The Lamp of the Wicked

Really?

She looked away. In the top corner of the field, where it was separated from the land that extended behind Roddy’s bungalow… was that a woman standing alone there against the wire fence, arms folded, very still, watching Roddy burn?

Or was it just a fence post, with an old, fraying rag caught in the wire, so that it blew back in the wind, like hair?

Epilogue

THE SKIN WAS softly sepia-toned, the crow’s-feet delicately faded out. There was an ethereal light around the head.

Angel of Our Days, it said above the picture of Merrily.

She shuddered. ‘I can’t even think where she got this one from.’

‘Of course, it’ll never be wiped now,’ Jane said. ‘You realize that? You’ll go on for ever, making rings around the world.’

‘Nothing goes on for ever,’ Merrily said. ‘Certainly not on the Internet.’

‘That’s true, in fact,’ said Eirion, who’d brought along the printout. ‘When somebody stops paying for the site, it’ll vanish overnight.’

‘You don’t know,’ Jane said. ‘Odd things happen.’

Merrily saw Eirion giving her his famous smile and guessed that they were holding hands under the table. Odd things happen. When did the kid last say something like that?

How quickly they recovered. The elasticity of young skin. Whereas crow’s feet only got deeper.

She stretched her legs under the table. It was the first time she’d felt able if not to relax, at least to sag. Like spending a few moments on a plateau where you could lie on your back and not see the abyss. Maybe this was the most she could hope for: the feeling of not, for a while, having to look into the abyss.

On the printout, underneath her picture, she read:

The Archangel Uriel is at this moment working on earth through Her servant, The Reverend Merrily Watkins, Deliverance Minister for the Diocese of Hereford on the border of England and Wales.

It is very unusual in the UK, where the women’s ministry is itself so very young, for a woman, especially one so youthful, to be elevated to this most important and spiritually crucial role.

We ask for your prayers to aid Merrily in what we believe to be the summit of her endeavour, the task for which she was chosen above all women.

We believe that a satanic male maleficence lives on and will be passed on again, unless Merrily Watkins is permitted to exorcize it at the laying down of Roddy Lodge in the village of Underhowle, Herefordshire.

You are requested to commence your prayers for Merrily NOW. By the grace of God, amen.

It was signed: The Daughters of Uriel. And the tone was ludicrously apocalyptic, and yet…

‘I failed her,’ Merrily said. ‘Don’t let anybody say otherwise. I did not get any of this right.’

‘You didn’t know,’ Jane said. ‘You couldn’t have known.’

‘All the praying I do, you’d think there’d’ve been a little divine intervention,’ Merrily said bitterly.

‘Don’t,’ Jane said sharply.

‘No. I’m sorry.’ Maybe there had been. How could any of them know?

Jane said, ‘Just because you’re a priest, it doesn’t have to happen through you. The other thing happened through Lol. I mean, didn’t it? It was Lol who exposed that guy.’

‘Yes.’ Merrily smiled. ‘And Lol hated every minute of it.’

Merrily had watched Fergus – or had seemed to – in that frigid flicker of transition between man and monster. Yet he was not a monster. He was the best head teacher they’d ever known in Underhowle; he treated kids like equals and he was endlessly enterprising and affable with everybody, only occasionally displaying the steel cord under the velvet, which was so essential to a good school director.

Yet already, according to Frannie Bliss, the stories were filtering through, including the rumours about why Fergus’s marriage had failed – not because his wife had found out about his evenings of recreational release, but because of what he’d become between the sheets at home: a gradual diminishing of tenderness, the parallel escalation of sexual violence. This indictment had come from Fergus’s mother-in-law, who had thought him such a wonderful man that at first she’d accused her daughter of simply being inadequate to his healthy, masculine needs.

How easily and efficiently he’d lied, exactly the way West had lied, revealing nothing until it had already been found out.

Bliss said that if the killing of Lynsey Davies had not happened exactly as Lol had suggested, he couldn’t have been far out. The way Frannie saw it, the three of them had probably agreed to wait for Roddy’s next blackout and then go for it.

Lol had told Merrily about Lynsey’s resonant instruction to the three of them: Fuse your dreams inside me.

It would be important for all three of them to kill her, fusing the guilt. But when it came to it, Frannie reckoned, Cody and Connor-Crewe would have chickened out. Maybe they didn’t have quite enough to lose.

Frannie wanted Fergus for this one. He’d said on the phone that they’d now be turning major heat on Cody and Connor-Crewe.

He was confident that, before the day was out, one of them would have pointed the finger. And then he’d start on Fergus.

Huw had gone home to the Beacons. But he and Merrily had arranged to return to the Baptist chapel tomorrow, possibly with Jerome Banks and a chalice of Harvey’s Spanish Red and some white wafers. A full exorcism of place would not be underplaying it.

Meanwhile, Huw had been learning more about Lynsey Davies’s past and was wondering how much of a coincidence it was that Donna Furlowe’s body had been found close to the hamlet where Lynsey had been born, near Lydbrook, in the Forest.

Had Donna been killed by Lynsey and Fred? West had, after all, known the girl. Or was it, as the police had suspected, too late in his murderous career for it to be down to Fred? Lynsey and somebody else, then? Not Roddy Lodge, that was more or less certain now.

Lynsey on her own? Or with another of her old Cromwell Street friends?

Not long after Huw had left, Gomer had arrived with a man who was as close to a cube as anyone Merrily had seen.

Jumbo Humphries had parked his blue and white Cadillac on the square, parallel to the Market Hall, the only spot where it was unlikely to cause an obstruction. Jumbo had curly hair and stubble and he talked a lot. He was from the southern end of the Beacons or the top end of the Valleys, however you wanted to look at it, and he talked fast and emotionally.

‘A wonderful lady, she was, Mrs Watkins. A delightful