The Smile of a Ghost (15 page)

‘Was he?’

‘But thank heavens, Merrily… thank heavens, in a way, that you didn’t take it any further.’

‘Sorry?’

‘From a Deliverance point of view. When you think of the kind of adverse publicity if the media had discovered that you’d performed what they would have seen as some sort of exorcistic rite at this poor woman’s house just hours before she died.’

‘A home-blessing?’

‘It’s not what’s been done, Merrily—’

‘A few prayers?’

‘—It’s who’s done it. You’ve become fairly widely known now, not least to certain sections of the media, as an exorcist. Certain people would put two and two together and make six.’

‘But suppose that – after this exorcistic rite – it hadn’t happened. Suppose Mrs Mumford hadn’t wandered into the river. Was therefore still alive…’

But then she
had
done it. She’d returned, behind Saltash’s back, and done her rudimentary blessing, and Mrs Mumford had still died.

‘We could play the “what-if” game for the rest of the day, Merrily,’ Siân said, ‘but I doubt exorcism has ever been hailed as a cure for senile dementia.’

‘So, do you think it’s time for me to quit, Siân, before I bring the Church into even more disrepute?’

‘Let’s not be silly,’ Siân said.

Sunday evening, the Bishop rang. Something he thought Merrily should know.

‘Old Reg Mumford phoned me today. Encouraging, really, that he was able to do that.’

‘How is he?’

‘Staying at his son’s house, but insisting on going home tomorrow. He… seemed more focused. And resigned. And in his resignation, behind the loss, one could almost sense, I’m afraid, an exhausted kind of relief. Said he knew Phyllis would never have come to terms with what had happened to Robbie, however long she lived.’

Merrily was taking the call on her mobile, alone in the church, preparing for the Quiet Service. She lowered herself to the edge of a pew opposite the west window, where the evening sun made a ruby in the apple held by Eve.

‘You mean he’d actually thought she might want to die?’

‘Not exactly,’ Bernie said. ‘She was so convinced the boy was still there, in the town, that Reg said he was half-expecting to hear she’d been knocked down in the traffic after spotting Robbie across the road or something and rushing to him.’

‘His… reflection.’

‘Reflections. Exactly. Look… ah… Reg said that, in happier times, he and Phyllis often used to walk by the river. And one fine evening last week, she got him to take her back there.’

‘Oh no.’ Merrily closed her eyes.

‘And it was early evening, and the water was fairly still, even so close to the Horseshoe Weir, and she went and stood near the wall, looking down. And of course…’

‘Robbie.’

‘Looking up at her from the water.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Reg couldn’t take it. He pulled her away. They walked home in silence, nothing to say to one another. The last thing she said to him last night – therefore the last thing she said to him ever – was, “I can’t feel him in here any more. You’ve driven him out.” ’

‘Meaning the mirror – turning it to the wall?’

‘Who knows? And then she walked out, and she was standing at the front of the house, and he could hear her talking to one of the neighbours for a while. When he looked for her, she wasn’t there.’

‘He didn’t tell you this last night?’

‘I think he had to get it clear in his own mind. Anyway, thought I should tell you, that’s all. So that we can draw a line under it, as it were.’

Merrily heard soft footsteps, opened her eyes to the sight of Lol padding into the aisle. Sometimes he’d come to the Quiet Service, though never any of the others. He was wearing his old Roswell-alien sweatshirt. He’d worn this in church before, possibly a signal that he wasn’t yet fully integrated.

‘You really think a line can be drawn, Bernie?’

‘I think we have to. This Marion business… that’s always going to be a mystery.’

‘Why have you never told me about that before?’

‘Didn’t seem relevant. And anyway—’

‘You mean, not relevant to, like, what I do?’

‘Put it this way,’ he said, ‘you’re the only person I’ve ever told. Including the friends who got to keep their ten quid. And I trust you’ll keep it to yourself. Are you in the church, Merrily?’

‘You want me to swear on the Bible, over the phone? Sorry. Yes, I’m just rearranging the furniture.’

Lol was pulling movable pews up to the front to set up a rough circle.

‘Ah,’ the Bishop said. ‘Your meditation service. That going all right?’

‘We just call it the Quiet Service now. Yeah, going very well, since we managed to cool the rumours of miracle healing. We’ll do prayers for specific people sometimes, but strictly no hands-on. I know my level. We get about twenty most weeks.’

Including Jane, occasionally, and now even Lol.

Merrily beckoned him down the aisle and into the vestry, soon to be converted into a gift shop. Its walls had been freshly painted in yellow and some cheap pine shelving had been fitted. A faded Victorian sofa, now looking for a new home, had been pushed against the wall under a window, and Lol sat on that.

‘Well, this is nice, but wouldn’t it be some kind of sacrilege?’

‘I just want to talk, you fool.’ Merrily shut the door behind them.

‘Sacrilege could have been exciting.’ Lol lifted his hands. ‘Kidding.’

‘I know.’

Couple of years ago, the church organist had openly fantasized about slowly unbuttoning Merrily’s cassock. Lol, however, after the experience with his parents, was still wary of the Church and its trappings. Another reason he preferred the Quiet Service, when Merrily wore only her pectoral cross over a dark sweater and jeans.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Belladonna?’

‘You could be right.’ Lol sat forward, hands on his knees. ‘I rang Prof. He said he’d been warned a few months ago that she was living in the area and possibly working on a new album. Consequently, he was putting it around that the studio was booked up for the foreseeable.’

‘She’s not changed, then?’

‘Don’t go there,’ Lol said.

‘Hey, I’ve been there. When I was Jane’s age, it would have been. It was at a wrestling stadium – she wasn’t very famous then, but she had a cult following. We all wore black tights for the gig and I had this kind of funeral coat I’d bought for a couple of quid from Oxfam, and a black velvet hat and a lot of cheap stage makeup. Thank God all the pictures have disappeared.’

