Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

Merrily switched off the set. The phone had stopped ringing, and Sophie brought it out of the drawer.

‘A girl,’ Merrily said. ‘A fifteen-year-old girl. What’s it mean? Another one.’

‘Children are impressionable,’ Sophie said.

She used to teach.

Merrily reached for the phone. ‘I’ll ring Andy. He mustn’t’ve known anything about it, either, until he switched the news on.’

Mumford’s line was engaged.

‘Probably ringing the sergeant he knows at Ludlow. Poor guy must feel right out of the loop when something like this happens and he finds out from the news like the rest of us. Especially when it’s going to add a lot of fuel to his own suspicions.’

‘Merrily, as the reporter said, there’s no reason to think Robbie Walsh’s death was anything other than accidental. Children have always been impressionable. Now they’ve become horribly… extreme. They want extreme experiences, extreme sports, sensations…’

‘Death?’

‘They see death on TV, and it’s usually rather exciting.’

Merrily pulled the Silk Cut from her bag. ‘Bloody hell, Sophie.’

Sophie frowned at the cigarettes.

‘When I was a child, the country had just come through a world war, and people were simply grateful to have survived, and we children were aware of that. Today… some of them seem to treat life almost like an unwanted present that they might as well take back. I’m sorry, Merrily, if I seem to be losing my Christian compassion. I’m sure there’ll be a thoroughly heartbreaking story behind it.’

The phone rang. Merrily grabbed it.

‘Andy?’

‘Ah, you are still there,’ the Bishop said. ‘I suppose you’ve heard the news from Ludlow.’

‘Just caught the last part of the TV piece.’

‘Tragic,’ the Bishop said. ‘Awful… wasteful. Three deaths, three… and in fact it’s more than tragic, it’s nightmarish, now, in ways I…’

‘We don’t know where she’s from?’

‘Other side of Herefordshire. Ledbury, I think. That is, George— I rang an old friend in Ludlow, George Lackland, the Mayor – you saw him on the TV thing. Used to be my senior churchwarden. George says the police are saying she seems to have hitch-hiked across.’

‘Thirty-odd miles? Forty?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Do they know why?’

‘Will they ever?’

‘Witnesses?’

‘Someone on the bowling green below The Linney appears to have seen her fall. No one inside the castle was aware of it, although it must have happened while the place was open to visitors. So easily done, you see. You can’t follow everybody around. She apparently paid to go in and just… never came out. Nightmarish.’

‘Was she dead when they found her?’

‘I’m not sure. George thinks there may have been complications. But if she was alive when they found her she didn’t survive long.’

Outside, the rain had started, like nails on the window.

‘Bernie… erm, should we be… involved in any way?’

Merrily heard his breath, slowly expelled.

‘I don’t know. Something did strike me when I saw the TV pictures. Actually, I feel rather foolish and trivial even mentioning it at a time like this, but you just know that some people in the town are going to be talking about it. This sort of gossip… one can’t do anything to stop it. You, ah… Marion. You remember Marion.’

‘I think I can just about remember Marion, yes.’

‘And we were all thinking, yes, but… wrong tower.’

‘The keep, as distinct from the Hanging Tower.’

‘Precisely. Well, you wouldn’t know the layout of the castle, but I do. And there it was, on the news.’

‘Sophie and I missed the beginning of the report,’ Merrily said cautiously.

‘Well, they didn’t make a point of it, but they wouldn’t know either. However…’ The Bishop coughed. ‘They showed it from the outside. Unmistakable. This time, it was the Hanging Tower.’

THAT NIGHT, LOL boiled some water for tea, using a Primus stove in his kitchen, leaving Merrily to finish dressing by firelight. He had something to tell her, but it could wait.

When he came back into the living room with the tray, she was sitting on the end of the sofa, small and demure, with – unless he was deluding himself – the same glow on her face that he’d once seen by the light of altar candles, and her hair tied back with a rubber band. But, too soon, the glow was fading.

‘OK?’

‘I’ll go up to the bathroom later, with a torch and a mirror, to check the fine details.’

‘That’s not exactly what I meant,’ Lol said.

As so often, it had been a touch furtive. Curtains surreptitiously drawn. Cushions from the sofa, this time, on top of freshly washed paint cloths on the flagstones. Like teenagers, when the parents might come in… only the parents were the parish.

‘Jane kept a straight face,’ Merrily said, ‘when I said it was my turn to help you with the painting. And then she spoiled it by murmuring something I didn’t quite catch, about brushes and paint pots.’

Lol smiled. Merrily looked around the fire-lit parlour with its bounding shadows. There were always shadows. Lol thought about Lucy Devenish, who’d made him read the poems of Thomas Traherne, the seventeenth-century Herefordshire minister who believed that God wanted you to be happy. Sitting there listening to your mournful, wistful records. It’s spring! Open your heart to the eternal! Let the world flow into you!

Lucy’s last spring, as it had turned out. Suddenly, he could almost feel her in the room with them – Lucy sensing Merrily’s underlying gloom and frowning, and turning, now, towards him, poncho aswirl, eyes like the smouldering core of the fire.

Do something , Lucy commanded.

Lol gazed into the top of the chromium teapot.

‘I see three male presences looming over you.’

‘Mystic Laurence, huh?’

‘One’s a retired detective, who hates the way his world is being fragmented. One’s a bishop, for whom retirement is looming, and he doesn’t want his longed-for haven spoiled. And the third is a retired psychiatrist, who… Actually I don’t think there’s such a thing as a retired psychiatrist. They never give up analysing.’

‘Wrongly, of course,’ Merrily said.

‘But the message is: retired people are the new delinquents – too much time, nothing to lose. Beware of them. Essentially, the teapot is saying this is not your problem.’

‘Easy for the teapot to say.’ Merrily went to sit on the hearth. ‘Last night, when he rang me in the church, Bernie was, “Oh, let’s draw a line under it.” Tonight, he’s virtually saying, “Sort this out.” ’

‘ “Sort this out for me.” ’

‘He does seem to feel a spiritual responsibility for that town.’

‘Because he used to work there. And hopes to retire there. So maybe nothing spiritual about it at all, really,’ Lol said.

‘Not sure about that.’ She took the pot away from him and poured tea for them. ‘Anyway, he thinks this girl’s death is going to cause a lot of dangerous speculation. And he’s probably right. The legend of Marion de la Bruyère is very well known in the town, and this is her tower. The idea that the girl didn’t know about that seems remote.’

‘Might have a terrible appeal for a certain kind of teenager in despair, sure.’

‘More so, probably, than the accidental fall of a fourteen-year-old boy, from a different tower. I just… There has to be a connection we can’t yet see.’

‘Had the girl been seen in Ludlow before?’

‘We’re not going to know that until they confirm her identity and issue a picture.’