Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘What about the dead girl?’

‘Especially that. That’s… horrific.’ Merrily stood up, steadying her mug of tea. ‘I’m going to suggest that Mumford talk to Frannie Bliss, see if he can find out what the police have uncovered. I think what Bernie’s saying is that it needs to be sorted – explained – before local people start putting a superstitious slant on it.’

‘Does that really happen any more, in our secular society?’

‘ Especially in our secular society,’ Merrily said. She reached out for Lol’s hand. ‘Nothing wrong, is there?’

‘I… no.’

‘You’re OK about the Bristol gig?’

‘I’ll just take lots of drugs,’ Lol said.

She peered at him to see if he was smiling. He smiled.

A few minutes later, he watched from the front window as she moved across the edge of the cobbled square to the vicarage gate. He felt vacant, spare. She was working seven days a week, letting herself be used to further other people’s agendas. In the past week, he’d written about half a song that was never going to be more than a filler track on the next album, if there was a next album. He felt incomplete, worthless.

The fire was burning low and the room was laden with shadows as dense as old clothes. It was time he got the electricity connected.

MUMFORD DIDN’T WANT to talk to Frannie Bliss.

Well, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to Bliss, he said on the phone, just that he didn’t want to put the DI in a difficult position.

Mumford, reluctantly, as Joe Public: a crisis of confidence.

‘You do want to find out about this?’ Merrily said. ‘How this girl’s suicide ties in. If it does.’

‘Suppose I wouldn’t mind, aye.’

Almost certainly Welsh Border-speak for, Yes, I will never rest again until I know. Outside the scullery window, the apple trees’ budded branches dangled uncertainly, and the grey-green moss gleamed coldly on the stone wall between the vicarage garden and the churchyard. Spring had stalled in frosty spurts of morning mist, the exhaust of winter.

‘You heard the local radio, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Some of the early stuff.’

The breakfast lead on Radio Hereford and Worcester had been an extended report live from Ledbury. Not unexpectedly, the parents weren’t talking. Anonymous neighbours said that the dead girl, Jemima Pegler, used to be a helpful, friendly kid, once, but she’d changed. Neighbours in small towns didn’t like to use words like sullen. They said more withdrawn lately.

‘You leave it on for the studio discussion?’ Mumford said.

‘Didn’t have time.’

‘Your friend Dr Saltash?’

Merrily gripped the wooden arms of her chair, Ethel the cat taking off from the desk and raking up a page of the sermon pad.

‘Introduced as a retired consultant psychiatrist with Hereford hospitals, special consultant to the Department of Health, and the author of a paper on self-harming in children and teenagers.’

‘Andy, was this man always bloody ubiquitous, or is it just my paranoia?’

‘Said he couldn’t really comment on an individual case but in the general way of things this particular method of suicide – public place – it was usually a cry for attention. A child saying, You’re all gonner know who I am now, kind of thing.’

‘And two near-identical deaths in more or less the same spot?’

‘Didn’t make much of that. Once a place gets known for it… like scores of folk jumping off Beachy Head, ennit?’

‘He mention your mother?’

‘Not in so many words. Old folk, that’s not so emotive, is it? Not like kids.’

‘And we still don’t know what the police think.’

Giving Mumford another opportunity to say he’d contact Bliss.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I gotter go into Ludlow this afternoon, see about the inquest, get an undertaker on standby for the ole girl. Might talk to some other people while I’m there. Let you know what I find out, all right?’

‘Please.’

‘’Course,’ Mumford said, ‘no partic’lar reason why you shouldn’t give the boss a call.’

‘Bliss?’

‘Always got time for you, as I recall.’

‘And then, like… tell you what he says.’

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Mumford said.

‘Andy Mumford,’ Frannie Bliss said nostalgically. ‘Merrily, I just can’t tell you how much I miss the miserable bastard. The faded rugby-club ties, the knackered tweed jackets he probably inherited from his dad…’

‘His dad’s still alive, Frannie.’

‘Figure of speech, Merrily.’

‘Unlike his mother.’

‘Ah… Jesus.’ Over the sounds of phones and fractured laughter in the Hereford CID room, she heard the side of his fist bump the desk. ‘I’m not thinking, am I? I’m sorry. I was gonna ring him, Merrily, it’s just…’

‘Difficult?’

‘Yeah. Strangers, I can handle the sorry-for-your-loss routine, and when it’s a working copper, you all go out and get drunk together. But a retired DS who never wanted to go. Never even got pissed when he left – you know that? We’re in the pub for his presentation, and he’s shuffling about a bit, trying to pretend he can’t wait to see the back of us. And then I look around and he’s like… just not there any more. Gone. Evaporated. Always that bit of distance, mind: him local, me incomer.’

‘Been trying for two years to get him to stop calling me “Mrs Watkins”.’

‘No chance,’ Bliss said. ‘So… Andy’s slumped in his garden, like a bloody old smouldering bonfire, thinking the Shropshire cops are sitting on information that could reveal the truth about his nephew’s death, right?’

‘And there’s also the question of his mother. And now…’

‘The girl. Listen, I’ve gorra say at the outset, this is not really my case. True, both kids came from this division, but it’s Ludlow’s headache, for which we’re frankly quite glad. I mean is it a case? I don’t know. Has it been a case for you, as it were?’

‘I’ve never yet had anything so clean-cut as “a case”, you know that.’

‘Go on, then,’ Bliss said, resigned. ‘Tell me why you’re interested.’

So Merrily told him about Mrs Mumford and the bereavement apparition/delusion/hallucination. Well, he knew what she was about. He was a Liverpool Catholic, tended not to laugh at her. Not often, anyway.

‘Funny, I remember me ma, when me uncle got killed on the railway, she swore she’d seen him walking up our front path. Didn’t know he was dead, then. Opens the front door, nobody there. Family’s a funny thing, Merrily. What did you do?’

‘Nothing. I had a psychiatrist with me. Not an entirely happy situation, but I won’t go into it now. Bottom line is, what she subsequently said, in front of Andy and me, was that a woman had taken Robbie. Later, she appeared to be suggesting that a woman had pushed him off the tower.’

‘How did she know that?’

Merrily sighed. ‘He’d told her.’

‘Ah,’ Bliss said. ‘The old phantom-witness scenario.’

‘I knew you’d be impressed.’

‘Don’t get me wrong—’

‘I’d have been dubious, too, Frannie, except we talked to someone who’d seen the boy with a particular woman on two occasions. Once in the grounds of Ludlow Castle.’

‘And?’

‘What do you top detectives call it these days when you’ve got a feeling?’

‘We call it time to keep very quiet, Merrily. Because, in the modern, computerized, CCTV, DNA, CPS-conscious, politically correct, focus-group fuckin’ police service, we do not do individual feelings any more.’

‘And there was me thinking you were the last maverick cop under forty. Man who needed to live life on the edge.’