The Lamp of the Wicked

‘The word “Ariconium” was inscribed on a stone in the hall.’ ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen a few mentions of it around the village. Listen, are you up for this now? Roddy? You can ask him about the dead ladies.’

Merrily shivered. ‘Frannie, it’s a police station, not a wine bar. He’s going to be on his guard. He isn’t going to tell me anything that he wouldn’t tell you. I really can’t see that it—’

‘Merrily…’ He stopped at the edge of the garage forecourt, by the police tape. ‘Let me be the judge, eh?’

‘That’s one of the things I’m worried about,’ Merrily said.

13 The Tower

THE CAIRNS WOMAN was sitting alone in the glass-sided recording booth, cradling this curved-backed Ovation guitar. She wore this long, dark blue dress, and the white streak in her tumbled hair was like a silk ribbon that had come undone.

From up in the darkness of the gallery, about ten feet above the half-lit studio floor, she looked… yeah, OK, impossibly romantic. Made you want to puke. Jane, in her tight little woollen top, directed a resentful glare at Eirion – besotted, the bastard – as the goddess Moira put on her headphones, and began adjusting the tuning on the Ovation.

On the other side of Jane, in the tiny gallery, was Lol, who wasn’t playing on this track; it was going to be a traditional folk song, stripped down. Jane was relieved to see how Lol kept looking away from the lovely Moira to where Prof Levin was hovering over his mixing board like a bald eagle.

Earlier, while Eirion had been drooling around the Cairns woman, she’d told Lol and Prof all about Gomer and the hateful pendulum of fate, and the impossible fix the poor little guy was in. And the dilemma: should he even be going back into a really back-breaking job, working alone, at his age? But what would become of him, mentally and emotionally, if he didn’t?

Prof Levin, who was not that much younger than Gomer, had said that if this plant-hire thing was what the man did, age was a meaningless consideration.

But he would say that, wouldn’t he, here in his cosy studio?

Later, Jane had privately conveyed to Lol as much as she knew about the even more grisly sequel to the fire, involving this Roddy Lodge – stuff she hadn’t even passed on to Eirion because Mum had told her not to. But there were going to be no secrets from Lol, right? Nothing to make him feel insecure in the relationship, and therefore open to—

A low-level fingered riff started up on the guitar, in the drumtight ambience, and then the voice came in: a voice that was low and heavy with dark magic and loaded with this beckoning sexuality.

Bitch.

Jane snatched a glance at Lol, noticing that he was looking less than relaxed, maybe wondering – and with reason – why Mum herself hadn’t phoned to explain why she hadn’t been able to see him just lately. He was wearing one of his sweatshirts with the Roswell alien face on the chest and his hair was nearly long enough again for the old ponytail. He was sitting very still. There was more Jane wanted to say but you weren’t allowed even to whisper up here, or the wrath of Prof would come down on everyone, and she couldn’t do that to Eirion, for whom this place was a bloody temple.

Other people: tact and consideration, walking on eggshells. Life was getting like some fragile little comedy of manners.

Jane sighed and leaned back in her canvas chair and listened to the song: predictable tragic-ballad stuff about a lady who waited in her tower room, watching every day at the window for her unsuitable suitor – and secret lover – to return from the wars. The way you did. Eirion was nodding, hands on his knees, so impressionable. She glanced at Lol. He was biting his lower lip, the way Mum would when something worrying was taking shape.

In a traditional narrative ballad, there were no wasted words and no sentiment. Long years passed and the hair of the Lady in the Tower was starting to go grey. Her father was bringing would-be suitors to her door, but of course she wasn’t interested and refused even to see them. Jane thought of Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, waiting for Odysseus to return from Troy.

As the seasons turned she moaned and cried

To the moon and the sinking sun.

And the flowers grew and the flowers died.

How long can a war go on?

And then suddenly, in this moment of, like, startling telepathy, Jane began to hear what she was sure Lol must be hearing: the awful subtext of the song. The realization just flew over her, like a ghostly barn owl, and she was sure she must actually have flinched.

The song was a mirror image of Lol’s own situation. The tower was the granary on the edge of Prof’s land, and the person in the tower was Lol himself – the Lol who would wait for long hours… days… weeks for Mum to come to him… she having to come to him, because of the covert nature of their affair. And it was she who was out there, following a vocation that, for two thousand years, had been the exclusive preserve of men… and working in its darkest places.

It was Mum who was away at the war.

Moira’s voice had grown thin with despair. This was a voice that killed the cliche of the form, invoking not so much beery folk clubs as the smoky jazz cellars of another era. A voice laden with doomed love.

Jane thought, in horror, It has to change, doesn’t it? It can’t go on. She knew that Lol considered his music trivial next to Mum’s spiritual work. He probably felt as confined and helpless, as furious and… impotent, as he once had in periods between medication. Like, outside of a recording booth, he had no reality. It would never occur to him, the way it occurred to Jane, that Mum – and the Church, too – might just be wallowing in self-deception. For Lol, it wouldn’t be the validity of what Mum was doing that mattered as much as her having the nerve to go out and do it.

One bright morning, the lady in the song is looking out from her tower and sees a lone horseman, and her heart takes a great leap. At this point Moira’s voice rose about an octave, and Jane saw Prof’s bald head nodding in satisfaction.

She didn’t actually know how the song was going to end, but she knew a bit about traditional music, and she recognized the fearful shrillness of false hope, as Moira Cairns sang:

It was the springtime of the year

And the sun was in the sky,

But the messenger climbed down from his horse

And night was in his eyes.

Right. So next time her lover appeared in the tower, it would be as a ghostly apparition. It was always as a ghost. Last night he came to me… my dead love came in…

When the next verse didn’t come, Jane looked down and saw that the Cairns woman’s fingers had fallen away from the strings. She stood for a moment, as if she’d forgotten the words, and then Jane heard her call across the studio, ‘Listen, Prof, can we leave this one for tonight, huh?’

Prof said something that Jane didn’t hear. Eirion, clutching the wooden railing at the edge of the narrow gallery, exhaled a word that might have been ‘Awesome.’

‘Aye,’ Moira replied to Prof, ‘goose over ma grave. Let’s move on.’

DI Frannie Bliss, at the wheel again, said, ‘If you ask me, those people, those villagers – the real locals, not the white settlers – they bloody know. They know at gut level that he’s done it before. They’ve more or less given us another name: Melanie Pullman.’

‘You’re still naturally suspicious of country people, aren’t you, Frannie?’ Merrily said. ‘You don’t understand them, so they scare you a bit.’

‘Balls.’ Bliss drove past the pub with the hare on the sign where, only last night, Merrily and Gomer had huddled over a mobile, waiting for Roddy to drive past with his… cargo. ‘No… all right, they