oak settle, hands forming a cross on her knees. ‘But at the time – and for other reasons, too – I was very deeply depressed. And the countryside was flat and unwelcoming and I felt lonely and unwanted and… unnecessary, you know? I’d spent a holiday here once, with my husband when things were good with us, and I loved it and I’d built up my hopes of finding somewhere… but now ’twas all wrong. I didn’t feel I belonged, or was ever going to belong. I was starting to question the whole idea of moving out here. And the clouds were gathering, and I just got into the car and drove in any direction, I didn’t care.’

Merrily asked hesitantly, ‘Your marriage had—’

‘Broken up? No. Oh no. And still hasn’t, though he goes his own way, and has his women like he always did. Well, that’s fine, I don’t have a problem with that any more. No, I just decided I wanted a place in the country and he was in no position, quite frankly, to object. I mean, he comes down sometimes, from London, at weekends, to discuss business matters – you’ll have seen him, no doubt, though not in church – but if he looks like staying for more than one night I’ll go and stay in London for a few days. The marriage, you might say, is winding down slowly.’

Merrily recalled the gist of her words from the other night: The business I was in, the things I was doing for money and self-gratification, all that’s repellent to me now. I came here to cleanse myself. A reference, it had seemed, to her modelling days, her brief career in daytime TV. Was there more to it, though?

‘But you’d still be business partners,’ Merrily said.

‘Would you happen to’ve been in one of the Vestalia stores lately, Merrily? Cheltenham? Cardiff?’

‘Er, no. I don’t seem to get out of the county too often.’

‘Ah well, there’s one supposed to be opening in Hereford in a few months’ time, and that’s what you might call a bone of contention. I don’t like the name much any more – ’twas from my sad New Age days, I was one for the goddesses then. Well, it’s too late now to change that, but I want the Hereford store to reflect a more robust spirituality.’

Merrily recalled what she could: the concept of Vestalia was about introducing spirituality into the home, from sacred candles and ornamental crystals to very expensive hearths like pagan altars. ‘You mean… ?’

‘A Christianization. I’ve been looking at Hereford Cathedral – at the ornamental chantries in particular. But we’ll have a High Church feel, with censers and things. I’m going to London next week to talk to some designers. I want a store which is going to reflect the true magic, if I can use that word, of Christianity. The angelic.’

‘And your husband…’

‘Hates and deplores it. Thinks it’s going to destroy us. Well, the hell with him, I’m the one with the ideas. Gareth has the contacts and the business acumen. Gareth it was who persuaded countless Londoners to install wood-stoves, to burn scented sacred apple logs brought up from the country at enormous prices. Would’ve been cheaper for some people to chop up their furniture and feed it to the flames.’ Mrs Box laughed coldly. ‘I don’t even want to discuss that man, thank you very much, in this holy place.’

She stood up and glided to the door and reached up and put out the lamp, so that the sacred cell was lit only from the altar, and then she went back to her seat, in shadow now.

‘Anyway… ’twas springtime,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry?’ Merrily stepped to one side so she wasn’t blocking the candlelight.

‘This day I found myself driving out towards Leominster. I’m leaving the main roads behind, soon as I can, looking for somewhere to get out and walk and think. ’Twas spring, and the leaves were half out, and some blossom on the trees, which were all startling white against a sky that was deep and mauve- coloured and loaded with rain that it wasn’t about to part with until it was good and ready. I parked up close to a footpath sign, and I climbed over a stile and here I am on the top of a hill overlooking what proved to be this very village.’

‘I think I know which place.’ Merrily recalled a certain afternoon walking with the late Miss Lucy Devenish, proprietor of Ledwardine Lore, who had known everything there was to know about the history of the village and made informed guesses about the rest.

‘Of course you do,’ Jenny Box said. ‘And you’ll know how it overlooks the orchards, with the spire poking out through all the apple blossom. So very white, the blossom was, this day, under that heavy, heavy purple sky. And here’s me just kneeling there on the grass, and praying and weeping, and weeping and praying… You know how it comes over you?’

‘I…’ Merrily looked down at the flagstones. ‘Yes.’

A movement: Jenny Box sliding gracefully to the end of the settle.

Sit with me.’

Merrily hesitated and then came to sit on the oak seat, opposite the altar and the picture of the church and the figure of light in the sky. There was some other movement, almost imperceptible, a small quiver, a flutter in the close air. Jenny Box gazed directly at the altar. When she began to speak, Merrily felt something like the breeze under Jenny’s voice.

‘I found myself praying to the Highest to be relieved of all that useless so-called spiritual debris. Praying with this absolutely overwhelming intensity – but the intensity wasn’t from me, y’understand. It wasn’t that half-phoney, feverish passion I’d known before; it was something out there that came around me and enveloped me. Something I was powerless to resist, to give you the auld cliché.’

Merrily nodded.

‘You understand that, Merrily? You understand what it is I’m talking about here?’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said and relaxed for a moment into common ground and memories of blue and gold. Yes, this did happen.

‘Of course you do,’ Jenny Box said. ‘See, I’d always thought myself to be a deeply spiritual person. But ’twas a poor spirituality, if I had but known it – Tarot cards and magical crystals and all the shiny paraphernalia of the Devil. Paganism slithering in round the back, like a door-to-door salesman with a suitcase full of glittery trash.’

Merrily, whose attitude towards paganism had become less black and white lately, said nothing.

‘But I was drawn to it all, in the beginning, you see, because of its leanings to the feminine, its exaltation of womankind. Let no one say, Merrily, that it isn’t men that’ve brought the world to the state it’s in. Let no one dare to tell me that – me that was hurled away from the Catholic Church when I was barely out of my teens, soiled with the sick hypocrisy of men.’

Ah. ‘Is this men in general?’ Merrily said. ‘Or…’

‘Or more specifically, our parish priest, Father Colm Meachin.’ The words coming out in a rapid, breathy monotone.

‘The saintly Father Colm, with his stately manners and his high-flown rhetoric and his political friends, and his thin, white hands all over a quiet girl, Niamh Fagan, who was my friend. But that… Ah, you see, it’s too perfect, that’s the real problem.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Too neat and hard, it seems to me now, and it doesn’t capture the glory of it all. The picture, Merrily – doesn’t capture the quite explosive glory of the moment, and I never really expected it to, but I thought the moment should be commemorated here nonetheless.’

Merrily moistened dry lips.

‘The moment?’

The unsettling thing was that Merrily was sure she could remember the exact day, last April or May… a ferocious electric storm heralding rain that had been almost equatorial. A Sunday. Tourists in the village hurrying into the church porch. Jane bored because Eirion had the flu and she’d been stuck indoors all weekend.

‘A flash of lightning, Merrily! A flash so wild and bright I had to shut my eyes against it. And when I opened them, the whole of the sky was as black as a peatbog, and then’ – the soft voice putting a thrill in the still air of the underground chapel – ‘came the tiny light, right at the centre, in the very darkest part of the storm.’

The church steeple in the painting was, without any doubt, Ledwardine’s, shooting out of crowded apple trees, with the wooded hills behind it and the stormy sky above, charcoal clouds delicately parted as if by the point of the sword, and the light oozing through in violet-magnesium bubbles.

‘The little light’s growing larger before my eyes, until it’s like a ball, or an egg shape, like some UFO thing. But I knew from the first that it would be more than that, more glorious.’

Merrily looked at the white figure, the sword-bearer: not Michael nor Gabriel but, apparently, Uriel, a peripheral archangel. Uriel came from the Biblical fringe, the Apocrypha.

As I stood there on that little hill’ – Jenny Box stood up – ‘absolutely transfixed, there was a sudden’ – she swung her arm – ‘slash of fork lightning, and the lightning itself became the sword. The sword was the lightning. You know? And I just shut my eyes, Merrily, and the rain came down, so very hard that I was soaked to the skin inside a minute. Soaked through, and laughing like a fool.’

Jenny Box’s face shone with joy in the altar lights. She’d stolen the show, had been in charge from the beginning. There had been no way of putting that question – So was it you who brought a sack full of money into the church last night? – not now, not here in Jenny’s private chapel, Jenny’s holy space, in the light of the candles and Jenny’s holy vision.

‘So I drove down to the village, and by the time I got here, in less than ten minutes, it had almost stopped raining and the weakest of suns had come out. And here I am, walking around the village in a dream, burning inside with the white heat of pure joy. I’m walking around the square, looking up at the old buildings and just revelling in the atmosphere… not the quaintness – that’s all rubbish – but this tenuous strand of sanctity that still threaded its way through the streets in spite of all this commercialism. I seemed to see the thread unravelling before me, and so I followed it and… you can guess the rest.’

‘It led you here?’

‘There was a FOR SALE sign. The only one in the whole village, as I remember.’

Merrily tried for a smile. ‘These things happen.’

But they didn’t really, did they? Not very often.

‘They do. I know that now.’ Mrs Box’s face was flooded with happiness. But, at the same time, Merrily was recalling the sense of loneliness and disturbance which had blown like dry leaves around the woman in the square on the night of the fire.

‘And I knocked on the door, and the people didn’t want to show me around at all – “Oh, you’ve got to go through the agent,” they said, but I insisted, I was very strong that day, and I felt the absolute rightness of it and I virtually made an offer there and then. I don’t think for one minute they believed me – thought I ‘was some stupid, doolally tourist woman, but it didn’t matter. I left the house and the sun was shining, and I walked down to the church, and it was there – it was right there in the churchyard – that I was granted another small vision: the one that clinched it.’

Merrily was silent. Too many visions.

Mrs Jenny Box, née Jenny Driscoll, this former model, this former minor TV-person turned successful businesswoman, said, ‘What I saw was… I saw you.’

