The Lamp of the Wicked (63 page)

Lol smiled uncertainly at Moira. ‘So you’ll do half a dozen songs ending with “Tower”, and then I kind of creep on and we do “Baker’s Lament”.’

‘Then you play for as long as you feel happy about, and I’ll come back as and when. Piece of cake, Laurence.’

‘Piece of cake,’ he said and felt that flicker of separation, putting him minutely out of synch, and for a moment he was watching himself looking at the beautiful woman in midnight blue and silver, knowing now for certain that it wasn’t going to happen for him, that this was her concert and hers alone and nothing else was going to happen.

‘Oh, it
will
happen,’ Moira said, and he didn’t even wonder how she’d plucked that thought from his mind, because he might actually have said it while he was out of synch. Anything could have happened; his head was full of storm clouds.

A possibly important thought came to him, then wafted past like a pale moth, and he put his head in his hands for a moment to try and catch it. But it had gone, and he heard Moira saying, ‘Who the hell are you?’

Cola French was standing in the doorway, the golden stars in her hair and a small black hat with a feather.

‘How’d you get in?’ Moira growled.

‘Friends,’ Cola said. ‘And lies. I tell a lot of lies.’ She looked past Moira at Lol. ‘I lied before, Lol – I lied when I said I wasn’t involved.’

Lol was on his feet. Then his phone buzzed.

‘Lynsey and Piers and Roddy and the whole bit,’ Cola said. ‘But when I heard the copper with Piers, and your… lady, this morning at the shop, I’m thinking, I can’t sit on this shit any more.’

‘Aye, well, you can sit on it a wee bit longer, hen,’ Moira said. And as Lol watched her shepherding Cola French into the passage, he heard in the phone, ‘It’s Jones here. That Lol Robinson?’

Another voice, one of the Courtyard staff, said, ‘Ten minutes, Moira.’

‘We meet in the name of Jesus Christ, who died and was raised to the glory of God the Father. Grace and mercy be with you.’

There was a muffled gonging from one of the cooling radiators. Under those opaque glass globes, it looked as cold inside here as it was starting to feel.

No warmth for those who would mourn a murderer.

It was a boxy place, the Church of St Peter, Underhowle, so regular and heavy with dark wood that it might have been a Victorian magistrates’ court. A Jerome Banks kind of church. Merrily, wearing her monastic white alb, was not comfortable here.

‘We… we’ve come here to remember before God our brother Roddy, to commend him to God, our merciful redeemer and our… judge. To commit his body to be buried. And to comfort one another.’

There were two rows of pews – to her right the Lodges, on the left Ingrid Sollars and Sam Hall. Ingrid wore a brown shawl over her ravaged wax jacket. Sam’s silver ponytail was tied with a thin, black ribbon.

The light-pine coffin rested on a bier like a hostess trolley. Lomas and son sat two rows down, behind the Lodges, inflating the congregation by twenty-five per cent.

‘Almighty God, you judge us with infinite mercy and justice… and love everything you have made. In your mercy, turn the darkness of death into the dawn of new life…’

Alone at the bottom of the nave, hunched like a night- watchman, was Huw. He’d phoned Banks himself, to arrange for the sacrament. Merrily didn’t trust him. The word AGENDA hung in the air above him, in mystic neon.

‘… And the sorrow of parting into the joy of heaven; through our saviour, Jesus Christ.’

Meanwhile, Gomer was out there, working by hurricane lamp at the bottom of the churchyard. Tony Lodge had shown them the spot, to the left of his parents’ grave, about ten feet from the boundary hedge, a line of laurels screening it from the rest of the churchyard. Seeing the spot had made Merrily wonder why anyone had thought it worth objecting; this would be a grave you’d need a map to find.

It was fortunate, in a way, that the funeral had been delayed because Gomer had also made a late start.

This was due to his stoical digging around the Baptist chapel uncovering nothing but stones.

At four-thirty, Frannie Bliss, pale and sweating, had still been refusing to give up, raging against the dying of the light,
Try here… Try back there. It’s gorra be here, or it all falls down.
And then, in agony,
Don’t let me down, Gomer!
Until Gomer, exasperated, had snatched out his ciggy:
I’m tellin’ you, boy, you blew it. There en’t nothin’ buried yere but clay.

