The Lamp of the Wicked (64 page)

Lol saw Jane, close to the front. Jane Watkins who one day, before he knew her mother, had come into the cluttered folklore emporium, Ledwardine Lore, when he was minding the shop for Lucy.

What the hell was his first song supposed to be?
Oh God
. The amplified silence boomed in his head. How long had he been standing here like this? How long before they started the slow handclap? How long before someone pulled the curtain? What was he supposed to
do
?

Directly opposite him was the glass-fronted control booth where Prof Levin sat. Prof was standing up, very still, his hands theatrically over his eyes, like this was some Greek tragedy.

Then Lol saw Eirion, on the far left, probably the only person in that audience not staring back at him, because he was looking at Jane, who
was
looking at Lol, hands clasped, face taut with anxiety.
Suddenly all she sees is darkness, doom, nothing… nothing amazing out there any more
.

There was an unexpected prickling in the corners of Lol’s eyes. He hadn’t mentioned the gig to the Boswells, wouldn’t have dared – it must have been Prof. But who had told Alison and Bull-Davies? And surely that was… who could possibly have told
Sophie Hill
… who was sitting with a man who must be her husband, very near the back, presumably in case the sound level proved insufferable.

‘Hey, man, where you been?’ A lone male voice curling out of the third row.

Nervous laughter from somewhere. The sweat in Lol’s hands felt like cold honey.

He whispered into the mike, ‘Away.’

The whisper was as crisp as an iceberg lettuce, and huge; how sound systems had improved.

‘When you reckon you’ll be back, then?’ the guy in the third row said.

‘Well, I don’t really know,’ Lol said. ‘It depends on…’

… remembering what the first song is.

And then suddenly he did, his fingers finding the riff. Into the mike, he said,

Tuesdays on Victoria ward We always hated Tuesdays.

And he must have sung it, kind of, because the lights went down and some applause bubbled up.

The last face Lol saw before the whole audience went into deep shadow was Jane’s. She was slumping in her seat with her head thrown back, and he could almost hear the whoosh of breath coming out of her, as he did the number.

Did the number!

Leaning on the guitar, now, as he went into the chorus.

Someone’s got to pay

Now Dr Gascoigne’s on his way

And it’s another…

HEAVY MEDICATION DAY.

***

Wondering, for the first time, whether it might have been wiser to change Dr Gascoigne’s name.

Nah. Stuff you, Dr Gascoigne, you cold-eyed sadist.

Lol discovered he was smiling. The people out there, the
unknown
faces, must have thought it was part of his act, faking disorientation. Only a real professional could do that and get away with it. Lol felt he was floating, and when the song was over, someone at the back started shouting, ‘ “Sunny Days”!’ and there were ragged handclaps in support.

Well, he wasn’t going to do that trite crap, not in a million years.

Definitely not.

When he reached the chorus, he was staggered at the number of people singing along.

And it’s always on the sunny days you feel you can’t go on On rainy days it rains on everyone But I’m running for the subway and I’m hiding under trees On fine days like…

‘Yes.’ Sam Hall held the angel under the brass-shaded pulpit light. ‘It’s what’s known as a bio-electric shield pendant.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Merrily said. ‘Jane – my kid – was looking for one. I just couldn’t remember what it was called.’

The two of them were up in the pulpit, voices lowered. The service had been suspended. What else could she do? There was no way this coffin was going in that grave. A grave that, before the night was out, would be surrounded by what Bliss called the Durex suits.

‘In here’ – Sam put a finger on the cameo part that had made the angel look pregnant – ‘we have a bunch of crystals – quartz, maybe some malachite – that are supposed to interact with the body’s own energy field to deflect electromagnetic radiation. Often worn by people who work with computers.’

‘And… have you seen one before? In Underhowle?’

‘Yep.’

So, when you said Melanie Pullman was getting nothing but Valium from Dr Ruck, and you suggested she should consult an alternative practitioner in Hereford about her EH, was this… ?’

‘This was one of the items they got for Mel. Told her to wear it day and night. For a short while, she was a familiar figure in the village, with the angel around her neck. In fact, you can ask Bliss about this, but I think, when she went missing, the description the police put out suggested that she might well be wearing it.’ Sam gave the angel back to Merrily. ‘Where did this come from, Reverend?’

