Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

They’d talked on the phone soon after nine, when Jane, clear-eyed and superficially undamaged by minimal sleep, had carried off a slice of toast and marmalade to the bus stop. Merrily had told Jane a certain amount, not everything, about last night. She’d told Sophie – because there were probably confessionals less secure than this office – the whole situation. More or less.

‘Oh yes,’ Sophie said. ‘On the filing cabinet – this morning’s Daily Mail .’

‘Oh.’

The paper was folded at page five and a fuzzy picture of Jemima Pegler at a party, collapsed in laughter, with two other girls holding her up. The circumstances of her death had come to light too late for yesterday’s morning papers to indulge in more than straight reporting.

What a difference a day made: on the other side of the page from Jemima was a line drawing of a woman in a medieval robe and headdress.

A leap across time… Eight centuries separated them. But now Jemima Pegler and Marion de la Bruyère are united in tragic death.

Obvious the media would discover Marion. And nobody waited for an inquest any more; the police line ‘no suspicious circumstances’ was a strong enough pointer to suicide. The story said Jemima’s death had the hallmarks of a copycat suicide, but who was she copying – Robbie Walsh or the death-plunge of the twelfth-century woman whose ghost was said to haunt the castle?

The story is certainly well known in Ludlow, according to Jonathan Scole, who runs Ghostours, which organizes lectures and guided walks around the town’s haunted buildings.

‘Our tours are getting increasingly popular, and this poor kid may well have come to one. We do occasionally get groups of teenage girls.

‘Marion is a very romantic figure, and one of the highlights of the tour is gathering under the castle wall at the precise spot where she fell.

‘It’s intended to be pure entertainment, and I’m afraid I do tend to ham it up a bit.

‘Naturally, it horrifies me that the story could have had this kind of impact on someone, but I doubt it did. If we’d had a multi-storey car park, it’s quite possible she would have jumped off that.

‘I think if someone’s determined to die, they’re going to do it somehow, aren’t they?’

But an experienced psychiatrist who is studying the Ludlow deaths, said that a second fatal fall at the castle was disturbing because it indicated the formation of a behavioural pattern.

‘Saltash.’

‘He does seem to be cornering the market in what one might call soundbite psychology,’ Sophie said.

‘He might be right, actually – the teenage pack-mentality, the need to feel that, even in death, you’re not alone. Anyway, someone has to be around to do the psychobabble.’

‘How far have you read?’ Sophie murmured.

‘What?’

and teenage girls are particularly susceptible to the fantasy world of ghosts and the supernatural as an escape from the ordered world of school and the prospect of exams,’ said Dr Saltash, who is also a special adviser on mental health to the Diocese of Hereford, which includes Ludlow.

‘Special adviser on mental—?’ Merrily let the paper drop to the desk.

‘You notice he doesn’t neglect an opportunity to file psychic phenomena under the general heading of fantasy,’ Sophie said, ‘thus detaching it from the Church’s official area of belief.’

‘This isn’t going to stop, is it?’

Merrily slumped down next to the window. It wasn’t warm out there, but there was enough early-afternoon sunshine for a few people on Broad Street to be wearing dark glasses. She took hers off just as the phone rang and Sophie looked up.

‘Ah.’ Sophie’s hand froze over the receiver. ‘I thought there might be some minor aspect of last night that you hadn’t mentioned.’

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Merrily tilted her head to the window. The sunlight hurt. ‘Purplish last night, now a delicate bottle green.’

‘What are you putting on it?’ Sophie picked up the phone.

‘Just the glasses.’

‘Gatehouse.’ Sophie tucked the phone between shoulder and chin, just above the pearls, leafing through her letters. ‘Yes, Bishop, I’m doing them now, they’ll be in the lunchtime post… Certainly… Well, yes, she’s here now as a matter of fact… I will.’ Sophie put down the phone. ‘He’s coming over later. He wants to talk to you.’

Merrily had started to roll up the Daily Mail into a stiff, tight tube. She stopped, sensing the change, and saw that Sophie’s face had hardened and darkened in a way that… just didn’t happen.

‘God almighty, Merrily! What the hell are you getting into?’

‘It was— OK, it wasn’t exactly an accident, but it—’

‘You do know that’s what’s known as assault causing actual bodily harm? What did they do to Mumford?’

‘Some…’ Merrily let the paper unroll, shaking her head helplessly. ‘Some damage. Nothing serious. We hope.’

Before leaving home, she’d talked on the phone to Mumford’s wife, Gail, who’d sounded cold and guarded, saying Mumford could hardly turn his head this morning. Hardly the first time he’d brought injuries home, but that was supposed to be all over now, wasn’t it?

Sophie wasn’t letting it go, either.

‘Did he even think about what might happen to you last night, when he took on these savages?’

‘I don’t suppose he did.’ Merrily reached for her bag; a woman with a painful black eye was allowed a cigarette. ‘With hindsight, I think he was quite happy when they invaded the garage. He was on home ground. Recognized one.’

‘Can we at least assume this will bring him to his senses?’

‘Sophie, we both know it’s going to make him worse.’

Blokes like Mumford – the bag-carriers, the local-knowledge men, the stoical, taciturn, imperturbable, down-beat, low-key, salt-of-the-earth types – when those guys started to come apart, it was like landmines: you were never sure where the next one was going to explode.

‘We now have – or we had last night, it’s destroyed now – evidence that Robbie Walsh was scared to go home to Plascarreg. We have it from his e-mail correspondence. Also his letters to… We also know he fantasized about Marion de la Bruyère. Saw her as some kind of a confidante and wrote to her.’

The postcard she’d seen, next to Robbie’s sketches, was now making perfect, heartbreaking sense.

Sometimes I pretend you are walking next to me and we are holding hands and it’s brilliant!!!! Everything is all right again, and I never want to leave cos this is our place… I was so miserable I didn’t think I could stand it till the end of term. Its worse than ever there. I hate them, they are stupid and ignorant and they are trying to wreck my whole life. The nearer it gets to the end of the holidays the sadder I feel and don’t want to go back.

‘If there’s anything that makes me feel a very unchristian hatred, it’s bullying. From cruelty to animals to…’ Merrily drew in too much smoke, suppressed a cough as colliding clouds sucked a sunbeam from the desk between her and Sophie. ‘We even know who some of them are, now. They as good as admitted it. But bullying’s not quite a crime, and neither’s suicide any more. Three people dead, and none of them crimes. Doesn’t make them any less dead.’

‘This woman,’ Sophie said. ‘Mrs Pepper…’

‘I don’t know what to think about that any more, Soph. She’s a woman who makes mournful music, evidently chosen as a suicide soundtrack by people who run unsavoury websites and chat-rooms. There’s undoubtedly a cult – or cults – of suicide operating on the Internet. If she is into all that and she talked to Robbie Walsh – as we know she did – and he was suicidal, is it remotely conceivable that she would actually have encouraged him to jump off that tower? I mean, I hate bullying, but I can understand the spiritual vacuum it comes out of. But this…’