The Lamp of the Wicked (58 page)

Merrily said, ‘Did you – when you were thrown back – feel anybody actually
touch
you?’

‘Yeah, I… I think so. But I didn’t really have time to, because I couldn’t breathe, you know? I was choking. There was suddenly this awful pressure on my throat.’

‘What kind of pressure, Zoe?’ Huw said. ‘What did you actually feel?’

Zoe rubbed her arms. ‘I couldn’t exactly say it was hands. I couldn’t say it
felt
like hands. But I
thought
of hands. I thought of these rough – what’s the word? – callused, kind of hands. And
dirty
. And what I heard – this was the very worst moment, I can tell you – I actually heard Martin’s voice. He was going, like, “What’s up with you? What you doing?” And his voice was like a long way away. I mean, what – five, six metres? And I’m trying to shout, scream… and all I could make were these little rattly noises, like snorting. And I was… absolutely… bloody terrified.’

‘I bet,’ Merrily said.

‘I thought I was gonner die. I thought I was gonner die there and then. You believe me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re, like, a vicar, too, yeah?’

‘Mmm.’

‘And I’ll tell you something else. Martin, he en’t got hands like that. He works in a bank.’ Zoe nodded towards the door, lowered her voice. ‘
They
still don’t believe me. Not really. Sometimes I think I dreamed it. You know, that we fell asleep in there or something. But I can’t have. I wasn’t comfortable in there, you know, not from the start.’

‘What happened in the end, Zoe?’ Merrily asked.

‘Martin put the lights on and there was nothing there.’

‘How far were you from the lights?’

‘’Bout four metres.’

‘Could you still feel the pressure as he was putting the lights on?’

‘When the lights went on, I could breathe. It wasn’t Martin. It definitely wasn’t Martin. And there was nobody else in there, I swear to God.’

‘Did you have any marks on your neck, Zoe?’ Huw asked.

‘No. Well, redness maybe. But no bruises like you’d expect. Listen, can you tell me what happened? I’ve heard some of this stuff Mr Hall talks about, and I’m doing physics at A level, so… I mean, I’ve been trying to tell myself this was all caused by electromagnetism and radio waves on my brain. That maybe, like he says, there
is
some problem caused by like intersection of electrics from the power lines and signals from the TV booster and the mobile-phone transmitters…’

Merrily looked at Huw.

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘it’s possible.’

‘Then what are
you
doing here?’ Zoe said.

An old Land Rover was parked outside the house; its lights flashed once and a rear door opened for them.

Ingrid Sollars was at the wheel, Sam Hall next to her. ‘If this was daylight,’ he said, ‘you’d see the goddam pylon right at the back of the house, and you’d see the TV booster across the valley. The existing mobile-phone transmitter’s in the wood across there, and the big new one—’

Ingrid switched on the engine, creating foundry sounds. ‘This is the Reverend Owen, Sam, and I really don’t think he believes this begins and ends with electricity.’

‘More sick people on this estate than you could otherwise account for – how d’ya do, Reverend Owen? – and Melanie Pullman lived right over there, end of the turning circle.’

The turning circle was jammed with cars, so Ingrid Sollars had to reverse off the estate. She drove them back into the centre of the village, where a few people still hung around and the placard saying KEEP SATAN OUT! was propped against a lamp-post.

Sam leaned over the back of his seat. ‘Ingrid, of course, would actually prefer this whole thing to be down to Satan.’

Ingrid pulled in behind Merrily’s Volvo. ‘What he means is that Ingrid would prefer it
not
to have been caused by something the removal of which would damage the progress of this village out of the Dark Ages. We need communications, and we need all those computers, and we need the power to make them work. At the moment, a child as bright as Zoe Franklin is the exception in her age group. In ten years’ time she’ll be the norm.’

‘It’s the main source of argument between us,’ Sam said. ‘I don’t believe this
is
progress if it’s gonna kill off half the people and give the rest waking nightmares.’

‘That’s a ridiculous exaggeration.’

‘Sure it is – at present.’

Huw said, ‘You talk to the spring-water people, Ingrid?’

Ingrid switched off the engine. It subsided with noises like the collapsing of metal plates. ‘Yes, I did. I said the Development Committee had limited funds and would very much like to know the name of the contractors they employed in the original conversion.’

‘And?’

