Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘You’ve seen her?’

‘No. I thought she might already be here. Or perhaps she’s with the television people. Doing what she does so well.’

Lol looked at her austere profile. The clouds that had suffocated the sun were relaxing into evening, admitting a wafery moon. Her hair was curling up from the collar of her jacket.

‘What is it with you, Ms…’ Couldn’t remember her damn name.

‘Siân will do. What’s up with me, as I think you already know, is that my and Merrily’s attitudes to the practice of Christianity in a secular age are… incompatible. Never made much of a secret of that. Putting it simplistically, I think there’s no room for superstition in what we do, while she appears to nurture it.’

‘In which case – sorry to be so naive – why would you want to be connected with Deliverance? What’s your agenda?’

Siân looked across the enclosure, dark as a stagnant pond now, towards the Keep with its drooping flag. She sighed.

‘It begins to look,’ she said, ‘as if the agenda was Mrs Watkins herself. Doesn’t it? The ubiquitous, self-effacing, photogenic Merrily Watkins.’

‘Had her picture in the paper too often? Well…’ Lol shrugged. ‘That was always going to happen. She hates it. But if you do what she does and… and you look like she looks, then you’re going to get your picture in the papers.’

‘Who wasn’t here when we – the women of Hereford – were battling for the priesthood. Wasn’t out there with her placard. Wasn’t part of the movement. And was then presented with this outdated but inherently sexy role by a rogue bishop, subsequently discredited. Managing to emerge after his inevitable departure smelling of lavender and honeysuckle. And continuing, for heaven’s sake, to get away with it.’

‘Not always. And not undamaged.’

‘And all of it built on superstition.’ Siân finally turned towards Lol. ‘Do you know what really got to me? How, when she restored evensong in Ledwardine Church – evensong with a fashionably esoteric tweak – it became an immediate talking point because some local woman had apparently been cured of a life-threatening condition.’

‘Which she probably hadn’t had in the first place. Misdiagnosis, or the medical records got mixed up.’

‘Doesn’t matter. It was still all over the Internet, apparently, that the mystical vicar of Ledwardine had healing powers. And the following week it was reported – not in the Church Times , thank God, one of the other rags – that her congregation had doubled.’

‘Trebled, I think. But she squashed the rumours and it slumped again. So everyone’s happy. Except I expect you were really pissed off that she hadn’t run with it, gone the way of all the other messianic cranks.’

‘Always one step ahead,’ Siân said.

‘You make it sound political. She doesn’t think like that. She offended you just by being there.’

‘Yes,’ Siân said. ‘I suppose she did.’

‘So when you were approached by the Dean, whose good friend Saltash had decided he should make his skills available to the Church—’

‘No. The approach came from Nigel himself.’

‘What did he tell you just now?’

‘He didn’t have to tell me anything. He’d walked out on a disturbed child. That was enough. Whatever Merrily may think of me, I’m still a Christian. Of sorts.’ She looked down at her hands, crossed on her abdomen. ‘So I’ve come back. And I don’t quite know what to do about this, Mr Robinson.’

‘You’re asking me? A recovering psychiatric patient? An abuser of women?’

Siân was silent.

‘They can’t find Merrily,’ Lol said. ‘And they think my name’s Longbeach and I’m qualified to dispel spirits. They’re now telling the girl that I’ll do it.’

‘Do what, exactly?’

‘I was thinking about an exorcism of place. Seems appropriate. Doesn’t target anything in particular. Lightens things. Takes away the tension and produces a feeling of calm. Psychology rather than superstition. Also it’s the only one I’ve ever watched.’

Siân looked into the pool of darkness in front of them. ‘Is that what Merrily would do?’

Lol shrugged.

‘I couldn’t,’ Siân said.

Lol didn’t say anything.

‘I’m not sure I’d know where to start.’

‘If you were planning to reform it, you must have done some research with the Deliverance handbook.’

‘It appalled me. It’s fundamentally medieval.’

‘This is a medieval town. We’re in a medieval castle.’

‘I don’t carry a copy, anyway.’

‘As I understand it,’ Lol said, ‘it’s only a set of guidelines, that book.’

‘One can hardly make it up.’

‘You don’t have to make it all up.’

‘Yes, I do realize that elements such as the Lord’s Prayer are mainstays of all Deliverance… ritual.’

‘Ritual,’ Lol said. ‘I quite like you when you talk dirty.’

Siân said, ‘I want to say… that I wouldn’t insult either of you with an apology, but sometimes one’s own gullibility results in the most… indefensible behaviour.’

‘You can get holy water from the church or somewhere,’ Lol said. ‘I was with Merrily at a hop-kiln in the Frome Valley, where something unpleasant had happened. A lot of the routine stayed with me. Good memory for verse and things. Something you develop in my line of work, otherwise you’re liable to dry up in the middle of a gig.’

‘Of course,’ Siân said. ‘What’s your first name? I did know…’

‘Lol. Laurence. Like the poor guy they named the church after. Someone once told me what happened to him, but it’s slipped my mind.’

‘He was roasted on a gridiron over a slow fire.’

‘Yes, now I remember,’ Lol said.

Tinted by the last of an invisible sun, clouds hung like a sandbank over the round tower that sat in the Inner Bailey like a great turreted cake.

‘For God’s sake,’ Siân said, ‘let’s not either of us be bloody stupid. Just have one last attempt to find Merrily.’

Leaving the church’s main door unlocked, Merrily entered through the huge stone porch and found the lights, the acoustics of the great church giving out a sigh as she went in. Entering a church alone at night was disturbing some secret alchemical process and, increasingly, she’d thought that Jane was probably right about this being at least partly connected with the site itself.

Partly a pagan thing, but it was all mixed up in those days.

She knelt in front of the altar in the chapel of St John the Evangelist, took off her fleece to expose the pectoral cross and prayed for the wisdom to see this through, to drop the curtain before the final act in an insane tragedy.

Prayed that a very cursory knowledge of forensic pathology acquired over two extraordinary years had not led her to the wrong conclusion about the death of Jonathan Scole.

Prayed for the courage to go up the tower and face the mad woman of Ludlow.

She had to. No one else would know how to approach it. If the police went up – as, surely, before long, the police would – it would all be horrifyingly over before the first of them put a boot on the parapet.

How long had Belladonna been here? Had she been behind that door when Merrily came in with George Lackland? Had she listened to George’s account of events leading up to their fevered coupling under the weathercock?

Merrily pulled on her fleece, opened the tower door into total darkness.

Obviously, there would be lights here – most likely bulkhead lights at intervals all the way to the top. But if she switched them on she’d be advertising herself.

Not good.

Only one solution. She padded into the nave, came back flicking her Zippo to light a tea-lantern from the gift shop and found she was no longer alone.