Merrily looked down at her own hands, one squeezing the other.

‘In your dog collar and your long white tunic. Walking out of the church, talking to some visitor-type people with their anoraks and their cameras. I saw you… all in white. And I felt I was in the centre… of the future.’

Merrily became aware that she was no longer the least bit cold. Too warm, if anything.

‘Will we pray now?’ Mrs Box said very softly. ‘Will we pray together?’

By the time Merrily got back to the vicarage, she was disgusted with herself: woman of straw.

In the scullery, the computer took for ever to boot up. It was a reconditioned PC bought primarily to receive e-mails, mainly from Sophie, and it hadn’t seemed too healthy for some weeks now.

There was one message highlighted, from ‘Deliverance’, subject ‘Extraterrestrial’, and she printed it out. Couldn’t get her feet under the desk because of the bin sack, which she now had no damn choice but to take to Uncle Ted.

After those brief and nervous prayers, Mrs Box had been very gracious, giving Merrily tea, giving her fruit cake, in a white-walled, low-beamed parlour that was furnished almost frugally: two grey sofas, a low, Shaker-style table, no pictures on the walls. And Merrily, sitting in the middle of one of the sofas, on the crack between two cushions, had said, eventually, ‘We’ve had… there’s been a donation.’

Watching Jenny Box who knew it, arranging herself on one of the sofas, a bleached sunbeam stroking her hair.

‘To the church,’ Merrily said. ‘A substantial donation.’

‘Really?’ Mrs Box smiling vaguely. ‘That’s really wonderful. I’m so glad.’

‘It’s a very large amount, in cash. So large that… I’m not sure I can keep it.’

‘Oh? Why ever not?’

‘Because a cash donation of that size is bound to be considered—’

‘Miraculous?’ said Mrs Box. ‘An answer to a prayer? To a dilemma?’

‘Suspicious. Because it’s anonymous, and in cash.’

Jenny Box inclined her head to one side, appearing to consider the implications and then said, in that light, velvety voice of hers, ‘Well, now, surely, if the donor didn’t want to put his or her name on the bottom of a cheque, then it would not be in the spirit of the gift for you to institute inquiries and thus risk causing unwarranted embarrassment. Would it not be the thing to treat it as just the most lovely coincidence and perhaps even an indication from God that turning His House into a place of business was not the way ahead?’

Merrily nodded, smiling weakly. Had she really been expecting a confession? Under the surface vulnerability, Jenny Box was clever, a slick operator – and rich. But that didn’t make it feel any more right. So much of this seemed wavery, blurred by an intermittent aura of flickering instability. I saw you… all in white. And I felt I was in the centre… of the future.

Had she been wearing the surplice that afternoon… the white alb? She didn’t remember.

But, to Merrily’s knowledge, no one throughout the recorded history of the village had ever claimed to have seen an angel lighting up the sky over Ledwardine Church.

Hard to say which was the most unlikely: that or aliens in Underhowle.

I’m sorry, Merrily, this took rather a long time to find, and as, like most of Canon Dobbs’s files, it was handwritten, I’m afraid I had to type it out. I’m now back in the office, if you have any more queries.

Sophie.

How extraordinary! Not, I would have thought, Canon

Dobbs’s ‘thing’ at all.

The report itself, dated April 1997, was quite short.

Subject:

Miss Melanie Pullman, of 14 Goodrich Close, Underhowle, near Ross-on-Wye.

Source:

The Reverend Iain Ossler, temporary priest-in-charge, Ross Rural.

Nature of the problem:

Nocturnal disturbances of unknown origins.

The attending minister, Canon THB Dobbs, states: I was asked to look into this most bemusing case by the Reverend Ossler who, having been consulted by the family of the subject, was unable to determine whether or not it fell within the purview of the Christian Ministry of Exorcism. I found Miss Melanie Pullman to be a relatively articulate young woman of some eighteen years, an employee of Boots the Chemist in Ross-on-Wye, who had been left in a somewhat confused and, I would say, debilitated condition, allegedly resulting from a series of ‘experiences’ at her home over a period of four to six months.

Merrily wondered what Melanie Pullman had made of Canon Dobbs with his eroded graveyard archangel’s face and no discernible sense of humour. A man who had rejected the term ‘Deliverance’ and all attempts to introduce a series of guidelines for Anglican exorcists.

I interviewed Miss Pullman in the presence of her mother, Mrs Audrey Pullman, and her elder brother, Mr Terence Pullman. Throughout the interview, Miss Pullman complained of headaches and said she had been experiencing a number of physical symptoms, which the family general practitioner had diagnosed as a nervous condition, subsequently prescribing small amounts of Valium. The family dwelling is a former council house on an estate of similar homes and has no record of psychic disturbance, according to my inquiries with previous owners/tenants. Miss Pullman recounted a number of incidents, an example of which I quote here, from my notes. ‘I awoke in the early hours of the morning to find that the television set in the corner of my bedroom had inexplicably activated itself. I am certain that I had switched it off, as usual, before falling asleep. However, there was neither picture nor sound, only a blinding white light on the screen which I could not look at for long.’

Inexplicably activated itself. Merrily wondered what terminology Melanie had actually used.

‘This light eventually became dimmer and finally faded away. However, concurrent with this, I became aware that my bed itself was becoming bathed in an orange light which became increasingly bright.’ Miss Pullman then related a most confusing story of apparently being taken from her bed and losing consciousness and subsequently awakening in what she described as a ‘spacecraft’ of a spherical nature where she was laid upon a white metal table and subjected to an intimate physical examination by humanoid creatures, which she described as being thin and grey with unusually large heads and eyes like black mirrors. She claimed the examination concluded with one of the creatures having sexual intercourse with her. Asked if she would describe this experience as rape, Miss Pullman became embarrassed and said that she would not. Her mother later explained that, some days afterwards, Miss Pullman had been treated by her doctor for what was described as a vaginal infection. Whilst my information is that reports of this type of alleged experience are not uncommon, particularly in the United States of America, it was my impression that Miss Pullman had indeed undergone some manner of hallucinatory or ‘dream’ experience. That is, I did not believe that she was ‘making it up’. The central question, however, remains: was demonic interference involved? I have learned that some investigators of the phenomenon known as ‘alien abduction’ have proposed a correlation between this type of experience and folkloric tales of people who were ‘taken by the fairies’ as they slept, sometimes with similar suggestions of sexual interference, often resulting in the birth of a ‘changeling’ offspring. As Miss Pullman does not appear to have become pregnant, I would be inclined to rule out any involvement of so-called elemental forces! My own tests, through prayer and meditation, failed to detect the presence of a demonic evil, but I remained concerned by Miss Pullman’s physical conditions, which had led to her taking considerable time off work and, according to her mother ‘moping about the house’. Accordingly, after blessing the premises, with the use of holy water, I had a short meeting with the general practitioner, Dr Ruck, whom I must say I found to be less than helpful. Dr Ruck stated that this was the second such case reported to him within a year, from the same housing development in Underhowle, and he considered it to be a ‘fad’ among young people, arising from certain popular films and television programmes. I asked the Pullman family to keep me informed about any future developments but have not heard from them since.

CANON T. H. B. DOBBS,

DIOCESAN EXORCIST,

HEREFORD.

Merrily was unexpectedly impressed by Canon Dobbs’s general diligence and open-mindedness. OK, this hadn’t, unfortunately, extended to women priests – and women exorcists in particular. But he had done his best with what, to him, must have been a perplexingly contemporary kind of haunting.

The idea of aliens as post-modern fairies was one she’d heard before. True, there was no suggestion of the demonic here, nothing for the Deliverance ministry to combat with traditional means. But who did you go to when you were convinced that something which you couldn’t resist had arrived in the night and taken you away for experimentation?

Certainly not the police. If she showed this to Frannie Bliss, it would only put question marks over Melanie’s mental state. As for the doctor: bloody Valium, the universal panacea.

Merrily recalled when Jane, approaching the peak of her New Age phase a year or two ago, had believed she was having nature spirit experiences in the orchards of Ledwardine.

And she was startled by a pang of nostalgia, realizing that she very much preferred that fey, impressionable kid to the hard- bitten cynic who’d emerged around the approach to her daughter’s seventeenth birthday. She wondered what Eirion thought of the new Jane.

She went back to the computer to e-mail her thanks to Sophie… and discovered that she couldn’t. The screen had frozen, but in a peculiar foggy way, and when she tried to restart the computer she found it wouldn’t.

Bugger. Hard disk gone, or what? She’d have to ask Eirion who, she had to admit, was becoming an indispensable extension of this household.

Meanwhile, she rang the Cathedral gatehouse. ‘Sophie, thanks for doing this.’

‘Do we have another case in this particular village?’ Sophie’s voice, which had once seemed severe, now conveyed this inimitable mixture of calm and capability.

‘Alien abduction? No, but Dobbs’s subject has since disappeared, and the police are worried about her.’

‘And you’ve been consulted?’

‘In a roundabout kind of way. Has there been anything on the radio about the discovery of a woman’s body early today, near Ross?’

‘Oh,’ said Sophie, ‘that.’

‘No, this is not her. That’s… another one.’

Oh well, at least this would delay having to take the sack to Ted. She told Sophie everything that had happened last night up to, but not including, the bin-sack incident, which was purely parish business.

It was like unloading stuff on your older sister.

‘My God… what an appalling night for you,’ Sophie said. ‘Two of them. Two dead bodies.’

‘Possibly both victims of the same man.’

‘I hadn’t heard about Mr Parry’s fire. I’m so very sorry. He’s a wonderful man – and a good friend to you. Do you really think this person was insane enough to start that fire?’

