Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

As he was approaching the lights in the centre of Leominster, Lol’s phone broke ironically into the first bars of ‘Sunny Days’, the nearest he’d ever come to an actual hit. He pulled off the road into the forecourt of the petrol station on the corner, eased up against some second-hand cars, all of them at least ten years younger than the Astra.

Jane said, ‘You’d better pull over, Lol, what I have to tell you could cause an accident.’

‘One moment.’ He switched off the engine. ‘OK.’

‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘First off…’

First off, she told him, he’d be well advised to start looking for Mum in the general area of Ludlow Castle, where a girl was threatening suicide. Yes, another one, and it was no use asking who or why because this was all Sophie had known, therefore it was all Jane knew.

‘Christ,’ Lol said.

‘OK, the second thing. You sure you’re off the road?’

‘Get on with it, Jane.’

‘I’d like to claim total credit for this, but it was Sophie. I didn’t think even Mum meant that much to Sophie – well, not in comparison with the cathedral. Just shows, doesn’t it? So, like, Sophie talked to the Dean.’

‘The Dean.’

‘At the cathedral? The steely-eyed number-cruncher in charge of the cathedral? It’s pretty clear Sophie’s got some serious dirt on the Dean that she’s been, like, saving up, and now it’s really come good. I mean, circumstantial evidence more than anything else, but the Dean is the missing component that connects everybody.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Lol said. ‘What are we talking about? This is about Mumford? Belladonna?’

The line seemed to fracture.

‘… And we checked it on the Net and it’s a bit of a gob-smacker.’

‘Start again, Jane,’ Lol said.

‘Can’t be done,’ Steve Britton said. ‘Sorry. Can’t allow it. Tense as hell in there, George. That girl goes out the hole, there’ll be an inquest on all of us.’

‘The hole?’ George said.

‘Well… window. Jagged hole in the wall. She’s up on this deep window ledge, and they can’t reach her. She made us take away the scaffolding – leaned back, half out the window, said if we didn’t take it away she’d… you know. Don’t look that big a drop from below, but when you’re up there…’

Steve Britton was probably in his forties, nearly as tall as George, with a scrubbed face and invisible eyebrows. He nodded at Merrily, across the castle gate.

‘Friend of Andy Mumford’s, right?’

‘You seen him lately, Mr Britton?’

He laughed. ‘I’m glad to say, no. Poor old boy.’

‘Who’s in with the girl?’

‘Inspector Gee and Dr Saltash. I think you know him, too. My superior suggested he go in, seeing he was around. Also the woman minister. Canon…’

‘Callaghan-Clarke.’

‘That’s it. Seems they been studying the situation,’ Steve Britton said. ‘It’s not an easy one. It’s not normal, this, is it?’

‘Do you think you could tell them I’m here… and I might just be able to help?’

Steve Britton coughed. ‘Like I say, a bit difficult in there just at the moment, Mrs Watkins. Perhaps if you could come back later?’

‘I see.’ Seemed clear he’d been told that if she turned up she definitely wasn’t to be allowed in. She could imagine Saltash briefing Steve Britton, in confidence. Not for me to try to influence you, Sergeant, but a woman with a stress problem in a situation this volatile… would that be wise?

‘Inspector Gee’s also very much the right person for this,’ Steve Britton said. ‘You’ll remember Sandy Gee, George – DC here, four, five years ago? Went back into uniform to take charge of family liaison in Shrewsbury. Plump person. Three kids, now. Needs somebody a bit mumsy, I reckon. Seems very young, this girl.’

‘So it is a girl?’ Merrily said. ‘I mean, you’ve seen her yourself?’

‘Who’d you think it was?’ Steve Britton eyed her, curious.

‘Do you know her name yet?’

Steve Britton pursed his lips.

George Lackland snorted. ‘God’s sake, Stephen, how long you known me, boy?’ He turned to Merrily. ‘People help each other in a small town. It’s how things get done. How good connections get made.’

The Mayor turned back to Steve Britton and gave him a long, considering stare, as if their future relationship and all it might promise was on the line here.

‘Samantha Cornwell,’ Steve said. ‘And it wasn’t me told you.’

‘Goes without saying, Stephen. Local?’

‘Ledbury. Like the other one.’

Merrily blinked. ‘That means she knew Jemmie Pegler?’

Steve Britton looked uneasy; he’d already said too much.

‘Thank you, boy,’ George said. ‘It won’t be forgotten.’

Merrily followed the Mayor back onto the square, everything reshaping.

She’d assembled a scenario in which Bell, betrayed, had fled to Marion’s tower, all ghosts together, but it was wrong. Now the scene in her head was a corner table at the café in a mews across the car park from Hereford Police HQ. On the table, a computer printout, e-mail format:

if i emptied every packet and every bottle in there and swallowed the lot. well just be sick as a dog most likely. how sad is that, sam. im not going out sad. im not. when i go theyll fucking know ive gone.

Samantha Cornwell. Sam?

Over by the tourist office, she saw the eight-year-old boy who was waiting for the big bump. He was staying very close now to a woman pushing a pram, presumably his mother, and he was no longer laughing. Often the way with children, the bravado melting in the suddenly frightening heat of reality. The policewoman, Kelly, had known her psychology: just about the last thing this kid wanted to hear was a big bump that would resound in his room at bedtime.

Merrily, too, but what the hell could she do?

The sun bulged like a damaged eye behind purplish cloud. The couple known to George Lackland had shifted their cardboard placard closer to the castle wall.

ONLY THE POWER OF GOD CAN STOP THIS NOW.

Tell that to Nigel Saltash.

Duss, duss, duss.

JUST THE ONCE, after denying everything with his usual contempt and arrogance and bravado, Jason Mebus tried to leg it.

Choosing his moment perfectly, when Mumford – and it could happen to anybody, there was nothing you could do – let go this unstoppable sneeze.

Bringing his knee up into Mumford’s crotch, not quite getting it right but enough to break free. Would have been well away, too, up the river bank, through the grounds of the derelict restaurant under the pines, if he hadn’t stopped for the parting gesture, like he always did on the CCTV pictures.

Vicious sneer and a rigid finger up at the camera.

With what he thought was a safe distance between them, he turned round and did it at Mumford, who was on his knees in the dirt.

Mumford did nothing – made a point, in fact, of showing no pain and looking unimpressed, like he’d merely bent to pick up a coin. Which was when Jason started screaming that if he’d had his way, they’d have finished hanging Robbie Walsh. Finished off the job by the time the Collins kid had started crying and run out of the shed and gone to fetch his dipshit dad.

As it was, they’d cut the little gayboy down and they were out of there. Which was a shame, all the trouble they’d gone to, to fix it up like a suicide, even ripping the hanging page out of the history book so it could be left by the body, and then putting the book back in Walsh’s school bag.

Jason telling him all this just in case Mumford thought he was dealing with an amateur. How it would’ve gone down as suicide, no problem ’cause everybody knew Walshie was having a bad time on the Plascarreg. But enough people would know what had really happened to make it crystal clear that there were certain individuals on this estate that you did not fuck with.