The Lamp of the Wicked (MW5)

by Phil Rickman

  ‘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, because 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.

  ‘I left her alone. How she wanted it, you could tell. Stayed well away, said nowt, walked out.’

  Merrily was picturing Brecon Cathedral: dusky pink stone on the shaded edge of town, near what was left of the castle. Unlike most cathedrals, it was a very quiet place, usually.

  ‘Anyroad, I sat on the grass, outside. Very warm day. Birdsong. Very near fell asleep. Didn’t notice her until she were coming past, not looking at me, like I were some owd vagrant. I opened me eyes, and before I could think about it, I just said, “Tell me to sod off, lass, if you like…” ’

  Merrily was shaking her head. Who could resist that one? It was no big surprise to learn that, about fifteen minutes later, Huw and Julia Furlowe had been having afternoon tea together in a café in The Watton.

  Her daughter was missing, this was it. Her only child, Donna, had just finished her final year at Christ College, Brecon, and was due to go up to Oxford in October. Meanwhile, she’d had a summer holiday job at a country hotel in the Cotswolds, up near Stroud. Although this was over two hours from home, and Donna had to stay there, it was a good arrangement because the proprietors of the hotel were family friends who would keep an eye on her. She was eighteen but, to be honest, her mother admitted, in some ways immature.

  And now she was missing. She’d gone shopping in Cheltenham, getting a lift with the cook, arranging to meet him at a car park at four-thirty p.m. But when the cook came to collect his car, ten minutes later than arranged, she wasn’t there. When she didn’t show up after an hour, the cook called the hotel to find out if she’d made her own way back. When nobody had heard from her by nine that night, they first called Julia and then they called the police.

  Three weeks now, and nothing. No sightings. Well, Cheltenham in August, what could you expect? Besides, missing eighteen-year-old girls, it wasn’t all that unusual. Not in the summertime. Try not to worry too much, they said.

  But Julia knew that something must have happened. They were close, she and Donna, always had been, especially since Tim had died, so suddenly – never any suspicion that there was anything wrong with his heart; he’d still been playing rugby at forty-eight.

  Couldn’t Donna have fallen in love – whirlwind holiday romance, gone off with him, the way young girls did? Absolutely out of the question. Was it possible Donna might have been unhappy about going to Oxford, felt unable to confide this to her mother? No, no, no. How could she be so sure? Because they were close. Truly, truly close.

  The Brecon and Radnor Express had carried the story; Huw must have missed it. Julia Furlowe went to the Cathedral every day, to pray; Huw wouldn’t have known, hadn’t been near the place in weeks.

  Middle of the following week, he’d driven Julia down to Stroud and Cheltenham and they’d done the rounds with colour photographs. Have you seen this girl? You wouldn’t forget, if you had – lovely girl, soft ash-blonde hair.

  Like her mother: Julia Furlowe, forty-nine, a widow for six years, one daughter, missing. A soft-spoken southerner, exiled in Wales. Alone now in a luxury farmhouse with a view down the Usk, where she painted local views in watercolour and gouache, very accomplished, and sold them in the local craft shops.

  ‘And I held back,’ Huw said. ‘As you would in a situation like that. Held back a long time. Longer than she were inclined to. Separate rooms, the first three trips. By the fourth, it seemed ridiculous. We’d prayed together every night, always went to the nearest church and prayed together. Knelt together and prayed to God, for Donna to be all right.’

  Merrily met Huw’s eyes; his face was pale and roughened in the feeble light: sackcloth and ashes.

  ‘We never lived together. I’d spend a couple of nights at her place at Bwlch, either side of Sunday. What a strange bloody time that were. Love and sadness. Love and anxiety. Love and stress, love and desperation. We used to tell each other how it would be when Donna turned up. Happen wi’ a babby – Julia were ready for that… th
at would’ve been just fine. I used to think, I wonder what she’s like when she’s really smiling… smiling from the heart, without reservation?’

  They spent Christmas together. Christmas 1993, the first Christmas there’d been no Donna. Christmas morning, Julia came to Huw’s church, up in the Beacons. The locals knew by now, knew who she was but said nowt. A farmer’s wife said she was glad for them, glad for Huw – a minister up here, all alone, it had never seemed right. Julia had cried a lot, that night.