‘Gomer’s in no doubt. And there’s definitely something wrong with Lodge. The bedroom wall was very… yuk. I mean, I can understand why Bliss is convinced Lodge has killed more women.’

‘And you say Mr Parry’s out there now, digging for more corpses?’

‘With Lol.’ Merrily fumbled a cigarette into her mouth.

‘Is this entirely wise of Inspector Bliss?’

‘Not in my view,’ Merrily said. ‘But who ever listens to me?’ Jenny Box, she thought. Jenny Box listens.

17 Expecting Confession

MADE SENSE, SEE, Gomer told Lol, as the truck bumped down into the valley, under the big pylons. This place was on the edge of the Forest, and anything could happen in the Forest – full of old secrets never told. Perfect place for a killer to lurk undiscovered for years.

Unlike Radnor Forest, that area of crowded green hills forty miles west of here where Gomer had grown up, the Dean was the real thing. Trees: oaks, chestnuts, sycamores, conifers. Miles of the buggers, wall-to-wall – twenty-five thousand acres, sure to be. Royal hunting ground in the Middle Ages, therefore operating according to separate rules, its own code.

‘What you gotter remember, Lol, boy…’ Gomer’s eyes shrank shrewdly behind his telescopic glasses. ‘What you gotter remember ’bout the Forest is it’s wedged up between these two big rivers, the Wye by yere, and the Severn in the east. And the Severn’s real wide; the other side’s like another country, so you’re lookin’ across at neighbours you likely en’t never gonner talk to the whole of your life.’

‘Sounds like West London,’ Lol said.

‘Point I’m makin’, boy, if you wanner get the other side of that river, from yereabouts, you gotter drive miles and miles down to the big bridges in South Wales, else your only alternative’s all the way up to the city of Gloucester and struggling through the terrible bloody traffic you gets there. Now… in between Gloucester and South Wales, see, you got the Forest. Like a big island full o’ trees.’

Trees were already thickening on both sides of the road and the cab of the truck was blue with Gomer’s smoke.

‘And if the Forest folk couldn’t easy get out, where do they go but down? Pits, see? Iron mines, it was, way back to Roman times, and coal mines. All closed down and covered over now, mostly, but the land’s still riddled with bloody ole shafts. Mines and secrets, boy, that’s the Forest. Mines and secrets.’

Despite the cold and the shuddering of the truck, Lol’s body was sagging into sleep. He sat up, shaking himself like a dog. ‘How come you know so much about it, Gomer?’

‘Ar, well…’ Gomer’s voice went gruff. ‘My first wife, God rest her, her family comed from Cinderford. Used to have to go over at Christmas, times like that. Never felt accepted, mind. Suspicious devils, her family. Close. Interbred.’

It was noticeable that Gomer had been talking more in the last five minutes than he had all day. He’d never mentioned his first wife before, not in Lol’s hearing. This was Gomer galvanized, sensing the closeness of a climax.

Coughed on three: Lynsey, Melanie Pullman and the girl from Monmouth, Rochelle Bowen.

Rochelle was the daughter of the couple who’d caught up with them when they were excavating the third Efflapure, at a brick cottage outside Pontshill. She was nineteen, a trainee dental nurse, missing for five months. Lol had felt heartsick; seeing in the faces of the parents this withering combination of resignation and cold dread, making it all searingly real. He hoped they weren’t going to be around when Bliss arrived with his prisoner.

Gomer slowed at a sign pointing to Under Howle – two words, as though the village had no identity separate from the hill. Lol couldn’t see a village out of the truck windows, only close-growing trees with brown, frizzled leaves.

‘This actually counts as the Forest, Gomer? So close to Ross?’

Gomer sucked on his ciggy. ‘This, boy, counts as a place even the Forest folk don’t know. Perfect hidey-hole for the likes of Lodge. Bastard goes out from yere, like them bloody ole raiders from centuries ago… cheatin’, philanderin’… killin’… He coughed. ‘Burnin’. Then crawls back to his lair, all snug.’

They came down into the village, which looked muddled and haphazard, houses floating in the early dusk like croutons in a brown soup. They passed the hulk of a church, entering a street with – surprisingly – several shops, their lights coming on. Down through a disjointed crossroads, back into the trees.

And then Lol saw, on his left, the first police car, the police tape and the tiered façade of the garage, like a concrete Lego garage from his childhood, with the pylon rearing behind it. Gomer turned in very slowly and deliberately, truck wheels grinding cinders.

‘All snug,’ he said.

Merrily punched in the numbers of Lol’s phone.

‘I’m sorry, the mobile you are calling is—’

She switched off again. It was so basic, Lol’s phone, that it hadn’t come with an answering service. In fact, he probably hadn’t even taken it with him. She pictured him digging, willing but a little inept, in some muddy field, red-brown stains on the alien sweatshirt – her mind could still never find him without the alien sweatshirt. Once she’d insisted on bringing it home to mend a hole in the shoulder and had ended up sleeping with the faded item under her pillow: how sad was that? You wanted to be adult about these things, wanted to take it slowly, but your emotions operated at a different velocity: feelings on fast-track, playing the old Hazey Jane albums when you were alone in the car – his voice a little higher then, a little smoother; he’d been not much older than Jane at the time, and now nearly twenty years had passed and – Oh God.

Merrily lit a cigarette. Her hand was shaking. It didn’t seem to take much to make her hands shake nowadays.

Jane had also talked about the folk-rock singer, Moira Cairns, on whom Eirion had seemed to have developed a crush, although the kid had emphasized in disgust that the singer was old enough to be his mother. Merrily recalled a Moira Cairns album with a sleeve picture of Cairns trailing a guitar along an empty beach. Something special then; how special was she now? Last night, Prof Levin, according to Jane, had thrown an oblique glance at the lovely Moira in her slinky frock and had said they should ‘Let what happens happen.’ Was this Jane winding her up? Jane, who wanted a situation where Lol actually moved into the vicarage with his guitars, which… which was really not possible, at the moment, was it? What would they say about her in the village (whore!), the diocese, the press. And, of course, Uncle Ted…

Merrily stared at the phone. Uncle bloody Ted.

No real reason for putting this off any longer. She called him. She called Uncle Ted Clowes and arranged to meet him in the church in ten minutes. She put out the cigarette, got back into her best coat and pulled out the sack full of cash, its origins still uncertain.

With the sun going right down, the wind getting up, and still no sign of the Hereford coppers arriving with Lodge, Gomer left young Lol Robinson rubbing his hands in the cold, tramped across the cinders and dragged miserable Andy Mumford over to one side, by the garage wall. Time to have this out.

‘You said three, right, Andy boy? You reckoned he’d confessed to three.’

Andy Mumford looked over his shoulder. ‘I never said anything at all, Gomer, you know that.’

‘Three, that it? Just the three women?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Behind Mumford, coppers were moving through the dusk, unloading tackle from a blue van.

‘Don’t you give me that ole wallop!’ Gomer levelled a finger. He’d known this boy for years. Born to a big family over by Wigmore, and if ole Ma Mumford was yere, she’d have the truth out of the bastard. ‘What about torchin’ a certain plant- hire shed? What do he say about that, boy?’

Miserable Andy looking frazzled. Coming up to retirement, didn’t need this. Well, too bloody bad! Gomer could feel the old fury coming to the boil. He’d worked all day for nothing much, seen his good friend young Lol Robinson reduced to a limp rag and now in all the excitement of Lodge shooting his mouth off, just the one serious crime gets very conveniently forgotten.

‘Not sexy enough – that it, Andy? Not got no spectac’lar headlines in it? Unknown Welsh Border drunk gets ’isself roasted?’

‘Look, Gomer,’ Andy said awkwardly, ‘we’ve been cooperating the best we can with Dyfed-Powys on this one, but it calls for a lot of forensic, and that’s not easy to come by after a big fire. I don’t know how much you know about DNA, but it doesn’t survive that kind of blaze. Anyway, proving that someone else other than Nev was involved is not gonner be a simple matter, take it from me.’

‘Ole wallop!’ Gomer was ramming his glasses up tight to his eyes. ‘In the ole days, they’d’ve bounced the bastard off the cell walls a few times till he told the truth.’ He was thinking of Wynford Wiley, the Radnor Valley sergeant – never liked the bugger, but he knew how to get the facts out of the lowlife.

‘Gomer’ – Andy sounding pained – ‘Lodge has a very smart young lawyer, I’m told. Going about it the old-fashioned way is the best way of not getting a conviction on anything these days, take it from—’

‘Ar, we all know what goes on nowadays – three-course dinner and tucked up with a hot-water bottle, all cosy. ’Spect he’d be getting a conjugal bloody visit if he hadn’t done for all his girlfriends.’

Bad-taste thing to say and, fair play, Gomer was truly sorry for those girls and their families, but there’d been no woman in Nev’s life at the end, and nobody was going to stand up for that boy if Gomer didn’t do it now.

Headlights blasting through the trees brought Andy Mumford out of his slump.

‘They’re here. Gotter leave this now, Gomer.’

Two cars… three.

‘Do one thing for me, Gomer.’

Gomer kept quiet.

‘I’ll admit I warned the boss about hiring you for this,’ Andy said. ‘But he was in a hurry, and I reckon he thought you’d have a bit more of an incentive than most digger-men.’

Boy had that right.

‘But don’t – just don’t… When you see Lodge, don’t say nothing, don’t do nothing. Soon as we nail this psycho on the women, we’ll talk about Nev, I promise. Just you keep in the background, meantime, and dig where you’re told. Don’t do nothing else, you understand me?’

‘You knows me, boy.’

‘Exactly,’ Andy says grimly.

The first car’s pulling up just a few yards from Gomer. It’s not a police car. The boy Bliss gets out first. He stands there, hands in his pockets, waiting, as the second car fits itself in behind.

