The Lamp of the Wicked

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IT WAS DURING her sermon the following Sunday that Merrily realized it wasn’t over – that Roddy Lodge, though dead, wasn’t out of her life.

This morning, she’d awakened at five a.m., or thereabouts, after the return of that old recurring dream: the one where she suddenly discovered she was living in a house with three floors, after thinking there were only two. And on the third floor was something dreadful, and she knew that she’d have to go up there and face it alone.

She was moving very slowly up the second staircase, the fear of reaching the top intensified by the inability to turn back – in dreams, turning back never seemed to be an option – when the dark upper landing suddenly came into view, and then she was at the top, and the first strange door was just above her and beneath it was a thin grin of icy, violet light.

This was enough. Ejecting in terror from the dream, Merrily had rolled over, with an urgent need to be held. But the bed was wide and empty and outside the uncurtained window the boughs of old apple trees were creaking in the sour October wind.

Alone.

For two nights after Lol had gone, she’d gone back to the fifth bedroom, slept in the single bed they’d shared, before returning despondently to her own, bigger room. Sad, huh?

And puzzled and unhappy, because now she actually was living in an old house with three floors, and Jane was in possession of the attics. She thought she’d dealt with the third floor.

Here in church, there were more stairs she preferred to avoid: the polished wooden steps to the pulpit. She knew she should really be up there this morning: little woman, big congregation, even for October when they tended to increase because there were no lawns to mow and the kids had stopped demanding days out. Here, close to the front, sat Big Jim Prosser from the Eight-till-Late, which reduced its Sunday opening hours at the end of the tourist season. Here even was Kent Asprey, heart-throb, jogging GP, back with his wife after a midlife-crisis fling. A penitent Kent, with Mrs Asprey – one week only, probably.

Merrily put a tentative foot on the first pulpit step, then backed down again. What she’d been doing during the summer and early autumn, when congregations were smaller and cosier, was to sit on a hassock on the carpeted chancel steps, under the apple screen, and not preach but chat. Sometimes, a few members of the congregation would join in, and there was a sense of warmth and unity. She found it exciting, was never sure where it would lead. One Sunday it had spontaneously opened out, like a flower, into communal meditation.

It was hardly going to happen today. The congregation was like the bed: too big, too cold, too quiet. And swollen by too many comparative strangers whose presence could only be explained by curiosity over rumours of Merrily’s links, through Gomer, with the Roddy Lodge sensation – an electric death still pulsing in Herefordshire like a snaking naked wire.

This was a small county; everybody knew somebody related to the Lodge family or the families of girls and women missing from home – one was from a farm near Staunton, just a few miles from Ledwardine – or at least someone who had considered having an Efflapure system installed. Everyone had been exposed to radio and TV reports and centre-spreads with the same grisly sequence of pictures and tasteless variations on the Daily Star’s:

Villagers watch in horror as man boasts:

‘I’m the biggest serial killer ever’, then is

FRIED IN THE SKY

Underhowle itself was reported to be in a grey state of communal shock. Nearly a hundred people, including children as young as five and six, had heard Roddy Lodge confess, then watched him die. Many were being treated and counselled for the trauma.

And the shock waves radiated outwards.

TRACKS OF THE BORDER BEAST.

On the third day, most of the headlines were variations of this one from the Mail. Where had Roddy Lodge been? Where might he have interred the bodies – Is there a corpse under YOUR septic tank? the Mail asked. The speculation now was that this was a false trail: cold-storing the body of Lynsey Davies in the pea-gravel under the Efflapure had been a one-off emergency measure – maybe Lodge had felt in danger of discovery at the time. Anyway, there would surely have been better options open to a killer with his own JCB.

So the other bodies could be anywhere.

All over Herefordshire and the Forest of Dean, this particularly was a live issue, and Merrily had felt obliged to address it, had assembled a sermon around the life and death of Roddy Lodge. Why did such people exist? Why had God created serial killers?

A difficult one. Why exactly?

It was certainly not a question voiced by the grateful papers, as the search for bodies went on, as police interviewed and reinterviewed the relatives of missing women and girls across five shires, as press and TV cameramen prowled Underhowle, reporters free to speculate now that the killer who had confessed so publicly was never going to face trial.

And the police, in this case, were… who exactly? No mention in the papers of Bliss. Or indeed of DCI Annie Howe. All the press briefings had been given by a Detective Superintendent Luke Fleming. Merrily had never heard of him – must have been from Headquarters. She noticed that there was nothing in any of the papers about Roddy’s taste in bedroom decor. Given that he was dead, why not?

Every day she’d expected her own involvement in the discovery of Lynsey Davies to be disclosed by the police, but despite the local gossip – inadvertently fuelled by Gomer, she suspected, as he pursued the truth about the fire – nobody had approached her.

This morning, preparing for Holy Communion in the early light, she’d decided to dump the Roddy Lodge sermon. It had seemed unnecessary, gratuitous.

Sermon B, then.

She didn’t sit on the hassock, but she didn’t go into the pulpit either; she stood at the side of the lectern.

‘Erm…’

She felt obscurely nervous; she really needed notes for this one, but there was nowhere to conceal them. And because pews were filled further back than of late, she had to project more than she’d become accustomed to. Had to make like a preacher.

‘If we… if we sit down and really think about it, I suspect most of us will remember an occasion when something’s happened, very suddenly, to divert us from a certain course of action. Maybe a flat tyre that stopped you making a particular journey. And then, some time later, you find out that that journey might have led you into a far bigger crisis – a motorway pile-up, or some confrontation that you might not have been able to handle. And then you say – and how often have most of us said this…?’

She leaned out, an arm around the stem of the lectern, found herself locking gazes for a second with James Bull-Davies, three pews from the front.

‘… Perhaps it was meant.’ She stepped back. ‘That’s a useful phrase, isn’t it? Meant by whom? By God? And why should God single us out for salvation? Why should we be diverted from the pile-up that’s going to kill or injure several other people?’ Longish pause. ‘For the Christian, there’s… another option. Suppose we think about that phrase in the context of the possibility of there being’ – she smiled faintly – ‘angels among us.’

Jenny Box was close to the front, to Merrily’s right, washed in amber light from the circular stained-glass window in which a clutch of apples was pensively surveyed by several angels. Jenny Box, with her fine old-gold hair under a small white hat that was almost a skullcap, her eyes unblinking but also unfocused, as if gazing into the ether. Merrily wondered how Thomas Aquinas would have handled this.

‘What do I mean by angels? To be quite honest, I’m not sure. Do I mean heavenly forces, agents of change? Powerful, invisible intelligences capable of assessing a situation, seeing the direction it’s going, anticipating the consequences. And occasionally intervening, sometimes as a result of prayer, but often quite spontaneously. Or so it seems.’

Mrs Box was watching her now. Merrily avoided her gaze.

‘We talk about governments being interventionist or non- interventionist – should they step in and overrule market forces or whatever? It’s always a fine balance and, because governments don’t have Godlike wisdom – or much wisdom at all, you might think sometimes – they often intervene over the wrong issues. But we have to assume that angels… that they never get it wrong.’

She hadn’t had time to prepare this properly. She was opening a can of worms. Were angels messengers of God or aspects of God? To what extent were they independent? Was this the time to mention Ledwardine’s own angel? Not the one with the sword allegedly witnessed spreading its radiance over the church in a thunderstorm but the anonymous one with the bin sack full of used fifties. That would take their minds off Roddy Lodge for a while.

Maybe not. Uncle Ted had whispered to her earlier, as they came into church, that he was still awaiting police clearance on the money. If he didn’t hear anything this week he was damn well getting back onto them.

‘The Bible doesn’t go into too much detail about the nature of angels. They just are. Most of us, if we think about them at all, think of them in the context of particular episodes – usually involving halos and harps and a few gobsmacked shepherds. Or we might mention – with a shiver – something we like to call the Angel of Death, which…’

Merrily looked up at the stained-glass window with the apples. The angels there were solid and looked female, with their extravagant golden curls and small pursed lips.

‘… which we always see as something horribly sinister rather than something gentle and understanding which exists to guide us through what, for most of us, is the only situation since birth in which we are one hundred per cent helpless.’

Jenny Box had lowered her gaze. Merrily thought of all the hospital beds she’d sensed to be enfolded in dark, downy wings. But then – the thought pierced her like a thin blade – what was the Angel of Death doing when the face of Lynsey Davies was turning blue under the savage pressure, her eyes bulging, her tongue—

‘I… As far as I know, I’ve never seen an angel. So I really can’t tell you if they look like the ones in the windows over there – if they’ve got actual wings, or if they’re light and vague, or as invisible as breath. I suspect that angels look… just like us.’

And how many others are dead? Nobody knows. And why? Nobody knows.

‘Some people do claim to have actually seen them in times of crisis, some to have… sensed them.’

She swallowed. Lifted her eyes and her thoughts. Had she sensed them? At her shoulder during a Eucharist? Once, perhaps, on Christmas Day, in an aura of profound holiness, as the bells awoke the valley?

‘Most of us, though, have only seen evidence of what appears to be a practical intelligence which comes out of nowhere to… alter a situation. Now that in itself – that’s such an amazing concept, such a Superman thing, that it’s easy to get carried away, to start looking for angels, looking for evidence of angelic intervention in everything, every little situation.’

She paused, looking around for Jane, who would occasionally slip in at the back, without making a thing about it. No sign of her today. No surprise.

‘My own feeling, for what it’s worth, is that angels are a layer of creation, an aspect of divinity, of which we should be aware. Or more aware. And if we ever have reason to think that an angel has intervened for us, then maybe we shouldn’t just say “Oh, it was meant,” we should spend some time thinking: Why? Why me? Why now?’

What Merrily was thinking right now was that all this sermon had told its listeners so far was that this vicar hadn’t yet worked out where she stood on angels. Or, indeed, on Jenny Box, probably the parish church’s biggest benefactor since the Bull family ran out of spare cash.

She looked into the congregation, perhaps for some guidance on how far to take this, and caught a movement from the bottom end of the nave: Frannie Bliss walking quietly through from the porch.

Frannie Bliss?

But, like several others, Bliss must have left before the after- service tea and coffee – either that or she’d imagined him. Jenny Box didn’t stay, either, but then she never had; she probably considered the serving of refreshments to be misuse of a holy sanctuary. On this one, Merrily would always disagree; this was about giving and sharing and opening up, not taking people’s money.

Sometimes, people would want to discuss aspects of the sermon, but not today. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to disclose a personal angelic encounter. Outside, after everyone had gone, only James Bull-Davies hung around in the churchyard.

It was a James kind of day: stiff, blustery. He angled over, hands behind his back, stared moodily at a windfall apple that had landed on a grave.

‘This Box woman.’

Merrily drew her woollen cape over her surplice, tilted her head to one side, curious. Pulled prematurely from the Army on the death of his father, James had reluctantly shouldered what he perceived to be his family’s burden of responsibility for the village. Lately, however – under the influence of Alison, no doubt – he seemed to have shrugged much of it off, coming to church alone, avoiding the traditional Bull pew, generally adopting a neutral stance on parish issues.

‘Don’t like to interfere, Mrs Watkins.’ He cleared his throat. ‘As you know.’

‘How’s Alison?’

‘Fine.’ He flicked a brittle wafer of lichen from the eighteenth- century headstone opposite the porch. ‘Met the husband, have you?’

‘Husband?’

James folded his arms, looked down at his shoes. He had on a checked shirt and a mud-coloured tie under the old tweed jacket he wore like battledress. ‘Encountered the guy in the Swan, Friday evening. Up here for the weekend. Works in London.’

‘I’ve never met him.’

‘Worried man.’ James gazed over Merrily’s head towards the lych-gate. ‘No one wants a wife playing away.’

Merrily blinked. She got a sudden flashback of James at the height of his crisis, drunk on the square, Alison trying to haul him into the Land Rover. Mistress, he’d called her. And then whore. Ownership. But Alison had been cool about all that.

‘Another man?’ Merrily said. ‘Here?’

‘Good Lord, no.’ James snorted. ‘Gord, Mrs Watkins. Gord!’

‘What?’

‘Has its place, religion – the Church. Always accepted that, as you know. Part of the framework. More of these newcomers we can bring into the fold the better.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Fanaticism, however… something else entirely.’

‘Oh, I see. You mean God is the… the other man.’ She smiled. Church, for James, was a local obligation, a necessary hour of faint tedium on a hard pew smelling of polish. Echoes of public school. James’s school had had masters. When the idea of a woman priest-in-charge had been mooted for Ledwardine, he’d apparently been the first to object. She’d kind of thought that was in the past.

‘Find this amusing, do you, vicar?’

‘James,’ she said, ‘He’s my boss.’ He sniffed. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s not awfully warm here. Do you want to come back to the vicarage? Sit down with a cup of tea and—’

‘No…’ He shook his head quickly. ‘No time, sorry. I just… This is simply the gypsy’s warning, all right? I’m strongly suggesting you keep that woman at arm’s length, if you know what’s good for you. Sorry… don’t mean that to sound like a threat.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Simply that Box told me some things. Guy’d had a few drinks, so I’m treating most of it as confidential. However, presume you know she’s been in psychiatric care?’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’

‘Well, there you are.’

‘But…’ Merrily thought of Lol. ‘We do try not to hold it against people. “Let the loonies come unto me,” sayeth the Lord, “and I shall…” ’

‘Mrs Watkins,’ James said wearily. ‘I realize that taking the piss out of me has become a little hobby of yours, but—’

‘What’s he like?’

‘What?’

‘Mr Box.’

‘Oh.’ He considered. ‘My height, perhaps an inch or two taller. A little older than her, but not appreciably. Keeps himself fit.’ He avoided Merrily’s eyes, inspecting the oak frame of the porch, as if the Bulls still paid for its maintenance.

Yes,’ she said, ‘but what’s he like?’

‘Ex-journalist. Businessman now, handles her shops. Says he does all the work, she wanders round, tweaks a few things. Don’t know these shops myself… decor.’ Saying it like you’d say blue movies. ‘Smoothish type.’

‘Is he still here?’

‘Wouldn’t know. We were only introduced on Friday. Guy’d drifted into the Swan for a few drinks because he was a little tired of sitting there watching his wife reading her Bible and mouthing psalms.’

‘He told you that?’ Behind him, in the churchyard, Merrily saw a tiny tendril of smoke rising.

‘Not in so many words. Conjecture. Look, vicar, I don’t know the ins and outs of it. Never been anyone’s idea of a marriage- guidance counsellor, thank Gord.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘But if Box is blaming anyone’ – James dropped his hand from the oak – ‘then I’d say he’s looking in your general direction. And that’s a bit more than conjecture.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, I… I…’ James glared down towards the lych gate, as though wishing he was out of it. ‘Woman’s got a bit of a crush on you, after all. Pretty common knowledge in the village.’

‘What?’

‘Ah… wrong word, as usual. Sorry. Still… big thing, women getting ordained. More underneath all that than any of us suspected. And you yourself – all this cross-waving, holy-water – I’m simply saying you’ve probably become a… what’s the word?’

‘If you mean role model—’

‘Icon?’

‘Bloody hell, James.’

‘Wrong word too, is it? Shut your mouth, James.’

‘Bloody hell.’

She was shocked, couldn’t look at him. As they walked out under the lych gate, she glanced back down the crooked alley of

graves to where she’d seen the smoke. Gomer Parry was sitting in his usual spot on Minnie’s grave, a roll-up in his mouth.

‘Poor old Parry.’ James had followed her gaze. ‘Never bloody rains, eh? They buried his nephew yet?’

‘Next week. After the opening of the inquest.’

‘Bad show. Didn’t notice him in church. Having problems with the old faith, you think?’

Merrily said nothing. Gomer always went to Minnie’s grave when he had something to work out. Along with Minnie, he’d buried both their watches, with new batteries. Gomer’s was one of the old kind which, despite the batteries, still ticked loudly. Sometimes, he’d said, he thought he could still hear it. Helped him think.

She watched the smoke rise from Gomer’s ciggy, darkening the day, a signal of distress. Something was wrong. After he’d told Minnie, maybe he’d tell her.

When they reached the square, she said to James, ‘You going to come and discuss this thing in private? Tell me what on earth people are saying?’

‘I think not.’ James sniffed the air. ‘Never been a gossip. Anyway, told Alison I’d be back before one. I’ve said all I wanted to say. Question of watching your back, vicar. Watching your back.’

‘Thank you.’

James merely nodded and walked away with long strides. Merrily looked around the square, as if there might be small knots of people pointing at her and muttering. Maybe the angel sermon hadn’t been such a good idea. Maybe – if Jenny Box had told anyone else here about her vision – it was a very bad idea.

In fact, the square was empty except for Frannie Bliss leaning against one of the oak pillars of the little market hall, munching a Mars Bar.

Merrily sighed.

22 Aura of Old Hippy

LOL TOOK THE call just before one on the kitchen phone at Prof’s. From the studio he could hear a playback of Moira’s ‘Lady of the Tower’, veined now with the seamless cello of Simon St John. Just Moira’s voice and Simon’s cello: experimental.

On the phone, he heard, ‘That you, boy? You know who this is?’

A warm voice, not quite American. Lol was momentarily baffled, before the voice threw up an image of the sepia sleeve of The Band’s second album, all beards and back porch.

‘Sam?’

‘Lol, I hope you don’t mind this intrusion. I got your number through talking to the cop… Bliss? Came over to see me a couple days back.’

‘Has he calmed down now?’

‘I guess you might say that,’ Sam Hall said, ‘though he doesn’t strike me as a man who can handle calm too well. Anyhow, we had a talk, and it, uh… it all came out about you and what you did when you weren’t up to your ass in mud.’

‘That Bliss,’ Lol said. ‘So discreet, it’s a wonder he never made the Special Branch.’ Behind him, Simon’s cello glided over the chasm left by Moira’s voice after the verse where the messenger climbed down from his horse and the night was in his eyes.

So in the afternoon I went on down to the village hall,’ Sam said. ‘They have a community computer room there, courtesy of Mr Cody, and I started to search the Web, and, hey, there you were, boy, all over the show – folks saying how come this guy is a footnote to so many other people’s careers? Where’d he go? Folks all over the world – America, Australia – asking questions about Lol Robinson.’

‘But you didn’t just ring up to scare me.’

Sam laughed. ‘Which, I concede, is the good side of the Web – people talking to each other, sharing enthusiasms. The payback, however, in phone lines, in power, that’s bad, bad, bad. But even a dangerous crank and a madman such as myself has to compromise sometimes… which is how I wound up at Ross Records, and they didn’t have the Hazey Jane albums, but they did have this collection by Norma Waterstone, with “The Baker’s Lament”. And… well, the up and down of it is, you’re good, boy. You… are… good.’

Lol was confused. ‘Thanks. That’s kind of you, but—’

‘I like how you write what are essentially new folk songs. “The Baker’s Lament”, that’s a new song sounds like it’s been around for ever till you really listen to the words, discover it’s a new take on an old theme, and it packs a strong message about what is happening to the countryside. So, the upshot, I wound up buying this Norma Waterstone album.’

‘Er… Waterson,’ Lol said.

‘Some voice, huh? Played it four times last night, used up all of my power ration. Listen, I’m gonna come to the point, Lol. You’re a guy feels strongly about the destruction of the country. You know my take on all that – and the power lines. But you don’t know it all. There is so… much… more.’

‘Well, I’m sure—’

‘And, listen, I don’t mean worldwide, I mean here. I’m talking Underhowle, I’m talking Lodge and I’m talking Melanie Pullman. I talk about this the whole time, and nobody listens to me ’cause I’m this old crank, this lunatic with a chip. I’m the fool on the goddam hill, man, and nobody listens. Wanna cut me off now?’

‘Go on,’ Lol said.

‘You wanna cut me off, you cut me off. Everybody cuts me off sometime. Anyhow, after the boy died the other night, I listened to all my neighbours walking home saying how it was all for the best, save the taxpayers having to keep him in jail for the rest of his miserable life, and I’m thinking, Hell, am I the only person in this whole village sees this as some kind of a tragedy? I’m always saying that – am I the only person in this whole valley knows what’s happening to us all? Anyhow, this time I went home and I started to write myself a poem. Sat up the whole night to finish it – a two-candle poem. And when Bliss told me about you, I started thinking, hey, this is more than coincidence. This is meant to be.’

Not one of Lol’s favourite phrases. Meant to be was a trap.

‘I’m gonna ask you straight out,’ Sam said, ‘I like to be direct. If there’s any way at all that you could find the time to turn this poem into a song – well, I don’t have the money to pay you, but you could keep the song, if you liked the idea. And the cause is good. It’s a world issue and a big one. It’s what my life’s been building towards.’ Sam paused. ‘You still there, boy? You hung up on me yet?’

When Eirion called, Jane was lying on her bed with Ethel the cat and a paperback. As soon as she heard his voice, she thrust the book under the pillow, as if he could see it down the line.

Eirion said, ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you she seems genuine, Jane. There is like no dirt at all on Jenny Driscoll – not on the Net anyway, and I searched hard. In fact, what I’ve read I rather like.’

Jane thought that, with this unnatural thing he was developing for once-good-looking old ladies, his opinion was hardly to be trusted, but she didn’t say anything.

‘Do you want to know now?’ Eirion said. ‘Or shall I print some of it out and fax it over or something?’

‘Can you give it to me potted? I’ll stop you if anything sounds interesting.’

OK.’ Eirion cleared his throat and started to enunciate like it was the voice-over on a TV biog. ‘She was born in County Wicklow into a respectable lower-middle-class family. Father was the manager of a small soft-drinks business. As a teenager, Jenny apparently got itchy feet and sent her picture to a model agency with an office in Dublin. It turned out she had the kind of looks that appealed at the time, and she wound up in London within a year. Someone said she “looked like a girl who bruised easily”. Evidently a famous quote. This was the post-punk New Romantic era, apparently. Terrible clothes, terrible music. And this element of sadomasochism.’

‘Mum was there – I’ve seen the pictures. She was briefly into Goth.’

‘Yes,’ Eirion said thoughtfully, ‘I know.’

‘Lewis…’ Jane gave it serious menace. ‘Kill that fantasy right now.’