  The next day, she started a painting, of the snow on Pen- y-fan and then abandoned it, saying she had to get home – what if Donna had come back? What if she was coming back for New Year? Donna always loved New Year, more than Christmas as she’d got older.

  Donna didn’t come back for New Year.

  It was sometime towards the end of February when Huw went over to Julia’s place, picking up her paper, as usual, at the shop in Bwlch, tossing it down on the long coffee table in the vast stone sitting room.

  And Julia had glanced at it and then picked it up and – he’d never forget this as long as he bloody lived – Julia had held the paper at arm’s length, feeling in the pocket of her denim frock for her reading glasses.

  And she’d said, almost vaguely, she’d said:

  ‘That’s Fred.’

  A long moment, because Huw had read the story by then and thought nothing of it except his usual tired disgust, and Julia hadn’t the faintest idea what it was about, she’d just seen the picture. Some nights, even now, Huw would lie in bed, hearing her voice on the north-east wind from Pen-y-fan: That’s Fred… that’s Fred… that’s Fred…

  ‘He’d worked a couple of times for her husband,’ Huw said. ‘Years before – before they’d come to Wales. When Donna was a little girl. When they were living at Highnam, near Gloucester. You never forgot Fred – such a cheerful little man, and a hell of a good worker. Nowt he wouldn’t turn his hand to, Fred. And always a smile for you. Always a smile for a lady. And a big grin for little Donna.’

  Huw’s eyes were like glass. ‘Oh dear God,’ Merrily said.

  ‘That were early days – the first bodies had been found at 25 Cromwell Street: Fred’s daughter Heather and two other girls, Shirley and Alison. Within a week or so, he’s confessed to nine more murders, and the whole bloody nation’s agog. By April they’re exploring two fields on the border of Much Marcle and Kempley. Digging up his first wife, Rena. Two months later, Ann McFall in Fingerpost Field.’

  ‘You went to the police…’

  ‘Oh aye. Like the relatives of every other missing girl within a hundred miles of Gloucester. And when it come out that Fred had worked for Tim Furlowe, that he knew Tim’s family… See, all these girls – they weren’t random kidnaps, he knew ’em all, before. Even Lucy Partington, the undergraduate, who seemed like a random snatch off the street, there’s evidence he knew her slightly, way back. “It’s me? Don’t you recognize me – worked for your dad?” ’

  ‘But if Donna was just a child…?’

  ‘The feeling was it happened the other way round. Donna bumps into him in the street, in Cheltenham. He was always in Cheltenham. Well, not a face you ever forgot, West. Do anything for you.’

  A soundtrack was playing in Merrily’s head. Traffic and the bustle and chatter of a summer pavement and… ‘Oh, gosh, it’s Fred! I bet you don’t remember me. Donna Furlowe?’ ‘Course I do, Donna, well, well, well… Give you a lift somewhere? The ole van’s just round the corner.’

  Huw leaned his head forwards, digging his fingers into the skin of his forehead. When he looked up, there were red marks.

  ‘That was when the police asked me if I knew of any satanic groups. I didn’t, so I went round all the local Deliverance priests. Took some leave from the parish. Stayed in Gloucester for over a month, me and Julia. No more bodies, but they always expected to find more. But I think it was Lucy Partington did it for Julia. Not like the others – an intelligent, cultured girl. Found in Cromwell Street, with tape around the skull, bits of rope. Evidence of— You don’t want to hear this, lass, I don’t want to tell you.’

  ‘She was Martin Amis’s cousin, wasn’t she? The novelist.’

  ‘Aye. Cultured lass. Artistic. Sensitive. So the cops are saying now to West, what about Donna Furlowe? Where did you bury Donna Furlowe? He denies it. He always denied it. Just like he denied murdering Ann McFall – buried her, but he didn’t kill her. He loved her, she was his angel – just let him bloody find out who killed her, that’s all… He lied, you see, Merrily, he lied all along. And all the time, I’m saying to Julia, “It’s coincidence. Coincidence, that’s all, let’s go home.” She wouldn’t.’

  ‘I wouldn’t, either, if it had been…’ Merrily swallowed. She found she was holding a hand to the neck of her black woollen jumper. She wanted to get up and make more tea, but she couldn’t move.