At 4.55, Fleming’s secretary had rung, wondering where Bliss was. Merrily saying,
Isn’t he there already? I hope he’s not had an accident
, like she was Mrs Bliss, poor woman. By then Frannie – so convinced earlier that he’d be making the triumphant call that would bring Fleming and his team down here, with a small army of SOCOs and the Home Office pathologist – had been close to tears. He’d said he might come up the church later; Merrily hoped he wouldn’t. Rage and despair were not helpful at a funeral.

The reflection of the cold globe above it wobbled now in the steel plate on the coffin. Merrily imagined Roddy Lodge lying there in the merciful darkness, sealed away from a hostile world of electric lights, televisions, mobile phones, radiation.

The schedule for
Common Worship
suggested this was the most suitable time for the first hymn. Hymns were useful; they gave you a break, time to gather your thoughts for the next stage, which was your ‘tribute’ to the deceased.

For which she wasn’t ready. There were some things still to work out. It was important to at least
approach
the truth.

But there would be no hymns tonight. There was no organist. She imagined seven strained voices raised in stilted intimacy under the dismal hanging lamps.

No hymns.

She was grateful, at first, when the side door opened and Gomer slipped in. He didn’t come any further, just stood by the entrance, still carrying his hurricane lamp, and when she raised a questioning eyebrow at him, wild, white light flared in his glasses:
warning, warning, warning
.

‘Would you… excuse me… one moment.’ Merrily moved down past the coffin and followed Gomer into the porch, closing the doors against the wind. Gomer coughed.

‘This yere grave, vicar. Problem with him. En’t entirely vacant.’

‘Oh.’ This sometimes happened. A graveyard was crowded underground; there was slippage. It
would
happen tonight. ‘How far down is the other coffin?’

Gomer said. ‘That’s the point, ennit? This one don’t have no coffin.’

‘Put it out of your head, all right?’ Moira picked up the Boswell guitar by its neck and handed it to Lol. ‘I told the girl you’d talk to her afterwards. She’ll find you. Now let’s get this stuff on stage.’

Mephisto Jones had said he’d been out all day helping a friend to do some fencing on his farm. Then he’d called in for a beer on his way home. He said he was feeling good at the moment; on nights like this, feeling stronger, he wondered if it wasn’t time to come back to England, give it another try. Yeah, he remembered Prof, of course he remembered Prof.

Lol had made himself sit down and ask some questions about the symptoms of electrical hypersensitivity, telling Mephisto about Roddy Lodge’s death on the pylon. At one point, Prof had looked in, his bald head shining with sweat, shaking both fists.

He’d be well out of it
, Mephisto had said.
Wouldn’t know who he was any more
.

He said he was Satan
,’Lol had recalled.

Makes sense
, Mephisto had said.
I used to think I was the walking dead, but you know what they said about Satan…

Now Lol and Moira carried the guitars down the passage, under muted lights, and out onto the stage, where black curtains concealed the auditorium. Sounds of mass movement out there. This wasn’t a big theatre, but it still felt like standing on a cliff- top overhanging a vast city.

They put the guitars on stands: the curved-backed Boswell, the Washburn and Moira’s thin-backed Martin. There were voice microphones and guitar mikes at waist level.

‘Check the tuning,’ Moira instructed, and Lol went through the motions while she fingered a couple of chords on the Martin, provoking a whoop from beyond the curtain. She put the guitar down, placed both hands on his shoulders, gripping hard, and hissed, ‘She’s no gonnae go away. She’ll find you. But you have to do this first, OK?’

A young guy in a black sweater appeared. ‘Whenever you’re ready.’

‘Thanks.’ Moira nodded. Rustling, chatter, laughter from behind the curtains. An audience. Hundreds of people anticipating an experience. ‘Will your wee priest have made it?’

He shook his head. ‘She’s been delayed.’

I lied when I said I wasn’t involved… Lynsey and Piers and Roddy and the whole bit
. What were the implications here? What could he do about it tonight? Moira would play for maybe forty-five minutes, then he’d shamble on, do his forgettable best, shuffle off. An hour lost, maybe more.

On the other hand, if he were to shuffle off now…? It wasn’t as if he’d be letting Moira down – probably the reverse; appearing with sub-standard support didn’t help anyone’s reputation. And he certainly wouldn’t be letting the audience down. But how easy would it be to find Cola French and then get out of the theatre?

They came to the black curtains at the back of the stage. The main curtains had opened now, and he could see the audience in the steep theatre, could see that it was almost full, that all the boxes set into the walls on either side seemed to have been taken.

