Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘Didn’t having a boyfriend…?’

‘Oh well, that didn’t last, did it? Thinks she’s finally got something steady with Sam’s ex-boyfriend… Hoo! Terrific! I’m a real woman! And then, having had his evil way, this lovely Harry dumps her like an old sofa. So Jemmie is now very depressed indeed, because she’s lost the feller, and she’s also lost her very best friend, the only real friend she’s had. So then she’s desperately trying to get back with Sam, bombarding her with pitiful, wheedling e-mails, the way these kids do. They were at different schools, you see?’

‘Jemmie was manic-depressive?’

‘That was certainly what Dr Saltash thought. Now Sam… the thing with her, she’s a very soft-hearted girl, basically. She’s quite pretty, but not too pretty, and perhaps a bit short on confidence – this is my opinion, you understand, from talking to her and listening to what she’s got to say. I’d guess that Sam was friends with Jemmie very much out of pity, in the early days. Because Sam doesn’t yet have the confidence to make her own way, she’s drawn to the underdogs – well, it’s nice to be needed, isn’t it? But at the end of the day she’s a little girl, she’s not a saint, and she’s really not going to forgive Jemmie that easily – if at all – for the business over the boy. And I think she was very glad, actually, to be free of Jemmie. Only to find herself, I’m afraid, with another underdog on her hands.’

Sandy Gee folded her arms, bulky in the fleece, and looked at Lol.

‘Guess,’ she said.

Lol shook his head. Behind the clouds, the sun was setting and the stones were full of detail and texture.

‘Robbie Walsh,’ Sandy said. ‘There’s a turn-up, eh?’

In the drabness and dereliction of the Hanging Tower, the first window, the one you could easily reach, was barred.

Or partly. The two bars didn’t reach to the top of the window, so it would be possible for anyone determined enough to climb up and squeeze over them.

This window offered a view of the River Teme and the pine woods where The Weir House, apparently, was hidden. Inside the tower, the window was on the ground floor, but outside there was a very long drop to the path at the bottom of the rocks into which the foundations were sunk.

Was this how Jemmie Pegler had gone?

Above it – it would have been one storey up if the floors and ceilings hadn’t all gone, leaving the tower as a hollow funnel – was another window, the second of four. A window that would have been inaccessible but for the scaffolding.

‘They were going to make it safe,’ Sandy murmured. ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’

The skeleton of galvanized metal tubing ended about three feet under the window, two planks along the top, a brown mug on the end of one. A wooden ladder extended to the top of the scaffolding; a second one had evidently been pushed away and lay at an angle against the wall.

The girl was huddled like a squirrel in the deep recess around the second window, about fifteen feet above the floor. A small girl in a pink hoodie and jeans, short brown hair and the glint of a ring at the end of an eyebrow. The window space almost directly behind her was about four feet high and two or three feet wide, and all you could see through it was the darkening sky.

‘You want another coffee, Sam?’ Sandy called up.

Sam didn’t reply.

‘How about a hot chocolate? You must be getting cold up there.’

‘No, thank you,’ Sam said. They thought she was fourteen or fifteen, but she sounded younger.

‘She must be needing to go to the loo by now,’ Sandy whispered to Lol. Then she called back up to the ledge, ‘Sam, if you want to go to the loo, we can organize something.’

‘No, thank you.’

Lol said tentatively, ‘I’m… Martin.’

Sam didn’t acknowledge him. He wished Steve Britton would get back here, with Merrily.

Sandy whispered in his ear, ‘Try again, eh?’

Lol said, ‘About Robbie… it really wasn’t your fault. I can explain why. Can I do that?’

There was silence. Sandy Gee looked at Lol, showed him fingers crossed on both hands. A bird fluttered at the top of the tower.

‘You just keep telling me lies.’ This small, lost voice from the stone ledge.

Sandy said, ‘This is not a wind-up, Sam. He knows stuff I didn’t know.’

Before they came in, she’d told Lol what Sam had said earlier, when she’d been more talkative. It seemed her mother had come to spend a week in Ludlow before Christmas to look after Sam’s Auntie Kate, who’d broken a leg, and she’d brought Sam with her, as Sam was very miserable at the time, having just found out about Jemmie and Harry.

At first, Sam had been really bored in Ludlow: didn’t know anybody, nothing to do. The turning point was the Friday night her mother had taken her on the ghost-walk this guy ran – which Sam expected would be totally crap, but it had turned out to be kind of fun and scary, too, because she basically believed in ghosts and all that stuff.

And there was this boy there, about Sam’s age, and he’d said if she was interested there were some things he could show her, maybe call for her the next day, and she said yeah, OK. So the next day they went to Gallows Bank, where people used to be hanged, and then this Robbie took her to the castle, where she was quite impressed by him being able to get in for nothing.

Anyway, they’d spent most of the week together. They came here quite a few times, to the Hanging Tower, and Robbie told her about Marion’s ghost being seen, and they’d stood here and listened for the breathing noise, but they hadn’t heard anything.

They were just, like, mates – that was how Sam had seen it. She didn’t want another boyfriend so soon after Harry. But it seemed Robbie was more serious about it than Sam was. When she’d gone home, Robbie had kept writing and e-mailing and sending her stuff about Ludlow, and she was interested, but not that interested.

‘Sam?’ Sandy Gee said.

No reply. Sam had half-turned so she was looking out of the window space. From below, Lol could hear ragged singing: a hymn, ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past’.

‘Oh no,’ Sandy muttered. ‘It’s this bloody religious group. We blocked off the path at both ends specifically to avoid this kind of thing. They must be on some footpath coming up from the river or somewhere. Damn, damn, damn.’

‘Tell them to go away, or I’ll jump,’ Sam suddenly shouted. ‘Tell them!’ She stood up and leaned out over the drop. ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’

‘We’ll get a message to them,’ Sandy said. ‘All right?’

What else could she say? From less than twelve feet away from them, Sam was holding all the cards. When the kid turned to face them, she was in tears.

This was pitiful. An obvious cry for help. People rarely kill themselves as self-punishment, Dick Lyden, the psychotherapist, had once told Lol. They kill themselves because life isn’t worth living any more. That’s it, basically. Nothing subtle.

But what had begun as a cry for help had often ended in tragedy, Dick had emphasized. A cry for help wasn’t that easy to stage-manage, and they often lost control.

Suddenly, Lol was remembering something that Merrily had told him the night after Mumford’s mother had died.

About a letter that Robbie Walsh had written to a ghost.

‘Sam,’ he said, ‘were you Marion?’

Sandy Gee looked at him in some alarm, like he was suggesting reincarnation. The hymn outside had become ‘Rock of Ages’.

‘Did Robbie call you Marion?’ Lol said. ‘Did he write to you, e-mails and stuff… sent to you as Marion?’

Sam moved away from the window, leaning over the scaffolding.

‘She’s frightened.’