by Phil Rickman
‘Well, you know,’ Bliss said, ‘we’d naturally prefer to chat to prisoners in the police conservatory, to a background of gentle fountains and aromatherapy candles, but the uncouth ruffians are apt to throw up, break things and wee on the walls.’
‘Humour me some more, Francis. How would the interview room compare to, say, Roddy’s cell, which I think he kept asking to be taken back to. How much power was there in the cell?’
‘Just the one ceiling light. But—’
‘You ever heard of EH, Frannie?’ She rose up. ‘And don’t tell me it’s a hospital show on Channel Four.’
‘No. I haven’t heard of it.’
‘Electrical Hypersensitivity. An allergy affecting people surrounded by electronic gadgetry or living in close proximity to high-voltage power lines and a confluence of transmitted signals, such as from mobile-phone masts, TV transmitters, satellite—’
‘Merrily—’
‘Probably only a very small percentage of people are affected to any marked degree. But in some cases we’re talking about a serious, chronic condition. You might find, for instance, if you looked into it, that Roddy Lodge was unusually sensitive to electric light and wore sunglasses even at night-time. You might find he was unable to wear nylon overalls because of the static or whatever. And we already know about his mood swings – miserable and withdrawn and then, “I’m Number One, I’m Satan, I’m the best drainage man in the known universe, the biggest serial killer…” ’
Bliss smiled. ‘So this is your personal diagnosis. Roddy was suffering from a condition that appears to have gone entirely undetected by various doctors and psychiatrists, but may be identified by priests.’
Merrily sighed. ‘I realize it’s something not universally accepted.’
‘Now tell me something I hadn’t already surmised.’ Bliss leaned back, locking his fingers behind his head. ‘Like what other bullshit Mr Sam Hall filled you up with.’
Jane put her head around the door then. Merrily hadn’t heard her come in from school. A long talk was way overdue.
‘Hello, flower. You want some coffee?’
‘No, thanks. Sorry, didn’t know you were busy.’
‘You can come in if you want, Jane,’ Bliss said. ‘This is nothing I’d be terribly afraid of a little child hearing.’
‘It’s OK,’ Jane said, with world-weary indifference. ‘I try not to be seen hanging out with the Filth. People might think I’m a snout.’ Her head vanished and they heard her going upstairs.
‘I love that kid,’ Bliss said. ‘She’s just like you, only more so.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Look, don’t get me wrong. I even quite like Mr Hall, the old shit-stirrer, and I think his intentions are good. I even think there’s probably a lot to what he says, about the profusion of overhead power lines arguably causing ill health. I just think that kind of wild speculation, at this stage of the game, about a man who isn’t ever gonna be able to confirm it, is a totally pointless exercise.’
‘It does explain a lot of things, though, doesn’t it? It might even make sense to Mr Nye, the lawyer, who was convinced his client was in poor health.’
‘So tell him! I’m sure he’d absolutely love to spend an hour or so, at no fee whatsoever, discussing his dead client’s medical mythology.’
‘It also explains why Roddy blacked out – which is commonplace, apparently.’
‘Who says?’
‘Frannie, look, I had already heard of this. But it’s something Hall’s been researching for years, here and in America. I find it convincing, or at least worth investigating, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m not out to try to prove or disprove it, I’m just saying it answers – very plausibly – a lot of questions.’
‘No, it doesn’t, Merrily, it just—’
‘And it also explains why Roddy Lodge confessed to every putative murder you could lay on him.’
‘Aw, come on!’
‘EH is an acute condition. It can apparently become entirely unbearable. He’d have confessed to strangling his own granny to get out of that interview room.’
‘Whose side are you on at all?’
‘He’d offer to show you as many bodies as you wanted just to get you to take him out of there. All the people he hadn’t murdered.’
‘All right.’ Bliss finished off his coffee and laid down the mug. ‘Let’s look at this. He wanted us to take him out of the horrible, electronically charged interview room, back to his nice country home under the big pylon – which he then proceeded to climb.’ He gave her a big smile. ‘Go on, you take it from there.’
