Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘You really were a goth?’

‘A phase. We all linked arms under the stage and stood very still, like mourners around a catafalque. I didn’t like the music that much, to be honest. Too slow, a bit dismal. Occasional bursts of hysterical screaming. No tunes to speak of.’

‘What does she look like these days?’

‘Hardly any different. This long grey Victorian kind of cape that trailed in the mud. Same slightly beaky nose, same slightly crooked teeth.’

‘But in an attractive way. That strange kind of uneven beauty,’ Lol said.

‘Mmm.’ She tossed him a suspicious look. ‘So how close did you get all those years ago?’

He smiled. ‘Nice of you to imply I might have been brave enough at eighteen. No, we once played a very badly organized one-day festival in this half-flooded field in Oxfordshire. We were near the bottom of the bill – eleven a.m. – and she was in the prime sunset spot. We didn’t actually stay for her gig. But I did hear the discussion she had with the organizers about the level of facilities. Scary.’

‘Formidable woman.’

‘Hadn’t realized she was so posh until then. You don’t expect it. No, I never actually met her. She…’ Lol’s gaze had turned watchful. ‘She came down to the river last night because she’d heard there’d been a death?’

‘She asked a policewoman if it was a suicide. I thought that was a curious question. Suggested she knew who it was. Or maybe I was just thinking that because I realized this was probably the woman seen with Robbie Walsh. She certainly knew where he lived because Mumford saw her standing outside the house. Ironically, we were going to ask Mrs Mumford if she knew this odd woman personally. Thought that might solve something.’

Merrily could hear voices and footsteps from the nave. And laughter, which was good.

‘This gig I went to,’ she said, ‘when I was seventeen – the band were all dressed as undertakers and they wheeled Belladonna on stage in a coffin, on a bier.’

Remembering the album: Nightshades . Fairly sure she didn’t have it any more, or Jane would have found it. Maybe that was why she’d got rid of it. On the cover, Belladonna had been sitting in some kind of dusty chapel cradling a mandolin like a baby, a strap of her dress pulled down as if she was about to breastfeed the instrument. Subtly profane.

‘This guy you spoke to,’ Lol said. ‘He said the woman’s name was Mrs Pepper?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Prof told me Belladonna was married at one time to her producer, Saul Pepper.’

‘That’s it, then. I’ll phone Andy Mumford when I get home and confirm it.’

Whatever her connection was with Robbie Walsh, Mumford would find it. If you wanner stick with this ghost stuff, mabbe I’ll check out the real woman. The living woman . His mother’s drowning was hardly going to make his inquiries more restrained.

‘Lol…’ He was leaning back on the Victorian sofa, exposing the big-eyed alien on his sweatshirt. Lol the former psychiatric patient, drop-out psychology student. ‘You were an imaginative kid, right?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Did you never fall in love with someone who didn’t exist? Seriously.’

‘With me, it was always serious.’ Lol stood up. ‘Even the real ones, you turn them into something that doesn’t exist. You start with a beautiful face and you build around it something that might actually love you.’

She told him about Robbie Walsh and Marion de la Bruyère.

Lol said, ‘If he saw Ludlow as a refuge from something very bad… It was the end of the holidays, wasn’t it, when he died?’

‘Virtually.’

‘Maybe he really couldn’t bear to go back this time. Maybe he just wanted to stay with Marion.’

‘Suicide? Mumford’s given no indication that his home life was that bad.’

‘Everything can seem very closed-in at that age,’ Lol said. ‘The future’s like staring down the wrong end of a telescope. You can’t envisage anything more than a few months ahead, at most, and if you’re having a very difficult time you don’t see a way out, ever.’

‘He killed himself in Ludlow, dying the way she died, because that was the only way he could stay there?’

She looked into Lol’s eyes. Lol shrugged.

Slipping back into the nave for the Quiet Service, Merrily was trying to see this unlikely triangle: Robbie, Marion, Belladonna. The kid’s connection with a 1980s goth rock singer was the hardest to envisage.

‘Frankly,’ Lol whispered in the vestry doorway, ‘if it turns out he was suicidal, I can think of more suitable people to administer counselling.’

MERRILY SOMEHOW SENSED it and looked up maybe half a second before it was dismissed… and Sophie’s face was blank again.

Outside the gatehouse office window, muscular clouds were hanging over Hereford like a street gang closing in. Maybe it was the sudden darkening of the room that had caused her to raise her head; nothing to do with Sophie, the only person she knew who could convey disapproval without any change of expression – probably went with her breeding.

‘What’s wrong, Soph?’

‘I’m sorry?’

Sophie looked up from her computer. She was wearing a dark red woollen suit over a cream silk blouse. The Bishop of Hereford’s lay secretary over many years and several bishops. Worth her weight in pearls.

‘You scowled,’ Merrily said.

‘I don’t think so, Merrily.’

There was a muttering of thunder from Dinedor Hill or somewhere. Merrily got up from her desk. On Mondays she usually tried to come in for a couple of hours to review the Deliverance schedule, although lately there hadn’t been much of one. She was late today because of the afternoon cremation. A difficult funeral: people she hadn’t known before, and so it was all the more important to make it resonate. Huw wasn’t the only Deliverance minister to suggest that cursory, conveyor-belt funerals were leading to disquiet on both sides of the grave.

‘I’d better put the kettle on before the power goes.’

‘This isn’t Ledwardine, Merrily, the power isn’t going anywhere.’

‘It’s my turn, anyway.’

She filled the kettle and plugged it in, spooned tea into the pot then swiftly backed up and peered over Sophie’s shoulder at the computer. There was an e-mail in the frame.

Sophie, Re the ‘sample’ of Deliverance files that you mailed me this morning, this is not what I meant. I feel it is important that the whole team sees all correspondence before it is filed. I also think we should be able to access the database at all times of day, rather than having to trouble you during office hours. Please get back to me with your thoughts before close of

Sophie clicked it away.

‘Ah,’ Merrily said. ‘I see.’

Sophie gazed into the screen-saver photo of swans on the Wye, impossibly blue.

‘I tend to receive instructions most days from Canon Callaghan-Clarke.’

Outside the window, the sky was solid now, like a rock formation over Broad Street.

And, oh dear, you didn’t do this. You didn’t treat Sophie Hill as a servant. What you had to learn, if you wanted to avoid trouble in the workplace, was that Sophie served only the Cathedral.

‘And will you be getting back to her with your, er, thoughts?’

‘What do you suggest? For instance…’ Sophie went back into the e-mails. ‘Should I have sent her a copy of this?’

Happy Beltane, Ms Exorcist! Yes soon be Walpurgis Night!!! Why don’t you come out and let your hair down. ha ha ha.

( )

* I * Lucifer

‘This came through the website?’