Eirion chuckled.

‘OK, so New Romantic.’ Jane knew some of this, but there might be something new.

‘But romantic in a kind of besmirched way,’ Eirion said. ‘Because she looked so vulnerable, they were putting her into these Vivienne Westwood type of things, so that she came across like some kind of teenage streetwalker. Smudged lip gloss and mascara with dribbles, like she’d been crying. Tarnished before her time, you know? It was all a little bit pervy, I suspect.’

‘I’m so glad you recognize it.’

‘She seems to have recognized it, anyway,’ Eirion said. ‘She suddenly packed in modelling at the height of her career, washed off all the make-up and got a job in children’s television, on the production side.’

‘How saintly.’

‘Where she was soon found to have an aptitude for presenting.’

‘What do you know?’

‘And kids liked her because she still had this faintly risqué ‘reputation, so in no time she’s presenting this cult teenage show – she was out of her teens by then, but she didn’t look it. And she eventually became quite popular with parents and older people because there was obviously a genuinely nice person underneath. And, as she got older, she resurfaced, presenting these lifestyle kind of shows – this is the mid- to late nineties, when she was also offered a column on one of the papers – could’ve been the Mail or the Express, I forget, but that was how she met her husband, Gareth Box. A journalist.’

‘Wrote the column for her?’

‘Do you have to be disparaging all the time?’ Eirion said. ‘Box was an assistant editor in charge of features or something but, since she was making so much more money than him, he seems to have packed that in soon after they got married, to manage her career. Maybe she was being exploited.’

‘Hmm,’ Jane said sceptically.

‘Anyway, this was when private TV production was really taking off, and Jenny and her husband came a long way very rapidly and started creating these home make-over type of programmes, with heavy emphasis on feng shui – there was a series for Channel Four which I remember seeing a couple of and it was actually pretty good. And that was when they set up this shop called Vestalia, which very rapidly became a chain and seems to be worth… well, a lot of money.’

‘Never put a foot wrong, then.’

‘But then she backed out of the spotlight.’

‘Or she saw when the spotlight was about to move on. Or they were making so much money that she didn’t need all that bullshit any more.’

‘There was some speculation at this time that the marriage was cracking up,’ Eirion said, ‘although she was never linked with anyone else.’

‘Staying together for the sake of the business?’

‘I don’t know, Jane. They were worth quite a lot by then, because Vestalia was into major cities, and also changing direction. One article I found, from the Telegraph, at the end of last year, was about how she was increasingly into personal development and meditation and spirituality, and he wasn’t particularly, but he went along with it. And it was then that the shops started to really specialize in creating a spiritual home environment. They’d stopped using the phrase feng shui, though, because that was seen as a passing fad.’

‘This is quite good, actually,’ Jane said. ‘We’re getting closer.’

In fact, this was moving nicely in the direction of home chapels.

She slid the paperback book out from under the pillow. It was called Working with Angels, Fairies and Nature Spirits. About a year ago – OK, she would admit this – she’d been finding it seriously inspirational, entirely sensible in its evocation of a complex world with all these different layers of existence, all these forces and incorporeal intelligences you could call on to improve and focus your own life.

Now, however, as a more balanced person, she was simply consulting the book to establish where the Box woman was coming from. Obviously, it helped that not too long ago Jane herself had been just as loopy, but there was method in Jenny’s particular madness; her so-called spiritual development always seemed to run parallel with an increase in material wealth.

The bottom line: this didn’t sound like a woman who gave away eighty grand without some underlying purpose unconnected with her immortal soul.

‘You actually did OK here, Irene.’

‘How very kind,’ Eirion said.

‘No, really, I mean… thanks.’

Maybe she and Eirion, approaching this from different directions – his investigative skills, her background esoteric knowledge – could nail the duplicitous bitch to the wall before Mum got stitched up.

‘What do you do now? How do you respond to this?’ Prof Levin advanced on Lol across the studio floor. ‘What you do now, Laurence, is not respond. That is, you decline… rapido. Because the one thing you, of all people, do not need at this stage is to get in with crazies. So what you do is you call him back and you put it very politely and very firmly. You don’t ask any more questions, you resist all his attempts to make you read the lyric, and you never ever write a song or the merest line of a song that reflects this proposed theme in any way.’

‘Except…’ Lol backed up against the glass-sided recording booth, ‘I kind of—’

‘You then make sure to avoid having dealings of any kind with this person, ever again.’

‘Only I kind of like him,’ Lol said.

‘Jesus.’ Prof feigned an intention to put his foot through the golden weave fronting the Guild Acoustic amp. ‘Of course you liked him. These people, they’re oh so very nice and humble and they tell you you’re Lennon and Dylan and Paul Simon all rolled into one, and they would consider it an honour to, in some small way, serve your art. Pah! Two years later, five, ten… whenever it seems like you’re finally doing OK for yourself, along comes the exceedingly unfriendly letter from their lawyer.’

‘He actually dealt with that,’ Lol said. ‘He said he was prepared to sign the whole thing over to me. Draw up whatever document you like, he said, and I’ll sign it. He said this wasn’t about money.’

‘Laurence, everything, at some stage, is about money. However, this is your funeral.’ Prof turned away, shaking his head, and mooched off towards the kitchen and his cappuccino machine. ‘Make it a noisy one.’

When he’d gone, Moira Cairns leaned back against the outside wall of the recording booth. She wore very tight jeans and a black top, her hair loosely tied behind with a crimson ribbon.

‘So,’ she said, ‘what is the great world issue this guy feels so strongly about?’

‘Electricity,’ Lol said. ‘Pylons, dangers of.’

‘Ah. So this would be a person you met at the, ah, execution.’ Moira came to sit on the amp opposite. ‘Tell me about it. Where’s the guy coming from exactly?’

‘Strong aura of old hippy,’ Lol said. ‘He’s very proud that some elements in the US government and the power companies were glad to get him off their backs. He talks about extensive scientific research linking overhead power lines with everything from brain tumours to leukaemia clusters – research that is constantly ignored.’

‘There’ll be background. There always is.’

Lol told her that Sam Hall appeared to live in a remote cabin on Howle Hill, generating his own electricity with a windmill while putting pressure on the power companies if not exactly to accept responsibility for all the health damage then at least to run more cables underground in rural areas.

‘He says he’s a crank and a loony and proud of it, and he admits to propositioning anyone he thinks might be able to publicize the cause. He says that seeing Lodge dying up there traumatized him into action – again. I mean, if he was asking Bruce Springsteen or Sting to write a song about it…’

Moira put her head on one side. ‘Perhaps he doesnae know Sting and Springsteen. Listen, loony or not, I wouldnae quarrel with the sentiments – I hate those things. There has to be a better way.’

‘Going round with Gomer, I got to see the whole valley. On environmental grounds alone, I’d like to help. Assuming he’s on the level. I mean, we don’t get to do much for anybody, do we, in this business? Not like some people.’

‘Not like your wee friend the Reverend, huh?’ Moira smiled. Lol stared at her in dismay. People always said she was psychic; they didn’t say she had the ability to uncover the hidden motives you hadn’t even admitted to yourself.

‘It’s so charming, the way you blush,’ Moira said. ‘So few guys today can still do that. Laurence, it’s perfectly fine for you to wannae be involved with the stuff in her life. Like I said the other night, a guy who understands the nature of madness…’

He let out a shallow, baffled sigh. ‘There was something else. It was when I was standing there watching this man climbing up towards… eternity. Knowing how it was going to end. And getting a strong feeling of people wanting it to happen.’

‘What, like the audience at the Colosseum or somewhere, willing the emperor to give the thumbs-down to the gladiator who came second?’

‘I don’t know. It was like there was something there to be… understood.’

‘What did you arrange with this guy?’

‘He said come and see him sometime. “Bring your lady,” he said.’

‘Will she go with you?’

‘I… can’t see her having time.’

‘Tell you what.’ Moira stood up. ‘Suppose I were to tag along, check out this guy. I can be quite intuitive, you know? That wouldnae bother you, if I came along?’

‘No, that would be—’

‘Call him, then.’

‘I can’t call him. He doesn’t have a phone. You leave a message for him at the village hall, and he calls you back. There are lots of things he doesn’t have.’

‘Interesting,’ Moira said.

23 Nothing But the Night

‘THE WIFE,’ Bliss said, ‘Kirsty…’ Shovelling a third sugar into his coffee, letting the spoon clang on the tabletop. ‘Aw, it’s dead difficult, Merrily, this personal shite.’

The first thing she’d noticed was that he hadn’t shaved. This wasn’t Frannie. Frannie was dapper, Frannie was tidy.

He drank some of the coffee, made a face.

‘I mean, I’ve gorra say I never really wanted a wife. In some ways it was that simple.’

Merrily rolled her eyes.

‘The police… It’s like you either go at it firing on all four cylinders, day and night, or it’s just a… just a job. Me, I never wanted just work. I’m like you, it had to be a vocation, a calling – and there was never gonna be a wife, not till I was pushing forty anyway, and I certainly never wanted kids.’ There were tears in his eyes now. ‘Needy little twats.’

‘Have you had anything proper to eat, Frannie?’ Merrily asked. He’d told her on the square that he’d give her an hour or so to get changed, get sorted – meaning get Jane out of the way, she guessed – and then he’d come and see her, if that was all right.

‘Nothing for me, thanks.’ He put up both hands. ‘Kirsty… she used to make me take a flamin’ yoghurt to work. She doesn’t bother any more. I miss that.’

He looked out of the window towards the ragged apple trees. There was silence, not even the mouse-scratch of Jane listening behind the door to the hall. Perhaps, Merrily thought, she’d grown out of that and therefore really had gone up to her apartment after lunch. She’d be back at school tomorrow.

‘So she’s a local girl,’ Merrily said. ‘Kirsty.’

‘Shit on her shoes soon as she could walk.’ Bliss made a desolate face. ‘All her family’s sunk into these bloody dead-end farms, all within about ten miles – ma and pa and her old bloody gran and about six thousand aunties. Jesus, they look so normal when you first meet them, country girls. She worked in the fashion department at Chadd’s. She was… very chic. So anyway, that’s why I’m still out here, chasing sheep-shaggers. Before we got married, West Mercia was gonna be strictly short-term. I was looking towards – I dunno…’

‘The Met?’

‘Yeh, maybe the Met. Or even back to Merseyside, with a bit of rank to stand on. But Kirsty, she’d just die in a big city, just curl up and… I’m not kidding, I’m not exaggerating.’

‘I know.’

‘I hate that in her. It’s not how wives are supposed to be, is it? She’s supposed to want to follow me to the ends of… wherever.’

‘Except that wherever you go, you’ve always got your family around you,’ Merrily said. ‘Because your family’s coppers – the Job. And she knows that. And she knows that if she’s stuck in some city suburb and all she has is you and you’re not there half the time…’

‘Very slick, Reverend. Very psychologically acute.’

‘True, though?’

‘Probably,’ Bliss said.

‘Tell me if this is not what you came for. I mean, you could always go to your long-suffering priest for five Hail Marys and a—’

‘Yeh, all right, it’s what I came for. Shuffling round the village square like a stray dog on a Sunday morning. It’s finally come to this.’

Merrily poured herself some black tea. ‘So you made a martyr of yourself. You put your career on the back shelf for love.’

‘Tugging me forelock to fast-track floozies like Annie Howe. Grovelling on me knees to po-faced jobsworth gits like Fleming. Listen, I might not be university-educated, Merrily, but I was doing all right. I’ve had… approaches, you know? You get enough results, it’s still possible to make your own fast track.’

‘Until you fall off it.’

‘Yeh.’ Bliss looked at her. ‘You fall off, you go down the flamin’ embankment so fast, you break both legs. So I’ve gorra simple choice: stay here and rot in an office or bugger off. What a waste. Either way, what a fuckin’ waste.’

‘OK.’ Merrily reached for her cigarettes. ‘Let’s look at the facts. After what happened in Underhowle, this Luke Fleming comes over from Headquarters and decides that you mishandled the case from the start. If you hadn’t kept it all to yourself, played all these wild cards, including Gomer, Roddy Lodge would be safely tucked up in his cell instead of on the slab.’

‘I took a risk.’ Bliss leaned on an elbow, hand cupped around his unshaven jaw. ‘Several risks.’

‘Even I could’ve told you that.’

‘You did.’

‘Mmm, well…’

When you thought about it, he was actually lucky his conduct hadn’t been the subject of an internal inquiry. In fact, with an inquest pending, he wasn’t out of the disciplinary shadows yet.

And yet Merrily couldn’t help thinking that the last time she’d been aware of him bending the rules was when, last summer, he’d passed information to Lol that might well have prevented Annie Howe hanging her out to dry on a very public washing line. Did she still owe him? Did it matter, anyway?

‘I mean, it could have been worse, Frannie.’

‘Suspended. Bumped down to sergeant But that would’ve been a public admission that we fucked up. Still comes down to the fact that I’ve no future in West Mercia now, and the normal thing would be to go on the transfer list. And we know what that means.’

Have you asked her?’

‘Indirectly. We had a big row last night. Ended with me driving off and sleeping in the car. My fault… as usual. When the job’s going well, I’m not there; when it’s not, I’m there but I’m flamin’ unbearable. I could stay on in Hereford, work me shifts, gradually mature into the mellow – but secretly bitter and twisted – old DI who lets the youngsters buy him pints and passes on his wisdom.’

‘How would it be if I had a chat to Kirsty?’

‘And let her know I’ve been telling yer all this? Look… I’ve gorra fair bit of leave owing, as you can imagine. It’s been suggested that I take it now. Kirsty thought it might be a good idea if we left the kids with her ma and went away for a week to try and get ourselves sorted.’

That was a very good idea, Merrily thought.

‘That was what the row was about,’ Bliss said.

Merrily closed her eyes in despair. ‘Oh, Frannie, you clown.’

‘I can’t leave it like this, Merrily. I’ve gorra know.’

‘Know what, for heaven’s sake?’

‘If I was right!’ Bliss leaned heavily on the table, spilling sugar, making his mug and spoon rattle. ‘You know what they’re saying now? You know what Fleming’s saying? He’s saying that what we’re looking at with Roddy Lodge is a one- off, bog-standard, common-as-muck domestic. That he strangled his girlfriend during a drunken barney, figuring he could cover it up with no fuss, but when we pulled him, being the kind of cocky sod he was, he gets carried away with the big-killer image. That was Fleming’s first assessment of the situation. In other words, he’s saying Roddy Lodge, serial killer, was created by me.’

‘Oh.’

‘And then he talks to Roddy’s GP, and then he consults Moffat, the forensic shrink who confirms that Roddy was exhibiting absolutely classic symptoms of advanced manic depression. You see where that’s going?’

‘It…’ Merrily hesitated. Lol would know for sure, but she had ‘a good idea, and it fitted all too well. ‘They lie, don’t they?’ she said glumly. ‘Manic-depressives lie on an industrial scale.’

‘Exactly.’ Bliss smiled icily. ‘In the manic phase, they may tell extravagant lies, which can be very convincing because they half believe it themselves. If it isn’t the truth, they believe it ought to be. In other words, they boast about things they haven’t actually done.’

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

Bliss said, ‘Fleming’s pointing to one thing in particular that Roddy came out with when he was up the pylon. He said he was gonna kill Madonna – we have all this on tape, of course, thanks to some local smart-arse with a video camera. You yourself said he claimed to have done Madonna’s drainage in the Cotswolds. And of course, Madonna doesn’t even live in the Cotswolds – he got that wrong. Her place is down in bloody Somerset or somewhere. Roddy Lodge never got closer to Madonna than pictures in the News of the World.’

‘But what about the other two? Melanie Pullman and the girl from Monmouth.’

‘They’re saying I offered those names to him and he went for them with his tongue out. They say my style of questioning was antiquated and inept, given that we’ve no proof that either of the women are even dead. To deal with it once and for all, Fleming’s hired another firm with five diggers. They’d excavated about fifteen more Efflapures by yesterday.’

‘Nothing?’

He didn’t even answer. Merrily didn’t know what to say. If Roddy Lodge in fact hadn’t been a serial killer at all, if there weren’t any more bodies buried, then that was surely the best possible outcome… except that Frannie would be seen as an ambitious but misguided detective who’d driven a man to his death – a man who, if hardly innocent, was certainly guilty on a far lesser scale than… Oh hell.

Bliss put his hands behind his head and stretched out his legs, talking flat-voiced to the ceiling.

The last thing Fleming said, yesterday afternoon, was that if I’d suggested to Roddy that he’d killed Lord Lucan’s nanny he’d have gone for that, too. He said I was dangerously naive. He said that in my craving for fame and glory, I was probably only slightly less manic than Lodge himself. He said the combustible combination of Lodge and me had created something it was gonna take West Mercia a long time to live down. He said – finally, he said that if he didn’t see me again for the rest of his career he’d consider himself a very fortunate man.’

His hands fell away from his head and he slumped in his chair, his lips compressed into the kind of smile you put on to ward off weeping. He didn’t need a Catholic priest; this was his confession. Merrily wondered if he’d told any of it to his wife; she feared not.

‘Which I thought spelled it out very nicely,’ he said after a while. ‘Pastures new, Frannie, and don’t expect a reference.’

She didn’t even like to ask what Fleming was saying about the incineration, allegedly by Lodge, of Nevin Parry.

Bliss stood up and walked across to the window. ‘Another option, of course, is for me to quit the Service altogether.’

‘Frannie, this is just one man. He might move on himself.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Marked me card now. No, I’ll do exactly as advised: take two weeks off. Use them as best I can.’ He turned away from the window and came up to where she was sitting. She could smell dried sweat on him. She could smell anxiety and frustration, a toxic mix. ‘I’m telling you he did it, Merrily. He did Melanie Pullman and he did Rochelle Bowen. And maybe some more. I could see it in his eyes, I could feel it in me chest. Somewhere, there are bodies.’

‘Oh.’ It was what she’d been afraid of. If the maverick loner cop was history, the suspended cop determined to clear his name was movie history. Anyway, Frannie’s situation was, in a way, worse than suspension: his conduct would not be investigated, the investigation would simply continue without him. An investigation that was no more now than a tying-up of loose ends. Nobody was in danger; the beast was dead, and perhaps he hadn’t been that much of a beast after all.

‘I’m gonna find them, Merrily.’

‘What – commandeer Gomer and Lol again?’

‘I’d pay them.’

‘Frannie, you’re bonkers. You don’t even have anything to go on, do you? You wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘Well, I would, actually,’ Bliss said. ‘If, for instance, we talk about the piccies on the walls—’

‘Part of his fantasy. Despite all this chatting up in pubs, making a fool of himself when he was in his manic phases, he was actually afraid of real live women; he only felt truly safe with dead ones.’

‘Aw, you’re just—’

‘I’m just saying what the shrink’s going to say. I don’t recall you had much to say about Lodge throwing his weight around in the police station. Subdued… uncommunicative… sick… didn’t want to leave his cell. “Hunched up into himself” – I think that’s what your phrase was at the time. The word depressive somehow springs to mind.’

‘All right, then.’ Bliss sat down again. ‘Let’s go back. Put yourself back in that bedroom for a minute. Look at the bed with the nasty black sheets. Sniff the air. Now look at the pictures in half-light from the low-wattage bulbs, so that they’re not like pictures any more; they’re actual shadowy women, right there in the room with you. Flickering about. Moving in the dark. And you know they’re all dead.’

‘But he didn’t kill them.’

‘Tell me you couldn’t feel the evil in there, Merrily. Tell me you couldn’t feel it. As a priest.’

‘I don’t… I don’t know what I felt.’

‘I know what I felt.’

‘It still doesn’t make too much sense, Frannie. You don’t have any kind of scenario for Roddy Lodge as a mass murderer. You don’t even know why and in what circumstances he killed Lynsey Davies, do you? What happens if you don’t find anything to support the theory you don’t yet have? What happens if you go blundering about and you don’t find anything at all?’

Merrily—’

‘I seriously think you should follow Kirsty’s suggestion and go on holiday somewhere quiet and uncomplicated with good food, nice views and room service, and spend a lot of time talking to one another. She’s throwing you a lifeline, if you could only see it. At the end of the week, if you play your cards right, who knows how the situation might’ve changed? I mean, I’d be the first to miss your famous scowl around the place if you went back to Merseyside, but—’

‘Merrily, I do have a scenario.’

‘What?’

‘Lol tell you about the attaché case? The one Gomer dug up just behind Roddy’s bungalow before he went up the pylon like a monkey?’

‘Possibly. I—’

‘Stay there.’ Bliss stood up. ‘Don’t go away.’

Bliss didn’t have the actual case any more. The case had gone to the lab.

It had been so lightweight that they’d thought at first it was empty, he said. He didn’t have the stained and crumpled newspaper cuttings that had subsequently been found inside, either, but he did have photocopies, and if she’d give him a minute he’d fetch them from his car on the square.

This just doesn’t go away, she thought. Why doesn’t it go away?

When he returned, she saw that the old briskness was back, his caffeine eyes burning through the fatigue.

‘Whatever this is, should you be showing it to me?’

‘Merrily, I shouldn’t even’ve taken the copies away. Who gives a shit?’

He dropped the A4 buff envelope on the kitchen table and slid out a stack of papers. He spread them. Merrily recoiled.

Headlines snarling, headlines pleading, headlines shouting outrage, black on white, hard and contrasty and unremittingly ugly.

IN THE DEPTHS OF EVIL

THE PREDATORS

THEY GREW INTO MONSTERS

A LETHAL LUST

‘I don’t understand.’ Even though they were only copies of copies of old newspapers, she didn’t like to touch them. A low cloud of black-flecked smog was almost visible above the heap. Bliss fiddled about in the papers and brought out one with a font that looked, among the rest, almost comfortingly familiar: the Hereford Times.

INQUEST ON REMAINS FOUND IN FINGERPOST

FIELD, MUCH MARCLE

‘It’s funny how many people mentioned it when we were in Underhowle,’ Bliss said. ‘We never thought. It’s only about eight miles away, Marcle, as the crow flies. Nothing really, is it?’

