Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

Merrily glanced at Siân, stone-faced on the fringe of the torch beam.

Wow.

‘How do I…?’ Sam inched back, towards the window. ‘How do I know it’s not a scam? Why you doing it now?’

‘It’s taken a lot of preparation,’ Merrily said. ‘We don’t take it lightly. We’ve had holy water and things to prepare. And I have to walk all around the area, sealing off points of access. We don’t want to let bad things seep through.’

There was silence – and then Sam said, ‘I’m the bad thing.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘She won’t let me sleep,’ Sam said.

‘Who are we talking about, Sam?’

Siân whispered to Merrily, ‘Give me a moment?’

‘OK. Two minutes, Sam? Some final things to organize.’

Around the corner, in the one-time great hall, Siân said, ‘I don’t know if what Nigel managed to elicit from her might help?’

‘Anything might help. I don’t see this as a cosmetic exercise any more.’

‘In which case… Nigel, I think, also became aware that we might be dealing with something unexpected, to which counselling might not provide a complete solution.’

‘He admitted that?’

‘I said, I think he became aware of it.’

‘Ah. Go on.’

‘The Pegler girl was a bully. It’s hardly unknown for someone who is herself subject to emotional bullying to find someone else on whom she can inflict stress. Pegler was taunted by her peers – boys, mostly, I would guess – for being overweight and unattractive. She initially sought solace with Samantha – a slightly younger and somewhat malleable neighbour. But Jemima was a very angry, rather vindictive person, and soon began to control Samantha, making her do things she would not normally have considered at all appropriate behaviour – like experiments with pills and shoplifting. And then, seeing how far she could push it, Jemima lured away Samantha’s boyfriend, with sexual favours, thus enhancing her own power and her superiority.’

‘And then Sam meets Robbie, and, although she might not particularly fancy him, he certainly represents a more innocent, less pressured world. It’s literally a holiday.’

‘But is it less pressured?’ Siân said.

‘Robbie’s fallen in love, maybe for the first time – at least the first time with someone who’s not been dead for centuries. And he wants Sam to share his world. Even calling her Marion. That’s pressure.’

‘Our feeling was that Samantha was finding it disquieting to be associated with Marion, the ghost of a young woman who died in a situation of appalling violence. She’s not particularly interested in medieval history – certainly not even close to Robbie’s level of obsession – and when he kept appealing to her to come back to Ludlow, to spend weekends with him, visiting historic remains she… eventually rebuffed him. And then, unfortunately, he died, and she – already feeling horribly guilty – was unwise enough to share her anguish and became the target for personal taunts by her peers at school. And then… all this came to the notice of Jemima Pegler. Did you see the pictures of her?’

‘I saw some party pictures.’

‘Not those. Nigel had a school photo, in which she’s glowering and looks… almost demonic. You know that famous Myra Hindley photograph, with powerfully hypnotic eyes? I would guess that’s the side of Pegler to which Samantha was exposed. The tactic is that, after stealing the boy, Harry, she professes shame and self-hatred, to wheedle her way back into Samantha’s life. Once she’s there, however, she’s worse than ever. We thought that, at one stage, Sam was on the verge of admitting that the girl had been physically assaulting her. She was certainly a violent person, subject to mood swings and severe depression – of which her parents, by the way, were aware. And, in fact…’ Siân moved away into the darkness, ‘she had been receiving medical attention.’

‘She was seeing a psychiatrist?’

‘For a time, Nigel discovered, she’d been prescribed medication – Seroxat, we understand.’

‘Where have I heard of that?’

‘You probably read about it in the papers.’

‘Serotonin?’

‘Increasing serotonin in the brain as an antiodote to depression. Seroxat was given to thousands of children in the UK. It then began to be linked with suicide and self-harm in some of them.’

‘I’m with you.’

‘Nigel’s initial, somewhat superficial suggestion that Jemima Pegler’s suicide was a form of escape from the mundane…’

‘Was bollocks, basically.’

‘Was a premature reaction because he simply wanted to be involved. When he found out more, it became clear that Jemima’s suicide – as the very circumstances, with an overdose of heroin, suggest – was an act of terminal aggression. And it does seem to have been related to this legend of the woman, Marion – who herself committed an act of extreme violence and then killed herself. Exploiting Samantha’s vulnerability to taunts in the wake of Robbie’s death, Jemima sends her distressing material from a suicide website. Samantha, a little unbalanced by now, sends Jemima in return the Internet material she’s received from Robbie relating to Marion – to which Jemima reacts by suggesting that they “leave behind their bodies”, or some such… I’m probably not putting this very well.’

‘You’re putting it brilliantly,’ Merrily said. ‘What we’re looking at, if we go along with it, is Jemmie first attempting to lure Sam into what might be a suicide pact. Maybe bringing along enough heroin for them both, and then, when Sam doesn’t turn up…’

‘We can’t know what was going through her head. All that matters now is what’s in Samantha’s head.’

‘Which is Jemmie, superimposed over Marion. Sam believes Jemmie is still out there and demanding Sam fulfils her side of the bargain. She’s taken up residence in Sam’s subconscious, she appears in dreams… I think we’re looking at a severe case of bullying from beyond the grave. How did Nigel propose to deal with it?’

‘In the short term,’ Siân said, ‘my guess is he had absolutely no idea.’

‘Now we can talk,’ Bell said. ‘Now I feel safe.’

Just looking at her turned Lol’s stomach cold.

She was sitting up on the wall between two raised battlements. She’d slipped off her shoes, the way she used to do on stage, and she was rubbing her bare heels against the stone through the hem of her long dress.

She’d casually leaned the mandolin case against the wall and then… he couldn’t believe how lightly she’d swung herself up there. Couldn’t believe how anyone who wasn’t a seasoned steeplejack could sit where she was sitting, with her back to that drop.

All she had to do was tip herself gently back – a hundred and thirty-five feet to the street.

Unless some jagged stonework broke her fall and her spine.

‘They let me hold him,’ Bell said, ‘in the hospital. Private hospital – my father paid. I had a room.’

‘The… dead one.’

‘I’d asked for a guitar, to take my mind off what was to come, but I found I couldn’t handle one over my huge pregnant belly, so somebody brought me a mandolin. I couldn’t play it properly, but I could fumble out simple tunes, and when they brought him in I laid him there and played to him: “Wee Willie Winkie”.’

‘When did you know there were going to be two of them?’

He had to keep her talking now.

‘I became aware of a death having taken place inside me.’ Pulling the mandolin case up onto her knees. ‘Turned out that one baby was strangled, I think, by the cord – I didn’t ask too many questions, wasn’t about to become a student of obstetrics. I know they were non-identical, or apparently they might both have died. I didn’t want to see the survivor, he was going to be someone else’s. But this one… he’d died inside me. I’d absorbed his spirit, you see.’