Phil Rickman: The Smile of a Ghost

… And this was OK. Lol finally getting the house – this was meant. Everything finally was going to be OK for Lol and for Mum, who’d been a widow for long enough. Yeah, in one way it was ridiculous, Lol living in this little house and Mum across the road in the huge vicarage, with seven bedrooms, but it was an arrangement that would work, for the time being.

And it would have Lucy’s blessing. Lucy who, though dead, still somehow spoke for Ledwardine.

Jane allowed herself a shiver. Lol carried the roller and paint tray into the kitchen and put them in the sink.

‘How about you get the chips?’

‘Lol, you wimp.’

‘Wallet’s on the mantelpiece.’

Jane found it and took out a tenner.

‘Mushy peas?’

‘Why not? Just don’t say they’re for me.’

Jane shoved the tenner down a back pocket of her jeans, along with the vice-rage note, and shrugged on her fleece.

‘You’ll be all right on your own for a few minutes, then? You and Lucy?’

Lol said, ‘Sometimes – did I tell you? – sometimes I try out a new song on her. If she likes it, she joins in. A bit croaky and out of tune, of course, but you can’t—’

Jane threw the paint rag at him.

NEXT MORNING, WHEN Jane had left for school, Merrily phoned Huw Owen. She hadn’t slept well, was feeling frayed and edgy, sitting in the scullery in the kid’s old pink fleece. Outside the window, the day was crazed with April chemistry: white sunlight soaking through holes in the foaming cloud.

‘So when did this happen, lass?’

Huw had been up north on what he liked to call a retreat, working with a gang of hard-nosed clerics in the badlands of south Manchester. She wasn’t yet ready to hear his horror stories.

‘Think it happened when I wasn’t looking. Can’t say you didn’t warn me – if you don’t pick a team, somebody picks one for you. Just that my guys didn’t want to be picked.’

He was silent. She could hear the kindling detonating his living-room fire. Pictured his feet in peeling trainers on the hearth, the volatile sunlight in his old hippy’s shaggy hair. She was getting the feeling that his Manchester time had left him energized rather than wearied.

Precarious psychiatric state . Bitch.

‘I feel pathetic,’ she said, ‘ringing you with this stuff. I just wondered if you’d – you know – heard anything.’

Huw had been born in rural Wales but brought up in Yorkshire, returning to the Beacons in middle age as a parish priest and a personal trainer in the practice of exorcism. Where nobody can hear you scream. Merrily heard the creak of his chair as he stretched, thinking.

‘Callaghan-Clarke. Wasn’t she one of the bints who did a circle-dance round the tombs of the old bishops in Hereford Cathedral to celebrate the ordination of women?’

‘If she was, she’s calmed down now.’

‘The calming power of naked ambition. Get their feet under the table, next thing they want’s a bigger table. Where exactly does she stand in your… Deliverance circle?’

‘Given herself a title: Diocesan Deliverance Coordinator. We voted on it. Every case we get from now on has to be submitted to the group before any action’s taken. We voted on that, too. Three in favour, one bemused abstention.’

‘Bugger,’ Huw said.

‘Quite.’

‘A little focus group. It’s just what you need, isn’t it?’

‘We light candles and concentrate. I’m not kidding.’

She told him about Martin Longbeach, and Huw laughed – the noise milk would make if you could hear it curdling.

Merrily looked up at the wall clock: nearly nine a.m., and a difficult funeral to organize – an elderly woman who’d moved to the village no more than a fortnight ago to live with her daughter and son-in-law, themselves comparative newcomers. And Andy Mumford was due here around ten. It was looking like another day when she wouldn’t see much of Lol.

‘Back-up’s one thing,’ Huw said. ‘You need a witness sometimes, no question, and somebody to watch your back. But an ill-matched committee operating in an area where nothing, at the best of times, is ever a bloody certainty…’

‘We all accept the need for a psychiatrist…’

‘There are good shrinks,’ Huw said, ‘and there are dangerous shrinks.’

‘You come across Nigel Saltash before?’

‘Never.’

‘Me neither.’ Merrily gazed out of the window at the unmown lawn, vividly green against the grey sky with its seeping sun. ‘He’s a regular churchgoer, however.’

Huw laughed again. ‘You know your problem, lass? Had your picture in the papers once too often, and you take a very nice picture. They don’t like that. And they weren’t happy at all when you were cosying up to the pagans against Ellis.’

‘Oh, Huw, Ellis was the kind of humourless, dangerous, fundamentalist bigot who brings the Church into—’

‘Ellis was part of the Church,’ Huw said. ‘Whereas pagans are pagans. Any road, I’m just planting the thought.’

‘Who doesn’t like it? Not the Bishop?’

‘Dunmore’s a time-server. He wouldn’t even be consulted. Think higher.’

‘Huh?’ She was thrown.

‘You want a list of all the embittered, back-stabbing bastards who hate the whole concept of Deliverance? Hey, God forbid that priests should meddle in metaphysics. Somebody’s happen saying, we need to keep an eye on that little Watkins in Hereford… could be getting carried away… too much, too soon. Needs a steadying hand…’

‘Hang on. Let me get this right. You think Callaghan-Clarke may have been nudged into place as a… an instrument of restraint?’

Merrily heard Huw sniff. She was thinking of what Siân had said about his precarious psychiatric state. Would it help to tell him about that? She stared out into the garden, at the pale buds on the apple trees.

‘And the bottom line,’ she said, ‘is that nothing much gets done, right?’

‘ “But how can we be certain?” ’ Huw doing this delicate, disapproving, posh voice. ‘ “We could so easily look ridiculous, couldn’t we?” And this lad with the candles sounds like window dressing. Bumbling New Ager. Whimsical, but essentially nice and harmless.’

‘Making us seem a little woolly?’

‘That’s a good word, aye.’

‘Let me get this right. You actually think—?’

‘Leave it with me,’ Huw said. ‘I’ll ask around, see what I can find out.’

Merrily made a call about the funeral. Hereford Crem: two p.m., Monday. She’d go and see the family over the weekend. It was always a problem when you didn’t know either the dead person or the bereaved: gently quizzing them about their mum, looking for the one little jewelled detail that would make it meaningful before you slid her through the curtains and the next one came through – another priest, another set of mourners. A line of sad trains on the last platform.

Andy Mumford turned up ten minutes early.

On the phone last night he’d sounded agitated. When he walked in, she was shocked.

He was wearing a fawn-coloured zipper jacket over a yellow polo shirt. She’d never seen him without a suit before, and he looked all wrong. He’d always seemed comfortably plump; now he was sagging and his farmer’s face was less ruddy than red.

‘You had breakfast, Andy? I can do toast—’

‘No, no…’ He waved a hand, said he’d have tea. Weak. No sugar.

So she’d been right: he’d retired from the police.

‘When?’

‘Three weeks back.’ Mumford pulled a chair from under the pine refectory table. ‘Three weeks and two days. CID boys bought me a digital camera.’

‘Oh.’

‘Now I’ll have to get a computer.’ He sat down with his legs apart, hands bunched together between his knees. ‘Like having your leg off.’