The Lamp of the Wicked

there’d been a badger. But badgers weren’t stealthy; they clattered and rummaged.

Merrily was sitting in the old choirmaster’s oaken chair with her hands on her knees, a single small candle lit on the altar fifteen feet away, a draught from somewhere bending the flame, making shadows swirl and dip and rise to the night-dulled stained-glass window at the top of the chancel.

Ledwardine Church was locked soon after dark, nowadays, unless a service or a meeting was scheduled. She’d let herself in through the side entrance, which at least had a key you didn’t need both hands to turn. Against all advice, she hadn’t locked the door behind her. It was fundamentally important to feel she had protection in here, inside this great medieval night-dormant engine, or else what was the point?

Probably hadn’t been a footstep at all. After a day like this, the world seemed riddled with tunnels of obsession. For a cold moment, Merrily held before her an image of the frozen smiles of all the dead women on Roddy Lodge’s bedroom walls as they writhed in other women’s bodies, and then she let it fade, whispering the Lord’s Prayer. Apart from having to give evidence at the inquest on Lynsey Davies, her role in this particular police investigation was probably over.

And yet – shifting restlessly in the choirmaster’s chair – how could it be over when she was still attached via Gomer, who would never back off until Lodge had been convicted for Nev? Plus, here was Frannie Bliss about to exploit Gomer in the interests of keeping the case in his pocket: bad, selfish policing, and he knew it. Maverick cops were for the movies, and Frannie was on a narrowing tightrope. Meanwhile, Roddy Lodge…

‘Barking, of course,’ the Reverend Jerome Banks had said at once. ‘A complete fantasist. Wanted to tell me about the ghosts he’d been seeing all over the place. Well, isn’t as if you and I haven’t met lots of people like this, all the clergy do… They seek us out, expecting tea and cakes and a sympathetic ear that also happens to be entirely uncritical. Hardly dangerous, in the normal… I mean, not even to themselves, not in the normal course of things. Well, hardly going to spew out all this to the detective chappie, was I? What was I supposed to say? Boy didn’t seem deranged in a psychotic sense. I had absolutely no reason at all to suspect he might ever do what he’s done – well, of course I hadn’t.’

‘So you just offered him a sympathetic ear.’

‘No, I said that was what these people expected. Personally, I’ve never been one to play the jolly old dim-witted vicar. That’s what’s got the Church into its present enfeebled condition, if you ask me. Public starts to think we’re all half-baked. And this chap was getting on my nerves, to be quite honest. Bumptious? Full of himself? Never seen the like. I wasn’t entirely sure, to tell you the truth, if he wasn’t taking the piss.’

‘You said he came specifically to tell you about the ghosts he said he was seeing?’

‘Look…’ Jerome Banks had made an exasperated rumbling noise. ‘He was asking me how his property could possibly be haunted. How this could happen when it wasn’t an old house? Just built it himself – so how could it be haunted? I said had he put the pipes in properly? Had he had the wiring checked by experts?’

‘He was hearing strange noises, you mean? Lights were going on and off, that kind of—?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what usually happens, isn’t it? Look, Mrs Watkins, I’m not awfully ashamed to admit I’ve never really been into that kind of malarkey. Don’t know how you people manage to keep a straight face half the time. And anyway, this was rather before your time, so the only alternative would’ve been to refer him to your predecessor, old Dobbs – who was completely bloody barking, in my view… well, in everybody’s view, really. So I was rather relieved when Lodge reared up aghast, said no, he didn’t want any of that, thank you very much.’

‘Any of what?’

‘You know… prayers for the Unquiet Dead.’

‘Then why did he come to see you? His family was Baptist, anyway, surely?’

‘No idea at all. Never met the chap before.’

‘So did he say what kind of… manifestation… he’d been experiencing?’

‘Oh, it was probably all washing over me by then. I didn’t take detailed notes. You know as well as I do that we could spend all our time listening to all kinds of complete nonsense, but when you’ve got half a dozen parishes to organize you have to adjust your patience-level accordingly.’

‘When exactly was this?’

‘Probably in my diary somewhere but, off the cuff, two years ago? Three?’

She hadn’t pushed him any further, but she guessed there was quite a lot he wasn’t saying.

Not her business, anyway. Merrily let her head roll, shoulder to shoulder, with tiny cracklings like the beginnings of fire in kindling. Her woollen shawl was a distraction; she let it slip over the back of the chair and began to relax her body, starting with her toes – tightening muscles, letting go. Warmth would come.

For a while, she’d resisted Eastern-influenced meditation – the awakening of the chakras – as vaguely unChristian and also very Jane. But the demands of Deliverance, especially, had brought out a need for experience on a deeper level, a need to find moments of knowing. There were still too many times when she was appalled at her own weakness and ignorance, the frailty of her faith – a woman of straw. OK, humility was crucial, but so was a small, hot core of certainty. Some kind of retreat might have helped restore her inner balance, but there’d never been time for that – hadn’t even been time for a holiday. This job was smothering her; it was everywhere, like fog.

Lose thoughts. Concentrate on the breathing. It had taken her some time to realize that this was not about breathing consciously but becoming conscious of your breathing, simple things like that.

Gradually, the fabric of the church faded: the stonework, the stained glass, the rood-screen with its carved apples, the pulpit where she tried to preach while hating the word ‘preach’ with all its connotations, the entrance to the Bull Chapel with its eerily sleepless effigy. After a time, the church ceased to be its furniture, its artefacts. Now came the space, the atmosphere, the charged air – this was the church.

Her spine straightened from what she hadn’t realized had been a slump; there was a warmth in her chest, her breathing was deepening. There was a moment when the warmth aroused an underlying pleasure that was close to sexual; she had a glimpse of Lol and let it go at once… you just let it go, without guilt or self-recrimination. You let the breath become the Spirit and the Spirit filled you, pouring down to the stomach, with that strange, active relaxation of the solar plexus – separation, breath of God… God breathes me – and, at some stage, entered prayer.

Thack.

Merrily’s eyelids sprang back. The building seemed to shudder, as though the pews, the pulpit, the stone tombs had been brutally hurled back into place.

She knew at once what it was, knew every little noise this church made after hours.

The latch. When you were used to it, you could let the iron latch on the side door slip silently back into place. When you weren’t, the latch came down hard: thack.

Someone had been in here with her for a while, and then gone out.

Or wanted her to think they’d gone out.

The draught had died; the candle flame was placid now, making a nest of light on the altar. Merrily rose quietly, stood under the rood-screen and listened intently for more than a minute, staring down the central aisle.

Rat eyes in the dark? Anyway, she refused to be intimidated. If they’d gone, they’d gone. If they hadn’t, she was safer up here, close to the altar. She hadn’t finished, anyway. She knelt in the centre of the chancel and prayed for Gomer. And for Roddy Lodge. And for Frannie Bliss, who confused police work with poker, his cards up against his shirt-front, always raising the stakes.

She waited for two or three minutes before coming to her feet, bowing her head, gathering her shawl from the back of the choirmaster’s chair and going to the altar to snuff out the candle.

She listened again. There was nothing to be heard inside, not even the skittering of mice. Only the wind from outside. The row of high, plain, diamond-paned windows was opaque – no moon to light her way down the aisle. She always thought she could find her way blindfold around this church, but twice she collided with the ends of pews. Nerves.

At the bottom of the aisle, Merrily walked into something that should not have been there and fell hard onto the stone flags.