The Lamp of the Wicked (26 page)

The hole in the grass lay abandoned. Someone had taken the case away. There was no stench of decaying flesh, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a body down there, somewhere. Lol stayed away from the hole. Only Roddy Lodge could explain this, and he wasn’t around. Roddy Lodge had taken a personal decision that his presence here was no longer essential. He’d just walked away into the darkness.

‘Can’t’ve got out of here,’ Mumford kept saying. ‘That’s for certain. I know this place now, end to end, and if everybody’s stayed in place, he can
not
have got out.’

‘You better be right, sunshine, for all our sakes.’ Bliss turned to the lawyer, ‘And if
you
—’

‘He was ill.’ Mr Nye had his arms folded and kept looking over his shoulder. Lol instinctively looked over his: how dangerous
was
Lodge? ‘He was
ill
,’ the lawyer insisted. ‘There was no question at all that he was ill.’

‘I’m not feeling too marvellous meself, pal, and if I thought for one minute that when you asked for those handcuffs to come off—’

‘Don’t be absurd!’

This man’ – Bliss’s forefinger came out like a gun – ‘is a suspected
multiple murderer
. So don’t you go anywhere, Mr Nye.’

‘Is that a thr—?’

‘And who the
fuck
,’ Bliss roared out, staring past Mr Nye, ‘let
these
bastards in?’

Maybe it was the kids driven away from the perimeter tape who’d spread the word. But it wasn’t just kids this time. Lol thought of a football crowd filing through turnstiles. Only with lamps and torches.

‘Jesus, it’s a fuckin’
circus
!’

The group of people moving along the path on one side of the garage building was led by a tall woman in a long stock- man’s coat. A lone PC behind them spread his arms, helpless.

‘Sorry, sir, they—’

‘Get back to the entrance!
Now!
’ Bliss walked up to the woman. ‘Mrs Sollars, you should know better than this. We’re not running a funfair here.’

‘Then what
are
you running?’ a man demanded. ‘You’ve spent the whole day digging up people’s gardens with abandon. I suppose you thought you were being discreet.’ He looked down at two children. ‘Miles… Ffion… home, please. I did ask you before.’

One of the kids said, ‘Aw, Fergus!’

‘Or there may have to be proportionately less time on line for the whole of next week,’ the man said calmly.

The woman said, ‘If you’d had the common decency, Inspector, to keep the community informed—’

‘Oh, pardon
me
,’ Bliss snarled. ‘I’ll have a special flyer pushed through everybody’s door next time. Look, I don’t have time for this. You’d better go over and stand by that wall, all of you, and stay together, you understand me? Because if any of you gets in my way, I’m gonna do you for obstruction, and that’s not—’

‘You’ve mislaid him, haven’t you?’ a man with a white beard said. ‘You don’t have Roddy right now.’

‘I’m telling you not to come any further. Stay together. And

‘don’t let anyone else in here. Can you do that? Can you do that for the sake of the
community
?’ Bliss began to walk away.

The bearded man said, ‘You don’t look very far, do you?’ He had a vaguely transatlantic accent. He wore a loose denim jacket and a plaid cap, and he had a canvas bag hanging from a shoulder strap. Also good night-vision, Lol figured; although he didn’t have a torch, he was peering around into the dark areas.

Bliss continued for a couple of paces and then stopped.

Lol saw exactly where the bearded man was gazing.

Up.

J
ANE HAD GONE
upstairs for a bath, leaving Merrily hunched by the sitting-room fire, feet in woolly socks, cardigan buttoned to the top, but still feeling cold. She pulled St Thomas Aquinas from the shelf:
Aquinas on Angels
. Intellectual exercise could sometimes deflate anxiety.

She opened the paperback, immediately shut it again, snatched up the cordless and tried Lol’s phone. It was now over a week since she’d seen him, and, OK, it felt very much longer – really, what kind of relationship
was
this? To Jane, for whom two nights without a call from Eirion was cause for sleep-loss, it must look like a trial separation.

Merrily felt angry, frustrated, losing her grip – a marionette with its strings pulled in different directions by Jenny Box, Uncle Ted, Frannie Bliss and…
Jane
? Like, what had happened suddenly to turn the kid into the self-appointed voice of rationality in this household?