Three uniform coppers in this one. And Lodge, bent drainage operator and likely the biggest serial killer in these parts since bloody Fred West.

Gomer fired up a ciggy in the fading light and waited too.

Stepping warily into the gloom of the vestry, Merrily found that Uncle Ted had already moved the wardrobe into a corner and folded up the card table, and was now brushing the dust from his sleeves, obviously envisaging the gift shop.

‘I thought the main counter about here… and perhaps a second display stand under the window?’

Merrily said, ‘Perhaps if we brick up the window altogether, we could have an even bigger display stand.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ Ted said, ‘because when you add up the cost of extra lighting…’

He dried up, realizing – lips twisted in annoyance – that his niece, the vicar, was taking the piss. His face went a deep and petulant red. ‘I very much hope,’ he said, ‘that you aren’t going to backtrack on this. We do need the income.’

Backtrack? She didn’t recall ever agreeing. ‘Well…’ She carefully re-erected the card table in the middle of the small, drab room and placed the black bin sack on it. ‘Maybe we can now afford to postpone the decision for a while.’

She was still dreading telling him about the money. Obviously, they’d have to put it out that there’d been an anonymous donation, without necessarily revealing how it had arrived. The gossip, anyway, would be considerable.

Ted frowned. ‘I admit the mobile-phone mast would bring in a regular income, but…’

‘You haven’t mentioned that in a while.’

‘No, I… to be honest, I’ve been a trifle perturbed by what I’ve been reading about possible health risks. Particularly to, ah, elderly people, it seems. Nothing proven, but it might be wise to, ah…’

‘I see.’

‘Sorry to toss a spanner in the works.’ He stood with his back to the door, hands across his belly, the last man in Ledwardine habitually to wear a Paisley cravat down the front of his Viyella.

‘No, that’s… very public-spirited of you, Ted,’ Merrily said. ‘Listen, there’s something I have to tell you. Something’s happened.’

He peered at her. ‘Why are you all dressed up?’

‘Because I’m leaving for Barbados tonight,’ Merrily said. ‘I’ve come into money.’

She emptied the contents of the bin liner on to the table.

Ted picked up one of the bundles of notes and then moved rapidly to the door and flung on all the lights.

‘Bloody hell!’ he said.

Lol saw them bringing Lodge out, couldn’t easily miss him. In direct contrast to the dark blue uniforms on either side, he was wearing orange overalls, probably police-issue while they ran tests on his clothes. His head hung, so you couldn’t see his face, and his hands were cuffed in front of him. He let the two coppers move him around in the greying light, like a bendy doll.

A mist-blurred, listless moon was skulking in the trees. The wind brushed fallen leaves into heaps against the closed doors of Roddy’s garage, and the police clustered in front. Nobody was doing much talking, but Lol was aware of an excitement he guessed they wouldn’t want to show – you could hear it in the agitated jostling of the leaves and the tense, metallic thrumming in the overhead power lines.

There were about eight police visible, among them DI Frannie Bliss who Lol had met during the summer – a brief liaison founded on the need to pull Merrily out of a threatening situation. There’d been a degree of self-interest then, but you felt you could trust him, up to a point.

Surprisingly, Bliss came over.

‘Knew the music industry was in a bad way, son, but not this bad.’

Lol nodded gloomily. ‘We’ve got Robbie Williams round the back, unloading the truck.’

‘Yeh, I thought it was.’ Bliss was dressed for action in a nylon hiking jacket, jeans tucked into calf-high cowboy boots.

‘You look happy, though.’ Lol was wary: the police and their prisoner waiting around, the night closing in, and the DI sparing the time to acknowledge the hired labour.

‘Tentatively happy.’ Small teeth flashed briefly. ‘You’re looking a bit knackered yourself, Laurence.’ Bliss pulled leather gloves from his jacket and put them on. ‘I suppose it was the little Reverend got you into this. Relieving Mr Parry’s burden, in his hour of sorrow.’

‘Thought it might help him to have somebody to laugh at.’

‘And how can we ever refuse her, eh? All right, son, listen…’ Bliss led him to the edge of the police tape, voice lowered. ‘Here’s the situation: after what’s been a difficult day, by and large, Mr Lodge has decided to cooperate. But this is’ – he waggled his fingers – ‘funny stuff, you know? Gorra go a bit careful.’ He nodded at the spade. ‘Obviously you’ve mastered the complexities of that, more or less, but what I need to know is, can you, if necessary, operate this little digger of Gomer’s?’

Lol took half a step back, stumbled.

‘Hey, we’re not talking heavy plant,’ Bliss said. ‘This is Tonka toy.’

Lol looked around. He couldn’t see Gomer anywhere, but he could see Roddy Lodge, luminous in his overalls, with a policeman either side and another man, in plain clothes, joining them. A policewoman was handing out plastic cups of tea or coffee from a couple of flasks in the boot of a police car, including one for the prisoner – Roddy clasping the cup like a chalice between his cuffed hands. The reality outside the recording studio – more of it than Lol had counted on.

‘I’m not saying we’re gonna need the digger.’ Bliss tapped the spade. ‘This might well suffice. But if we do need to go a bit deeper, I don’t want Mr Parry within quarrelling distance of Roddy Lodge. Better an inoffensive little artiste than a combustible old bugger with a grudge, this is my view.’

‘And how would you feel,’ Lol said, before he could think, ‘if your nephew’s murder was getting sidelined by a slippery copper on the make?’

Must have been even more tired than he’d figured.

Bliss merely frowned. ‘Suspicious death. His nephew’s suspicious death, Laurence. I apologize for calling you inoffensive.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, that’s over the garden hedge – Dyfed- Powys’s case. I’m not saying there won’t be meaningful discussions with our Welsh colleagues when this present business gets sorted, but right now I want to build on what we know we’ve got. It’s about seizing the moment. Now you run along and ask Mr Parry for the keys of his little digger.’

Lol didn’t move. ‘I thought you’d have real forensic people to do it, now you’ve got something positive.’

‘Never fear – you happen to strike anything softish, I’ll have vanloads of the buggers here before you can scrape the shit off your wellies. I’ve just gorra be quite sure our friend here isn’t being disingenuous.’

‘So where will this be? Where are we going?’

‘Going? We’re not going anywhere.’ Bliss patted Lol on the shoulder and walked with the wind behind him across the crowded forecourt towards the cops guarding the prisoner. ‘Right then, Roddy, my son, let’s be having yer.’

Here? He’d buried one on his own property?

‘DI Bliss!’ The third man with Lodge stepped out, his hands going up protectively as the headlights of one of the police cars sprayed his dark suit. ‘I just want to say, before you—’

Lol saw Bliss quiver. ‘Mr Nye… we’ve had an independent doctor in to check him over, we’ve also had him looked at by an experienced psychiatric nurse, neither of whom thought he was seriously ill or unfit to travel. Now, will you let us get on with our job, please?’

The guy shook his head. He looked young, maybe not too sure of his ground. ‘Inspector, I have to tell you that I’m far from confident that anything Mr Lodge might say under these circumstances can be considered admissible. I think—’

‘I know what you think.’ Bliss stood with his arms by his side, fists tight. ‘And what I think is that Mr Lodge’s mental state has no particular bearing on the situation at this stage. And I’m more interested right now in what he’s got to show us, rather than what he tells us. And if any of this upsets him further, I’m terribly sorry, Mr Nye, but in comparison with the parents of Rochelle Bowen, with whom I spent a very distressing forty-five minutes this afternoon, my sympathies—’

‘Mr Bliss, I repeat that my client is unwell, and I think you could at least – bearing in mind that Mr Lodge hasn’t been charged and he is cooperating fully – remove the handcuffs.’

Bliss threw up his arms. ‘All right, we’ll take off the f— the handcuffs.’ He moved close up to Mr Nye. ‘I should, however, remind your client that if he at any stage makes a personal decision that his continued presence here is no longer entirely essential, I’ve got police officers posted at the front and the rear and every conceivable exit from these premises. Is that fully understood, Mr Nye?’

‘We wouldn’t expect otherwise, in the circumstances,’ said Mr Nye. ‘Thank you, Inspector.’

Bliss nodded. One of the uniformed policemen bent to remove Lodge’s handcuffs.

‘You believe that?’

Lol turned. Behind him, Gomer was furiously assembling a ciggy, the headlights turning his glasses opaque, like cross-slices of banana.

‘You ask me, en’t nothin’ wrong with that piece of rubbish you couldn’t bloody shake out of him.’ He shoved the new ciggy in his mouth and closed the tin with a snap.

‘Gomer—’

‘You don’t need to explain nothing, boy. Miserable Andy’s spelled it out. Keep Parry out of it. Don’t nobody mention Nev. You go with ’em. I’ll stay yere.’

‘It’s nothing personal,’ Lol said. ‘Just Bliss covering himself against any comebacks in court. If they do find anything and it was you who dug it up, a man with a grudge…’ He sighed; he didn’t want to operate the digger, either, even if he could be sure he knew how to. ‘Nobody’s going anywhere, it seems. Looks like they want to dig here. Maybe we should tell them they can do it themselves.’

‘Not with my bloody gear, they don’t. I’ve lent tools to cops before.’ Gomer pulled a single key on a chain from his overalls. ‘So don’t you let anybody else—’

‘Hang on to it,’ Lol said nervously. ‘It may not come to that.’

They watched Roddy Lodge flexing his arms, rubbing his freed wrists. Lol saw his face properly for the first time, and it was the colour and the texture of paving stone. His eyes seemed sunken, but somehow gleaming back there, like glass, like cat’s eyes in the road.

And then he started slowly shaking his head, a smile forming.

