The Smile of a Ghost mw-7

by Phil Rickman

  Jack Fine sat on the shorter stepladder, his microphone between his knees, wired to a mini-disc recorder in his jacket pocket. He had floppy hair and sulky lips and looked like he could be about nineteen. But then so did a lot of blokes that Lol learned later were in their mid-twenties. A sign of age, but he tried not to worry about this any more. And it became clear that Jack Fine did know the background. Maybe too much of it.

  ‘So, as I understand it, Lol, this goes back to when this other guy in the band — Karl Windling? — was hot for this groupie, and he roped you in to keep her mate occupied. And they were both under-age, and you got stitched up?’

  ‘I was eighteen,’ Lol said patiently. ‘I was very naive.’

  ‘But you were the one who finished up getting arrested and taking the rap—’

  ‘For something that never even happened.’

  Oh God, how many times was he going to have to tell this wretched story? Even Karl Windling was history — dead in a road accident two years ago.

  ‘Leaving you with a police record,’ Jack said.

  Lol nodding wearily. ‘And then my parents… they were tied into this fundamentalist religious sect, and they disowned me. And everything went downhill from there. Got the wrong kind of help, cracked up, wound up in a psychiatric hospital, and… Listen… Jack… I’m not trying to cover anything up or tell you your job or anything, but would it be possible to maybe not go into all this again?’

  ‘Lol…’ Jack leaned over his mike, his fair hair falling over his forehead and covering up one eye. ‘Look, man, OK, I can gloss over it. I can deal with it in, like, a couple of paragraphs? It’s just that you seem to be putting this experience into a few of the songs on the album?’

  Lol sighed. No way round this.

  ‘The song “Heavy Medication Day”,’ Jack said. ‘The one that goes, “Someone’s got to pay, now Dr Gascoigne’s on his way.” What’s that about?’

  ‘It was just a particular doctor who was — how can I put this? — liberal with the medication. Anything for a quiet life. And probably so people wouldn’t know what he got up to on the side.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Lol shook his head. ‘He knows and I know, and all the rest is… just a song.’

  ‘There’s real anger in that song, though, isn’t there? Which is unusual for you — it’s usually more sort of resigned. It’s as if this guy did something really bad to you.’

  ‘Not to me personally.’

  ‘So, what—?’

  ‘Can we leave this one, Jack?’

  ‘Seems to me this whole album is about your journey, through the system… back into the light, kind of thing,’ Jack said. ‘Like an exorcism.’

  ‘Not exactly the word I’d use.’

  Jack grinned, like maybe he knew about Merrily. He couldn’t know.

  ‘So how did you wind up out here in the sticks?’

  ‘Well, I… came here originally with a woman. She eventually went off with someone else. And then, um…’ Lol leaned back on his sofa and paused for a few seconds while he worked out what it was best to leave out — like him leaving the village and then coming back, because of Merrily. ‘… Then I met Prof Levin, just as he was setting up his studio on the other side of the county. And I’ve been working there, helping Prof out, doing a bit of session stuff. And then Prof kind of persuaded me to do the album. So I owe it all to him, really.’

  Lol got out a copy of the CD and put it on the boombox, and they sat there, amid the paint cans and the dust sheets, discussing the songs and people who’d played on the tracks.

  ‘Including Simon St John on bass and cello,’ Jack said. ‘That’s a real name from the past. And he’s a vicar now, right?’

  ‘He’s been a vicar for years.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s cool.’

  ‘But you’re nothing to do with the Church…’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘’Cause, like, your parents…’

  ‘It can put you off, when your parents are… extremists.’

  A lorry full of gravel went clanging down Church Street, and Jack was silent for a moment, seemed to be thinking what else he could ask.

  ‘How long have you been in music-writing?’ Lol asked.

  ‘Oh, not long. My old man — he publishes specialist magazines now, but he used to be a newspaper reporter when he was young. But my grandad thought this was a really disreputable thing to be and he tried to persuade him to pack it in and get into the management side. My old man’s really encouraged me to go into cutting-edge journalism. Go for it, you know? Don’t look back.’

  ‘Music’s, er, cutting edge?’

