The Lamp of the Wicked (MW5)

by Phil Rickman

  And the police, in this case, were… who exactly? No mention in the papers of Bliss. Or indeed of DCI Annie Howe. All the press briefings had been given by a Detective Superintendent Luke Fleming. Merrily had never heard of him – must have been from Headquarters. She noticed that there was nothing in any of the papers about Roddy’s taste in bedroom decor. Given that he was dead, why not?

  Every day she’d expected her own involvement in the discovery of Lynsey Davies to be disclosed by the police, but despite the local gossip – inadvertently fuelled by Gomer, she suspected, as he pursued the truth about the fire – nobody had approached her.

  This morning, preparing for Holy Communion in the early light, she’d decided to dump the Roddy Lodge sermon. It had seemed unnecessary, gratuitous.

  Sermon B, then.

  She didn’t sit on the hassock, but she didn’t go into the pulpit either; she stood at the side of the lectern.

  ‘Erm…’

  She felt obscurely nervous; she really needed notes for this one, but there was nowhere to conceal them. And because pews were filled further back than of late, she had to project more than she’d become accustomed to. Had to make like a preacher.

  ‘If we… if we sit down and really think about it, I suspect most of us will remember an occasion when something’s happened, very suddenly, to divert us from a certain course of action. Maybe a flat tyre that stopped you making a particular journey. And then, some time later, you find out that that journey might have led you into a far bigger crisis – a motorway pile-up, or some confrontation that you might not have been able to handle. And then you say – and how often have most of us said this…?’

  She leaned out, an arm around the stem of the lectern, found herself locking gazes for a second with James Bull-Davies, three pews from the front.

  ‘… Perhaps it was meant.’ She stepped back. ‘That’s a useful phrase, isn’t it? Meant by whom? By God? And why should God single us out for salvation? Why should we be diverted from the pile-up that’s going to kill or injure several other people?’ Longish pause. ‘For the Christian, there’s… another option. Suppose we think about that phrase in the context of the possibility of there being’ – she smiled faintly – ‘angels among us.’

  Jenny Box was close to the front, to Merrily’s right, washed in amber light from the circular stained-glass window in which a clutch of apples was pensively surveyed by several angels. Jenny Box, with her fine old-gold hair under a small white hat that was almost a skullcap, her eyes unblinking but also unfocused, as if gazing into the ether. Merrily wondered how Thomas Aquinas would have handled this.

  ‘What do I mean by angels? To be quite honest, I’m not sure. Do I mean heavenly forces, agents of change? Powerful, invisible intelligences capable of assessing a situation, seeing the direction it’s going, anticipating the consequences. And occasionally intervening, sometimes as a result of prayer, but often quite spontaneously. Or so it seems.’

  Mrs Box was watching her now. Merrily avoided her gaze.

  ‘We talk about governments being interventionist or non- interventionist – should they step in and overrule market forces or whatever? It’s always a fine balance and, because governments don’t have Godlike wisdom – or much wisdom at all, you might think sometimes – they often intervene over the wrong issues. But we have to assume that angels… that they never get it wrong.’

  She hadn’t had time to prepare this properly. She was opening a can of worms. Were angels messengers of God or aspects of God? To what extent were they independent? Was this the time to mention Ledwardine’s own angel? Not the one with the sword allegedly witnessed spreading its radiance over the church in a thunderstorm but the anonymous one with the bin sack full of used fifties. That would take their minds off Roddy Lodge for a while.

  Maybe not. Uncle Ted had whispered to her earlier, as they came into church, that he was still awaiting police clearance on the money. If he didn’t hear anything this week he was damn well getting back onto them.

  ‘The Bible doesn’t go into too much detail about the nature of angels. They just are. Most of us, if we think about them at all, think of them in the context of particular episodes – usually involving halos and harps and a few gobsmacked shepherds. Or we might mention – with a shiver – something we like to call the Angel of Death, which…’

  Merrily looked up at the stained-glass window with the apples. The angels there were solid and looked female, with their extravagant golden curls and small pursed lips.