Merrily didn’t say anything. She’d put the same point to Sam Hall. He’d said that in his experience no two cases of EH were exactly the same. He said allergics were often mysteriously drawn to the allergen in its most obvious form. He said a certain frequency of the electromagnetic field might prove particularly addictive to a particular person. He said this all needed much more research, but it was one explanation of why Roddy had climbed that pylon, just like he’d done repeatedly as a boy.
‘Did you know that Melanie Pullman was a fellow sufferer?’
Bliss’s eyes narrowed.
‘With side effects. You interested?’
‘Go on,’ he said.
She told him about the side effects. She brought out the transcript of Canon Dobbs’s report. Bliss read it slowly. He looked up and didn’t smile. This is getting very silly, Merrily, even by your standards. Now we learn she was taken by aliens. Could even be the same aliens that strangled Lynsey and buried her under the tank.’
She carried on, in the face of it all. ‘I also gather Roddy Lodge had been having inexplicable experiences for most of his life, and that his condition worsened when he moved to the bungalow, where electromagnetic radiation levels were far stronger. It seems likely their relationship – him and Melanie – grew out of mutual support.’
Frannie Bliss gritted his teeth, making a hissing noise. ‘So they were both bonkers. What does that tell us? Does it explain why he might have killed her?’
‘You’re sorry you got me into this, now, aren’t you?’
‘I just don’t understand why you suddenly care so much,’ he said.
‘Because I’m burying him, and too many funerals today are superficial and meaningless and don’t manage to lay anything to rest – we talk to relatives and we gather up a handful of anecdotes about the deceased and reel them off, then it’s on with the soil and bring on the next one. I just think we owe it to them to try to understand what their lives were about. God, didn’t that sound pompous?’
In the dregs of the daylight, she saw a shadow shambling past the big kitchen window. Not many people came round the back, not even Lol. This was someone who liked to move softly, like God’s secret agent. Someone who even used spy-type euphemisms for the negative numina of his trade: volatiles, insomniacs, hitch-hikers… Bliss had his back to the window and hadn’t seen the shadow.
She stood up. ‘So… how are things at home, Frannie?’
‘Crap, thank you,’ Bliss said.
‘Huw’s here.’
‘Owen?’ He stood up quickly. ‘Shit. Is there another door out of here?’
35
Sackcloth
SHE’D NEVER SEEN Huw like this before. He was white with anger, and he was wagging a forefinger under Frannie Bliss’s nose.
‘… Always feet first. Bloody great copper’s boots. No matter how long you’re in the CID, you never lose them copper’s boots!’
The finger trembling in the lamplight.
‘Huw…’ Bliss was out of his chair again, and they were nearly head-to-head across the table. ‘It’s my career going down the bloody toilet, pal!’
Not the most well-chosen response, all things considered.
‘Oh aye.’ Huw’s expression was… not priestly. ‘Never a thought for the parents of all them dead and missing girls, lying awake night after bloody night wondering precisely what were done to their kids
and how many times. Waking up in the dark, heads full of cellars and concrete. Dreams full of blood and filth and sobbing and wondering how long it went on before they died. How much of it they took before they wound up naked and dead under some… some bloody septic tank.’
‘For starters,’ Bliss said through his teeth, ‘Lynsey Davies wasn’t in fact found naked.’
‘You wanted a national scare. Big, high-profile case to play with.’
‘But not now, for Christ’s sake! Will you just let me—?’
‘Will you both, for God’s sake, shut up?’ Merrily said quietly. ‘You’re scaring the cat.’ She came and sat down at the far end of the long table, away from both of them. ‘And me.’
‘Aye,’ Huw said, looking at her at last, as if realizing where he was. ‘I’m sorry.’
And she was shocked at the sight of him, at how much someone could change in six months or so. He was wearing his clerical shirt, the dog collar parchmented with age, under a patched tweed jacket. The effect was decrepit rather than casual. His long hair was dry and salted with dandruff, and there were lines she didn’t remember down each cheek, deep as sewn-up knife wounds. He was breathing hard.
