The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Not good, is it?’

Moira Cairns shook her head slowly. ‘Jesus, Laurence, you don’t go out of your way to make things easy for yourself, do you?’

Lol smiled his hopeless smile.

10 Caffeine

IN THE EARLY afternoon, with wind-driven rain coming in hard from Wales and the last of the apples down on the vicarage lawn, the police arrived.

Actually, just one of them: DI Francis Bliss, of Hereford CID, which was a relief; it meant this was informal. DI Bliss sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee greedily. He was unshaven, been up all night, couldn’t hide his excitement.

‘Merrily, we’ve gorra name.’

‘For the… ?’

‘Dead person.’

‘Oh.’

They had Merseyside in common, he and Merrily, if not synchronistically. She’d been a curate there, her first job in the clergy, her baptism of fire and acid, but good times, on the whole. By the time she’d arrived in Liverpool, Frannie Bliss – stocky, red-haired, raised a Catholic in Kirby – would already have left. It was unclear how he’d wound up in Hereford.

He folded his hands around his warm mug.

‘Lynsey Davies. Local woman. Reported missing back in the middle of August by her partner – I say “partner”… one of her partners. The father of two of her kids, anyway, which he reckons gives him first claim.’

‘Claim on what?’

‘On any compensation that might be due to the dependants of a murder victim, I imagine. Everybody talks compensation now. You don’t have a loss, you have an opening for gain.’

‘Not a loving relationship, then.’

‘With Lodge on the side?’ Frannie Bliss sniffed. Merrily, feeling chilly even inside her oldest roll-neck woolly, carried her ashtray to the table and slumped down opposite him. It was a day for despairing of people. Bliss’s excitement depressed her. But then, if everybody enjoyed their jobs that much, the sum of human happiness… She surrendered to confusion and lit a cigarette.

‘When you say “local”… ?’

‘Village called Underhowle. Backside of Ross-on-Wye, where it joins the Forest of Dean. I’d never been there before. Lodge has his depot on the outskirts, and a bungalow he’s built next to it. Lynsey Davies lived in a council house in Ross. She was thirty-nine, had four kids by three different blokes, and was apparently Roddy’s intermittent girlfriend. A fun-loving lady.’

‘So she was… identifiable, then.’

Frannie smiled thinly. ‘Ah… not strictly. The ex-partner, Paul Connell, reckons he doesn’t mind having a quick glance, but I’m not sure how useful that would be. It does help a bit that the body was dumped in pea-gravel rather than soil, with this big tank thing on top, so it’s not as badly eaten-up as you might expect after a couple of months underground. And the clothes tie in. We’ve sent for dental records, anyway.’

‘Lodge actually took it… her out of the ground?’

‘Dug down by the side of the tank, fished her out – probably manually. Dumped her in the shovel of the digger, tucked her in nicely.’

Merrily shuddered, recalling the mud drying on the front of Roddy Lodge’s leather jacket, on his trousers.

‘The, er, you know, the bodily fluids, they’d have gradually drained out through the gravel,’ Bliss said. ‘So although she was a big girl, the body wouldn’t’ve weighed that much. Wouldn’t’ve taken a great feat of strength for Roddy to roll her onto a couple of feed sacks and lift her out of the pit and into the shovel.’

Merrily thought of Roddy Lodge’s pungent aftershave, wondering if he’d plastered it on to combat the smell. Didn’t make too much sense; this was a man who installed foul drainage.

She and Gomer had seen the big digger go rumbling past while they were waiting for the police on the pub car park – the body presumably out in front, sunk into the raised-up shovel like an offering to the moon. Gomer had wanted to follow Lodge; Merrily had talked him out of it. Half an hour or so later, the police had cornered Roddy at his depot. The woman’s body was still under the tarpaulin. Not much room for denial.

‘How did she die?’

‘The PM should be taking place as we speak.’ Evidently, Frannie didn’t want to say how she’d died. He finished his coffee. ‘Can I go over a few points? According to your statement, you and Mr Parry went to this house because you had reason to think Roddy would be going there to retrieve this septic-tank unit. The, er…’

‘Efflapure. But we didn’t expect him to be there.’

‘Right.’ He lifted his cup. ‘Don’t suppose… ?’

‘Sure.’ She went to fetch the coffee pot, trying to recall what she’d said in her brief statement to a detective constable in Hereford in the early hours. ‘I know it all sounds unlikely, Frannie, but you have to remember we were both pretty hyped- up last night. There was no way Gomer was going to go home and sleep. But we really didn’t expect to find Lodge there.’

‘Actually, Merrily, it all sounds far enough off the wall to be true, given the circumstances, even if I didn’t know you well enough to think it unlikely in the extreme that you’d lie to the police.’ He beamed at her. ‘But in fact we’ve also spoken to Mrs Pawson in London, who confirms Lodge insisting that he should be the one who took the thing away. Which, of course, now makes perfect sense. Not a question of professional pride, as you assumed, but the fact that the bugger had a body buried underneath it, and he was panicking at the thought of it getting discovered by Gomer Parry. Makes a lorra sense, from Roddy’s point of view.’

It doesn’t really make sense to me that he should bury a body under a septic tank.’ Merrily poured Bliss more coffee and saw his wrist quiver; after a long night, he must be sizzling with caffeine. ‘I mean, OK, he might not have expected it to be dug up again within weeks, but surely there was always going to be a chance that some day it was going to be re-excavated. They don’t last a lifetime, do they?’

‘They can last a lifetime, apparently. But yeh, I do see what you mean. But you’ve gorra remember we’re not dealing with a fully rational person. A feller who drives through the night with a body held up in his bloody digger’s shovel…’

‘He did kill her, then? I mean, there’s no suggestion that he might have been getting rid of a body for someone else?’

‘An extension of his waste-disposal empire? He’s arrogant and daft enough, but I don’t see it, do you? My feeling is we’ll have a confession before dark. I’m leaving him to stew for a few hours. I’m not hurrying.’

This was not Merrily’s impression. She still wasn’t quite sure why Bliss was here. She’d expected a visit at some stage, but not so early in the investigation, and it wasn’t as if Ledwardine was on the Ross side of Hereford. This was a special trip.

‘Will you be talking to Gomer again? Because Jane’s round there at the moment. I don’t particularly want…’

Jane was making Gomer’s lunch. The kid had still been awake when Merrily had got in around 5.45 a.m. Neither of them had really slept after that.

‘Er… yeah.’ Frannie Bliss sounded doubtful. ‘We will be talking to Mr Parry again at some stage, obviously. Though I’ve gorra tell yer it might be less easy than he thinks to prove that Roddy Lodge torched his yard.’

‘And, besides, you’ve got something more important, now?’

Bliss looked pained. ‘Don’t put it like that. I know the lad’s dead, and I’m not saying it wasn’t down to Roddy. But while he’s still dodging around Lynsey Davies, he’s