Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘Not to worry – they said you were slightly unconventional, sir.’

In the centre of the inner space was a squat round tower with a Norman arch and a mullioned window but no roof. A group of people had assembled outside it, mainly uniformed police and paramedics. Lol kept his distance.

‘How’s the girl?’

‘Sitting tight. Nearly four hours now. Dr Saltash is convinced she has absolutely no intention of doing it, just wants an audience.’ Steve Britton sniffed. ‘Wouldn’t bet on it, meself. She’ll be quite rational one minute, accepting a pack of sandwiches, can of Coke… and then she’s back up into the window space, all hunched up. And you know that all she’s gotter do is lean gently back and it’s all over.’

‘Salt— Nigel’s talking to her himself?’

‘Sandy Gee, our family liaison officer – she’s doing most of the talking, sometimes the Canon, when the girl starts on about being possessed. Dr Saltash is watching and making observations, offering advice. He says he’ll come out and talk to you in a few minutes, if you just hang on here. There’s really not that much space in there, and they don’t want her to feel crowded or threatened.’

‘When you say possessed? Things were a bit rushed. The Bishop’s office didn’t have time to explain much on the phone.’

‘They watch too much TV, sir. Too many DVDs. And what was in the morning papers didn’t help, obviously. All I know is she apparently turned up this morning, hung around for a couple of hours, found nothing was happening and got herself in a state. Then she sees the scaffolding in the tower, and up she goes. First she’s come to kill herself, then she’s waiting for the exorcism. Confused.’

‘Have they… done anything? Any kind of…’

‘Mumbo-jumbo? Sorry, sir, forgetting who I’m talking to. Long day. No, Dr Saltash advises against it, and I think he’s probably right. In my experience, you need to calm people like this down, not overexcite them.’

‘Sarge!’ The policewoman, Kelly, appeared by the gatehouse, holding up a mobile phone. ‘DI Bliss, Hereford. They’ve found the parents. They were shopping in Worcester.’

‘OK,’ Steve Britton said. ‘Better have a word. Excuse me, Mr Longbeach.’

And so Lol was on his own when Saltash came out of the castle.

Never seen him before, but there could be no mistake. Something in the walk, something in the cursory inspection of the police and paramedics gathered by the sawn-off round tower.

Sometimes, Lol wondered if there really was some trait, some aspect of demeanour, that united psychiatrists or if it was simply something that he projected on men once he knew that this was what they did. And they were men, nearly all of them. Maybe most women didn’t have the arrogance for it. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to sleep so easily.

Saltash wore a cream-coloured cotton suit. His tie was loosened. His face was narrow and evenly tanned, lined rather than wrinkled, and his grey beard was barbered to the length of his grey hair. He stood on the short, tufted grass, where shadows converged, looking around for a man whom Merrily had said was plump and friendly and conspicuously camp. He didn’t move, expecting the man to approach him.

Lol wandered over. ‘Dr Saltash?’

Saltash stared through him. ‘I’m looking for Martin Longbeach. Is he here?’

‘I think you’re looking for me.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Saltash said. ‘Because you don’t appear to be Martin Longbeach.’

‘And you don’t appear to be Lord Shipston,’ Lol said, aware of so many years tumbling into this moment. ‘But I think you know him.’

THE PALMERS’ WINDOW told its tale in reds and blues and gold.

Merrily made out a ship bound for the Holy Land, a stylized ship like a floating horn, with people far too big to fit into it. She saw King Edward the Confessor and St John the Evangelist, whose chapel was dominated by this window. The mystical ring passing between St John and the King, via the Palmers, all dressed in blue.

Mostly myth and wishful thinking. The Saxon King Edward had predated the first of the Ludlow Palmers by about two centuries.

The Chapel of St John, the original Palmers’ chapel, was to the left of the high altar in St Laurence’s, a dark three-aisle palace of a church, not far short of a cathedral. George Lackland stood at the entrance to the chapel, his back to a narrow door set in stone. Looking down, Merrily saw she was standing on an inscribed tombstone.

‘Guild wardens buried under here,’ George said.

He and Merrily were alone in the church, George having obtained the keys from the verger on his way out. Who could anyone trust with the keys more than George, former churchwarden and a merchant of quality who, in the Middle Ages, would surely have been a prominent Palmer himself?

Not that the Lacklands had been in Ludlow in the Middle Ages; they hadn’t left East Anglia until the eighteenth century. But George, with his tiered face and his slow-burn eyes, looked like part of the story, part of the myth.

It would have been enough for Bell.

‘One weekend – a Saturday – we were all here… in the church.’ His voice was dry and ashy. ‘Nancy and Susannah and Stephen and me. And her.’

Merrily recalled George’s description of Bell on that day or a similar one: dressed decently and conservatively. Her Edwardian summer dress, her blonde hair neatly styled. Quite girlish, rather attractive.

A day in the rosy dawn of Bell’s love affair with Ludlow. Tripping and gliding around the Buttercross, her smiling face upturned to the sun.

‘Like a buttercup,’ George said now, his voice laden with a damp sorrow. ‘And then she wanted to go to the top of the tower.’ He turned to the narrow door behind him. ‘This is the way, behind here, see.’

‘Famous viewpoint,’ Merrily said, ‘I’d guess.’

‘Spectacular. See for miles. But it’s a long old haul – couple of hundred steps, and it seems like more. Bell said would someone like to go up with her? Nancy said, no, thanks, once was enough, and her legs ached for days afterwards. Susannah wasn’t particularly interested either, so I said – because, I suppose, I didn’t want her to think I was an old man – I said, Aye, I’ll go. I’ll go up with you.’

George turned his back on the door. He said the steps were very narrow and twisty, so it was necessary to go up in single file. There was a rope that you could hold on to, to help pull yourself up.

Bell went first. You can catch me if I fall, George , she said.

‘She didn’t fall. She was very light on her feet.’

‘Oh yes.’ Merrily recalled the stage act – split black skirts, bare feet.

‘I tried to leave a bit of space between us, see, but when you’re on a tight spiral the person in front’s apt to disappear around a bend. You know what I mean?’

‘Mmm.’ Vicars knew about church spirals.

‘So, three or four times, Bell would come to a sudden stop on a bend, and I’d go bumping up against her. Which was embarrassing for me, but she’d just laugh. That laugh that she has, far back in her throat.’

George wouldn’t look at Merrily while he was talking. His gaze was raised to the Palmers’ window, as if he was wishing he could sail away to the Holy Land or anywhere. Merrily felt that the closer George’s story took them to the top of the tower, the more it was plummeting to the bottom of his own deepest well.

He’d refused to tell her about this in the street, insisted on coming into the church, knowing it was about to close for the night, as if it was part of his penance to unload it all before God and a woman young enough to be his daughter, who also happened to be an ordained priest.