Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘Yesterday. When exactly is Beltane?’

‘April the thirtieth… Saturday? May Day Eve, anyway. When all card-carrying Satanists perform their blood sacrifices.’

‘Ah, yes. Probably mailed from an Internet café.’

‘Just some kid who’s learned how to construct a devil on the keyboard. With a website, you’re bound to get a percentage of this sort of crap.’

‘Unless, of course’ – Sophie looked up – ‘one decides to dispense with the facility.’

‘Scrap the message line? She wants to do that?’

‘The entire website, actually,’ Sophie said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve been asked, initially, to supply a list of all the e-mails it’s stimulated in the past year.’

Merrily went to the window, exchanging hard looks with the sky. This time, there had to be a mistake. The website was about offering straightforward advice to people experiencing problems they thought might be of paranormal origin. It included self-help procedures and useful prayers. It advised them to contact their local clergy if the problems persisted or, if they preferred to, e-mail, phone or write direct to this office.

She turned back to Sophie.

‘So how many people did contact us in the past year through the site?’

‘Not a great many. Perhaps thirty.’

‘And what percentage, would you say, were jokes or try-ons?’

‘I’d say about twenty per cent. A few were from children who genuinely thought they had a problem, but turned out to have seen too many episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer . A couple came from Women’s Institutes asking if you could address their meetings. We had, I think, four from people thanking us for the prayers and the advice and saying they’d actually worked and they were now sleeping better – that sort of thing.’

‘And how many requiring follow-up action?’

‘Seven. Mainly poltergeist-related, all subsequently dealt with by the local clergy – prayer and counselling.’

‘It’s a substantial number, when you think about it, for a largely rural diocese. What exactly has Siân said?’

‘She said she’d placed the issue of the website on the agenda for the next meeting of the Deliverance Panel and, as I say, went on to ask for detailed background information as to the site’s usage.’

‘What do you think her argument’s going to be?’

‘I suspect she’s going to dismiss the whole thing as costly and trivial. If anyone wants this essentially… esoteric service badly enough, they’ll go to the trouble of finding us. Of course, I may be quite wrong—’

‘Esoteric – that was her word?’

‘Unless I misheard.’

‘So we’re minority stuff. They’re pushing us into a back room and switching the light out.’

‘Or possibly a cupboard,’ Sophie said.

‘If that website has saved just one faintly timid person from—’

‘You don’t have to convert me, Merrily.’

‘No.’

They looked at one another in the dimness of the afternoon. The kettle rumbled towards the boil, distant lightning glimmered. Merrily sat down at the desk, her back to the window, and switched on the lamp.

‘Sophie, what am I going to do about this bloody woman?’

This morning she’d phoned Huw Owen, leaving a message on his answering machine. He’d come back to her just after twelve when she was getting into her black coat for the funeral. He hadn’t found out very much and none of it was encouraging.

Except that there appeared to be no hidden agenda. No worthwhile conspiracy theory. No credible faction, in or out of Canterbury, with a mission to destroy Deliverance.

Which, of course, didn’t mean it wasn’t bubbling under, somewhere.

Huw told her what he’d learned about Siân Callaghan-Clarke: fifty-one years old, formerly a barrister – which would explain her need to work with professionals like Saltash, the resident expert witness. Born in Winchester to an upper-middle-class, High Church, landowning family.

‘Word is,’ Huw said, ‘that the father was a traditionalist. Her younger brother would have the career, Siân was expected to marry well, raise kids – women’s stuff.’

Not a good time to impose those values. Siân had not only not married well, she hadn’t married at all, moving to Worcester as a criminal barrister and managing to raise two sons inside a comfortably loose arrangement with her head of chambers. He was still around, still in Worcester, and the sons were both at Oxford.

The Church?

‘Well, it was in the family,’ Huw said. ‘Uncle became Bishop of Norwich. Her brother – who she appears to have resented from an early age – is now an archdeacon, Exeter or somewhere. Siân, commendably enough, began to help some of the youngsters she was defending and concluded that the Church had the facilities to operate a support network for addicts and suchlike and wasn’t using them. It’s not that simple – as I’ve just been finding out up in Manchester – but it was enough to get her involved. And that was the time when the battle for women priests was on, and her younger brother, apparently, was strongly anti.’

‘That would do it,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh aye. That were the red rag, all right. She’d get into the Church and she’d leave the brat behind.’

As a priest, Huw said, Siân was exactly what she seemed: a modernist and a politician. Known to be tolerant of Islamic fundamentalism while deploring its equivalent in Christianity. Suspicious of evangelism and Alpha training. Considered opposition to gay clerics to be irrational to the point of superstition.

Talking of which…

‘Aye, well… there were rumours of her having a bit of a thing in Worcester with a bloke I trained with, Keiran Winnard – younger than me, charismatic in all senses of the word. She’d certainly be his type: striking blonde, plenty of style and fancy footwork in debate. Liked a woman with a bit of intensity, Keiran, as I recall.’

‘Risky, though, in the Church. In the same diocese?’

‘Wouldn’t be the first. Pure physical attraction, not necessarily a meeting of minds. Anyway, it must have burnt through quickly enough, leaving her even less well disposed towards the miracle-and-wonder lads than before. Happen that was the reason she got out of Worcester. Or she just thought she could rise faster in Hereford – smaller pool, bit of an outpost. Either way, looks like Hereford’s got her for the foreseeable future. And so have you.’

‘So maybe she sees Deliverance as a method of exercising control,’ Merrily said to Sophie.

‘You mean, over the wilder elements within the diocese? The charismatics, the evangelicals?’

‘If you consider that, in certain hands, exorcism itself can be very rigid and repressive… keeping the lid on the cauldron, as someone once said. Taking a dim view of the Charismatic movement, arm-wavers, happy-clappies, speakers in tongues, because of what they might be opening themselves up to. Look at my predecessor. He hated all that.’

‘But from a different perspective, surely.’ Sophie leaned into the lamplight. ‘Canon Dobbs lived an ascetic life – self-denial, fasting, long hours of prayer. A deeply spiritual man. Bitterly opposed to women priests, as we know, and I have no doubts at all where he’d have stood on the issue of gay clergy.’

‘With his back to the altar and a big cross in front. You’re right, it works both ways. Rationalism can be even more repressive, in its way: all possession is mental illness, all ghosts are psychological projections. Siân is potentially more restrictive than Dobbs.’

‘Then why…’ Sophie pinched her chin, forefinger projecting pensively along her cheek. ‘Why would she want Martin Longbeach on the Panel? A… well, a tree-hugger.’