The Smile of a Ghost mw-7

by Phil Rickman

  ‘They gave it back to nature,’ she said. ‘They just… let it go.’

  ‘What you got here, Mary, is part of a kind of secret passageway linking the oldest parts of town — and the two rivers. The Corve down at this end, which is this narrow, private kind of river, and the big one, the Teme, at the other.’

  Between the trees, over the bushes and the rooftops, you could see the tower of St Laurence’s, as if this graveyard was still intimately linked to it. Which, in a way, it was. Merrily was enchanted. Not in some flimsy, poetic way; there was a real and powerful enchantment happening here.

  Maybe it was a combination of the rose-coloured glasses and her own disconnection from the diocese: Jane’s pagan forces reaching out for her. Maybe this was just an overgrown graveyard.

  ‘We’re going the opposite way from the way she walks,’ Jon said, back on the path. ‘She comes up from The Weir House, up the steps and into The Linney, which goes from just above the Teme, up to the church and then starts again on the other side of the church and comes down again, and you wind up here. Magic.’

  ‘How often does she… walk?’

  ‘Whenever the mood takes her. No, that’s wrong, she probably follows some pattern. Late at night, or in the hour before dawn. Something’s got to be turning her on, though, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Well… you know. There’s obviously a lot of places she finds a bit of a turn-on. That’s why she came here. Like I say, this is just a very haunted town, and it feels like it, know what I mean?’

  ‘It feels nice.’

  ‘It feels haunted, Mary. Everywhere you go. Look at all the stories… you got an old woman in a dressing gown in the churchyard, and heavy footsteps. You got Catherine of Aragon — allegedly — at the Castle Lodge. Summat shivery at The Reader’s House. You got haunted shops, a hairdresser’s with a poltergeist. And… look over there…’

  A view had opened on the left, the kind of view that seemed like it was planned. Anywhere else, there’d have been a viewing point with a telescope that you could feed 10p coins into.

  It was the castle, as she’d never seen it before. It was away on the other side of the town but, from here, it appeared to be nestling in lush greenery, the scene uninterrupted by modern buildings or, in fact, any buildings — as if you were viewing it along a wooded valley. As if you were back then, when there was only the castle.

  ‘Jon, it’s like this place — this cemetery — is linked with everywhere. You turn a corner and…’

  ‘Magic,’ Jon Scole said. ‘Everything in this town is connected up. Like electric wires. Like a circuit. If you know how, you can plug yourself in.’

  ‘Bell told you that?’

  ‘Just once. And then she shut up, like she were giving too much away. Links through time — all the sacred places interlinked, and there are special spots where all the… like the eras of time come together. When she walks here, it’s like… you know?’

  ‘Like she doesn’t walk alone? Or at least she feels…’

  ‘Feels, yeah. Doesn’t see nowt, but… I tell you, if I could get that woman into the ghost-walks, as a regular, I’d bloody clean up. As it is, I’m just taking it all in, I feel like I’m tapping into her consciousness.’

  Merrily remembered Lol suggesting that inside Belladonna’s consciousness was not a safe place to be.

  ‘… Learned a lot about Bell,’ Jon was saying. ‘I mean, the music, that’s only half of it. This is a heavy lady, Mary.’ He paused, nodding his head. ‘’Course, she’s also halfway out of her fuckin’ tree.’

  They went and stood under the dark, feathery awning of the yew, and she felt stupid with her glasses on, turning everything the colour of ripening plums.

  ‘Presumably,’ she said, ‘you’ve heard about the other things she’s supposed to have done. I mean, apart from walk.’

  ‘Naked!’ He laughed. ‘With a feller. Just over there, it was, apparently, where the ivy’s all thick on the ground. You’ve got to hand it to her, at her age. They must’ve been scratched to buggery.’

  ‘The Mayor was not amused.’

  ‘Well, what d’you expect? I mean, George Lackland… his generation… he’s not exactly a left-wing espouser of liberal values, is he? I mean, she was in rock music. They don’t operate according to George’s rules. They don’t live on the same planet.’

  ‘George lives on Planet Ludlow,’ Merrily said. ‘Isn’t that where Bell wants to be, too?’

