Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘Evidently.’ Merrily felt rage clogging her chest. ‘Siân, are we becoming a fu— focus group?

‘That’s becoming a derogatory term, I think.’

‘Because focus groups appear to be designed to obliterate the individual intuition by which something as inexact as Deliverance often stands or falls.’

‘One viewpoint, certainly,’ Siân said. ‘We could discuss that issue, also.’

Afterwards, Merrily sat watching the wind in the apple trees.

She folded up the pad and rang the Bishop at the palace behind Hereford Cathedral. Answering machine. She left a message asking what he was doing tonight, anticipating his groans, but this was important, even if she wasn’t sure exactly why. Intuition, maybe.

She rang Andy Mumford on his mobile.

‘Hold on one minute,’ Mumford said, and she heard him apologizing to someone else, and then he came back with a different acoustic – outside. ‘I was in with Mr Osman. The witness. Feller who saw Robbie fall?’

‘You went back to Ludlow?’

‘En’t far.’

‘Oh God, what are we doing, Andy?’

‘Think I’ve found a woman,’ Mumford said. ‘Mabbe two.’

‘HARD TO CREDIT,’ the Bishop said. ‘My God, how it’s changed.’

The street had narrowed, closing around the crawling Volvo. Merrily couldn’t see how the town centre could have changed much at all in about five centuries.

She had her window wound down. The dusk was dropping over Ludlow like muslin on antique trinkets, the cooling air singed with woodsmoke. The medieval timbered buildings on either side seemed to be reaching for each other, gables bent towards a creaking kiss under the dusty copper sky.

‘Not the buildings,’ the Bishop said. ‘Most of this town’s in aspic. Lay a finger on a brick and English Heritage will crucify you.’

‘With antique nails?’

‘Goes without saying. No, I meant the people. Even when I was living here, on a Saturday night you’d have the pub trade and not much else. Now look at them – listen to their accents. TV actors live here now, you know – and news-readers, politicians. And what are they all doing? Where are they all going? They’re going to dinner. Now call me a puritan…’

‘Inappropriate. You haven’t got the waistline for it.’

‘You’re very frivolous tonight, Merrily.’

‘Actually, I’m nervous,’ she said, ‘and I’m not sure why.’

The plan had changed. Andy Mumford wanted them to meet up at the spot where the man had seen Robbie Walsh fall. There were some things that Mumford thought Merrily should know before she took the Bishop to see his mother.

The Volvo was stuck in an unexpected queue of vehicles on the bottleneck corner near the Buttercross. She tapped the accelerator as the engine began to falter, recalling reading somewhere that Ludlow now had more Michelin stars than any other town its size in the country.

‘What exactly started this invasion of restaurants, Bernie?’

‘I think they had a food festival, which was a huge success. Perhaps someone realized there was something irresistible about expensive meals served in crooked oak-framed rooms with sloping floors. I don’t really know why it took off. All I know is that it’s virtually destroyed my chances of ever moving back one day. Nowadays, if you’re going to even look in an estate agent’s window in Ludlow, it’s advisable to swallow a Valium first.’

Bernie Dunmore was probably the first Suffragan Bishop of Ludlow ever to be given Hereford – safe pair of podgy hands after a difficult period. All the same, he was often heard to say he wished they’d left him alone; seemed to have personal history invested here.

‘Which is how we arrive at a possibly dangerous imbalance,’ he said. ‘It’s always been a friendly town, but there’ll be resentment, inevitably, from people who were born here and have been thoroughly priced out. Even the likes of me – I wasn’t born here, but there’s nowhere quite like it. Once you’ve been here, you never want to leave.’

‘You do the Lottery, Bernie?’

‘Is that a sin, do you think, in my position?’

‘Only if you pray for a result.’

The traffic broke and they emerged into the market square, turned sandy by the last of the sunset. There were shops either side of the square, and a wider street sloped down to the left: warped and tangled medieval timbers giving way to graceful Georgian terraces with their soft lights, and the wooded hills behind.

Serene, timeless, secure in itself. All of that.

The Bishop shaded his eyes against a sudden sunset flare before they drove back into shadows.

‘Straight on, Merrily. And then, just as you think you can’t go any further, follow the wall to the left.’

The wall. Directly ahead, across the square, flat as a film-set in the muddy dusk, was the reason, maybe, this town had survived to become so cool and comfortable in the twenty-first century.

By day, as Merrily remembered, the castle was more obviously ruined: sunny sandstone, like a big play area. Now, in fading light, it was seizing power again, dragging its history around it like a heavy military cloak. It was a royal history.

‘Didn’t Catherine of Aragon live here for a while?’

‘With the short-lived Prince Arthur,’ Bernie said. ‘And then she married his brother, who became Henry VIII, and the rest is… Oh, and the two ill-fated sons of Edward IV, they were here. The Princes in the Tower. Here in happier times – presumably. People tend to be happier here.’

She headed left, where he’d told her, along the walls. Ludlow Castle: lost and won, besieged and battered, but still hugging this craggy site, as if to stop the town crumbling into the river below.

‘I suppose hundreds of people must have died here.’

‘It’s just that most of us thought the deaths were over,’ the Bishop said.

Steeply down through Dinham, another ancient piece of town with a small medieval chapel dedicated to the martyred St Thomas of Canterbury, and across the bridge over the River Teme, with the castle behind them – from this side, as much of a fortress as it had ever been. She supposed that the highest tower was the keep, from which Robbie Walsh had fallen.

‘I suppose I ought to have come to the funeral,’ the Bishop said. ‘But it was David’s show and, with the TV cameras and everything, I knew there’d be scores of people there. Anyway, I didn’t think the Mumfords would remember me. I just bought my papers there.’ He sighed. ‘Suppose that’s why I felt obliged to come with you tonight, even though I’m not entirely sure what this is about or why she’d want to talk to me, especially.’

‘She liked you because you didn’t have much to say about God.’

Bernie grunted. ‘Limited opportunity to bring the Almighty into a transaction involving a packet of Polos and the Shropshire Star .’

She smiled, guessing he’d used the Mumfords’ shop as an information bureau, picking up on local gossip. He could look jovial and vague, but Bernie didn’t miss much. When he’d asked her how she was getting on with the Deliverance panel, she’d been glad it had been too dark for him to see her eyes while she was murmuring that this was something they perhaps ought to discuss. When there was more time. Like several hours.

‘Phyllis and Reg must have been well into their seventies when I knew them,’ the Bishop said. ‘I remember when they sold the shop we sent them a good-luck card.’

‘You ever see the boy?’

‘I’ve been trying to remember. I don’t think so. But he didn’t live here all his life, did he?’

‘Only the best bits, apparently.’

Across the river, the land gave in to ranks of dark conifers and the lane took them uphill. Cottages and a hotel had been flung into the hillside, lights coming on in them now. The road kept on climbing, and they did almost a U-turn and emerged, unexpectedly, onto a natural parapet.