Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘Well…’ Jon Scole thought for a moment. ‘I should tell you – if he hasn’t already – that there’s a certain issue on which old George and me swap confidences.’

‘Belladonna?’

Jon grinned. ‘Bane of his life. Lovely lady – undermining every bloody thing he thinks he stands for: moral decency, all this stuff. And he can’t do anything, ’cos very soon she’s gonna be at the very heart of his eminently respectable family. Respectable! He’s an old crook, like all bloody councillors. You ever know a councillor who was in it for the public good?’

‘But why would he share confidences with—? I’m sorry…’

‘A yob like me? Because I mix with the kind of people who come into contact with Bell. And even Bell herself, now and then. Better placed than anybody, me, to keep an eye on her. I mean, I can see his problem – it must be scary having a woman like that around.’

‘A woman like what?’

‘A woman with enough money never to have to give a shit for people like Councillor Lackland. A woman who’s fascinated by the mysteries of life and death, and is open to… experiments.’

‘What kind of—?’

Jon tapped his nose. ‘All in good time, Mary. Tell me about yourself.’

‘Well…’ She’d spent some time working out what she wanted to say and what it was best to conceal. ‘I work for the Diocese of Hereford…’

‘You’re a real, actual priest.’

‘I… yeah.’

He frowned. ‘See, that’s not good, Mary. She doesn’t like priests, Bell. Likes churches but she doesn’t like The Church. If you get me.’

‘Mmm.’

‘So what’s The Church’s angle on this?’

‘Good question. All right… I work for the division of the Church that investigates hauntings and… things of that nature.’

‘That’s more or less what George said, but I wondered if he was having me on, so I said I’d talk to you. So you’re actually an exorcist, right?’

‘Well, I… yeah.’

‘You don’t look a lot like Max Von Whatsisname.’

‘I’m a disappointment to everyone.’

‘There isn’t some silly bugger wants you to go in and exorcize the castle, is there?’

‘Nothing formal, as yet.’

‘Because that…’ Jon was lifting his glass. He put it down with a bang. ‘That would be fuckin’ insane, Mary! Apart from what it’d do to my business, you’d be undermining the very essence of Ludlow. Bell would go spare.’

‘For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t like to do that either,’ Merrily said. ‘But I’m interested in why you think it would be insane.’

‘Really? All right. Come with me, then.’

‘Where?’

‘Not far.’ He stood up and put on his motorbike jacket. Its chains rattled like an alarm, and two retired-looking couples at the next table all turned round at once.

Jon Scole wiped his mouth and beard with the back of a hand. ‘You psychic yourself, Mary?’

‘No more than anybody.’

‘As long as you’re receptive, you’ll feel it. There’s some places with more resonance than others, especially in this town. Not sure why, but it’s fact. Physically, it’s got a lot to set it apart – built on a kind of promontory, two rivers, a very ancient church… and I mean very ancient. And, like, the whole atmosphere here, you can feel it… it’s rich and heavy, like it’s drenched in some ancient incense, you know what I’m saying?’

‘Actually, I do. Especially in the evening.’

‘You don’t need the evening.’

DOWN PAST TESCO’S, towards the bottom of Corve Street, yew trees overhung a high stone wall and they could see the roof of the chapel.

‘Dogs,’ Jon Scole said. ‘They reckon the dogs know.’

He had to shout over an old yellow furniture van clattering out of town. It had one word diagonally on the side: LACKLAND.

‘Dogs?’ Merrily said.

‘Dogs are supposed to go bonkers this end of the Street. Out of control. Well, I’ve seen it. Some old dear hauling on the lead: Brutus! Heel! No chance. Very strong atmosphere. Accumulation of psychic energy. So, anyway, this is where she walks.’

‘Sorry… who?’

‘Who do you think?’

Jon Scole led her through the gateway, where cars were parked next to a circle of youngish yews, gloomily wrestling for the light. The chapel was set back, regular and Victorian-looking like the chapels you found in cemeteries, which was what it appeared to have been.

There was an information board on a lectern. It told you that the chapel had been built partly on the site of a Carmelite friary dating back to 1349, in use until suppressed by Henry VIII in 1539 when its buildings were sold and demolished. And then came the cemetery.

‘No, don’t read it, Mary, come and see it.’

Jon Scole led her down past the chapel, which was some kind of print workshop now – and that was good, she thought, much better than dereliction, brought a flow of people down here, kept up a flow of energy.

Merrily blinked. Bloody hell, she was thinking like Jane.

But there was an energy in Ludlow, the kind you didn’t find in too many ancient towns, and even the rolling roof of Tesco’s was urging it in. The town was prosperous, sure, but not in any self-conscious way, and what Bernie Dunmore had said about the buildings being preserved in aspic was misleading. Nothing that she’d seen here was in aspic; it was all still in use, and it buzzed, and it hummed, and it chattered.

Even the graveyard. A path ran down the middle; Jon Scole was strolling along it, but Merrily had stopped. There were cemeteries and there were graveyards, and the thing about cemeteries was that most of them weren’t places you’d want to end up.

Jon Scole turned and came back. He was beaming.

‘Surprising, eh? When they ran out of room at St Laurence’s this was where they came. And then this one got full. There’s supposed to be fourteen hundred graves here.’

Very few of them were fully visible any more because someone had taken an inspired decision. The result was that St Leonard’s graveyard was vibrantly alive: a tangly, scuffling, mossy-green delirium, busy with birdsong, rich with moisture and slime. Merrily looked around, saw a fat, hollowed-out yew tree and two shiny, rippling domes of ivy that probably used to be headstones. In the summer, the air would be shimmering with butterflies, haunted at night by bats and moths.

‘They gave it back to nature,’ she said. ‘They just… let it go.’

‘What you got here, Mary, is part of a kind of secret passageway linking the oldest parts of town – and the two rivers. The Corve down at this end, which is this narrow, private kind of river, and the big one, the Teme, at the other.’

Between the trees, over the bushes and the rooftops, you could see the tower of St Laurence’s, as if this graveyard was still intimately linked to it. Which, in a way, it was. Merrily was enchanted. Not in some flimsy, poetic way; there was a real and powerful enchantment happening here.

Maybe it was a combination of the rose-coloured glasses and her own disconnection from the diocese: Jane’s pagan forces reaching out for her. Maybe this was just an overgrown graveyard.

‘We’re going the opposite way from the way she walks,’ Jon said, back on the path. ‘She comes up from The Weir House, up the steps and into The Linney, which goes from just above the Teme, up to the church and then starts again on the other side of the church and comes down again, and you wind up here. Magic.’

‘How often does she… walk?’

‘Whenever the mood takes her. No, that’s wrong, she probably follows some pattern. Late at night, or in the hour before dawn. Something’s got to be turning her on, though, hasn’t it?’