18 Up

JANE SAID, ‘So you’re saying Jenny Driscoll saw an angel.’ She flinched slightly. ‘An actual… with like, wings?’

Merrily stood up, went to switch on the earthenware reading lamp on the wide window sill. It had been clear to her that if she was going to tell the kid about the money then a preliminary account of Mrs Box and the vision of the angel was probably unavoidable.

Besides, this had been, not too long ago, very much Jane’s kind of thing. Up in the apartment, against the Mondrian walls, two bookcases still bulged with pastel-spined paperbacks about contacting nature spirits, working with the elements, finding secret pathways to enlightenment.

Which had bothered Merrily quite a bit at one time; less so now. If, occasionally, it bordered on neo-paganism, it was still spirituality. Better than agnosticism.

Certainly better than the possible onset of atheism.

‘Let’s say a startling brightness formed out of the veins of light on the edge of clouds,’ Merrily said. ‘Resembling in this case, it seems, the Archangel Uriel. This is the lesser-known one usually portrayed with a sword, pointing down. It was very dramatic, Mrs Box says.’

‘And it was pointing at the steeple. Your steeple?’

‘This would be… you remember the huge, spectacular storm one Sunday last spring? Where we were standing here at the window and the whole of the orchard was lit up white, like a snowstorm? Well, Mrs Box parked her car and walked up onto Cole Hill. She was in a… an emotional state.’

‘Evidently,’ Jane said.

Eirion had dropped her off around four before having to go home for his step-grandmother’s eightieth birthday party. Now the day was closing down, the old Aga making its smug Aga noises without putting much heat into the kitchen. Merrily and Jane had mugs of tea for warmth.

The lamp laid a golden mist on the room. The kid had changed into white jeans and a sweater discarded by Merrily as terminally shapeless. It seemed to fit Jane better. She slid forward on her elbows, chin cupped in her hands, gazing into her mother’s eyes, very candid and calmed by something awesome that Merrily was seeing more frequently: a level of understanding that murmured adult.

Merrily’s hand tightened around her mug.

‘OK, just reassure me,’ Jane said, ‘that you don’t believe a word of this bollocks.’

The strengthening night-wind rattled the trees.

‘Bastard!’ Bliss was livid. He stormed over to where Lol and Gomer were standing, out of Lodge’s earshot.

‘Lawyer’s got it right for once, boss.’ Mumford was ambling behind like a pack pony. ‘Bloke’s mental.’

‘Andy, he’s mental when he wants to be.’ Bliss moved up to the barrier tape, clutched it with both hands, failed to snap it. ‘I’m buggered if I’m chauffeuring the crafty bastard back to his cell after this little works’ outing. I’d rather dig the whole site up and make him watch. Put him back in the cuffs.’

‘Look a bit peevish?’ Mumford said.

‘I’m a peevish person.’

‘En’t bein’ helpful n’more, then,’ Gomer said insouciantly through blue smoke.

‘No, he en’t.’ Bliss stared out across the lane into the trees, hands rammed into the pockets of his green and cream hiking jacket. ‘As you may have overheard, Mr Lodge appears to have had a lapse of memory and is now effectively saying he no longer recalls precisely why he brought us here.’

‘Ar.’ Gomer smiled through his ciggy. Relief seeped into Lol’s aching body like warm alcohol. It looked like this could be over before it started.

‘What’s he got here, Andy?’ Bliss said.

‘Boss?’

‘How much ground? Acreage. Roughly. What we looking at?’

‘I’d reckon… say two and a bit acres, all told. That’s including the yard and the bungalow and the triangular piece of land at the bottom with the pylon on it. Oh, and the other side of the main perimeter fence it seems Lodge owns a paddock, and then there’s about one and a half acres surrounding what used to be the Underhowle Baptist chapel. Lodge used to own that, too, but he’s now sold it to the Underhowle Development Committee.’

‘Proper little property speculator,’ Bliss said sourly. ‘We been in there?’

‘The chapel? Empty, boss. The Development Committee’s turning it into a museum for all the Roman finds.’

‘We’ll still put it on the list for the Durex-suits.’

‘He’s just had money to spare and a good accountant,’ Mumford said. ‘Property always makes sense, even derelict property. I bought the field next to us, with an old cowshed.’

‘Yeh, you would.’ Bliss hacked the heel of a cowboy boot into the cinders. ‘Wouldn’t know where to start here on our own, would we? Take days to dig up this lot, and I haven’t got days.’ He turned his back to the tape, looked across at Roddy Lodge standing motionless in his orange overalls. ‘I’m gonna look a right twat when this gets out.’

Lol noticed two kids hanging around at the far end of the tape, one apparently shielding the other who was bending over the tape – probably cutting himself a couple of feet of it as a souvenir.

Gomer cleared his throat, but Frannie Bliss didn’t look at him. A policeman advanced on the two kids, who ran off up the lane towards the village. Then one turned and gave him the finger. It began to rain very lightly.

There was a sigh of resignation from Bliss. ‘Yes, Mr Parry.’

‘Course’ – Gomer spat out the last millimetre of ciggy – ‘if I hadn’t been discharged from my duties, told to take a back seat, like…’

Lol became aware of just how cold it had become, how thin his old army jacket was, and how much night there was stretching ahead.

‘What you got in mind, Gomer?’ Bliss said.

Lol just hoped that whatever it was wouldn’t involve him or his frozen muscles.

Merrily said, ‘So I emptied out the sack, and waited for it to happen. And, sure enough, he metamorphosed before my eyes. Out goes the churchwarden, in comes the lawyer.’

‘Dr Jekyll and Mr—’

‘No, this is Ted,’ Merrily said. ‘Mr Hyde and Mr even-Hyder.’

Jane grinned fractionally. Merrily poured more tea, glad to be off the subject of angels. She was bewildered by Jane’s reaction to the report of a dramatic visionary experience on her own doorstep. Was this not the kid who had entered her middle teens with a fervent belief in fairies and the kind of elemental forces not covered by the Bible? There was a point where New Age philosophy and Christianity crossed over, and angels were it, and you didn’t just abandon all that virtually overnight – not even Jane.

‘So what did he say?’ Jane demanded, clearly far more interested in the manifestation of the money, obviously annoyed that this was the first she’d heard about it, when both Uncle Ted and Jenny Box had been told.

‘Oh… “Lock the church at once, Merrily!” ’ Merrily threw up her arms. ‘Pulls out his mobile, brings up the police number, which he appeared to have in his index. “OK,” I say, “but I’m locking it from the outside, I’ve not got time to sit around here…” “No, no! You can’t leave me on my own with all this money!” I said, “Ted, I’ve just dragged it all the way along the bloody cobbles, from the vicarage, on my own.” ’

‘So where is it now?’

‘Probably in his safe at home. I somehow can’t see him surrendering eighty grand to the police for safe keeping. He’ll give them the minimum legal leeway, just to make sure it doesn’t match up with some robbery.’

‘And assuming it doesn’t?’

Merrily shrugged. ‘Goes into the parish coffers. End of story, everybody happy. We just don’t spend any for a while, to be on the safe side.’

‘It’s a lot of money, Mum,’ Jane said soberly. ‘Take a whole canteen of collection plates to accommodate that lot.’

‘Mmm.’ Merrily was remembering a row she’d had with Uncle Ted when she’d decided to abolish the time-honoured practice of sending round collection plates during the final hymn. Let’s not make an exhibition of it, Ted. They can put something in the box on the way out. Ted had insisted this wouldn’t work; people never shelled out unless they were publicly shamed into it. It even emerged that the old bugger had sometimes taken twenty-pound notes from parish funds, placing one on each plate prior to its circulation, setting an example.

‘And Jenny Driscoll didn’t come close to admitting it was her?’ Jane said.

‘Maybe I didn’t push her hard enough, but… I suppose it’s actually quite a considerate thing to do. If it had been a cheque with her name on it, we’d both have felt uncomfortable. Like she owned the place or… me.’

‘Yeah, but secretly you know it’s her. And she knows you know. And nobody else does – just you and her. That makes it altogether more subtle, don’t you think?’

‘Too subtle for me, flower.’

For a few moments neither of them spoke. The only sound was Ethel the cat at her bowl, crunching dried food.

‘You know your problem, don’t you?’ Jane was carefully inspecting her nails. ‘You’re becoming unworldly.’

reared up. ‘Me?’

Merrily

‘Obvious side effect of Deliverance.’ Jane put her hand down and met Merrily’s stare across the table. ‘Like, in the job, if you’re exorcizing some house or something, it has to be that it’s not you doing it, it’s God. You’re just the vehicle. If in doubt, butt out. God will find a way.’

‘No.’

‘Think about it,’ Jane said. ‘She’s targeted you. All that bollocks about seeing an angel over your church. And then she bungs you eighty grand. She wants something. You’re in the cross-hairs, vicar.’

Merrily took in the kid’s serious face, the hair – darker now – pushed back behind her ears. A face she hadn’t seen before? She felt a stirring of panic, very glad now that there were some aspects of that unnerving couple of hours in the incense air below Chapel House that she hadn’t told Jane about.

She finally flared a little. ‘Somehow, I just can’t help being a little surprised at hearing the rational, not to say cynical argument from someone who used to stand on the lawn on nights of the full moon and solemnly utter ritual incantations.’

‘I was a kid then!’

‘It was last year!’

‘Look…’ Jane planted both palms flat on the table, leaning across. ‘Doesn’t this worry you in the slightest? She might look like a wilting snowdrop, but what you have here is an ex-TV person, a top businesswoman with shops all over the place who’s probably never been known to do anything that wasn’t for publicity…’

‘The money’s for the church, not me.’

‘Your church.’

‘What – you think I should take it back?’