‘You really were a goth?’

‘A phase. We all linked arms under the stage and stood very still, like mourners around a catafalque. I didn’t like the music that much, to be honest. Too slow, a bit dismal. Occasional bursts of hysterical screaming. No tunes to speak of.’

‘What does she look like these days?’

‘Hardly any different. This long grey Victorian kind of cape that trailed in the mud. Same slightly beaky nose, same slightly crooked teeth.’

‘But in an attractive way. That strange kind of uneven beauty,’ Lol said.

‘Mmm.’ She tossed him a suspicious look. ‘So how close did you get all those years ago?’

He smiled. ‘Nice of you to imply I might have been brave enough at eighteen. No, we once played a very badly organized one-day festival in this half-flooded field in Oxfordshire. We were near the bottom of the bill – eleven a.m. – and she was in the prime sunset spot. We didn’t actually stay for her gig. But I did hear the discussion she had with the organizers about the level of facilities. Scary.’

‘Formidable woman.’

‘Hadn’t realized she was so posh until then. You don’t expect it. No, I never actually met her. She…’ Lol’s gaze had turned watchful. ‘She came down to the river last night because she’d heard there’d been a death?’

‘She asked a policewoman if it was a suicide. I thought that was a curious question. Suggested she knew who it was. Or maybe I was just thinking that because I realized this was probably the woman seen with Robbie Walsh. She certainly knew where he lived because Mumford saw her standing outside the house. Ironically, we were going to ask Mrs Mumford if she knew this odd woman personally. Thought that might solve something.’

Merrily could hear voices and footsteps from the nave. And laughter, which was good.

‘This gig I went to,’ she said, ‘when I was seventeen – the band were all dressed as undertakers and they wheeled Belladonna on stage in a coffin, on a bier.’

Remembering the album:
Nightshades
. Fairly sure she didn’t have it any more, or Jane would have found it. Maybe that was why she’d got rid of it. On the cover, Belladonna had been sitting in some kind of dusty chapel cradling a mandolin like a baby, a strap of her dress pulled down as if she was about to breastfeed the instrument. Subtly profane.

‘This guy you spoke to,’ Lol said. ‘He said the woman’s name was Mrs Pepper?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Prof told me Belladonna was married at one time to her producer, Saul Pepper.’

‘That’s it, then. I’ll phone Andy Mumford when I get home and confirm it.’

Whatever her connection was with Robbie Walsh, Mumford would find it.
If you wanner stick with this ghost stuff, mabbe I’ll check out the real woman. The living woman
. His mother’s drowning was hardly going to make his inquiries more restrained.

‘Lol…’ He was leaning back on the Victorian sofa, exposing the big-eyed alien on his sweatshirt. Lol the former psychiatric patient, drop-out psychology student. ‘You were an imaginative kid, right?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Did you never fall in love with someone who didn’t exist? Seriously.’

‘With me, it was always serious.’ Lol stood up. ‘Even the real ones, you turn them into something that doesn’t exist. You start with a beautiful face and you build around it something that might actually love you.’

She told him about Robbie Walsh and Marion de la Bruyère.

Lol said, ‘If he saw Ludlow as a refuge from something very bad… It was the end of the holidays, wasn’t it, when he died?’

‘Virtually.’

‘Maybe he really couldn’t bear to go back this time. Maybe he just wanted to stay with Marion.’

‘Suicide? Mumford’s given no indication that his home life was that bad.’

‘Everything can seem very closed-in at that age,’ Lol said. ‘The future’s like staring down the wrong end of a telescope. You can’t envisage anything more than a few months ahead, at most, and if you’re having a very difficult time you don’t see a way out, ever.’

‘He killed himself in Ludlow, dying the way she died, because that was the only way he could stay there?’

She looked into Lol’s eyes. Lol shrugged.

Slipping back into the nave for the Quiet Service, Merrily was trying to see this unlikely triangle: Robbie, Marion, Belladonna. The kid’s connection with a 1980s goth rock singer was the hardest to envisage.

‘Frankly,’ Lol whispered in the vestry doorway, ‘if it turns out he was suicidal, I can think of more suitable people to administer counselling.’

12

M
ERRILY SOMEHOW SENSED
it and looked up maybe half a second before it was dismissed… and Sophie’s face was blank again.

Outside the gatehouse office window, muscular clouds were hanging over Hereford like a street gang closing in. Maybe it was the sudden darkening of the room that had caused her to raise her head; nothing to do with Sophie, the only person she knew who could convey disapproval without any change of expression – probably went with her breeding.

‘What’s wrong, Soph?’

‘I’m sorry?’

Sophie looked up from her computer. She was wearing a dark red woollen suit over a cream silk blouse. The Bishop of Hereford’s lay secretary over many years and several bishops. Worth her weight in pearls.

‘You scowled,’ Merrily said.

‘I don’t think so, Merrily.’

There was a muttering of thunder from Dinedor Hill or somewhere. Merrily got up from her desk. On Mondays she usually tried to come in for a couple of hours to review the Deliverance schedule, although lately there hadn’t been much of one. She was late today because of the afternoon cremation. A difficult funeral: people she hadn’t known before, and so it was all the more important to make it resonate. Huw wasn’t the only Deliverance minister to suggest that cursory, conveyor-belt funerals were leading to disquiet on both sides of the grave.

‘I’d better put the kettle on before the power goes.’

‘This isn’t Ledwardine, Merrily, the power isn’t going anywhere.’

‘It’s my turn, anyway.’

She filled the kettle and plugged it in, spooned tea into the pot then swiftly backed up and peered over Sophie’s shoulder at the computer. There was an e-mail in the frame.