Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘So how badly do you think he fancies you?’ Jane said.

‘He’s seventy-one, flower.’

‘The new dangerous age. They’re getting in as much sex as they can before it’s too late. Apparently, at that age they can only hold an erection for five minutes max, and it’s counting down all the time, did you know that?’

‘Oh, Jane…’

‘And, listen, you’ve got to stop calling me “flower”. You’ve been calling me “flower” since I was seven.’

‘I’ll try.’ Merrily pulled her coat from the peg. ‘What are you doing today?’

‘In the absence of his girlfriend, I’ll probably help Lol finish painting Lucy’s living room.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Jane peered down at her, hands on hips. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The guy from Q magazine’s coming to interview him. Teenage girl walks in, the guy remembers Lol’s history.’

‘Oh, that is…’ Jane bounded downstairs. ‘That is like totally ridiculous. It was twenty years ago. He was a kid. And he was fitted up, and if the guy from Q ’s done his research he’ll know that.’

‘No smoke, flower. Just stay away until he’s gone, OK?’

‘Hah!’ Jane stopped, with an arm wrapped around the black oak post sunk between the flags like a tree stump at the foot of the stairs. ‘Now I understand. If the journalist sees me, Lol will have to explain whose daughter I am. And we can’t have that coming out, can we?’

Merrily sighed. ‘It’s a music magazine. They wouldn’t be interested anyway.’

‘Yeah, but doesn’t the same firm publish Heat ?’

‘Jane, please? Humour me?’

Feet crunched the gravel outside and the front door was rapped. Merrily unbolted the door, telling herself that some Deliverance teams worked like this all the time, in tandem with a bloody shrink.

At the Eight till Late, now the only worthwhile shop in Ledwardine, a partitioned strip along the side of the main window was full of handwritten notices.

PUPPIES. Border Collie/Lab cross. Good working strain. Parents can be seen. £40… RESPECTABLE CLEANER NEEDED TWO DAYS A WEEK… MOUNTAIN BIKE, NEARLY NEW. EIGHTEEN GEARS.

That kind of stuff. Even the personal columns of the Hereford Times were loaded now with ads like: Live Adult-fantasy Chat… Venus’s 24-hour Wankline . But village noticeboards never changed – unless ‘respectable cleaner’ was some little-known rural euphemism for bondage-supervisor.

This window was Jane’s last hope, anyway. She’d checked out the prayer board in the church. She’d even, for the first time ever, been through the parish register to see if, by chance, somebody had endorsed their marriage vows in the hand that had also scrawled VICERAGE.

She’d photocopied the poison-pen note before giving it back to Lol. OK, maybe it wasn’t that poisonous. It was just that they all had to go on living here, and Lol and Mum had been through all kinds of crap already, and it just really pissed Jane off that there was some mean-spirited git in this village who begrudged them a hint of happiness.

And Mum was the vicar and therefore too nice to deal with it, and Lol was too timid, and so…

Mobile hairdresser. Women and men catered for.

She pulled the photocopy from her jeans, held it up to the window. Close.

Jim Prosser, who ran the shop, waved to her from inside. Jane put away the paper, waved back. Jim knew everybody in Ledwardine, must have seen a fair few handwritten shopping lists and weekly orders, for delivery. And he knew all about Mum and Lol.

Maybe not. And the lettering wasn’t that close.

She walked off down Church Street. Sharp Saturday sun slanting on Ledwardine, the black and white cottages and shops all tarted up for the early tourists looking for pseudo-antiques and maybe a weekend cottage to display them in.

Predatory Londoners on the spree. Jane had read in one of the Sunday property supplements that, now you couldn’t find a garden shed in the Cotswolds for much under half a million, the Welsh Border was no longer considered too remote for commuters. So Ledwardine, this classic calendar village still enclosed by ancient orchards, was well in the cross-hairs. Even its one-time council estate no longer looked like a council estate, with its new hardwood windows, rendered brickwork, conservatories bulging out like transparent blisters.

Hereford’s estate agents were doing faster business than Venus’s Wankline.

Lol had somehow squeezed in, though Jane guessed that his mortgage on Lucy’s house was crippling. And knew that when she got round to needing a place of her own there’d be like no chance here. And she liked Ledwardine, didn’t want it to become Beverly Hills with a botox population and Jim Prosser forced to stock disgusting pâté de foie gras to stay in business.

But unless you had a farm or something to inherit, you were stuffed. At least when the Church kicked her out of the vicarage Mum could move in with Lol. If that was acceptable to Mr Vicerage.

Who might be here right now on the square, watching.

Jane wandered around, keeping an eye open for Eirion’s car. After Mum had put her off going to Lol’s, she’d called Eirion at home in Abergavenny, and he’d said, yeah, OK, he could probably try and cobble together a few quid for the petrol; he’d come over. Less enthusiastic than he might have been. Was something cooling off? It was true that there were times when she felt she needed some space, maybe go out with someone else, just to, you know, compare. But the thought of Eirion with another girl… she couldn’t handle that.

She stopped in front of the two-up, two-down terraced cottage, separated from the pavement by a ridge of new cobbles. Lucy’s house. A little black Nissan was parked outside behind Lol’s clapped-out Astra. The man from Q ? She thought of going round the back and letting herself in through the kitchen door that Lol never locked. Just sitting in the kitchen, listening.

But she knew that if Lol was being too self-deprecating she’d just get annoyed and give herself away. And she was annoyed enough already, at the carrion crows from Off scooping up Ledwardine. And at herself for being so insecure.

‘You must feel I’m rather on your back,’ Saltash said, cruising onto the Leominster road.

He had dark glasses on and his leather seat eased well back. There was a buttermilk sun, and the hedgerows on either side of the road were greening up almost in front of their eyes.

‘Well, I… tend to think that if you arrive with a psychiatrist most people feel a bit threatened,’ Merrily said. ‘Some of them have really had to steel themselves to approach someone like me, and so… we probably need to think of a way around that.’

Saltash chuckled. ‘Just as well I’m no longer a psychiatrist, merely a new member of the team who wants to learn.’

‘Probably a few things I could learn, too,’ Merrily said, being diplomatic for the moment. She was wearing civvies, jumper and skirt. In another parish, you didn’t make a show of what you were.

The BMW was swallowing miles in small, easy sips. When Saltash slowed for the Leominster traffic island, the engine made a thick and fleshy sound, as if it was powered by rising sap. With the size of insurance premiums and the cost of petrol, you peered into a sports car these days and almost invariably saw white hair and driving gloves. Merrily tightened her seat belt.

‘So what exactly do you want to know about ghosts, Nigel?’

‘Ghosts?’ Saltash twisted his head towards her, the cords in his long neck like piano wires. ‘Oh, ghosts are terribly interesting. Don’t you think? I doubt there’s ever been a wholly convincing study, though.’