  ‘I do other stuff. Anything that comes up, really. Anyway, Lol… I mean, you were really fucked up for a long time, weren’t you? It was like with Nick Drake — how long’s he been dead now, thirty years? I mean, like him you couldn’t cut it on stage, face an audience.’

  ‘I identified a lot with Nick Drake, from the beginning. Hence the name of the band, Hazey Jane.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The Nick Drake song, “Hazey Jane”?’

  ‘Oh yeah, sure. Sorry, I thought you meant… So like, how did you get over that? ’Cause you did this amazing comeback gig… at the Courtyard in Hereford?’

  Lol told Jack about all the help he’d had from Moira Cairns, folk-rock goddess, who happened to have been recording at Prof’s. How Moira had literally pushed him out in front of that audience. Scary? Oh yeah, cold-sweat situation. All those lights, all those faces.

  ‘And you’re still doing a few gigs as support for Moira, right? But you and her…?’

  Jack moved his hands around.

  ‘Oh no,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘But you’re with somebody?’

  ‘No, I live alone. A rural idyll.’

  ‘Right,’ Jack said. ‘Right.’

  Still waiting for Eirion, Jane saw Lol and the guy from Q come out of the front door of Lucy’s house and walk up the street to the village centre. They seemed to be getting on OK. She didn’t know why she felt so responsible for Lol. He was just that kind of guy — vulnerable.

  The journalist was a surprise. He didn’t look any older than Eirion, for God’s sake. He had a camera with him — a Nikon, digital-looking. Doing his own pictures, too. Jane slid behind one of the thick oak supports of the old market hall as they came onto the square. A few shoppers and tourists were glancing at them by now, and Jane saw that Lol was looking a bit unhappy.

  ‘’Course I won’t say where it is,’ the Q guy said.

  ‘Only the market hall’s fairly well known,’ Lol said. ‘Be a give away.’

  ‘No problem — we’ll face you the other way. Better for the light, too.’

  The guy lined Lol up on the edge of the square, with the church in the background and people walking past, and Jane wondered if he was trying to simulate one of the famous black and white street-scene pictures taken for Nick Drake’s first album, Five Leaves Left.

  And she wondered, not for the first time, if that was a good thing. Nick Drake’s music was wonderful but he surely represented the old Lol. He had, after all, killed himself with an overdose of antidepressants.

  Jane saw Eirion’s car arrive — little grey Peugeot with the CYM sticker, identifying him as a Welshman abroad. Eirion drove slowly around the square to park in front of the vicarage gate, and Jane stopped herself from running across, waving. A measure of cool might be more appropriate. Try and cobble together a few quid for the petrol, indeed.

  She strolled casually over the cobbles as Eirion climbed out. He spotted her at once and did his incredible smile — the kind of smile that said you were the only person who could make it happen.

  Smooth bastard.

  OK, he wasn’t. Eirion wasn’t smooth. He didn’t even know he had any charm.

  When they’d finished kissing, he said, ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s ver
y busy here today, isn’t it? I’ve never seen it like this.’

  ‘It’s Saturday.’ Jane looked back at the square. Lol and the guy from Q had gone already. Not a major photo-session, then.

  ‘Didn’t used to be like this on a Saturday, did it?’ Eirion said.

  ‘Tourism. It’s like tourists have suddenly discovered the area.’

  ‘Good for the shopkeepers.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Jane imagined the figure of Lucy Devenish, the ghost of Ledwardine past, standing in the shadows under the market hall. Lucy looking very old, the way she never had, and the poncho drooping. Something feeling wrong.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jane said.

  6

  On the Slippery Slope

  Merrily found the atmosphere stifling. Too much heat, food-smells, a sense of something out of everyone’s control.

  She exchanged glances with Saltash from opposite ends of the sofa. Saltash raised an eyebrow. Mrs Mumford seemed to think he was some kind of priest. And the wrong kind, at that.

  ‘Where’s the Bishop?’ she kept shouting at her son. ‘You said you’d bring the Bishop. You never does what you says you’s gonner do.’

  Mumford sat, impassive, on a hard chair by the TV, which was silently screening some Saturday-morning children’s programme: grown-ups wearing cheerful primary colours and exaggerated expressions, smiling a lot and chatting with puppets.

