The Smile of a Ghost mw-7

by Phil Rickman

  ‘And what are they saying?’

  ‘ “Hinting” would be a safer word. No more than whispers. Undercurrents.’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘You’re not getting me to say it, Merrily.’

  ‘Some people are suggesting that the recent spate of tragedy is somehow rooted in… whatever happened on the same site over eight hundred years ago?’

  ‘Ah…’ The Bishop cleared his throat, uncomfortable. ‘I don’t imagine anyone’s expressed it with that degree of… exactitude. Rumours trickle through the streets about a place becoming unlucky, and they gather momentum. Even when I was there, you’d get people saying the town was becoming ungodly, selling out to Mammon — new restaurants, rich incomers.’

  ‘How does that relate to two teenagers and an elderly woman?’

  ‘Well, it… That is, George says some people were suggesting the Walsh boy had become a little too obsessed with the past. Aspects of the past, that is, that should be left to, ah…’

  ‘Has he seen the papers this morning?’

  ‘For once, it seems, the papers are only echoing what’s already been whispered. It’ll die down in the press, probably before the week’s out. The media always treat these stories as a joke. Not in the town, however. Things will be blamed on it that have no connection whatsoever.’

  ‘So what’s the Mayor want?’

  ‘A meeting. He’s asked me to go and see him. Tonight. I’ve told him I’d like to bring someone with me who knows more about the elements being, ah, hinted at. Are you free tonight, Merrily?’

  ‘I could be.’

  ‘Good. Excellent.’

  ‘Right, then,’ Merrily said. ‘So, do you want me, or Sophie, to inform the Deliverance Panel?’

  The Bishop looked blank.

  ‘Procedure,’ Merrily said. ‘All possible cases must be referred to the panel for assessment before any action is taken.’

  ‘Who decided that?’

  ‘The panel.’

  ‘Well, I think’ — the Bishop stopped tapping and closed his hand around the pen — ‘that we ought to regard this as a preliminary and essentially informal discussion. Don’t you?’

  ‘If that’s what you think, Bishop.’

  ‘Oh yes. I do.’ He placed the pen carefully on the desk. ‘I… your eyes, Merrily. Is there something wrong with your eyes, or are you trying to look sinister?’

  21

  Tradition

  The Mayor closed his heavy front door, and they stepped into a hall that was cream-panelled and bright with shards of crystal light from an electric chandelier. Through Merrily’s new glasses it glowed amber and pink, like a rose garden at sunset.

  ‘This is the Reverend Mrs Merrily Watkins,’ the Bishop said. ‘Merrily is my, ah, Deliverance Consultant.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ The Mayor shook hands stiffly. He wore a mid-brown three-piece suit, with a watch chain, and you didn’t come across many of those any more. ‘I see.’

  He obviously didn’t see at all. You could be close to the church your whole life without being aware of what went on in the crypt. Bernie Dunmore didn’t explain; Merrily felt he was still faintly embarrassed, even in Ludlow, about perpetuating a tradition as medieval as hers.

  ‘Come on through, Bernard,’ the Mayor said. ‘Let’s sit down in the drawing room and hope to discuss all this in a civilized manner.’

  George Lackland’s home was above and behind Lackland Modern Furnishings, midway down Corve Street. The Corve was the more modest of Ludlow’s two rivers, and this ancient street sloped steeply down from the town centre to meet it. The shops here didn’t look like shops at night; most were fabricated inside historic buildings, and the owners hadn’t been allowed to enlarge windows or put up new signs. Much of Corve Street was frozen in various eras, all of them pre-neon.

  Even the Mayor looked like part of the façade. His forehead jutted like a mantelpiece over the deep-set embers of his eyes. He looked more like a bishop than the Bishop.

  ‘Nancy sends her apologies, Bernard. Meeting of the festival committee. Some very big names coming to town this year.’

  ‘You mean the few who don’t live here already?’ Bernie said. He was still in his episcopal purple shirt. He’d told Merrily that George would expect this.

  She followed the Mayor down the hall to his drawing room, unbuttoning her black cardigan so that the dog collar was fully on view. She wasn’t insecure about the women’s priesthood any more, but he might be.

