The Smile of a Ghost mw-7

by Phil Rickman

  And here was the Mayor of Ludlow, still publicly hanging all this on an 800-year-old ghost rather than a living woman in a period shroud — an increasingly pitiable woman who, for some reason, he regarded as his Nemesis. Why?

  ‘If you’re a real friend of the Bishop’s, George,’ Merrily said, ‘you won’t mention that ten-quid bet ever again.’

  Another policeman was approaching the castle gateway from the inside.

  ‘Ah, here’s Sergeant Britton,’ George said. ‘Let’s see if we can get you in there.’

  But she was uncertain. This was no time for a confrontation with Saltash.

  And was it really a young girl up there, or…?

  Do something, Lucy Devenish had told him. How many times had Lucy said that?

  Lol drove due north, up the Welsh border, under an unsure sky in which clouds would gather and then fall away like discarded underwear. Spring was an unbalanced time, made him nervous. He didn’t really know what to do, apart from act as some kind of messenger boy. All he was doing as he drove was thinking about Andy Mumford, without whom none of this — not least that perfidious eye-injury — would ever have happened.

  Thinking about Mumford — not something that enough people seemed to have done over the years. What had this glum, anonymous man stirred up?

  ‘Miserable Andy’ was what Gomer Parry called him because he rarely smiled, never seemed to be particularly enjoying his work. Gomer must be twenty years older and still riding his JCB like he was part of some heavy-metal rodeo, but Gomer was self-employed and could retire if and when he wanted to, while Mumford had been forced into it and, like Dylan Thomas had advised, he wasn’t going gentle. Retirement: maybe this was the most savage rite of passage.

  Which made Lol think about himself and the received wisdom that said that if you hadn’t made it in the music business by the time you reached thirty it wasn’t going to happen, ever. So it probably wasn’t going to happen. Was that worse than being like Belladonna, an international cult-figure at twenty and now some eerie Sunset Boulevard ghost?

  As he was approaching the lights in the centre of Leominster, Lol’s phone broke ironically into the first bars of ‘Sunny Days’, the nearest he’d ever come to an actual hit. He pulled off the road into the forecourt of the petrol station on the corner, eased up against some second-hand cars, all of them at least ten years younger than the Astra.

  Jane said, ‘You’d better pull over, Lol, what I have to tell you could cause an accident.’

  ‘One moment.’ He switched off the engine. ‘OK.’

  ‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘First off…’

  First off, she told him, he’d be well advised to start looking for Mum in the general area of Ludlow Castle, where a girl was threatening suicide. Yes, another one, and it was no use asking who or why because this was all Sophie had known, therefore it was all Jane knew.

  ‘Christ,’ Lol said.

  ‘OK, the second thing. You sure you’re off the road?’

  ‘Get on with it, Jane.’

  ‘I’d like to claim total credit for this, but it was Sophie. I didn’t think even Mum meant that much to Sophie — well, not in comparison with the cathedral. Just shows, doesn’t it? So, like, Sophie talked to the Dean.’

  ‘The Dean.’

  ‘At the cathedral? The steely-eyed number-cruncher in charge of the cathedral? It’s pretty clear Sophie’s got some serious dirt on the Dean that she’s been, like, saving up, and now it’s really come good. I mean, circumstantial evidence more than anything else, but the Dean is the missing component that connects everybody.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Lol said. ‘What are we talking about? This is about Mumford? Belladonna?’

  The line seemed to fracture.

  ‘… And we checked it on the Net and it’s a bit of a gob-smacker.’

  ‘Start again, Jane,’ Lol said.

  ‘Can’t be done,’ Steve Britton said. ‘Sorry. Can’t allow it. Tense as hell in there, George. That girl goes out the hole, there’ll be an inquest on all of us.’

  ‘The hole?’ George said.

  ‘Well… window. Jagged hole in the wall. She’s up on this deep window ledge, and they can’t reach her. She made us take away the scaffolding — leaned back, half out the window, said if we didn’t take it away she’d… you know. Don’t look that big a drop from below, but when you’re up there…’

  Steve Britton was probably in his forties, nearly as tall as George, with a scrubbed face and invisible eyebrows. He nodded at Merrily, across the castle gate.