‘Sorry, I don’t—’

‘Much Marcle?’

‘Frannie…?’

Merrily froze up.

The table was whited out by ghastly flash-photo images: bodies under concrete in a cellar in Gloucester, police digging up red Herefordshire fields. A series of young women raped, tortured and butchered over a period of twenty years. Gloucester Council had demolished the house and talked of eradicating the name of Cromwell Street, but both Gloucester and the village of Much Marcle, in Herefordshire, would retain the memory of this man and his vicious wife for ever. An evil you couldn’t see through because there was nothing on the other side but the night.

24 On the Sofa in Roddy’s Bar

‘HOW MANY?’

‘Twelve, officially. Including his first wife and two daughters.’

‘But probably more.’

‘Oh, yeh,’ Bliss said, ‘could be a lot more. The estimates range from twenty to sixty. The little bastard kept careful count, I’m sure of that, even if he could never remember their names. Very efficient, in his way – this is what people don’t realize. Most serial killers, they relish the reputation, the drama of it, the fancy names the papers give them: The Night Stalker, all this shite. They enjoy that sense of ritual. With him, that was no big deal at all. He just had an extremely skewed sense of right and wrong. He didn’t relish being evil, because he couldn’t see himself as evil. It wasn’t a concept he understood. This is a man with a big part of him missing, and the space filled up with something black.’

‘Yes.’ Merrily was finding all this sickening, didn’t see the point, wished they were still into marriage guidance.

Bliss had hung his jacket over a chair back. Now he was unfolding one of the cuttings, flattening it out.

‘This is the important one. Not the article – the photo.’

The picture under the headline, though embellished with the smuts and smudges of hasty copying, had a feeling of formality. A flash photograph, carefully posed, of the two of them. Merrily was sure she must have seen it before.

Even if you didn’t know who he was and what he’d done – what they’d both done – you would automatically have given him an identity: maybe the one-time randy paper boy grinning over his handlebars, grown now into the backstreet grease monkey who would guarantee to get your banger through its MOT for twenty in hand or – Seeing it’s you, my love – a tenner and a kiss.

Frederick West, in suit and shirt and tie, was leaning over the back of a sofa that had floral cushions. Behind him was a photomural of mountains and fir trees. Fred’s hands were resting around the shoulders of the woman sitting on the sofa – plump, mumsie Rosemary, his wife. Fred looked like he’d rather be doing something else to her; Rose looked happy about that.

Two big smiles for the camera, four eyes alight with twisted love and shared memories of dead girls.

‘Oh, it was an eye-opener for all of us, no denying that,’ Bliss said. ‘It shocked us out of our provincial complacency, Merrily. It actually shocked coppers.’

‘Look, I…’ She pushed the paper away; West wore a grin that could sear your dreams. ‘Maybe I should’ve read more about it at the time, but I couldn’t face it. When was it – ninety-five? I wasn’t here then. And I still had… some other problems, personal.’

‘I had nothing to do with him meself,’ Bliss admitted. ‘I’d not been down here long – still a DC when they were digging at Marcle. It was a couple of years later when I was in a pub with a sergeant from Gloucester, who once escorted West to a remand hearing, and this guy, he said that the worst thing of all, the very worst thing, was that you could actually get on well with him. One of the lads, good for a laugh. Of course you’d hire him to install your new bathroom – why not?’

‘And leave him alone with your wife while you were at work?’

Bliss inhaled through clamped teeth. ‘It’s easy to go through all the pictures now and say, yeh, you can tell straight off he’s an evil bastard. But if you didn’t know… I mean, look at him – an imp, a troll. Where’s the serious harm in him?’

Merrily chose not to look, for the moment. It hadn’t even registered at the time that he was a Herefordshire man. He was always ‘the Gloucester mass-murderer’ because that was where he lived, operating as a self-employed builder out of a tall terraced house in Cromwell Street. The house where Fred had promoted Rose as a willing prostitute, watching her doing it with other men, especially black men. Where the Wests had rented out rooms to young people who didn’t take too much luring into sex. And where the police had found most of the bodies of women and girls – buried in the garden or concreted into the cellar. Frederick West who lived for sex – and then killing became part of it. Fred West, the lust murderer, and Rose, his all-too-complicit wife.

But the killing had started long before Fred and Rose moved to Cromwell Street. It had started when he was a Herefordshire country boy, born and bred less than thirty miles from Ledwardine and only a ten-minute drive from Underhowle. This was where the police had gone next, after Cromwell Street, discovering that the roots of the evil lay deep in Hereford red soil – something Bliss now kept emphasizing.

‘I remember when the lads came back from Marcle. After they found the first body in the Fingerpost field. Probably his first victim, Ann McFall – tied up and strangled, stabbed… butchered. Here.’ His fingertips pressing into the pine top of the kitchen table. ‘A feller who grew up among farms, worked for a slaughterhouse. In the country, where—’

‘Where everybody killed, yeah. You keep saying that.’

‘And buried the bodies. To West it was no different from disposing of a dead ewe. He cut them up for more efficient burial. Efficiency – that was the only ritual for Fred. An efficient workman. An efficient workman always makes good afterwards. Is it really such a big step? I mean, if you can kill and butcher an animal, you’ve got over the queasy part, haven’t you? Only the morality of it left to deal with. And he didn’t have any of that, anyway.’

‘Frannie, can we just get to the point?’ Merrily felt jittery, like a child who couldn’t swim, standing on the edge of a frozen pond and watching a friend skating enthusiastically towards the centre. ‘He’s dead. He hanged himself in Winson Green prison while awaiting trial, and his wife’s serving life for her part in the murders.’ She pulled her cigarettes towards her. ‘And Jane will be coming down for tea very soon and when she does I really would like not to be discussing this stuff. Get to the point.’

‘You know the point. These selected articles were in an attaché case buried in what would have been Roddy Lodge’s back garden, if he’d been of a horticultural bent.’

‘And are they – Fleming, the SOCOs – entirely sure that Lodge was the one who buried them?’

Bliss sniffed. ‘I don’t know what they think. They’re not telling me things any more. But I’m sure. And I’m asking meself, Why? Why did he bury them? Why didn’t he just burn them if he wanted to get rid of them?’

‘Was that all there was in the case – the cuttings?’

‘No. This is it. This is the point. There was one other thing – one photo which, to my great sorrow, I didn’t have time to copy.’

‘Of?’

‘So I can’t show yer it. But you’ve already seen it, in a way. It’s a happy snap of Roddy and Lynsey. In Roddy’s Bar. You remember Roddy’s Bar?’

‘In his bungalow? Neon sign, optics, tall stools, leather suite, copies of Loaded.’

‘The same. What this photo shows is Lynsey on the sofa in a nice red dress and Roddy in his suit and tie leaning over her from behind, like he’s dying to start pawing. Got his back to the bullfight poster. Smiling for the camera. Geddit? Identical pose to the famous shot of Fred and Rose.’

‘I may be starting to feel sick,’ Merrily said.

‘Well, hold on to it a bit longer.’ Frannie Bliss went over to his jacket and dug an envelope from an inside pocket. ‘Now then, I’ve gorra cutting of me own here. Andy Mumford put me on to this. Good memory, Andy.’

Bliss laid the paper in front of Merrily. It was from the Daily Telegraph, dated 5 December 1996.

LIFE FOR KILLER WHO COPIED THE WESTS

‘Frannie…’

‘No, read it first.’

It was the report of the trial at Cardiff Crown Court of a man from South Wales known as Black Dai because of his preference for black clothing. In 1996 he was thirty-two, a car thief who’d never had a proper job. He was obsessed with Fred and Rose West.

‘Oh God.’

Bliss said nothing. He sat down again. The phone rang in the scullery; Merrily let the machine take it.

She read that the prosecution had told the court how Black Dai had suggested to his girlfriend that ‘just like the Wests, they could travel the country, pick up girls, have sex with them and torture them’.

No. Merrily took out a cigarette then pushed it back into the packet.

The girlfriend had thought it was ‘just fantasy on his part’. Until Black Dai abducted a young woman from a pub disco in Maesteg, Glamorgan, and subsequently drove her sixty miles to Herefordshire, where he beat her to death with a wheel brace and dumped her body in woodland at a place called Witches Fell, at Symonds Yat.

Symonds Yat: just a few miles outside Ross-on-Wye. Five miles from Underhowle.

Black Dai got put away for life.

‘And I keep thinking what a great pity it was,’ Frannie Bliss said, ‘that we were prevented by a green young lawyer from letting you and Roddy have your little chat.’

‘And what do you think he’d have told me that he didn’t tell the entire population of Underhowle?’

If he’d opened up to you, we might not even’ve needed to take him out to Underhowle, Merrily. I’m thinking of when Gloucester pulled West in, and he was leading them a bit of a dance, until a woman social worker was brought in to look after his welfare while on remand. Seems she looked a bit like Ann McFall, the first victim, his first love – the words “love” and “victim” tended to be synonymous in Fred’s world – and pretty soon he was telling her everything. Out it came: possibly the full body count. No more ever found, but still…’

Merrily jerked upright. ‘That’s why you set me up for it?’

‘No. Honestly, swear to God, I had no idea then. Never even thought about West. And no, don’t worry, you don’t look remotely like Lynsey. She was twice as big as you, for a start.’

She had a flashback then to her one contact with Lynsey Davies, the nauseous blast of human decay from under a tarpaulin, a stench like a howl of pain and outrage. She pulled out the cigarette again.

‘Lynsey, however,’ Bliss said, ‘did look more than a bit like Rose. Bit bigger maybe – taller. But buxom.’

Merrily lit the cigarette. ‘You’re saying that Roddy saw her as his Rose-figure. That he saw the two of them as…’

‘Can’t say there’s no solid precedent for it, can you?’

‘Yes, but when you look at all the women Fred West killed and the one he didn’t kill…’

‘That’s because Rose was what she was.’

‘His soulmate – if he had a soul.’

‘And also found guilty of ten murders,’ Bliss pointed out. ‘And now in prison with a recommendation from the judge that she should never be released. Talk about star-crossed lovers – when you start to ask yourself what the chances are of two people that depraved finding each other within a small area of rural England…’

‘Yes.’ The aura of an almost alien abnormality lit the image of Fred and Rose, two people who’d formed into something that lived for physical gratification in its most twisted and degraded forms, mixing other lives at random into the bubbling sexual soup.

‘Lynsey might’ve put it about over the years,’ Bliss said, ‘and she might not’ve been on the shortlist for the Mothercare Trophy. But my guess is that when she posed for that picture she wasn’t aware of the true significance. So when she did become aware that she was posing as Rosemary West – well, how would you react?’

‘You’re saying he killed her because she found out and was threatening to shop him?’

‘Probably. We don’t know. We probably never will know.’

‘Who took the picture?’

‘Automatic exposure, I should think. There were two SLR cameras around the place, and a camcorder in the car. Lodge liked gadgets, just like Fred did. On the other hand, Roddy was different from Fred. He boasted more. Fred was talkative, but Roddy was loud. Yeh, it’s possible he got somebody else to take the picture – flaunting it a bit.’

‘Frannie, why did he go up that pylon?’

‘There was nowhere else to go. We’d got men on all the possible exits, he knew that. Maybe he stupidly thought we wouldn’t spot him up there in his orange overalls, and he could wait till we’d gone. He’d been up the pylon before, I reckon – somebody’d cut away the barbed wire they bind around the legs. Maybe he used to go up them as a kid. Like kids do – for a dare.’

‘You don’t think he intended to die?’

‘No, I don’t. I think he saw himself as invulnerable. Merrily, look, what I wanted to ask you… why do you think he buried all these West cuttings – together with the picture of him and Lynsey as Fred and Rose? If he was suddenly worried about them being found, why didn’t he just set fire to the lot? He was good at fire, if we accept Gomer’s viewpoint.’

‘Well, he didn’t get rid of the pictures of women in the bedroom, did he? What do Superintendent Fleming and his pet psychiatrist think?’

‘We didn’t exactly get around to discussing it.’

Merrily shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t know, Frannie. I mean, you’ve established that he did have some kind of West fantasy, although how far he took it none of us can say for certain. As you say, if he wanted to put all that behind him, burning would be a quicker and safer option. Sealing the picture, together with the news cuttings, in the case – making it absolutely clear, by the context, what that picture was meant to convey – seems more of a… an affirmation, I suppose.’

She found herself thinking of Gomer who, when Minnie had died, had buried both their watches, with new batteries, in her grave.

‘Go on,’ Bliss said.

‘Like it’s a way of binding them all together. Fred and Rose and Lynsey and Roddy.’

‘Binding together how?’

‘Sealed up together, underground. I don’t know.’

‘You see, he took us back there, leading us to think we were gonna find bodies. And there are no bodies buried there – only this little case, which Gomer found in the end, making Roddy bloody furious. And it was shortly after that that he did a runner.’

‘Perhaps that case was more important to him than bodies.’

‘He took us back to uncover something and then when we got there he changed his mind. What’s that tell us?’

‘Tells us he wasn’t thinking straight, Frannie. Look, I…’ Merrily didn’t see how she could help Bliss any more. From where he was sitting, his future in the police service depended on proving that he’d been right from the beginning about Roddy Lodge. It depended on finding bodies.

Bliss stood up, put on his jacket. ‘Well, thanks, Merrily. You’re a pal.’

‘I haven’t done anything.’ She followed him out into the hall, where the jaded Jesus stood with his lantern.

At the door, Frannie Bliss turned. ‘Fred and Roddy. Two self-employed contractors, who pride themselves on being methodical, efficient in what they do…’ Under the light, with those freckles, he looked like a schoolboy, and schoolboys would do anything. ‘Somewhere, Merrily, there are bodies.’

Merrily shut the front door, went back into the kitchen, reached automatically for another cigarette, then tossed the packet down and went into the scullery office, where the light was flashing on the answering machine. She pressed play.

‘Oh, Merrily, I’m so sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but could you ring me at home? It’s twenty past five. Thank you.’

Sophie.

She rang back. ‘Something I’ve forgotten, or something I don’t yet know about?’

‘You sound gloomy, Merrily.’

‘Just trying to untangle some things, Soph. Sorry.’

There was a short silence, and then Sophie said, ‘Merrily, I’ve been meaning to ask… Why don’t you and Laurence Robinson come for supper one night?’

‘Oh.’ She knew, of course. Nothing had ever been said, but Sophie had known maybe even before Merrily had known. ‘That’s… very kind of you.’

‘I don’t mean tonight or even this week. But sometime.’

This was Sophie reaffirming that it was OK. She was not a priest – as the Bishop’s secretary, she didn’t need to be – but Sophie lived for the Cathedral, and if you knew it was OK with Sophie there seemed no immediately obvious reason why it shouldn’t be OK in the sight of God.

‘Thank you,’ Merrily said. ‘Was that what you wanted?’

‘Oh no. That would have waited until we met. This is rather more complicated. I understand you’ve been peripherally involved in the police investigation at Underhowle, of which we’ve all been reading.’

‘Who told you about that?’ She’d never thought to inform the Bishop; perhaps she ought to have.

‘You spoke, I think, on the phone to the Reverend Jerome Banks. Who, in turn, spoke to the Bishop. In connection with the late Mr Lodge.’

‘It wasn’t an official approach.’

‘He isn’t complaining, Merrily. According to the Bishop, he seemed not ungrateful for your interest. From what I understand, Mr Lodge dead is considered no less of a problem in the parish than was Mr Lodge alive.’

‘Mr Lodge wasn’t considered a problem alive. Nobody knew about his hobby.’

‘Well, they do now, and it’s put the Reverend Banks into what he perceives as a rather difficult situation. Merrily, we do realize your involvement here had no connection with the Church and that it isn’t your parish, obviously… but the Reverend Banks did have a suggestion to make which the Bishop has asked me to put to you, and that’s what I’m doing.’

There was a movement at the door. Jane stood there, wiggling her fingers in a resigned hello again kind of way. Merrily smiled and did it back.

‘In relation to Mr Lodge,’ Sophie said, ‘I have to ask you… how you would feel about burying him?’

25 The Plague Cross

THE SKYLINE HAD broken into a lushness of wooded hills and an elegant tiered town, the River Wye fronting it like a moat. In the late afternoon, a low, unexpected sun was burning across the dual carriageway, gilding the town and its tall steeple.

Moira looked enchanted, Lol thought, as though the pattern had been laid out especially for her, the sun’s last curtain call timed for this moment. She wound down her side window.

‘Has quite a soft air, actually. That would be the sandstone walls, I’d guess.’

Lol’s geriatric Astra rattled down the side of a traffic island and then crossed a long bridge that became more like a causeway, with green parkland beside the river bank on the left, sandstone cliffs hanging over them on the right. There were no suburbs this end; you entered the town almost at its centre, expecting a fortified gateway. Instead, there was a single medieval-style round tower set into the red walls: Victorian Gothic, but it fitted.

Moira nodded approval. ‘Somebody got this place right.’

Lol glanced at her. Often, she talked like she was reacting to a sixth sense she no longer questioned. Moira had something of the threshold about her.

According to Gomer Parry, the way the council had ballsed things up only disabled taxi-drivers could be guaranteed to get parked on the street in Ross. But this was Sunday and Lol found a space close to the top of the hill, before the first shops.

He locked the car. Moira was waiting for him, leaning on a wall, peering down towards the twisting river, pulling a black woollen wrap around her shoulders. It was that time, just before the street lights came on, when the autumn air was thickening and the church, no more than a couple of streets away, seemed less solid than it had from across the river, the steeple a sepia spectre.

‘Where’s he gonnae be, this guy?’

Lol almost said, Where do you want him to be? This woman seemed to persuade things to happen. When he’d rung the village hall at Underhowle to leave a message for Sam Hall, Sam himself had answered the phone as though he’d been waiting around for Lol’s call. Sure, let’s do this right now. But let’s not do it here. Let’s meet in town. Hour and a half, say?

‘He said he’d find us in the churchyard.’ Lol looked towards the steeple, along a narrow, uphill street where everything was Sunday-silent. There was no wind, and the dusk was forming like coppery smoke around them.

And Moira said, ‘So you’re definitely up for the gig, right?’

They walked up some steps to the churchyard, their footsteps echoing from the buildings of brick and stone on either side.

‘So the offer’s still, er…’

‘Open, yeah.’ Moira, who persuaded things to happen, took his arm, hugging it to her. ‘What a difference a death makes, eh?’

Something like a pebble landed in Lol’s gut.

‘Directly under your feet,’ Sam Hall said, ‘are hundreds of dead people. Buried in their clothes – no shrouds, no coffins.’

Sam had found them at the edge of The Prospect, a plateau behind the church with a view of the river and, beyond it, twenty-five miles of darkening countryside rising to the slopes of the Black Mountains on the Welsh border.

He’d explained that there used to be a bishop’s palace up here, a second home for the bishops of Hereford who, for centuries, had been the biggest landowners hereabouts. Now The Prospect was mainly public space, a high garden sloping down to the sandstone walls and the Royal Hotel.

Moira had looked around, tossing an end of her wrap over a shoulder. ‘No sign of power lines.’

‘Oh, they’re around,’ Sam had said. ‘Come with me. I’d like to show you something.’ Turning away abruptly and setting off back along the path with a seasoned walker’s easy gait, a small knapsack hanging from his shoulder like just another crease in his plaid jacket. They went back into the churchyard under mature trees still heavy with dark foliage, where a straight path led from the church itself down towards the centre of the town.

Near the end of the path, opposite a shadowy street of houses and offices, was this stone cross on a hexagonal plinth with steps. Now Sam Hall had a foot on the lowest one.

‘This is the Plague Cross. In 1637 the Great Plague took out more than three hundred people, putting Ross into quarantine. All the trading with the outside world was done down by the bridge, and they washed the money in the river. Even the church services here were suspended. And the dead…’

Lol glanced at Moira, who was standing very still, the white streak in her black hair gleaming in the last of the light as she watched Sam climb to the third step and put a hand up to the stem of the cross.

‘The dead were buried in pits right here,’ Sam said. ‘At night. Buried, according to a local account, “in their wearing apparel”. The bodies were brought up here on carts, and dumped… while the minister stood here, right where I’m standing now, and gave the last blessings by torchlight. Can you imagine that?’

Moira said nothing. Lol thought she probably could – in full colour, with agonized suppurating faces and the stench of disease. Suddenly, in the stillness, he saw it all too, was aware of people in a state of exhaustion, beyond despair, beyond pity, beyond both fear of death and expectation of life. The images were so dense and complete that it felt as though Moira was sending them to him.

This is the same Great Plague that swept through London?’ he asked.

‘Only it came to Ross first. Prosperous-looking place, even then, but the streets were thick with filth and packs of rats. Most of the rich folk left town. But the minister stayed, to bless the sick and the dying.’ Sam turned to Moira. ‘You’d have heard of this man, maybe?’

‘Me?’

‘Name was the Reverend Price. At the height of the plague, the darkest hour, he had all the townsfolk that could make it to their feet join him in a procession – all walking with this desperate dignity through the town streets at five a.m. chanting a litany, a solemn appeal to the Lord for deliverance.’

A light came on in one of the houses across the street, making it seem darker in the churchyard.

‘And his faith was rewarded. When the sun rose that day, it was said, the plague went on the run.’ Sam Hall stepped down from the cross. ‘And you’re wondering why I’m showing you this, right? Well, see, a plague is how I think of it. The Great Plague of the Twenty-first Century. I have an engraving of this cross as the motif on my notepaper.’

‘This new plague is about power lines?’ Lol said.

‘The power towers are the enemy we can see.’ Sam stared up into the sepia sky. ‘If we could see all the TV and satellite signals, all the radio waves serving mobile phones, police communications, cab fleets, air networks, the sky would be this kind of poisonous black the whole day long. If we could smell them like exhaust fumes, we’d all choke to death. But it’s a whole lot more subtle than that. They zip unseen and unfelt through our atmosphere and through our bodies and our brains. They are the insidious wind that blows right through us all – through flesh and tissue, through bones.’

It sounded like a speech he’d made before. Sam was back on the path.