  ‘This is nice,’ she said.

  Well, it probably had been, once. The room was lodged in the era when cream leather three-piece suites were cool, and carpets were always fully fitted because bare floorboards were a sign of penury. There was a high ceiling, with mouldings and another crystal chandelier. French windows revealed a moon-bathed sunken garden, and that really was nice.

  ‘Yes, we’re fortunate — if that’s the word — to have quite a number of famous folk living here now.’ George’s voice had an Old Ludlow roll, Shropshire easing into Hereford. ‘We seem to have become a bit of a refuge from London — actors, television personalities, political people…’

  ‘Singers?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Aye, singers too.’

  The Mayor put on a cautious smile, showing Merrily to a chair near the hearth, where a log-effect gas fire fanned out tame flames. He opened a drinks cabinet, glancing towards the French window — perhaps, by daylight, you’d be able to see the castle ruins from here. Then he looked back, with uncertainty, at Merrily.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Watkins… what exactly was it that you said you did? I don’t fully…’

  ‘Perhaps…’ Bernie coughed. Sweat had pooled in the centre of his expanding male-pattern tonsure. ‘Perhaps I ought to explain, George, that Deliverance Consultant is the modern term for what we used to call Diocesan Exorcist.’

  A silent moment, flames flickering emptily among the artificial logs. Conscious of what the Bishop had said about her looking sinister, Merrily had dived into Chave and Jackson on Broad Street and picked up this pair of less-dark glasses that might even be taken as ordinary tinted spectacles. On the outside, the glasses looked light brown, but they turned these flames bright red, like a miniature synthesis of hell.

  ‘Merrily’s our adviser on the paranormal.’ Bernie sank into the leather sofa. ‘That is, the person who advises people who believe they’re having problems with… what we loosely refer to, George, as the unquiet dead.’

  There. He’d said it. His hands came together in his lap as the cushions broke wind with a soft hiss.

  ‘This young woman?’ George said. ‘Oh dear.’

  And then he changed the subject and went to get them drinks.

  Merrily saw, against a far wall, an elderly radiogram: polished mahogany case with gilded fabric over the speakers. She could imagine the records: nothing later than Elvis.

  She sipped her tonic water. ‘Mr Mayor, is there any history of… disturbance, unrest… around the Hanging Tower?’

  It had taken half an hour to get to this point, via the new restaurants (a good thing in general, better than nightclubs) the new Tesco’s (there was demand for it, and it could have been worse, long as it didn’t put the traditional butchers out of business) and the new people.

  The new people? Well, they had money, which they spent in the new shops. Buying the sort of old rubbish that George and Nancy, not so long ago, used to throw out. But at least the new people appreciated the town. Sometimes too much.

  ‘Disturbance?’ the Mayor said. ‘You mean these young people dancing around?’

  ‘No.’ Merrily looked at the Bishop. ‘I mean paranormal phenomena.’

  ‘Of what… nature?’

  The Bishop avoided her gaze and said quickly, ‘Merrily knows about the breathing, the gasping sounds. Alleged.’

  Alleged, huh? When I realized I was actually cringing into the stones, like a cornered animal, I… threw out a prayer, like a sort of yelp.

  George Lackland came to si
t down opposite Merrily, a leather-topped coffee table between them, with a hard-backed loose-leaf file on it.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s always been stories. You expect it, don’t you, in an old place? Different stories all over the town. Catherine of Aragon’s been seen, some say. There’s an old woman who walks through the churchyard — that’s a regular one. But Marion, aye, she’s probably the oldest. The breathing, like someone in a deep sleep, quite a few folk reckon they heard that. Nobody’s said they seen her lately, mind — not in years.’

  ‘People used to?’ Merrily said.

  The Bishop’s chin was sunk into his chest.

  ‘The White Lady,’ the Mayor said. ‘Marion of the Heath. Walked the ruins. And the path around the walls. And people who used to live in the flats at Castle House used to talk about strange noises and… what do you call it when things misbehave?’

  ‘Poltergeist phenomena?’

  ‘Aye. But, like I say, nothing about that lately. Although somebody did blabber on about strange lights round the old yew tree, year or two back.’

