The Lamp of the Wicked (49 page)

‘But if Donna was just a child…?’

‘The feeling was it happened the other way round. Donna bumps into him in the street, in Cheltenham. He was always in Cheltenham. Well, not a face you ever forgot, West. Do anything for you.’

A soundtrack was playing in Merrily’s head. Traffic and the bustle and chatter of a summer pavement and… ‘Oh, gosh, it’s Fred! I bet you don’t remember me. Donna Furlowe?’ ‘Course I do, Donna, well, well, well… Give you a lift somewhere? The ole van’s just round the corner.’

Huw leaned his head forwards, digging his fingers into the skin of his forehead. When he looked up, there were red marks.

‘That was when the police asked me if I knew of any satanic groups. I didn’t, so I went round all the local Deliverance priests. Took some leave from the parish. Stayed in Gloucester for over a month, me and Julia. No more bodies, but they always expected to find more. But I think it was Lucy Partington did it for Julia. Not like the others – an intelligent, cultured girl. Found in Cromwell Street, with tape around the skull, bits of rope. Evidence of— You don’t want to hear this, lass, I don’t want to tell you.’

‘She was Martin Amis’s cousin, wasn’t she? The novelist.’

‘Aye. Cultured lass. Artistic. Sensitive. So the cops are saying now to West, what about Donna Furlowe? Where did you bury Donna Furlowe? He denies it. He always denied it. Just like he denied murdering Ann McFall – buried her, but he didn’t kill her. He loved her, she was his angel – just let
him
bloody find out who killed her, that’s all… He lied, you see, Merrily, he lied all along. And all the time, I’m saying to Julia, “It’s coincidence. Coincidence, that’s all, let’s go home.” She wouldn’t.’

‘I wouldn’t, either, if it had been…’ Merrily swallowed. She found she was holding a hand to the neck of her black woollen jumper. She wanted to get up and make more tea, but she couldn’t move.

‘We did leave in the end,’ Huw said. ‘We had to. I had to go back to the parish, and the Deliverance courses were about to get started. But it were never the same after that. I’d go over to Bwlch every other day. Stay the odd night. She’d keep saying, “I can’t settle, Shep, I can’t settle.” Always called me Shep. Said I reminded her of a border collie, always ready, always on watch.’

‘Yes.’

Another Christmas. A couple of dozen half-finished paintings. Then a week later, New Year’s Day 1995, Fred West, awaiting trial for a dozen murders, constructed a rope out of shirts – always a practical man – and hanged himself in his cell at Winson Green. Having told his carer he’d killed a lot more girls. As many as twenty more girls. No names.

‘It were summer again before we knew it. This was when Julia told me about the medium in Brecon. I’d asked her to marry me by then, she said let’s leave it a year, see how things are. And that she’d been to a bloody medium.’

It’s understandable. Kind of situation that sends most people to mediums.’

‘
I
know that, lass. And all I could do was beg her not to. You know the shite that comes through at these bloody sessions… not to be trusted, mediums, not ever. We had a row. I didn’t see her for a week. I went back, crawling, beginning of August 1995, and stayed the night, and when we got up the next morning there was a call from a copper in Gloucester to say they’d found a female body, butchered, in field near Lydbrook, in the Forest of Dean.’

Merrily tried to say something, couldn’t. She hadn’t known, hadn’t recognized the name.

‘We saw some of the clothes. She were still wearing clothes, but there were thick brown parcel-tape round the lower part of the skull.’

‘Huw…’

‘And bones missing. Finger bones and foot bones.’

Merrily’s nails pierced her palms.

‘See, we’d read it all by then. Hundreds of pages already in the papers, books being written, Rose coming up for trial on ten murder charges. She must’ve known… Oh aye, we all knew by then exactly what Fred West did to his victims, him and Rose. We knew all the details. Fred abusing his children and watching Rose with other men, through a hole in the door. Taking in girls, at first, who were up for it –
they
thought, but not the things Fred and Rose did, nobody were up for that. Then girls who weren’t up for it, Fred and Rose getting off on the fear.’

And she heard him at Frannie Bliss across the table:
cellars and concrete… dreams full of blood and filth and sobbing.

‘Can I tell you what it were like for Julia, then, Merrily? Can I start to tell you?’

‘No need.’