‘The phone you are calling is switched off…’

Inevitably.

Nearly two hours into darkness, now. Were they still out there digging for Frannie’s corpses on the windy fringe of the Forest? Merrily tapped in Gomer’s home number, on the off chance that they were out of there.

‘This yere is Gomer Parry Plant Hire. We en’t in, but that don’t mean we en’t available, so you be sure and leave your number.’

Damn.

Merrily hit
end
and tossed the phone on the sofa. Slumping down with the book, she found St Thomas Aquinas no more accessible.

It is not necessary that the place where an angel is should be spatially indivisible; it can be divisible or indivisible, greater or less, according as the angel chooses, voluntarily, to apply his power to a more or less extended body. And the whole body, whatever it be, will be as one place to him.

She read the paragraph twice more. You could always rely on Thomas to make you feel totally thick. Hard to imagine a mind this colossal functioning within a society of bows and arrows, boiling oil, trial by ordeal… but then, inside grey walls in the thirteenth century, with no TV or radio or phones or kids, only a solitary circle of candlelight, a trained intellect powered by spiritual energy might well acquire laserlike focus.

In the dog grate, a mix of coal and apple logs burned with an intensity that she could neither feel nor find in herself. To be a serious student of Aquinas, theology was not enough. You also needed to be Stephen Hawking.

An angel is in contact with a given place simply and solely through his power there. Hence his movement from place to place can be nothing but a succession of distinct power contacts.

What she was hoping for was… OK, a
sign
. Like, sometimes, you could open a book – it didn’t have to be the Bible – to a random page, and the solution would be there, as though at the end of a shaft of light. The answer might not depend on a literal interpretation of the text; it might be a certain metaphor which sprang a diversion, lit some indirect path to an unexpected truth.

Jenny Box: what the hell does she want from me?

Jenny’s angel: was
that
a metaphor, or what? A person coming from New Age spirituality – from earth-powers, shamanism and healing crystals – to Christianity would probably need some kind of visionary incentive, real or imagined. Jenny Box would have to find ample metaphysical justification for her move to an obscure village in Herefordshire: Ledwardine as Glastonbury, Ledwardine as Lourdes. Just as Merrily herself often wondered if she’d been washed up here for a
reason
– at college, she’d always seen herself as an urban priest, firing faith in concrete alleys full of vomit and discarded syringes.

She lay back on the sofa with the Aquinas paperback on her lap, closed her eyes and saw four possibilities:

1. Jenny Box had hallucinated the angel.

2. Jenny Box had invented the angel.

3. An optical illusion.

4. An angel.

Floodlit by a dozen small lamps, it looked like a gigantic headless metal puppet, with six arms rigidly outstretched – wires from its pendulous fingers, wires from its elbow joints.

If there was a formidable elemental force travelling those wires, the pylon itself looked dangerously unstable, Lol thought. And archaic. A skeletal survivor of the days when cars broke down every few weeks and a single computer filled a whole room.

This was your standard National Grid tower, the bearded man in denims had explained in his relaxed, tour-guide kind of way. He’d hung around with Lol when the adrenalin kicked into Frannie Bliss. There were over fifty pylons in this part of the valley, he said, and this was one of the big ones. It was carrying 400,000 volts.

And Roddy Lodge.

Lodge was about forty feet up, like a crawling insect, not far beneath the first pair of arms, at the end of which the live powerlines were coiled around insulators resembling hanging candles of knobbly green glass.

Lol heard Bliss telling someone to call for an ambulance and the fire brigade. He was standing about twenty feet from the pylon’s splayed legs of reinforced steel, hands in the pockets of his hiking jacket, more controlled now that he could see his prisoner again – could see that the prisoner had nowhere to go.

Nowhere in this world.

Lol wiped his glasses on the sleeve of his jacket. It had stopped raining, but the wind was up. The wires were zinging in his head. Vicarious vertigo.

‘You’re not with the police, then,’ the bearded man said. Directly in front of them was the abandoned excavation, the spade still sticking out of it. From here they could see the whole of the pylon, maybe 150 feet tall, and the shape of Howle Hill behind it, a black thumbprint on the sky.

‘I’m just one of the gravediggers,’ Lol said.

‘That mean I can actually talk to you without I get told to climb back on the school bus and leave it to the grown-ups?’