  ‘She wants to be part of it, that’s true. But like, if she gets off on doing it in places where’ — making quote marks in the air with crooked fingers — ‘The Veil is Thin… I can connect with that. Sex produces a lot of psychic energy. And if there’s this vortex of energy there already, you probably get a top buzz. ’Least, you do if you’re Bell. You know what I mean?’

  ‘In a way.’

  It was still a graveyard, though. Death-fixated erotomania was how Nigel Saltash might describe it. The yew tree was draped around them, exposing its insides. Ancient yews always looked like they’d been dead and come through it.

  ‘She’s built a career around an obsession,’ Jon Scole said. ‘If you’ve heard the music you’ll know that. She’s made a shitload of money, but she’s had a couple of brushes with the big D along the way, so she knows what a tightrope life is, even if you’re loaded. And she’s not getting any younger. So she’s not playing any more, and she doesn’t care what people think. She wants to know what she’s got coming.’

  ‘We all want to know,’ Merrily said. ‘Even the clergy.’

  ‘Yeah, but you got distractions. You got other things to do. This woman… she’s done the lot. Every way you can gratify yourself in this life, she’s done it. What’s left? Think about it.’

  ‘You sound as if you understand her.’

  ‘I try. I mean, she’s here… I’m here… there’s potential.’

  ‘But you said she was out of her tree?’

  ‘Halfway out of her tree.’

  ‘How would I get to meet her?’

  ‘You don’t meet her. She meets you… if she wants to. You can hang round here all night, and it’s like waiting for some rare creature — you might get lucky, you probably won’t. When she first came to live in Ludlow, reporters’d show up, full of themselves, and they’d all go back with nowt. Unless she wanted to talk. Which mostly she didn’t. Talked to the Journal ’cos that were the local paper. Wouldn’t even talk to the Star, ’cos it circulates outside.’

  ‘And that’s why local people protect her?’

  ‘That’s one of the reasons. She’s eccentric, Mary. This town likes eccentrics.’

  ‘George doesn’t. And a few others.’

  ‘No. Well…’

  ‘So if I wanted to meet her?’

  ‘You’d have to be someone she was interested in.’

  ‘Like Robbie Walsh?’

  ‘Let’s get back into the light, eh?’ Jon Scole said.

  They stood inside the chapel gateway, near the information board, their backs to the surrounding wall and Corve Street. A young man came out of the print-shop with two carrier bags, smiled at Merrily.

  ‘Don’t believe a word this feller tells you. Most frightening thing you’ll ever see in Ludlow is him at closing time.’

  ‘Right…’ Jon Scole levelled a finger. ‘That order for four hundred Ghostours leaflets? Consider it bloody cancelled!’

  He dropped his grin as the guy walked away. Turned to Merrily and shook his head.

  ‘What happened to Robbie, that were the worst thing of all. Great kid. Great to have around, you know? All that knowledge, he was like a wassername, prodigy. You’d see him wandering around, world of his own, and you’d go, All right, Robbie? You OK, mate? Be like he was coming down off something. Blink, blink — where am I?’

  ‘He used to go on the ghost-walk?’

  ‘Towards the end, he were practically a fixture. At first, he’d just tag along — well, I couldn’t charge him, could
I? ’Sides, people liked him. He used to do half my job — knew everything about every building we came to. I didn’t, hadn’t been here long enough. Loved telling people about the past. In his element.’

  ‘He was interested in ghosts?’

  ‘Not so much the ghosts as the ’ist’ry. I did the ghosts, he did the ’ist’ry. We were quite a team, all through Easter. See… he could give you a picture. He was like a kid that’d just walked out of the Middle Ages. When he died, I were just fuckin’ gutted, Mary.’

  Jon recalled the funeral — only right the service should be at St Laurence’s; even though he wasn’t local, he’d made himself local. Jon had waited to talk to old Mrs Mumford afterwards, telling her how much they’d all thought of Robbie.

  ‘Including Mrs Pepper?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘So how did they meet?’