‘You’ll notice I came down off of the cross before I said all that. I’m no preacher, just a guy who seethes inside whenever ‘he sees some twelve-year-old kid in the street, calling up her pal on a piece of pink plastic that burns brains.’

‘Which is always gonnae be denied,’ Moira murmured.

‘Oh, sure. The bigger the investment, the stronger the denial. Like the electricity industry denied the report that came out of Bristol University a couple years ago linking overhead power lines to leukaemia, skin cancer, lung cancer – you name it.’

‘A plague on all humanity, huh?’

‘Sure. And we’re all of us guilty to some extent, even me. I won permission for a windmill to generate clean power for my place up on Howle Hill. I don’t have a phone, let alone a mobile. But if I want to get on the Web, I’ll still go down the hall, use one of Cody’s community computers. Act of plain hypocrisy, with the guy hell-bent on turning Underhowle into the hot spot to end all hot spots.’

‘Hot spots?’ Lol said.

‘ “Hot spot” is the term for a dangerous configuration of transmitters, pylons, what-have-you which renders an area… let’s say difficult to reside in. Cody’s computer plant came to the area on account of a development grant and a derelict site going for peanuts, and now they want to… but you know all this.’

‘I’m a stranger,’ Moira said. ‘I don’t know any of it.’

Sam Hall looked hard at her in the dimness. Moira folded her arms in her wrap.

‘We have a complex situation,’ Sam said. ‘The small industries which once built up Underhowle into a community with three, four pubs, a bunch of shops and its own school went to the wall long ago. By the mid-nineties, the shops had all gone out of business, the school was threatened with closure, and the village wasn’t pretty enough to attract the cottage-hunters from London – specially with these damn pylons like watchtowers around Belsen and Auschwitz.’

It was almost night now and growing cold. Somewhere at the back of his mind Lol could hear Prof Levin saying, The one thing you, of all people, do not need at this stage is to get in with crazies.

Biggest disease in Underhowle, when I came back from the States, was apathy,’ Sam Hall said. ‘I didn’t mind. I just wanted a place I could afford and where I’d be left alone to be a crank and a pain-in-the-ass idealist, sustain my fantasy that we could live without the goddam mains services run by fat cats who’d watch us die one by one, to stave off wasting-disease of the wallet.’

Lol wondered if Sam saw himself as the new Reverend Price, who’d chosen to live and fight in the plague hot spot.

‘At first, I was as pleased as anyone,’ Sam said, ‘when, like the recipient of a touch of magic, Underhowle began to undergo a small revival.’

Two things happened, almost simultaneously, he told them. Two new elements of growth that fed one another, two men with compatible dreams. Fergus Young, a teacher with real vision, took over a dying primary school, down to fourteen pupils. And Chris Cody, this computer whizz, brought in enough employees with young families to fill it up again.

‘I like Fergus. He’s evangelical, like me. Gave up a lot for that school – even his marriage, in the end. Hell, I even like Chris. Fergus knows how to inspire kids, he was getting incredible results very quickly, but I guess it was the computer input that revolutionized everything.’

‘They provided computers for the school?’ Lol recalled the Efflapure owner, Mike Sandford, telling him about the children’s computers they were manufacturing – for four-year-olds, three-year-olds, two… younger.

‘They donated computers,’ Sam Hall said. ‘Not only to the school, but to every household in the catchment area with a small kid. Time the kid reaches school, it’s computer-literate, with all the educational benefits that brings. Plus most of them could read and write by age five or earlier. So between them, at this run-down school in a run-down village, Fergus and Chris have already created a generation of very smart kids.’

Lol recalled Mike Sandford again: Might look run-down, but this place is the future.

‘This been publicized?’ Moira wondered.

‘In all the right journals. Result: Cody’s kiddie computers are starting to sell, internationally – so yet more jobs. Parents squeezing themselves into the catchment area to get their kids into Fergus’s school. Property prices rising. Place still isn’t pretty, but it’s changing fast – two shops reopened in the past year, one by Cody, as a retail software outlet, but the other sells food. And we have a hairdresser, we have the refurbishment of the village hall as a sophisticated community centre. And – you know – so far, so good. We were all getting along together fine on the Underhowle Development Committee. Till we fell out.’

Sam said that although he’d been less enthused than some by the idea of Underhowle becoming a blueprint for rural regrowth, he’d kept quiet about the aspects that worried him. Until the demands for better communications began bringing results. Until the growing complaints about the poor mobile- phone signals in the valley and the bad quality of TV reception began to have enough relevance for the fat cats who ran the networks to act on them.

When the Development Committee had voted to express its approval of a plan for a new and powerful mobile-phone transmitter on the side of Howle Hill, along with a TV booster less than half a mile away, Sam had quit the committee in an atmosphere of serious acrimony. Now the booster was up and shooting signals at Underhowle, the new phone mast only awaiting the green light from the council. And no groundswell of opposition to get in the way. Only Sam, the crank, the fruitcake.

‘I expected support from the newcomers, but hell, with the village taking off the way it is, they’re scared to be seen as blocking progress. In most cases, their jobs depend on it. But it’s… with the number of goddam power lines we already got intersecting here, it’s my absolutely unswerving belief we’re in for one hell of a hot spot. Health problems – and mental health problems – on a scale you can’t imagine. Signs are there. I can give you a long list of people who died prematurely – people living too close to 140,000 volts. When that damn mast goes up, it’s gonna be electric soup. But… I got no proof and no back-up.’

Lol was thinking Sam was going to need more than a rally and protest song to raise any. He didn’t know what to say.

Sam said, ‘Sure, I have friends outside – links with Green organizations. But Green activists, they tend to be gentle people. They don’t have maybe the blind rage needed to tackle what is one enormous ecological problem and – I would venture to suggest, Reverend – a spiritual one.’

Moira said, ‘Huh?’

‘I can explain this aspect, if you’ll give me some time. If we can meet this week, perhaps, I can explain it in detail. But, essentially, our local minister, Reverend Banks, is a man with – and, as someone who’s at least half a Christian, I make no apology for this – a man with a small, closed mind, who refuses to absorb or even to consider—’

‘Mr Hall, I wouldnae doubt that he is, but if I could—’

‘I realize your position’s bound to be sensitive, where another clergyperson’s concerned. But there are some things I need to get aligned in my own mind, and I could use some advice from someone… such as yourself.’

He stood at the foot of the Plague Cross, shoulders slumped, sagging a little, looking more like his age. He unshouldered his knapsack, as if it had suddenly become too much of a burden, and laid it on the bottom step.

‘Sam,’ Lol said gently, ‘I think…’

Lol drove around the island and back onto the A40, from which the town of Ross glittered in the early night, like a birthday cake, across three lanes of traffic and the river. He drew a fold of paper from his jacket pocket.

‘Gave me this just as we were walking back into town. I guess it’s the poem. The song. He took it out of his bag almost like an afterthought, just before we went our separate ways.’ He handed the paper across to Moira. ‘Sorry, the interior light doesn’t work, but there’s a torch in the glove compartment.’

‘I suppose I ought to feel flattered,’ Moira said. ‘This could be the first time in ma whole life I was ever mistaken for a good and devout person.’

There was only one way this misunderstanding could have come about: Sam had talked to Frannie Bliss, and Bliss had disclosed Lol’s close friendship with the diocesan exorcist for Hereford. Lol had introduced Moira to Sam only by her first name. Moira – Merrily? It was an honest mistake.

‘I don’t think he’s crazy,’ Lol said. ‘But he certainly seems less stable than he did the other night. Or maybe it’s me who’s more stable than I was then.’

‘Well…’ He heard the snap of the torch switch. ‘I don’t think he’s crazy either, but he sure is no poet.’

‘Not good?’

‘It’s like he just scribbled it down, off the top of his head, before he came out.’

‘Maybe he did.’

‘Aye.’

In the darkness of the car, Lol was aware of Moira’s scent; it made him think of deserted sand dunes in the Hebrides. Or maybe that wasn’t the scent at all. Her voice came back, low.

‘He doesnae want you at all, Laurence. Or your talents. It was a wee ploy and not a very convincing one. He wants your friend. He wants an exorcist. It’s why he asked you to bring your lady.’

‘Yes.’

‘If you’d been alone, I guess he’d’ve sounded you out about an introduction. When he thought I was her, he went for it: “an ecological problem, but also a spiritual one”. But when he found out I wasnae exactly ordained, the spiritual part stayed under his woolly hat. I guess he’ll find your wee reverend some other way.’

Lol said, ‘What if he’s a little crazy?’

‘Ach, Laurence, we’re all of us a little crazy.’

‘And the Plague Cross?’

‘Well… there’s a sickness there, all right,’ Moira said.

Still?’

She was quiet for a moment. ‘He’s scared of something, and he’s no’ sure exactly what.’

Lol was puzzled. ‘He is sure, isn’t he?’

‘He knows what he can see – the pylons and the TV masts and those sinister mobile-phone masts with the bits sticking out. But he cannae see electricity and he cannae see evil.’

Lol said after a while, ‘Is this a warning?’

‘Oh, Laurence,’ Moira said, ‘if it was all as simple and direct as, like, “Don’t get on any planes on the 18th”. What do I say to you here? I’m standing by the Plague Cross and this guy’s talking about people buried without coffins, and then I start thinking about you and your friend digging for dead people, and I get this rather loathsome curling sensation down in ma gut – which I believe I managed to conceal rather well. I don’t know what that means, do I?’

‘What should I say to Merrily?’

She let him drive in silence for a while.

‘Aye well,’ she said, ‘that’s a difficult one.’

That night Lol called Merrily on the mobile, from his loft.

‘Mmm,’ she said, ‘I met Sam Hall when I was in Underhowle with Frannie Bliss. He didn’t go out of his way to speak to me then. On the other hand, Bliss had introduced me as a DC. Which nobody seemed to question at the time.’

‘Maybe assuming there must have been a change in the height regulations,’ Lol said.

‘Ho ho. So am I supposed to go and see him?’

‘Why would you need to? I was just warning you he might try and get in touch. So you’d know what it was about, vaguely, if he did. And if I could just—’

Merrily said, ‘Only, I’ve been asked to bury Roddy Lodge, you see.’

‘Bury him?’

‘Not dig the hole – conduct the funeral.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a Christian tradition. But if you mean why me, it’s because a large number of people in Underhowle are saying, We don’t want this murderer in our churchyard, and the local minister’s got cold feet from sitting on the fence. And I’m like your Mr Hall. An established fruitcake.’

Lol said, ‘Do you have to do it?’

‘I don’t have to.’ A pause. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

Lol imagined her at her desk, shoes off, toes curled under the electric fire. He felt that, whatever she was getting into, she should not be left in there alone.

26 Black Sheep Kind of Thing

HE’D COME DOWN from the hill on his quad bike as soon as his wife had reached him on the mobile. ‘I can’t discuss this,’ she’d said miserably when she saw the dog collar. ‘You’ll have to speak to Mr Lodge.’ And went on talking about the rain and how much of it there was these days, until he was pulling off his wellies at the kitchen door.

Out of the plain, square kitchen windows, all Merrily could see was damp fog, greenish like mucus.

Mr Lodge: this defined him now. His father was dead, and he was the eldest brother. This was his farmhouse, brown-washed and hunched into the foggy hillside, and this was his name: Mr Lodge, the last one in the valley.

They looked at one another. By the frosted fluorescent tube on the kitchen ceiling, Merrily saw a fawn-haired man in a working farmer’s green nylon overalls, edging quietly towards sixty, lean and wary as a dog fox. He saw something that evidently worried him.

He coughed. ‘I’m sorry I, er, I didn’t expect you’d be a woman.’

Well now, wouldn’t she be running a wealthier parish, if she had a pound for every time someone had said that?

‘I’ll make some tea,’ Mrs Lodge mumbled.

‘Yes.’ He nodded at Merrily. ‘Well… thank you. Thank you for coming.’ He indicated a wooden chair with arms and a car cushion on it, near the Rayburn. ‘You have that one. In the warm.’

‘Thank you.’ She took off Jane’s duffel coat and hung it around the back of the chair. She was wearing the black jumper- and-skirt outfit and her fleece-lined boots. He looked away.

‘Tony Lodge,’ he said reluctantly.

‘Merrily Watkins. I’m… afraid I only heard about this last night. From the Bishop.’

‘Ah.’ He sat himself on a hard chair at the edge of the gatelegged table, leaving about seven feet of flagged floor between them. He sat with his cap on his knees. ‘So you en’t spoken to Mr Banks.’

‘Not about this, no. I’ll probably be seeing him later.’

‘If you’re lucky.’

She smiled, easing her chair to one side so that Mrs Lodge could put the kettle on the Rayburn, which Mrs Lodge accomplished without looking at her.

‘Not, er… not that I’m a churchgoing man any more,’ Tony Lodge said. ‘My parents were chapel, and I was raised to that. When the chapel went out of use my father, he started going to the church instead, because at least the church was still here, even if the services were few and far between. He wouldn’t go to Ross to worship. And he wouldn’t go to Ross to be buried. And that’s what this is about.’

Merrily said, ‘I gather there’s a long-standing agreement with the Church, on burials.’

‘Never been any other way, look. They reckon the chapel here was near as old as the church, and there’s only one graveyard in Underhowle – that’s up at the church, where the land’s better drained, more suitable for burial. And that’s where we goes, the Lodges.’ He paused. ‘That’s where my brother’s to go. Friday, we thought, if that’s all right for you. Funeral director’s Lomas of Coleford.’

‘Your father…’

‘Would not be happy if the sons were not around him and my mother. You understand that.’

‘Of course. Erm…’

Mr Lodge raised bony brown hands in a warding-off gesture. ‘No,’ he said calmly. ‘I don’t want to talk about what he’s done. My duty to my father, as eldest son, is to see my brother buried at Underhowle – not cremated. I would like there to be a proper service. If Mr Banks wants to throw in his hand with the newcomers, that’s his business.’

Merrily didn’t say anything. She might have known it would be something like this.

‘There was a deputation here last night,’ Mr Lodge said. ‘How much you know about that, I en’t sure.’

‘Deputation?’ All Sophie had told her was that the Rev. Banks had said the Lodges were not members of his congregation, whereas the family of the missing Melanie Pullman was, and therefore he would prefer it if an outside minister could handle Roddy’s funeral. It wasn’t an unusual procedure in cases like this.

‘Local people,’ Tony Lodge said, ‘and some not so local. Wanting me to have my brother cremated. Said it would be better for his ashes just to be scattered in the churchyard, that a grave would become a… “tourist attraction”. Not the sort they wanted for Underhowle. The new Underhowle.’ Bitterness tainting his tone now. ‘Not the image they wanted for the new Underhowle.’

‘I see.’

‘I doubt you do.’ Mr Lodge almost smiled. ‘I doubt you do, Reverend, but I don’t suppose that matters.’

‘I have met some of the people in the village: Mr Young, the headmaster. And… Ingrid Sollars?’

‘Mrs Sollars. Yes, I was surprised she was part of it, but there you are. They all have their own concerns. Things aren’t simple like they used to be. In the old days, you accepted responsibility for your village, in good times and bad. And the people there, good and bad. You kept together. Now it’s all about what you looks like to outsiders.’

‘True, I suppose.’ She was mainly worried about how she’d justify this to Gomer: leading prayers for the everlasting soul of the man he believed had murdered his nephew, incinerated his depot and his machinery, taken a pickaxe to the foundations of his life. She’d tried to reach him last night: no answer.

‘You’ll be wanting some personal information about my brother,’ Tony Lodge said. ‘I’ve written out a list – date of birth, where he went to school, that sort of detail.’

‘Well, actually, what…’ What Merrily wanted most was a cigarette. ‘What I normally do is have a chat with the relatives of the person who’s died so that, at the service, I can talk about them, as people. We don’t bury bodies, we bury people. If you see what I mean.’

She wondered if he did. There were few signs in this drab, functional farmhouse of real sorrow, only of resignation: perhaps an attitude branded into farmers by BSE and foot-and- mouth and endless forms from the Ministry of Agriculture, now called DEFRA – which Jane said stood for Destroying Every Farm-Reared Animal.

‘Look…’ Mr Lodge was facing her, although she could tell his eyes weren’t focused on hers as much as on the space between them. ‘I don’t want no fuss. I don’t want things said about him that weren’t true, just for appearances. I don’t really want anything said about him at all. Just like it done quickly and with dignity. Isn’t as if there’s going to be much of an audience anyway.’

Merrily sighed. ‘I’m afraid you might find there’s rather more of one than you think. There’ll almost certainly be police and… reporters. Possibly even television – I wouldn’t like to say.’

He stood up. He said, without raising his voice, ‘He was cursed from the first, that boy.’

The kettle came to the boil behind Merrily and began to shriek, as if demanding she should leave. She stood up, too. ‘Look, if you want to have a think about it, I’ll leave you my number, or I can ring you. We’ll also have to discuss the choice of hymns, that kind of… Oh, and one other thing – Roddy. Roddy’s… body. Where do you—?’

‘I don’t know all the details yet of how they release him. There’s already been a post-mortem. They reckons the inquest is being held tomorrow.’

‘Well… opened,’ Merrily said. ‘All they’ll have is a short hearing at which the coroner will take formal evidence of identification – which means that the body can be released for burial – and then it’s adjourned, usually for several weeks.’

‘So the worst is to come.’

How could she deny that?

Mrs Lodge almost brushed past her to reach the kettle on the Rayburn. Close up, Merrily registered that she was quite a few years younger than her husband, although the age gap was fogged by colourless, wispy hair and an absence of make-up – somewhere along the line, she’d lost the need or the will to be noticed.

Merrily pulled her coat from the back of the chair; they both knew that she wouldn’t be staying for tea. ‘Meanwhile, if there’s, you know, anything at all I can do…’

‘You will conduct the service, then?’

‘Of course. If that’s what you want. I’ll talk to Mr Banks, see when’s best for everyone.’

He nodded once. ‘And beyond that,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t do anything, if I were you. Let’s get him in the ground, and there’s an end to it.’

A bleak statement in bleak surroundings on a bleak day. She wondered if, in the end, he hadn’t been jealous of his manic young brother, travelling the countryside and apparently making a lot of money while he, the inheritor of the farm, stayed and rotted in it. Was that how it was? On the way here, she’d felt she ought to explain the circumstances of her own brief meeting with Roddy Lodge; now she didn’t think it would change anything, would probably not help at all.

At the door, she said, ‘What I meant was… if there’s anything I could do to help the two of you cope with this.’

‘Oh, we’ll survive.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘In this job, most of us gave up looking to God for any help a long time ago. If it’s the same God that helps the continentals to reject our beef, where’s the point?’

Not the time, either, for theological debate. Merrily saw that Mrs Lodge was standing over the Belfast sink, staring into it, unmoving.

‘I, erm… I have to call and see Mr Hall. Sam Hall? I was told his house is somewhere near here.’

‘Aye, carry on up the track and you’ll see his windmill. It’s a bit mucky up there, but you’ll get through. Friend of yours, Mr Hall?’

‘I’ve not really met him. As such.’

‘Nice enough man,’ said Mr Lodge. ‘Used to be local, then he emigrated to America and come back a bit cranky.’

‘Oh?’

‘Takes my dogs for a run. Loves dogs, he says, but he won’t have one himself ’cause he reckons there’s too many dogs around for no particular reason. That kind of cranky.’

‘Ah. Right. Look, I…’ Feeling, if anything, more hopelessly inadequate than was usual on these occasions. ‘I just want to say I’m very, very sorry for what’s happened.’

‘Thank you. But you don’t know what’s happened, do you?’ Tony Lodge presented her with his summary of Roddy’s life, scribbled in felt pen on half a sheet of lined notepaper. ‘None of us do. And likely that’s best for everyone.’

Spectral in the fog, the windmill rose like a huge, petrified sunflower out of a clearing on a small escarpment, a plateau on the edge of the hill. It looked alien and probably always would, Merrily thought. The house was about thirty yards away, behind a wall around four feet high and the winter remains of vegetable patches.

Pulling on woollen gloves, she left the Volvo at the top of the track, before it narrowed into a footpath and curved past the house towards what she guessed would be the summit of the hill – could only guess because it was smothered by the fog, whitish here like a blank stage backcloth.

Despite the murk, she could see no lights in the house. But then, from what Lol had said, this place would never be well lit. It was a brick-built bungalow, square and compact, with small windows, dense as Gomer’s glasses, and a solar panel like a blister in the roof. There was no smoke from the chimney.

The wooden front gate was unlocked, and Merrily went through, along a path between veg beds, to the front door inside its wooden porch. She couldn’t see a bell or a knocker and ending up banging on the panels with a gloved fist. No answer. She went back outside.

Electricity and radiation, Lol had listed. Pylons, power lines, TV and mobile-phone transmitters. The twenty-first-century plague. Hot spots and the death road. And something else it was clear he wasn’t going to tell me or Moira.

Me or Moira. Moira and me. Why did this nag? They were all supposed to be adults. But it had got into her dreams last night. In the last dream, she’d suddenly realized – with the dramatic intensity that only dreams could bestow – that Lol Robinson was in the music business… where everybody slept with everybody else. Awakening anxious and cold – again. Of course, she knew he wasn’t like that – quite the opposite in some ways, after what had happened to him all those years ago. But he was insecure about his abilities and perhaps this mature, experienced Moira Cairns was giving him the reassurance that only another musician could.

Oh God. The fog swirled around her like hostile floss.

Merrily heard footsteps on the track, then a slurring in the mud, the sounds somewhere inside the white fog. She stayed inside the garden wall, hands cold inside her coat pockets and the gloves.

The engine was running to support the heater, doing its best, but this was an old car and the heater took a while to get going, the car warming up very gradually like an old man rubbing his hands and massaging his joints.

The Volvo was backed onto the grass beside the footpath, out of sight, if not earshot, of Sam Hall’s eco-house. On the passenger side, Mrs Lodge was bulked out by a US Army parka, far too big for her. She’d started talking outside on the track, her voice high and querulous and revealing the remains of a South Wales accent. He’s not heartless, she’d cried. I didn’t want you to leave thinking he’s heartless.

Merrily said, ‘Mrs Lodge, this is one of the hardest situations anyone has to go through. When it’s not of your making but you’re dragged into it and you don’t know where your loyalties are supposed to lie.’

