Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

Even the Mayor looked like part of the façade. His forehead jutted like a mantelpiece over the deep-set embers of his eyes. He looked more like a bishop than the Bishop.

‘Nancy sends her apologies, Bernard. Meeting of the festival committee. Some very big names coming to town this year.’

‘You mean the few who don’t live here already?’ Bernie said. He was still in his episcopal purple shirt. He’d told Merrily that George would expect this.

She followed the Mayor down the hall to his drawing room, unbuttoning her black cardigan so that the dog collar was fully on view. She wasn’t insecure about the women’s priesthood any more, but he might be.

‘This is nice,’ she said.

Well, it probably had been, once. The room was lodged in the era when cream leather three-piece suites were cool, and carpets were always fully fitted because bare floorboards were a sign of penury. There was a high ceiling, with mouldings and another crystal chandelier. French windows revealed a moon-bathed sunken garden, and that really was nice.

‘Yes, we’re fortunate – if that’s the word – to have quite a number of famous folk living here now.’ George’s voice had an Old Ludlow roll, Shropshire easing into Hereford. ‘We seem to have become a bit of a refuge from London – actors, television personalities, political people…’

‘Singers?’ Merrily said.

‘Aye, singers too.’

The Mayor put on a cautious smile, showing Merrily to a chair near the hearth, where a log-effect gas fire fanned out tame flames. He opened a drinks cabinet, glancing towards the French window – perhaps, by daylight, you’d be able to see the castle ruins from here. Then he looked back, with uncertainty, at Merrily.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Watkins… what exactly was it that you said you did? I don’t fully…’

‘Perhaps…’ Bernie coughed. Sweat had pooled in the centre of his expanding male-pattern tonsure. ‘Perhaps I ought to explain, George, that Deliverance Consultant is the modern term for what we used to call Diocesan Exorcist.’

A silent moment, flames flickering emptily among the artificial logs. Conscious of what the Bishop had said about her looking sinister, Merrily had dived into Chave and Jackson on Broad Street and picked up this pair of less-dark glasses that might even be taken as ordinary tinted spectacles. On the outside, the glasses looked light brown, but they turned these flames bright red, like a miniature synthesis of hell.

‘Merrily’s our adviser on the paranormal.’ Bernie sank into the leather sofa. ‘That is, the person who advises people who believe they’re having problems with… what we loosely refer to, George, as the unquiet dead.’

There. He’d said it. His hands came together in his lap as the cushions broke wind with a soft hiss.

‘This young woman?’ George said. ‘Oh dear.’

And then he changed the subject and went to get them drinks.

Merrily saw, against a far wall, an elderly radiogram: polished mahogany case with gilded fabric over the speakers. She could imagine the records: nothing later than Elvis.

She sipped her tonic water. ‘Mr Mayor, is there any history of… disturbance, unrest… around the Hanging Tower?’

It had taken half an hour to get to this point, via the new restaurants (a good thing in general, better than nightclubs) the new Tesco’s (there was demand for it, and it could have been worse, long as it didn’t put the traditional butchers out of business) and the new people.

The new people? Well, they had money, which they spent in the new shops. Buying the sort of old rubbish that George and Nancy, not so long ago, used to throw out. But at least the new people appreciated the town. Sometimes too much.

‘Disturbance?’ the Mayor said. ‘You mean these young people dancing around?’

‘No.’ Merrily looked at the Bishop. ‘I mean paranormal phenomena.’

‘Of what… nature?’

The Bishop avoided her gaze and said quickly, ‘Merrily knows about the breathing, the gasping sounds. Alleged.’

Alleged, huh? When I realized I was actually cringing into the stones, like a cornered animal, I… threw out a prayer, like a sort of yelp.

George Lackland came to sit down opposite Merrily, a leather-topped coffee table between them, with a hard-backed loose-leaf file on it.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s always been stories. You expect it, don’t you, in an old place? Different stories all over the town. Catherine of Aragon’s been seen, some say. There’s an old woman who walks through the churchyard – that’s a regular one. But Marion, aye, she’s probably the oldest. The breathing, like someone in a deep sleep, quite a few folk reckon they heard that. Nobody’s said they seen her lately, mind – not in years.’

‘People used to?’ Merrily said.

The Bishop’s chin was sunk into his chest.

‘The White Lady,’ the Mayor said. ‘Marion of the Heath. Walked the ruins. And the path around the walls. And people who used to live in the flats at Castle House used to talk about strange noises and… what do you call it when things misbehave?’

‘Poltergeist phenomena?’

‘Aye. But, like I say, nothing about that lately. Although somebody did blabber on about strange lights round the old yew tree, year or two back.’

‘What kind of lights?’

‘Hovering lights.’ The Mayor made a ball shape between his hands. ‘Orbs of lights.’

Routine stuff. Low-key energy-fluctuation.

The Mayor’s eyes narrowed. ‘What are you looking for, exactly?’

‘I’m not looking for anything that isn’t there… at some level,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s just that what you’ve told me doesn’t sound as if it’s particularly bothering anyone.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You see, we don’t consider it our function to investigate all inexplicable phenomena just because they’re there. We like to think that we’re here to try and help people who are frightened or upset by what’s happening to them.’

‘Well…’ George Lackland leaned towards her. ‘Top and bottom of it is, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mrs Watkins, that a great many people have been very gravely upset by these deaths. Folks remember Mrs Mumford in the shop, and they were fond of that boy, too. Walked into my shop one day, asked if he could look at the old fireplace in the back, and the cellar. Very polite, very knowledgeable. All the little tearaways as breaks your windows and writes on your walls, and the one who falls to his death has to be the decent one.’

‘He didn’t fall from the Hanging Tower, though.’

‘He was the start of it. The start of something.’ The Mayor looked into her eyes; maybe he could see the discoloration through the glasses. ‘See, I truly love this old town, Mrs Watkins. We’re not from here; my family’s roots are in East Anglia, but we’ve been here nigh on two centuries – wool merchants originally.’

‘That sounds… pretty local to me, Mr Mayor.’

‘We’re settled, but we don’t feel we own it. Been selling furniture here for over seventy years – real furniture, hardwood, none of your stripped-pine rubbish. We believe in solidness and quality – what this town always stood for. Solidness. We can be relaxed about the side-effects of the tourism and the new people – because we’ve got a solid heart. And the Church… the Church has always played an essential role here, and still does.’

George turned away, staring fiercely into the gas flames.

‘What about the owners of the castle?’ Bernie said. ‘What do they have to say about all this?’ He turned to Merrily. ‘The Earls of Powis, the Herberts, have owned the castle for many generations. Edward Herbert was MP for Ludlow in the early nineteenth century, prior to inheriting the earldom.’