‘Least the police don’t have guns,’ Lol said, hoping he was right about this.

‘One of the reasons I came home, my friend. Protest about something in New Labour Britain, you don’t get shot, you just get patronized. Name’s Sam Hall, by the way.’

‘Lol. Lol Robinson.’ He saw that Sam Hall was older than he’d first appeared, well into his sixties, maybe beyond that – that backwoods-pioneer look grizzling over the years.

‘Tough day, Lol?’ Sam said mildly. As if they were unwinding at something not over-exciting, like crown-green bowling.

Before Lol could reply, a woman screamed. He saw Roddy Lodge gripping an overhead girder, swinging himself, apelike, into a steel V, finally wedging there. The orange overalls might have been designed to make him conspicuous in a pylon at night, like a warning beacon for aircraft.

‘Aw,
Roddy
!’ A small shrillness under Frannie Bliss’s voice as he called up, ‘Roddy, you daft bugger, where’s this gonna get yer? Tell me that, eh?’

No answer.

‘That’s because he doesn’t know,’ Sam Hall said to Lol.

‘Sorry?’

‘’Less, of course, he has an end in mind.’

Lol glanced sharply at him.

‘Which would depend on whether he’s done all they say he’s done,’ Sam Hall said.

‘How much danger’s he in?’

‘Boy, we’re all of us in danger from those monsters. I could name you three, maybe six people’d be alive today if they’d lived the other side of that hill. But Roddy… My guess would be that he’s done this before. You’ll notice somebody already cut through the barbed wire the power guys snag around the base to stop people climbing – and this is Roddy’s land, so I’d say it was him. Evidently knew where to find the footholds. He’s been up there before. Just look at the guy go…’

Roddy was moving again, pulling himself onto the first of the great arms, about sixty feet up now, lamp beams following him.

‘For God’s sake,’ a woman shouted from behind them, ‘can’t anyone get him down?’

‘Not possible, Ingrid,’ Sam Hall said, although there was no way she could hear him. ‘Not worth the candle,’ he said to Lol. ‘Tower’s earthed, so anyone standing on it’s earthed, too. Electricity will do anything to hitch a ride to the ground. What happens – he gets too close, it’s gonna jump him, and I wouldn’t like to be the person holding on to his feet when it does.’

‘You know a lot about it.’ Lol had his hands deep in his pockets, hunched against the shivering. ‘Worked in the power industry?’

Sam Hall let out a big, echoing laugh that sounded a little shocking in this situation, like it was bouncing around the valley. ‘Partner, what
I
do is I work
against
the power industry.’

Roddy Lodge had come fully to his feet. He was standing on the arm, a yard or so out from the shoulder, holding on to a diagonal steel bar with one hand. On the ground, the policewoman, Tiffany, and a male colleague were arranging a sheet of white plastic over the hole Lol had dug, weighting down the edges with bricks from a pile of building rubble.

‘Fact is,’ Sam Hall said, ‘a bunch of fat cats here and over in the US would give just about anything in the whole world to have me up there, ’stead of that poor sucker.’

A gasp of wind hit Roddy and he swayed and lost his footing and slipped down between two girders and hung there, his feet dangling in space.

‘Christ,’ Lol whispered. Three police officers ran, amid screams, towards the pylon.

‘Could be safer if he dropped now,’ Sam Hall said. ‘He doesn’t hit metal on the way down, he
might
not die. All depends on what he wants out of this.’

‘This is a little early for you,
cariad
,’ Eirion said.

‘How’s the party?’

‘
Yn Cymreig
. I’m having to watch my grammar.’

‘The whole party’s in Welsh?’ Jane sat on the edge of her bed, wrapped in the big bath towel.

‘My step-gran’s discovered cultural correctness in her old age. And her heritage – distant cousin of Saunders Lewis, see.’

‘You’ve lost me already.’

‘Anyone who wants to speak English is finding it expedient to go outside,’ Eirion said. ‘Bit like having a fag out on the balcony.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said, ‘another world. Is that where you are now?’

‘I’m in the kitchen. But not, I have to tell you, because my Welsh isn’t wholly fluent. Where are you?’

‘My bedroom. Just got out of the bath. Goose bumps everywhere.’

She heard Eirion moan faintly.