  ‘What kind of lights?’

  ‘Hovering lights.’ The Mayor made a ball shape between his hands. ‘Orbs of lights.’

  Routine stuff. Low-key energy-fluctuation.

  The Mayor’s eyes narrowed. ‘What are you looking for, exactly?’

  ‘I’m not looking for anything that isn’t there… at some level,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s just that what you’ve told me doesn’t sound as if it’s particularly bothering anyone.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You see, we don’t consider it our function to investigate all inexplicable phenomena just because they’re there. We like to think that we’re here to try and help people who are frightened or upset by what’s happening to them.’

  ‘Well…’ George Lackland leaned towards her. ‘Top and bottom of it is, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mrs Watkins, that a great many people have been very gravely upset by these deaths. Folks remember Mrs Mumford in the shop, and they were fond of that boy, too. Walked into my shop one day, asked if he could look at the old fireplace in the back, and the cellar. Very polite, very knowledgeable. All the little tearaways as breaks your windows and writes on your walls, and the one who falls to his death has to be the decent one.’

  ‘He didn’t fall from the Hanging Tower, though.’

  ‘He was the start of it. The start of something.’ The Mayor looked into her eyes; maybe he could see the discoloration through the glasses. ‘See, I truly love this old town, Mrs Watkins. We’re not from here; my family’s roots are in East Anglia, but we’ve been here nigh on two centuries — wool merchants originally.’

  ‘That sounds… pretty local to me, Mr Mayor.’

  ‘We’re settled, but we don’t feel we own it. Been selling furniture here for over seventy years — real furniture, hardwood, none of your stripped-pine rubbish. We believe in solidness and quality — what this town always stood for. Solidness. We can be relaxed about the side-effects of the tourism and the new people — because we’ve got a solid heart. And the Church… the Church has always played an essential role here, and still does.’

  George turned away, staring fiercely into the gas flames.

  ‘What about the owners of the castle?’ Bernie said. ‘What do they have to say about all this?’ He turned to Merrily. ‘The Earls of Powis, the Herberts, have owned the castle for many generations. Edward Herbert was MP for Ludlow in the early nineteenth century, prior to inheriting the earldom.’

  ‘Bit of a silence so far,’ the Mayor said. ‘Apart from taking the obvious steps to ensure it don’t happen again — plans to get that window barred, that kind of measure. It’s a question of what other steps might be taken. On what you’d call a spiritual basis.’

  ‘We’d have to go carefully, George.’ Bernie took a hurried sip from his brandy balloon.

  ‘Let me put it to you directly,’ Merrily said. ‘Do you personally really believe that the two deaths at the castle are in some way connected with a paranormal presence dating back to the twelfth century?’

  George Lackland grimaced at the stupidity of the question.

  ‘Top and bottom of it is, it don’t matter what I believe, Mrs Watkins. I’m the Mayor. My role is to go along with the will of the people. And among the older residents there’s a strong sense that something’s very wrong. Very bad.’

  ‘Is there a history of suicide here?’

  ‘Well, obviously—’

  ‘I mean in the rather lengthy period between the twelfth century and a few weeks ago.’

  The Mayor didn’t reply. Bernie Dunmore shot a warning look at Merrily, to which she didn’t respond.

  ‘I mean, what actually happened, do you think, to make two teenagers take—’ She bit off the sentence: no suggestion of suicide in Robbie’s case, although after last night… ‘Lose their lives in a place that had been the scene of just one suicide, over eight hundred years ago?’

  George Lackland looked at the Bishop. ‘Am I supposed to be able to answer that?’

  ‘George, I think what Merrily’s saying is that we have levels of response. Perhaps in the old days, the — let’s get the word into the open — the rite of exorcism was enacted without many preliminaries. Today, with the, ah, levels of bureaucracy within the Church…’

  ‘Is this lady going to help us, Bernard, or not?’

  ‘Of course she is,’ the Bishop said.

