Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

Remembering, as he often would, the first night he’d met Merrily, when Ethel the cat had been given a kicking by Karl Windling and Lol had wound up carrying her to the vicarage. And Merrily had tended Ethel and, although it had been a very bad night for her in ways that he hadn’t yet known about, she’d sat down and lit a cigarette and had said, in a voice full of ironic uncertainty, Talk to me, Mr Robinson… I’m a priest .

Lol unlocked the door and stumbled through the darkness towards the parlour, until he remembered he had power.

He had power.

He clicked the switch and the bulb over the foot of the stairs drizzled out its low-wattage light. Lampshade , Lol thought. Lampshade tomorrow .

A rectangle of white.

Shit.

Before he’d picked the envelope off the mat, he knew what it was.

Somehow he’d forgotten. He really had forgotten. Hadn’t thought about it for ages. It belonged to the days of oil lamps and paint-trays, before he had power.

He almost crumpled it up and threw it away. But the night had already darkened. He tore it open at the door and held it under the bulb.

Your a sick man.

How long you been hitting her

NEXT MORNING, AS soon as Jane had left for school, Merrily drove straight to Hereford, letting herself into the gatehouse office with her own key before Sophie had arrived.

Dressed-down again, jeans and fleece, as yesterday, she sat at Sophie’s desk and rang Lol on his mobile. Still switched off. She left her second so-how-did-it-go? message of the morning. She knew he was back; she’d seen his car on the square.

Outside it was raining hard, Broad Street speckled with umbrellas. In the dullness of the office, the figure 2 was glowing from the message window on the answering machine.

No glow, however, in the messages.

‘Sophie, I think we must talk on the subject of office reorganization – and Mrs Watkins. Call me, please. Thank you.’

Callaghan-Clarke, clipped, concise and ominous. The teacher: see me.

And so barefaced about it, because Mrs Watkins was on holiday. Finding she could hardly get her breath, Merrily was close to phoning back herself. Instead she lit a cigarette, her hands unsteady, fumbling with the Zippo, listening to the second message: Andy Mumford.

‘Mrs Watkins, tried to get you before you left. Don’t know whether you listened to the local radio…’

Actually, in the car on the way here, she’d been listening to Lol’s album with the volume well up, his breathy vocals on ‘Camera Lies’ reassuring with their sense of his need: the camera lies, she might vaporize . A song he’d written in the tingling dawn of their relationship.

‘… Big dawn raid on the Plascarreg,’ Mumford was saying.

Sophie arrived, turning in the doorway and shaking her umbrella over the stone stairwell. She heard the answering machine, left the umbrella outside and came in to listen.

‘Large selection of Class A drugs removed. Three dealers nicked, it looks like. Well… too much of a coincidence, see. Wouldn’t surprise me if Mebus and his little mates hadn’t grassed up their neighbours with a view to avoiding prosecution. I been trying to get my relative on the phone, without success so far, but I’ll keep you informed. Thank you.’

Merrily put the machine on hold and then played the message again. Mumford had not sounded exactly euphoric. But, then, if Jason Mebus was back on the streets without a stain…? And where had Jason found the nerve to grass up his neighbours? Something didn’t sound right.

‘Long overdue,’ Sophie said. ‘Half the drugs in Hereford seem to have come through that estate. I had the radio on just before leaving the house, and it’s now five arrests. Quantities of heroin and crack-cocaine with a street value of somewhere around three-quarters of a million pounds.’

‘That’s huge, for Hereford.’

‘There’ll be large, and possibly liquid, breakfasts in the police canteen, no doubt.’ Sophie slipped out of her coat, hung it behind the door.

‘There’s also a message from Siân Callaghan-Clarke,’ Merrily said. ‘Wants to talk to you about office reorganization.’

‘One can hardly contain one’s anticipation,’ Sophie said.

‘And about me.’

‘In which case, I ought to call her back while you’re still here. However, you didn’t come in to pass on my messages, did you?’

‘I’m in a quandary,’ Merrily said. ‘Need advice from a wise and entirely balanced individual.’

Sophie nodded. It wouldn’t be arrogance that stopped her denying these qualities; she just didn’t believe in wasting time. She sat down on what was usually Merrily’s side of the desk.

‘Tell me.’

Merrily had taken it as far as the encounter with Belladonna outside the castle walls – more bizarre the more she thought about it – when the phone rang. She motioned for Sophie to take it.

‘Gatehouse,’ Sophie said. ‘Ah. Good morning, Canon Callaghan-Clarke.’

Merrily pulled her bag across the desk, took out the cigarettes and the Zippo.

The call lasted less than five minutes but seemed longer. Most of Sophie’s replies were monosyllabic and negative – No… not at all… never – but her minimal facial responses sent out signals of extreme danger. At one point, a corner of her mouth twitched sharply, as though a wasp had landed there.

Finally she said calmly, ‘Canon Clarke, I think you’ll find that such a conclusion is absolutely and utterly preposterous.’

When she put the phone down, the rain was stopping, and a gauzy sunlight powdered part of the room. When Sophie reached out and clicked on the desk lamp, Merrily sensed this was, as was customary with Siân, going to be worse than she could have imagined.

Sophie straightened the notepad on the desk, took a long breath and let it escape slowly.

‘As you’ve probably guessed, Merrily, that wasn’t about office reorganization, it was entirely about you.’

‘There’s flattering.’

‘No,’ Sophie said.

‘No, I didn’t think it would be.’

‘To begin with, she said she didn’t want to hear any more manufactured stories from me, because she now knew precisely why you’d suddenly felt compelled to take a holiday.’

‘She’s bluffing. Couldn’t possibly know, unless Bernie—’

‘Nothing to do with that. Nothing to do with the Bishop or Ludlow or Ms Pepper.’ Sophie coughed. ‘You appear to have taken a holiday to conceal the fact that you’ve become a victim of domestic violence.’

Merrily sprang out of her chair.

‘I’ll make some tea,’ Sophie said.

Lol rang.

‘How did it go?’ Merrily trying to sound bright, the way you did in church on grey Sundays.

‘It was really good.’ His own tone was small and somehow distant, as though it was floating inside a balloon. ‘They… sold over sixty copies of the CD.’

‘That’s incredible, Lol.’

‘Yes, Prof’ll be…’

‘Mmm. He will. And it was OK? I mean, on stage?’

‘In the end. I’ll tell you tonight… maybe?’

‘Definitely.’

And they went on like that for another minute or so, this thick wedge of the unspoken between them, furtive fingers of sunlight sliding between the rainclouds and across the desk, steam rising as Sophie poured boiling water into the pot.

Merrily put the phone down and stared at it, as if it might be bugged.

‘Can’t have leaked out through Mumford. And it couldn’t have come out of Hereford. I didn’t even take off the other glasses to try on the new ones in Chave and Jackson, just held them up to the light. Which leaves only one source.’