by Phil Rickman
The Lamp of the Wicked
( Merrily Watkins - 5 )
Phil Rickman
It appears that the unlovely village of Underhowle is home to a serial killer. But as the police hunt for the bodies of more young women, Rev. Merrily Watkins fears that the detective in charge has become blinkered by ambition. Meanwhile, Merrily has more personal problems, like the anonymous phone calls, the candles and incense left burning in her church, and the alleged angelic visitations.
The Lamp of the Wicked
(The fifth book in the Merrily Watkins series)
A novel by Phil Rickman
The light of the righteous rejoiceth, but the lamp of the wicked shall be put out.
Proverbs 13.9
October 1995
Just about every door on the top landing of that three-storey house had a hole bored in it, for crouching at and watching. Holes and watching. Watching through holes. It would always start like that.
‘You still doing it?’
He realized he’d shouted it down the valley, which was wide and shallow and ambered under the late afternoon sun.
It was a lovely place. It ought to be grim and stark, with scrubby grass and dead trees. The reality – the actual beauty, the total serenity of the scene – he couldn’t cope with that, didn’t want any kind of balm on the memories that had brought him out here.
Oh, aye, a lovely place to be buried, beneath the wide sky and within sight of the church tower. But not the way the two women had been buried, chopped like meat and stowed in vertical holes. Not, for God’s sake, like that.
And now he had to turn away, with the weary knowledge of how futile this was, because there was still too much hate in him.
What had happened – what had started him off – was spotting one of those neat holes that appeared sometimes in the clouds, as if the sun had burned through, like a cigarette through paper, and then vanished. He’d at once imagined a bright little bulging eye on the other side of it. And that was when he’d down the valley, this great mad-bull roar: You still screamed doing it? You still watching?
Now he was looking all around, in case someone had heard, but there was nobody, only his own car in this pull-in area right by the field gate, near the fingerpost after which the field was named.
One of the signs on the fingerpost was light brown with white lettering, signifying a site of historic interest and pointing, up a narrow road to his left, towards a church that was not visible. The one that you could see, looking down the field, must be the village church, where the ashes of the monster had been scattered.
They should’ve been flushed down the bloody toilet.
He shut his eyes in anguish. Get a grip!
The county boundary apparently ran through the field, but he didn’t know exactly where. Should’ve brought an OS map, but he wasn’t really sure what he was looking for. Didn’t really know why he’d come, except for the usual problem of not being able to settle, not being able to stop anywhere for long before it all caught up with him again. He’d be walking in and out of his house, driving to places and coming home without remembering where the hell he’d been, and then going into his own church and walking out of it again, uncomforted and fearful for his faith.
And still wanting confrontation. It was anger that brought him here, and he’d have to be rid of that before he could make any kind of start. If you were dealing with something that had been human, no matter how low, how depraved, it was incumbent upon you to operate in a spirit of consideration and sympathy and…
… love?
Oh, bugger that. He punched his own thigh in fury, thinking about old comrades – survivors and relatives of the war dead – who had made pilgrimages to battlefields aglow with poppies. How much love had they been able to summon for the bloody killers?
Not that this was really like that. The pity and the waste, oh aye. But the evil here had been slow, systematic, intimate and concentrated – some of it ending in this field, with the hacking and the dripping of blood and offal into the holes. The horror had been intensely squalid, and the hatred… well, there didn’t seem to have been any particular hatred.
That, in some ways, was the worst thing of all: no hatred.
Except his own.
He’d left his car and climbed over the gate, near two black, rubberized tanks. There was a mature oak tree on his right. There’d been references in the statements to an oak tree. But was this one too near the road?
Now, he kept his eyes shut listening. It was said that no birds sang at Dachau, but the little buggers were singing away here. He’d never been able to identify types of birdsong, though, only the mewling of the buzzards in the rough country where he lived.
Where he lived, the countryside was scarred by hikers and by soldiers training. Not so very long ago, this field had been lacerated by police with spades. But it had healed now, was already back to being a beautiful place. Was that so bad?
Only for me.
He found himself patting his pocket, in case it had fallen out. He knew the words – ought to after all this time – but there was also a notebook in his pocket with it all written down, in case he got resistance, something bent on wiping it from his head, and he had to read it from the page, shouting it out into some dark wind.
But there was no wind. It wasn’t even cold. He wanted challenge, he wanted resistance, he wanted to see the gloating in those little glittering eyes. Feel the watching. Experience the demonic. It didn’t matter what else he’d become, at the bottom of it he was a man and he couldn’t cope with it any other way.
Finally, in his desperate need for discomfort, he actually sat down by the hedge, letting the dampness soak through his pants. Which was daft and childish, but it sent him spinning back into the pain. It did that, at least.
And it started the memory like a silent film, black and white, ratchet click-clicking in the projector, no stopping it now. Here he is raging into Julia’s bedroom, throwing himself down, sobbing, both hands on the bedclothes either side of where she’s lying, feeling the still, waxy atmosphere in the bedroom and smelling the perfumed air.