  ‘We did leave in the end,’ Huw said. ‘We had to. I had to go back to the parish, and the Deliverance courses were about to get started. But it were never the same after that. I’d go over to Bwlch every other day. Stay the odd night. She’d keep saying, “I can’t settle, Shep, I can’t settle.” Always called me Shep. Said I reminded her of a border collie, always ready, always on watch.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Another Christmas. A couple of dozen half-finished paintings. Then a week later, New Year’s Day 1995, Fred West, awaiting trial for a dozen murders, constructed a rope out of shirts – always a practical man – and hanged himself in his cell at Winson Green. Having told his carer he’d killed a lot more girls. As many as twenty more girls. No names.

  ‘It were summer again before we knew it. This was when Julia told me about the medium in Brecon. I’d asked her to marry me by then, she said let’s leave it a year, see how things are. And that she’d been to a bloody medium.’

  It’s understandable. Kind of situation that sends most people to mediums.’

  ‘I know that, lass. And all I could do was beg her not to. You know the shite that comes through at these bloody sessions… not to be trusted, mediums, not ever. We had a row. I didn’t see her for a week. I went back, crawling, beginning of August 1995, and stayed the night, and when we got up the next morning there was a call from a copper in Gloucester to say they’d found a female body, butchered, in field near Lydbrook, in the Forest of Dean.’

  Merrily tried to say something, couldn’t. She hadn’t known, hadn’t recognized the name.

  ‘We saw some of the clothes. She were still wearing clothes, but there were thick brown parcel-tape round the lower part of the skull.’

  ‘Huw…’

  ‘And bones missing. Finger bones and foot bones.’

  Merrily’s nails pierced her palms.

  ‘See, we’d read it all by then. Hundreds of pages already in the papers, books being written, Rose coming up for trial on ten murder charges. She must’ve known… Oh aye, we all knew by then exactly what Fred West did to his victims, him and Rose. We knew all the details. Fred abusing his children and watching Rose with other men, through a hole in the door. Taking in girls, at first, who were up for it – they thought, but not the things Fred and Rose did, nobody were up for that. Then girls who weren’t up for it, Fred and Rose getting off on the fear.’

  And she heard him at Frannie Bliss across the table: cellars and concrete… dreams full of blood and filth and sobbing.

  ‘Can I tell you what it were like for Julia, then, Merrily? Can I start to tell you?’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘Course not. She started painting again, within days. Painting Donna, from photographs. But very pale. Paintings you could see the white paper through, like she was trying to clean off the child’s body. I tried to get her to come to the cathedral. She ‘wouldn’t. But she was still going to the medium. What could I say about that? I couldn’t bring her comfort, the Church couldn’t do owt.’

  Huw was feeling in an inside pocket of his tweed jacket, bringing out what looked like an old tobacco pouch of yellow
plastic. He unwrapped it and took out a small piece of folded paper. Thick paper, quality notepaper. He unfolded it and passed it across the table to Merrily. She took it to the lamp.

  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 forgive me, and please go on praying for us. I’m so SORRY.

  Merrily stood there by the lamp, holding the paper, feeling its texture, the weight of it. Paper made to last. She was thinking of all those times she’d wondered if there had ever been a woman in Huw’s life.

  When he started to speak again, she couldn’t look at him.

  ‘It were me found her. I think that was what she wanted. Thought I were strong. Owd Shep. Seen it all. She’d left the farmhouse doors unlocked. Lovely balmy summer’s evening, and an overdose of sleeping tablets.’

  ‘Huw, I…’ Blinking back the tears; that wouldn’t help.

  ‘God?’ His voice was down on the flagstones. ‘I went into me own church that night and screamed obscenities at God for the best part of an hour. Close as I’ve ever been to chucking it in. They say it makes your faith stronger in the end, and happen they’re right, but you can’t possibly know that at the time. It’s not a time when faith makes any kind of bloody sense.’

  No.’

  She had to put the paper down. Wondering if he’d brought it tonight specially to show her, or if he carried it with him all the time, in his inside pocket next to his heart, the suicide note of a woman he’d never really had and perhaps was already losing when she died. ‘