  Soon after they’d arrived, Mumford’s dad had walked out. ‘Can’t stand no more of this. I’m off shopping. She won’t face up to it. You talk some sense into her, boy, else you can bloody well take her away with you.’

  ‘I’m cold.’ Mrs Mumford was hunching her chair dangerously close to the gas fire. ‘Fetch me my cardigan, Andrew.’

  ‘You got it on, Mam.’

  Mumford looked down at his shoes. The room felt like the inside of a kiln. His mam wore this winter-weight red cardigan and baggy green slacks. She had one gold earring in, and that wasn’t a fashion statement. She looked from Merrily to Saltash to Andy. She’d done this twice before, as if she was trying to work out who they all were.

  ‘Why en’t the Bishop come?’

  ‘He en’t well, Mam, I told you. He had a heart operation.’

  Her eyes filled up. ‘You’ll tell me anything, you will.’

  ‘Mam—’

  ‘He was always nice to me, the Bishop, he never talked about God and that ole rubbish. Used to come in when we had the paper shop. Used to come in for his Star nearly every night.’

  ‘Mam, that was the old bishop. He don’t live here no more.’

  ‘He can’t tell me why, see! That’s why he don’t wanner come.’ She turned to Saltash. ‘Can’t tell me.’

  Mrs Mumford stared at Saltash in silence. Merrily looked away, around the room. The walls were bare, pink anaglypta, except for a wide picture in a gilt frame over a sideboard with silverware on it. But the picture had been turned round to face the wall. All you could see was the brown-paper backing, stretched tight.

  What was it a picture of? Ludlow Castle?

  ‘What would you like the Bishop to tell you?’ Saltash asked.

  Mam kept on staring at him, like she knew him but couldn’t place him. You could feel her confusion in the room, like a tangle of grey wool in the air. Her voice went into a whisper.

  ‘Why did God let her take him?’ Starting to cry now. ‘Why did God let that woman take our boy?’

  Saltash leaned forward. ‘Which woman is that, Phyllis?’

  ‘You’re supposed to be a policeman!’ Mam rounding on Andy, chins quaking. ‘Why din’t you stop her?’

  Andy Mumford drew a tight breath through clenched teeth, the veins prominent in his cheeks.

  ‘The Bishop, when he come round, he sat on that settee with a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit and he never mentioned God nor Jesus, not once.’

  Merrily said softly, ‘Mrs Mumford, who was the woman?’

  Mam didn’t look at her. ‘I can’t say it.’ She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose. Saltash caught Merrily’s eye.

  Andy said, ‘Mam, you can say anything to Mrs Watkins, and it won’t go no further.’

  ‘What… this girl?’

  Mam snorted. Mumford looked helplessly at Merrily.

  ‘Phyllis,’ Saltash said. ‘I think you were starting to tell us about Robbie.’

  ‘Oh…’ She smiled suddenly, her face flushed. She sat up, centre stage. ‘He loves it here, he does.’

  ‘He felt safe here.’

  ‘He loves it.’

  ‘He was interested in history, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He loves all the old houses. He’s always walking up and down, looking at the old houses. He knows when they was all built and he knows who used to live in them. You can walk up Corve Street with him, and he’ll tell you who used to live where, what he’s found out from books. Reads such a lot of books. Reads and reads. I says, you’ll hurt your eyes, reading in that light!’

  ‘Phyllis,’ Saltash said. ‘Can you see Robbie… reading?’

  ‘No!’ She reared up, nodding the word out, hard. ‘I don’t need to see him no more. I said, please don’t let me see him. I don’t wanner see him like that…’

  ‘Like that?’

  ‘All broken. I don’t wanner— I just hears him now. Nan, Nan… Sometimes he’s a long way away. But sometimes, when I’m nearly asleep, he’ll be real close. Nan…’ She smiled. ‘And he draws them, the old houses. He’s real good. Draws all them old houses. And the church. And the ca—’

  She stopped, her mouth open. And then her whole face seemed to flow, like a melting candle, and a sob erupted, and she clawed at her face and then — as Merrily stood up — kicked her chair back, dropping her hands.

