The Lamp of the Wicked (72 page)

What a cliché that was:
seen it in his eyes, windows of the soul
– all that stuff.

In Fergus’s eyes, she saw nothing at all. A void. An absence. It was like opening the doors of a lift and finding that you were looking directly down the shaft. The
absence
that could now only be filled with life and energy when his hands were exploring you, when the eyes were lighting up like little torch bulbs. When he was swimming towards you through a pool of liquid lust.

Merrily knew that she was seeing what Lynsey Davies had seen, been surprised and probably delighted by, in the second before he came for her with… what?

A thin belt was the pathologist’s suggestion, according to Bliss, but no belt had ever been found. Perhaps it was Roddy’s – Fergus bending over the unconscious Roddy, as if to help him, sliding the belt out of his trousers. And then subduing Lynsey with his fists. She saw blood jetting from Lynsey’s nose and then the image cut to the belt, each end wrapped around one of Fergus’s hands and then its length pulled tight around Lynsey’s throat.

Silence soaked her head and then, over it, she heard, quite clearly and crisply:

Show you what’s what, where the bits goes, you little smart bitch
…

‘Do you renounce—?’

‘Yes, of course. I renounce everything.’ Fergus smiled. ‘Is that it?’

‘That’s up to you,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m sure that will do.’ Fergus stood up. ‘Thank you, Merrily. I imagine we all feel so much better for that.’

And he walked out of the glow and into the darkness.

‘Laughing,’ Ingrid Sollars said. ‘Laughing at us. Didn’t you feel that?’

‘I didn’t feel anything. There wasn’t anything to feel.’ Merrily turned to the altar and saw that the candles had gone out. But her eyes had long since adjusted; it seemed much lighter in here, and she could see Ingrid and Sam and Lol quite plainly. ‘Were we all expecting a confession?’

‘He’s not that dumb,’ Sam said. ‘All the people who know the truth are dead. Hell, I can see it
all
now. The panic Roddy musta been in – a killing he didn’t recall, a body on the floor right here. What’s he gonna do? Maybe they even advised him, Fergus and Piers – you can’t bury her here, buddy, all these excavations we’re gonna have. Must surely be someplace you’ve been working lately where you could stash her.’

‘Mmm.’

Merrily walked away, looking for Huw, whose idea this had been… and what a pointless exercise. She was disappointed in him – which she knew was wrong; he was just a man, with a burden. Perhaps what she was really avoiding was her disappointment in God, into whose hands this had been placed, in the hope of a solution. And there was none, not really. No one had been redeemed.

‘Cola French,’ Sam Hall mused. ‘I recall her now. She’d stay some weekends with Piers, I guess, came along to the village hall with him sometimes. Bright kid. But what I wondered, Lol…’ He looked around. ‘Where’d he go?’

Lol?’

Merrily could see him across the chapel, quite clearly silhouetted against a dust sheet hanging from the ceiling. Silhouetted because there was a blush on the cloth, a warm glow inside it. Lol was gathering the cloth into his arms and pulling on it.

‘What’s happening?’ Ingrid said.

When the sheet came down, with a shower of dust and plaster fragments, Merrily saw it had concealed a Gothic window that was both tall and wide and had plain glass in it, and what she saw through the glass explained why it was now so bright in here.

Cherry Lodge was wearing her old parka, and her hair was matted to her forehead. She was panting. There was a pile of old tyres beside her and she lifted one quite easily and threw it into the flames.

‘We piled some tyres all around, first,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to
see
him go up, did I?’

A tractor was parked at the edge of the field, not far from the end wall of the Baptist chapel. It had a trailer attached, and there were more tyres on that.

‘Left over from the foot-and-mouth pyres,’ Cherry said. ‘Railway sleepers would’ve been better but there was no time for that, see. I don’t know what’ll happen if it goes out before he’s all gone.’

The flames, with the wind under them now, lit up the pylon at the bottom of the field. When Merrily and the others had first come out of the chapel, it had looked as though the pylon itself was alight, as though the flames were filling it up inside, turning it into some metal Wicker Man of the new millennium: sacrificial fire.

