Phil Rickman: The Smile of a Ghost

‘Sorry…?’

‘People thought I was looking forward to it. Like you look forward to having your leg off. Wake up in the morning and you think it’s still there, and then you realize.’

It was why his clothes didn’t fit; he’d lost the kind of weight you could never quite put back. Poor Andy. She’d seen a lot of him over the past two years, most recently as bag-carrier to Frannie Bliss, the DI. Bag-carrier and local encyclopaedia: an essential role.

‘You’ll get another job?’ Merrily filled the kettle. ‘Security adviser somewhere, or…?’

‘To be honest, Mrs Watkins, I’d rather not be a night-watchman at some battery-chicken plant.’ Mumford looked down at his hands. ‘Might get some chickens of my own, mind. Beehives. Dunno yet. However—’ He looked up at her. ‘How’re you?’

‘I’m all right.’

She smiled. Along the Welsh Border it was some kind of etiquette that you took ten or fifteen minutes to get around to what you’d come about. You tossed pebbles into the pond and, at some stage, the issue would float quietly to the surface. Must have been fascinating to listen to Mumford interrogating a suspect.

‘Your mother don’t live round yere, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Cheltenham. She has a lot of friends there now. We don’t see each other that often.’

‘But you did have some relations yereabouts?’

‘My grandad had a farm and an orchard near Mansell Lacy when I was a kid. All gone now.’

Mumford nodded. ‘My folks moved north into south Shropshire, after my dad retired from the Force. Ludlow. They had a little newsagent’s and sweetshop for a while, then it got too much for them.’

‘Nice place. Historic.’

‘Pretty historic themselves, now, my mam and dad. They’ll expect me to do more for them, now I’m retired.’

‘No brothers… sisters?’

‘Sister. Twelve years younger than me, lives in Hereford with this low-life idle bugger. Her…’ He paused. ‘Her boy, from when she was married, he never got on with this bloke. Always an oddball kid. Used to spend the school holidays with his grandparents. In Ludlow.’

He looked at Merrily, and she met his baggy-eyed gaze and detected ripples in the pond, a circular movement, something coming up.

Mumford said, ‘My sister’s boy, my nephew – Robson Walsh.’

The name broke surface, lay there, the water bubbling around it. Robson Walsh .

‘Suppose you’d still be… dealing with the funny stuff, Mrs Watkins?’ Mumford’s face was a foxier shade of red now, but she saw that his eyes looked anxious.

‘When it comes up.’

She sat down opposite him. Never the most religious of professions, the police. Saw too much injustice, degradation, few signs of divine light. Even Frannie Bliss, raised a Catholic up in Liverpool, had once said that if he ever made it to heaven he wouldn’t be too surprised to see a feller with a trident and a forked tail sitting on a cloud and laughing himself sick.

Whatever this was, it was hard for Mumford.

Robson Walsh. Robbie Walsh, Robbie Walsh…

‘Oh my God, Andy.’ TV pictures: old mellow walls, police tape. A school photograph. ‘The boy who fell—’

‘From Ludlow Castle, aye. I was there.’

‘At the castle?’

‘In the town. Come to pick up the wife – she was working at Ludlow Hospital. We were going out for dinner, celebrate my… celebrate…’ He looked down at the table. ‘Station sergeant at Ludlow spotted me in the street, took me into the castle. Boy’s still lying there, waiting for the pathologist.’

‘God, I’m so sorry, Andy, I just never—’

‘I’ve spent time with a lot of families lost a child.’ He looked up at her. ‘But at the end of it, Mrs Watkins, you always gets to go home.’

‘You said your sister’s son?’

‘Slag.’

‘Oh.’

‘Lives in Hereford with a new bloke – toe-rag. Only too happy to let the boy spend his holidays at his gran’s. Now she blames me.’

‘Your sister? Why?’

‘’Cause we covered up, Robbie and me, covered up how bad the ole girl was getting. He couldn’t stand the thought that he wouldn’t be able to go and stay there. He loved it, see. Ludlow. The history.’

‘They called him The History Boy – in one of the papers.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You and he covered up that your mother was…?’

There was a knocking from the front door, where the bell had packed in again. Merrily didn’t move.

‘What’s the point of putting a long name to it?’ Mumford said. ‘But her mind’s going, and it en’t no better for this.’

‘But didn’t your sister know what your mother was like?’

‘They don’t speak. Not since she went off with the toe-rag. I usually got to take the boy to Ludlow. Hell, he was all right there. Better than at home on the bloody Plascarreg, with a latchkey.’

‘Your sister lives on the Plascarreg?’

Not the best address in Hereford.

‘He was capable and intelligent,’ Mumford said. ‘I never had a son, but I couldn’t’ve complained if I’d got one like him. Anyway, Gail works at Ludlow Hospital three days a week, so she pops in, sees they’re all right.’

‘What about your father?’

‘Not the most sympathetic of men. Tells you about all the death he’s seen in his time, how you gotter put it behind you kind of thing. Meanwhile, ole girl goes over and over it in her mind, what’s left of it.’ Mumford glanced over at the door to the hall – more knocking. ‘You better get that.’

‘It’s OK.’

Probably just the postman with a parcel. He’d leave it in the porch.

Robbie Walsh. She recalled the case throwing up questions in the papers. How had he managed to conceal himself in the castle? Had he been alone?

‘So has the inquest…?’

‘Opened and adjourned after medical evidence. Boy was cremated at Hereford. No proof of anything more than an accident. Most popular theory is he got totally absorbed in whatever he was checking out inside the castle, got hisself locked in and went up the tower to try and signal for help. Mabbe leaned over too far.’

‘That feasible?’

‘It’s feasible. But there’s ways out of there for an agile kid, and if anybody knew ’em he would. But… nothing iffy sitting on a plate, the police don’t go looking for it no more. Not enough manpower to handle what they got on the books already. Verdict of misadventure, most likely.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘I reckon it should be an open verdict. Mabbe I’m just saying this on account of it’s destroyed what was left of my bloody family, but I reckon there’s stuff we don’t know. Meanwhile, my mam… this is gonner be hanging over her for the rest of… whatever she’s got left.’

There was more knocking at the front door, insistent.

‘In more ways than one, it looks like,’ Mumford said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Hanging over her. It’s why I’ve come. You better get that this time, it en’t gonner stop.’

Merrily went to open the door.

Just what she needed.

‘Sorry if I got you out of the bath or something, Merrily.’

Nigel Saltash smiling his all-purpose smile.

ON HIS TRAINING courses at the disused chapel in the Beacons, Huw Owen liked to invent pet names for the unquiet dead.

Insomniac, hitch-hiker, breather, groper…

Exorcist jargon, a touch of black humour for the troops.

Merrily brought over an extra mug, poured three teas and sat down at the head of the table, her back to the window. The sun laid a creamy sheen, like an altar cloth, on the pine table top.

Huw would have called Mumford’s mother’s problem a parting-caller or a day tripper. Throwaway terms for a commonplace phenomenon – loved ones dropping in just to show their faces, let you know they wouldn’t be far away. They tended not to stay long. She remembered Huw saying that, nine times out of ten, they were none of his business.