  Help us? Merrily had the sense of being woven into someone’s fabric. It was time to tease out George Lackland’s agenda. This was the man to whom the traders and tourist operators had gone when Mumford had started questioning them about Belladonna. This was the man who, as vice-chairman of the police committee, had leaned on the head of Shrewsbury CID, who in turn had contacted Annie Howe to get Mumford warned off.

  Right. She took a sip of tonic. ‘Erm… the strange people gathering around this yew tree below the Hanging Tower. With their candles, and their chanting. Who are they, Mr Mayor, do you know?’

  ‘Not local.’ As if this was all that needed to be said about them.

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘Oh… stupid. Horror-film clothes. You know the kind of thing.’

  ‘What I heard,’ Merrily said, ‘was that there’d been quite a few of them around the town recently. Possibly before the deaths.’

  The Mayor spread his hands. ‘It’s possible. We get all sorts comes and goes.’

  ‘And there was a bit of a fight with some local boys.’

  ‘More of that than there used to be, regrettably — street violence. Too much drink about.’

  ‘And someone got stabbed?’

  ‘First I’ve heard of that, Mrs Watkins.’

  But she’d seen the twitch of a nerve at the corner of an eye.

  ‘Perhaps people like this were… attracted here by the ghost stories?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’ He smiled apologetically and shook his bony head. ‘To be honest, I feel a little bit daft sitting here in this day and age talking about ghosties and ghoulies and things that goes bump.’

  ‘Oh, I get used to it,’ Merrily said. ‘But the thing is, before we can organize any kind of remedial action, we have to eliminate all the possible rational explanations. For instance, somebody told me that these kids in fancy dress are probably just fans of… one of your rich settlers? A singer?’

  George Lackland said nothing. Nothing twitched this time, but she was sure that she saw a quick glitter of anguish in the hollows of his eyes, and he planted levering hands on his thighs as if his instinct was to walk out.

  ‘Can’t remember her name… used to sing these mournful songs all about death and… and things like that.’ Merrily smiled ruefully at George. ‘Not your cup of tea, really, I suppose.’

  The flame-effect gas fire gasped, the Bishop’s brandy glass chinked on an arm of the sofa as he sat up, and she felt his curiosity uncurling in the air.

  ‘No
,’ the Mayor said at last. ‘Not my cup of tea at all.’

  He came to his feet, screwing his eyes shut for a moment and swaying slightly, rubbing a hand wearily over the back of his neck.

  ‘Ah, that’s the trouble with public life,’ he said. ‘Always some malcontent ready to shoot his mouth off.’

  ‘Something here you should be telling us, George?’ the Bishop said.

  22

  Stepmother

  The Bishop’s gaze swivelled back to Merrily, and in it was incomprehension… and suspicion.

  Well, she could understand it. The hour-long journey here had been filled with an explanation of her bruised eye and everything that had led up to it: Jemmie’s sordid e-mails, Mumford and Robbie’s computer and the history books and Jason Mebus. Not reaching the Departure Lounge until they were leaving the bypass at the Sheet Lane entrance into town, with the moist blue night dropping over Ludlow like the lid on a jewel box.

  And so not quite getting around to Belladonna.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to hide about this,’ George Lackland said. ‘Nobody could possibly expect me to like the woman.’

  He was standing up now, behind his cream leather chair, both hands gripping its wings. One of the bulbs in the chandelier had blown and was hanging there like a bad tooth, making the room seem just slightly tawdry.

  ‘When the boy came home with this girl, Susannah, she was everything you’d want for your son — respectable, steady, nicely spoken. And a solicitor, too, of course. Always useful to have a solicitor in the family, especially with a firm like Smith, Sebald and Partners.’

  Merrily glanced at Bernie, both eyebrows raised to convey that she had no idea what the hell the Mayor was talking about.

  ‘Sorry, George,’ Bernie said, ‘I’m a bit out of touch — which boy is this, Douglas, or, ah…?’

  ‘Stephen, the younger one. The one who went to university. Like Nancy said, when you think of the girls he might have brought home from that place…’

  ‘He’s, ah, engaged, is he?’

  ‘To this girl from Smith, Sebald, as I say. Very well established firm, as you know — offices in Ludlow, Bridgenorth and Church Stretton. She’ll be a partner one day, Bernard, no question of that.’