It had taken Merrily a long time to work out what was happening here. Ingrid Sollars had been the first to realize, showing no shock at all. ‘Mr Lomas,’ she said drily, ‘would be most offended.’

Underneath the stench of diesel and burning rubber, Merrily detected the worst smell of all – barbecue, roast pork,
Nev
.

She coughed into a hand and wondered if Gomer was here, among the small but swelling crowd, the bonfire-night crowd, ‘the villagers who would never in a million years have turned out for Roddy Lodge’s funeral.

‘The police’ve sent for the fire brigade.’ Cherry Lodge was smiling, tired but triumphant. ‘Too late now. Oh, they’ll probably think of something to charge us with, but we’re only doing what they all wanted, aren’t we?’

My fault
, Merrily thought.
Should have made sure the church was locked
.

She saw Lol coming back from the chapel, with Huw. They walked across to the other side of the fire, where there were fewer people, and Merrily was sure she saw Huw throw something grey-white into the flames.
The diary?

‘After we left you, we went straight back up to the farm, we did, and piled the tyres on the trailer with the diesel,’ Cherry said. A wild exhilaration there now. ‘And we built up the pyre, and then we went back to the church and just wheeled the coffin out on Mr Lomas’s bier and loaded him on the trailer and brought him back here. Nobody noticed. The police weren’t out in force yet, just a couple down by the grave.’

‘Your idea?’ Merrily asked.

‘Bit of both. He was very bitter, Tony was, about that protest, with the banners and the placards. Lived here longer than any of them and he gets treated like dirt. Very bitter, he was. And at Roddy too, of course.’

Let him be cremated. Empty his bloody ashes in the gutter
.
Catharsis
, Merrily thought, a hand on her pectoral cross.

And the Lodges didn’t yet know that he was probably an innocent man.

Redemption
.

Really?

She looked away. In the top corner of the field, where it was separated from the land that extended behind Roddy’s bungalow… was that a woman standing alone there against the wire fence, arms folded, very still, watching Roddy burn?

Or was it just a fence post, with an old, fraying rag caught in the wire, so that it blew back in the wind, like hair?

T
HE SKIN WAS
softly sepia-toned, the crow’s-feet delicately faded out. There was an ethereal light around the head.

Angel of Our Days
, it said above the picture of Merrily.

She shuddered. ‘I can’t even think where she got this one from.’

‘Of course, it’ll never be wiped now,’ Jane said. ‘You realize that? You’ll go on for ever, making rings around the world.’

‘Nothing goes on for ever,’ Merrily said. ‘Certainly not on the Internet.’

‘That’s true, in fact,’ said Eirion, who’d brought along the printout. ‘When somebody stops paying for the site, it’ll vanish overnight.’

‘You don’t know,’ Jane said. ‘Odd things happen.’

Merrily saw Eirion giving her his famous smile and guessed that they were holding hands under the table.
Odd things happen
. When did the kid last say something like that?

How quickly they recovered. The elasticity of young skin. Whereas crow’s feet only got deeper.

She stretched her legs under the table. It was the first time she’d felt able if not to relax, at least to
sag
. Like spending a few moments on a plateau where you could lie on your back and not see the abyss. Maybe this was the most she could hope for: the feeling of not, for a while, having to look into the abyss.

On the printout, underneath her picture, she read:

The Archangel Uriel is at this moment working on earth through Her servant, The Reverend Merrily Watkins, Deliverance Minister for the Diocese of Hereford on the border of England and Wales.

It is very unusual in the UK, where the women’s ministry is itself so very young, for a woman, especially one so youthful, to be elevated to this most important and spiritually crucial role.

We ask for your prayers to aid Merrily in what we believe to be the summit of her endeavour, the task for which she was chosen above all women.

We believe that a satanic male maleficence lives on and will be passed on again, unless Merrily Watkins is permitted to exorcize it at the laying down of Roddy Lodge in the village of Underhowle, Herefordshire.

You are requested to commence your prayers for Merrily NOW. By the grace of God, amen.

It was signed:
The Daughters of Uriel
. And the tone was ludicrously apocalyptic, and yet…

‘I failed her,’ Merrily said. ‘Don’t let anybody say otherwise. I did not get any of this right.’