‘Excuse me, Mrs Watkins.’ Down in the nave, Mr Lomas was tentatively on his feet. ‘I don’t like to interrupt, look…’

Merrily flashed a warning glance at Sam, and went down to talk to the undertaker. Taking Mr Lomas over to the door where Gomer was waiting, telling him there’d been an unforeseen problem with the grave, that it wasn’t empty. Mr Lomas nodded, not entirely surprised; he’d been here before.

‘What do you want to do, then, Mrs Watkins? I don’t suppose it’s a problem easily dealt with until tomorrow. Which might cause another problem here.’ Mr Lomas nodded at the coffin. ‘You want us to take him back? Or you could lock him in here for the night, and we’ll be back tomorrow.’

Tony Lodge came over. He’d overheard. ‘Can’t be nobody else in that plot, Reverend, it was a field twenty years ago. Our field. That’s how we got the family plot extended – we gave the field to the Church.’

‘Sloping graveyard, ennit?’ Gomer said knowledgeably. He’d replaced half the soil over the remains, for concealment. ‘Slippage, see. Likely there was coffins under that field when you was still ploughing him.’

‘God, God,
God
.’ Cherry Lodge was out of her pew. ‘Is this bloody nightmare
never
going to end?’

‘Don’t you worry, Mrs Lodge,’ George Lomas said. ‘We’ll get this sorted in the morning,
no
problem. We’ll sort out another plot, but you can’t do that by torchlight.’ He looked at Merrily. ‘Leave him here, then, is it?’

Merrily looked at Tony Lodge, who looked non-committal. ‘I suppose so. Yeah… OK. Thank you, Mr Lomas.’

And so the Lomases left. And then there were seven, with Gomer. Seven and a corpse. Merrily looked at the four mourners, all of them on their feet, faces waxy under the sour- cream lights. ‘I don’t really know what to do now.’

She was aware of Huw Owen moving quietly up the aisle. Sam Hall said, ‘You can tell us about the body. That’d be a start.’

She nodded. ‘Well… it’s a woman, as you’ve gathered. And it isn’t in a coffin.’

‘Oh God almighty,’ Cherry Lodge said.

‘Roddy…’ Merrily hesitated. ‘Roddy dug graves for the church sometimes, didn’t he?’

‘They always had a regular gravedigger,’ Tony Lodge said, ‘but when the ground was difficult or they hit rocks, they’d call the boy in with his digger.’

Ingrid Sollars came over to inspect the bio-electric angel. She took it out of Merrily’s hands, held it tenderly in her own. ‘It
is
Melanie, then?’

Merrily nodded. ‘Looks like it, I’m afraid. Who are her nearest relatives?’

‘Her parents moved six months ago, into Ross. There’s an aunt over at Ryford. Was this still around her neck?’

‘It was lying on her chest. Whoever buried her evidently put it there. You can see the chain’s broken.’
Did it snap when she was being strangled?

‘Well, that’s the end of it, far as I’m concerned.’ Tony Lodge looked at the coffin with contempt, then down at his feet. ‘Let him be cremated. Empty his bloody ashes in the gutter.’

Huw Owen said quietly, ‘You can do what you like after the requiem. But finish it now, before you leave him in here for the night. Before the place is swarming wi’ coppers.’ He looked at Merrily. ‘Take it from me, lass, you mustn’t do half a job on this.’

Her heart sank. He was right. She turned to Gomer. ‘Do me one last favour? Frannie Bliss is probably down in one of the pubs. If you could give us, say, twenty minutes and then go and find him, put him in the picture, and…’

Make his night.

Gomer nodded, opened one of the double doors and stopped. There was a group of people packed into the porch. Seven or eight of them.

Merrily closed her eyes. Maybe they would go away.

‘This is so utterly contemptible,’ Fergus Young said. ‘Who would have thought the Church would lie and cheat and
conspire
?’

Lol didn’t know if it was any good, but he’d done it. As his eyes adjusted, he could again see Jane in the front row, and he was convinced at one point that she was crying – during the song he’d written about her mother when the longing was becoming acute.

Did you suffocate your feelings

As you redefined your goals

And vowed to undertake the cure of souls?

