The Smile of a Ghost mw-7

by Phil Rickman

  * * *

  Cariad: If you get this before you go off to play pagans, I couldn’t sleep, due to underlying blind rage, so put some checks in, and I’m 99 % certain JDF and Q are not any kind of item. I’m now going to find out where he lives so as to plan dawn raid. Well, OK, half-elevenish raid. Will keep you informed.

  The e-mail was timed at 1.55 a.m. Chances were he was still vaguely conscious. Jane rang his mobile.

  ‘Yes, I’m very nearly naked,’ Eirion said. ‘And, sadly, alone. Are you in bed also, your body glistening with oriental oils?’

  ‘You sound pleased with yourself.’

  ‘I’ve found out where the shit lives. It’s one of those Georgian piles behind a ten-foot wall at Breinton, overlooking the city.’

  ‘So you’ll be going through Ledwardine to get there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just that the Ludlow trip could be off.’

  ‘Does this mean I don’t get to do something potentially rewarding all on my own?’

  ‘You can do what you like after you switch the light out, but maybe you could call for me in the morning. I feel strongly about this, too. Lol’s my… whatever you call the bloke your mother’s having an unaccountably clandestine relationship with. And he’s… he’s taken enough shit this week.’

  ‘You told Lol about Fyneham?’

  ‘No. Not a word. I mean, let’s find out what the score is first. Like, if it turns out you’re wrong and the guy actually is working for Q…’

  ‘Jane, I went through a pile of back copies, looking for the name Jack Fine in all the concert reviews and small stuff, and then every known music website. I put him into every available search engine. If Fyneham’s working for Q, I’m going to leave school, get a job on a remote hill farm in Snowdonia and shag sheep.’

  ‘Yeah, OK, we get the point.’

  ‘Call me when you know if you’re going or not?’

  ‘I will do that.’ Jane noticed a new e-mail for Mum from the Deliverance office. It was highlighted with one of those red exclamation marks, conveying urgency. Sophie, who knew Mum always checked her e-mails before bed.

  ‘If I don’t hear from you before ten forty-five,’ Eirion said. ‘I’ll just go straight over there, OK?’

  ‘And, like, will you be armed?’ Jane said.

  She put the computer to sleep and went to the window. A fox was standing in the dark garden, as though embossed on the wall. Jane didn’t move either; foxes were cool. She supposed she ought to grab a couple of hours’ sleep. Flushing out Fyneham would be second-best to penetrating Belladonna’s lair, but still better than an average Saturday.

  And then the phone rang and the fox sloped away towards the orchard and the churchyard.

  Mum, this time. ‘What on earth are you doing still up? I was going to leave you a message on the machine.’

  ‘Running the switchboard. You left your—’

  ‘Phone. I know. Jane, I’m just… it doesn’t look like I’ll be back till the morning, OK?’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, everything’s fine.’

  ‘You sound like you can’t talk.’

  ‘Well, there you are, then.’

  ‘Somebody’s there?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Right.’ They’d become good at this over the years. Jane focused on the computer’s hypnotic lemon sleep-light as it swelled and faded like a nervous sun. ‘Could this be Belladonna? You’re with Belladonna, in person?’

  ‘Very intuitive, flower.’

  ‘Is she mad?’

  ‘Bit early to say. Definitely before lunch.’

  ‘I mean, you’re not in need of help?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘So where are you exactly? Like, where are you going to sleep? Are you going to sleep?’

  ‘Well, just a bit… weary. Been a long day.’

  ‘Wow… you’re at The Weir House?’

  ‘Exactly. So get some sleep yourself, all right?’

  ‘Oh, I forgot…’ Jane leaned forward and revived the computer. ‘There’s an e-mail from Sophie, marked urgent. You want me to read it?’

  ‘Quickly, then.’

  ‘OK, one sec…’

  Merrily, this came just before I left, from a secretary at Lackland Modern Furnishings. The attachment is a scan of a petition received by the Mayor of Ludlow this afternoon. It was marked for your information (by the Mayor, this is). Hard to say if it’s important or merely an attempt by someone to pre-empt your inquiries and perhaps pressure you into unnecessary action, but I thought you should see it.