  ‘Friend of Andy Mumford’s, right?’

  ‘You seen him lately, Mr Britton?’

  He laughed. ‘I’m glad to say, no. Poor old boy.’

  ‘Who’s in with the girl?’

  ‘Inspector Gee and Dr Saltash. I think you know him, too. My superior suggested he go in, seeing he was around. Also the woman minister. Canon…’

  ‘Callaghan-Clarke.’

  ‘That’s it. Seems they been studying the situation,’ Steve Britton said. ‘It’s not an easy one. It’s not normal, this, is it?’

  ‘Do you think you could tell them I’m here… and I might just be able to help?’

  Steve Britton coughed. ‘Like I say, a bit difficult in there just at the moment, Mrs Watkins. Perhaps if you could come back later?’

  ‘I see.’ Seemed clear he’d been told that if she turned up she definitely wasn’t to be allowed in. She could imagine Saltash briefing Steve Britton, in confidence. Not for me to try to influence you, Sergeant, but a woman with a stress problem in a situation this volatile… would that be wise?

  ‘Inspector Gee’s also very much the right person for this,’ Steve Britton said. ‘You’ll remember Sandy Gee, George — DC here, four, five years ago? Went back into uniform to take charge of family liaison in Shrewsbury. Plump person. Three kids, now. Needs somebody a bit mumsy, I reckon. Seems very young, this girl.’

  ‘So it is a girl?’ Merrily said. ‘I mean, you’ve seen her yourself?’

  ‘Who’d you think it was?’ Steve Britton eyed her, curious.

  ‘Do you know her name yet?’

  Steve Britton pursed his lips.

  George Lackland snorted. ‘God’s sake, Stephen, how long you known me, boy?’ He turned to Merrily. ‘People help each other in a small town. It’s how things get done. How good connections get made.’

  The Mayor turned back to Steve Britton and gave him a long, considering stare, as if their future relationship and all it might promise was on the line here.

  ‘Samantha Cornwell,’ Steve said. ‘And it wasn’t me told you.’

  ‘Goes without saying, Stephen. Local?’

  ‘Ledbury. Like the other one.’

  Merrily blinked. ‘That means she knew Jemmie Pegler?’

  Steve Britton looked uneasy; he’d already said too much.

  ‘Thank you, boy,’ George said. ‘It won’t be forgotten.’

  Merrily followed the Mayor back onto the square, everything reshaping.

  She’d assembled a scenario in which Bell, betrayed, had fled to Marion’s tower, all ghosts together, but it was wrong. Now the scene in her head was a corner table at the café in a mews across the car park from Hereford Police HQ. On the table, a computer printout, e-mail format:

  if i emptied every packet and every bottle in there and swallowed the lot. well just be sick as a dog most likely. how sad is that, sam. im not going out sad. im not. when i go theyll fucking know ive gone.

  Samantha Cornwell. Sam?

  Over by the tourist office, she saw the eight-year-old boy who was waiting for the big bump. He was staying very close now to a woman pushing a pram, presumably his mother, and he was no longer laughing. Often the way with children, the bravado melting in the suddenly frightening heat of reality. The policewoman, Kelly, had known her psychology: just about the last thing this kid wanted to hear was a big bump that would resound in his room at bedtime.

  Merrily, too, but what the hell could
she do?

  The sun bulged like a damaged eye behind purplish cloud. The couple known to George Lackland had shifted their cardboard placard closer to the castle wall.

  ONLY THE POWER OF GOD CAN STOP THIS NOW.

  Tell that to Nigel Saltash.

  Duss, duss, duss.

  Mumford

  Just the once, after denying everything with his usual contempt and arrogance and bravado, Jason Mebus tried to leg it.

  Choosing his moment perfectly, when Mumford — and it could happen to anybody, there was nothing you could do — let go this unstoppable sneeze.

  Bringing his knee up into Mumford’s crotch, not quite getting it right but enough to break free. Would have been well away, too, up the river bank, through the grounds of the derelict restaurant under the pines, if he hadn’t stopped for the parting gesture, like he always did on the CCTV pictures.