‘You didn’t know,’ Jane said. ‘You couldn’t have known.’

‘All the praying I do, you’d think there’d’ve been a little divine intervention,’ Merrily said bitterly.

‘
Don’t
,’ Jane said sharply.

‘No. I’m sorry.’ Maybe there had been. How could any of them know?

Jane said, ‘Just because you’re a priest, it doesn’t have to happen through you. The other thing happened through Lol. I mean, didn’t it? It was Lol who exposed that guy.’

‘Yes.’ Merrily smiled. ‘And Lol hated every minute of it.’

Merrily had watched Fergus – or had seemed to – in that frigid flicker of transition between man and monster. Yet he was
not
a monster. He was the best head teacher they’d ever known in Underhowle; he treated kids like equals and he was endlessly enterprising and affable with everybody, only occasionally displaying the steel cord under the velvet, which was so essential to a good
school director
.

Yet already, according to Frannie Bliss, the stories were filtering through, including the rumours about why Fergus’s marriage had failed – not because his wife had found out about his evenings of recreational release, but because of what he’d become between the sheets at home: a gradual diminishing of tenderness, the parallel escalation of sexual violence. This indictment had come from Fergus’s mother-in-law, who had thought him such a wonderful man that at first she’d accused her daughter of simply being inadequate to his healthy, masculine needs.

How easily and efficiently he’d lied, exactly the way West had lied, revealing nothing until it had already been found out.

Bliss said that if the killing of Lynsey Davies had not happened
exactly
as Lol had suggested, he couldn’t have been far out. The way Frannie saw it, the three of them had probably agreed to wait for Roddy’s next blackout and then go for it.

Lol had told Merrily about Lynsey’s resonant instruction to the three of them:
Fuse your dreams inside me
.

It would be important for all three of them to kill her, fusing the guilt. But when it came to it, Frannie reckoned, Cody and Connor-Crewe would have chickened out. Maybe they didn’t have
quite
enough to lose.

Frannie wanted Fergus for this one. He’d said on the phone that they’d now be turning major heat on Cody and Connor-Crewe.

He was confident that, before the day was out, one of them would have pointed the finger. And then he’d start on Fergus.

Huw had gone home to the Beacons. But he and Merrily had arranged to return to the Baptist chapel tomorrow, possibly with Jerome Banks and a chalice of Harvey’s Spanish Red and some white wafers. A full exorcism of place would not be underplaying it.

Meanwhile, Huw had been learning more about Lynsey Davies’s past and was wondering how much of a coincidence it was that Donna Furlowe’s body had been found close to the hamlet where Lynsey had been born, near Lydbrook, in the Forest.

Had Donna been killed by Lynsey and Fred? West had, after all, known the girl. Or was it, as the police had suspected, too late in his murderous career for it to be down to Fred? Lynsey and somebody else, then? Not Roddy Lodge, that was more or less certain now.

Lynsey on her own? Or with another of her old Cromwell Street friends?

Not long after Huw had left, Gomer had arrived with a man who was as close to a cube as anyone Merrily had seen.

Jumbo Humphries had parked his blue and white Cadillac on the square, parallel to the Market Hall, the only spot where it was unlikely to cause an obstruction. Jumbo had curly hair and stubble and he talked a lot. He was from the southern end of the Beacons or the top end of the Valleys, however you wanted to look at it, and he talked fast and emotionally.

‘A
wond
erful lady, she was, Mrs Watkins. A de
light
ful woman. I cannot bring myself even to think about it. Asked myself a thousand times, I have, since I yeard:
what
could I have done? How could we have helped her, any of us? How could we have
saved
her?’

Jenny Box.

Jane said now, ‘I’m not sure anyone could have saved her. Really, I’m not just saying that. I’ve been thinking about it all day. She never told you anything
straight out
, did she? She was like so diffuse – is that the word? I mean, sometimes you looked at her and it was like part of her had already left the building. You know what I mean?’

‘Yes.’ Diffuse. Gone with the fairies. Flying with the angels. Merrily blinked back tears. ‘Oh God, if I’d only gone to see her yesterday morning…’