  ‘I’m opening the attachment, Mum, OK? If it’s a virus, you know who to blame. Uh-oh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Looks like the fundamentalist loonies are on your back again.’

  to the mayor of ludlow, County Councillor G. H. Lackland.

  Sir,

  A GREAT GODLESSNESS.

  It has come to our notice that you have been in discussion with the diocese of hereford with regard to recent tragic events at ludlow castle. we are glad that, as our first citizen and a practising christian, you have shown such commendable regard for the spiritual and moral health of the community and trust that you will support our call for suitable action to remove what many townsfolk regard as the shadow of darkness and dissolution.

  with respect,

  (followed by 443 signatures)

  ‘Notice that “shadow of darkness”,’ Jane said. ‘As distinct from a shadow of light. Who wrote this turgid crap?’

  ‘Well, thank you, flower,’ Mum said. ‘That’s made my night.’

  ‘But what do they mean? OK, you can’t… I understand. Anyway, if that’s the worst thing that happens to you before dawn you’ll be OK. But, like, if I was having to sleep in Belladonna’s house, I’d make sure my bedroom door was well locked.’

  36

  The Legend

  It smelled old: this was what you noticed first. Because the trees around it made everything so dark and close, and there was a night mist down here near the water, there wasn’t much to see until you were inside, where the smell met you: the dusty sweetness of woodsmoke and warm stone, like the balm of a small church.

  Even when Bell put on the lamps, it remained dim. An entrance hall with a low ceiling. The beams, Merrily noticed, were rough-cut, retaining an element of bark. Two lanterns projected from the swollen, ochre walls — electric, but the bulbs were no bigger than match flames, and so the room was no brighter than it would have been in the Middle Ages, lit by candles or rushlights.

  The phone was in a niche in the wall, like an aumbry for the sacrament. But this was evidently for the concealment of an anachronism, and Bell drew the short curtain back across it.

  ‘Your daughter was still up, then?’

  Bell Pepper was faintly haloed by the clay-coloured light. She’d brushed her fair hair and washed her face. It looked pale and puffy, like creased linen, and there were shadows under her eyes, but no blood — except down the front of the shroud, like an emblem of war.

  ‘She was waiting for me to call,’ Merrily said. ‘She’ll go to bed now.’

  ‘My son was born dead,’ Bell said bluntly. ‘He died inside me.’

  Some belligerence there. This was a famous-artist thing: you demanded privacy, railed against media intrusion, but it was important that people should realize that your experiences were always more dramatic and significant than theirs.

  ‘I was dreaming a great deal, then.’ Bell’s voice softening, a hint of the years in California rolling in like surf. ‘Lucid dreams in which I was walking the streets of an old, old town, and I had no body. I was light.’

  Merrily said nothing. Hormonal. So many chemicals at work during pregnancy.

  ‘And during this really vivid dream, Mary — a dream full of colours and the scent of woodsmoke — during this dream, I was aware of someone beside me, and I was so sure that my baby had died.’

  ‘Yes, I… can understan
d that.’

  ‘And yet I didn’t feel the way you’d expect.’ Bell smiled — those crossover teeth, what Lol had called that strange kind of uneven beauty. ‘No sorrow, more a kind of… Come and have some wine, Mary.’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit—’

  But Bell had moved away through a low Gothic doorway, coffin-shaped around her, and Merrily shrugged and followed her into a passage that was low and narrow and unlit, sensing this woman’s smile moving ahead of them like a guiding light, something separate.

  ‘It was more like a kind of awe,’ Bell said, ‘that I was carrying death inside me. That I was containing death. That death had happened inside me. I knew from that moment that I’d always have death with me. And that death is like love… it must be nurtured.’

  Turning to face Merrily at the end of the passage. Even in the gloom, Merrily could see that Bell’s eyes were alight.

  ‘But, you see, Mary, I was never very good at love.’