‘Papers came same day for once. West, West, West. They all want him to be another West.’
‘And what do you want?’ Frannie Bliss’s face was maroon under the freckles. ‘We let it lie? We let the missing stay missing, the bodies stay buried?’
Huw had shut his eyes, was digging his knuckles into the table top. He stayed like that for several seconds before breathing out and opening his eyes, pulling out a rueful smile like an old handkerchief.
‘Hello, lass.’
‘Hello, Huw.’
‘That woman,’ Huw said to Bliss, as if the last few minutes had somehow been wiped. ‘Lynsey. Were there any bits of her missing?’
‘Bits?’ Bliss sat down again.
‘Bones. Fingers, toes.’
‘Like Fred did to them?’
‘Aye.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Merrily said.
‘All of the West victims,’ Bliss told her, ‘had several bones missing. Mostly fingers and toes, but sometimes shoulder bones. Like he was keeping souvenirs.’
‘Another of the reasons the Gloucester coppers suspected occult belief,’ Huw said. ‘A sense of ritual about it – always took the same bones.’
‘I’ve been reading as fast as I can,’ Merrily said. ‘I just haven’t got to this bit.’
‘Came to a lot of bones – well over a hundred. None of them have ever been found.’ Bliss turned to Huw. ‘No, Roddy didn’t go that far. Not with Lynsey. But then, she wasn’t your regular victim, was she?’
‘There were no regular victims, wi’ West.’ Huw’s voice was as flat as hardboard again. ‘Mostly they just ended up dead because there was nowhere else for them to go.’
Merrily winced.
‘What I mean is,’ Frannie Bliss said, ‘Roddy probably killed Lynsey because she found out about him – what he’d been up to. Not just as a result of getting his rocks off.’
‘West killed his own daughter, Heather, because she said she were leaving the happy home,’ Huw said. ‘Lost patience with her.’ He turned to Merrily. ‘Do you remember Donna Furlowe?’
‘No. Who was she?’
Huw mopped up some spilled coffee with his sleeve, possibly to hide the fact that he wasn’t replying. What the hell was the matter with him?
‘I’ll leave you to explain, Huw,’ Bliss said. ‘And then Merrily can tell you about this wonderful pseudo-scientific theory which argues that, far from being a psychotic serial killer, Lodge was actually a victim of his environment. Should comfort a lot of people.’
Huw looked up at Merrily. That old wolfhound look.
‘I’m going home now,’ Bliss said, ‘to try and get used to spending more time with me family, who hate me nearly as much as me colleagues.’
Merrily had put the lamp back on the window sill. It was all a little mellower in the room now. Huw was drinking tea, dunking chocolate digestive biscuits in it. His voice was softer.
‘A twenty-first-century plague village, eh? Would it worry you to live there?’
‘Actually,’ Merrily said, ‘I was only thinking earlier how much more exciting Underhowle was – more progressive, more alive than Ledwardine. But I suppose everything has its drawbacks. I mean, you can go on telling yourself it’s all overheated rubbish, but every time somebody dies prematurely after living for five years under high-voltage power lines you immediately forget about all the people who spent half a lifetime underneath and made it to ninety-six.’
‘And the apparitions? The hallucinations? The little grey men with big eyes?’
‘Used to be that electrical gadgets were affected by aliens. Now they’re saying electricity creates the aliens.’
‘I can buy it,’ Huw said. ‘I can also accept that electrical stimulation of the temporal lobes, whether it’s by a roomful of computers or whatever, simulates the sense of “presence” you get in a haunted house. But it’s not the whole story. It’s just another one of the rational explanations we have to be aware of. Another mine in the minefield.’
Merrily sat back, relieved. She might have guessed he’d know about it all: he subscribed to dozens of scientific and esoteric journals; his library filled four rooms of his rectory.