  ‘On the ghost-walk. Some nights, when it’s a bit quiet, she’ll just show up. Tag along. Tourists leave her alone; she’s a bit forbidding in that cloak. Anyway, one night — this’d be around last Christmas, when I was just getting the shop together — Robbie was there, and I were a bit knackered so I let him do most of it. He knew all the stories, better than me. And he just… little bugger brought it alive, standing there under a lantern on a stick. Especially the medieval stuff. He’d tell you what they were wearing, what the streets were like… the smells, even. Not in an academic way — he were still a young lad, no big words. But it was like the rest of us were in the here and now, and he was walking the same street, but he was in the twelfth century. You had to see it.’

  ‘He sounds remarkable. I hadn’t quite realized…’

  ‘I don’t wanna build him up too much, Mary, he were just a lad.’

  ‘And Bell…?’

  ‘Riveted, obviously. A young lad who seemed to be seeing things she couldn’t?’

  ‘What did you think about that?’

  ‘Me? I just thought he’d read a lot of books.’

  ‘And they became friends — Robbie and Bell?’

  ‘She made sure of that.’

  ‘Guy I spoke to said they seemed like… mother and son.’

  ‘They were mates.’ Jon looked irritated. ‘Let’s not get silly about it.’

  ‘Did you talk to him about her?’

  ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘And how did he relate to her… special interests?’

  ‘You mean was he exposed to Bell’s obsession with all things death? I don’t know. This copper asked me that. Detective. You know what they’re like, trying to make you say things.’

  Mumford.

  ‘I mean, what is this, Mary? Is this some scheme of Lackland’s to get her out of his hair for good? Stitch her up for assisting Robbie to do himself in? Turn the whole town against her?’

  Merrily stared at him. ‘What makes you think he did himself in?’

  ‘I dunno.’ Jon jammed his hands in the lowest pockets of his leather jacket, rattling chains. ‘It just never made a lot of sense to me that he’d just fall off. Kid knew his way around every passage in that castle with his eyes shut. And then that girl — not much doubt about that, is there? She came here to die.’

  ‘Did you ever have any reason to think Robbie was depressed about anything?’

  ‘No, he were full of life when he… I never thought, you know? He said things maybe I should’ve put together. Like, you’d ask him about his parents, and his face would cloud over. I was thinking maybe divorce, so I stopped asking. Didn’t wanna upset him. We just don’t know, do we, how to react for the best? What do you think?’

  ‘I think there are some questions that nobody’s been asking. And I think everybody’s been walking round Belladonna as if she’s the Queen.’

  ‘Mary, next to Bell, the Queen’s anybody’s.’ He looked at her, standing a bit too close. ‘She could be interested in you. I mean, you know your stuff, don’t you? It’s just… the priest thing. And an exorcist, even worse. Like Rentokil for ghosts.’

  ‘We’re not—’

  ‘I know you’re not. I’m telling you how she’d see you.’

  ‘Doesn’t mind being in the church, though.’

  ‘That’s because it’s where it is. It’s obvious the church is one of the places. Right at the top of the town, at the centre, where all the lanes and alleyways come out. View from the top of the tower — amazing. You should see that, makes the Hanging Tower look like jumping off a stepladder. You been there yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Blimey, you gotta see that. We could go there now. Ten minutes. You got time?’

  Merrily looked at her watch. It was coming up to one p.m. She needed a break to think about all this, and she wanted to speak to Mumford. But more than any of this, she felt the need to break the spell.

  ‘All right, what are you doing around, say, four o’clock?’ Jon said. ‘Suppose I meet you at the entrance to the car park, near the castle?’

  She nodded. She’d have to see it sometime. At least this guy would know the exact spot. Four p.m. would give her time to talk to Mumford and try to see the interior decorator who, according to George Lackland, had had some peculiar requests made of him by Mrs Pepper.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Ace. Meanwhile — Bell. Let me think about this. I mean, I reckon she’d take to you as a person.’ Jon Scole grinned. ‘They say she goes both ways.’

  ‘Not with me she doesn’t, Jonathan.’

  ‘Just kidding, Mary.’

