The Smile of a Ghost (12 page)

‘Couldn’t be Marion?’

‘Doesn’t ring any bells. Well, not in that context.’ Mr Osman turned to Mumford. ‘You asked me that, didn’t you?’

‘Do you know anyone called Marion who… frequents the castle?’ Merrily asked.

‘Well, not…’ He laughed. ‘As I told Mr Mumford here, not someone I’ve ever seen.’

‘I’m sorry?’

Mr Osman didn’t reply. Over the town, the sky was turning a luminous acid green with early moonlight.

‘Ah,’ the Bishop said. ‘I think I understand. You mean Marion de la Bruyère. But that wasn’t the keep, was it, Mr Osman?’

‘It was the Hanging Tower, Bishop. I wrote some verse about her, for my calendar the year before last. Marion, whose endless death… is poised upon a midnight breath. Not… not awfully good, really.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘Three of you seem to know what this is about, but one of us doesn’t. Who are we talking about here? What does she do?’

‘She haunts,’ Bernie Dunmore said. ‘Allegedly.’

9

T
HE
B
ISHOP SAID
he was confused: too much, too fast.

‘Why did you want to know if Osman had seen anyone else on the tower? I mean, surely you don’t imagine that someone actually killed the boy?’

The ornate lamps in the square were white, like magnesium flares.

‘We have’ – Merrily slotted the Volvo into a corner, down by a darkened delicatessen and well away from the castle – ‘a kind of reason to try and eliminate the possibility.’

God
, she was thinking,
do we
? She had her window half-down, collecting music and laughter draining from a pub in a nearby street no wider than an alley, the sounds disconnected, somehow, as though on the tape-loop of a separate but parallel time-frame.

Eras overlapping: a disconcerting town.

All she’d told him earlier was about the supposed bereavement visions – that Phyllis Mumford had been in a distressed and confused state, that he was the only priest she seemed likely to open up to. There hadn’t seemed much point, at that stage, in going into what Phyllis had said about a woman.

But it was unavoidable now.

‘I see.’ The Bishop breathed in slowly. ‘That’s rather a difficult one, isn’t it?’

‘Only for a Deliverance consultant,’ Merrily said. ‘The rest of you are free to roll your eyes.’

‘If I could just say…’ Andy Mumford was a bulky shadow on the back seat. ‘The fact that Osman didn’t see another person don’t mean there wasn’t someone up there with the boy. Just they didn’t hang around afterwards.’

The Bishop shuffled. ‘You do know what you’re saying here, Andrew?’

‘After many years as a detective, Bishop, I think I got a basic idea.’

‘Yes, but what are you actually suggesting – kids fooling about and one falls off the tower? Or what?’

‘I was ready to believe,’ Mumford said, ‘that it was an accident. At first. Mabbe it’s what we all wanted at the time – no stigma with an accident. But now’ – he leaned forward between the front seats – ‘now it’s like something’s telling me, real strongly, that something en’t what it seems. You understand?’

‘Story of my life,’ Merrily said.

‘The night Robbie was found, after my sister ID’d the body, I go back to my mother’s house. There’s a woman outside. Long cape. Just standing there, looking across at the house. When I tried to talk to her, she walked off.’

‘What?’

‘What I could see of her face, she’d been weeping.’

‘Andy, you never even mentioned this before.’

‘Didn’t think too much of it afterwards. Spooked me a bit at the time, OK, but I was tired. Lot of neighbours been in and out the house. Lot of people dress funny in Ludlow these days – people going out to dinner.’

‘So the chances are your mother knows this woman?’

‘She was carrying a lantern – with a candle in it. Well, there’s a few shops in town now selling tat like that. You think, some crank, don’t you?’

‘We’ll certainly ask Phyllis about her,’ the Bishop said. ‘Perhaps clear it up.’

‘Meanwhile,’ Merrily said. ‘Can we…’ She squirmed a little. ‘Can we talk about Marion now?’

* * *

The ‘Dear Marion’ postcard. She talked about that.

‘When we go over there, I’ll ask Mrs Mumford if I can show it to you.’