The house lights went down. The chat sank as sweetly as the ambient noise being lowered in the mix of a live recording. The mike stands and the guitars stood in pools of golden light, and you could almost hear the steel strings vibrating in the air.

Silence like a gasp. Four hundred people out there. Anticipation.

Then Moira said, ‘OK, off you go.’

He spun in shock, and she stepped behind him to cut off his retreat, and the curtains either side of her were execution black.

‘I thought, with you needing to get away, you could go on first after all,’ Moira said.

Lol’s lungs made like a vacuum pump.

Moira pushed him hard. ‘Just get the fuck out there, eh, Robinson?’

G
OMER HAD LEFT
an earthen step inside the grave, and he went down onto it, but he held the hurricane lamp away so that Merrily couldn’t see.

‘En’t terrible attractive, vicar,’ Gomer admitted.

‘Doesn’t matter.’ She stood on the slippery rim of the grave and leaned over, the wind pulling at the hood of her alb and rattling the laurel bushes. The church crouched above them with its stubby bell-tower, and the lights from inside were dull and unhelpful.

The smell was mainly of freshly turned earth and clay, but it was still the smell of mortality. Her foot dislodged a cob of soil, and she stumbled.

‘Careful, vicar.’

‘I’m OK. Go on… let’s have a look.’

She drew a breath. Gomer flattened himself against the side of the grave and lifted the lamp so that it lit up the interior of the grave like an intimate cellar.

‘Deep,’ Gomer said. ‘Cold earth – preserves ’em better, see.’

Merrily looked down into an absence of eyes. Decay was a corrosive face pack. In its nest of clay-caked hair, the face was like a child’s crude cardboard mask, the emptiness of it all emphasized by the mouth, the way the jaw had fallen open on one side into a last crooked plea.

And all of it made heartbreaking by the rags of what looked like a red sweatshirt and an uncovered hand with its dull glimmer of rings. She had to be fully six feet down. Some gravediggers today didn’t go that deep. She could have ended up with a coffin on top and never have been found.

Merrily stepped back, making the sign of the cross.

‘There was this.’ Gomer climbed out. He held up the lamp and opened out his other hand. ‘Cleaned him up a bit, vicar, so’s you can see.’

She saw an angel.

An angel on a chain.

‘If he was still round the neck, see, I’d’ve left him on, but he was lying on top, he was. Loose. Like somebody’d put him in after the body.’

The angel was no more than an inch and a half long, with wings spread and hands crossed over its lower abdomen, which protruded as though it was pregnant. In fact, there was something curved there, like a small locket or a cameo.

‘Any idea what he is, vicar?’

She felt a sadness as sharp as pain. ‘Think I just might.’

‘Valuable?’

‘It was to someone,’ Merrily said.

Lol felt like he was dying, his recent past laid out before him in a mosaic of faces.

He stood there, frozen, gazing into purgatory, a warm-col- oured vault with boxes set into the sides like the balconies of apartment blocks or the doors in an advent calendar.

The house lights had come up again, because somebody thought he wasn’t ready – some technical problem, maybe – and now he could see the individual faces in the mosaic.

He saw, in one of the boxes, Al and Sally Boswell – Al in his Romany waistcoat and his diklo, Sally in that long white dress with the embroidery around the bosom, the dress that was so much a part of her personal history. The two of them sitting in their box, gypsy aristocracy, as if this was a ceremonial occasion for them. Al, who’d given Lol the Boswell guitar, had come to Hereford to see it abused.

The Boswell guitar was behind Lol, on its stand. He had the Washburn hanging from his shoulder; it felt unresponsive, like a shovel.

He saw Alison Kinnersley, this woman who’d originally gone with him to Ledwardine and then left him for the squire, James Bull-Davies, and his farm and his horses.
Bad for you
, Lucy Devenish had told him sternly.
Wrong type of woman entirely
.

James was there, too, in a tie.
A male-menopausal stooge
, said Lucy Devenish,
who’s known only two kinds of women – garrison-town whores and county-set heifers
.

Lol’s hands felt numb as he stared into the huge, cavernous silence and all the people stared back at him with a tremulous fascination – that apprehension-turning-to-anticipation which had been so palpably apparent when Roddy Lodge was high in the pylon, reaching out to the insulator, the killing candle.