‘Cherry,’ Mrs Lodge said. ‘My name’s Cherry. Like the fruit, not Mrs Blair.’

The run up the track had reddened her cheeks, as if to underline the point. She told Merrily she’d known Sam Hall wasn’t at home, had seen him walk past, towards the village, over an hour ago, and when her husband had climbed back on his quad bike and gone back to finish his fencing in the top field, she’d grabbed her chance to say what she couldn’t say in front of him.

‘Not that we’re not close.’ She stared through the windscreen into the fog. ‘Not that we haven’t been close, I should say. The bad things that happen on a farm – even the money problems – are things you can discuss. This—’ She sniffed and dragged out a clutch of tissues to wipe her nose. ‘This is beyond everything.’

Merrily said, ‘Do you mind if I smoke… if I were to open the window an inch or two?’

‘Of course.’ Cherry almost smiled, seeming grateful for this sign of human weakness. Merrily lit a Silk Cut.

‘He’s changed, of course,’ Cherry said. ‘He doesn’t think he’s turning into his father, because the old man was always so religious, but he is.’ She put away the tissue and turned in her seat to face Merrily. ‘Still, there are worse things. Lord knows what Roddy was turning into. All in all, I can’t help thinking, God help us, that it’s as well it ended the way it did. If we could say it had ended. If we’re ever going to be able to say that.’

‘Were you there?’

‘No. Neither of us was there. I remember I went out to fill the coal scuttle about teatime and I thought I could hear something from down the hill, but I thought it was just kids. It was about ten o’clock before the police even came and told us he was dead. We didn’t know what to do. Nobody else came. We didn’t know everybody had seen him… electrocuted. We just… Tony and me, we just sat there and talked about it until the early hours. But then the next day he didn’t want to know, and that’s how it’s been since. That’s how the old man would’ve been. And then it was in the papers and on the telly – the videos people’d taken. Our neighbours, so-called.’

‘How long’ve you been married?’

Wanting to take her away from those images. The car, swaddled in fog, was warming up inside now and Cherry was talking freely. It emerged that she and Tony had met through a dating agency for farmers. Born in Newport, where her parents had a shoe shop, she’d always dreamed of life on a farm. They’d been married twenty years, since she was twenty-seven, and had two sons, both now working in Cardiff and loving it. If Tony Lodge left them the farm, it would only be sold off. He had a decision to make and fairly soon. He didn’t need this on top of it all, his wife said.

And when they’d turned up at the door last night, the villagers, the new villagers, telling him he ought to do the decent community thing and have Roddy tidily cremated…

‘I don’t think I’m quite understanding this,’ Merrily said. ‘All this talk of the “new” Underhowle. Would this be something to do with the Development Committee?’

‘They don’t even like to call it Underhowle any more. “Oh, it’s a nowhere sort of name,” one of them said once, when they had a public meeting about it. “A neither here-nor-there name”.’

‘Meeting about what?’

‘Ariconium. That’s what they call the project. Ariconium was an old Roman town that was supposed to be further down the valley towards Weston, but Mr Crewe, who bought the Old Rectory, he reckons it was more this way, and he found a little statue of a Roman god and they all got excited, and that’s how it started, really. I can’t see it myself – I mean, there’s nothing there. It’s not like as if there were walls and ruins, things you can walk round. It’s just marks in the ground.’

‘I saw a stone plaque thing in the village hall, with the word Ariconium carved into it.’

‘They wanted to put it on the signs at the entrance to the village, but some historical organization objected because they said it wasn’t proved, but they’re fighting that. They’re setting up a museum of things people’ve found and maps and audiovisual stuff – in the old chapel. They’ve had a grant from the Lottery, lots of things like that.’

‘ “They”?’

‘Well, Mr Crewe and Mr Young at the school and the chap who has the computer factory. People like that. Seem to be more of them every day. But they’ve done a lot for the village, kind of thing, put a lot of people in work, so everybody’s going along with it. And they make it all sound so exciting for the future – more tourism, more jobs. They’re planning this big launch next Easter, with leaflets and articles in the papers and television and that. The last thing they want is for the village to be associated with a mass murderer. Oh, dear God, no, not now.’

‘Pretty tactless, however, coming to your husband, so soon afterwards.’

‘Had to come in good time for the funeral. They were nice enough about it, I suppose. Said they’d help keep it discreet. Keep the press away. How it was in everybody’s interests to develop an upmarket tourist economy kind of thing and until that was established we had to be conscious of our public profile.’

Merrily shook her head at the crassness of it. ‘Not, even in normal circumstances, the best thing to say to a traditional farmer.’

Cherry Lodge managed a smile. ‘That’s true.’ She was actually quite pretty; there had probably been a time, before the reality of it all started to wear her down, when Tony Lodge hadn’t been able to believe his luck. ‘All tourism means to my husband is people tramping across his land, leaving gates open. That’s what he’s doing up there now – repairing fences, tightening the barbed wire. Battening down the hatches.’

‘That’s not good, is it?’ Merrily said carefully, and collected another grateful look.

‘Like he’s accepted that we’re supposed to be hermits now, for the rest of our lives. Not show our faces down there ’cause we’re going to be tarred with it for ever.’ A glimmering of tears. ‘And this family’s been here longer than any of them. Longer than any of them.’ She leaned forward in the seat. ‘You know what I’d like to do – sell our story to the papers. We had the reporters here, loads of them, and Tony was ready to get his gun out to them. But I’d like to get them back, tell everybody what he was really like, how weird he really was – that’d teach—’ She blinked. ‘I keep forgetting you’re a vicar. I don’t get to talk to many women. You must think—’

‘No. Not at all.’ Merrily focused rapidly, glad that Jane’s duffel was still toggled over the dog collar. ‘What would you tell them, Cherry? What would you tell them about Roddy? Weird how?’

‘Oh…’ Cherry looked uncomfortable again. Too eager. Blown it. ‘All sorts of things. Tony used to talk about him a lot at one time – all the things he couldn’t understand. There’s always somebody in a family you talk about, isn’t there? Somebody you always despair of. Always, “Oh what’s he gone and done now?” Black sheep kind of thing.’

‘What kind of things did he do?’

Cherry’s hazel eyes flickered. ‘You’ve put me on the spot now. I’m not sure I should—’

‘It’s OK.’ Merrily nodded quickly, pushing her cigarette into the ashtray. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve asked.’

‘Anyway, I’ve taken up too much of your time already. I’ve got the lunch to make and everything. Not that he’ll eat much.’

‘I’ll take you back down.’ Merrily let out the clutch, biting her lip. How to play this… ‘Look, you can take up as much of my time as you want, whenever you want. Any time you feel this is getting on top of you and you want to talk.’

She backed into some bushes in the fog – more scratches – before managing a clumsy three-point turn, dragging the Volvo back onto the track, crawling down the hill in second gear, foot on the brake, headlights on, until the farmhouse imprinted itself drably on the clogged air. Cherry was silent the whole way, and when Merrily pulled up, she made no move to open the door.

‘You’re not an ordinary priest, are you?’

‘Well, most of them are bigger…’

‘Mr Banks, it was, who told Tony. About what you do.’

‘Well, whatever Mr Banks said, I don’t think it’s anything to do with why I was asked to take over the funeral.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘If it is, nobody’s told me.’

Cherry stared out of the window. ‘You on e-mail, are you?’

‘Yes. Well, no… actually the computer’s crashed at home, but you can reach me at the office in Hereford.’

‘Write down the address for me, can you? Don’t look so surprised, I’m not a peasant, I’ve been doing the accounts on an IBM computer for four years now. Listen, if I write all this out for you and send it, no one will see it? You promise me that?’

‘Except possibly my secretary. Who’s also the Bishop’s secretary. Who you could trust like your mother. But—’

‘I don’t know what good it’s going to do – except I think we should’ve told the police and Tony wouldn’t do that. It was when the police told us about all these pictures on his wall, and they asked could we throw any light on it, and Tony said no, we couldn’t. And afterwards he was going, “What difference is it going to make now, anyway – except everybody thinking, Oh they’re all like that, all the Lodges. Mental. Sick.” ’

Merrily’s throat was dry. The fog seemed, if anything, thicker now; it felt like when you were a kid burrowing under the bedclothes with a pencil flashlight. Cherry opened the car door, got out and then leaned back in.

‘It torments me. I keep thinking, maybe we should have tried to get him to see a psychiatrist, we might’ve saved those girls. I mean, he went to his doctor, with the headaches, and he didn’t spot anything.’

‘Whatever it was, I think a lot of people failed to react to it,’ Merrily said. She was thinking of the Rev. Jerome Banks. She was thinking of her own wimpish relief at being denied access to Roddy Lodge at Hereford police headquarters.

Cherry said, ‘This is going to sound stupid, but what it comes down to is Roddy and dead people. From an early age, this thing about the dead.’ She leaned on the door frame, looking around, listening perhaps for the putter of the quad bike. ‘Maybe I’m making too much of it.’

27 Lamp

THE SCHOOL BUS was actually starting up when Jane looked out of the window and saw Eirion standing there by his car, in his school uniform, in the fog. And her heart pulsed the way it used to when he drove all the way from the Cathedral School in Hereford because he just like had to see her. Serious turn-on.

And today he’d come all this way in terrible driving conditions.

But when she scrambled down from the bus, dragging her flight bag full of books, she saw that he wasn’t smiling. From the beginning, the most amazing thing about Eirion had been his smile, and when it wasn’t there he looked pasty, a bit jowly, even. These days, anyway. Especially through the fog.

In the old days – March, April – arriving at her school, he’d say, I was just passing. Both of them knowing that this wasn’t a place anyone in their right mind ‘just passed’. So it was a catchphrase nowadays, and they’d be touching one another before the car’s doors were properly shut. But tonight…

‘I just needed to see you.’ Eirion making it obvious by his tone that today it wasn’t that kind of need. ‘You want a lift home?’

When she got into the new old car, the sky was going dark. It always seemed to be going dark, Jane thought. Life was one long dusk. Eirion just started the engine and when they were through the gates, he said, ‘Jane, do you think we need to talk?’

Like how many crappy soaps did you hear that line in, in the course of an average week? Or you would if you watched them. Jane tried to think of a corresponding cliché, couldn’t come up with one.

‘What about?’ she said finally.

‘Well… you.’

He took the back lanes to Ledwardine, prolonging the journey like he used to when they weren’t quite going out together but he was hoping. It could take for ever today, with these conditions. The fog had never really cleared from this morning; they’d had the lights on in the school all day. And what a long and tedious day it had been. In Eng Lit, she’d collected a couple of dagger-glances from Mrs Costello whom she liked really but, come on, wasn’t life just a little too short for flatulent prats like Salman Rushdie?

‘I, er, checked out the insurance,’ Eirion said. ‘It’s probably OK for you to drive this car, after all. I mean… when it’s a better day than this.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘A better day.’

A better day. A bright new beginning. You’re so young, people said. What I wouldn’t do if I was your age again. When what they really meant was that when they were young the idea of a bright new beginning for the world didn’t seem quite so laughable.

In the summer, after she and Eirion had made love for the first time (the first time for both of them, with anybody, it later emerged) it was incredible, like climbing a mountain, and it was all there at your feet: the whole of life a glowing patchwork of endless, glistening greenery.

Jane scowled. Didn’t ‘make love’. Had sex.

And that was it. Done it now. Done it a bunch of times and, sure, sometimes – before and during and after – it felt as though she was very much in love and didn’t want there to be anyone else ever…

In which case, this was really it? Seventeen now, an adult. Now what?

And why? Why bother? It was all going to end in tears, anyway.

‘I’ve been wondering what’s made you so negative lately,’ Eirion said.

‘Oh, really.’

‘And whether there was any way I could help.’

The car heater panted. The dipped headlights excavated shallow trenches in the grey-brownness. It was a situation that, at one time, might have seemed cosily mysterious. As distinct from totally dismal.

‘Because if I can’t,’ Eirion said. ‘You know…’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, if you don’t know…’ After a while, Jane stopped noticing the limited views – atmosphere was just a psychological condition, right? She found she was gripping folds of her skirt. What was happening to her? She didn’t even want to drive. What was the point? Be gridlock everywhere within about ten years.

‘It’s like you just want to wreck things,’ Eirion said. ‘If things aren’t working exactly as you’d planned them, you don’t want to wait.’

‘Life’s short. Very short for some people.’ Thinking of Layla Riddock, who hadn’t even made it out of school when the big pendulum did it in one blow. Thinking of Nev. Thinking of their day out in mid-Wales, when Eirion had taken her to see this particular standing stone, and it had somehow just looked like… a stone. And Eirion had been dismayed because she wasn’t going like, Hey, wow, can’t you feel that earth energy?

Jane felt her eyes filling up as the car bumped around a bit. She thought at first he’d just gone over the kerb in the fog, but it was deliberate. He was fully in control. The car stopped, and he switched off the engine. Jane looked out and saw wet grass.

‘Where are we?’ Turning to him, wanting for a moment just to see his old smile in the dimness and then fall into his arms and everything would be all right.

For a while, anyway.

So where does it begin, this clinical depression? At what stage do they prescribe the pills? She pulled her bag onto her lap, folding her hands on top of it: self-contained, untouchable. Inside, along with the books, was her Walkman with the Nick Drake compilation CD – Nick Drake, who died of an overdose of antidepressants. It could all be really funny. Except it wasn’t.

Eirion scrubbed at the windscreen with his hand. ‘You can’t even see it.’

‘What?’

‘The steeple at Ledwardine. We’re on Cole Hill.’

‘What are we doing here?’

‘I don’t know, really.’ He sank back in his seat. ‘This is where she saw it, isn’t it? Where Jenny Driscoll saw the angel. Or didn’t… as you decided.’

‘So?’ She stared at him. If she was getting an inkling of what this was all about, she wasn’t inclined to allow the idea to develop.

‘Doesn’t matter, anyway.’ He stopped rubbing. ‘It’s too foggy.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I think you do.’ He swallowed. ‘It’s like I said before – a few months ago this whole thing would’ve been just so exciting to you that we’d’ve been up here every night on some kind of angel hunt.’

‘No, we wouldn’t. That would be stupid.’

‘Yeah,’ Eirion said. ‘It probably would be, now. But the thing is… it would also have been fun. I would’ve liked it. Flask of hot soup and the… you know, the need to keep warm.’

‘Oh, right,’ Jane said, laying on the scorn. ‘This is about sex.’

‘No!’ Almost a scream. ‘That’s not what—’

‘Think about it very carefully,’ Jane said sadly. ‘Underneath it all, it would be about sex.’

Eirion drew in a tight breath. ‘So we’re into Freud now, is it?’ Stirrings of anger bringing out the Welshness in his voice.

‘I really wouldn’t know about that,’ Jane said. ‘I think I’m probably just coming to my senses.’

He exploded then. ‘This is your senses? It seems to me that you’re losing your fucking senses. All… all six of them.’

Jane said, without thinking much about it, ‘Can you take me home?’ The windscreen was opaque with fog and condensation; it was already going cold inside the car.

‘Is this it?’ Eirion said. ‘Is this it for us?’ Talking in this dramatized way to provoke from her an outraged denial.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe like the angel will float down and spread this healing radiance all around us and we’ll feel really cool.’

It was hard to see his face in what light was left, but she could feel the extreme shock coming off him. It was like being in one of those cold patches that Mum was supposed to look for in haunted houses. And though she’d caused it, Jane felt detached from it – and that wasn’t right, was it? That was kind of… cruel.

‘Listen,’ Eirion said urgently. ‘We all get like this sometimes. You read about executive stress and mid-life crisis, but I think those people’ve just forgotten what it was like when they were in their teens and there were like whole big areas of their lives they couldn’t control.’

‘What?’

‘They don’t remember how bad it could be sometimes. When you can’t cont—’

‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ She looked at him with pity. ‘I’ve realized that nobody’s in control. Nobody and nothing. All this information going round and round the world on the Internet and stuff, and it’s all bullshit and everybody’s got a Website that tells you nothing you want to know, and all the politicians are like… And Mum… Mum knows these guys know sod-all really and are never going to get us anywhere, and the hospitals and everything are always going to be totally crap, but she can live with it, because she’s managed to con herself into thinking that way above all this ridiculous mess there’s this all-knowing, benevolent thing.’

‘Oh Jane—’

And meanwhile she and Lol are coming apart before it ever came together. And he’ll shag the Cairns woman, if he hasn’t already, because at least she’s there for him. At least she’s there. And Mum will just spend the rest of her life humouring fruitcakes like Jenny Driscoll. And poor old Gomer will start sitting in front of daytime telly – day after mindless day of soaps and Kilroy – not even seeing it after a bit, and falling asleep, until one blessed day he doesn’t wake up.’

Silence.

‘It’s a phase,’ Eirion said feebly at last. ‘It’ll pass, Jane.’

She jerked in her seat. ‘I don’t want it to pass, you cretin! This is reality!’

She started to cry, and wound down the window to let the fog come in like a damp facecloth.

‘I’ll take you home, then,’ Eirion said emptily.

Merrily had come home via Hereford, calling in at Tesco to pick up a sandwich and then at the hospital to see a couple of parishioners in the geriatric ward – Miss Tyler and Mrs Mackay, once neighbours in the village and now they didn’t even recognize one another on the ward. But they recognized Merrily, or seemed to, and Mrs Mackay wanted her to pray with her and, at the end of it, Merrily added her own silent prayer that something could be done about geriatric wards. Even the word itself had become demeaning and contemptuous, and when you said it aloud it made a sound like a creaking wheelchair.

Back home, she found a parcel – a brown Jiffy bag – in the porch and dumped it on the hall table when she heard the phone ringing. She exchanged grimaces with the lamp-bearing Christ and went through to the scullery to answer it.

‘You sound a bit down, lass.’

‘Oh. Hello, Huw.’

‘You find that stuff about the girl?’

‘Yeah. I was trying to think if it could be relevant, in any way, to her disappearance.’

‘Depends if it were still going on.’

‘Getting abducted by aliens becomes a regular thing?’

‘Sometimes the experience is repeated. Sometimes it even seems to be site-specific.’

‘You mean the house is haunted, rather than the individual? That rather argues against aliens, doesn’t it? More like geological conditions – fault lines, underground springs. Any atmospheric conditions that might promote hallucinations. Nothing to do with rehabilitation of the displaced dead. No requirement for social services of the soul.’ Merrily sat down, still wearing her coat. ‘Huw, I’ve got to bury Roddy Lodge.’

‘So I heard.’

‘Did you?’ Amazing how much gossip drifted up the Brecon Beacons. ‘And would you have any advice on that? For instance, there’s a body of local opinion doesn’t want him in the churchyard.’

‘That bother you?’

‘I feel OK about it. He’s entitled to a Christian burial. However, bearing in mind that I’ve never buried a murderer before…’

‘Aye.’ A pause for consideration. ‘Complications are possible. A lot of psychic fallout drifting round a murder. As for several murders…’

‘Not proved. He’s still an innocent man in the eyes of the law.’

‘And that can make it even more complex. Unfinished business, lass.’

‘This is what you rang about, isn’t it?’

Huw was silent for quite a while. Long enough for Merrily to tuck the phone under her chin while she shed her coat.

‘I had a call from young Francis,’ Huw said. ‘The detective.’

‘Bliss? You had a call from Bliss?’

‘Catholic, am I right?’

‘Ten a penny in Liverpool.’

‘And a bit… not exactly unstable. Would “volatile” be a better word?’

‘Let’s say “impetuous”. What’s this about, Huw?’

Lad’s been out and about, asking a lot of questions in certain areas. Bee in his bonnet. Bees buzz.’

‘Certain areas?’

‘Specifically, the West case.’

‘Why would he phone you about that?’ She was cautious now.

‘I, er… I were a consultant on that inquiry.’

‘You never mentioned that before.’

‘Couple of us were brought in after talk of the Wests being involved with a satanic cult.’

‘I wasn’t aware of that.’

‘Talk by West himself, mostly. Some of it was allegedly said in discussions he had with his prison carer, while he was on remand. Could’ve been bullshit. Anyroad, during the police investigation, a number of us were asked if we knew of anything, any groups operating around Gloucester or the Forest of Dean. Satanist, sadist, anything deviant. One suggestion was that Fred West were supplying this group with virgins. Abducting women, taking them to some farm for ritual abuse, subsequent murder. Course, he lied a lot. Probably just a latent attempt to shift some blame was how the coppers saw it, but they didn’t want to take any chances.’

‘And were you able to help?’

‘Well, we couldn’t supply a string of addresses of satanic temples, if that’s what they expecting. But there was evidence of hard magic in 25 Cromwell Street itself. One of the victims – young lass of seventeen – was into occultism and blood-ritual, linked to bondage, S-and-M. Whether they believed in it or not, the Wests were only too happy to join in. Lass ended up tied by her ankles to a beam in the cellar, hanging upside down like a side of meat.’

Huw’s tone of voice had altered, gone flat. The level of emotion in his voice was often an inverse reflection of his actual commitment. Merrily recalled one of her fellow students on the Deliverance course saying, Funny chap, old Huw. Been through the mill. Wears his scar tissue like a badge. This had been unfair.

He didn’t. He might slope around in baggy jeans and trainers with holes in them, looking ravaged – but only ravaged like the lead guitarist of some old blues band you vaguely remembered from your childhood. And he rarely talked about the mills he’d been through, dark or satanic.

‘Anyroad, Bliss reckons there’s a link between Lodge and West that his esteemed colleagues are not taking seriously enough.’

‘He told you about the attaché case and the pictures?’

‘Asked me if I could see any ritual angle.’

‘Asked me, too. Could you?’

‘Told him I couldn’t see either of them buggers being bright enough for that kind of stuff. However, we can’t rule out a link, can we? West got around the Forest of Dean a lot. Him and Lodge were both two-bit contractors.’