  ‘She took him off.’

  ‘Mam!’ Andy knelt by the side of the chair, steadying it. ‘You mustn’t—’

  ‘She pushed him off, Andrew.’

  ‘No,’ Mumford said. ‘Now, that didn’t happen. Did it?’

  ‘Pushed him off,’ his mam said. ‘He told me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Mumford staring up into his mother’s swirling face. ‘What are you saying?’

  Outside, the sun had gone in and there was a cold breeze. Merrily stared across the car park at the Tesco store. Its roof line had a roller-coaster curve, and she saw how this had been formed to follow the line of the hills beyond the town.

  Some town — even Tesco’s having to sing in harmony.

  She felt inadequate. Something wasn’t making sense. Or it was making the wrong kind of sense. There was an acrid air of betrayal around the house where the Mumfords lived, in the middle of a brick terrace, isolated now on the edge of one of the new access roads serving Tesco’s and its car park. When they came out, Nigel Saltash had spotted Andy’s dad walking back across the car park with a Tesco’s carrier bag, a wiry old man in a fishing hat.

  ‘Think I’ll have a word, if that’s all right.’

  Mumford nodding glumly, sitting on the brick front wall of his parents’ home, looking out across what seemed to be as close as Ludlow got to messy. The train station, small and discreet, sat on higher ground opposite the supermarket. Lower down was an old feed-mill, beautifully preserved, turned into apartments or something. Then tiers of Georgian and medieval roofs and chimney stacks and, above everything, the high tower of St Laurence’s, like a column of sepia smoke.

  ‘The doc says she needs assessment,’ Mumford said. ‘Should have had assessment some while back. See the way he looked at me?’

  ‘It’s how he looks at everybody,’ Merrily said. ‘He’s a psychiatrist.’

  Her hands were clasped across her stomach, damming the cold river of doubt that awoke her sometimes in the night — the seeping fear that most of what she did amounted to no more than a ludicrously antiquated distraction from reality.

  ‘Checking out the old feller now, see,’ Mumford said. ‘Next thing, he’ll have the bloody social services in. Thi
s is—’ His hands gripping the bricks on either side. ‘She’s got worse, much worse, since the boy died.’

  ‘A dreadful shock can do it. Reaction can be delayed. It doesn’t necessarily mean she’s on the slippery slope.’

  ‘At her age,’ Mumford said, ‘what else kind of slope is there?’

  Merrily paced a semicircle. She saw Saltash, just out of earshot. His head was on one side, and he was pinching his chin and nodding, flashing his mirthless smile as Mumford’s dad talked, his carrier bag at his feet. She was remembering Huw Owen’s primary rule: never walk away from a house of disturbance without leaving a prayer behind.

  Had she left without a prayer because she was afraid it might have inflamed the situation? Or because Nigel Saltash was there?

  ‘Just because I’m working with a psychiatrist doesn’t mean other possible interpretations go out of the window.’ She bit her lip, uncertain. Hoping she wasn’t just fighting her corner for the sake of it. ‘What do you think she meant about a woman pushing him off the castle?’

  Mumford shook his head. ‘She never said that before.’

  ‘Does it make any sense?’

  ‘There was a witness — bloke lives over the river. Steve Britton showed me the statement. Bloke saw him fall. Nothing about anybody else. I… Where’s she get this stuff from? Never said nothing like that before. I don’t… Christ, I need to check this out, now, don’t I? You’re right, it’s easy enough to say she’s losing it.’ He sprang up from the wall. ‘I dunno… at every stage of your bloody life you become somebody you said you was never gonner be.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Ah… you’d be on an investigation: murder, suicide, missing person, and there’d always be some pain-in-the-arse busybody relative — never the father, always someone a bit removed from it — who’d be trying to tell you your job. Have you looked into this or that aspect, have you talked to so-and-so, why en’t you done this? You wanted to strangle them after a bit. But the truth is there aren’t enough cops to do half of what needs doing. And so things don’t come out the way they should, things gets left, filed, ignored…’

  ‘Be careful, Andy,’ Merrily said, for no good reason, knowing she wouldn’t be careful in a situation like this.