Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

Eirion looked faintly contemptuous – but then his family had been loaded since for ever. Jane started to wonder if Fyneham would maybe give her a weekend job. Hadn’t earned a penny of her own since the maid thing at Stanner Hall.

But then she remembered why they were here.

‘Does your dad own Q , then?’

Fyneham stared down at her, eyes narrowing. She noticed a faint sheen on his face, above the weekend stubble that Eirion said some guys in his year started cultivating from about Wednesday.

‘We’re talking about Lol Robinson,’ Eirion said.

‘Aw…’ Fyneham shuffled out this crooked grin. ‘Look, maybe it’ll get in, maybe it won’t.’

‘You’re saying you did it on spec?’

‘You’ve never done that? Written a piece for a magazine and just sent it in, see if it gets used?’

‘Can’t say I have, JD.’

‘Scared of rejection, huh? I’ve had quite a few pieces published – OK, not in Q yet, but some of the others.’

‘Fanzines?’

‘Oh, better than that. Look, somebody tells me about this guy who’s just brought an album out and how he used to be halfway famous, way back, and how he used to be a mental patient with a police record. Burns me a CD. Like, I don’t personally go for that acoustic shit, but I get onto the Net, dredge up some background and think, yeah, I’ll go and interview him.’

‘You told him you worked for Q ,’ Eirion said.

‘I told him I was a freelance. What’s wrong with that?’

‘You told him it was definitely going in,’ Jane said.

‘I told him I couldn’t be sure when it would go in. And I couldn’t.’

Jane looked at Eirion. He was red-faced and tight-lipped and looking far younger than he had when he was smarming the second wife at the door. It was all turning out to be no big deal; just another wannabe chancing his arm. OK, a wannabe with a head start… well, a head start on Eirion, anyway.

She wished they’d never come now. She wished she was in Ludlow with Mum. She wished they could just get out of here.

‘Anyway, it wasn’t fair,’ she said to Fyneham, more for Eirion’s sake than anything. ‘Lol Robinson’s a really decent guy, with a lot of talent, and you conned him.’

‘You won’t say that if it makes it into the magazine.’ Fyneham knowing he was on top now, his grin turning into a sneer or maybe it had been a sneer all along. ‘Anyway, why should you be worried about the guy being conned, when he’s beating the shit out of your mother?’

A few seconds later, Jane was hearing Eirion saying, like from a long way away, ‘Jane, no…’

But it was like when she’d tried on Mum’s new glasses: the whole room had gone red – all the printers and the binders, and the scanners and the copiers and the state-of-the-art flat-screen computers.

Including the big, handsome one that she was holding in her arms, maybe sixteen hundred quid’s worth, its cables wrenched out of their sockets and dragging along the carpet as she backed away towards the window.

Fyneham snarling, ‘You’re insane! You’ll be paying for that for the rest of your—’

‘It fell off the desk,’ Jane said through her teeth. ‘Our word against yours. Keep away from me, you scumbag!’

She tripped over an extension cable and had to go down on one knee to prevent the computer slipping out of her arms, and Fyneham let out a screech.

‘For Christ’s sake, Lewis, do something about this bitch!’

‘Out of my hands, JD.’

‘And it’ll be out of mine,’ Jane said, ‘if you take one more step.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know where you got it from.’

‘Got what?’

‘You know what. You’ve been trying to bullshit us all along. You think we’re like hicks or something, and you’re this big-time professional journalist…’

‘I don’t know what you’re—’

‘You…’ Jane hefting the computer above the level of her chin: further to fall, more damage. ‘You do!’

‘Put it down!’ Fyneham like went into spasm. ‘Put it down and we’ll talk.’

‘We’ll talk first.’

‘It’s not paid for, you stupid bitch!’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Look,’ Fyneham said, ‘I was just told what to ask, OK, and he bought me—’

Eirion came over then, and Jane clutched the computer to her chest in case he snatched it. But he just stood between her and Fyneham, who looked close to tears, Eirion just looking puzzled.

‘Bought you what?’

Fyneham looked down at his trainers, arms stiffened, fists clenched by his sides.

‘The Evesham.’

‘Your dad bought you the Evesham?’

‘He bought it, and I’m paying him off week by week. My dad… he came up the hard way. He doesn’t do anything for nothing.’

‘But he got you the Evesham if you asked Lol some questions?’

‘He’ll kill me.’

‘Is that what happened?’

‘Lewis, will you please tell that bi— your girlfriend to put it down?’

‘Could you put it down, Jane?’

Jane stood for a few moments trying to work out what was coming out here, when all she’d wanted to know was who’d told Fyneham this evil crap about Lol giving Mum the black eye.

‘Jane?’

She looked into Eirion’s worried eyes, and picked up what they were saying: If you drop that thing now, we’ve lost it…

… Whatever it is.

She carried the big computer across the room to the nearest table to the door and let it down slowly, keeping her hands on the base in case she had to snatch it up again. This was a relief, frankly, but it was Fyneham who nearly sobbed.

‘All right, let’s go right back to the beginning, JD,’ Eirion said.

Bliss said there were some small factories, not much more than workshops, on the edge of the Barnchurch industrial estate. Not the halfway respectable part, where the shops and warehouses were, but at the rough end, where it joined the Plascarreg.

Only one of these had ever been let. A light-engineering plant there had gone bust fairly soon, but a ‘small business syndicate’ on the Plascarreg had paid the tenants to pretend otherwise and sublet part of their unit for the preparation and distribution of crack cocaine and other commodities.

It was a relatively foolproof arrangement, and nobody had ever disturbed this enterprise until Robbie Walsh discovered that the site to the rear of the workshop was of archaeological importance, being a one-time place of execution.

Such was Robbie’s enthusiasm for first-hand knowledge of the past that he was disinclined to take ‘Piss off, son, and forget all this exists’ as a useful piece of advice. And so particular youngsters on the estate were encouraged to take an interest in Robbie and his leisure pursuits, to the extent of borrowing some of his books.

‘What did they do to him?’ Lol asked eventually, wanting to get this over with.

‘Each of the workshops has a storage shed at the rear,’ Bliss said. ‘Wood shed, traditional design with exposed cross-beam.’

Bliss stared into his glass of Gomer Parry’s cloudy homemade cider, the colour of rust and border clay. Threw down names that Lol had never heard before: Jason Mebus, Connor Boyd, Shane Nicklin.

‘The first time they hanged him,’ Bliss said, ‘they cut him down fairly quickly.’

THE BACKSTAIRS WERE a dim half-spiral, coldly lit by one vertical slit too high to see through. Merrily was half-expecting the kitchen below to have a greasy spit and dead meat hanging from hooks, but it wasn’t like that.

‘Good morning again,’ the woman said.

The kitchen was warm and glazed with light tinted orange and emerald from illuminated glass in Gothic tracery around the tops of two long, thin windows. Pale ash units with olive-tiled work surfaces were built around a double-oven Aga. A rack of oak shelves displayed an apothecary’s collection of coloured jars and stoppered bottles.