  Vicious sneer and a rigid finger up at the camera.

  With what he thought was a safe distance between them, he turned round and did it at Mumford, who was on his knees in the dirt.

  Mumford did nothing — made a point, in fact, of showing no pain and looking unimpressed, like he’d merely bent to pick up a coin. Which was when Jason started screaming that if he’d had his way, they’d have finished hanging Robbie Walsh. Finished off the job by the time the Collins kid had started crying and run out of the shed and gone to fetch his dipshit dad.

  As it was, they’d cut the little gayboy down and they were out of there. Which was a shame, all the trouble they’d gone to, to fix it up like a suicide, even ripping the hanging page out of the history book so it could be left by the body, and then putting the book back in Walsh’s school bag.

  Jason telling him all this just in case Mumford thought he was dealing with an amateur. How it would’ve gone down as suicide, no problem ’cause everybody knew Walshie was having a bad time on the Plascarreg. But enough people would know what had really happened to make it crystal clear that there were certain individuals on this estate that you did not fuck with.

  ‘Now that’s a lie, ennit, Jason?’ Mumford said, back on his feet, strolling nonchalantly towards the vermin. ‘No way, see, that you’d leave a body in a shed next to a crack factory.’

  ‘Nah, that was gonner be over, anyway,’ Jason said. ‘Couldn’t trust that unit no more. He might’ve told somebody. Might even’ve told you, dad.’

  Jason backing off the whole time, along the edge of the water. Knowing he was safe, with his long legs, from this overweight old bastard. Telling Mumford that if his fat face was ever seen on the Plascarreg again it was gonner get sliced off.

  Bringing his hand down like a guillotine.

  ‘Sliced off like a side of bacon, dad.’

  And it was as he was saying these actual words, making the gesture, that he backed into an empty petrol can with one of his heels and turned round too quickly and lost his footing and nearly went in the river.

  Thank you, boy.

  Mumford — brain inflamed with the images of Robbie’s suffering that Jason had so lovingly invoked, and moving pretty near as fast as when he was a promising athlete in his teens and early twenties — went to rescue the boy, at the same time taking him down with a sharp little knuckle-punch to the throat.

  Jason retching pitifully, but all Mumford could hear was him saying, with his casual, hard-boy confidence, We was only his very best mates, dad. We had some awesome laughs with Robbie.

  The last laugh being at the top of the Keep, at Ludlow Castle.

  All added up. They wouldn’t have known about the significance, to Robbie, of the Hanging Tower. The Keep, with steps all the way to the top, was so much easier. What was also useful was that, instead of landing on the public footpath outside, for all to see, the body would drop privately into what they called the Outer Bailey, all locked up for the night.

  Jason or, more likely, two of them — Jason and Chain-boy, say — would’ve hidden out somewhere in the castle with Robbie till the place was closed and then taken him up there, thrown him off, quietly vacated the premises, with all the time in the world. No, they weren’t amateurs, these boys.

  So why hadn’t Robbie told anybody about the hanging?

  Or had he? Could be Robbie had told Mathiesson. Mumford could hear the toe-rag laughing. Gotter be a man… stand up to ’em. Telling himself that Robbie had exaggerated the story. Not telling Angela anything.

  Mumford drew back his foot as Jason tried to get up. Pity it was only a trainer.

  Still, Jason was cowering away, his eyes alive with fear. Or mabbe it was the look on Mumford’s face that did that — Mumford listening to his poor drowned mother.

  And Robbie, he wants to show you all his favourite places in the town, don’t you, Robbie? He’s nodding, see. He’s always saying, when’s Uncle Andy coming?

  Uncle Andy, who could easily have gone that very morning to the house opposite Tesco’s and had a long and meaningful chat with Robbie, probably ending with a full statement and Robbie not having time to go to the castle that afternoon and therefore still being alive.

  Had this not been the same Uncle Andy who just couldn’t face the thought of his old man formally welcoming him to the wonderful world of retirement.

  Another time, another place, Andy was going to weep.

  And he wasn’t stupid. Knew that what he was doing now was no substitute, was unlikely to make him feel any better.