  Merrily stopped in the passage. Beginning to see everything now, the whole purpose of this woman’s cycle of ritual: the candles burnt in ancient, sacred places, the menstrual blood in the church… the shroud, her magical apparel on a ghost-walk from the yew outside this house, over the spiritual summit of the town, to the yew in the overgrown cemetery of St Leonard’s that was humming and rustling with energy.

  ‘Death is eternal life without pain,’ Merrily whispered. ‘We make our own eternity.’

  There was a momentary silence, except for the small sounds of a sleeping fire in the space behind Belladonna, where there were glimmerings of red and orange.

  ‘You know,’ Bell said, in a kind of awe.

  They’d walked from The Linney, down some steps under the castle wall, like descending from the high town into the country.

  Once, a sensor had found them and set off an imitation Victorian gas-lamp in the tiered, tree-snuggled garden of a modern bungalow, and Bell Pepper had stopped and turned around, with the musical-instrument case held by her side. Her shroud had a high, ruffled neck and came close to the ground where her feet were in sandals. She seemed, for a moment, to be flickering in time, and that was when Merrily had had the first inkling.

  Soon, the buildings were separating out, town houses giving way to farmhouses, brick to stone, walls to high hedges, viridian-grey under the egg-shaped moon. The pavement narrowing, so Bell was walking some way ahead of Merrily, the pale shroud like a waving handkerchief.

  There were stone gateposts at The Weir House drive and high, iron gates. But a smaller gate to the side had been unlocked, and Bell had led Merrily into a pathway which took them not to the house but to a yew tree which the path encircled. The yew was the width of one of Gomer Parry’s diggers, very softly floodlit from below, green and gold. Like so many in churchyards, it was the remains of a long slow implosion, the great tree serving up its own entrails in a blackened tangle of pipes, like a ruined church organ.

  Bell had walked inside.

  Not uncommon to find them alive and hollow; there was one at Much Marcle with a seat inside. Merrily had hung back, didn’t want to go inside the tree with Belladonna. Emerging a few moments later, Bell had stepped back and bowed to the tree and walked away, with no explanation.

  But she hadn’t been carrying the instrument case any more, only a long key.

  ‘That was quite a shock.’ Bell laughed nervously, a glass of red wine at her lips. ‘I thought for a moment— But I suppose Jonathan told you, didn’t he? He was here when we rehearsed it. That particular line — we make our own eternity — is on the album, the thing I’m doing with Le Fanu. Which we haven’t yet recorded. Jonathan was dropping so many hints I let him in once to listen — special treat. Little bastard, I expect he was making notes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ Merrily said. ‘Jonathan didn’t tell me.’

  The laugh was snapped off, and then Bell, face glowing in the firelight, said, with uncertainty, ‘There is no other way you could—’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid there is.’

  There was what looked like half a small tree on the fire in the great stone hearth. There must have been some draught system under the hearth because Bell had awoken the fire, and they were sitting in its sporadic light in these hopelessly uncomfortable oak chairs, no more than carved wooden boxes with vertical backrests and the fronts blocked in like commodes. Velvet cushions helped a bit, not much. Bell leaned out of hers.

  ‘But of course Jonathan maintains you’re the best natural psychic he’s ever encountered. I was inclined not to believe him. Jonathan is… how shall I…?’

  ‘Prone to hyperbole.’ Carving on the chair’s upright spine bit into Merrily’s back. She sat up, sinking her hands into the pockets of her fleece. ‘Mrs Pepper, I read it on the Internet.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about the Internet!’ Bell’s voice rose erratically. ‘Computers suck your energy. You couldn’t have!’

  ‘The quote was on a website. Well, more of a chat-room.’

  ‘I don’t even know what a fucking chat-room is.’

  ‘It’s like a forum. Where people can send messages to each other? In this case, people interested in suicide.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where would-be suicides gather to talk it over online. It was quoted in a reply to someone who was planning to take her own life. I couldn’t tell you where they got it from, but the Internet moves almost as fast as you can think. Passing thoughts suddenly get shared with thousands of people.’

