Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘Bell asked me to take care of you.’ The woman, who hadn’t yet introduced herself, had tufted brown hair, wore a white-and-grey-checked suit, no jewellery. ‘If not quite, I have to say, in those words.’

Coffee was percolating, and she was making wholemeal toast.

‘Have a seat, Mrs Watkins.’

Oh.

Merrily said nothing. A stone trough of red and orange tulips sent up a warm glow from below the twin windows, which opened up views across the fields to where the town rose in steep tiers to the church tower.

‘It’s rather late for breakfast,’ the woman said, ‘but I don’t suppose you particularly feel like lunch.’

‘Tea or coffee would be’ – Merrily had noticed that the tulips were in fact growing out of a stone coffin, its interior shaped for a body – ‘fine.’

Life directly out of death. Symbolism everywhere.

The woman wrinkled her nose, tapped the coffin with a shoe. ‘I’m still trying to persuade her to put that morbid artefact outside. Having already bribed the plumber to say there was no way it was going to work as a kitchen sink.’

No way she’d have it outside, either. Bell must have been cosying up to death since her teens.

‘She must be a… challenging person to accommodate,’ Merrily said.

‘Actually we accommodate each other fairly well. I call in most days, on the way to or from the office, or for lunch. Organize all the maintenance people and the services and the cleaner and the gardener and everyone else she’s far too vague to deal with. Do grab yourself a seat.’

There was a round table, with wooden chairs reflecting the design of seventeenth-century Glastonbury church chairs, with stubby X-legs. Merrily slid one out and sat down cautiously.

‘I think we spoke on the phone.’

‘Briefly.’ Susannah Pepper put the tray of coffee and toast in the centre of the table and sat down opposite her and smiled.

Ominous. A friendly, relaxed lawyer was rarely a good omen.

‘Where’s Bell?’

‘I don’t know.’ Susannah looked Merrily in the eyes. She was about thirty, and she seemed fit and confident and capable. Her skin was softly furry, like a peach’s. ‘I persuaded her to go out and let me handle things. She’s awfully disappointed in you. Feels betrayed.’

Silence. The sun had come out, setting fire to the orange glass in the tracery at the top of the windows, and the tulips in the stone coffin reached up like small goblets waiting to be filled.

‘All right,’ Merrily said at last. ‘I’m going to have to ask, aren’t I? How did you know who I was?’

Susannah stood up and went out of the room and came back with a leather briefcase, extracting a folded newspaper and tossing it on the table.

‘This morning’s edition.’

Merrily opened the paper and stared down, growing cold with dismay, at two pictures, one of the Hanging Tower, the other of herself, in colour, full face, under the headline:

EXORCIZE OUR CASTLE OF DEATH

Evil ghost must go, say townsfolk

She looked up. ‘This is crap.’

‘I think you should read it.’

She read it. It was overdramatized and dumbed-down. It was crass. It was full of conjecture. But at the centre of it…

The Mayor of Ludlow, George Lackland, confirmed last night that he had discussed the issue with Hereford exorcist, the Rev. Merrily Watkins.

‘It’s very much a matter for the Church,’ he said. ‘Whether you believe in ghosts or not, there’s no doubt in my mind that a religious service, or an exorcism, would make many people feel more at peace.

‘It’s been suggested that these tragic deaths have brought tourists into the town, but to my mind notoriety of this kind is no good for anyone in the long run.’

‘OK. It’s not crap. Not entirely.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s misleading, but it’s come from an actual petition sent to George Lackland. Someone obviously sent a copy to the press. But nobody’s spoken to me about it. I mean, one reason I’m here is to try and avoid anything drastic or…’

‘Laughable,’ Susannah said. ‘Holy water and incantations. Or am I misrepresenting your occupation?’

‘Don’t know where this picture came from, either,’ Merrily said. ‘Looks like an old one… couple of years old, anyway.’

She was outside Ledwardine church, and she was in the full kit. It looked like an official picture from the diocese. She didn’t remember it being taken.

And now Bell Pepper had evidently seen it. Bell, who disliked the clergy, had learned that she was not only a minister but a working exorcist, and she wasn’t called Mary. Everything was now entirely clear, and the situation couldn’t be worse.

‘Would you mind if I had a cigarette?’

‘Yes, I would,’ Susannah said. ‘Cigarettes are disgusting. And let’s drop the bullshit, shall we? Why are you associating my client with what you’ve come here to do? Bearing in mind, before you answer, that I’ve talked to George Lackland.’

‘In which case you’ll be aware that it was George Lackland who approached us – the diocese.’

‘George is an old-fashioned man,’ Susannah said. ‘He still thinks the Church should have a role in the way this town is run, and he seems to have fallen for the myth that the deaths of two children and one old woman are manifestations of some kind of spiritual malaise.’

‘And is he entirely wrong there?’

‘He’s in danger of becoming a laughing stock.’

‘Well…’ Now that George had dropped her in it, there seemed little point in dressing this up. ‘A lot of people saw Bell with Robbie Walsh in the days before he died. A woman famously obsessed with death. Last night, she told me she’d been taking steps to adopt him, which would explain quite a lot. Can you confirm that?’

‘I don’t have to confirm anything to you,’ Susannah said. ‘Your ridiculous role with a failing religion gives you no right, legal or moral, to probe into people’s private lives.’

‘Up to you, Susannah, but adoption at least offers a plausible explanation for—’

‘All right, yes.’ Susannah leaned back and opened her jacket. ‘It was already in progress. It was to have been a substantial settlement, and the mother was practically biting our hands off. Kept ringing me up, just to make sure we weren’t going off the idea.’

‘Figures.’ Merrily thought of all the things Mumford had said about his sister: the extreme bitterness towards their own mother after the boy died. Big money, maybe life-changing money, had just gone down the pan.

‘He’d have moved in here,’ Susannah said, ‘and gone to school in Ludlow. And his gran – of whom he was fond but who was becoming unfit to look after him – would have seen far more of him than she already did. I don’t claim to have fully fathomed out the relationship between Bell and the boy. But they certainly had shared interests which he seems to have been unable to pursue at home.’

‘And perhaps she needed an heir? Of sorts. Would that be…?’

‘You mean for the New Palmers’ Guild Trust?’

‘What exactly is that?’

‘No big secret. The Trust, into which most of Bell’s assets will pass when she dies, will support, in perpetuity, specific historic features of the town.’

Merrily nodded. ‘Like the maintenance of the St Leonard’s cemetery as a wilderness with corpses?’

‘Be assured that I and my successors will administer the Trust entirely according to my client’s wishes.’

‘And the conservation of certain yew trees? Preservation of public rights of way connecting sacred places? And perhaps keeping particular viewpoints open, in the face of possible future development?’