Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘Policemen don’t just drop their mates.’

‘Times change, Merrily. We didn’t used to have divisional chiefs like Howe. So you tell Mumford: any officer spotted discussing the weather with him, it’s a red-card situation. Do you think you could convey that to him?’

Merrily nodded. There was nothing to be said. Mumford was so far out of line he probably couldn’t even discern a line any more.

‘Good,’ Bliss said. ‘Now let’s talk about poor Jemmie Pegler.’

it was realizing i just did it to keep him quiet and so he’d keep paying for the drinks. what’s that say. im anbodys after a few drinks and they just laugh at the desperate worthless fat bitch and when your worthless thats the bottom. your never gonna come back from that are you

Merrily winced. ‘Who’s this one to, Frannie?’

‘Girlfriend. Found it on the end of a reply from the other girl. Karen went to talk to the other girl. She seemed genuinely shattered. Said Jemmie Pegler’s e-mails always went over the top – wanted her mates to think she was a woman of the world who’d had so many men she was bored with sex. Girl thought it was all bullshit.’

‘Doesn’t seem like that to me.’

‘In which case…’ Bliss put a stiff-backed photo envelope in front of Merrily with another e-mail on top of it. ‘The girl said she thought this was bullshit, too.’

they’ve gone out again so i looked in the bathroom cabinet just now and im thinking what would happen if i emptied every packet and every bottle in there and swallowed the lot. well just be sick as a dog most likely. how sad is that, sam. im not going out sad. im not. when i go theyll fucking know ive gone.

Merrily read it a second time, then opened the envelope.

It was a flash photo, in colour: a party pic of a fleshy girl, laughing. Short black hair gelled into gold-tipped spikes. A nose-stud with an implausible royal-blue gemstone. She was gripping a bottle by its silvery neck.

‘When did the computer come in, Frannie?’

‘Soon after we got a firm ID. Last night.’

‘And would Karen have been working on it last night?’

‘She was certainly on last night, and it’s much nicer tucked up in an office with a computer and mug of tea than going out on the cold streets, so probably. Why?’

Merrily went back to the e-mail. ‘This line about not going out sad. Seems to echo what someone apparently said on the radio this morning – that this kind of public suicide was a way of saying, “Now you’re all going to know who I am.” ’

‘Who said that?’

‘I’m probably being paranoid. Dr Saltash, interviewed by Radio Hereford and Worcester. Is he officially assisting the police?’

‘Possibly. He’s done it before. The Ice Maiden’s fond of psychological consultants, profilers, all these buggers who’re supposed to be doing our job for us.’

‘Mmm. And Siân Callaghan-Clarke.’

‘Who?’

‘Colleague of mine.’

Callaghan-Clarke on DCI Annie Howe, the night of the Deliverance Panel: I get on very well with her .

‘Why paranoid, Merrily?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You said you were probably being paranoid.’

‘Oh, it… it’s just that Nigel Saltash has been inflicted on me as a psychiatric consultant.’

‘He probably volunteered when he saw your picture.’

‘Do you have a reason to say that, or…?’

‘Hmm.’ Bliss did a wry smile. ‘If he is a mate of the Ice Maiden’s, forget I spoke. Have a look at this one.’

i want to go away. want US to go away where they cant get at us do you know what im saying. im sick of *guys* im sick of *going to london* in nicked cars only it always turns out to be Worcester and im sick of loading the poxy dishwasher. i want to GOOOOOO AWAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY FOR GOOD!!!!

Merrily went back to some of the earlier e-mails about Jemima not wanting to go to school any more, but not wanting a job either. Jemima professing to despise girls who stuck with one boy longer than a few weeks – suggesting that boys usually dumped her within that time-span.

‘Doesn’t want to live at home, but she thinks it must be crap to have a place of your own and have to clean it. So… she’s overweight and has a reputation as an easy lay because she must be desperate. Self-esteem at rock bottom. Bored with going out with blokes who nick cars because there’s nowhere worth driving to in them. Was she ever diagnosed as clinically depressed?’

‘Parents say not.’

‘Drugs?’

‘In normal life… possibly. Hard to say. When she died, however— This is well off the record, right?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘The window in the ruins we’re fairly sure she went out of is not actually that high up. Certainly not compared with the top of the tower that Robbie Walsh came off. You can’t get to the top of Jemmie’s tower without a ladder – it’s hollow. So you’re going out of one of the reachable windows – quite a drop the other side, and it could kill you, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. Unless, that is, you’ve already shot yourself full of enough heroin to make Keith Richards play the wrong chords.’

Merrily looked up, blinking.

‘She shot up before she jumped,’ Bliss said. ‘Threw the syringe out the window first, it looks like. SOCO found it underneath a yew tree, with her mobile a few feet away, both some distance from the body. PM this afternoon showed cardiac arrest.’

‘Is that—?’

‘Common enough, with an inexperienced user. More often than you’d think, the first fix is the last. Sometimes they don’t even have time to take the needle out before they’ve gone. Dr Grace thinks she might’ve been dead before she hit the ground, but we’ll never know that.’

‘God.’

‘So for all the drama, it’s a sad little death, Merrily. Mobile shows she tried to call her mate, Sam, before she did it. See, we know she wouldn’t have had any problem at all getting the stuff. A useful by-product of getting into Jemmie’s computer was it led us directly to a dealer we didn’t even know about in Ledbury. She’d had Es and dope from the same guy. So delightfully indiscreet, these kiddies.’

Ledbury: pleasant, picturesque old place at the foot of the Malverns. You didn’t think of it happening there. But then, it happened more or less everywhere now.

‘And some links to bigger players in Hereford,’ Bliss said. ‘For all she never spoke to her parents, she’s chatting away to us, from the other side of the grave. Talking of which…’ Bliss spread out some typescript. ‘Read this.’

with a plastic bag u can tie it round your neck but its not really necessary and it will take u much longer to get it off if u change your mind!!! Wot is good about plastic bags is that u dont look really horrible when they find you like with some methods of suffocation cos your eyes dont come out all bloody.

‘You can also read about the delights of hanging yourself,’ Bliss said.

‘This is an Internet chat-room, right?’

‘A specialist suicide chat-room. Adults advising unhappy kids on how to top themselves. Can’t describe what I’d like to do to these bastards with a few plastic bags, but then a few of us Catholics still think suicide’s a sin.’

‘Did Jemmie Pegler join in the discussions in the suicide chat-rooms?’

‘Just eavesdropped, I think. Lurking, as they say. Been doing it, on and off, for weeks, it looks like. Downloaded quite a lot. So we know she’d been dwelling on the possibility of suicide for quite a while.’

‘But no clues as to why she chose this method, this place? No mention of Robbie Walsh? Or Ludlow Castle?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You see, the point is that Robbie fell from the big tower, the Norman keep. No history to that. But Jemima wasn’t the first to go off the Hanging Tower.’