‘Course not. She started painting again, within days. Painting Donna, from photographs. But very pale. Paintings you could see the white paper through, like she was trying to clean off the child’s body. I tried to get her to come to the cathedral. She ‘wouldn’t. But she was still going to the medium. What could I say about that? I couldn’t bring her comfort, the Church couldn’t do owt.’

Huw was feeling in an inside pocket of his tweed jacket, bringing out what looked like an old tobacco pouch of yellow plastic. He unwrapped it and took out a small piece of folded paper. Thick paper, quality notepaper. He unfolded it and passed it across the table to Merrily. She took it to the lamp.

I’ll keep it short, Shep.

I’m so, so sorry about this. But I do believe there is somewhere else – you showed me that – and that Donna needs me there now. She so needs someone to comfort her, I feel this very strongly. I’m so very sorry, because I love you so much, Shep, you know I do, and it’s only thinking of you and sensing your arms around me that’s going to give me the last bit of strength I need for this, so please don’t take your arms away and please, please forgive me, and please go on praying for us. I’m so SORRY.

Merrily stood there by the lamp, holding the paper, feeling its texture, the weight of it. Paper made to last. She was thinking of all those times she’d wondered if there had ever been a woman in Huw’s life.

When he started to speak again, she couldn’t look at him.

‘It were me found her. I think that was what she wanted. Thought I were strong. Owd Shep. Seen it all. She’d left the farmhouse doors unlocked. Lovely balmy summer’s evening, and an overdose of sleeping tablets.’

‘Huw, I…’ Blinking back the tears; that wouldn’t help.

‘God?’ His voice was down on the flagstones. ‘I went into me own church that night and screamed obscenities at God for the best part of an hour. Close as I’ve ever been to chucking it in. They say it makes your faith stronger in the end, and happen they’re right, but you can’t
possibly
know that at the time. It’s not a time when faith makes any kind of bloody sense.’

No.’

She had to put the paper down. Wondering if he’d brought it tonight specially to show her, or if he carried it with him all the time, in his inside pocket next to his heart, the suicide note of a woman he’d never really had and perhaps was already losing when she died. ‘

‘A
ND YOU KNOW
the joke?’ Huw said.

‘There’s a joke?’

With the lights of Hereford city centre clustered in the rear- view mirror, Merrily headed left by the Belmont roundabout, finding the Ross road. They were going to make a surprise call on the Reverend Jerome Banks. Huw’s idea. Huw sat placidly in the passenger seat, wearing his donkey jacket, hands clasped on his knees, no seat belt on.
Wears his scar tissue like a badge.
No, not like a badge at all. Like scar tissue, the kind that was never less than inflamed. She was glad she no longer had to look into his stricken eyes.

‘The joke, Merrily, was that it’s possible Donna wasn’t down to West after all. ‘The bones – aye
that
matched. Otherwise, a few differences. The Home Office pathologist were the first to question it. He knew the West style by then, see.’

‘What kind of differences?’

‘Well, there were nowt wrong with the hole. West used to bury them in holes that were deeper than they were wide. They weren’t
graves
, they were holes. Practical. Like you’d have for dead sheep.’ Huw’s voice was as flat as the road ahead. ‘Nobody had ever just stumbled on one of Fred’s bodies. He’d cut them up, then bury them neatly. Efficient butchery, economical disposal.’

‘Thank you, I’ve read about that.’

And Donna
had
been cut up, but with no great skill. The head… hacked off, the legs broken. The hands, too. One foot mutilated, bones removed. But not Fred’s way, was how the pathologist saw it. Too rough, he figured, therefore too frenzied.’

But after Donna had been in the ground for the best part of two years, Huw said, there was no strong forensic evidence either way – not much more than the pathologist’s feeling that this wasn’t down to Fred.

‘You can bet most of the coppers
wanted
it to be him, mind. You don’t want more than one of these buggers, do you? Not on the same patch. So whatever investigation there was must’ve been cursory, wi’ over seventy per cent of the team convinced the case was already solved. Always somebody to say, Oh, happen Fred were in a hurry this time, not his usual self… especially under the circumstances.’

‘Circumstances?’ Down the Callow pitch now, and off into the country, reminding her of that night with Gomer, when it all began, experiencing again that feeling of being
drawn in
.