It was somewhere between this song and the next that he caught the mothlike thought that had glided past him in the Green Room, and he held it fluttering in his mind along with something Mephisto Jones had said:
What happened, I was getting blackouts more frequently, and they’re not ordinary black-outs – you come round and you’re out of synch, don’t know where you are or what you’ve done
.

It was like a song already: ‘Mephisto’s Blues’. The idea rocked him so hard that he muffed the tidy bit of Elizabethan finger- style at the end of ‘Cure’. A signal that it was time to go.

‘Thank you,’ Lol said, bemused. ‘I mean… you know… thanks for having me.’ He nodded to the audience, turned and left.

They were stamping furiously by the time he reached the wing of the stage. Stamping for Moira, probably.

Moira was hugging him. ‘
Back
.’

‘What?’

‘One more.’

‘I’ve got to
go
, Moira. I’m so grateful to you for this, but—’

‘Yeah, yeah, now get back out there. This is how it’s done – don’t you remember anything? And you forgot “Kivernoll”.’

He shook his head. His whole life had changed, but tonight that wasn’t very important. He had to find Cola French.

‘It’s organized,’ Moira said. ‘One more, then you can go.’

Something else hit him. ‘I need to collect Jane.’ Dismay. ‘She’s got no way of getting home.’

‘
I
’ll see to Jane, God help me.’

Moira turned him round and pushed him hard in the small of the back ‘
Go!
’

When Lol went back, it was like he’d won the war. He picked up the Boswell, of which he was unworthy. ‘Right,’ he told them. ‘Local-knowledge time.’ The Boswell eased her curvy back into his stomach. He did the unsurprising A-minor finger- style intro. Exorcizing Alison Kinnersley.

Under mountains of winter

Where the river of gold defines the valley

Something delicate splintered there…

He glanced over to where Alison sat with James Bull-Davies, but couldn’t make either of them out. This was a song that had come out of the Alison period, towards the end, when James was making his move. Lol and Alison had driven up to the Black Mountains on the Welsh border and there’d been an outburst and crying and, somehow, a reconciliation as they were motoring back down into the Golden Valley, and Lol had seen a name on a sign in a nowhere kind of place, with flat fields and a roadside barn-conversion in progress, and the place was called Kivernoll.

Approaching the chorus, he heard a rustling behind him, and Moira was there, a graceful ghost in midnight blue, and the response to this from the audience was like a wall of heat.

***

Kerry’s Gate the tears abated,

Cockyard found her smiling,

From Abbey Dore to Allensmore

By Kiverno—

And then Moira’s voice was lifting the line from under him: ‘—oh… oll.’ Dropping away, leaving Lol to sing, unaccompanied, ‘We were on a roll…’

He knew that she was introducing magic to an undistinguished little song and that this was approaching the best he would ever achieve, and when it was over, he just shouted into the mike, ‘Moira Cairns!’ and ducked out.

It
was
over this time, and Moira was mouthing
Good luck
and Lol was out of there, leaving the guitars on stage. Down the stairs and into the huge glassed area, all lit up. A bar to one side, a bunch of people in there. He needed to get into the auditorium, find—

‘Cannot
wait
for the album.’ Cola French had come up behind him. ‘Give me a lift home?’

She’d evidently been waiting for him; Moira had organized her. She followed him out into the blustery night to where the battered Astra was parked, the way he always left it, close to an entrance, vaguely pointing outwards.

‘
This
… is yours?’

‘It’s quite safe.’

‘Jesus.’

Lol was fitting his car key into the door when a man said, ‘Lol Robinson?’ The night blared white, three times. He was blinded. He stumbled against the car. ‘Sorry about that, mate,’ the man said. ‘Thanks a lot. All the best.’

Cola said, ‘Does this mean we’re an item?’

Lol stared after the photographer, fifty yards away by now, walking fast. He thought he could rule out the
Hereford Times
.

It couldn’t even be mistaken identity; the guy had known his name.

In

They got into the Astra; he drove to the roundabout and then over Greyfriars Bridge, on to the Ross road.

Cola said, ‘I’m not even called Cola French, it’s just the name I write under. But if your name was Tracey Gilbert, how would
you
play it?’

‘You said you’d lied when you said you weren’t involved.’ Lol drove south from the city. Not too many suburbs this side; you were soon out of the street lights. ‘What did you mean?’