‘Needs to be photocopied, I think, Merrily,’ the Bishop said.

‘Good idea.’

‘Then Andrew has to decide if the police should see it. Meanwhile, let me… let me get this right – this is a postcard, with a photograph of the castle on the front, written by Robbie Walsh to someone he actually addresses as… as Marion.’

‘Someone he imagines he’s walking with in the castle grounds, holding hands. And there’s a drawing of what appears to be a spectral female figure. Pleading with her to come to him. “I’ll be waiting,” he says.’

‘I see.’ Bernie Dunmore was silent for a moment. He seemed agitated. ‘What are your conclusions about that?’

‘The psychological one first?’

‘Please.’

‘Shy, solitary kid, fascinated by medieval history, besotted with Ludlow…’

‘You’re thinking fantasy-girlfriend,’ the Bishop said.

‘I don’t know. Is she fantasy-girlfriend material?’

He sighed. ‘All right… look… I do, as it happens, know something about this story. Goes back to the twelfth century. Or, in my case, about thirty-five years, to when I was a young curate. Here, as it happens.’

‘I didn’t know you were a curate in Ludlow.’

‘Not something I’ve ever emphasized on my CV. A bishop is expected to have been around. Unfortunately, once I’d lived here I didn’t want to end up anywhere else. Moved on, drifted quietly back. I’ve been, ah, fortunate.’

‘You jammy sod, Bernie.’

‘Yes, that’s another way of putting it. So… I happened to be a young curate at St Laurence’s when a chap called Peter Underwood – doyen of British ghost-hunters, though I didn’t know it at the time – was researching a book called, if I remember rightly,
A Gazetteer of British Ghosts
. It has quite an extensive entry on Ludlow – most of which, as it happens, is taken up by the story of Marion de la Bruyère. Marion of the Heath.’

She was usually described as ‘a lady of the castle’, Bernie said.

Which could have meant anything – possibly she was a lady-in-waiting, if there were such creatures in the reigns of King Stephen and his successor, Henry II.

Turbulent times. Less than a century after the Norman conquest, and the ownership of the new and highly strategic Ludlow Castle was in dispute. Stephen had put the fortress in the charge of a Breton knight, Joce de Dinan – arguably the source of the name Dinham, for the community under the castle’s perimeter wall, to the south-west. But the powerful baronial de Lacy family thought it should be theirs, and it was the conflict between Joce and the de Lacys that led to a young knight called Arnold de Lisle, a de Lacy man, being taken prisoner.

‘While not exactly established history, it’s certainly well-documented in a medieval epic known as
The Romance of Fulk FitzWarrin
,’ Bernie said. ‘Seems that Marion de la Bruyère – described by one source as “a guileless damsel” – had fallen in love with the prisoner, Arnold, and helped him escape from the castle either down a rope or knotted sheets.’

And then – her fatal mistake – Marion had arranged to let Arnold back into the castle, on a later occasion, by means of a rope ladder.

‘While the two of them are otherwise engaged in Marion’s bedchamber, a large number of armed men from the de Lacy camp come swarming up the ladder to capture the castle. Now we know that happened – de Lacy did get the castle. Appears to have slaughtered a lot of people and set fire to property in the streets of Ludlow that night to make it clear that he was now running the show. In fact, some of the killing and the burning would have happened exactly where we’re parked now.’

‘Thanks for that, Bernie.’

‘Anyway, when she finds out what’s happening, Marion – full of remorse and fury at his betrayal – snatches Arnold’s sword and kills him with it. And then – not seeing, presumably, much of a future for herself – she throws herself from a high window in the Hanging Tower.’

Merrily said, ‘But that—’

‘No, it’s not where Robbie fell. It’s a tower at the rear of the castle, facing the river. And the present Hanging Tower doesn’t seem to have been built until two centuries after these alleged events took place.’

‘But Marion…?’

‘Yes. Marion. There’s certainly quite an extensive section in Underwood’s book relating to her activities, post-mortem. It, ah, it was said that people could hear her final screams for many years, but the more recent stories relate to a sort of heavy breathing – supposedly as she psyched herself up either to dispatch Arnold or herself. Underwood told me he’d talked to a local man who’d heard it several times and researched it pretty thoroughly, disproving to his own satisfaction the theory that the noise was caused by a nest of young owls. Not possible in January, apparently.’