  Merrily looked around into the darkness. They might as well have been sitting outside in front of a brazier. This would be a very atmospheric rehearsal room, but as living space, despite the heavy tapestries on the walls and the sheepskins on the floor, it was too big, too cold, too rudimentary. Too starkly, uncompromisingly medieval.

  Bell Pepper was watching her intently over her wine glass. ‘Why were you looking at this suicide website?’

  ‘I was trying to help my friend, Robbie’s uncle. I wanted to understand Robbie and why he died.’

  ‘You think he committed suicide?’

  ‘His uncle thinks it’s possible. What do you think?’

  Bell’s face went blank. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He seems to have been victimized — bullied — on the estate where he lived. There’s evidence that he didn’t want to go back. That he took his life to… stay here…’

  ‘No, that’s not true.’

  ‘So we looked at his computer and he—’

  ‘No! Listen… I didn’t put that stuff there. Yeah, yeah, there’s a computer here that Le Fanu use — for the music, they download sounds, sample stuff, I don’t know how it works, I don’t have to, I’m not an Internet freak like fucking Bowie… and I didn’t put those words out, or any of that song… I didn’t.’

  ‘I never said you did,’ Merrily said. ‘And, for what it’s worth, there’s no evidence that Robbie went near those sites. But, since I’ve just quoted that line back to you, somebody must have, mustn’t they? Did one of the band do it — Le Fanu? Your songs appear to be widely available on the suicide network, did you know that?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me. Anybody could… Everybody knows what I did.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m getting confused, what are we—?’

  ‘It’s in the books. The unauthorized biographies.’

  ‘I’ve never read them,’ Merrily said. ‘I just know the music. I just… wore the clothes.’

  ‘When I was fifteen,’ Bell said, a tired incantation, ‘I tried to kill myself. I took an overdose. I spent quality time on a stomach pump. I was fifteen and I was overweight, bad skin, repressed and horribly shy, and I had a heart defect and I was not allowed to do games and my parents drove me everywhere — even if I went out at night with friends they drove me there and collected me — and I also had a disgusting brace on my twisted teeth, so I tried to kill myself. It’s in the books.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know about that.’

  Bell cra
ned her neck forward. ‘Darling, it’s part of the legend. The next part is when I was seventeen and someone said I could sing and someone else pointed out that if you took the middle out of my dreary name, Isabella Donachie, you had the magic word Belladonna — poisonous, the most resonant name for a singer in those days — and that seemed like some glorious epiphany, and I snatched the brace off my teeth and slept with about a hundred men in six months.’

  ‘Legend?’

  Bell sniffed. ‘You see, I’d grown up to whispers behind my back: doctors to parents, parents to relatives. Peering through the banisters, ears flapping — children have such sharp ears and an acute understanding of the basics. By the time I was ten, I knew I was going to die before my time.’

  ‘You’re still here…’

  ‘And I still have a heart defect, apparently — it wasn’t a mistake or anything: they picked up on it again when I was having the baby. I mean, I could still die any time. I just haven’t died yet. But death and me…’ Bell enclosed one hand with another. ‘Close, Mary. Very close, always. And it’s been a remarkable relationship.’

  ‘It’s certainly produced some remarkable music.’

  ‘All about sailing close to the precipice. When I swallowed the pills, I was convinced just a handful would finish me off — someone already hanging delicately over the great abyss? Didn’t happen. When I was twenty-one, I recorded the Hungarian Suicide Song and had all the scratches put into the mix, just like the original. Singing close to the precipice.’

  Merrily said hesitantly, ‘They say that knowledge and acceptance of death can show you how to live… intensively.’

  Bell leaned back in her box. ‘That’s not quite true. It induces, more than anything, a sense of the temporary. I couldn’t settle. Couldn’t settle in a place — travelled all over the world or, at least, back and forth across the Atlantic. Couldn’t stay with a man, either. Pepper was the best, he was a nice guy — why I kept his name — but I was turning him into a nervous wreck, so he appealed to my better instincts and I let him go. But there was only one constant, and that was my son.’