  ‘… which we always see as something horribly sinister rather than something gentle and understanding which exists to guide us through what, for most of us, is the only situation since birth in which we are one hundred per cent helpless.’

  Jenny Box had lowered her gaze. Merrily thought of all the hospital beds she’d sensed to be enfolded in dark, downy wings. But then – the thought pierced her like a thin blade – what was the Angel of Death doing when the face of Lynsey Davies was turning blue under the savage pressure, her eyes bulging, her tongue—

  ‘I… As far as I know, I’ve never seen an angel. So I really can’t tell you if they look like the ones in the windows over there – if they’ve got actual wings, or if they’re light and vague, or as invisible as breath. I suspect that angels look… just like us.’

  And how many others are dead? Nobody knows. And why? Nobody knows.

  ‘Some people do claim to have actually seen them in times of crisis, some to have… sensed them.’

  She swallowed. Lifted her eyes and her thoughts. Had she sensed them? At her shoulder during a Eucharist? Once, perhaps, on Christmas Day, in an aura of profound holiness, as the bells awoke the valley?

  ‘Most of us, though, have only seen evidence of what appears to be a practical intelligence which comes out of nowhere to… alter a situation. Now that in itself – that’s such an amazing concept, such a Superman thing, that it’s easy to get carried away, to start looking for angels, looking for evidence of angelic intervention in everything, every little situation.’

  She paused, looking around for Jane, who would occasionally slip in at the back, without making a thing about it. No sign of her today. No surprise.

  ‘My own feeling, for what it’s worth, is that angels are a layer of creation, an aspect of divinity, of which we should be aware. Or more aware. And if we ever have reason to think that an angel has intervened for us, then maybe we shouldn’t just say “Oh, it was meant,” we should spend some time thinking: Why? Why me? Why now?’

  What Merrily was thinking right now was that all this sermon had told its listeners so far was that this vicar hadn’t yet worked out where she stood on angels. Or, indeed, on Jenny Box, probably the parish church’s biggest benefactor since the Bull family ran out of spare cash.

  She looked into the congregation, perhaps for some guidance on how far to take this, and caught a movement from the bottom end of the nave: Frannie Bliss walking quietly through from the porch.

  Frannie Bliss?

  But, like several others, Bliss must have left before the after- service tea and coffee – either that or she’d imagined him. Jenny Box didn’t stay, either, but then she never had; she probably considered the serving of refreshments to be misuse of a holy sanctuary. On this one, Merrily would always disagree; this was about giving and sharing and opening up, not taking people’s money.

  Sometimes, people would want to discuss aspects of the sermon, but not today. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to disclose a personal angelic encounter. Outside, after everyone had gone, only James Bull-Davies hung around in the churchyard.

  It was a James kind of day: stiff, blustery. He angled over, hands behind his back, stared moodily at a windfall apple that had landed on a grave.

  ‘This Box woman.’

  Merrily drew her woollen cape over her surplice, tilted her head to one side, curious. Pulled prematurely from the Army on the death of his father, James had reluctantly shouldered what he perceived to be his family’s burden
of responsibility for the village. Lately, however – under the influence of Alison, no doubt – he seemed to have shrugged much of it off, coming to church alone, avoiding the traditional Bull pew, generally adopting a neutral stance on parish issues.

  ‘Don’t like to interfere, Mrs Watkins.’ He cleared his throat. ‘As you know.’

  ‘How’s Alison?’

  ‘Fine.’ He flicked a brittle wafer of lichen from the eighteenth- century headstone opposite the porch. ‘Met the husband, have you?’

  ‘Husband?’

  James folded his arms, looked down at his shoes. He had on a checked shirt and a mud-coloured tie under the old tweed jacket he wore like battledress. ‘Encountered the guy in the Swan, Friday evening. Up here for the weekend. Works in London.’

  ‘I’ve never met him.’

  ‘Worried man.’ James gazed over Merrily’s head towards the lych-gate. ‘No one wants a wife playing away.’

  Merrily blinked. She got a sudden flashback of James at the height of his crisis, drunk on the square, Alison trying to haul him into the Land Rover. Mistress, he’d called her. And then whore. Ownership. But Alison had been cool about all that.

