‘I’d
‘Frannie, you’re bonkers. You don’t even have anything to go on, do you? You wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Well, I would, actually,’ Bliss said. ‘If, for instance, we talk about the piccies on the walls—’
‘Part of his fantasy. Despite all this chatting up in pubs, making a fool of himself when he was in his manic phases, he was actually afraid of real live women; he only felt truly safe with dead ones.’
‘Aw, you’re just—’
‘I’m just saying what the shrink’s going to say. I don’t recall you had much to say about Lodge throwing his weight around in the police station. Subdued… uncommunicative… sick… didn’t want to leave his cell. “Hunched up into himself” – I think that’s what your phrase was at the time. The word
‘All right, then.’ Bliss sat down again. ‘Let’s go back. Put yourself back in that bedroom for a minute. Look at the bed with the nasty black sheets. Sniff the air. Now look at the pictures in half-light from the low-wattage bulbs, so that they’re not like pictures any more; they’re actual shadowy women, right there in the room with you. Flickering about. Moving in the dark. And you know they’re all dead.’
‘But
‘Tell me you couldn’t feel the evil in there, Merrily. Tell me you couldn’t feel it. As a priest.’
‘I don’t… I don’t know what I felt.’
‘I know what
‘It still doesn’t make too much sense, Frannie. You don’t have any kind of scenario for Roddy Lodge as a mass murderer. You don’t even know why and in what circumstances he killed Lynsey Davies, do you? What happens if you don’t find anything to support the theory you don’t yet have? What happens if you go blundering about and you don’t find anything at all?’
Merrily—’
‘I seriously think you should follow Kirsty’s suggestion and go on holiday somewhere quiet and uncomplicated with good food, nice views and room service, and spend a lot of time talking to one another. She’s throwing you a lifeline, if you could only see it. At the end of the week, if you play your cards right, who knows how the situation might’ve changed? I mean, I’d be the first to miss your famous scowl around the place if you went back to Merseyside, but—’
‘Merrily, I
‘What?’
‘Lol tell you about the attache case? The one Gomer dug up just behind Roddy’s bungalow before he went up the pylon like a monkey?’
‘Possibly. I—’
‘Stay there.’ Bliss stood up. ‘Don’t go away.’
Bliss didn’t have the actual case any more. The case had gone to the lab.
It had been so lightweight that they’d thought at first it was empty, he said. He didn’t have the stained and crumpled newspaper cuttings that had subsequently been found inside, either, but he did have photocopies, and if she’d give him a minute he’d fetch them from his car on the square.
When he returned, she saw that the old briskness was back, his caffeine eyes burning through the fatigue.
‘Whatever this is, should you be showing it to me?’
‘Merrily, I shouldn’t even’ve taken the copies away. Who gives a shit?’
He dropped the A4 buff envelope on the kitchen table and slid out a stack of papers. He spread them. Merrily recoiled.
Headlines snarling, headlines pleading, headlines shouting outrage, black on white, hard and contrasty and unremittingly ugly.
IN THE DEPTHS OF EVIL
THE PREDATORS
A LETHAL LUST
‘I don’t understand.’ Even though they were only copies of copies of old newspapers, she didn’t like to touch them. A low cloud of black-flecked smog was almost visible above the heap. Bliss fiddled about in the papers and brought out one with a font that looked, among the rest, almost comfortingly familiar: the
‘It’s funny how many people mentioned it when we were in Underhowle,’ Bliss said. ‘We never thought. It’s only about eight miles away, Marcle, as the crow flies. Nothing really, is it?’
‘Sorry, I don’t—’
‘Much Marcle?’
‘Frannie…?’
Merrily froze up.
The table was whited out by ghastly flash-photo images: bodies under concrete in a cellar in Gloucester, police digging up red Herefordshire fields. A series of young women raped, tortured and butchered over a period of twenty years. Gloucester Council had demolished the house and talked of eradicating the name of Cromwell Street, but both Gloucester and the village of Much Marcle, in Herefordshire, would retain the memory of this man and his vicious wife for ever. An evil you couldn’t see through because there was nothing on the other side but the night.
24
On the Sofa in Roddy’s Bar
‘HOW MANY?’
‘Twelve, officially. Including his first wife and two daughters.’
‘But probably more.’
‘Oh, yeh,’ Bliss said, ‘could be a lot more. The estimates range from twenty to sixty. The little bastard kept careful count, I’m sure of that, even if he could never remember their names. Very efficient, in his way – this is what people don’t realize. Most serial killers, they relish the reputation, the drama of it, the fancy names the papers give them:
‘Yes.’ Merrily was finding all this sickening, didn’t see the point, wished they were still into marriage guidance.
Bliss had hung his jacket over a chair back. Now he was unfolding one of the cuttings, flattening it out.
‘This is the important one. Not the article – the photo.’
The picture under the headline, though embellished with the smuts and smudges of hasty copying, had a feeling of formality. A flash photograph, carefully posed, of the two of them. Merrily was sure she must have seen it before.
Even if you didn’t know who he was and what he’d done – what they’d both done – you would automatically have given him an identity: maybe the one-time randy paper boy grinning over his handlebars, grown now into the backstreet grease monkey who would guarantee to get your banger through its MOT for twenty in hand or –
