Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

She had to start talking to people – Jane, Lol, Mumford, the Bishop.

Recalling a bathroom somewhere, mercifully modern, she grabbed her clothes into a bundle and unlocked the oak door – yes, it did have a key and she had locked it – and went out into a short passage that was daylight-dim: interior lime-plastered walls of wattle and daub, which was basically clay and cow muck over a framework of branches and twigs. Clay and cow muck and animal fat and whatever other personal ingredients—

Merrily stopped, clutching the bundle to her chest. The woman standing at the end of the passage was not Belladonna.

BREINTON WAS ON the western side of Hereford in sloping, wooded countryside that managed to conceal most of the city’s lower, more modern buildings, so that from the road outside the Fyneham residence you could see the cathedral apparently poking out of greenery, as if the city centre was a neighbouring village.

Eirion parked his Peugeot half on the grass verge, just out of sight of the solid wooden gates that were like castle gates: all you could see of the house was a brick wall, a chimney and a burglar alarm. Homes up here cost an arm and a leg now.

‘Hereford’s Beverly Hills,’ Jane said sourly. She was seriously uptight, the world full of invisible hostility. If she’d been a hedgehog she’d have been rolled up in a ball, spikes out.

‘If that’s meant to be an insult, it would escape Fyneham.’ Eirion locked the car. ‘He’s a Beverly Hills kind of person. How do you reckon we get to the front door?’

‘You need one of those little battering-ram things the cops have.’

‘Jane…’ Eirion was looking at her as though she might have been secretly carrying one. ‘Don’t do anything, right? Leave this to me.’

‘You know me, Irene.’ Jane put on an icy smile. ‘Walking definition of the word discretion. Look – dinky little door in the wall.’

There was a black iron ball-handle; when Eirion turned it, the door opened onto a short gravel drive and this imposing, blindingly white conservatory porch with a Victorian type of bell pull that turned out to be electric and sent Big Ben chimes bonging through the house.

The woman who responded was serious second-wife material: bleached blonde, about thirty-five, and dressed for hovering hopelessly with hi-tech secateurs. She stayed inside, keeping a hand on the door, Eirion treating her to his winning smile.

‘Oh, hi. Sorry to just turn up like this, but Jack said if we were ever passing…’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘This is the right house, isn’t it? Jack Fyneham?’

‘Jack?’ She looked blank for a moment and then she said, ‘Oh, you mean Johnno.’

‘Actually, we just know him as JD at school.’

‘Oh, I see, you’re—’

‘This for me, Tessa?’ J.D. Fyneham appeared in person at her shoulder, wearing a half-smile that faded with gratifying speed into this oh-shit expression when he saw who was outside. Jane smiled at him.

‘Why don’t you take them up to your rooms, Johnno?’ Tessa said. ‘I’ve got this guy coming about the pool, which your dad, of course, conveniently forgot about…’

‘Cool.’ Eirion beamed. ‘JD’s told us so much about his rooms.’

In the first hour, nobody rang. Lol went upstairs to Merrily’s bedroom and brought down the Washburn he kept there and tuned it and played fingerstyle to Ethel, the way he had when he’d lived in Blackberry Lane and Ethel had been his cat and he’d probably still been half-mental.

Walking across to the vicarage, he’d seen a woman looking at him and then she’d frowned and looked away and Lol had thought, Jesus, no … and put his head down and almost run across and into the driveway. Jane, in the doorway with Eirion, waiting to leave, had glared at him with a kind of furious pity.

And now there was a knock on the front door, and he put down the guitar and didn’t know whether or not to answer it.

Someone had paid a child twenty quid to write and deliver two anonymous letters, the latest accusing him of beating up his half-secret girlfriend, the parish priest. No smoke . Not everyone would believe Gomer Parry. He envisioned a drab lynch mob of Ledwardine villagers clustered around the porch: What have you done with the vicar?

He closed his eyes and held his breath. Immediately Lucy Devenish sprang out of the shadows, and he almost reeled back from the draught caused by the admonishing swirl of her poncho: Sitting there listening to your mournful, wistful records. It’s spring! Open your heart to the eternal! Let the world flow into you!

‘Mr Robinson.’

Just one man at the door. Close-cropped red hair and a blue plaid jacket.

‘Ah,’ Lol said.

‘Now, don’t think we’re targeting you now you’re a successful recording artist, but experience has taught us that many of your kind still like to conduct experiments of a chemical nature in order to, shall we say, stimulate the creative juices.’

‘So how much do you want, Frannie?’ Lol said. ‘Couple of grams see you through the graveyard shift?’

Frannie Bliss beamed. ‘How are you, Laurence? Can I come in?’

‘Well, you can,’ Lol said. ‘But she’s not here.’

‘That’s a shame.’ Bliss stepped inside, followed Lol into the kitchen. ‘Hoped I’d catch her. My day off, strictly speaking, but, with having to go over to Leominster to see Gail Mumford, I thought I’d call in.’

‘I haven’t spoken to Merrily this morning. I’m just here kind of minding the phone.’

‘She’ll be in Ludlow, then, will she?’

‘Why would you say that?’

‘You know anything about that peculiar business?’

‘What?’

‘Let’s deal with Merrily and Mumford.’ Bliss rubbed his forehead. ‘Lol… being straight with each other now can only save a lorra serious pain later. Had a call at home this morning from Karen, my new DC. You won’t have met her. Karen’s current headache is being second cousin, twice removed, to Mumford, who seems to have forgotten he’s no longer permitted to hit people with his truncheon, as it were. Basically, Karen’s feeling guilty because, for reasons of Family, she’s been doing PNC checks for him and divulging things she shouldn’t have.’

‘Family,’ Lol said. He didn’t seem to have one any more, outside of Merrily and Jane.

Bliss sat down at the pine refectory table. ‘It’s bloody lucky I understand how this area operates. This got passed up to headquarters, Karen’d be ironing her uniform tonight. How much do you know about the Robbie Walsh business?’

‘I just live a quiet life, Mr Bliss,’ Lol said, ‘writing my little songs.’

‘But you do have the ear of the Reverend. And other bits, too, it’s rumoured. Lol, let me put it this way: Andy Mumford was a fine detective, with a good nose. But once you’re out, you’re out, and Andy’s crossed a line you do not cross.’

Bliss talked about a family on the Plascarreg Estate, name of Collins, who were being looked after by the police after fingering several drug dealers. They had a son, Niall, formerly associated with some youngsters who, it seemed, had not been nice to Robbie Walsh.

‘I had Karen looking after them. There was a message for her this morning, to ring the Collinses at their safe-house. Seems they’re not too happy about this strange copper who turned up to talk to Niall, in some detail, about Robbie Walsh and things that got done to him. Drugs are one thing, but the Collinses are sincerely hoping their son’s not gonna be called to give evidence against his former playmates on this one. For reasons that may become apparent.’

‘Have you spoken to Mumford?’