‘Hold on…’ Merrily’s hand tightened round the phone. ‘I don’t think even Frannie Bliss is going that far. He told me about a man from South Wales who had a sick fascination with the Wests and killed a girl on the edge of the Forest in 1996. Bliss was thinking along those lines – West as role model. He didn’t see a personal connection, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Merrily, what I’m saying is this: you’ve got one woman dead, and the coppers are looking at the possibility that Lodge killed her either because she wouldn’t go along with his horrific West fantasies or she found out what he’d done to the others. What he’d done to the others. See? What did he do to the others?’

‘Nobody yet knows whether there are others.’

‘Aye. And happen that’s why the police aren’t publicizing it about those pictures and the cuttings. Because once you throw down the name West, it’s no longer an ordinary murder investigation. No longer, God forbid, even an ordinary sex-murder inquiry. It’s kidnap… torture… mutilation. It’s the unspeakable. It’s saying to the parents of every missing girl within a fifty-mile radius or more: you’ve read about West and what he did. Well, we’re not trying to worry you or anything but…’

‘Huw,’ she said, ‘he’s dead. Lodge is dead and West is dead.’ Merrily, West told this woman in Winson Green that he’d done another twenty. He also said there were other people involved. Now, there must be a lot of folk with missing relatives who can’t help wondering, whenever they wake up in the night. And in that area of West Gloucestershire and the Herefordshire border and the Forest, it’s all a bit close. Still raw. If any link with West came out, then you really would have a problem with that funeral.’

‘Yeah.’ She sagged a little in her chair. ‘I hadn’t really thought about that.’

‘Keep it to yourself,’ Huw said, ‘and pray that Francis does the same.’ He paused. ‘“The lamp of the wicked shall be put out”.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Book of Proverbs.’

‘I know. What’s the relevance?’

‘I don’t know if Lodge had any connection, real or imagined, with West,’ Huw said. ‘All I know is that nowt reignites faster than the lamp of the wicked.’

Jane let herself in and put on the hall light, which lit up The Light of the World. She stared into His lined face: so benign, so sad and world-weary, so…

… So holier than thou.

She experienced this shockingly powerful urge to pull down the picture and smash it to pieces on the flagstones. This was how the Church had been keeping bums on pews for two mil- lennia. He died for you. You owe Him.

Guilt. Original guilt.

They gave you pictures like this to underline it: you owe Christ, you owe Uncle Ted, you owe the parish and the smug bloody Church that pays you peanuts. Bastards!

Jane’s face was stiff with drying tears. The kitchen door was open, the light was on, and from the other side of the room she could hear Mum on the phone in the scullery, living the lie. She closed the kitchen door quietly, and went upstairs to her apartment in the attic, where she and Eirion had first… had sex. She

‘dropped her bag on the floor and threw herself on the bed under the Mondrian walls, and sobbed in rage and incomprehension. It used to be so wonderful up here, so exclusive. It had never felt so lonely, so empty.

What’s happening to you? Are you like some kind of freak that you can’t just talk about blokes and bands and DVDs, like your mindless little friends at school?

Not that she actually had any friends. Not really. She got on with everybody OK, on a superficial level, but there was nobody to really talk to, no real-life friends. The one who might have been, Layla Riddock, was gone. Leaving only Eirion, who was intelligent and thoughtful and only a little overweight, and who she’d just…

… Just abused. For no real reason… other than that he probably did understand. And of course she’d known that he didn’t just want sex, he wanted love, which she couldn’t give him.

And now it’s over. You just ended it, like on a whim because… maybe because he was getting too close; he was blocking your horizon… the horizon beyond which is nothing. Nothing at all.

No heaven; you could only make a temporary heaven, out of money or sex or drugs. She’d never done drugs. Had opportunities, inevitably – Es, whizz, spliff, all that – but she’d resisted it. Felt slightly contemptuous of kids who spent all their spare cash on chemicals, because there were other ways to get there, weren’t there? Meditation, ritual dance, spiritual exercises. Other ways of actually being there.

Or not. Maybe there was nowhere to go but deeper into your own delusions.

Jane turned the pillow over to the dry side.

Merrily remembered the parcel she’d left on the hall table, and went to fetch it. She was suspicious of parcels now. The Jiffy bag wasn’t light, and it bulged. Suppose it contained another few thousand pounds in used fifties.

She took it into the scullery and pulled it open under the Anglepoise.

There were three paperback books inside, all scuffed and with split spines: An Evil Love. Happy Like Murderers. She Must Have Known.

There was a note on yellow paper attached to one of the books with a paperclip.

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW

ABOUT THE WESTS AND A LOT YOU’LL WISH YOU

DIDN’T. JUST IN CASE YOU WERE INTERESTED.

LET ME HAVE THEM BACK SOMETIME.

F.

‘Well, thanks, Frannie.’ Merrily put the books back in the bag. ‘Just what I bloody needed.’

She switched off the lamp and sat there in the blood red of the old electric fire and wondered where all this was going.

28 Bloody Angels

JANE SAID, ‘WHAT are you doing sitting here in the dark?’

Silhouetted in the doorway, with the creamy kitchen behind her, she looked so slight and vulnerable that Merrily wanted to rush over and hold her. The way you did sometimes, even in normal circumstances.

As if she’d sensed it and didn’t want it, Jane backed off into the kitchen.

‘Sorry.’ Merrily felt a cool wave of dismay. ‘Sorry, flower. I was on the phone, and the light just faded on me. What’s the time?’

‘Twenty to six.’

Merrily got up. ‘Things have been a bit… Maybe we could put some music on later?’ Code for a deep and meaningful chat.

‘Whatever.’

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah.’ The light, throwaway kind of yeah, carrying many times its weight of meaning. And now the damn phone was going again. Merrily glanced back to make sure she hadn’t switched off the machine by mistake.

‘Better get it,’ Jane said quickly. ‘Might be important.’

Merrily hesitated, and Jane turned away. Merrily sighed, went back and picked up. ‘Ledwardine Vic—’

‘Mrs Watkins!’ Cheery, booming male voice. ‘George Lomas, Lomas and Sons, Coleford. We haven’t done business before, but we’re burying a certain gentleman – if that’s the correct term in this instance – for Mr Tony Lodge and your good self.’

‘Ah, right. Erm… hello.’

‘You have Friday, I believe.’

‘As I understand it.’

‘And, unfortunately, Mrs Watkins, I have to tell you, as quite a number of people now understand it. Mr Lodge had hoped to keep it discreet by using ourselves, rather than one of the firms in Ross, but it seems someone’s let the cat out of the bag, and I had a phone call this afternoon from the local press.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Quite. Not what we want, under the circumstances. However, I’ve spoken to the parties concerned, including the Reverend Banks, and we have an alternative proposal to put to you, if it can be accommodated into your schedule. And that is Wednesday – the day after tomorrow. We’re suggesting late afternoon – very late afternoon.’

‘You mean under cover of darkness?’

‘I think it makes sense, Mrs Watkins. It had been arranged that Mr Lodge’s coffin should spend at least one night in the church prior to burial, so no one will be surprised to see a hearse arrive. We propose – and Mr Tony Lodge is somewhat reluctantly in agreement – that the funeral should be carried out as soon as possible. We expect there to be no more than five mourners.’

‘A clandestine funeral?’

‘That wouldn’t exactly be my choice of word but, under the circumstances… well, Mr Banks is certainly in agreement. It means that Mr Lodge will be safely interred before anyone can… cause problems.’

‘You’ve been warned of problems?’

‘Not if it’s dealt with on Wednesday evening and arrangements remain confidential. Could we say five-thirty?’

‘Well…’ There really wasn’t an alternative, was there? ‘OK.’

‘Splendid,’ said Mr Lomas.

When she put down the phone, it rang again, under her hand.

‘Damn.’ Merrily picked up. ‘Led—’

Sophie said, ‘I was just doing my final check on the e-mail, and there’s one you might just want to know about before the morning. Cherry Lodge?’

‘Already? How long is it?’

‘Quite long. Merrily, I’ve already mailed it, but I thought I’d tell you in case you weren’t going to check your e-mails again until the morning.’

‘Fine. Thanks. Oh, sh— the computer’s gone down. It’s not working. I was going to ring up someone tomorrow. Oh God, look, under the circumstances I think I’d better come in and collect it.’

‘I could drive it over there if you’re tired. You sound tired.’

‘No, that’s ridiculous, I’ll come in. How’s the fog?’

‘Patchy. I’ll wait for you.’

‘No need.’

‘I’ll wait.’

‘OK, give me just over half an hour.’

When she’d put the phone down, Merrily went into the kitchen and found Jane at the farthest window, where the light was dim, looking out at dark nothings in the garden. The kid didn’t turn round.

‘Off to HQ, then.’

‘Sorry. Something I need to pick up.’ Merrily saw that Jane’s hair was flattened on one side, as if she’d been lying on it. ‘Erm… why don’t you come, too? We could call for some chips on the way back.’

‘I’ve got homework to wrap. Anyway, it always takes you longer than you think it’s going to, once you’re up there closeted with Auntie Sophie.’

‘No, I’ll be as quick as I can, honest. But if you want to get something to eat, meanwhile… or I could—’

Jane said, ‘Just go, Mum, huh?’

Desperately cuddling Ethel, Jane had thought about it for a long time, and it was her fault. No question, she was the guilty party.

she would call him.

A mature decision. You didn’t – because of your own weakness, your own inadequacy – just walk away like this from someone who was not only your first lover but also your best friend. Who you’d lain with and laughed about things with together. Who had virtually nicked his stepmother’s car last summer to drive you home from Wales on a whim. Who, also last summer, had been – face it – hurt for you, and almost very badly, in fact almost—

Jane clutched the edge of the refectory table with both hands, squeezing hard until she, too, was hurting. Ethel watched her, big-eyed, from the stone flags.

She should be able to understand why she was feeling like this, continually juggling rage and despair. Like, she’d read The Catcher in the Rye, about the kid in the 1950s making the shattering discovery that all adults were hypocrites. But this wasn’t the 1950s and she wasn’t a kid any more, and she’d known for years that all adults were total fucking hypocrites.

OK, maybe except for Lol. And Gomer. And Mum, who did her best.

And anyway, all these were people in the process of getting damaged.

Jane let go of the table, walked into Mum’s office, and snapped on the light. It was actually quite calm and plain in here. No awful Victorian Bible scenes. Just a blue-framed print of a painting by Paul Klee, which Huw Owen had once given Mum: irregular coloured rooftops under a white moon. On the wall above the desk, there was just one smallish cross, in oak. A paperback New Testament and a prayer book lay on the desk. There was a single bookcase in which the standard theological tomes were being gradually displaced by the kind of books that Jane herself used to borrow: paranormal stuff.

The Deliverance Ministry. My mother, the exorcist.

An Anglican shaman, a Christian witch doctor. Paid peanuts to humour fruitcakes.

Could be worse; she might actually have finished her

So university course and become a lawyer, like Dad, like Uncle Ted. Jane forced a grin, picked up the phone, tapped out a mobile number more familiar than their own. He’d be home now, in the grim family fortress outside Abergavenny.

Irene, what can I say? I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve to live. Could he bear to hear that again?

Ominous silence. No ring.

Vodaphone robot: ‘The Vodaphone you are calling has been turned off…’

And nothing about voice-mail. No, please… Jane felt like she was about to start hyperventilating. He’d even disabled his voice-mail.

Oh Christ, I didn’t mean it. Slamming down the phone, staggering back into the kitchen. I didn’t mean any of it. You know I didn’t, you utter bastard!

Drawing in a breath like a long, thin hacksaw blade. Once too often – she’d abused him once too often.

Jane wrapped her arms around herself.

It was over. It really was over.

She stood there, not moving, as though she was set in marble, an angel on a grave. Stood there for well over a minute before moving numbly to the sink, half-filling a glass with water and drinking it, watching Ethel disappearing purposefully through the cat door.

She went back to the table and pulled out the chair where Mum normally sat, removing a book from the seat before sitting down. This house was like a nunnery; even the book was by St Thomas Aquinas, Mum’s place marked with an envelope at a page with – she opened it – some stuff about… angels, of course. Bloody angels.

Messengers of God. Jane shook her head slowly in contempt, then lowered it into her arms on the table top. This was what Mum had once admitted to doing when all else failed, when she didn’t know where to turn. With a cringing curtsy to primitive superstition, she would actually open the Bible or some other holy tome at random, seeking divine inspiration from the first she read. God, the weight of sadness in a gesture like that.

And wasn’t it ironic that, after years of mocking Jane’s own passing fascination with nature spirits and angels, Mum should get finally get round to investigating the subject because a madwoman had given the church a hefty bung? Wasn’t it also typical that she’d turned to a medieval theologian rather than simply ask her own daughter, who had read more books on angelic forces…

Jane lifted her head slowly, then shook it, smiling what she guessed was a smile of near-insanity but really, what the hell?

Maybe it worked. A sign from God. Angelic inspiration. She looked at the clock: five to seven. Be a least a couple of hours before Mum got back.

She got to her feet and went through to the hall. Didn’t, for once, feel the need to take down The Light of the World and smash it onto the flags, didn’t even give it a glance as she pulled her blue fleece jacket from the peg, shrugging it on as she opened the front door, Mum’s voice bleating in her head from when they’d had the row about Jenny Driscoll.

Maybe I didn’t push her hard enough.

Well, of course she didn’t. She wasn’t intellectually equipped for it. The truth was that Mum simply didn’t have the knowledge. Everything she knew about angels came from the Bible or the works of guys like Aquinas, whereas Jenny Box-née-Driscoll was coming directly from the New Age, where angelic energies corresponded with the devas, the high-level faerie entities supervising whole areas of life… where angels were considered to be an ecological fact, not a religious device.

OK, it was all sad crap, but it was crap she knew about. Nobody in – well, OK, certainly nobody in this village was better equipped to get the truth out of Driscoll.

The fog wasn’t bad now, actually. Jane zipped up her fleece, plunged her hands in the pockets and set off down the drive, towards the square and Chapel House. It would have been good to discuss this first with Eirion, but she was on her own again now, had to find her own way, make her own decisions. thing

29 Seeing Marilyn

DELIVERANCE

From: cherry lodge cherry.lodge@agritel.co.uk

To: deliverance@spiritec.co.uk

‘Has her own separate e-mail address,’ Merrily noted. ‘But I’d be a bit concerned about mailing her back, all the same.’

‘I wouldn’t worry – the husband probably never even goes near the computer,’ Sophie said. ‘Some older farmers are uncomfortable with them. Their farm’s a private world, a domain, and they don’t like the thought of anything having access – whether it’s through a public footpath or the Internet. Electronic intrusion is as big a threat as a Ministry man with a clipboard.’

Lately, Sophie had been letting her white hair grow; in the subdued light it looked unexpectedly dense and dramatic above the grey cashmere and pearls. She was perched elegantly on a corner of the desk, her back to the window, conveying no hurry to be away. Sophie Hill: a woman who lived close to and for the Cathedral. Who didn’t, therefore, keep ‘hours’.

There’d been tea waiting for Merrily in the Bishop’s Palace gatehouse, and chocolate biscuits. Jane’s ‘Auntie Sophie’ jibe had not been entirely misplaced. It was a bit like going to your auntie’s when you were a kid. A guilty pleasure now, especially with Jane at home nursing her private angst.

Have you read this?’ Merrily asked. Below the Cathedral gatehouse, the lights of Broad Street were still fuzzy with fog.

‘Merrily, it’s why I called you.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘Well, obviously my first thought was that they should have told the police.’

‘I can’t.’

‘No, of course not – not without consulting her first. But then, when you think about it, how interested would the police be anyway? What difference would it make, now he’s dead?’

We’ve been feeling isolated, like outsiders now in our village, even though Tony’s family has been here for generations. We’re the nearest farm to the village, but we don’t feel involved any more or especially wanted, and since all this came up it’s got much worse. Some people we’ve known for years have been very kind, but they don’t run things here any more. That’s why we didn’t want to talk about it to the police or anyone, it could only have made things worse than they are.

‘She’s very fluent, Sophie. Getting things off her chest.’

Sophie nodded. ‘E-mail can be a liberating experience, as I’m sure you know. One can say things it would be difficult, if not impossible, to say in a two-way conversation on the phone. While the problem with letters is that not only are they more formal but one is inclined to read them back an hour or so later and think, I can’t send that, and tear them up. But with an e-mail…’

‘You pour it all out and you’ve pressed send before you can change your mind.’

‘For people – especially for women – in remote situations, it’s become a refuge, a confessional… a lifeline. Particularly women who can’t discuss some things with their husbands. She probably gets into chat rooms as well. Therapy. Company.’

Merrily, sitting at Sophie’s desk, looked up, head on one side. ‘I’ve often wondered, never asked… but are you in The Samaritans?’

Sophie smiled briefly and looked away. It was obvious now, when you considered. And she’d be very good at it.

‘Also, one can write and transmit an e-mail while one’s other half is still in the house, without the danger of being overheard. Without even having to sneak it into the post. I suppose it’s become, for many people, the nearest thing to thinking aloud. Or crying aloud.’

‘Yes.’ Merrily thought of Cherry Lodge and her IBM and her spreadsheets. Tony Lodge slumped in front of the TV, and his wife ostensibly at work on the accounts in another room, dealing with DEFRA forms on the Net, in the night when it was cheaper… while secretly entering the bigger world, the limitless virtual world.

Merrily started to go through the printout for a second time, pencil-marking key paragraphs.

The police took me and my husband to Roddy’s bungalow, and we were both shocked because we’d not been there much. They didn’t mix, Tony and his brother, him being so much younger, and we’d certainly never been in the bedrooms before. Well, I was not as shocked as Tony because I thought, well, he was just a lad, even though he was thirty-five, and him being single and everything it didn’t shock me that much. I mean the black sheets and everything. We all knew how much he’d changed since he went on his own, how much more confident he was, perhaps through being in business. But then when we saw the pictures of women Tony squeezed my arm to say nothing, and when they asked us if we knew he collected pictures like that, all of famous women who were dead now, with nude bodies of page three girls pasted onto them, Tony said it didn’t make any sense to him at all, and he was just disgusted and he hoped it wasn’t going to be talked about publicly or told to the papers because things were bad enough.

‘I saw those pictures when I went to the bungalow with Frannie Bliss. He was hoping I might be able to throw some light on it, but it was as much a mystery to me. I mean, without knowing the full background I’d never have been able to come up with anything as bizarre as this.’

His father was very religious and he wouldn’t even think about it and so obviously it wasn’t to be talked about in the house, but there’s no doubt in my mind it comes back to the death of Roddy’s mother when he was so young. She was well over 40 when she had him, and never very fit, always ailing, they never thought she’d make old bones. Well she was dead before the baby was 3 years old. It was all so unexpected, and it must have taken a toll on her.

You’d have thought he’d feel resentment towards Roddy, the old man, because of that, instead of him being his favourite, but he was very religious, he always saw Roddy as a gift from God for which there was a price to pay and that was the loss of his wife. I never understood the logic of that, but Roddy was always special. If anyone was resentful I suppose I would have to say it was Tony and his brother Geoff who had lost the mother they knew and loved and got Roddy instead.

‘Merrily, what do you suppose she means by that?’ Sophie fingered the phrase gift from God. ‘All right, it was unexpected, a fluke – but is she actually saying that he believed his ailing wife had been preserved by God just long enough to give birth to this…?’

‘Monster?’ Merrily shuddered.

The farm was doing quite well in those days and the old man was able to employ a woman to look after the child in the daytime and stay over when he wasn’t well, but they never became substitute mothers, because they never stayed in the job long enough. It was a male household with a bit of help with the meals and the cleaning and childcare on top of that. My husband has told me how Roddy was always asking about his mother, what she looked like and so on, and one day Marilyn Monroe was on the telly and the old man laughed and said That’s what she looked like and although there must have been pictures of his mother around the house Roddy seemed to get fixated on this idea and he started collecting pictures of Marilyn Monroe to put up in his bedroom. When one of his brothers said something about it, Roddy said it was all right because she was dead. And then he’d find other pictures of women he liked the look of and if they were dead he’d say he’d have them for his mother and he’d put them up too and he seemed to find comfort in it so nobody thought anything of it.

‘You heard of anything like that before?’ Merrily asked. ‘Be interesting to talk to one of the nannies, wouldn’t it?’

‘Perhaps the police already have.’ Sophie picked up the electric kettle to refill it. ‘Reinventing his mother: not some worthy but possibly rather dowdy middle-aged farmer’s wife in some fairly dour farmhouse, but in fact something world-shakingly beautiful, with glittery dresses and glossy lips.’

‘Making a goddess of her.’

‘A sex goddess,’ Sophie said quietly.

‘That came later,’ Merrily said. ‘Let’s do the child-psychology stuff first. A boy with no mother, an all-male household. He’s quite lonely at home; his brothers are grown men with work to do; his father’s well into middle age and strict in all kinds of ways. It’s an altogether rigid regime. So here’s a child desperately in need of a mother’s love, jealous of all the other kids he sees being taken to school by their mums.’

‘What you would call a projection, then?’ Sophie offered.

‘Or a simple invention? Some kids have imaginary friends, Roddy has an imaginary mum. But is he looking for maternal love or a situation where he feels, to some extent, in control – the way he doesn’t, normally, in that house? The dead don’t push him around. He doesn’t feel quite so small and insignificant with the dead.’

‘Quite touching, in a child.’ Sophie took the kettle into the adjacent washroom. ‘But it can only get unhealthy, can’t it, as he approaches the dread years of puberty and all his burgeoning urges become fixated upon… well, I think we can both see where this is going. It’s very hard to understand why they allowed it.’

‘Household of working men. If it kept him quiet at night…’

Sophie’s voice came thinly from the washroom, over the rattle of water on metal. ‘Not if the rest is true.’

Roddy was always seeing people who were not there, so he said. He didn’t seem to be afraid of them. At first it seemed like just his imagination, but when they heard him talking to them in his bedroom at night, the dead, well, this was a very stiff God-fearing house and talk of ghosts and spirits was thought of as sinful in the extreme! Roddy got into a lot of trouble with his father. Of course, in most homes today they would have him to a psychiatrist but there was still a stigma attached to that kind of thing then even though it doesn’t seem so very long ago to me.