  ‘Another man?’ Merrily said. ‘Here?’

  ‘Good Lord, no.’ James snorted. ‘Gord, Mrs Watkins. Gord!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Has its place, religion – the Church. Always accepted that, as you know. Part of the framework. More of these newcomers we can bring into the fold the better.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Fanaticism, however… something else entirely.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You mean God is the… the other man.’ She smiled. Church, for James, was a local obligation, a necessary hour of faint tedium on a hard pew smelling of polish. Echoes of public school. James’s school had had masters. When the idea of a woman priest-in-charge had been mooted for Ledwardine, he’d apparently been the first to object. She’d kind of thought that was in the past.

  ‘Find this amusing, do you, vicar?’

  ‘James,’ she said, ‘He’s my boss.’ He sniffed. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s not awfully warm here. Do you want to come back to the vicarage? Sit down with a cup of tea and—’

  ‘No…’ He shook his head quickly. ‘No time, sorry. I just… This is simply the gypsy’s warning, all right? I’m strongly suggesting you keep that woman at arm’s length, if you know what’s good for you. Sorry… don’t mean that to sound like a threat.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Simply that Box told me some things. Guy’d had a few drinks, so I’m treating most of it as confidential. However, presume you know she’s been in psychiatric care?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well, there you are.’

  ‘But…’ Merrily thought of Lol. ‘We do try not to hold it against people. “Let the loonies come unto me,” sayeth the Lord, “and I shall…” ’

  ‘Mrs Watkins,’ James said wearily. ‘I realize that taking the piss out of me has become a little hobby of yours, but—’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mr Box.’

  ‘Oh.’ He considered. ‘My height, perhaps an inch or two taller. A little older than her, but not appreciably. Keeps himself fit.’ He avoided Merrily’s eyes, inspecting the oak frame of the porch, as if the Bulls still paid for its maintenance.

  Yes,’ she said, ‘but what’s he like?’

  ‘Ex-journalist. Businessman now, handles her shops. Says he does all the work, she wanders round, tweaks a few things. Don’t know these shops myself… decor.’ Saying it like you’d say blue movies. ‘Smoothish type.’

  ‘Is he still here?’

  ‘Wouldn’t know. We were only introduced on Friday. Guy’d drifted into the Swan for a few drinks because he was a little tired of sitting there watching his wife reading her Bible and mouthing psalms.’

  ‘He told you that?’ Behind him, in the churchyard, Merrily saw a tiny tendril of smoke rising.

  ‘Not in so many words. Conjecture. Look, vicar, I don’t know the ins and outs of it. Never been anyone’s idea of a marriage- guidance counsellor, thank Gord.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘But if Box is blaming anyone’ – James dropped his hand from the oak – ‘then I’d say he’s looking in your general direction. And that’s a bit more than conjecture.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I… I…’ James glared down towards the lych gate, as though wishing he was out of it. ‘Woman’s got a bit of a crush on you, after all. Pretty common knowledge in the village.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ah… wrong word, as usual. Sorry. Still… big thing, women getting ordained. More underneath all that than any of us suspected. And you yourself – all this cross-waving, holy-water – I’m simply saying you’ve probably become a… what’s the word?’

  ‘If you mean role model—’

  ‘Icon?’

  ‘Bloody hell, James.’

  ‘Wrong word too, is it? Shut your mouth, James.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  She was shocked, couldn’t look at him. As they walked out under the lych gate, she glanced back down the crooked alley of

  graves to where she’d seen the smoke. Gomer Parry was sitting in his usual spot on Minnie’s grave, a roll-up in his mouth.

  ‘Poor old Parry.’ James had followed her gaze. ‘Never bloody rains, eh? They buried his nephew yet?’

  ‘Next week. After the opening of the inquest.’

  ‘Bad show. Didn’t notice him in church. Having problems with the old faith, you think?’

  Merrily said nothing. Gomer always went to Minnie’s grave when he had something to work out. Along with Minnie, he’d buried both their watches, with new batteries. Gomer’s was one of the old kind which, despite the batteries, still ticked loudly. Sometimes, he’d said, he thought he could still hear it. Helped him think.

