The Lamp of the Wicked

in the sour October wind.

Alone.

For two nights after Lol had gone, she’d gone back to the fifth bedroom, slept in the single bed they’d shared, before returning despondently to her own, bigger room. Sad, huh?

And puzzled and unhappy, because now she actually was living in an old house with three floors, and Jane was in possession of the attics. She thought she’d dealt with the third floor.

Here in church, there were more stairs she preferred to avoid: the polished wooden steps to the pulpit. She knew she should really be up there this morning: little woman, big congregation, even for October when they tended to increase because there were no lawns to mow and the kids had stopped demanding days out. Here, close to the front, sat Big Jim Prosser from the Eight-till-Late, which reduced its Sunday opening hours at the end of the tourist season. Here even was Kent Asprey, heart-throb, jogging GP, back with his wife after a midlife-crisis fling. A penitent Kent, with Mrs Asprey – one week only, probably.

Merrily put a tentative foot on the first pulpit step, then backed down again. What she’d been doing during the summer and early autumn, when congregations were smaller and cosier, was to sit on a hassock on the carpeted chancel steps, under the apple screen, and not preach but chat. Sometimes, a few members of the congregation would join in, and there was a sense of warmth and unity. She found it exciting, was never sure where it would lead. One Sunday it had spontaneously opened out, like a flower, into communal meditation.

It was hardly going to happen today. The congregation was like the bed: too big, too cold, too quiet. And swollen by too many comparative strangers whose presence could only be explained by curiosity over rumours of Merrily’s links, through Gomer, with the Roddy Lodge sensation – an electric death still pulsing in Herefordshire like a snaking naked wire.

This was a small county; everybody knew somebody related to the Lodge family or the families of girls and women missing from home – one was from a farm near Staunton, just a few miles from Ledwardine – or at least someone who had considered having an Efflapure system installed. Everyone had been exposed to radio and TV reports and centre-spreads with the same grisly sequence of pictures and tasteless variations on the Daily Star’s:

Villagers watch in horror as man boasts:

‘I’m the biggest serial killer ever’, then is

FRIED IN THE SKY

Underhowle itself was reported to be in a grey state of communal shock. Nearly a hundred people, including children as young as five and six, had heard Roddy Lodge confess, then watched him die. Many were being treated and counselled for the trauma.

And the shock waves radiated outwards.

TRACKS OF THE BORDER BEAST.

On the third day, most of the headlines were variations of this one from the Mail. Where had Roddy Lodge been? Where might he have interred the bodies – Is there a corpse under YOUR septic tank? the Mail asked. The speculation now was that this was a false trail: cold-storing the body of Lynsey Davies in the pea-gravel under the Efflapure had been a one-off emergency measure – maybe Lodge had felt in danger of discovery at the time. Anyway, there would surely have been better options open to a killer with his own JCB.

So the other bodies could be anywhere.

All over Herefordshire and the Forest of Dean, this particularly was a live issue, and Merrily had felt obliged to address it, had assembled a sermon around the life and death of Roddy Lodge. Why did such people exist? Why had God created serial killers?

A difficult one. Why exactly?

It was certainly not a question voiced by the grateful papers, as the search for bodies went on, as police interviewed and reinterviewed the relatives of missing women and girls across five shires, as press and TV cameramen prowled Underhowle, reporters free to speculate now that the killer who had confessed so publicly was never going to face trial.

And the police, in this case, were… who exactly? No mention in the papers of Bliss. Or indeed of DCI Annie Howe. All the press briefings had been given by a Detective Superintendent Luke Fleming. Merrily had never heard of him – must have been from Headquarters. She noticed that there was nothing in any of the papers about Roddy’s taste in bedroom decor. Given that he was dead, why not?

Every day she’d expected her own involvement in the discovery of Lynsey Davies to be disclosed by the police, but despite the local gossip – inadvertently fuelled by Gomer, she suspected, as he pursued the truth about the fire – nobody had approached her.

This morning, preparing for Holy Communion in the early light, she’d decided to dump the Roddy Lodge sermon. It had seemed unnecessary, gratuitous.

Sermon B, then.

She didn’t sit on the hassock, but she didn’t go into the pulpit either; she stood at the side of the lectern.

‘Erm…’

She felt obscurely nervous; she really needed notes for this one, but there was nowhere to conceal them. And because pews were filled further back than of late, she had to project more than she’d become accustomed to. Had to make like a preacher.

‘If we… if we sit down and really think about it, I suspect most of us will remember an occasion when something’s happened, very suddenly, to divert us from a certain course of action. Maybe a flat tyre that stopped you making a particular journey. And then, some time later, you find out that that journey might have led you into a far bigger crisis – a motorway pile-up, or some confrontation that you might not have been able to handle. And then you say – and how often have most of us said this…?’

She leaned out, an arm around the stem of the lectern, found herself locking gazes for a second with James Bull-Davies, three pews from the front.

‘… Perhaps it was meant.’ She stepped back. ‘That’s a useful phrase, isn’t it? Meant by whom? By God? And why should God single us out for salvation? Why should we be diverted from the pile-up that’s going to kill or injure several other people?’ Longish pause. ‘For the Christian, there’s… another option. Suppose we think about that phrase in the context of the possibility of there being’ – she smiled faintly – ‘angels among us.’

Jenny Box was close to the front, to Merrily’s right, washed in amber light from the circular stained-glass window in which a clutch of apples was pensively surveyed by several angels. Jenny Box, with her fine old-gold hair under a small white hat that was almost a skullcap, her eyes unblinking but also unfocused, as if gazing into the ether. Merrily wondered how Thomas Aquinas would have handled this.

‘What do I mean by angels? To be quite honest, I’m not sure. Do I mean heavenly forces, agents of change? Powerful, invisible intelligences capable of assessing a situation, seeing the direction it’s going, anticipating the consequences. And occasionally intervening, sometimes as a result of prayer, but often quite spontaneously. Or so it seems.’

Mrs Box was watching her now. Merrily avoided her gaze.

‘We talk about governments being interventionist or non- interventionist – should they step in and overrule market forces or whatever? It’s always a fine balance and, because governments don’t have Godlike wisdom – or much wisdom at all, you might think sometimes – they often intervene over the wrong issues. But we have to assume that angels… that they never get it wrong.’

She hadn’t had time to prepare this properly. She was opening a can of worms. Were angels messengers of God or aspects of God? To what extent were they independent? Was this the time to mention Ledwardine’s own angel? Not the one with the sword allegedly witnessed spreading its radiance over the church in a thunderstorm but the anonymous one with the bin sack full of used fifties. That would take their minds off Roddy Lodge for a while.

Maybe not. Uncle Ted had whispered to her earlier, as they came into church, that he was still awaiting police clearance on the money. If he didn’t hear anything this week he was damn well getting back onto them.

‘The Bible doesn’t go into too much detail about the nature of angels. They just are. Most of us, if we think about them at all, think of them in the context of particular