The Lamp of the Wicked

The Make-over

‘AH YES,’ MOIRA Cairns said, like she’d just remembered something vaguely distasteful. ‘Hi, Jane.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Jane stepped away from the box office, dismayed. ‘This woman says Lol’s gone.’

Cairns was looking smaller and somehow younger in jeans and this big Hebridean sweater, her hair tied up, the make-up washed off.

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘He had to leave.’

Leave? The big star gone off with some major international promoter, some record company exec. Goodbye to the old life. Hello hotel rooms, hello groupies.

Jane bit her lip, feeling isolated among the crowd in the foyer, probably the only one of them who was here alone and now would leave alone. Come to support Lol, and he’d triumphed and gone. She’d twice called Mum’s mobile to tell her about that call from Jenny Box, if she didn’t already know about it. Nothing – switched off.

‘I said I’d run you home,’ Cairns said, autographing the sleeve of an old vinyl album some sad git had brought along. ‘Sorry about the shaky bit,’ she said to the sad git. ‘Must be ma age.’

‘You look younger than ever,’ the sad git said, going off, and Cairns blew him a kiss.

Jane looked down at the poisoned blade of betrayal. ‘What?’ Give me five minutes, OK?’ Cairns said. Jane said tightly. ‘I can get a bus.’ Of course, there was no late bus to Ledwardine midweek, and

she caught herself making swift glances to either side. Maybe Eirion? He must still be around. He couldn’t really have dumped her. Just because she’d come on like somebody spoiled and bitchy. He wasn’t like that. He loved her.

Or what she used to be. He’d loved what she used to be. Eirion would have come here to see Lol and Moira, no reason to seek out Jane. It was over.

‘Or I can get a taxi. I’ve got enough money.’

Moira pulled a bunch of keys from her jeans and tossed them at Jane. ‘Grey BMW, right down by the bottom entrance. I’ll be there in about five minutes. I just have to see Prof, OK?’

And she turned and walked off, the smug bitch, leaving Jane standing there, holding the keys.

Jane spun away, with a semi-sob, and walked out of the building into the squally air, gulping it in. Looked up in despair at the night over Hereford, saw a faded cluster of stars, small holes in worn denim. Gas balls in a barren universe.

None of them wanted to know her now, not Eirion, not even Lol. She was spoiled and peevish and stupid; she was negative. She’d grown up a negative person in a negative world, this floating cyst of dying matter about which everything was known. A world that had peaked some time ago, and all scientists were doing about it was shrinking it more rapidly, while finding ways of keeping you alive longer so that you could go on and on being crapped on.

Halfway across the car park, seeing a couple of guys in their twenties watching her, she caught herself actually starting to think of the several individuals who would be twisted with guilt for the rest of their lives when she was found raped and murdered behind one of the warehouses off the Holmer Road or just killed, in a cursory way by some heroin addict, for her mobile.

In the end, she just found Moira’s BMW and let herself in and locked the doors to keep out the junkies and the rapists.

Then she made another fruitless attempt to call Mum and tell her about Jenny Driscoll, who had been so anxious to see her before the funeral on Friday, possibly because of something this guy Humphries had turned up in Underhowle. But the funeral had happened. It was all over. Mum should be home now.

Should be home.

Jane rang home, and listened to all the messages again, ending with Dear God, he’s coming back.

Like Gareth Box was some kind of rapist/slasher.

Poor Driscoll. She wasn’t crass and superficial, just damaged. And likeable, really, another emotional refugee, although it was still hard to know how much of what she said you could seriously believe. The angel stuff: I’m not claiming to be Bernadette. I don’t care whether anyone believes me. And then: I saw it, Jane. And she was beautiful. Was that the final confirmation that Mum was the angel?

Yet nothing sexual – could you believe that? You certainly believed it when she said it last night; you grabbed it gratefully, squeezed it to your bosom: Oh thank you, thank you. But now? How did you feel about Jenny Driscoll, with hindsight?

Jane said, ‘Oh God.’

God who did not exist, who just served now as an all-purpose expression for dismay, confusion, exasperation, contempt – and fear.

By now, any semblance of a service had evaporated. There were eleven people and a corpse under the ice- cream lights, and no reason for anyone to be here any more, not even the corpse.

Yet nobody was trying to leave.

Merrily saw Frannie Bliss placing himself next to the church door, needing to contain everybody while he worked it all out, examining the cards in his hand, rearranging them, wondering which ones to throw away.

It was like this: if Lynsey Davies had killed Melanie Pullman, it threw up a new and plausible motive for Roddy to have killed Lynsey, a – God forbid – normal motive.

Arguably, a hot-blooded killing: Lodge had discovered that this warped and dangerous woman had murdered his girlfriend. The kind of killing, then, for which – had he lived to appear in court – he might well have ended up with no more than a couple of years in prison.

If Lynsey Davies was the only one he’d done. If the serial killing was something happening only in the dark mind of Lynsey Davies.

Did you confess just to get it over, to get the police off your back, the heat from your brain? Merrily put her hands either side of the pine coffin, just where Roddy’s head would be, cooled at last. She saw him scaling that pylon, gripping the steel skeleton of his personal tormentor, swinging up into the rigid, spindly arms of Kali the Destroyer, with the killer candles in her fingers.

Sam Hall was at the foot of the coffin, and their gazes met: what now? She didn’t know. If Roddy was going to the crematorium, there didn’t even need to be a funeral.

From over by the door, Frannie Bliss called, ‘Do we want to take this further? I don’t think I’m in any position to demand that everybody stays, but if I phone my boss – which is what I ought to do – I can guarantee a long night for some of us.’

Piers Connor-Crewe’s big, pale body twitched. ‘Are you going to tell us exactly what you’ve found?’

‘Found, Mr Crewe?’

Sam Hall said, ‘Merrily, you just raised the possibility that Lynsey Davies had someone else kill Melanie. You want to explain that?’

‘Well…’ She moved away from the coffin. ‘I think if we look at what we know about Lynsey…’

‘I know a bit more now, in fact,’ Bliss said. ‘Andy Mumford finally called. It’s not much, but it might make you think.’ He moved away from the door, resting a foot on a pew seat, hands on his knee. ‘Some of it we knew, but there’s no harm in going over it again. Lynsey – like Roddy, actually – grew up in a Nonconformist household on the edge of the forest – Drybrook or Lydbrook, one of those places. Her old feller was a coalman – one of the blokes who carted the sacks about, rather than ran the yard – and he was also the caretaker at his chapel. There were four kids, and Lynsey was the eldest. And the old man used to make them go twice on a Sunday to chapel. Strict. Very strict.’

‘He still alive?’ Sam asked.

‘No, neither parent, but Mumford talked to a sister, who hadn’t seen Lynsey in years but did remember things like how she was once suspended from school for bullying. And how much she hated the chapel.’

‘Figures,’ Sam said.

‘Actually, it wasn’t that simple,’ Bliss said. ‘Funny, these are things you’d never bother going into when somebody’s just “the victim”. Even less important when you’re just a victim – one of several. When we say she “hated the chapel”, we mean the organization, the religion. The actual building – this