  She watched the smoke rise from Gomer’s ciggy, darkening the day, a signal of distress. Something was wrong. After he’d told Minnie, maybe he’d tell her.

  When they reached the square, she said to James, ‘You going to come and discuss this thing in private? Tell me what on earth people are saying?’

  ‘I think not.’ James sniffed the air. ‘Never been a gossip. Anyway, told Alison I’d be back before one. I’ve said all I wanted to say. Question of watching your back, vicar. Watching your back.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  James merely nodded and walked away with long strides. Merrily looked around the square, as if there might be small knots of people pointing at her and muttering. Maybe the angel sermon hadn’t been such a good idea. Maybe – if Jenny Box had told anyone else here about her vision – it was a very bad idea.

  In fact, the square was empty except for Frannie Bliss leaning against one of the oak pillars of the little market hall, munching a Mars Bar.

  Merrily sighed.

  22

  Aura of Old Hippy

  LOL TOOK THE call just before one on the kitchen phone at Prof’s. From the studio he could hear a playback of Moira’s ‘Lady of the Tower’, veined now with the seamless cello of Simon St John. Just Moira’s voice and Simon’s cello: experimental.

  On the phone, he heard, ‘That you, boy? You know who this is?’

  A warm voice, not quite American. Lol was momentarily baffled, before the voice threw up an image of the sepia sleeve of The Band’s second album, all beards and back porch.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Lol, I hope you don’t mind this intrusion. I got your number through talking to the cop… Bliss? Came over to see me a couple days back.’

  ‘Has he calmed down now?’

  ‘I guess you might say that,’ Sam Hall said, ‘though he doesn’t strike me as a man who can handle calm too well. Anyhow, we had a talk, and it, uh… it all came out about you and what you did when you weren’t up to your ass in mud.’

  ‘That Bliss,’ Lol said. ‘S
o discreet, it’s a wonder he never made the Special Branch.’ Behind him, Simon’s cello glided over the chasm left by Moira’s voice after the verse where the messenger climbed down from his horse and the night was in his eyes.

  So in the afternoon I went on down to the village hall,’ Sam said. ‘They have a community computer room there, courtesy of Mr Cody, and I started to search the Web, and, hey, there you were, boy, all over the show – folks saying how come this guy is a footnote to so many other people’s careers? Where’d he go? Folks all over the world – America, Australia – asking questions about Lol Robinson.’

  ‘But you didn’t just ring up to scare me.’

  Sam laughed. ‘Which, I concede, is the good side of the Web – people talking to each other, sharing enthusiasms. The payback, however, in phone lines, in power, that’s bad, bad, bad. But even a dangerous crank and a madman such as myself has to compromise sometimes… which is how I wound up at Ross Records, and they didn’t have the Hazey Jane albums, but they did have this collection by Norma Waterstone, with “The Baker’s Lament”. And… well, the up and down of it is, you’re good, boy. You… are… good.’

  Lol was confused. ‘Thanks. That’s kind of you, but—’

  ‘I like how you write what are essentially new folk songs. “The Baker’s Lament”, that’s a new song sounds like it’s been around for ever till you really listen to the words, discover it’s a new take on an old theme, and it packs a strong message about what is happening to the countryside. So, the upshot, I wound up buying this Norma Waterstone album.’

  ‘Er… Waterson,’ Lol said.

  ‘Some voice, huh? Played it four times last night, used up all of my power ration. Listen, I’m gonna come to the point, Lol. You’re a guy feels strongly about the destruction of the country. You know my take on all that – and the power lines. But you don’t know it all. There is so… much… more.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure—’

  ‘And, listen, I don’t mean worldwide, I mean here. I’m talking Underhowle, I’m talking Lodge and I’m talking Melanie Pullman. I talk about this the whole time, and nobody listens to me ’cause I’m this old crank, this lunatic with a chip. I’m the fool on the goddam hill, man, and nobody listens. Wanna cut me off now?’