‘Nothing seen?’ Merrily said.

‘Ah… there was talk of a… a white lady. Nothing on record.’

‘But it seems likely that Robbie Walsh would have heard the stories.’

‘Best-known ghost story in Ludlow, Merrily. And there’s no shortage of competition in this town. There’s a chap now who conducts ghost-walks at least twice a week in the season. Marion, I’d guess, would be his star attraction.’

‘From what little I know about medieval history,’ Merrily said, ‘an unattached female, in those days, wouldn’t be far into her teens.’

Bernie coughed. ‘If at all.’

‘Robbie would have known that. He wandered the town alone. He might well have fantasized a relationship – maybe, at that age, no more than a rather romantic friendship – with a girl from the past, rather than a supernatural entity. The guileless damsel. The kind you rarely encounter today.’

Merrily thought about Jane, who wouldn’t have fitted the description ‘guileless’ since turning eight.

‘And written to her?’ Bernie said.

‘Gives a kind of substance to the fantasy. Makes her seem more real to him.’

‘Pleading with her to meet him? Saying he’ll be waiting?’

Merrily shrugged.

‘If that’s your psychological explanation,’ the Bishop said, ‘I’m not sure I want to hear the other one.’

‘I haven’t fully worked out the other one yet.’

They were silent for a few moments. A bunch of kids were whooping and kicking a lager can in the square. Merrily wound her window up.

‘Andy, isn’t it likely, given what Bernie says, that your mother would have heard the story of Marion?’

Mumford grunted. ‘I hadn’t. But then I en’t from yere.’

‘Could she be subconsciously associating it with Robbie’s death, is what I’m wondering. She’s seen his drawing. She’s probably read the letter, even if she’s forgotten about it. And in her confused state of mind…’

Out on the square, one of the boys who’d been kicking the can, shouted out, for no obvious reason, ‘Fuckin’ shiiiiiite!’ Merrily thought of the cries – somewhere on the tape-loop – of slaughtered citizens, hacked to death by de Lacy’s men, while the broken body of Marion de la Bruyère still lay at the foot of the tower.

‘And also, Andy, given that the card suggests a depth of unhappiness at home, doesn’t this open up another possibility?’

‘You’re saying suicide.’

‘In which case’ – Merrily looked over her shoulder at the shadowy Mumford – ‘would you really want to take it any further?’

‘Wrong tower,’ Mumford said stubbornly. ‘You heard what Osman said: boy knew that castle like the back of his hand. He wants to kill himself the way this girl did, why would he jump off the wrong tower?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Tell you what,’ Mumford said. ‘If you wanner stick with this ghost stuff, mabbe I’ll check out the real woman. The living woman. The one he was seen with. Mother and son.’

‘Mrs Pepper.’

‘If her name turns out to be Marion, what we gonner be looking at then?’

‘Look, it’s getting late,’ the Bishop said. ‘Perhaps we should go and do what we came for – see how we can comfort your mother. Perhaps hear what Phyllis has to say. And then… little prayer-circle, do you think, Merrily? Proper blessing of the house? How’s your father, Andrew?’

‘He’s all right.’

‘Probably showing less than he’s feeling if he’s the Reg I remember, but I’ll persuade him to join us. All right, Andrew, how about you drive down and prepare the ground? Merrily and I should perhaps… discuss tactics.’

‘Thank you,’ Mumford said. ‘Aye, I’ll go and talk to them. Thanks.’

He had to put his shoulder to the rear offside door, which jammed most times. When he’d gone, the Bishop turned to Merrily, his arms folded, his legs stretched out into the well.

‘So what’s all this really about?’ he said mildly.

She asked if she could have a cigarette, so they got out and walked down towards the centre of the town. There was a greenish sheen on roofs and a glare in window-glass as a near-full moon came up like stage lighting, sharpening the medieval gables and creaming the appropriately buttery stonework of the Buttercross with its neo-classical portico and its clock tower.