‘They said they didn’t have a phone number but they were pretty sure this particular contractor was… no longer available.’

‘I bet they couldn’t remember his name, either.’

Ingrid said, ‘What do you propose to do about this, Mr Owen?’

‘I intend to discuss it with my colleague here, who I hope will allow me to be involved in tomorrow’s funeral.’

‘
Tomorrow?
’

‘Don’t spread it around, eh?’

‘You’re a bastard, Huw.’ Merrily realized she was driving too fast and her foot stabbed the brake. The rain had stopped, but the night clouds hung low and sombre as the lights of Ross began to flower around them.

‘Me mam never tried to hide it,’ Huw said placidly.
‘For a start, you
knew
what Zoe was going to tell us.’

‘Ingrid told me about it while you were messing with the TV people. She didn’t give me the name then, though.’

‘But you had to make the kid go through it again.’

‘Cathartic, lass. Anyroad, I wanted
you
to hear it. You might not’ve believed me. A few tools disappearing and a bloke punched off a ladder doesn’t amount to much. I wanted you to feel that sense of being watched. And the rest of it.’

‘It doesn’t prove anything.’

‘Nothing’s ever proven.’

Merrily drove slowly through the medieval centre of Ross, behind the ancient sandstone market house, the church rising on her left, roofs glistening.

‘You even knew who the contractor was.’

‘The good Mumford and his contacts,’ Huw said. ‘Ear to the ground, that lad. A respectable spring-water firm would hardly like it broadcast. Nobody wants to be known as having employed him, having been to the pub with him a time or two, and certainly not—’

‘You wasted Ingrid’s time.’

I wanted her to hear it, and I wanted you to hear it from her.’ ‘Because you didn’t want me to think it was all down to you.’

Huw said nothing.

‘Which it is, of course.’

‘Who else cared enough?’ Huw said.

Consider, Huw said.

Consider Cromwell Street, Gloucester: a street full of flats and bedsits and therefore young people in need of cheap accommodation, coming and going, moving out and moving in. And the top rooms in number twenty-five were the cheapest of the lot. Police had actually traced about a hundred and fifty former tenants, some of whom had paid no more than a fiver a week.

So it was a haven for itinerant kids, some of whom might otherwise be sleeping in cardboard boxes in shop doorways. Some actually said it was the happiest,
safest
time of their adult lives, being in Cromwell Street, being part of Fred and Rose’s big family, with all that this involved. Looked back on it with real nostalgia.

Strange. And yet not so strange.

Because it was an
organism
, was 25 Cromwell Street, Huw said, and Fred loved it for that. It was end-of-terrace, tall and narrow – three storeys, plus cellars, plus attics – built like a person. And Fred knew all its private parts: where the wires went, where the pipes went.

He liked to feel the presence of the bodies in there, bodies live and dead. Bodies became part of the fabric of that place, said Huw, who had studied it all in nauseating depth. Bodies, not people, because Fred basically was not interested in
people
, only their bodies.

25 Cromwell Street: a bargain flophouse, a free brothel and a burial chamber, and Fred loved it. Loved messing with it, altering this and that, contriving, bodging. He turned one room into a primitive cocktail bar – the Black Magic Bar, they called it, with optics on the bottles and a big mural of a Caribbean ‘beachscape. It was the first real house he’d ever owned; got it for seven grand, but it needed renovation; it needed a builder, needed
him
. And he’d keep working on it whenever he had the time: extending it, building new bits, fabricating this, concreting that. Building
himself
into that house. Putting his consciousness into it.

Such as it was.

Fred’s consciousness was basement stuff, Huw said. Fred thought about sex all the time, talked about sex most of the time he was awake.

And if the walls in 25 Cromwell Street all had eyes, they were Fred’s eyes. Eyes and ears: microphones and speakers, video cameras, so Fred could absorb the sights and sounds of sex – squeals of ecstasy upstairs, sobs of fear and despair in the cellars, the dungeons. 25 Cromwell Street throbbed with it. The house that Fred built, full of Fred’s porno pictures, Fred’s porno videos, Fred’s tools. And the dead.

‘And they knocked it down,’ Huw said. ‘That were all they could think of to do with it afterwards. There
was
talk of having a memorial garden, for the victims, but nobody wanted to be reminded what had happened there.’

