The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Covering me back,’ he said. ‘Put it like that if you want. Call it selfishness. Call it me not wanting to take any guilt to my grave if more lives get lost.’

‘Why should more get lost?’

Huw leaned back against the passenger door. ‘If there’s a group of people out there still, and they’re taking lives or harming folk in any way, it’s a police matter. If there’s a spiritual evil, it’s ours. Accepted?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I don’t know anything about Lodge – yet. But I know a lot about West. A man driven by lust. An uneducated man who arranged his life around the constant need for sexual pleasure. No moral values, no sense of remorse. Not a hint of basic decency. A man who watched through holes in doors, who had sex with his own kids because they were there. In his house. His house. The house he’d converted with his own tools. A man who loved nobody, yet loved things. Tools, gadgets. A man who possessed.’

‘Huw—’ Merrily wound down the window. She wanted both fresh air and a cigarette.

‘And what’s changed, Merrily? He might’ve gone, physically, but how many people have died since?’

‘Because the lamp of the wicked must be put out.’ Cold air on her face. ‘That’s why you’re here. You’ve come with a view to snuffing out his lamp, haven’t you?’

‘Start the car,’ Huw said roughly. ‘Let’s go and see this bugger Banks.’

Dressed for dinner, in a dark wool jacket over a white blouse, her features sharp with suspicion, Mrs Pawson was scanning the reception area at the Royal Hotel for whoever had put out the call.

Lol stood up and walked over to her. He didn’t have the smallest idea how he was going to handle this but, on the night before his first gig in nearly two decades, fear was relative.

‘What do you want?’ Mrs Pawson’s voice was hard and brittle as dried nail varnish. She was flicking glances to either side of him, probably to see if there was anyone around she could call on if he attacked her.

‘Have you…?’ Lol looked around too, saw two elderly women, nobody else. ‘Could you spare a few minutes?’

Mrs Pawson didn’t move. ‘What’s this about?’

‘It’s about Lodge,’ Lol admitted. ‘I’ve not been able to stop thinking about what you said this morning, and I’m sorry, but I think there was more you weren’t saying.’

‘And are you, in fact, something to do with the police?’

Though aware that Mrs Pawson’s general experience of the drainage trade would not predispose her to be generous or open, he still shook his head.

‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I do not want to speak to you. That man caused enough damage. I don’t want to discuss him. You’d better go.’

Lol nodded and had half turned away, to leave, when he suddenly turned back. He’d thought about this a lot after returning to the studio, rehearsing a couple of songs in a desultory kind of way, finding that even at the eleventh hour his heart wasn’t in it. Mrs Pawson had been perhaps the last person to have any business dealings with Lodge, and she was a woman on her own and something was not right.

‘You mentioned another woman,’ he said. ‘When you said Roddy Lodge was a nightmare person, I didn’t think you were talking about getting conned over a septic tank. And then you mentioned a woman.’

And then he told her that he’d been there when Lodge had died, standing underneath that pylon. And that something like this didn’t just go away. He told her he didn’t normally work with Gomer Parry and was just helping out because Gomer had had a lot of trouble that he didn’t imagine Mrs Pawson even knew about as it hadn’t exactly been national news. And then he told her he and Gomer were both friends of the church minister who’d landed the job of burying Lodge.

He shook his shoulders helplessly and told her what a small county it was. He apologized to her again.

Mrs Pawson looked him in the eyes. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

‘Usually, yes,’ he said, ‘to be honest.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Robinson. Laurence Robinson. If you don’t want to talk to me, what about Merrily Watkins?’

‘The priest?’

‘I could probably arrange that. Maybe I could bring her here.’

She stared at him. ‘Why do you think I’d want to talk to a priest?’

‘I was thinking maybe a woman. The woman who found the body in the shovel of Lodge’s digger after he…’

It was this that seemed to do it.

Jerome Banks’s study had Ordnance Survey maps on the walls, with coloured drawing pins marking his churches. It was next to the living room and you could hear the sound of the TV through the wall. His wife was sitting in there. He’d told her not to bother with refreshment; this wouldn’t take long.

Jerome was irritated by their visit and was making no effort to conceal it.

‘My day off,’ he said. ‘Always take every second Tuesday off, everyone knows that.’

The wrong attitude to take with Huw, tonight.

‘Creature of habit, eh?’

‘Something wrong with that? I’ve always found people like to know where they are with their clergy.’

‘No mysteries,’ Huw said.

None here, Merrily thought. The rectory was a modern house on the edge of a small estate of neo-Georgian detached homes west of Ross. There was a cold street lamp outside the study window. Only one hardwood chair in front of the desk, and he’d made Merrily sit in it, and she felt very small but aware that this probably wasn’t going to be her showdown.

Jerome Banks surveyed Huw, both of them standing up. They were about the same height, but Banks held himself straighter. Military backbone. His checked shirt was crisply ironed, and you could have sliced bread with the creases of his trousers. ‘We met before?’ He had stiff, sandy hair and a nose with a small red bump on the tip, like a bell push.

‘Can’t see it, somehow,’ Huw said.

‘No. If you’re who I think you are, I agree it’s unlikely. And if you’ve come about what I think you’ve come about, I doubt there’s much I can say to assist you.’

‘What would that be?’

‘You tell me, Mr Owen.’

‘Well, like a lot of people, including the police, I’m becoming a little concerned about events in and around the village of Underhowle. And in my experience it’s always best to have a chat with the lad on the ground. We don’t stick our noses in much these days, the clergy, but there’s not much we don’t at least hear about.’

‘Some of us stick our noses in further than others,’ Banks said.

‘Agreed. How long have you got before retirement, Jerome?’

Banks coloured. ‘Obviously, Owen, I’ve heard about you and your little Deliverance empire. Your incantations and your Thermos flasks of holy water, your new medievalism. And, yes, you’re quite right. I don’t have long before retirement – eighteen months at the most – and I don’t intend to spend any of that time kow-towing to the charismatics and the damn happy- clappies!’

Merrily smiled.

Huw scowled. ‘I don’t clap much, pal. And I’m not happy.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know about a few of the incidents that’ve been brought to your notice but which you haven’t felt inclined to do owt about, being as how you’re not into new medievalism.’

Merrily sat still and said nothing. She just wouldn’t have dared…

‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about,’ Banks said, but he’d left too long a pause. ‘If you think I’ve been “got at” over the Lodge funeral, I can show you two dozen letters and a small petition, all of them urging me not to bury Lodge at Underhowle, and no letters at all in support.’