Jane shook her head helplessly. ‘I don’t know. But I should be really, really careful, if I were you.’

Merrily said nothing. She was hearing Jenny Box from the square, the other night. It isn’t over, you see… those things aren’t over… those things have hardly begun. No, she didn’t know what that meant either.

‘Because, if you think God’s going to see you right, protect you from whatever devious shit—’

‘Jane—’

‘Like he protected Gomer. Like he protected Nev.’

Merrily closed her eyes. Not tonight, please. ‘All right.’ She breathed in and out slowly. ‘All right, I didn’t do very well, did I? There were things I should have asked her that I didn’t. Maybe I had a lot on my mind, with this… police thing. Which is probably all over now, anyway.’

‘All over? Not for Gomer it isn’t! Not for Lol either, who probably wouldn’t have got involved at all if you—’

‘What?’

Jane shrugged sulkily. ‘Just something else you’re letting slip away, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ This is not going to become a row. ‘I’ve tried to ring him several times.’

‘Maybe you’ve got more problems than you know, Reverend. Maybe Uncle Ted’s actually right—’

‘I do not—’

‘—when he says Deliverance is taking over your life. And he doesn’t even know what it’s done to your basic common sense.’

Merrily’s lips tightened. Bloody teenagers. What a great shame it was that there wasn’t some kind of hormone-reduction therapy.

‘So how did you leave it with the Driscoll woman?’ Jane said. ‘Like, thanks for the cakes and see you in church?’

‘She…’ Merrily stared into her cooling tea. ‘She asked me to do something for her. She wanted me to formally reconsecrate her private chapel. In the cellar.’

Jane’s smile was three parts sneer. ‘And?’

‘No consecrations. But a blessing, yes. Probably.’

The kid’s exhaled breath was like a slow puncture. The kitchen seemed bigger and felt colder.

‘Well, what was I supposed to say, Jane? It’s what I do!’

And of course what you do is of major spiritual, like cosmic significance. Even though it’s all f— fantasy. Whereas, us down here… I bet… I bet you don’t even know about Lol’s first gig in twenty years.’

‘Lol?’ Merrily whispered. ‘Gig?’

The rain fell steadily on the field at the back of the bungalow. Lol held the rubber-covered lambing lamp over a spot just off- centre, lighting up a circle of green and yellow. He could hardly flex his fingers any more. He thought that if he were to lie down now in the cold, wet grass, he’d probably be asleep within a few seconds.

‘Yere.’ Gomer bent down, pushing his fingers through the grass. ‘Just about yere. Sure t’be.’

Where Gomer’s hands were, you could see the soil level was lower, the grass a slightly different shade. Before locating this spot, Gomer had spent no more than twenty minutes scouring the site as if he was dowsing for water – sometimes pulling back bushes and brambles, getting Lol to shift piles of building rubble.

A circle of police was forming around them, as Gomer came triumphantly to his feet alongside Lol and the lamp.

‘’Bout last spring, I reckon, this was dug up. No later’n that. Try it, anyway, I would. You’ll know soon enough.’

Bliss was sauntering up, looking less than impressed, when a howl of outrage exploded over the heads of the circle of cops.

‘You don’t wanner take no notice of that ole fuck! He’s well past it, he is! He don’t know what he’s—’

In the choked silence, Lol was aware of the razory thrumming of the power lines.

Then a chuckle. One of the uniformed police fisted his palm in glee. Frannie Bliss, smiling in the lamplight like a freckled cherub, punched Gomer joyfully on the upper arm.

‘Thank you, Roddy. Thank you, God.’

Laughter. You could feel the current passing around the circle.

Bliss beckoned the policewoman. ‘Gomer, this merits a nice

‘plastic cup of tea, which Tiffany here will provide for you, if I’m not being sexist there. And an Eccles cake?’

‘Welsh cake, boss,’ the policewoman said.

‘Sorry, Tiff.’ Bliss was still smiling as he handed Lol the spade. ‘Take it slowly, son.’

Like he could take it any other way. Quite when he began to tremble, he wasn’t sure. He was just suddenly aware of doing it. It could’ve been the cold, because it was cold, and it was wet and the earth was clammy. But he knew it wasn’t that; he’d been cold and wet most of the day.

His head was full of rumbling: they’d brought two cars round the back, with their engines running and the headlights on full beam. He was caught in the lights, the star attraction, sweating under the scrutiny of a hyper-attentive audience – Lol Robinson on stage for the first time in nearly two decades, Lol Robinson performing live, digging up the dead.

He was directly under the power lines – heavy-gauge black strings on a fretboard of night cloud. The spade was about eighteen inches down now, raising a little hill of muddy soil and wedges of clay at the side of the hole. Lol’s glasses had misted up and the spade was feeling sledgehammer-heavy, pulling him down, the way the old solid-body electric guitar had done once, on stage with Hazey Jane – Lol sagging under the responsibility, the knowledge that all he had to do was touch a string with a fingernail – the wrong string, the wrong note, the wrong chord – and there would be this hall-filling blast. A power he didn’t want, the amplification of his inadequacy.

His head felt hot. The sweat on his face was like cream. Moira Cairns said smokily in his head, Let me get this right: if you reappear on stage now, the 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?’

Lol hated it here. The half-imagined zinging of the power lines was like the panting of old amps on stage, and like every chord he played, every spadeful he dumped on the heap at the side of the hole, they landed on it, pulling it apart, mauling it: blurred figures in boots and uniforms. Spotlit from several angles, Lol had the clear sensation of digging his own grave, like some prisoner of war, surrounded by uniforms, and he didn’t even notice when the spade found something – something that was actually not softish – until Frannie Bliss, his Liverpool accent cranked up to distortion level, was bawling:

‘Stop! What’s dis? What’s dis, what’s dis…?’

A skull? A human skull caked in clay? Lol was out of there fast, gripping the spade with both hands.

‘Leave it,’ Bliss said, as if people were going to rush to the thing in the hole like it was a holy relic. He snatched a lamp and shone it down. ‘Spade, Laurence.’

Bliss grabbed the spade from him and stood astride the hole. Handing the lamp to Mumford, he started to probe with a corner of the blade. Lol found himself next to the lawyer, Mr Nye, who turned away from him, like Lol had flakes of dead flesh on his arms.

‘Hang on,’ Bliss said. ‘What the… ?’ Lol saw something in the hole that was dull and grey and blistered with earth. Bliss said, ‘Right. Fetch Roddy. Now.’

He got the spade under it and levered it half out.

It was not a skull.

‘Suitcase, boss?’ One of the police crouched down. The curved, shiny bit, Lol saw, was a metal corner-support.

‘Too small.’ Bliss looked down in disgust, like a kid on Christmas Day who didn’t get the bike after all. ‘Attaché case, more like. Feels like it’s bloody empty. I said, fetch Roddy!’

Lol, thinking he was maybe the only person here who was relieved, walked away from the lights towards the shelter of the garage.

Hands in leather seized his left arm and spun him around. White flashlight speared his eyes. All around him, there was heavy movement in the mud, scuffling, panting. Torch beams were intersecting erratically in the rain.

When they let him go without an apology, he realized something had happened.

‘Oh shit.’ Panic scraping a young copper’s voice. ‘I can’t bleeding believe this.’

The initial stampede had been constrained. Procedure now. They were fanning out, covering the ground, lamp and torch beams pooling.

Someone had gone into the bungalow and put on all its lights. The whole compound was lit up now, multiple shadows climbing the windowless back wall of the garage.

‘Somebody,’ Bliss said through his teeth, ‘is going down for this.’ The hoarsened edge to his voice suggesting that he was getting worried it was going to be him.

The hole in the grass lay abandoned. Someone had taken the case away. There was no stench of decaying flesh, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a body down there, somewhere. Lol stayed away from the hole. Only Roddy Lodge could explain this, and he wasn’t around. Roddy Lodge had taken a personal decision that his presence here was no longer essential. He’d just walked away into the darkness.

‘Can’t’ve got out of here,’ Mumford kept saying. ‘That’s for certain. I know this place now, end to end, and if everybody’s stayed in place, he cannot have got out.’

‘You better be right, sunshine, for all our sakes.’ Bliss turned to the lawyer, ‘And if you—’

‘He was ill.’ Mr Nye had his arms folded and kept looking over his shoulder. Lol instinctively looked over his: how dangerous was Lodge? ‘He was ill,’ the lawyer insisted. ‘There was no question at all that he was ill.’

‘I’m not feeling too marvellous meself, pal, and if I thought for one minute that when you asked for those handcuffs to come off—’

‘Don’t be absurd!’

This man’ – Bliss’s forefinger came out like a gun – ‘is a suspected multiple murderer. So don’t you go anywhere, Mr Nye.’

‘Is that a thr—?’

‘And who the fuck,’ Bliss roared out, staring past Mr Nye, ‘let these bastards in?’

Maybe it was the kids driven away from the perimeter tape who’d spread the word. But it wasn’t just kids this time. Lol thought of a football crowd filing through turnstiles. Only with lamps and torches.

‘Jesus, it’s a fuckin’ circus!’

The group of people moving along the path on one side of the garage building was led by a tall woman in a long stock- man’s coat. A lone PC behind them spread his arms, helpless.

‘Sorry, sir, they—’

‘Get back to the entrance! Now!’ Bliss walked up to the woman. ‘Mrs Sollars, you should know better than this. We’re not running a funfair here.’

‘Then what are you running?’ a man demanded. ‘You’ve spent the whole day digging up people’s gardens with abandon. I suppose you thought you were being discreet.’ He looked down at two children. ‘Miles… Ffion… home, please. I did ask you before.’

One of the kids said, ‘Aw, Fergus!’