She obviously sprayed perfume around first, to make it less unpleasant for whoever found her, if her body betrayed her, relaxing into death.
Typical, that.
He feels dampness. The dampness by the side of her. What must have happened, she swallowed a couple of handfuls of the pills and then, maybe half asleep, thought Not enough, and took some more, another handful. She was likely so far gone by then that the glass simply fell from her hand, spilling the rest of the water on the quilt and rolling away into the corner of the room, where he finds it. And then his gaze is tracking slowly around the bedroom with its mid-blue walls and its Paul Klee prints, noting, in the well of the pine dressing table, the vellum envelope.
Picking up the glass first, though, and laying it on the bedside table, a few inches from Julia’s hair – she must’ve combed it first, you can tell. Oh Christ, oh Christ. Turning away, moving slowly towards the envelope until he can read his own name written on the front.
Inside, on the creamy notepaper she always used – her one constant luxury; she never could abide cheap notepaper – it says, in big looping handwriting that soon becomes blurred:
I’ll keep it short, Shep.
I’m so, so sorry about this. But I do believe there is somewhere else – you showed me that – and that Donna needs me there now. She so needs someone to comfort her, I feel this very strongly. I’m so very sorry, because I love you so much, Shep, you know I do, and it’s only thinking of you and sensing your arms around me that’s going to give me the last bit of strength I need for this, so please don’t take your arms away and please, please forgi
ve me, and please go on praying for us. I’m so SORRY.
He’d no idea how long he’d been there, when the farmer found him: sitting with his back to the hedge, staring down the valley at the sunlight over the church tower. Sitting there up against the hedge like a bloody old tramp, with his eyes wet and his wet pants sticking to his arse.
Conceding afterwards that perhaps it was just as well the farmer did find him.
For now, anyroad.
Part One
Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
The First Epistle of Peter 5.8
1
Foul Water
IT WAS A crime, what he was doing, this Roddy Lodge, with his wraparound dark glasses and his whipped-cream smile.
The stories had kept filtering through, like foul water out of sludge, and Gomer Parry had felt ashamed to be part of the same profession. Plant hire was the poorer for shoddy operators like Roddy: wide boys, duckers and divers and twisters and exploiters of innocent people, rich and poor – mostly incomers to the county that didn’t know no better.
Too many blind eyes had been turned, this was it. Too many people – even so-called public servants, some of them – looking the other way, saying what’s it matter if a few Londoners gets taken down the road; they got money to burn.
Bad attitude, sneering at the incomers, ripping them off. They were still people, the incomers. People with dreams, and there was nothing wrong with dreams.
Mostly.
What about Gomer Parry, though? Would he have backed off like the rest or looked the other way, if he’d had any suspicion of how deep it went? What about Gomer? Just a little bloke with wild white hair and wire-rimmed glasses and a sense of what was right and honourable: the plant-hire code, digger chivalry.
No point in even asking the question, because, the way it started, this was just a drainage issue. Just a matter of pipes and shit.
* * *
It had seemed odd sometimes to Gomer that his and Roddy’s trenches had never crossed, even allowing for the fact that they operated from different ends of the county. Plant hire: big machinery in a small world.
But it was happening now, no avoiding it on this damp and windy Sunday – a weary old day to be leaving your fireside, and if Minnie had still been alive likely Gomer would’ve put it off. But the old fireside wasn’t the same no more, and she’d sounded near-desperate, this lady, and only up here weekends, anyway.
A Londoner, as you’d expect. Londoners were always looking further and further west in the mad rush to get country air down their lungs, like it was some kind of new drug. Rural properties in Herefordshire never stayed long on the market nowadays, especially the ones that really looked like rural properties, even if there were clear drawbacks.
Take this one. Classic example, see. What you had was this lovely old farmhouse, with a couple of acres, on the A49 between Hereford and Ross. Built in the rusty stone you got in these parts, and from the front there were good long, open views over flat fields to the Black Mountains.
But before that there was the A49 itself.
Gomer put a match to an inch of ciggy, October rain sluicing down on his cap, as another five cars and a big van came whizzing past – and this was a Sunday. All right, fair play, he spent his own days bouncing around on big, growling diggers, but no way Gomer could live so close to a main road like this, with fast cars and all the ground-shaking, fume-belching, brake- screeching juggernauts heading for the M50 and the Midlands.
Yet for this Mrs Pawson, in her tight white jeans, it was some type of peace, after London. Oh, we’d had enough of it, Mr Parry. Or, at least, I had. We couldn’t hear ourselves think any more, and I was convinced Gus had the beginnings of asthma. I told my husband that if we didn’t get out now we never would, not this side of retirement. We desperately needed peace, above all. Somewhere to walk.
Walk? Pretty soon, in Gomer’s view, you’d give up going for walks, being as how there was a good two hundred yards of no-pavement between you and the nearest public footpath. For half the price, the Pawsons could’ve got theirselves a modern place, with no maintenance headaches, up some quiet lane.
But modern places weren’t part of the dream. This was the dream: eighteenth-century, a bit lopsided, no damp-proof course, dodgy wiring.
And private drainage.