‘Superficially, it’s a fast-changing world, Merrily.’ He brushed crumbs from his shirt-front. ‘Your feller’s right: we’re surrounding ourselves wi’ transmitters and receivers. We’ve got CCTV in every town centre, scores of techno-industries competing to sell us bits of tat that do some meaningless trick the only point of which is that the last bit of tat couldn’t do it. And nobody really wants to tell us what it’s all doing to our brains, else that’s another industry gone to the wall. Oh aye, I’m perfectly willing to believe that a certain configuration of signals and electromagnetic fields in a small area is likely to set up a… what was it?’
‘Hot spot.’
‘However, once you start spreading these stories, the centuries drop away and you get into an essentially medieval situation. We’re every bit as impressionable as folk were then. This gets around, there’ll be five times as many people think they’ve got a brain tumour when it’s only a headache. Five times as many kids who think they’ve got company at night when it’s only a bad dream or headlights on the window pane. And if the rector’s as unapproachable as you say, who else do they go to with their fears?’
‘So why…’ She hesitated. ‘Why have you come, Huw?’
He dunked his biscuit. ‘Merrily, if you think I know what I’m doing, you’re wrong. If you think I’m a balanced, laid-back old bugger, wi’ a steady finger on the pulse, you’re wrong again. You don’t know owt about me, really.’
‘So tell me.’
‘Bag of nerves? Bubbling cauldron of hatred and regrets? Oh aye. I reckon I’ve had a hatred of God, sometimes, as strong as anybody alive.’
‘And Donna Furlowe?’ Merrily said. ‘Who is she?’
Silence.
‘You remembered the name,’ Huw said.
‘Only from when you said it earlier. Who is she?’
‘She isn’t,’ Huw said. ‘Any more.’
And Jane, listening at the door, crept away. Thrown by that sentence. I reckon I’ve had a hatred of God, sometimes, as strong as anybody alive.
The things the clergy said sometimes, usually only to other clergy. She didn’t know Huw Owen very well, suspected nobody did, really. She’d still been a kid when Mum had first met him, last year. Oh yeah, still a kid last year: she understood that now.
Jane went up to her apartment and sat on the bed. Probably Mum would be shouting up for her soon. Flower, I’m really sorry about this, but how would feel about going to the chippy? Always chips these days, since she’d got bogged down with this thing at Underhowle. And now Huw Owen was involved, which meant it was serious – something Huw didn’t think a woman could handle, be
cause he was from Yorkshire.
And sometimes he hated God. And when Yorkshiremen said hated, there were no two ways about it. If God existed, it must be rough to have nobody who really liked you, nobody who actually trusted you not to shaft them in the end. Jane looked up at the ceiling, and she began to giggle with sheer, sour despair.
You poor, all-powerful, sad git.
‘I knew her mother, you see,’ Huw said.
Merrily sat down. Huw was looking down at his fingers on the table. He’d pushed his mug away, and then the biscuits.
‘Her mother lived in Brecon. Julia. A white settler in Mid- Wales. She were everything I didn’t like. Well-off. Widow of a bloke who ran a company that did up old country properties and flogged ’em off to folk like themselves – rich and rootless, desirous of a slice of countryside, a view they could own. Julia had a lovely farmhouse, down towards Bwlch, and she worshipped at Brecon Cathedral.’
Merrily suspected Huw was a socialist of the old, forgotten kind; his contempt for the former Bishop of Hereford, Mick Hunter, and Hunter’s New Labour friends was memorable. He leaned back. The lamplight made his skin look like sacking.
‘I went into the cathedral one afternoon. August 1993, this’d be. Funny, really – I hadn’t intended to go in at all. I were going for groceries at Kwiksave, only the pay-and-display were full – height of summer, hordes of tourists. I weren’t up for carrying a bloody great box about half a mile, so I decided to come back later. Parked up by the cathedral. Popped in, the way you do. Or, in my case, the way you don’t, not often. And there was this woman near the back, very quietly in tears.’ He looked across at Merrily. ‘Some of ’em, they make a big deal out of it – you know that. They want a sympathetic priest to come over: There, there, what’s the problem? This one was quite the opposite: private tears. You wouldn’t notice, unless you were a bloke on his own, thinking, What the bloody hell have I come in here for?’
It was true. A cathedral was the last place you’d expect to find Huw – he might run into a bishop.
