Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

ALL THE PEOPLE who’d told Mumford, It’s a new beginning.

All the beaming faces blurred by pint glasses frosted with froth, all the damp handshakes. Mumford mumbling, Ah, thanks… thank you… very nice… ’course I will… No, I won’t be going nowhere… yes… no… thank you.

Andy Mumford, who didn’t see the point of new beginnings – complete waste of half a lifetime’s experience. Andy Mumford who had just wanted to carry on.

The way this town had carried on: the oldest town he knew – or at least the one that looked oldest. Bent and sagging, and people loved it for that, and nobody looked up at the crooked gables and the worm-riddled beams and said, What this old place needs is A New Beginning.

Mumford felt a gassy fury inside, like in one of the first-ever pictures he could remember – in a children’s encyclopaedia, it was, and it showed the inside of a volcano close to eruption. How many years ago was that now – forty-four, forty-five? God almighty.

Not that anybody would ever know about the volcano in Mumford. Not showing it was the one thing he was real good at. Not showing his excitement when the suspect in the interview room said the wrong thing at the right time, springing the trap. Not showing what he really wanted to do to the rat-eyed rapist with a cellar full of porno videos. Never showing his feelings because he was a professional and because he was…

… imperturbable.

Clumsy old word, bit of a mouthful, but probably the nicest thing anybody ever said about him in all those years in the Job. And that was all right. Imperturbable implied solid, reliable… professional.

Only, what bloody use was being totally professional when you didn’t have a profession any more? What use was imperturbable ever going to be to him again?

Mumford walked up Broad Street, Ludlow, which some folk maintained was the most beautiful street in the most beautiful medieval market town in the country, and it might as well have been a semi-derelict industrial estate for all he noticed.

Warmish evening now, Easter just gone and the town coming alive for the tourists, everybody’s world opening up, Mumford’s closing down. What would he do, day to day, through the summer? And then the autumn and the winter and then another year. Another thirty years, if he was spared. The length of his career all over again. Thirty years of what’s the point?

He reached the top of the wide street, across from the Buttercross, the old market building with its fancy little clock, behind it the tower of St Laurence’s soaring over a tight mesh of streets and alleys. The whole scene warm and golden. Andy Mumford feeling as warm and golden, frankly, as shit.

Ludlow wasn’t his town, mind. Mumford came from Leominster, back in Herefordshire, a dozen or so miles down the A49. It was just that his Mam and Dad had moved here to take over a little shop after the old man retired from the Force (‘Why don’t you get yourself a little shop, Andy?’ some bastard had said in the pub; Andy could’ve nutted him) and now Gail was working part-time as an auxiliary nurse at Ludlow Community Hospital.

Because Gail was still a professional.

For probably the first time ever, Mumford had brought his wife to work this morning and he’d come back now – after what had to have been the longest day of his entire life – to pick her up. Tonight they were going to have a meal at one of the fancy new restaurants that had opened up here.

A celebration meal. A couple of extra glasses of wine for him because Gail would be driving them home. A toast to a new beginning. A meal they wouldn’t normally think of affording in the town that, with all these new eateries, had become the Food Capital of the Welsh Marches – Mumford conceding that, for the town, this probably did, in fact, qualify as a new beginning. Always been prosperous, but it had real wealth now, all these poncy-voiced bastards moving up from London with their silver knives and forks.

Mumford glared, with this new resentment, at the little shops with their blinds down and the dark windows of the Buttercross where the town councillors met and patted each other on the back and swapped the odd Masonic handshake.

He was in his best suit, the suit he’d last worn to collect his commendation from the Chief Constable, and Gail had brought to work some nice clothes to change into at his Mam and Dad’s house down the bottom of town, behind the new Tesco’s.

Which was why Mumford was walking uptown… trying to get himself into the right mood to face his Mam and his bloody Dad for the first time since the Home Office had officially repossessed his warrant card. Needing to sound a bit jovial from now on, on account of imperturbable was no longer enough to see him through. He was expected to become a member of the human race. To become Andy.

Andy, the dumpy, middle-aged, genial, smiling, bastard civilian.

We’ll likely be seeing a bit more of you at last, then, Andy , Mam had said the other night on the phone. You can do a bit of decorating for us, if you want to. And Robbie, he wants to show you all his favourite places in the town, don’t you, Robbie? He’s nodding, see. He’s always saying when’s Uncle Andy coming?

Robbie, his young nephew, his sister’s boy from Hereford, who preferred to spend the school holidays with his grandparents in Ludlow, even though his grandad despised him.

I’ll be getting some kind of job , Mumford had snapped back. En’t that old yet .

Guessing that when he got there tonight she’d have forgotten he was even retired. In any other job he wouldn’t have been. If he’d just been a bit more ambitious in the early years, if he’d pushed a bit more, he could’ve made Inspector and stayed on till he was sixty. But he was a plodder, and the plodders didn’t get promoted and so they were forced into retirement at fifty. And everybody thought that, being plodders, they were looking forward to it: crown-green bowls, growing sprouts, bloody line-dancing.

Surprisingly, the only bit of understanding had come from Francis Bliss, his last boss, who was fifteen years younger and, as a senior officer, still had another twenty-odd years to serve if he wanted it.

CID room, Mumford’s last morning, Bliss frowning.

This is all to cock, this system, Andy. We just throw away our best natural resources, like pressing the fuckin’ delete button on thirty years of database.

He’d respected Bliss for that. Realized how much he’d come to respect Bliss as a detective, too, despite him being a smart-mouth from Merseyside. Knew that when the time came, unless the world was a very different place by then, Bliss – never a man you’d call imperturbable – would go out cursing.

Cursing.

Mumford looked up at the hard, shiny evening sky, ready to curse God.

But God got in first.

God pulled the rug from under the slippers that Mumford was never going to wear.

He was turning the corner to walk up to Castle Square when he heard it coming up behind him, a sound that used to make his blood race but now seemed more like a taunt, and he wanted to shut it out. The way this morning he’d punched in the button on his alarm clock – which he’d routinely set without a thought last night – and then lain there staring into the white-skied emptiness of a new day.

Ambulance. He stood on the corner under the dull maroon façade of McCartney’s estate agents, and watched it barrelling through the narrows, a couple of tourists glancing up in annoyance like it ought to be horse-drawn in Ludlow.