The Lamp of the Wicked

She grinned and stepped out into the peppery breeze. Bliss ushered her along a flagged pathway down the side of the garage, and there, within ten yards of the rear of the grey building, was the bungalow. It had been invisible from the front. Maybe just as well, as it wasn’t pretty: multicoloured bricks assembled in no particular pattern, flat roof, no garden, no flower tubs, just a concrete surround and the tiled pit of a drained swimming pool near the back wall of the garage.

‘And in summer you can float on your back and watch the sun sizzling through the power lines,’ Merrily said.

‘Apparently he got the land cheap. Built the bungalow himself, more or less.’

‘You don’t say.’ Down in a parallel field she could see half of what looked like a stone chapel.

‘Be worth quite a bit now. It’s actually quite well built, according to Mumford who knows about these things.’

‘Maybe it just lacks the feminine touch.’

Bliss glanced at her. ‘How true that is,’ he said.

Roddy Lodge’s office was at the rear of the bungalow, to the right of the back door. Its walls were only half plastered, and its rectangular window looked into the brackeny hillside, through the steel bones of the pylon.

Merrily saw a filing cabinet and a metal desk with a bright red computer and a phone on it. Also, a bulky middle-aged man in a shapeless dark suit sitting in a vinyl-backed executive swivel chair. Bliss bent down to him, cocking his head on one side.

‘So was the Prince cooperative, Andy? Was he as nice as he always seems on the telly?’

‘Good afternoon, Reverend.’ Mumford carefully folded up his mobile phone and placed it on the desk. ‘Nice to see you again.’

‘Hello, Andy.’ Merrily wondered, not for the first time, what kind of vocation this was turning out to be, when she seemed to encounter more coppers than priests.

Mumford looked at the mobile. ‘Boss, I’m just waiting for a call back from Mrs Jilly Cooper’s secretary. They do seem to remember being approached by Lodge sometime last year, but had no need of his services.’

‘How wise,’ Bliss said.

‘And… Highgrove came back to me to confirm getting repeated letters and leaflets from him. I asked if they’d kept any, but apparently they didn’t. I’ve also found a pile of press cuttings in the filing cabinet, mostly relating to famous people who’ve moved to this area… in fact, anywhere within a fifty- or sixty-mile radius.’

‘What does that tell you,’ Merrily wondered, ‘apart from that he’s enterprising?’

‘And a terrible celebrity-stalker,’ Bliss said.

‘He’s very upfront for a stalker.’

‘He’s certainly not efficient.’ Mumford nodded at the scarlet computer, which had yellow speaker grilles and looked like a toy. ‘At one time he seems to have tried doing his bills and stuff on that thing, but the last one I can find on the hard disk seems to be over a year old. He’s all over the place after that, and the computer’s gathering dust.’

‘Other things on his mind, Andy?’

‘Shows a lot of nerve, in a way,’ Merrily said. ‘I mean, a small operator making a direct approach to Prince Charles?’

‘And Princess Anne at Gatcombe,’ Mumford said. ‘At least, she’s down here on his list. When I phoned, I wasn’t able to talk to anybody who might know about him, so I’ve arranged to call back in an hour or so. As for Sting’s place – no answer at all. A couple of other people you won’t’ve heard of, boss, seem to remember getting leaflets from Roddy as well as individual letters.’

‘Yeah,’ said Frannie Bliss, ‘but have any of these nobs actually hired the bastard?’

Mumford shrugged.

Merrily said, ‘This is like one of those old Ealing comedies.’

Bliss didn’t smile. ‘Right.’ He opened the office door. ‘Come with me, Merrily. I’ll show you just how funny it gets.’

The focus of the living room was a big mahogany cocktail bar, brand new but well out of fashion. There were tall stools, optics, dozens of bottles and a neon sign: Roddy’s Bar. The low seating was arranged around it: a couple of sloppy dark leather chairs and a sofa behind a long, glass-topped coffee table with copies of Loaded and Front on it.

‘This is clearly a man who knows all the best discount warehouses,’ Bliss said.

On one wall, a bullfight poster had Roddy’s name added to the list of contenders. There was a Bang & Olufsen sound system with speakers on wall brackets, and a CD pyramid with one CD lying on top: Ibiza Nights, Vol 2. But the stereo was unplugged, as was the wide-screen TV, as if Roddy didn’t use them much any more, didn’t spend much time here.

‘It’s all very clean,’ Merrily observed.

‘He has a Mrs Wellings, from the village, comes in once a week. But she says this, and the kitchen and a couple of other rooms, are about as far as she’s allowed to go.’

Bliss led her back into the passage. This was a plain corridor bungalow, doors to left and right, two of them still unpainted. It reinforced the feeling Merrily was getting of a man who moved around like a moth, never settling to anything for very long.

‘How long has he lived here?’

‘Built it about four years ago from money his old man left him. He’s got two older brothers – like twenty years older. One’s living in Oz, one has the family farm up the valley – both quite respectable, by all accounts. Roddy was a bit of a difficult boy, but not in the sense that he’d be known to us… and he wasn’t. I don’t know the full circumstances, but you had a situation where the father bequeaths him a wodge of cash on the proviso that he uses it to set himself up in business. The brother up the valley says he seemed to have knuckled down to it.’

Bliss had stopped outside a door at the end of the passage with a conspicuous metal lock screwed to the outside. The lock was conspicuously broken.

‘That’s us. Most coppers are frustrated burglars.’ He opened the door. ‘After you. This is where you don’t touch anything, but I don’t suppose I’ll need to emphasize that.’

It was dark inside, except for a shape like the screen of one of the old black and white TVs she remembered from when she was a little kid – when you had to fiddle with a switch labelled horizontal hold because all you could get were black, white and grey lines.

She blinked and realized it was only a window with Venetian blinds, their blades not quite fully closed. ‘Oh, sorry,’ Bliss said ingenuously, once she was fully inside the room. ‘Lights. I forgot.’

Merrily was starting to feel annoyed. He’d been setting this up for her, so she’d be in the best viewing position to get the full effect when his hand crept around the door jamb and found the switch.

… and all the women came out of the shadows.

It didn’t seem unusually disturbing at first. They were centre- folds mostly; you could even see the little holes and rips left by the staples. They were pasted on two white emulsioned walls.The other two walls were black or a very deep purple.

She hardly needed to screw up her eyes against the light. The only illumination came from shielded spotbulbs just above skirting-board level, and it was subdued, serving only to reveal the photos and deepen clefts between breasts and thighs.

Of which there were quite a lot. Could be as many as a hundred pictures? Merrily wondered. They were soft-porn poses, mostly, colour and black and white. A scattered few were harder core, a couple featuring women using vibrators. The weakness of the lights and the clouding shadows added the illusion of movement – that was disturbing, in an eerie way. The rest, Merrily decided, was just sad for a man twenty years out of his middle teens.

‘Like some repressed schoolboy’s fantasy den, isn’t it?’ Frannie Bliss stood in the bedroom doorway.

Merrily turned to glance at the bed, keeping her hands in her coat pockets. The bed was king-size, unmade. Black shiny sheets – well, of course. There was a thick smell.

‘Makes you wonder how he ever got a woman to spend a night in here, doesn’t it?’ Bliss said.

‘I don’t think he’d get one for a second night.’

‘Ah, well…’ He came a little way into the room. ‘The answer, of course, is that he’s got another bedroom,