When he was older it seemed to stop. But Tony reckoned it was only that he stopped talking about it. They never said anything to the old man, knowing it would distress him, but it was definitely going on well into Roddy’s teens. Tony said you could still hear him talking and giggling in his room in the dead of night and you would swear, listening to it, that he was not alone in there. He said he and Geoff tried to laugh it off but there was something frightening about it too and they just tried to put it out of their minds and not hear it and get on with their lives. He said it was because they didn’t want to worry their father but I am not sure this was a good attitude to take, especially now obviously. I am also sure that Tony himself saw or heard more than he will talk about to me or anyone but there’s farmers for you. Head in the sand!

‘Was he psychic? Is that what we’re looking at, Sophie?’

Sophie sat down opposite Merrily, with her back to the window and the lights of Broad Street, reached for a pencil and her shorthand pad. ‘What do you know that would reinforce that theory?’

‘Not much. Told me he’d been to see the vicar and scared him. After talking to Jerome Banks myself, I’d say the scaring bit was wishful thinking, but Banks did admit Roddy had been to see him – claiming his bungalow was haunted. The usual poltergeist effects were mentioned, but that was probably Banks being dismissive. So either Roddy was genuinely experiencing something or he wanted to give people the impression he was. And this is in a new bungalow, don’t forget. No history apart from his own.’

Sophie lifted an eyebrow. ‘He brought Marilyn and the others with him?’

When Tony and I were married we lived in a bungalow in the village so that he could carry on running the farm with Geoff. Roddy was about fifteen then and I never saw that much of him. He didn’t want anything to do with the farm except driving the tractor, so he had a few other jobs including training as a mechanic at a garage in Ross but he didn’t stick that of course, he never stuck at anything for long. The old man said he was sure Roddy was going to make something of himself one day although none of us could see it. Then Geoff went to Australia with his family and the old man died soon after. Tony got the farm and there was money for Geoff and Roddy with the proviso he spent it on setting himself up in a decent business which Tony was to approve and oversee in the early stages. Quite a few local farms etc said they would offer him work if he got himself a digger and a bulldozer and the parish council said he could dig graves, so that was how it started, although we never imagined it was going to take off like it did. I think that was because of getting into septic tanks. He never looked back, especially after he got that contract as representative for Efflapure. How he managed that we’ll never know.

I think Tony was also relieved when he started going out with girls. Or rather Melanie Pullman who was his first real girlfriend, they were going out together for quite some time, over a year, but then they broke up and then she disappeared and he started going out with that Lynsey.

‘Now that’s interesting, don’t you think, Sophie?’

‘The fact that both he and the Pullman girl were having odd experiences?’

‘I wonder why they split up.’

‘People do, Merrily – especially a first relationship. Men have one sexual liaison, and it gives them confidence to go out looking for something new.’

Merrily recalled Sam Hall in the community centre. Boy seems to have gone through what you might call a delayed adolescence – as if he’d discovered sex for the first time in his thirties. No woman was safe.

‘So, how do we follow him into the next stage? Which is killing living women.’

‘I’m not sure that’s somewhere I want to follow him,’ Sophie said. ‘And I’m not sure you need to either. I’ll just make the tea.’

Merrily marked one more paragraph.

I should also say it came as no surprise to either of us, the way he died. He was always one for the pylons, according to Tony. He had long legs and was always good at climbing. When he was about ten he had a good hiding off his father for going up the one in the field behind the farm, almost right to the top. He wasn’t afraid. He never seemed to be afraid of anything, Tony said, so it came as no surprise at all how he went.

Was that part of his world of the dead? Climbing to another level of – what? But that whole area was an electric valley. Always part of his world. Who knew what connections he might have made?

Merrily read the last sheet again.

I have never had any kind of experience in this house so I must assume that when Roddy went from here it all stopped. Well, it stopped here anyway, and that was all that mattered to Tony, I am afraid to say. Head in the sand until it’s too late! Isn’t it always the case? I’m telling you all this, Mrs Watkins, and I haven’t told anybody else and I hope that as a Church minister you will respect this. None of us could possibly have known, could we, what was going on inside him. We couldn’t. Tony says that if we could just get him buried and do our duty by his father then we can try and settle down but I don’t know. I think Tony is getting very depressed about it and I think sometimes that it would be the best thing for everyone if we were to sell up and move from here. But we can’t do that yet because who would want to buy a farm where a mass murderer was raised?

Sophie came back with the teapot and went to the window. ‘Fog’s clearing.’

‘Glad you think so,’ Merrily said.

30 Light and Sparks

BEFORE JANE WAS even across the square, she knew precisely how she was going to play it: deceit against deceit. Lies, illusion… front.

Despite the fog, the square was collecting its nightly quota of upmarket 4X4s: well-off couples coming in to dine – on a Monday night, for heaven’s sake – at the Black Swan and the restaurant that used to be Cassidy’s Country Kitchen. The Monday diners were mostly the youthfully retired with up to half a century to kill before death. The Swan, mistily lit up, had become more like a bistro than a village pub and pretty soon Ledwardine would be more like a theme park than a village, with its shops full of repro, its resident celebs – and, of course, its state-of-the-art, postmodern, designer vicar with the sexy sideline in soul-retrieval. Poor as a church mouse, but you wouldn’t kick her out of your vestry, haw, haw.

Unfair. Bitch. Jane straightened her back and siphoned in a slow breath. You had to channel your anger or it would all come back at you; she’d learned that much, at least, from her New Age years.

The lights of the Swan dimmed behind her in what remained of the fog, as the pub’s façade sobered up into a couple of timber-framed terraced houses. Then there was an alleyway with a wrought-iron lantern over it, which looked pretty old but probably wasn’t. It was unlit. On the other side of it – narrow and bent, with one gable leaning outwards like a man in a pointed hat inspecting his shoes – was Chapel House.

The house was the real thing. As for its owner… Hello, I’m Jenny Driscoll and this afternoon I’ll be looking at ways you can turn your living room into a true sanctuary… a place where you can really be yourself… and yet also be taken out of yourself. What do I mean? Let’s go inside and find out…

Yeah, right, let’s do that.

Three steps led from the pavement up to the front door. Jane stood at the bottom, clutching the cold handrail. It was quite dark here, away from the fake gaslamps on the square. There was a glow in one of the downstairs windows but the bottom of the window was too far above the road for her to tell where the light was coming from or if there was anyone in that room.

Cold feet, now, of course. Something like this was always ‘the obvious thing to do’ until it actually came to it. Like, would she even be here if Eirion had left his phone switched on, if he’d answered it? If it hadn’t been over.

Well, probably not. But that was not what had happened and this, in the event, was where the obvious path had led. Probably, it was meant. A confrontation waiting to happen.

Jane paused, with a hand on the knocker. All right. Stop. Consider. This was her last chance to backtrack home and think this through properly, for it might not, in fact, be such a good idea. And if it failed, and the Driscoll woman hung the whole thing on Mum, it could get seriously dicey – believe it.

Clear footsteps behind the door, then. Oh God, she’d been seen from inside. So much for the element of surprise. Jane swallowed fog, coughed. Mrs Box, look, I hope you don’t mind me just arriving like this, but I’d really like to talk to you about angels. We might be able to help each other.

Aw, she could wing this. As it were. She unzipped her fleece halfway, thinking of Jenny Driscoll at seventeen: Terrible clothes, terrible music. And this element of sadomasochism. Thank you, Irene. Goodnight.

Oh, shit, run!

Too late. None of the tugging and creaking you got at home; the door opened like it was greased. But not to reveal Jenny Box. A man stood there.

There was a hum in the studio, and Prof Levin was trying to track it down, lying underneath the mixing board, scrabbling about. Concerned about all the electricity under there, Lol offered to switch off at the master.

Prof’s howl came out boxy. ‘You crazy? How would I find it then? Why don’t you take a walk, Laurence? I can’t concentrate.’

Lol said thoughtfully, ‘Prof, you’ve spent whole decades in this kind of atmosphere. Has it… you know, affected you at all?’

‘Huh?’

‘All the electricity.’

Prof’s bald head came up, glowing with sweat. ‘It’s an electric world. What’s your problem?’

‘Just, is there too much of it? Are we killing ourselves?’

‘Nah,’ Prof said scornfully. ‘Our bodies adjust. One day we’ll become electric beings. Just light and sparks.’ He crawled out from under the mixing board. ‘This is about the mad guy wanted you to do his song, right? Moira told me. The guy who now wants urgently to meet the Reverend to discuss who-knows-what.’

Lol had driven up to Ledbury to collect supplies from Tesco and got back to find Merrily had left a message with Prof: she’d tried to see Sam Hall but he wasn’t there. She’d call Lol here again, early this evening. She hadn’t. He’d called: answering machine. Then Gomer had called, asking if he was free tomorrow.

Prof stood up and laid his electrical screwdriver on the board. ‘You ever know Mephisto Jones?’

‘Mephisto Jones, the session guitarist?’

‘No, Mephisto Jones, the road sweeper, Mephisto Jones, the systems analyst. Jesus.’

‘He doesn’t seem to have been around for a while.’

Plays acoustic now. That’s all he plays. Acoustic.’

‘Well,’ Lol said, ‘if he’s happy…’

‘Happy? He’s fucking wrecked! Case, I suspect, of what your man’s talking about. Mephisto takes his headaches to the doctor, is referred to a neurologist. The neurologist invites him to have a brain scan. Mephisto says, “What, you wanna kill me now?” Brain scan – that’s how much they know about it, these neurologists. A brain scan involves the use of a massive electromagnetic field.’

‘Mephisto Jones was damaged by electricity? I always thought it was the drink.’

‘Drink would’ve been easier. And when I say that… No, this came out of nowhere, out of the ether. Headaches, weakness, pain in the joints, fingers swollen. Started with he couldn’t work in the studio, so he’d go home, lie on the sofa with a bottle of Jameson’s and the TV on. And feel even worse. It was a while before he put it all together that this was the TV, not the drink. By then, he couldn’t even listen to a Walkman. Mobile phones… goes without saying. He told me he felt so ill some nights, he couldn’t stay in the house, so he used to go and sit in the car – in the cold, because if he switched on the engine to power the heater…’

‘He became allergic to electricity?’

Prof tilted his hands. ‘Some people it just happens to. Like anything else, some people are more sensitive to it than others. Most doctors still don’t even accept it as a valid condition. Most doctors are arseholes: give you a choice of nerve tablets… red ones or blue ones. In the end, Mephisto found this international support group for electro-allergics or whatever the hell it is they’re called.’

‘So where is he now?’

‘Somewhere in Ireland, with no power to speak of and a bunch of acoustic guitars. Living on old royalties and looking fearfully out the window in case someone should decide to drag his valley into the last century. They’d have a lot to talk about, Mephisto Jones and your madman. If Mephisto’s in a mood to ‘answer the phone.’ Prof picked up his screwdriver. ‘Not a mobile, needless to say. Now will you leave me to my wires?’

‘That’s very interesting. Thank you, Prof.’

But Prof had already vanished, like a badger into its set. Lol went through to the kitchen and out through the stable door, trying to think what use a priest might be in this kind of situation.

Tendrils of fog were still ghosting the trees along the banks of the hidden River Frome, but the rooftops were clear. It was cold out here, colder than he’d expected. Presently, his own song came drifting out, as Prof tested the system. These Burt Bacharach kind of chords he couldn’t put names to, sounding better with distance.

Remember this one? The day is dwindling Down in Badger’s Wood, collecting kindling Smudgy eyes, moonrise… Golden.

Warm images. The toes curling by the electric fire.

The rather loathsome curling sensation in Moira’s gut. This bothered him. He’d heard too many shivery stories about Moira’s premonitions.

In fact, Lol shivered and was about to go back into the kitchen, out of the cold, when headlights lit the bushes along the track from the road.

The car came very slowly, mud sucking at its tyres, as the song went into its second short verse. At the end of it, streaked with cello, the chord change registered as bitter and paranoid in the dense air.

The camera lies She might vaporize…

The headlights splashed Lol’s eyes. The car stopped, the lights went down. He heard the driver’s door opening, feet on gravel, and then the door closing very lightly and carefully to make the most minimal of clinks. A visitor sensitive to studio hours.

Lol walked out and saw that it was young Eirion, on his own.

On the drive home, the fog was patchy. The road would be clear for up to a mile and then a sepia canopy would fall silently around the Volvo’s windows, muffling. Inside the car, a grey passenger was nestling beside Merrily all the way from Hereford to Ledwardine: anxiety.

Dead people. We’re talking about dead people.

For much of his life, Roddy Lodge seemed to have found solace in the dead, and now he was among them. Gone. Nobody could be damaged by him any more. Except, perhaps, his family.

And the community? Really?

On the way out, Sophie had regretfully handed her another e-mail, received by the Bishop’s office late this afternoon from the secretary of the Underhowle/Ariconium Development Committee asking for a meeting with Mrs Watkins. She could hardly say no.

But the anxiety came from something more amorphous. She was starting to feel spiritually darkened by the shadow thrown by Roddy Lodge and its merger with the even more monstrous shade of Fred West, a connection now strengthened by Huw Owen.

Skirting the square, slowing at the entrance to the churchyard, Merrily could see a light in the vicarage through the trees.

And then, to one side, another light – a tiny one, ruby splinters under the lych gate. A light she knew of old – its level above the ground, the speed it moved, like the landing light on a small boat: Gomer Parry following his ciggy to Minnie’s grave.

Merrily braked hard. Right.

Pulling the car half under the lych gate and sliding out. The cold was a shock, made her gasp. She left the car door hanging open and ran through the gate into the churchyard, spotting Gomer where the path forked by the first apple trees. He didn’t turn round. He knew who this was, was mumbling his response before she caught up with him.

‘… En’t your problem, vicar.’

How many times had he said that to her? She moved alongside him, walking on the wet and freezing grass. ‘Cold and nasty night, Gomer. Catch your death.’

‘That time o’ year, ennit.’

It was like she was interrupting some interior dialogue. The way Lol had described him on their night ride back from Underhowle. Like he wanted to catch his death.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m going home to cook something for Jane and me. It’ll be pretty basic, but we’ll be most insulted if you don’t join us.’

‘Vicar, this en’t an issue you can sort out.’ Gomer kept on walking, the give away ciggy cupped in his hand.

‘All right.’ She moved in front of him, crooked old gravestones, damp and shiny, on either side. ‘Who told you?’

‘Ar?’

‘About me conducting the funeral at Underhowle. For Roddy Lodge.’

She felt his attention hardening, as if he was only now becoming fully aware of her presence. It was almost as if she could see his glasses lighting up.

‘You’re plantin’ Lodge?’

The night air around them was unexpectedly pale, as though the village lights had soaked into the fog and been carried out here. Branches of the old apple trees poked out like arthritic hands.

Bugger. He hadn’t known, then.

‘You’re doing Lodge’s funeral?’

‘Must seem like a betrayal to you.’

Gomer laughed, without much humour. ‘Can’t none of us get away from it, can we?’

‘That’s how it seems.’

‘Like it was bloody well meant.’

Sorry?’

‘Ar,’ he said. ‘You and me both, vicar.’

She didn’t understand, pushed both hands far into the corners of the pockets of Jane’s duffel.

‘Think we got it all worked out, see,’ Gomer turned and started walking back between the graves towards the lych gate. ‘Feelings get the better of you, ennit? Go shootin’ your ole mouth off, ’fore you knows…’

Merrily followed him, saying nothing, new frost crackling under her shoes.

‘Had to fix up Nev’s funeral, see,’ Gomer said. ‘That’s why I en’t been around much.’

‘Is everything… OK?’

‘Rector of Presteigne’s got it in hand. We’ll likely have Nev’s… Nev back next week. Anyway, been talkin’ to other folk, while I was over there. Folk like Cliff Morgan.’

‘The police sergeant?’

‘Told me what I already knowed, vicar.’

‘They’ve finally linked him to the fire? Lodge?’

There was the sound of a woman’s laughter from the square: people entering the Black Swan. Gomer stopped under the lychgate.

‘Nev started the fire.’ He stared out towards the square. ‘Accident, like they thought. Found bits of an ole Primus stove. Boy was likely frying bloody sausages, pissed out of his head. Always used to say he didn’t like eating at home n’more. So that’s it. Lodge is in the clear – for what it’s worth to him now.’

‘When did you learn all this?’

Gomer looked down at the cobbles. ‘’Bout five seconds before the bugger went up the pylon, if you want the truth.’

‘What?’

He sighed. ‘En’t got much of an appetite these days, vicar, but I wouldn’t mind a cup o’ tea.’

Lol cleared a space in the clutter of the kitchen area and gave Eirion a cappuccino from Prof’s machine. Eirion was looking ‘upset – shoulders hunched, eyes downcast: the demeanour of the dumped.

‘I didn’t know where else to come. You know what she’s like – this… loose cannon.’ Gone eight p.m., and he was still wearing his school uniform.

‘You’ve got to drive back to Abergavenny tonight in this fog?’

‘It’s clearing. And they know where I am. You don’t mind, do you, Lol? I just—’

‘Eirion, look…’ Lol climbed onto a stool at the breakfast bar, which was still made up mainly of old packing cases. ‘Look, maybe the main problem is that the last thing she ever wants to think is that she’s at all like her mum, you know?’

Eirion smiled faintly. ‘A religious maniac?’

‘Bad enough if your dad’s a vicar. But your mother? So… What’s she going to do by way of rebellion? Obvious. She’s going to be a practising pagan, secretly joining a women’s mystical group meeting over a health-food café in Hereford, Next thing, she’s out in the vicarage garden bonding with the full moon.’

Eirion smiled.

‘And then suddenly Merrily’s realizing – as if she didn’t really already know – that not all pagans are sacrificing animals and deflowering virgins on the altar. She’s even made friends with a witch, for heaven’s sake. And so from Jane’s point of view, some of that essential inter-generational friction that you need, as a teenager, to grow up with a positive sense of yourself is not there any more. Her mum’s no longer shocked and appalled.’ Lol spread his hands, the way Prof would do. ‘Too easy, this stuff. I should’ve stuck with the psychology course.’

Eirion grinned.

‘So which way does she go next?’ Lol said. ‘Satanism?’

‘You’re right,’ Eirion said. ‘It’s denial, isn’t it? It’s not real atheism at all. It’s just spiritual denial.’

‘See? You don’t need me at all.’

Eirion gratefully drank some coffee.

‘What you’ve got,’ Lol said, ‘is a reluctant – and therefore unhappy – atheist. We’re oversimplifying here, because she’s still towing a lot of emotional luggage, including her dad, all of that. And, like you say, bad things happening to people close to her – like Gomer – giving her ammunition to use against Merrily’s faith. Lots of triggers.’

‘Including me, I expect.’ Eirion looked up, slightly red. ‘It’s pretty clear I’ve been a serious disappointment in… certain areas. Implying I’d been putting it about a lot, with the band and everything, the way you do. I’m probably totally crap in bed and she’s thinking, Christ, is this it?’

Lol tried not to smile. ‘Often it’s the ones who don’t think they’re crap that…’ There was history he could have gone into, but the boy needed to get home tonight.

‘And then there’s this Jenny Driscoll situation,’ Eirion said. ‘The woman behind the Vestalia stores? Jenny Driscoll’s discovering Christianity and she’s supposed to have seen an angel over Ledwardine Church. And Jane’s seriously contemptuous of her and all she stands for. Of course, she’d’ve given anything to have had that kind of experience herself… So a lot of resentment, lot of anger. Inflamed by all this about her mum not having a normal life – giving everything up for God. Who doesn’t exist anyway, and if he does he’s a complete shit. You know?’

Lol leaned on his elbows on the breakfast bar. ‘She was laying all this on you, day after day?’

‘I wouldn’t mind that if I thought there was anything I could do.’ Eirion looked at Lol, then looked away.

‘But you think there’s something I can do.’

‘Well, it’s just that Jane thinks you’re… I’m sorry, Lol… she thinks you and Moira…’ Eirion hesitated, biting his lower lip. ‘Are perhaps having sex,’ he said mournfully. ‘Together. Like musicians do. With the erotic charge of playing together.’

Lol sprang off the stool.

‘Not that she’s blaming you. She blames her mother, for neglecting the relationship. Putting God first, as usual, when God’s only going to stab her in the back, if He exists, because He’s a shit, right?’

‘She said any of this to Merrily?’

‘I don’t know. She was so happy about you and her mother finally getting together. She thought she’d brought you together. I mean, it’s obvious she really loves her mum, despite all the rows they have. Maybe the only person she does truly love. I mean I… I was thinking, isn’t it just maybe a lot more simple to think that maybe she’s found somebody else?’ Eirion shook his head. ‘Look at me – you’d think we were married or something, wouldn’t you? I mean, there’s bound to be someone else at some point, isn’t there? It’s what happens. Childhood sweethearts, twin souls – that’s pathetic, isn’t it?’

‘Eirion…’ Jesus, Jane thought Lol and Moira Cairns were having sex. ‘Would it be OK if I talked to Merrily about this?’

‘Well, I would hate it if she thought I was hoping she’d, you know, intercede on my behalf, but…’ Eirion sat there, wearing his school uniform, his puppy fat, his dismal expression. ‘It’s just that Jane… Suddenly all she sees is darkness, doom, nothing amazing out there any more. Mrs Watkins has been a bit busy lately. Maybe she hasn’t noticed how bad it’s been getting.’

‘Look, I’m helping Gomer again tomorrow,’ Lol said. ‘Maybe I can call in the vicarage.’

‘I’m really sorry.’ Eirion pushed fingers through his hair and stood up. ‘Lol… look, man, I might be overreacting, all right?’

Lol looked at him, shaking his head. ‘This is Jane, Eirion.’ ‘Yes,’ Eirion agreed miserably.

The man had said, ‘She can’t be long, I suppose. Do you want to come in and wait?’ And at first Jane had been completely wrong-footed; this was hardly the kind of issue she could raise in front of both of them together, especially if their marriage was more or less on the rocks. And then she’d thought, On the other hand…

And had felt suddenly clever and strong, in a thinking-on- your-feet kind of way. In a let’s use this situation kind of way.

