The Lamp of the Wicked

Inspector. When she’s not in residence at Roddy’s place, she lives over in Ross, which is where he picked up most of his, uh, companions.’

‘So that’s where we could expect to find Ms Davies at the moment, then, is it, sir?’

‘I guess. Though there is another— OK!’ Sam put up his hands to field Ingrid’s glare. ‘No gossip. I’ll stick with the facts. Yeah, someplace in Ross. Personally, I haven’t noticed her around the last couple weeks.’ He raised an eyebrow at Bliss, then looked away to show he wasn’t going to follow up on this.

Ingrid Sollars moved towards a chair, then turned back to Bliss. ‘When Melanie Pullman disappeared, some of us thought you – the police – ought to have looked harder. But you abandoned her.’

‘I don’t think “abandoned” is quite the right word,’ Bliss said. ‘But, yeh, there are hundreds of adult missing persons, and not that many police. We have to prioritize and, unless we think someone’s in immediate danger, we can’t always devote the resources we’d like to. However… I can say I’d be very surprised if this turned out to be Miss Pullman’s body. And not only because it’s about two years since she disappeared.’

‘Oh.’ Ingrid Sollars sat down, expressionless. ‘Thank you.’ ‘Nonetheless,’ Bliss said thoughtfully, ‘since you mention it, in the light of what’s happened, the circumstances of Melanie’s disappearance might warrant another look, do you think?’

‘Oh, now just a minute.’ Fergus Young sat up. ‘This situation’s fraught enough—’

‘I’m just asking the question, Mr Young. How long after breaking up with Roddy Lodge did Miss Pullman disappear? Is it possible she disappeared before breaking up with Roddy? If you see what I mean.’

Sam Hall said, ‘I’d say not. But around this time Roddy Lodge’s love life would’ve been a little hard to chart. Boy seems to have gone through what you might call a delayed adolescence – like he’d discovered sex for the first time in his thirties. I guess you’d say no woman was safe. Although by safe, that’s not to say…’

Fergus Young nodded regretfully. ‘In a way Sam’s right, I suppose that’s what I meant earlier about Roddy being a big kid. His overtures to women were always so obvious, so unsophisticated – so immature, really – that we perhaps didn’t appreciate how often he… you know.’

‘Stop it!’ Ingrid Sollars shouted. ‘You’ve no grounds, neither of you…’

Fergus looked embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry. It’s true that most of us haven’t been here long enough to give you a reliable opinion.’ He looked at Ms Sollars. ‘You were born here, of course.’

‘And brought up not to gossip, Mr Young.’

‘Well, I was born here, too.’ Sam Hall lowered himself into a chair opposite Bliss. ‘And I think this is a situation where the famous Forest caution can do more harm than good. I know the Lodge family reasonably well. Solid, traditional farmers, made a good living, looked after their money, regulars at the Baptist Church before it closed.’

And Roddy was the baby, right?’ Bliss said.

Sam Hall nodded. Merrily noticed he was drinking not coffee but spring water from a bottle. ‘Mother dead, so it was an all- male household: Harry Lodge and the three sons, of which Roddy was the youngest by almost a quarter-century. Harry never remarried, and whatever happened, he tended to accept it as the will of God. Personally, I don’t know too much about Roddy’s life when he was growing up, being as I was away for some years, but I guess it was kinda… constrained?’

He stopped and glanced at Ingrid, who presumably had been here during those years, but she wouldn’t be drawn and looked away.

‘Don’t give up on us, Mr Hall,’ Bliss said.

Sam shrugged. ‘Well… when I came back from the States, Harry Lodge had just died and left Roddy the money to start a business, give himself a direction in life. To everyone’s surprise – not least Roddy’s, I guess – it took off, and… and so did Roddy. After this confined, God-fearing life on the family farm, where earnings tended to be conserved, were certainly never flaunted, he suddenly had more money than he knew what to do with. I guess it went straight to his head.’

‘There’s this little sports car in the garage, along with the diggers,’ Bliss said.

‘Yeah, a red one. And some pretty expensive weekend wear in his wardrobe, I’d guess. Sure, with his flashy car and a place of his own, he found he’d become suddenly attractive to a certain kind of woman. I guess he was getting to think he could have just about any woman he wanted – or a good proportion, anyway. Lynsey Davies didn’t seem to mind – least, she stuck around. Maybe she liked the sports car.’

‘And were the other women around, too, at the same time?’

‘Not in Underhowle. But I have friends in Ross. In some of the pubs there, Roddy was felt to be a nuisance, always trying to pick up girls.’

‘Sometimes succeeding?’

‘Aw hell, more than sometimes. Rebuffs bounced off him. If ‘there’s such a thing as what the Americans call a retard – only with a mental age of sixteen – then that’s what I guess you’re looking at here.’

‘Nicely put, sir,’ said Frannie Bliss. Merrily expected follow- up questions, tracing the directions Roddy’s new-found liberation might have taken him, but Bliss stood up. ‘Well, thank you all, very much. I think we’ve managed to exchange some useful information there. If you can think of anything else, I’ll leave a couple of cards on the bar here. Ring me.’

Outside, Bliss said to Merrily, ‘Next time I talk to those buggers, it’ll be individually. Like, the woman can obviously tell us a lot more, but she’s not gonna do it in front of the rest of the Underhowle Development Committee.’

‘What’s that about? What are they developing?’

‘Everything. Place has been going down the pan for years. Used to have three pubs, post office, bakery, all that. Used to be plenty of jobs in the Forest of Dean – mining and… forestry, obviously. Now, even farming’s in trouble, and a place this scrappy’s never going to make the tourist trail. All they had left was the school, and they had a hell of a battle to keep that going. That guy Fergus got a big campaign going, now he’s a local hero.’

They walked back along the lane. The rain had stopped again, but the wind was up, rattling like a flock of pigeons in the trees on either side.

‘And the other little bloke – Cody – the one who doesn’t say much, he’s the big industrialist. Builds computers.’

‘Here?’

‘Got a little factory. Doing very well, comparatively. Not exactly Bill Gates yet. More of a Bill Catflap – somebody called him that.’

Merrily laughed into the wind. Bliss looked at her. ‘They don’t pay you much, do they, the Church?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘The knackered old Volvo. That coat. I always thought maybe you got extra for being an exorcist.’ No, just the privilege of having only one parish, instead of about six, like the bloke who covers this patch.’ Merrily looked down at her coat. ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll have saved enough for a new one from the Oxfam shop before winter sets in.’

Bliss smiled, his mind already moving off somewhere else – she could almost see it racing ahead of them down the windy lane, a striker needing a swift score before somebody blew the whistle. She tried to intercept.

‘You learn anything back there, about Roddy Lodge and Lynsey Davies?’

‘Just threw up more questions. If he was suddenly getting his leg over half the girlies in Ross, why the older woman?’

‘Thanks.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘What’s more curious, I would’ve thought,’ Merrily said, ‘is why – if he’s doing so well with real live women – why the wall full of dead pin-ups?’

Ahead of them, she could see lights in the garage complex, where Andy Mumford would be working stolidly on, alone in the bungalow with Roddy’s gallery. She didn’t want to see that again and was worried that Bliss was going to ask her to.

‘And what’s Ariconium, Frannie?’

‘Eh?’