Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘It’s all word-of-mouth in our profession, Mrs Watkins,’ Mr Corey said. ‘Any gossip of this sort gets out, it can do us immense harm. My father thought he was doing old Lackland a favour – didn’t think he was going to blab it all over town.’

‘I don’t actually think,’ Merrily said, ‘that confiding it to a priest amounts to blabbing it all over town. Besides, he didn’t actually tell me what happened, he just suggested that I might have a word with you.’

‘You don’t look like a priest to me.’

‘What’s a priest look like?’

Mr Corey was the new type of ex-public-school painter and decorator, working out of this tasteful Georgian town house in Broad Street, which sloped to the old town gate and then to the river at the Horseshoe Weir where Mrs Mumford had drowned. The office was the size of a small ballroom, with blue-washed walls and four long Georgian windows. Trestle tables displayed leather-bound catalogues and samples of moulding and dressed stone.

‘OK.’ Merrily stood up. ‘I can see I’m putting you in a difficult position. I’ll go. Thank you for seeing me, Mr Corey.’

‘No, look—’ He came half out of his chair. ‘Wait… sit down. I just wondered… how the Church came into it. We… we’ve done some work for the Church.’

‘One word from me and all that would be over for good.’

He looked startled for a moment. Merrily smiled.

‘Joke, Mr Corey. OK, how do we come into it? Well… there’ve been incidents in St Laurence’s. We don’t like to involve the police if we can deal with these things ourselves. And I’d be grateful if this wasn’t blabbed all over town either.’

A glass-fronted cast-iron wood-burning stove was burning low, more for effect than heat at this time of year. Callum Corey pulled his chair away from it.

‘It wasn’t our job, originally. The Weir House was a project by the Raphaels – hit-and-run restorers. Move into a place, do it up, sell it, move on. Except in this case they virtually had to build from the foundations up. One of the old Palmers’ Guild houses. Look, please sit down. Would you like something to drink?’

‘Just had lunch, thanks.’ She sat down across the desk from him. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the Palmers’ Guild.’

‘Name’s now been appropriated by Mrs Pepper for a conservation trust she’s setting up. I’m afraid I’ll believe that when I see it. Originally, they were well-off pilgrims to the Holy Land in the Middle Ages. Brought a palm leaf back to prove it, something like that. That was how it started. Then they became a sort of cooperative movement that employed priests exclusively to pray for the immortal souls of their members. They became immensely wealthy and lasted for several centuries.’

‘Just in Ludlow?’

‘Began in Ludlow, spread over a wide area. Put huge amounts into the fabric of the church and financed the building of about fifty houses in the town. Including the ruin that the Raphaels renamed The Weir House.’

‘Mrs Pepper bought it off these Raphaels?’

‘Very quickly, apparently. There were still bits and pieces left to complete – but that’s always the case with these quick-bodge merchants. It’s all about appearances.’

‘So Mrs Pepper hired you to finish it off.’

‘Perfect it,’ Callum said. ‘There’s an impressive central room with an immense stone fireplace. One wall had been improperly finished and was miasmic.’

‘You mean it was damp?’

‘They’d used a gypsum mix on top of the stones but it hadn’t worked. What it needed was something more sympathetic.’

‘Like lime?’

‘Exactly.’ He looked surprised that she’d know.

‘I live in a four-hundred-year-old vicarage.’

‘Ah. We’re asked to renovate churches, but rarely touch vicarages and rectories still owned by the Church. They don’t seem prepared to spend too much money on dwelling houses.’

‘Unlike Mrs Pepper.’

‘Mrs Pepper didn’t quibble at all about the price. However, she had in mind certain… refinements of her own. Originally, horsehair was often mixed with the slaked lime. Did you know that?’

‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘Mrs Pepper had something similar in mind. But she wanted to use… her own hair.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m not sure you do, actually.’ Callum looked down at his unused blotter. ‘We do get a few odd requests of this nature sometimes – the craze for feng shui, fuelled by those dreadful TV make-over programmes. Some of the proposals contravene listed-building regulations, but we do what we can to satisfy the customer.’

‘So you went along with it.’

‘I did the work myself. She said too many people trampling around the place… that would not be acceptable.’

‘For reasons of privacy.’

‘I thought so, yes. I didn’t realize quite… Well, anyway, she presented me with a cardboard box with hair in it. Her own hair is blonde – whether it’s dyed or not, I’m not qualified to say. But this hair, um, wasn’t. It was darker and clearly of a different… consistency.’

‘It was someone else’s hair?’

Callum stood up and walked over to one of the long windows which overlooked not Broad Street but a small, flagged courtyard with a tall cedar tree at the bottom.

‘That wasn’t the impression I had,’ he said. ‘My impression, by the lack of length and the, er, texture of the hair was that it… hadn’t been taken from her head.’

‘Oh. And did you go ahead with the job? Did you mix it in?

‘Yes, I did.’

‘And was she happy with it?’

‘Er… very happy. She insisted on helping me. She got the plaster all over her hands. I did suggest she wear gloves, but she… seemed to want it on her skin. She then… at some point… she asked me if I would also like to add something of myself to the wall. As it were. I was quite wary by this time. I don’t really like working alone in houses where there’s only a woman at home.’

Merrily smiled. ‘I always thought you builders were men of the world.’

‘I am not a builder. Well, I am, but… This is a small town, and we’re a respected company, and my father’s a town councillor.’

‘You made an excuse and left?’

‘I did. Wasn’t just that she was old enough to be my mother, she… it wasn’t healthy.’

‘She lives there on her own?’

‘She has a cleaner and a gardener who come in. Seems to have most of her meals in restaurants in the town.’

‘That must be costly.’

‘Not a problem, it seems, for Mrs Pepper. The house is filled with… “antiques” would perhaps not be the word. There’s a sink, for instance, fashioned from what appears to be a stone coffin. They become available sometimes when old churches are converted into houses.’

‘So she had a wall plastered with hair… not from her head. Anything else she… wanted you to do?’

‘I’m not going to elaborate on what she invited me to add to the mix.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Quite,’ said Mr Corey.

IT WAS JUST after three p.m. when Merrily left Corey’s, walking, more or less aimlessly, up Broad Street, past de Grey’s café and then the clothing shop which Bernie Dunmore had told her had been retail premises since the fourteenth century.

She started imagining Robbie Walsh drifting this way, his self-educated inner vision replacing tarmac with cobbles, delivery vans with wooden carts, coats with cloaks, Levis with leggings. Ending the exercise when, without trying too hard, she was able to turn a man with a charity tin on the steps of the Buttercross into a leper in rags with a peeling face and wretched, burning eyes.

There’s some places with more resonance than others , Jon Scole had said. All it would take would be a moment of slippage, a mental stumbling, and she’d be seeing through Mrs Mumford’s eyes: dead Robbie shivering in sun-splashed glass.