The Lamp of the Wicked

friends and lovers of long-missing girls and women who did something like this every night. And he broke down.

At some point, Fergus’s eyes opened, and Merrily came in at once with the ritualized question, ‘What do you want from God in his Holy Church?’

Fergus, unprepared, made no reply at first. While she waited, she could hear the wind outside, coming down off Howle Hill. Sam Hall’s line came into her head: insidious wind. Where was Sam? She couldn’t see him. Where was Lol? All she could see were Fergus’s eyes, looking into hers.

‘I want,’ Fergus said, ‘what I deserve.’ He smiled at her.

Merrily felt a hollowness in her stomach. She gripped the angel pendant and felt the weight of her pectoral cross.

‘Do you renounce the Devil and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?’

Fergus kept smiling. ‘Sure.’

‘Do you renounce all the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy what God has created?’

‘I… yes,’ Fergus said. ‘Of course.’

‘Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you away from the love of God?’

When he hesitated, Merrily saw that he was looking at her breasts. Then he looked up.

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

The heat from the pendant went right up her arm. She looked into his eyes, then, and knew.

What a cliche that was: seen it in his eyes, windows of the soul – all that stuff.

In Fergus’s eyes, she saw nothing at all. A void. An absence. It was like opening the doors of a lift and finding that you were looking directly down the shaft. The absence that could now only be filled with life and energy when his hands were exploring you, when the eyes were lighting up like little torch bulbs. When he was swimming towards you through a pool of liquid lust.

Merrily knew that she was seeing what Lynsey Davies had seen, been surprised and probably delighted by, in the second before he came for her with… what?

A thin belt was the pathologist’s suggestion, according to Bliss, but no belt had ever been found. Perhaps it was Roddy’s – Fergus bending over the unconscious Roddy, as if to help him, sliding the belt out of his trousers. And then subduing Lynsey with his fists. She saw blood jetting from Lynsey’s nose and then the image cut to the belt, each end wrapped around one of Fergus’s hands and then its length pulled tight around Lynsey’s throat.

Silence soaked her head and then, over it, she heard, quite clearly and crisply:

Show you what’s what, where the bits goes, you little smart bitch…

‘Do you renounce—?’

‘Yes, of course. I renounce everything.’ Fergus smiled. ‘Is that it?’

‘That’s up to you,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m sure that will do.’ Fergus stood up. ‘Thank you, Merrily. I imagine we all feel so much better for that.’

And he walked out of the glow and into the darkness.

‘Laughing,’ Ingrid Sollars said. ‘Laughing at us. Didn’t you feel that?’

‘I didn’t feel anything. There wasn’t anything to feel.’ Merrily turned to the altar and saw that the candles had gone out. But her eyes had long since adjusted; it seemed much lighter in here, and she could see Ingrid and Sam and Lol quite plainly. ‘Were we all expecting a confession?’

‘He’s not that dumb,’ Sam said. ‘All the people who know the truth are dead. Hell, I can see it all now. The panic Roddy musta been in – a killing he didn’t recall, a body on the floor right here. What’s he gonna do? Maybe they even advised him, Fergus and Piers – you can’t bury her here, buddy, all these excavations we’re gonna have. Must surely be someplace you’ve been working lately where you could stash her.’

‘Mmm.’

Merrily walked away, looking for Huw, whose idea this had been… and what a pointless exercise. She was disappointed in him – which she knew was wrong; he was just a man, with a burden. Perhaps what she was really avoiding was her disappointment in God, into whose hands this had been placed, in the hope of a solution. And there was none, not really. No one had been redeemed.

‘Cola French,’ Sam Hall mused. ‘I recall her now. She’d stay some weekends with Piers, I guess, came along to the village hall with him sometimes. Bright kid. But what I wondered, Lol…’ He looked around. ‘Where’d he go?’

Lol?’

Merrily could see him across the chapel, quite clearly silhouetted against a dust sheet hanging from the ceiling. Silhouetted because there was a blush on the cloth, a warm glow inside it. Lol was gathering the cloth into his arms and pulling on it.

‘What’s happening?’ Ingrid said.

When the sheet came down, with a shower of dust and plaster fragments, Merrily saw it had concealed a Gothic window that was both tall and wide and had plain glass in it, and what she saw through the glass explained why it was now so bright in here.

Cherry Lodge was wearing her old parka, and her hair was matted to her forehead. She was panting. There was a pile of old tyres beside her and she lifted one quite easily and threw it into the flames.

‘We piled some tyres all around, first,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to see him go up, did I?’

A tractor was parked at the edge of the field, not far from the end wall of the Baptist chapel. It had a trailer attached, and there were more tyres on that.

‘Left over from the foot-and-mouth pyres,’ Cherry said. ‘Railway sleepers would’ve been better but there was no time for that, see. I don’t know what’ll happen if it goes out before he’s all gone.’

The flames, with the wind under them now, lit up the pylon at the bottom of the field. When Merrily and the others had first come out of the chapel, it had looked as though the pylon itself was alight, as though the flames were filling it up inside, turning it into some metal Wicker Man of the new millennium: sacrificial fire.

It had taken Merrily a long time to work out what was happening here. Ingrid Sollars had been the first to realize, showing no shock at all. ‘Mr Lomas,’ she said drily, ‘would be most offended.’

Underneath the stench of diesel and burning rubber, Merrily detected the worst smell of all – barbecue, roast pork, Nev.

She coughed into a hand and wondered if Gomer was here, among the small but swelling crowd, the bonfire-night crowd, ‘the villagers who would never in a million years have turned out for Roddy Lodge’s funeral.

‘The police’ve sent for the fire brigade.’ Cherry Lodge was smiling, tired but triumphant. ‘Too late now. Oh, they’ll probably think of something to charge us with, but we’re only doing what they all wanted, aren’t we?’

My fault, Merrily thought. Should have made sure the church was locked.

She saw Lol coming back from the chapel, with Huw. They walked across to the other side of the fire, where there were fewer people, and Merrily was sure she saw Huw throw something grey-white into the flames. The diary?

‘After we left you, we went straight back up to the farm, we did, and piled the tyres on the trailer with the diesel,’ Cherry said. A wild exhilaration there now. ‘And we built up the pyre, and then we went back to the church and just wheeled the coffin out on Mr Lomas’s bier and loaded him on the trailer and brought him back here. Nobody noticed. The police weren’t out in force yet, just a couple down by the grave.’

‘Your idea?’ Merrily asked.

‘Bit of both. He was very bitter, Tony was, about that protest, with the banners and the placards. Lived here longer than any of them and he gets treated like dirt. Very bitter, he was. And at Roddy too, of course.’

Let him be cremated. Empty his bloody ashes in the gutter. Catharsis, Merrily thought, a hand on her pectoral cross.

And the Lodges didn’t yet know that he was probably an innocent man.

Redemption.