The FOR SALE sign lay in the damp gravel at the side of the driveway. Gomer reckoned it’d be back up in the hedge within the year. They’d get their money back, no problem at all – the way Hereford prices were going these days, they’d likely get it back twice over. Even allowing for what it was going to cost them to put this drainage to rights, after what Roddy Lodge had done to it.
Gomer tramped back up the drive, past his bottle-green van. It had GOMER PARRY PLANT HIRE on the sides and across both back doors in white. Nev’s idea, this was – You gotter advertise, Gomer, gotter put it about, see. Your ole clients is dyin’ off faster ’n you can dig their graves.
The other side of the van, Gomer could see the top of the installation poking out of the grass not two yards from the property.
Efflapure: state-of-the-art sewerage.
Gomer had never even heard of an Efflapure before. Nev was likely right about him losing touch. He was well out of touch with the kind of rip-off junk getting unloaded on city folk who thought all they had to do was flush the lavvy and the council did the rest.
As for where Lodge had put it – un-bloody-believable!
‘Mr Lodge showed us several brochures,’ Mrs Pawson had told him earlier, ‘and gave us the telephone numbers of two other people who’d had these particular models installed.’
‘Phone ’em, did you?’
Mrs Pawson hadn’t even looked embarrassed. ‘Oh, we had far too much to think about.’
Woulder made no difference, anyway,’ Gomer conceded. ‘Both be stooges, see. Friends of his, telling you you couldn’t get no finer system anywhere in the country. Load of ole wallop.’
He started scratting about in the fallen leaves, uncovering a meter-thing under an aluminium shield, with another one like it inside the house, to tell you where the shit level in the processing tank was at. Waste of time and money. Folk had got along happily for centuries without knowing where their shit level was at.
Presently, out she came again, under a big red and yellow golfing umbrella.
‘So what’s the actual verdict, Mr Parry?’ Attractive-looking lady, mind, in her sharp-faced way. Fortyish, and a few inches taller than Gomer, but weren’t they all?
‘You wannit straight?’ Gomer took out his ciggy. Mrs Pawson was looking at it like he’d got a bonfire going with piles of old tyres. She took a step back.
‘It’s the reason we came to you, Mr Parry. Our surveyor said that you, of all people, would indeed give it to us… straight.’
Gomer nodded. This surveyor, Darren Booth, he was a reputable boy. He’d said these Pawsons could be looking at trouble, and he wasn’t wrong. Gomer looked over at the Efflapure, blinking through his rain-blobbed glasses.
‘All your ground’s to the far side of the house, ennit? That orchard?’
‘We did try to acquire some more, but—’
‘And how far’s he from the house?’ Gomer nodded at the Efflapure. ‘Four foot? Five foot? Bugger-all distance, ennit? You don’t do that, see, Mrs P. Should’ve been set back, that thing, well bloody back. Likely Lodge done it this way to save a few yards o’ pipe and having to go into the old orchard, mess with roots and stuff. But you never digs it in that close to a house, specially—’
‘We specifically…’ Mrs Pawson all but stamped her nice clean trainer in the mud. ‘We specifically told him that cost was not an issue.’
‘Ah…’ Gomer waved a hand. ‘Some folk, they’d cut corners for the sake of it. Don’t reckon he’d’ve passed on no savings to you, mind. So, er…’ Holding back a bit, because this wasn’t good. ‘What exackly did young D
arren say could happen?’
‘He didn’t.’ Mrs Pawson shivered under her umbrella. ‘He just said it could become a problem and advised us to get a second opinion, and he suggested you, as… as the most honest contractor he knew. For heaven’s sake, Mr Parry, what does it mean?’
Staring at him, all wild-eyed. She was up here on her own this weekend – husband still in London, kiddie with the nanny – and she was finding out, in the mud and the rain and the wind, how country life wasn’t always a bowl of cherries. She looked thin and lost under the big brolly, in her white jeans and her clean trainers, and Gomer felt sorry for her.
He sighed. Nobody liked jobs like this, where you had to clean up after another outfit. But this time it was Roddy Lodge, and Roddy Lodge had it coming to him.
He went over to the house wall. No way you could be entirely sure, see, but…
‘See this bit of a crack in the stonework?’
‘Is that new?’
‘Sure t’be. What he’s done, see, is dug ’isself a nice pit for this article, eight, nine feet down, right up against the ole foundations.’
‘You’re saying’ – her jaw trembling – ‘it could cause the house to collapse?’
Gomer thought about this, pushing back his cap.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘not all the house.’
They agreed it needed moving, this Efflapure, to a safer location. If you accepted that such an object was actually needed at all.
‘See, I wouldn’t’ve advised you to get one o’ them fancy things,’ Gomer said. ‘Wasteo’ money, my view of it. You got a nice, gentle slope to the ground there. Needs a simpler tank and a soakaway, like there was before. Primitive, mabbe, but he works, and he goes on workin’. No problems, no fancy meters to keep checking. Low maintenance, no renewable parts. Get him emptied every year or two, then forget all about him. Tried and tested, see, Mrs P. Tried and tested.’