So the council had knocked it down and built a walkway, with street lamps, so that nobody would know it had even been there. So you could walk past where it had been, walk over it, as a short cut to the centre of Gloucester. They’d turned it into another small extension to the old Roman street plan that still lay at the heart of the city – one of the best-preserved Roman street patterns anywhere in Britain. Glevum, the Roman name for Gloucester, meant
place of light
.

The darkest corner of the place of light: gone. But where had
Fred
gone? The man who was so attached to the flesh and to gadgets and tools and working with his hands; the man with no morals, no sensitivity, no spark of spirituality.

A one-man definition of the term ‘earthbound’.

Where was Fred? The man who remained unconvicted, who had cheated justice, who was said to have sat in his cell, between interrogations, and dreamed of Cromwell Street.

Where was whatever remained of Fred?

‘This is crazy,’ Merrily said.

‘Is it? You know about Lodge. You’ve been in his bungalow. You’ve seen his facsimile of the Black Magic Bar. You’ve seen the buried cuttings and the photo of him and Lynsey Davies on the sofa, posing like Fred and Rose. All
I
know is, lass, there were too much holding him to Cromwell Street and they took it away. First, they took his kids away, then they took the dead away. And they took him away, and he couldn’t cope with that. And then, when he was dead and burned and sprinkled over Much Marcle, they took the house itself away… his creation.’

‘Huw…’ Merrily was finding it hard to breathe. ‘This is a notorious killer of the lowest kind who—’

‘I don’t believe you can lay a man like that so easily to any kind of rest. I expected traces—’

‘—Who, in the end, avoided the processes of the law—’

‘I expected traces in the fields at Marcle, but I should’ve realized – he didn’t like it there because it was a village and everybody knew your business. He liked to watch, not
be
watched.’

‘—And now nobody can get at him,’ Merrily said. ‘All the relatives of the dead denied justice. All the relatives of the missing who’ll never know for sure… never.’

‘No,’ Huw said.

‘And nobody can get at him. Except…’ She was gripping the wheel tightly with both hands. ‘… Except, perhaps, for you, and I wonder what the Christian Deliverance Study Group would think of whatever you have in mind.’

Huw didn’t reply. Merrily drove slowly over Wilton Bridge towards the bypass, and the moon edged out for a moment and glimmered in the Wye.

T
HE VAN PULLS
up in the Tesco car park, where it backs on to the bus station, just the other side of the little wall, and Jane sees him getting out and she has to smile.

Coming towards her, pointing with his stubby right forefinger, a loose semi-grin on his face, plastic carrier bag hanging from his left hand. He’s actually not bad-looking in the right light, for his age, in this gypsyish sort of way. In this earthy sort of way, which you’d probably call ‘coarse’ if you were snobby and middle-class and buttoned-up, which Jane definitely is not.

‘Well, well,’ he says, ‘I thought it was you!’

Jane’s been waiting for her bus to Ledwardine, and it’s late and there’s nobody else waiting in the North Hereford queue, and in fact she was beginning to wonder if she’d missed it. Bugger. Going to be late, so she needs to ring Mum, but she’s left the mobile at home again, and if she goes off to phone and the bus comes, she’ll be stuffed.

‘How you doing, then, girl?’

‘I’m OK, Fred. You?’

‘Busy. Up to the eyes, as usual, look, but that en’t no bad thing.’ Looking her up and down, with the old saucy wink. ‘You’ve grown, en’t you? How old you now?’

‘Seventeen.’ Jane rolls her eyes. ‘Over the hill.’

He smirks in delight. ‘Well, don’t seem no time at all, do it, since we done your bathroom, took out the ole shower? Had a good laugh then, di’n’t we? How’s your ma? Still doin’ the ole…?’ Miming the dog collar like it’s got a ball and chain attached.

‘Well… She’s probably OK now, at this moment,’ Jane says doubtfully. ‘But she’ll be mad as hell if it turns out I’ve missed this bus and she’s late for her communion class.’

‘Missed your bus, is it? Bugger.’

‘It’s OK, there’ll be another three in about two hours.’

‘Well now, hang on…’ He purses his lips, thinking. ‘Just you hang on a mo, Jane… Ledwardine, ennit? I’m off up to wosser- name… Weobley, look. So how far’s that from Ledwardine? No distance, is it, if we goes back along the ole Brecon road – no time at all. Hey, listen, I got Rose in the van, too. You en’t met Rose, did you?’