  26

  The Mix

  There was this feeling of unease now, whenever Merrily thought about Andy Mumford. Wouldn’t have been too surprised to spot him back on the prowl here in Ludlow. She felt he was teetering like Jemima Pegler had, and perhaps Robbie Walsh, over a long drop.

  But when she rang from the Volvo he was at home.

  ‘How’re you?’ His voice was still higher than usual; he would hate that — every time he spoke, a reminder of the kid with the chain.

  ‘I’m fine.’ She was in the car park at the top of town, close to the castle. The day had dulled, thin grey clouds windshielding the sun like smoked glass. She crumpled up the cellophane wrapping of her lunch, one free-range egg-and-cress sandwich. ‘You seen a doctor, Andy?’

  ‘No need. It’s better than it was.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound it.’

  ‘That’s because it hurts more.’ Mumford wheezed out a laugh. ‘Where you calling from?’

  ‘I’m back in Ludlow.’

  ‘That a fact.’

  ‘I’ve got a few days off.’ She could hardly tell him about the Bishop or George Lackland. ‘Vicar with a black eye doesn’t look good in the pulpit. And I thought that, with you being persona non grata here, maybe I could… check a few things out?’

  ‘Good of you.’

  ‘So I went to talk to Jonathan Scole.’

  ‘Boy tried to bullshit me.’

  ‘I think it’s his way. He does seem to have been fond of Robbie, however. Poor kid had a virtual season ticket on the ghost-walk in return for lecturing the punters on local history.’

  ‘What about the woman?’

  ‘She seems to have milked Robbie, too. If I ever get to see her, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Watkins,’ Mumford said. Paused. ‘Oh… I had a bit of information, too. From headquarters.’

  ‘You finally spoke to Bliss?’

  ‘No, no. Another person this was, in the Division. Distant relation. Second cousin to a second cousin, kind of thing. Gives me a call now and then, we chats about this and that.’

  Family. In this part of the world, no matter how thinly a blood link was stretched, it was there to be rediscovered when necessary.

  ‘Seems Jason Mebus finally turned seventeen,’ Mumford said.

  ‘And you missed his party.’

  ‘They had his party below stairs at Hereford, attended by former colleagues of mine. Jason got into a confrontation at the Orchard Gardens last night — pub by the Plascarreg?
Two boys finished up seriously hammered in the car park.’

  ‘By Jason?’

  ‘By four of them, but the others were juveniles. Jason’s charged with ABH. His first as an adult.’

  ‘He’s off the streets, then?’

  ‘That en’t gonner happen till he kills somebody. He was bailed. If the presiding magistrate’s in a real bad mood, he’ll get community service, the others’ll have a stern ticking-off. One of the others, by the way, was Chain-boy — Connor Boyd, his name.’

  ‘How do you know it’s him?’

  ‘Moron still had the chain.’

  ‘Ah.’ She watched a young couple loading babies and groceries into a people-carrier parked against the wall under the castle, where some siege engine might once have stood. ‘Andy, does this… relative know what they did to you?’

  ‘Said I had a throat infection. Another one of them’s Connor’s half-brother, Shane Nicklin, twelve. I reckon he was likely the little angel who came in to see us on his own. Regular at juvenile court. Shot a toddler in the eye with an airgun when he was seven.’

  ‘A good family, then.’

  ‘An example to us all,’ Mumford said.

  ‘I’m rather embarrassed about this,’ Callum Corey said. ‘You shouldn’t be putting me in this position.’

  He looked about twenty-three and wore a white silk shirt. He stretched his legs out, swivelling sulkily from side to side in his leather chair. On the wall behind his desk were framed photo blow-ups of the restoration jobs Coreys had handled, and it was impressive: baronial interiors, open log fires.

  ‘It’s all word-of-mouth in our profession, Mrs Watkins,’ Mr Corey said. ‘Any gossip of this sort gets out, it can do us immense harm. My father thought he was doing old Lackland a favour — didn’t think he was going to blab it all over town.’

  ‘I don’t actually think,’ Merrily said, ‘that confiding it to a priest amounts to blabbing it all over town. Besides, he didn’t actually tell me what happened, he just suggested that I might have a word with you.’

  ‘You don’t look like a priest to me.’