The Lamp of the Wicked

‘He tricked himself,’ Huw said. ‘Now put the lights out.’

Merrily took off her coat, knelt at the packing case and prayed. The cold seeped through her alb, and it felt as though her back was naked. She was aware of Huw standing behind her, as if trying to shield the fragile candle flames from an unfelt wind.

She said the Lord’s Prayer, muttered St Patrick’s Breastplate and wondered what this spontaneous, makeshift ritual, without any of the important preliminaries, could possibly achieve. Was this Huw grabbing his last chance, while Fergus was relaxed enough – or hypocritical enough – to throw himself at the mercy of a God in whom he had probably never believed?

Huw whispered, ‘Call him.’

Merrily said, ‘Fergus.’

Huw and Lol had dragged over one of the rubber mats and then folded a dust sheet and laid it on top, Lol squeezing her hand and leaving something in it.

‘Where do you want me?’ Fergus said.

‘Might be as well if you just knelt. If that’s not too uncomfortable.’

‘I try to keep myself flexible, Merrily.’

‘Good.’

Fergus knelt. She stood. She still didn’t have far to gaze down on his open, bony face, his wide-apart brown eyes. Had he? Was any of this even conceivable? She saw how long and bony his hands were, knuckles like ball—

‘If you could move a little closer to the altar.’ She wanted it so the two candles lit the upper part of his face, so that she could see his eyes.

It was always going to be the eyes.

Very quietly, Huw was removing from the bag two items: the white diary of Lynsey Davies and a small picture, the miniature in its slender frame, and he was edging silently along the dust- sheeted wall towards the entrance. He could leave this to the lass.

He had to.

Huw crept away, to be on his own. He hadn’t eaten for more than a day now. He’d awoken at five a.m. in the dark, and had spent nigh on three hours in meditation at the window. His room had faced east – she were thoughtful like that, the lass – and before the dawn came he’d established inside himself a centre of calm to which periodically, during the day, he’d returned.

His head was light now, filled with this quiet incandescence that was still linked to his spine as he padded down the body of the chapel, arriving at the side of the door. Standing there with his back to a hanging dust sheet, looking down to the altar at the opposite end of the chapel where, between the shapes of the people gathered there, he could see the candlelight, as remote from him now as starlight.

He placed the diary on the flagstones at his feet and held the miniature for a few moments in both hands. Too dark to see it, but the image was clear to him. He could see the face of Donna Furlowe sketched by her mother in pale grey pastel on white paper, so that it was like an imprint on a sheet. Or a shroud.

Huw knelt and, clasping the picture to his heart, held it there behind his hands as he put them together to pray.

With the bulbs out, there was a vague ball of light around them; Merrily could barely see anyone else.

‘Our Father…’

She said the Lord’s Prayer, the old exorcism, for the second time, slowly, and she could hear the others joining in, a grounded echo. She saw that Fergus was mouthing some of the words but not all of them, as if finding them difficult to remember. He looked briefly puzzled.

Merrily said, ‘Deliver us, merciful Lord, from all evils, past and present and to come, and grant us peace in our day. Keep us free from sin and safe from all distress…’

Fergus knelt with his heavy, proud head raised up like the prow of a Viking longboat, his eyes closed. Where was he? Where were his thoughts taking him?

Merrily floundered, sought out Huw’s shadow, couldn’t see him anywhere, but she thought she heard his whisper: ‘Confession.’

Yes, she thought, of course.

‘Almighty God, in penitence we confess that we have sinned against you, through our own fault, in thought, word and deed…’

No penitence, no regrets, course there wasn’t. He was what he was, no getting round that. He’d scratched it out on the wall of his cream-painted cell at Winson Green: Freddy the mass murderer from Gloucester.

Gloucester, not Hereford, them days was long gone. He’d picked Gloucester; made his home there, made it hisself, filled it full of hisself and what he’d took – bringing bits of Gloucester home.

Some nights he’d go back to Number 25 – not to the place it was now, look, emptied and gutted by the bloody coppers, but what it used to be, full of sweat and heat… vibrating with it.

Him too. He was strong then, at his peak, ready for anything: work hard, play hard, that was him.

Now he’d lost a lot of weight, didn’t feel too good no more. Not here in this shithole, no privacy, nothing to see, nothing to watch. Nothing to watch here but him – people looking at him all the bloody time, having a laugh, the laughs echoing across the exercise yard – ‘Build us a patio, Fred? Ho ho!’

Days fading into more days, going nowhere, never going nowhere again. Never working for hisself again, no more building things with his hands. Nothing to do with his hands no more.

No women, no more women ever. No wife. When they was in court, she wouldn’t look at him – after all he’d done for her, trying to keep her out of it, telling the coppers she didn’t know nothing. And she en’t talking to them neither. And him… he’s talked enough. All he’s got left now’s his secrets – the who and the when and the where. The how-many-times. They don’t know next to nothing, when you works it out, en’t got the half of it and that’s all right by him – Freddy the mystery man. Freddy the mass murderer from Gloucester.

And Huw stood there in the gutted chapel, and he could hear the voice well enough, but he couldn’t feel anything. No energy. All he was getting was the husk in the prison cell on New Year’s Day, 1995. The day the prison officer couldn’t get the cell door open because of what was hanging behind it from a rope made out of – versions differed – a prison blanket, or prison shirts.

This was the very worst crime to be committed against the relatives of every missing girl in Britain: allowing him to do it – letting Fred escape, with all his secrets.

Why hadn’t they – the police, the prison authorities – put the psychology together, realized just how depressed he was likely to become without the anticipation of gross and grosser sexual excesses to heat his blood? Had nobody guessed he’d become empty, a husk, insubstantial enough to hang?

Maybe they had. Maybe they just bloody had. He’d heard of coppers who’d cheered when they’d heard about the death at Winson Green. A banner going up: Nice one, Fred – something as inane as that.

And now nobody would know the who, the where, the how- many. Lynsey had written her secrets down, in the Magickal Diary, but amiable, garrulous Fred had been barely literate, and Rose was saying nowt.

Freddy, the man of mystery, and those who followed him: Lynsey and the others, the unknown others who’d lived in Cromwell Street or had just dropped in for an hour or two, and would never be identified now. Out there, with the virus inside them.

Huw stared into the darkest corner of the chapel, listening for the remains of the laughter and the sniggers, the sound of a hammer, thrown from a ladder, clanging on the flags.

He heard nothing but the drone of Merrily’s ad hoc ritual, useless in itself.

It was all useless. There was nobody watching, nothing worthy of a fight.

Huw held the pastel drawing of Donna, by Julia, close to his aching heart, thinking of all the relatives and