  But at least Uncle Andy was finally here for Robbie Walsh and all the other Robbie Walshes who would be hanged, cut, beaten by this scum who had every reason to think the useless, bureaucratic, CPS-constricted police service was never gonner touch him.

  Mumford looked down at him.

  ‘This river, Jason, the Wye. When I was a boy, much younger than you, folks used to say the River Wye demanded a sacrifice every year. Used to say the mothers was always scared to let their kids go anywhere near the water till somebody somewhere had been pulled out dead. You yeard that one?’

  Jason said nothing. There was drool all over his mouth, and his eyes were wet. His famous jacket, with all the zips, had split under an arm.

  ‘Some very old man was considered best,’ Mumford said. ‘Or a drunk. Or a tramp.’

  Jason snuffled and rolled away from the water’s edge.

  ‘Or anybody that wouldn’t be missed,’ Mumford said, thinking how primitive and tribal this had been for the 1950s.

  ‘But we was told we better be good kiddies else we might be the ones wouldn’t be missed.’

  A few minutes later, as he began a more formal interrogation of the suspect, the possibility that this would not end with Jason’s death and disposal in the River Wye had dwindled to a minuscule point of light at the end of a very long tunnel already fogged with a suffocating rage against a world that had no further use for the imperturbable Detective Sergeant Mumford.

  42

  Like Heat

  She looked so lonely when he found her, this small figure hunched up in the fleece with the torn pocket. She’d been trying to get it over to a policewoman on the castle gate that the girl in the castle was linked with the last one, Jemima Pegler, and the policewoman had looked at her like she was just another voyeur determined to get in on the action.

  ‘Thank you,’ the policewoman said coldly. ‘They know.’

  That was it, a blank snub: you are irrelevant to this, you’re as useless as the people with the power-of-God placard. You are wasting my valuable time.

  Go.

  Nobody else wanted to talk to her. She said she’d been looking for Belladonna, but there was no sign of her either.

  This was Merrily Watkins: any responsibility going spare, she’d accept it.

  Lol virtually dragged her into the Assembly Rooms. There was a café upstairs, with big windows from which you could see the edge of the square, and they sat close together like sad young lovers, watching the light beginning to fade, although it was still two hours to sunset.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come a
ll this way.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have forgotten your mobile,’ Lol said. ‘Who poisoned the local cops against you? Saltash?’

  He was watching her eat, guessing this was the first time today. She was forking up salad in a desultory way as though, if he turned away, she might empty her plate into a pot plant.

  ‘And where is Saltash?’

  ‘In the castle. Dispensing psychological wisdom.’

  She’d explained about Jemima’s e-mails to the girl called Sam and told him a lot about Belladonna, as if she had to justify her continued presence here even to him.

  When Merrily was starting to seem less fraught, Lol ordered some more tea and told her about Jonathan Scole and the killing of the Ghostours man’s parents.

  She pushed her plate to one side, staring at him. Bombshell.

  ‘He said they’d died in their car. I was thinking, road accident…’

  ‘Don’t know where the car comes in. Unless they were shot getting into it after leaving the café.’

  ‘The police think Jon Scole killed his own parents?’

  ‘Couldn’t have done it himself — he had an alibi,’ Lol said. ‘But the proceeds of the robbery were so meagre, the shooting so professional, that the cops were thinking cut-price contract killing. He just seems to have been the only one likely to profit from having them dead.’

  ‘What about…’ She scrabbled around. ‘I dunno, protection. Maybe they refused to pay protection money. Or a rival café-owner with a grudge?’

  ‘Sure, or they were dealing drugs under the counter. But you’d expect the police up there to have checked all those angles, wouldn’t you? Do you like this Scole?’

  ‘He’s…’ Merrily was looking around — for ashtrays, he guessed, to see if it was OK to smoke in here; apparently not. ‘He’s driven. A lot of energy, enthusiasm. Yes, he’s likeable. Someone who could have both his parents killed? A monster? No.’

  Lol said perhaps Scole had been forced to leave the area to escape the damaging gossip. Understandable, in that case, that he’d changed his name. Understandable, too, that he’d simply say that his parents had died rather than have to go into it all with strangers, over and over again.