‘Or there may have to be proportionately less time on line for the whole of next week,’ the man said calmly.

The woman said, ‘If you’d had the common decency, Inspector, to keep the community informed—’

‘Oh, pardon me,’ Bliss snarled. ‘I’ll have a special flyer pushed through everybody’s door next time. Look, I don’t have time for this. You’d better go over and stand by that wall, all of you, and stay together, you understand me? Because if any of you gets in my way, I’m gonna do you for obstruction, and that’s not—’

‘You’ve mislaid him, haven’t you?’ a man with a white beard said. ‘You don’t have Roddy right now.’

‘I’m telling you not to come any further. Stay together. And

‘don’t let anyone else in here. Can you do that? Can you do that for the sake of the community?’ Bliss began to walk away.

The bearded man said, ‘You don’t look very far, do you?’ He had a vaguely transatlantic accent. He wore a loose denim jacket and a plaid cap, and he had a canvas bag hanging from a shoulder strap. Also good night-vision, Lol figured; although he didn’t have a torch, he was peering around into the dark areas.

Bliss continued for a couple of paces and then stopped.

Lol saw exactly where the bearded man was gazing.

Up.

19 On Angels

JANE HAD GONE upstairs for a bath, leaving Merrily hunched by the sitting-room fire, feet in woolly socks, cardigan buttoned to the top, but still feeling cold. She pulled St Thomas Aquinas from the shelf: Aquinas on Angels. Intellectual exercise could sometimes deflate anxiety.

She opened the paperback, immediately shut it again, snatched up the cordless and tried Lol’s phone. It was now over a week since she’d seen him, and, OK, it felt very much longer – really, what kind of relationship was this? To Jane, for whom two nights without a call from Eirion was cause for sleep-loss, it must look like a trial separation.

Merrily felt angry, frustrated, losing her grip – a marionette with its strings pulled in different directions by Jenny Box, Uncle Ted, Frannie Bliss and… Jane? Like, what had happened suddenly to turn the kid into the self-appointed voice of rationality in this household?

‘The phone you are calling is switched off…’

Inevitably.

Nearly two hours into darkness, now. Were they still out there digging for Frannie’s corpses on the windy fringe of the Forest? Merrily tapped in Gomer’s home number, on the off chance that they were out of there.

‘This yere is Gomer Parry Plant Hire. We en’t in, but that don’t mean we en’t available, so you be sure and leave your number.’

Damn.

Merrily hit end and tossed the phone on the sofa. Slumping down with the book, she found St Thomas Aquinas no more accessible.

It is not necessary that the place where an angel is should be spatially indivisible; it can be divisible or indivisible, greater or less, according as the angel chooses, voluntarily, to apply his power to a more or less extended body. And the whole body, whatever it be, will be as one place to him.

She read the paragraph twice more. You could always rely on Thomas to make you feel totally thick. Hard to imagine a mind this colossal functioning within a society of bows and arrows, boiling oil, trial by ordeal… but then, inside grey walls in the thirteenth century, with no TV or radio or phones or kids, only a solitary circle of candlelight, a trained intellect powered by spiritual energy might well acquire laserlike focus.

In the dog grate, a mix of coal and apple logs burned with an intensity that she could neither feel nor find in herself. To be a serious student of Aquinas, theology was not enough. You also needed to be Stephen Hawking.

An angel is in contact with a given place simply and solely through his power there. Hence his movement from place to place can be nothing but a succession of distinct power contacts.

What she was hoping for was… OK, a sign. Like, sometimes, you could open a book – it didn’t have to be the Bible – to a random page, and the solution would be there, as though at the end of a shaft of light. The answer might not depend on a literal interpretation of the text; it might be a certain metaphor which sprang a diversion, lit some indirect path to an unexpected truth.

Jenny Box: what the hell does she want from me?

Jenny’s angel: was that a metaphor, or what? A person coming from New Age spirituality – from earth-powers, shamanism and healing crystals – to Christianity would probably need some kind of visionary incentive, real or imagined. Jenny Box would have to find ample metaphysical justification for her move to an obscure village in Herefordshire: Ledwardine as Glastonbury, Ledwardine as Lourdes. Just as Merrily herself often wondered if she’d been washed up here for a reason – at college, she’d always seen herself as an urban priest, firing faith in concrete alleys full of vomit and discarded syringes.

She lay back on the sofa with the Aquinas paperback on her lap, closed her eyes and saw four possibilities:

1. Jenny Box had hallucinated the angel.

2. Jenny Box had invented the angel.

3. An optical illusion.

4. An angel.

Floodlit by a dozen small lamps, it looked like a gigantic headless metal puppet, with six arms rigidly outstretched – wires from its pendulous fingers, wires from its elbow joints.

If there was a formidable elemental force travelling those wires, the pylon itself looked dangerously unstable, Lol thought. And archaic. A skeletal survivor of the days when cars broke down every few weeks and a single computer filled a whole room.

This was your standard National Grid tower, the bearded man in denims had explained in his relaxed, tour-guide kind of way. He’d hung around with Lol when the adrenalin kicked into Frannie Bliss. There were over fifty pylons in this part of the valley, he said, and this was one of the big ones. It was carrying 400,000 volts.

And Roddy Lodge.

Lodge was about forty feet up, like a crawling insect, not far beneath the first pair of arms, at the end of which the live powerlines were coiled around insulators resembling hanging candles of knobbly green glass.

Lol heard Bliss telling someone to call for an ambulance and the fire brigade. He was standing about twenty feet from the pylon’s splayed legs of reinforced steel, hands in the pockets of his hiking jacket, more controlled now that he could see his prisoner again – could see that the prisoner had nowhere to go.

Nowhere in this world.

Lol wiped his glasses on the sleeve of his jacket. It had stopped raining, but the wind was up. The wires were zinging in his head. Vicarious vertigo.

‘You’re not with the police, then,’ the bearded man said. Directly in front of them was the abandoned excavation, the spade still sticking out of it. From here they could see the whole of the pylon, maybe 150 feet tall, and the shape of Howle Hill behind it, a black thumbprint on the sky.

‘I’m just one of the gravediggers,’ Lol said.

‘That mean I can actually talk to you without I get told to climb back on the school bus and leave it to the grown-ups?’

‘Least the police don’t have guns,’ Lol said, hoping he was right about this.

‘One of the reasons I came home, my friend. Protest about something in New Labour Britain, you don’t get shot, you just get patronized. Name’s Sam Hall, by the way.’

‘Lol. Lol Robinson.’ He saw that Sam Hall was older than he’d first appeared, well into his sixties, maybe beyond that – that backwoods-pioneer look grizzling over the years.

‘Tough day, Lol?’ Sam said mildly. As if they were unwinding at something not over-exciting, like crown-green bowling.

Before Lol could reply, a woman screamed. He saw Roddy Lodge gripping an overhead girder, swinging himself, apelike, into a steel V, finally wedging there. The orange overalls might have been designed to make him conspicuous in a pylon at night, like a warning beacon for aircraft.

‘Aw, Roddy!’ A small shrillness under Frannie Bliss’s voice as he called up, ‘Roddy, you daft bugger, where’s this gonna get yer? Tell me that, eh?’

No answer.

‘That’s because he doesn’t know,’ Sam Hall said to Lol.

‘Sorry?’

‘’Less, of course, he has an end in mind.’

Lol glanced sharply at him.

‘Which would depend on whether he’s done all they say he’s done,’ Sam Hall said.

‘How much danger’s he in?’

‘Boy, we’re all of us in danger from those monsters. I could name you three, maybe six people’d be alive today if they’d lived the other side of that hill. But Roddy… My guess would be that he’s done this before. You’ll notice somebody already cut through the barbed wire the power guys snag around the base to stop people climbing – and this is Roddy’s land, so I’d say it was him. Evidently knew where to find the footholds. He’s been up there before. Just look at the guy go…’

Roddy was moving again, pulling himself onto the first of the great arms, about sixty feet up now, lamp beams following him.

‘For God’s sake,’ a woman shouted from behind them, ‘can’t anyone get him down?’

‘Not possible, Ingrid,’ Sam Hall said, although there was no way she could hear him. ‘Not worth the candle,’ he said to Lol. ‘Tower’s earthed, so anyone standing on it’s earthed, too. Electricity will do anything to hitch a ride to the ground. What happens – he gets too close, it’s gonna jump him, and I wouldn’t like to be the person holding on to his feet when it does.’

‘You know a lot about it.’ Lol had his hands deep in his pockets, hunched against the shivering. ‘Worked in the power industry?’

Sam Hall let out a big, echoing laugh that sounded a little shocking in this situation, like it was bouncing around the valley. ‘Partner, what I do is I work against the power industry.’

Roddy Lodge had come fully to his feet. He was standing on the arm, a yard or so out from the shoulder, holding on to a diagonal steel bar with one hand. On the ground, the policewoman, Tiffany, and a male colleague were arranging a sheet of white plastic over the hole Lol had dug, weighting down the edges with bricks from a pile of building rubble.

‘Fact is,’ Sam Hall said, ‘a bunch of fat cats here and over in the US would give just about anything in the whole world to have me up there, ’stead of that poor sucker.’

A gasp of wind hit Roddy and he swayed and lost his footing and slipped down between two girders and hung there, his feet dangling in space.

‘Christ,’ Lol whispered. Three police officers ran, amid screams, towards the pylon.

‘Could be safer if he dropped now,’ Sam Hall said. ‘He doesn’t hit metal on the way down, he might not die. All depends on what he wants out of this.’

‘This is a little early for you, cariad,’ Eirion said.

‘How’s the party?’

‘Yn Cymreig. I’m having to watch my grammar.’

‘The whole party’s in Welsh?’ Jane sat on the edge of her bed, wrapped in the big bath towel.

‘My step-gran’s discovered cultural correctness in her old age. And her heritage – distant cousin of Saunders Lewis, see.’

‘You’ve lost me already.’

‘Anyone who wants to speak English is finding it expedient to go outside,’ Eirion said. ‘Bit like having a fag out on the balcony.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said, ‘another world. Is that where you are now?’

‘I’m in the kitchen. But not, I have to tell you, because my Welsh isn’t wholly fluent. Where are you?’

‘My bedroom. Just got out of the bath. Goose bumps everywhere.’

She heard Eirion moan faintly.

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

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

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

‘Thank you.’

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

‘Decades,’ Eirion said obliquely.

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

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

‘Irene, this is—’

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

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

‘And she lives in your village.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘You did.’

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

‘Meaning what?’

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

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

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

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

‘Huh?’

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

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

‘I don’t think you mean that, Jane.’

‘How would you know what I mean?’

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

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

‘Surfing for shit?’

‘Just help me, Eirion.’

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

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

‘That’s not fair.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Roddy, can you hear me?’

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

‘NO!’

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

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

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

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

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

Silence.

‘Roddy, if you—’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fragment of silence.

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

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

He tore past Lol, making for the cars.

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

‘No.’

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

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

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

He saw a tiny red glow tracking across the field.

‘Lodge!’

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

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

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

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

‘YOU KNOOOOOOOOW!’ A roar of pain.

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

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

‘I DONE IT!’

Gomer bounced. ‘What? Where?’

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

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

‘YOU KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gomer reached them, muttering.

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

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

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

20 Stadium Rock

THEY SEEMED to have awoken at about the same time, in the still hollow of the early hours. Merrily sensed him becoming aware, by touch, that she was actually here, in this strange bed, in this unknown timber-framed chamber that was strange to her, too – she’d never slept in here before, the air was different, the sounds in the walls.

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

Done it.

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

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

Sin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gomer said, ‘And I figured you’d wanner know, anyway.’

Know?

Evidently, this had not turned out as expected. Looking at Gomer now was reopening narrow channels of anxiety. Merrily hadn’t asked about anything, only offered him some tea and something to eat, which he’d declined, claiming that if he sat down, he wouldn’t get up till morning.

She’d watched him tramping back to his truck, small and grey against the remaining lights of Ledwardine. There was only one other vehicle parked on the square. She’d gone back in and made some tea for Lol and left him to drink it while she slipped upstairs and quickly made up a bed – in the fifth bedroom, the small one at the back of the house, over the kitchen and therefore warmer than most of them. Also, well away from the stairs leading to Jane’s attic.

‘We’ll talk in the morning,’ Merrily had said.

Lol had wanted to tell her everything now, but she’d slipped away to run a bath for him. He was here, in her home. What else mattered?

A lot, but it would wait. While he was in the bathroom, she’d stolen most of his clothes and loaded them into the washing machine. When she came back upstairs nearly an hour later, dressed for bed, he was still wrapped in the towel, lying on his stomach on the single divan in the fifth bedroom.

She’d stood looking at him for quite a while, his compact body, his wet hair, before taking away the towel and covering him with the duvet. Then she’d set her alarm clock on the window sill, knelt and prayed silently, and then slipped in next to him, putting out the light.

‘So we… we went back,’ Lol said. ‘How could we not?’

They had their arms around one another, holding themselves together in the narrow bed in the darkness.

‘Chaos. People screaming and pushing, as if they thought the whole area was in danger of becoming electrified. Couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’

She was visualizing it, recalling the pylon standing over the bungalow in a whole valley polluted with pylons.

‘Bliss went crazy. Had everybody thrown out, except Gomer and me – and that was only because he wanted to give Gomer a bollocking.’ Lol stared into the dark. ‘Gomer was right. It turned into a public execution.’

‘He wasn’t still… up there?’

‘No, he fell off. When we got back to the field, he was lying at the foot of the pylon. Someone said he was still twitching, but I couldn’t…’

‘But you didn’t actually see it happen?’ Wanting him not to have. Detailed images lived for years in Lol’s head. Today had left multiple bruises and scratches on his body and his face, and that was enough.

‘I don’t know.’ His hand tightened around her upper arm, against the memory. ‘It’s all mixed up with what other people said they saw. There was a bang. A flash of light. He was all lit up for a moment, somebody said.’

Merrily was picturing Roddy Lodge’s angular, jutting, puppet face jerking in spasms. She shuddered. Was this really where he’d wanted to end up, when he’d slipped quietly away from the police? She recalled him screaming at Gomer that night at the Pawson house: Chicken, then, is it? You chickenshit?

‘When we saw him afterwards,’ Lol said, ‘I didn’t know what to expect. Whether he’d be… burned to a crisp. But it doesn’t… this guy told me it’s like a microwave… cooks from the inside.’

‘But was he trying to kill himself? Did he know what he was doing?’

She was feeling leaden inside now, with guilt and remorse, recalling that initial relief when she’d been spared a meeting with Roddy Lodge at Hereford Police Station – because of the intervention of his solicitor, who had insisted his client was mentally ill. Why had Lodge wanted to see her? What had he wanted to tell her that he was refusing, at least at that stage, to tell the police? And would it have made a difference?

Lol said, ‘In the end, he was holding out his arms. Standing there, on the arm of the pylon, spotlit from all directions, and he’s suddenly flinging out his arms. Bliss had been shouting up to him about the dangers. He shouted back that he was electric already. This was some minutes before he… before the electricity jumped into him. There was this guy there, called Sam, and he’d said that was what might happen. Whether the wind or the rain made a difference, I don’t know, but he couldn’t’ve touched anything. His fingers must’ve been at least a couple of feet from this… hanging thing, the insulator, hanging down from the second arm, above him.’

‘This was just after he confessed?’

She felt his face move against her hair – Lol nodding.

‘So Gomer…’

‘Bliss obviously blamed Gomer for pushing Lodge to the brink. The confession… obviously that was what Bliss wanted, but not in public. The way it happened, it was like Lodge was – I don’t know…’

‘Stealing his glory,’ Merrily said. ‘Stealing the case right out of his hands and giving it to everybody. Stealing the whole judicial process. Roddy Lodge having the last laugh, hijacking Frannie’s result. And Gomer…’

‘Gomer wasn’t laughing.’

‘He’d got what he wanted. Roddy did confess to the fire. And Nev? What about Nev?’

‘He said he… fried the fat bastard. So Gomer got his confession, too, finally. It was really odd. All the way back here, he said hardly a word. You’d expect some kind of cathartic reaction. But not a word. I think Gomer was seriously stunned.’

‘You travelled all the way back in silence?’ Merrily felt around on the oak-boarded floor for her cigarettes.

‘No, he talked about this and that – the tanks and why we hadn’t found any bodies underneath them. How that was one secret Lodge had taken to his grave. Which, of course, is another problem for Bliss. Nobody’s going to tell him where to look now. He could dig up half the county and still not get close.’

‘Lot of explaining ahead for Frannie, I’d imagine.’ She thought about Bliss and his ‘messy’ home life and the Job – only the police gave it a capital J – becoming his refuge. It wasn’t going to be much of one now. His superiors would want to know exactly how he came to mislay his prisoner, why he’d sat on the case, kept it to himself, hired the volatile Gomer Parry to dig up septic tanks installed by a man Gomer believed had murdered his nephew.

She wondered how much of a basis Bliss had really had for bringing Roddy Lodge out to Underhowle, how much Lodge had actually told him in the interview room. Evidently he’d admitted to several killings, but had he given any indication of why? Serial killers had become a species, their motives taken for granted. They were male predators, and that was it, jungle carnivores, bringing down young women like gazelles, to be pawed and raked at leisure.

Leave it. Merrily peered at the old luminous alarm clock in the window; she didn’t want to oversleep and have Jane find them here in the morning… even though the kid would probably be delighted.

Hell it was the morning. In three minutes’ time it would be Hell, four a.m.

Lol said suddenly, ‘I felt sorry for him.’

‘Bliss?’

‘Lodge.’ His voice sounded distant, detached. His arm went slack around her. ‘That’s not right, is it? How can anybody feel sorry for a man who killed women?’

Merrily said, ‘It’s a… Christian thing.’

Trite.

‘Empathy,’ Lol said. ‘I saw him up there, and I seemed to feel what he was feeling. Or it translated itself. It was like stadium rock. All the lights. Pink Floyd or something. Crazy.’

Or something. Merrily said, ‘When’s the gig?’

‘Oh. Next week. Wednesday.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I… In case…’

‘You mean you’re considering not doing it.’

‘It’s a Moira Cairns concert. That’s all it says on the posters. Nobody would be the wiser.’

‘I’m going to order some tickets.’

‘Don’t do that. I can get you some. She’ll be worth seeing.’

She.

‘I want to buy them,’ she said, ‘out of my meagre stipend.’

‘Merrily—’

‘Shush.’

They’d agreed that in the morning he would stay up here until Jane wasn’t around, and then he’d slip quietly away through the orchard to pick up his car at Gomer’s. No one would know. Merrily felt tearful.

‘Why did you do it? Why did you offer to go with Gomer?’

‘I like Gomer.’

She reached for his hand; it felt like half-set concrete. ‘Feels like you won’t be able to pick up a guitar for days.’ She stiffened. ‘Is that why? Is it?’

He kissed her naked shoulder. ‘And I sensed people wanting him to die. I was sure I sensed people wanting to see him die.’

Lol sighed, as if this was something he needed to get out of himself. Merrily was about to say something when she realized he was asleep.

She kissed his forehead and wondered if he was dreaming about Roddy Lodge. Or Moira Cairns.