The Lamp of the Wicked

spared a meeting with Roddy Lodge at Hereford Police Station – because of the intervention of his solicitor, who had insisted his client was mentally ill. Why had Lodge wanted to see her? What had he wanted to tell her that he was refusing, at least at that stage, to tell the police? And would it have made a difference?

Lol said, ‘In the end, he was holding out his arms. Standing there, on the arm of the pylon, spotlit from all directions, and he’s suddenly flinging out his arms. Bliss had been shouting up to him about the dangers. He shouted back that he was electric already. This was some minutes before he… before the electricity jumped into him. There was this guy there, called Sam, and he’d said that was what might happen. Whether the wind or the rain made a difference, I don’t know, but he couldn’t’ve touched anything. His fingers must’ve been at least a couple of feet from this… hanging thing, the insulator, hanging down from the second arm, above him.’

‘This was just after he confessed?’

She felt his face move against her hair – Lol nodding.

‘So Gomer…’

‘Bliss obviously blamed Gomer for pushing Lodge to the brink. The confession… obviously that was what Bliss wanted, but not in public. The way it happened, it was like Lodge was – I don’t know…’

‘Stealing his glory,’ Merrily said. ‘Stealing the case right out of his hands and giving it to everybody. Stealing the whole judicial process. Roddy Lodge having the last laugh, hijacking Frannie’s result. And Gomer…’

‘Gomer wasn’t laughing.’

‘He’d got what he wanted. Roddy did confess to the fire. And Nev? What about Nev?’

‘He said he… fried the fat bastard. So Gomer got his confession, too, finally. It was really odd. All the way back here, he said hardly a word. You’d expect some kind of cathartic reaction. But not a word. I think Gomer was seriously stunned.’

‘You travelled all the way back in silence?’ Merrily felt around on the oak-boarded floor for her cigarettes.

‘No, he talked about this and that – the tanks and why we hadn’t found any bodies underneath them. How that was one secret Lodge had taken to his grave. Which, of course, is another problem for Bliss. Nobody’s going to tell him where to look now. He could dig up half the county and still not get close.’

‘Lot of explaining ahead for Frannie, I’d imagine.’ She thought about Bliss and his ‘messy’ home life and the Job – only the police gave it a capital J – becoming his refuge. It wasn’t going to be much of one now. His superiors would want to know exactly how he came to mislay his prisoner, why he’d sat on the case, kept it to himself, hired the volatile Gomer Parry to dig up septic tanks installed by a man Gomer believed had murdered his nephew.

She wondered how much of a basis Bliss had really had for bringing Roddy Lodge out to Underhowle, how much Lodge had actually told him in the interview room. Evidently he’d admitted to several killings, but had he given any indication of why? Serial killers had become a species, their motives taken for granted. They were male predators, and that was it, jungle carnivores, bringing down young women like gazelles, to be pawed and raked at leisure.

Leave it. Merrily peered at the old luminous alarm clock in the window; she didn’t want to oversleep and have Jane find them here in the morning… even though the kid would probably be delighted.

Hell it was the morning. In three minutes’ time it would be Hell, four a.m.

Lol said suddenly, ‘I felt sorry for him.’

‘Bliss?’

‘Lodge.’ His voice sounded distant, detached. His arm went slack around her. ‘That’s not right, is it? How can anybody feel sorry for a man who killed women?’

Merrily said, ‘It’s a… Christian thing.’

Trite.

‘Empathy,’ Lol said. ‘I saw him up there, and I seemed to feel what he was feeling. Or it translated itself. It was like stadium rock. All the lights. Pink Floyd or something. Crazy.’

Or something. Merrily said, ‘When’s the gig?’

‘Oh. Next week. Wednesday.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I… In case…’

‘You mean you’re considering not doing it.’

‘It’s a Moira Cairns concert. That’s all it says on the posters. Nobody would be the wiser.’

‘I’m going to order some tickets.’

‘Don’t do that. I can get you some. She’ll be worth seeing.’

She.

‘I want to buy them,’ she said, ‘out of my meagre stipend.’

‘Merrily—’

‘Shush.’

They’d agreed that in the morning he would stay up here until Jane wasn’t around, and then he’d slip quietly away through the orchard to pick up his car at Gomer’s. No one would know. Merrily felt tearful.

‘Why did you do it? Why did you offer to go with Gomer?’

‘I like Gomer.’

She reached for his hand; it felt like half-set concrete. ‘Feels like you won’t be able to pick up a guitar for days.’ She stiffened. ‘Is that why? Is it?’

He kissed her naked shoulder. ‘And I sensed people wanting him to die. I was sure I sensed people wanting to see him die.’

Lol sighed, as if this was something he needed to get out of himself. Merrily was about to say something when she realized he was asleep.

She kissed his forehead and wondered if he was dreaming about Roddy Lodge. Or Moira Cairns.

Part Four

I am glowing radioactive

We draw

Beams around the world

Super Furry Animals ‘Rings Around the World’

21 Icon

IT WAS DURING her sermon the following Sunday that Merrily realized it wasn’t over – that Roddy Lodge, though dead, wasn’t out of her life.

This morning, she’d awakened at five a.m., or thereabouts, after the return of that old recurring dream: the one where she suddenly discovered she was living in a house with three floors, after thinking there were only two. And on the third floor was something dreadful, and she knew that she’d have to go up there and face it alone.

She was moving very slowly up the second staircase, the fear of reaching the top intensified by the inability to turn back – in dreams, turning back never seemed to be an option – when the dark upper landing suddenly came into view, and then she was at the top, and the first strange door was just above her and beneath it was a thin grin of icy, violet light.

This was enough. Ejecting in terror from the dream, Merrily had rolled over, with an urgent need to be held. But the bed was wide and empty and outside the uncurtained window the boughs of old apple trees were creaking