‘Yeah, OK,’ Jane had said coolly. ‘I suppose I could hang on for a few minutes.’ Following him into the dark-panelled hall and then into… wow…

‘I feel quite embarrassed about bringing anyone in here,’ he’d murmured. ‘I’m afraid my wife’s tastes have become a little minimalist.’

Minimalist. At once, Jane had liked the way he didn’t talk down to her. Then she learned that this was how he was: serious, saying what he meant.

Just two areas of light: the smoky greenish night in leaded windows and the glowing, crumbly fire built on the hearth – just enough to bring out this oaky feeling of age and strength. No TV or stereo on view, or anything modern or new; and the room was heavy with the oldest aroma in Herefordshire, the rich, sweet scent of apple wood.

In fact, she ought to be in two minds about all this really because, although it felt like the old Ledwardine, this was actually the new Ledwardine. Most ordinary people didn’t have the money for this sympathetic, sparing kind of conservation; they just lived around the past, with exposed wires along the beams and a Parkray in the inglenook.

Still, Jane had felt immediately at home. Enclosed. He’d taken her fleece to hang up. ‘Sorry about the temperature, but my wife absolutely refuses to have central heating in here. It would damage what she calls the monastic purity.’

‘It’s fine. It’s quite warm.’

‘It’s not terribly fine when you have to keep the damn fire going all the time,’ Gareth Box had said, sounding tired at the very thought of it, but with this sort of attractive ashiness in his voice. ‘When I’m here, I tend to build it up and keep it in all night, which I suppose is wasteful nowadays.’

‘Maybe “nowadays” isn’t what this house is about,’ Jane said smoothly. ‘You have to give it what it needs.’

‘Really.’

‘I suppose you don’t get to spend as much time here as you’d like.’

‘I think I probably do,’ he said, ‘actually. This is my wife’s house. She chose it, restored it. With her instinctive taste.’

Yes, Jane thought now, observing him over her glass, she at least has taste. Nothing minimalist about you, Mr Box.

The two Tudor-looking chairs were facing one another, either side of the fire, and were actually more comfortable than they looked, and when you sat down you felt kind of transported back. Especially with a glass of wine in your hand – red, full- bodied, naturally.

And especially when you were served by Gareth Box because – call this corny but, with his collarless white shirt and black jeans, his longish hair and his heavy, wide moustache – there really was something of the cavalier about him. Sitting down opposite Jane, pouring himself a glass of this serious wine and standing the bottle on the fairly rudimentary oak table by the side of his chair, he looked far more suited to this house than the insubstantial Jenny Driscoll ever could.

A weary cavalier, though, perhaps depleted by civil war.

‘I’m sorry.’ He held an arm towards the fire to see his watch; there was no clock in the room. ‘She really should’ve been back by now. Seems to have very little awareness of the passage of time these days.’

Jane felt his gaze on her, like a touch.

‘Look… Jane… There isn’t anything I can help you with, is there? I feel awful now, wasting your time.’

Wasting my time? Oh, I really don’t think so.

31 Good Worker

GOMER FINALLY TOOK off his cap and sat down at the refectory table. He seemed to have lost weight, the way he had just after Minnie died. His glasses were dulled.

Merrily glanced into the scullery, with Ethel floating around her shins. No sign of Jane anywhere. ‘Gone up to her apartment, I expect. Can I at least do you some toast?’

‘Tea’ll be fine, vicar.’

‘See how you feel afterwards.’ She moved around switching lamps on, then went to put the kettle on, quite glad that the kid wasn’t around. She didn’t want Gomer inhibited.

‘Oughter’ve told the cops straight away. But he was already mad as hell at me, that boy. And it was all confused, some folk near-hysterical. Bloody pandemonium.’

‘I can imagine.’

As soon as they’d left the church grounds, he’d emptied it all out for her, no flam, no excuses. He’d been mad as hell that night, see – likely with himself. Couldn’t hold himself back, even in public.

She remembered the location, under the pylon, could conjure the scene from what Lol had told her: the cops trying to conceal their panic at having lost a murderer. Local people all over the place, smudging the picture as Roddy Lodge went weaving between the flashlight beams, fast and lithe on his own territory, used to moving by night, covering a lot of ground very quickly. Easily avoiding the police, because they’d be watching all the possible exits, certainly not the pylon at the far end, fully enclosed and no way out but up.

Only Gomer, who was outside the action, having left Lol to do the spadework, had seen him go. Catching up with his enemy at the foot of the pylon. Seizing his chance, keeping his voice low.

You told ’em yet, boy?

You mad ole fuck! Gomer asking the vicar to pardon his French, but that was what Lodge had called him: Mad ole fuck.

At the time, he’d been edging Lodge back towards the giant girdery legs of the pylon, telling him, You’re goin’ down anyway. Why’n’t you just tell ’em the bloody truth ’bout what you done to my depot? What you done to Nev. Tell the truth, boy, just once in your nasty, lyin’, cheatin’ little bloody life.

Lodge’s eyes swivelling all over the place, Lodge in his bright orange overalls. But it was dark here, no coppers anywhere near, just Gomer standing his ground.

Fuckin’ kill you, ole man, you don’t get out my way.

Gomer not moving. Merrily could imagine all the scattered lights in the field gathering in his glasses as he raised himself up to his full five feet four, glaring up into Lodge’s concave face.

Oh aye? What you gonner kill me with? Got a can o’ petrol on you, is it, sonny?

Half a second for it to get through, and then Lodge had come for him, come at Gomer, rage going through his whole body – you could feel the electricity of it, Gomer would swear. And in the shock of it he’d backed away, giving just enough ground for Lodge to straighten out an arm, his open hand going flat into Gomer’s face, ramming the glasses tight into Gomer’s eyes, into his nose. And then Lodge had hissed out the typically crowing, boastful sentences that proved he’d had nothing whatsoever to do with the death of Nevin Parry.

Course I done it, you ole fuck. Been over to fuckin’ Ledwardine loads o’ times, look. Got clients all over that village – rich bastards. Hadn’t planned to torch your place, but I’d got a coupler minutes spare that night.

Then a final contemptuous push, leaving Gomer on his back in the mud, and then Lodge was off and away – up the pylon, though Gomer didn’t know that at the time, as he heaved himself to his feet, straightening his specs, winded, unsteady. But perhaps it had been his brain that was most battered, by what he’d heard.

No wonder he’d been so quiet for days, hanging round Minnie’s grave.

Merrily put the kettle on the stove and came to sit down opposite him. She was remembering Lol’s graphic description of the exchange between Roddy Lodge up in the pylon and Gomer on the ground – Lol recalling Gomer’s opening challenge as completely as if it was the first line of one of his own songs.

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

‘You just couldn’t believe it, could you?’ she said.

‘Couldn’t be sure I’d yeard it right,’ Gomer said. ‘Well, I was sure, see, but then I’m thinking mabbe he was – ’scuse me, vicar – pissing up my leg, so to speak.’

‘I don’t think he was ever that clever, do you?’

No. Lodge had surmised that, because Gomer lived in Ledwardine, that was also where his depot was. Aggressively admitting to something he hadn’t done just to get the little guy out of his way, and simultaneously proving his innocence. And how had Gomer reacted? He’d straightened his glasses and gone to the pylon to seek confirmation.

‘You were trying to get him to say it again, just to be sure, in your own mind. Or maybe to catch him out.’

‘Ar.’ Gomer took off his glasses, rubbed them on his sleeve. ‘Silly bugger. Gutted, see. How could I get it that wrong? Ever since, been asking meself, asking Min at the grave if it was me killed him. Hounded an innocent man to his death.’

‘Well: A – you didn’t force him up the pylon, and B – he wasn’t innocent at all, was he?’

‘Innocent till proved guilty.’ Gomer rammed both hands through his wild, white hair. ‘Rock-solid sure, I was, that he’d started that fire.’

Which he admitted again on the pylon.’

‘Ar, along with how he was gonner do… wossername?’ ‘Madonna. I know. Who doesn’t even live in the area.’

‘Load of ole wallop! All bloody lies. Couldn’t trust a thing he said. He was in Ross that night, from early on – Cliff Morgan told me that. They got witnesses seen him in two pubs in Ross.’

‘But think about it this way… If you hadn’t had good reason to suspect Lodge, we’d never have gone over there and found what we found, and Lynsey Davies would’ve been quietly reburied somewhere more discreet. God moves in myst—’

‘I tried to tell him. Tried to tell that boy, Bliss, when he’s draggin’ me away.’

‘Perhaps that wasn’t really the best time, Gomer.’

‘Still oughter’ve told him afterwards, though, ennit? Likely they’d have talked him down off there, see, if I hadn’t been standing at the bottom givin’ the bugger stick. Worst of it is, they en’t never gonner know the full truth now, is it? Never.’ He looked across at Merrily, then lowered his gaze. ‘And now I’ve dumped it all on you, vicar. Didn’t wanner do that.’

Merrily patted his hand. ‘It’s what I’m here for, as we vicars like to say.’

‘You gonner tell him?’ He looked apprehensive, but she knew that whatever she wanted he’d go with it; he nearly always did – a channel for God’s opinion, wasn’t she? Which made offering Gomer advice so much more of a responsibility.

‘I don’t somehow think it’s going to arise. You… haven’t heard from him again, have you? In connection with more digging?’

Gomer shook his head. No time for that in the last couple of days, anyway. He’d been tidying up a few small jobs, things he could do without hauling young Lol out. Need the boy tomorrow, mind, to install a new tank for Mrs Pawson, now the cops had finished messing up her garden. Her’d been in London, and who could blame her, with no working drainage and knowing what had lain underneath the Efflapure?

The two phones began to ring simultaneously, in the kitchen ‘and the scullery. When the answering machine kicked in, the message was fully audible through the open scullery door.

‘Merrily, I need to talk to you… urgently, so call me soon as you get back, eh? Or if you’re there now, will you please pick up the phone?’

‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Coincidences, eh? Give me a minute, Gomer.’

‘Jesus, Merrily, you took your flaming time.’

‘God’s work, Francis.’

‘Yeh, listen, I’ll keep it short. The shit’s just hit the fan. One of the people Andy Mumford spoke to in Much Marcle – on my behalf, on the subject of our late friend West – decided there could be a few quid in it and phoned some bloody hack.’

‘Oh no…’

‘Who of course gets onto our press lady at Hereford for an official quote. And the upshot is, to head off any really wild speculation, Fleming’s been forced to put out a statement on the West angle. And he’s fuming, naturally. And Andy’s on the carpet. And I’m lying very low. So if anybody contacts you, you haven’t spoken to me in yonks.’

‘Why should anyone phone me?’

‘You didn’t see the local TV news? They had this story about the Rector of Underhowle backing out of Roddy’s funeral due to protests by people who don’t want him lying shoulder to shoulder with their God-fearing ancestors. Then it was mentioned that you’d be standing in.’

‘I was named?’

‘I’m afraid so, Merrily. So if you’re talking to anybody there, or here or anywhere, I did not take you into Roddy’s lair, you know nothing about any pictures on walls, et cetera, et cetera.’

‘You’re saying you want me to lie for you?’

‘If you would, please,’ Bliss said. ‘Er, you got the package?’

‘Yes, thanks very much. It’ll make a change from the Bible.’

‘Seriously,’ Bliss said, ‘I should give them a glance. There is a connection with West, gorra be. Huw Owen knows that, as you—’

What?’

‘Sorry, Merrily?’

‘Right, let’s sort this. Why did you really phone Huw Owen? And how does Huw Owen know there’s a connection between Roddy Lodge and Fred West?’

‘Well, he doesn’t know,’ Bliss said awkwardly. ‘I mean, none of us know.’

‘It’s all right,’ Merrily said tightly. ‘I’ll ask him myself.’

‘Fred bloody West,’ Gomer said. ‘Now why don’t that surprise me?’

Merrily had left the scullery door open; he could hardly have avoided overhearing. Hardly mattered now, if it was all coming out in the press.

She sat down. ‘You remember the case you found for them, behind the bungalow? It contained a pile of press cuttings on the West case. Things like that.’

‘Always givin’ you all this ole wallop ’bout what he done and who he done it with,’ Gomer mused. ‘Showin’ you photos of his missus’s… of his missus.’ He looked beyond Merrily towards the dark window in the back wall. ‘Just the same as Lodge – lies, lies and more bloody lies. You never thought much of it, see… and then the truth turns out to be… a sight worse. Sight more worse than you could ever imagine anybody could be. Least of all some cocky little builder, love nest in the back of his bloody van… always showing you photos.’

Gomer took out his ciggy tin and extracted one he’d rolled earlier. Merrily stared at him.

‘You knew West?’

Gomer wrinkled his nose in distaste. ‘Wouldn’t say I knowed him, thank the Lord – though you might’ve thought you did after ’bout half an hour, the way he went on. Givin’ it that’ – making rabbiting motions with fingers and thumb – ‘the whole time. Bugger could’ve yattered for Hereford. ’Bout… private things, mostly, and you can only take so much of that kind o’ chat.’ He lit his ciggy. ‘Good worker, mind, couldn’t fault him on that. Always looked after his tools.’

‘You said photos?’

‘Ones I saw was just pictures of his wife with no clothes on. But this feller I worked with once said West’d offered him, you know, bit of a session with the missus. Free, like.’

‘I’ve heard that.’

‘And later they reckoned there was these video tapes doing the rounds. Never come across ’em meself, mind.’

‘Porno videos?’

‘Worse.’ Gomer looked down at the table.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Ar, well…’ Gomer coughed.

‘Oh God,’ Merrily said.

Quite when it became clear that Gareth Box was actually interested in Jane as a woman, she was not sure, but it must have been fairly soon after he first called her ‘Jane’, as if he really knew her. As if they’d known one another quite some time.

She supposed at first that it was simply a journalist’s thing, assuming this easy familiarity – although he hadn’t been an actual reporter for a long time, she guessed. If Eirion had got it right, he’d already become some sort of executive editor when he’d met Jenny Driscoll.

It was just the way he said ‘Jane’. Hearing her name in his deep, world-weary voice. There was a kind of charge under it. Also an intensity in the way he looked at her. He was a very intense person.

And that wasn’t stupid. And she’d only had one glass of wine. Well, OK, he’d topped it up, so say two, but definitely not much more than that; it wasn’t as if she’d been here very long. And anyway Jane could usually hold her drink, no problem, except for cider. Just have to be a bit careful she didn’t say too much, too soon.

‘My, er, my… ex-boyfriend… wants to be a journalist.’

‘Could do worse,’ Gareth said. ‘Opens lots of doors.’

‘Well, at your level, I suppose. Not round here.’

He shrugged. ‘I started not all that far from here, actually. Worked for a news agency. It doesn’t matter where you start, if you’re good enough, if you can spot opportunities.’

‘Yeah.’ She supposed Jenny Box must have seemed like a good one at the time, if you could put up with her obsessive behaviour. ‘Er, you haven’t actually met my mother, have you?’

Gareth Box sighed. ‘I certainly feel as though I have. My wife talks about your mother quite a lot.’ The way he kept saying my wife, Jane thought, conveyed a definite detachment. ‘I tend to hear about all her problems, though it’s hardly my business.’ He smiled wryly. ‘How are things between her and… er…?’

‘Lol.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Oh, well…’ Wow, the old girl really was getting in with Jenny Box. ‘Complicated, you know, unsatisfactory. But like… what’s new?’

And he poured her a bit more wine and they chatted about Lol for a while, and a few other things. He was very easy to talk to. He concentrated on what you were saying, made meaningful observations, seemed concerned, treated you like a person, a woman. Yes, that was the point: from the first, he’d treated her like an equal. Only Lol had ever really done this before. Even with Gomer, who was never patronizing, it was still always ‘young Jane’. So this felt good, she wouldn’t deny that.

‘So like… how do you feel about the angel thing?’

A pause. ‘More to the point’ – he leaned back in his chair, tossing one long leg across the other, tilting it so that an ankle lay easily on a thigh – ‘how do you feel about it, Jane?’

‘Well, I…’ Jane drew breath and went for it. ‘Frankly, I’m inclined to think it’s kind of bollocks.’

Gareth didn’t laugh. He just nodded, a lock of dark hair falling over his forehead. Jane felt obliged to qualify bollocks immediately and talked about angels and the kind of people who professed to see them. Talking too fast, maybe. He didn’t interrupt. She felt hot now, edged her chair away from the fire.

‘I mean, there’s a history of sightings like this, in certain places, mainly abroad – although most of them sound like mass hallucination. But obviously there’s no history of it here… not over Ledwardine Church.’ She forced a laugh. ‘The problem is, the business my mother’s in, you can’t just knock something like that on the head. Not easily, can you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I imagine not.’

‘And it’s hard for her, you know?’

Gareth Box nodded. ‘So you thought you’d come over and… knock it on the head.’

She squirmed a little. ‘I just wanted to know what was really happening… what’s really behind it.’ Best not to mention the money at this stage. ‘I don’t like to see her getting taken for a ride.’

He was silent. Shit, I’ve gone too far.

A log collapsed in the hearth. Jane jumped. Gareth Box didn’t move.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean to be offensive or anything.’

He met her gaze, although his own eyes were just shadows. Kept on looking at her steadily, as though he was trying to make up his mind about her. Intense. A little shiver went up her spine. Deliciously.

Then he said, very quietly, ‘What if I was to tell you – in absolute confidence – that she’s done this kind of thing before?’

She jumped again. Oh my God. Didn’t know what to say.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘all this is pretty painful for me, as you can imagine. No man likes to think his wife’s…’ He looked away. ‘How old are you, Jane?’

‘Old enough.’

He smiled. ‘I wouldn’t doubt it. Jane, can I rely on your absolute discretion?’

‘Yes… absolutely.’ She was aware that her voice had shrunk. She found she’d come to the edge of the chair. She saw that two logs had enmeshed, forming a red, ashy heart. The apple-wood scent filled her head.

‘This is a village.’ Gareth Box uncrossed his legs and sat forward with his hands pressed together between his knees, which seemed uncharacteristically hunched and defensive. ‘Whatever’s happening needs to be handled with a certain tact.’

‘I’m used to that,’ Jane said. ‘It goes with the territory.’

He nodded. ‘Look, I don’t know very much about your mother… but I think we both have to accept that, in Jenny’s eyes, there’s only one angel in Ledwardine.’

The log fell apart. Christ.

Standing under the porch light, Merrily watched Gomer walking away down the drive, feeling relieved when he turned right at the bottom, heading towards his home and not the churchyard, not Minnie’s grave.

What a small county this was. Gomer had met Fred West when they were both involved in the renovation of some farm buildings at a small equestrian centre near Ross. Gomer and Nev had been putting in drainage, and Fred had been rebuilding walls and installing the electrics. His van seemed to have been furnished in the back for sex, which he talked about all the time. For all these women he seemed to run into who were begging for it.

Merrily had asked Gomer if West might have had any contact, in the course of his work, with Roddy Lodge. Gomer, who knew a lot of people in the service industries, had said he couldn’t be sure about Lodge but more men – and women, of course – had been associated with West than were ever likely to admit it.

Merrily closed the front door, locked it and barred it top and bottom.

She went to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Flower!’

No reply. It was after nine-thirty now; the kid had probably made herself something to eat earlier, although there were no signs of it in the kitchen. Merrily switched on the grill to warm it up, just in case. Then she went into the scullery, sat down with a sigh and the first of the three books about the West case. On the back it said,

How and why an evil psychopath was able to ensnare so many in a web of unseeing complicity.

Horrific, but there was no avoiding it any longer. Perhaps she should know. Everybody else in the county seemed to. It was part of the underside of Hereford history. Fred West still crouched like a spider in a corner of so many lives.

Even Gomer’s.

The videos he’d mentioned – the ones he’d only heard of, after the West murders had become public knowledge – were snuff videos. It was said that Fred had rigged up cameras and shot videos of himself doing what he’d done to girls and young women.

Gomer had wondered if maybe Roddy Lodge had somehow got hold of a copy.

The phone rang. Merrily looked at it, didn’t feel like speaking to anyone else tonight and let it go on ringing until the machine picked it up.

This is Ledwardine Vicarage. Sorry we’re not around, but please leave a message after the bleep.

Bleep.

Then, ‘Bitch!’

Merrily put the book down.

It was muffled – one of those tissues-over-the-phone voices. ‘Bitch, if you do that funeral on Friday, you’re gonna regret it. You stay at home on Friday, you understand? You bitch.’

Jane let herself in very quietly by the side door and padded up the stairs to the attic, collapsing on her bed under the Mondrian walls.

This was killing her, and there was nobody to ring. Nobody at all.

She lay there, numbed by this shattering hyper-awareness, listening to parts of the past clunking into place like the pieces of one of those really obvious wooden jigsaws aimed at very small children.

Or the ratchets on some crude medieval engine of torture, squeezing your brain.

Dad.

Poor dead Dad. Why exactly did he go off with Karen, his secretary with whom he’d died in a ball of blazing metal on the M5? Jane remembered seeing Karen a couple of times in Dad’s office, and she wasn’t exactly to die for, was she? Maybe a bit younger than Mum but not as pretty. So what exactly was there missing from his marriage that drove Dad into Karen’s arms, Karen’s bed?

And why had Mum, instead of working to save her marriage, thrown herself into the arms of ‘God’?

Consider: it was a known fact that a huge percentage of male clergy were gay. OK, so maybe no figures had emerged on women priests yet, but looking at pictures of some of them in the papers you could soon draw your own conclusions.

Jane sat up. Opposite the bed, the longest Mondrian wall, with its garish red and yellow and blue emulsion, looked like a bad idea clumsily executed. She wished she was lying on Gareth Box’s hearthrug in the red glow of the apple-log fire. Please, Gareth, show me I’m normal.

Eventually, she got ready for bed. Sleep? No chance. And what was she supposed to say tomorrow over the breakfast table?

What was she supposed to say the next time she saw Lol?

Or maybe he knew. Oh yeah, it would certainly explain all that, wouldn’t it? All that keeping-up-appearances shit, Mum and Lol not being able to see one another very often. It was never a question of the relationship going stagnant – because it had never happened, had it? It was another lie.

Jane began beating her forehead into the pillow. Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies…