The Lamp of the Wicked (11 page)

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

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

Lol sat down on the edge of the bed.

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

Lol’s heel clinked on something under the bed.

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

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

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

A set-up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lol shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

‘This and that. Royalties.’

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

Lol tensed. ‘Girlfriend?’

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

‘Who, er… who told you… ?’

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

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

‘Who?’

‘Prof… Simon.’

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

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

Moira stared at him.

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

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

‘Lol, what year is this?’

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

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

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

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

‘Not good, is it?’

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

Lol smiled his hopeless smile.

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

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

‘Merrily, we’ve gorra name.’

‘For the… ?’

‘Dead person.’

‘Oh.’

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

He folded his hands around his warm mug.

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

‘Claim on what?’

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

‘Not a loving relationship, then.’

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

‘When you say “local”… ?’

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

‘So she was… identifiable, then.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How did she die?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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