Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘Ah,’ the Bishop said. ‘I think I understand. You mean Marion de la Bruyère. But that wasn’t the keep, was it, Mr Osman?’

‘It was the Hanging Tower, Bishop. I wrote some verse about her, for my calendar the year before last. Marion, whose endless death… is poised upon a midnight breath. Not… not awfully good, really.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘Three of you seem to know what this is about, but one of us doesn’t. Who are we talking about here? What does she do?’

‘She haunts,’ Bernie Dunmore said. ‘Allegedly.’

THE BISHOP SAID he was confused: too much, too fast.

‘Why did you want to know if Osman had seen anyone else on the tower? I mean, surely you don’t imagine that someone actually killed the boy?’

The ornate lamps in the square were white, like magnesium flares.

‘We have’ – Merrily slotted the Volvo into a corner, down by a darkened delicatessen and well away from the castle – ‘a kind of reason to try and eliminate the possibility.’

God , she was thinking, do we ? She had her window half-down, collecting music and laughter draining from a pub in a nearby street no wider than an alley, the sounds disconnected, somehow, as though on the tape-loop of a separate but parallel time-frame.

Eras overlapping: a disconcerting town.

All she’d told him earlier was about the supposed bereavement visions – that Phyllis Mumford had been in a distressed and confused state, that he was the only priest she seemed likely to open up to. There hadn’t seemed much point, at that stage, in going into what Phyllis had said about a woman.

But it was unavoidable now.

‘I see.’ The Bishop breathed in slowly. ‘That’s rather a difficult one, isn’t it?’

‘Only for a Deliverance consultant,’ Merrily said. ‘The rest of you are free to roll your eyes.’

‘If I could just say…’ Andy Mumford was a bulky shadow on the back seat. ‘The fact that Osman didn’t see another person don’t mean there wasn’t someone up there with the boy. Just they didn’t hang around afterwards.’

The Bishop shuffled. ‘You do know what you’re saying here, Andrew?’

‘After many years as a detective, Bishop, I think I got a basic idea.’

‘Yes, but what are you actually suggesting – kids fooling about and one falls off the tower? Or what?’

‘I was ready to believe,’ Mumford said, ‘that it was an accident. At first. Mabbe it’s what we all wanted at the time – no stigma with an accident. But now’ – he leaned forward between the front seats – ‘now it’s like something’s telling me, real strongly, that something en’t what it seems. You understand?’

‘Story of my life,’ Merrily said.

‘The night Robbie was found, after my sister ID’d the body, I go back to my mother’s house. There’s a woman outside. Long cape. Just standing there, looking across at the house. When I tried to talk to her, she walked off.’

‘What?’

‘What I could see of her face, she’d been weeping.’

‘Andy, you never even mentioned this before.’

‘Didn’t think too much of it afterwards. Spooked me a bit at the time, OK, but I was tired. Lot of neighbours been in and out the house. Lot of people dress funny in Ludlow these days – people going out to dinner.’

‘So the chances are your mother knows this woman?’

‘She was carrying a lantern – with a candle in it. Well, there’s a few shops in town now selling tat like that. You think, some crank, don’t you?’

‘We’ll certainly ask Phyllis about her,’ the Bishop said. ‘Perhaps clear it up.’

‘Meanwhile,’ Merrily said. ‘Can we…’ She squirmed a little. ‘Can we talk about Marion now?’

The ‘Dear Marion’ postcard. She talked about that.

‘When we go over there, I’ll ask Mrs Mumford if I can show it to you.’

‘Needs to be photocopied, I think, Merrily,’ the Bishop said.

‘Good idea.’

‘Then Andrew has to decide if the police should see it. Meanwhile, let me… let me get this right – this is a postcard, with a photograph of the castle on the front, written by Robbie Walsh to someone he actually addresses as… as Marion.’

‘Someone he imagines he’s walking with in the castle grounds, holding hands. And there’s a drawing of what appears to be a spectral female figure. Pleading with her to come to him. “I’ll be waiting,” he says.’

‘I see.’ Bernie Dunmore was silent for a moment. He seemed agitated. ‘What are your conclusions about that?’

‘The psychological one first?’

‘Please.’

‘Shy, solitary kid, fascinated by medieval history, besotted with Ludlow…’

‘You’re thinking fantasy-girlfriend,’ the Bishop said.

‘I don’t know. Is she fantasy-girlfriend material?’

He sighed. ‘All right… look… I do, as it happens, know something about this story. Goes back to the twelfth century. Or, in my case, about thirty-five years, to when I was a young curate. Here, as it happens.’

‘I didn’t know you were a curate in Ludlow.’

‘Not something I’ve ever emphasized on my CV. A bishop is expected to have been around. Unfortunately, once I’d lived here I didn’t want to end up anywhere else. Moved on, drifted quietly back. I’ve been, ah, fortunate.’

‘You jammy sod, Bernie.’

‘Yes, that’s another way of putting it. So… I happened to be a young curate at St Laurence’s when a chap called Peter Underwood – doyen of British ghost-hunters, though I didn’t know it at the time – was researching a book called, if I remember rightly, A Gazetteer of British Ghosts . It has quite an extensive entry on Ludlow – most of which, as it happens, is taken up by the story of Marion de la Bruyère. Marion of the Heath.’

She was usually described as ‘a lady of the castle’, Bernie said.

Which could have meant anything – possibly she was a lady-in-waiting, if there were such creatures in the reigns of King Stephen and his successor, Henry II.

Turbulent times. Less than a century after the Norman conquest, and the ownership of the new and highly strategic Ludlow Castle was in dispute. Stephen had put the fortress in the charge of a Breton knight, Joce de Dinan – arguably the source of the name Dinham, for the community under the castle’s perimeter wall, to the south-west. But the powerful baronial de Lacy family thought it should be theirs, and it was the conflict between Joce and the de Lacys that led to a young knight called Arnold de Lisle, a de Lacy man, being taken prisoner.

‘While not exactly established history, it’s certainly well-documented in a medieval epic known as The Romance of Fulk FitzWarrin ,’ Bernie said. ‘Seems that Marion de la Bruyère – described by one source as “a guileless damsel” – had fallen in love with the prisoner, Arnold, and helped him escape from the castle either down a rope or knotted sheets.’

And then – her fatal mistake – Marion had arranged to let Arnold back into the castle, on a later occasion, by means of a rope ladder.

‘While the two of them are otherwise engaged in Marion’s bedchamber, a large number of armed men from the de Lacy camp come swarming up the ladder to capture the castle. Now we know that happened – de Lacy did get the castle. Appears to have slaughtered a lot of people and set fire to property in the streets of Ludlow that night to make it clear that he was now running the show. In fact, some of the killing and the burning would have happened exactly where we’re parked now.’

‘Thanks for that, Bernie.’

‘Anyway, when she finds out what’s happening, Marion – full of remorse and fury at his betrayal – snatches Arnold’s sword and kills him with it. And then – not seeing, presumably, much of a future for herself – she throws herself from a high window in the Hanging Tower.’