‘He’d just had a rather difficult year, Merrily. One of his kids had told a schoolfriend about the domestic arrangements at 25 Cromwell Street, and Fred had found himself in Gloucester court facing charges of tampering with a daughter. Three counts of rape, one of buggery. Rose next to him, accused of cruelty and complicity. Police and social services walking all over the beloved home, kids taken into care. So then Fred has to discuss his married life in detail with the coppers – “My wife and I, we leads a very full sex life.” Nudge bloody nudge.’

‘They got off, though, didn’t they?’

‘Aye. So near and yet so far. In the end, the victim wouldn’t give evidence. Nobody would. Nobody wanted to break up the happy home. So they got off, the pair of ’em – embracing in the dock, picture of bloody innocence.’

But the police had been inside number 25, seen all the signs – the sex aids, the pornographic home-videos. And, while the other children were in care, the social workers had heard the ‘family jokes about Heather, who was missing (run off with a lesbian, Fred said), being buried under the patio. It was the beginning of the end. Within nine months they’d arrested him for the murder of Heather, buried more or less where she was said to be buried. Not a very good joke any more.

So did Fred realize the clock was ticking? Was he determined to get a last one in before the bells went off? Or did he just happen to run into Donna in Cheltenham and couldn’t resist?

Or did somebody else kill her?

‘You think Donna might’ve been killed by Roddy Lodge, don’t you? That was what you told Bliss. And it’s no wonder Frannie’s excited. Because if this
was
down to Lodge, it proves that we’re not just looking at another copycat,’ Merrily said.

‘No.’

‘Because, while it might not have been a perfect match, it was still very close to West’s
modus operandi
, including the bones. And when poor Donna was buried, two years before the arrest and all the publicity, the only way anyone could possibly have known about West’s
modus operandi
would have been by
actually knowing West
.’

‘There we are, then,’ Huw said placidly.

So Huw had come to take over, AGENDA written now in neon capitals between the lines on his forehead. Huw was running a crusade on behalf of
the parents of all them dead and missing girls, lying awake night after night wondering precisely what were done to their kids and how many times.

Or just for one parent, one girl.

Or just – God forbid – for his own redemption.

Now Huw wanted to talk to the Reverend Jerome Banks, to whom Roddy Lodge had gone with his haunted-bungalow stories and been turned away. Why? And why had Banks offloaded the funeral so fast? Why had he
really
done that? Huw wanted answers. Huw Owen, with his wolfhound hair and his slow-burn stare.

Scary.

Before they left, Merrily had gone up to the apartment, with the chip money in one hand – Jane, at seventeen, was becoming what in Liverpool they used to call a latchkey kid. This couldn’t go on.

‘Flower, Huw and I have… someone to see.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said in her most bored tone. ‘Really?’

‘Shouldn’t take long, but—’

‘Yeah, yeah, chips’ll be fine.’

‘Unless you want to come along? We could call somewhere for a meal afterwards.’

Jane had turned down the stereo and stared at Merrily, with that awful twisted little smile. ‘Let me get this right. You’re offering me a night out with a couple of vicars talking shop. Discussing like
God’s Work
.’ The kid had sighed, shaking her head in slow motion. ‘Merrily, if you only
knew
how distressingly patronizing that sounded.’

‘You used to be quite interested in… aspects of the job.’

‘Interests change,’ Jane said. ‘Or maybe we get people wrong. Like, for quite a while, I thought my mother had a normal interest in men.’

‘Now what does
that
mean?’

Jane had shrugged.

They passed a pub on the Ross road called, with an awful irony, The Axe and Cleaver.

‘If there ever is evidence that Lodge killed Donna,’ Merrily said, ‘what could that mean? It would seem to me to suggest there really might have been a group of them.’

‘Aye. The cult that Fred talked about, and everybody thought he were just trying to spread the blame. However, when all’s said and done, if Roddy Lodge killed Donna he didn’t kill Julia. Fred killed Julia.’

‘You mean just the thought of…?’

‘The thought of Fred and Rose and what they’d done to the others. The images of his hands on Donna. Julia was an artist. She couldn’t live with the images.’

‘I’m so sorry, Huw.’

‘Been dreaming about her again, Merrily. Julia and her white portraits of Donna. Keep seeing the white portraits. I’ve got one at home. I don’t think she’s at peace. I don’t think either of them are at peace.’