The Smile of a Ghost (25 page)

They’d talked on the phone soon after nine, when Jane, clear-eyed and superficially undamaged by minimal sleep, had carried off a slice of toast and marmalade to the bus stop. Merrily had told Jane a certain amount, not everything, about last night. She’d told Sophie – because there were probably confessionals less secure than this office – the whole situation. More or less.

‘Oh yes,’ Sophie said. ‘On the filing cabinet – this morning’s
Daily Mail
.’

‘Oh.’

The paper was folded at page five and a fuzzy picture of Jemima Pegler at a party, collapsed in laughter, with two other girls holding her up. The circumstances of her death had come to light too late for yesterday’s morning papers to indulge in more than straight reporting.

What a difference a day made: on the other side of the page from Jemima was a line drawing of a woman in a medieval robe and headdress.

Obvious the media would discover Marion. And nobody waited for an inquest any more; the police line ‘no suspicious circumstances’ was a strong enough pointer to suicide. The story said Jemima’s death had the hallmarks of a copycat suicide, but who was she copying – Robbie Walsh or the death-plunge of the twelfth-century woman whose ghost was said to haunt the castle?

‘Saltash.’

‘He does seem to be cornering the market in what one might call soundbite psychology,’ Sophie said.

‘He might be right, actually – the teenage pack-mentality, the need to feel that, even in death, you’re not alone. Anyway, someone has to be around to do the psychobabble.’

‘How far have you read?’ Sophie murmured.

‘What?’

‘Special adviser on mental—?’ Merrily let the paper drop to the desk.

‘You notice he doesn’t neglect an opportunity to file psychic phenomena under the general heading of fantasy,’ Sophie said, ‘thus detaching it from the Church’s official area of belief.’

‘This isn’t going to stop, is it?’

Merrily slumped down next to the window. It wasn’t warm out there, but there was enough early-afternoon sunshine for a few people on Broad Street to be wearing dark glasses. She took hers off just as the phone rang and Sophie looked up.

‘Ah.’ Sophie’s hand froze over the receiver. ‘I thought there might be some minor aspect of last night that you hadn’t mentioned.’

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Merrily tilted her head to the window. The sunlight hurt. ‘Purplish last night, now a delicate bottle green.’

‘What are you putting on it?’ Sophie picked up the phone.

‘Just the glasses.’

‘Gatehouse.’ Sophie tucked the phone between shoulder and chin, just above the pearls, leafing through her letters. ‘Yes, Bishop, I’m doing them now, they’ll be in the lunchtime post… Certainly… Well, yes, she’s here now as a matter of fact… I will.’ Sophie put down the phone. ‘He’s coming over later. He wants to talk to you.’

Merrily had started to roll up the
Daily Mail
into a stiff, tight tube. She stopped, sensing the change, and saw that Sophie’s face had hardened and darkened in a way that… just didn’t happen.

‘God almighty, Merrily! What the hell are you getting into?’

‘It was— OK, it wasn’t exactly an accident, but it—’

‘You do know that’s what’s known as assault causing actual bodily harm? What did they do to Mumford?’

‘Some…’ Merrily let the paper unroll, shaking her head helplessly. ‘Some damage. Nothing serious. We hope.’

Before leaving home, she’d talked on the phone to Mumford’s wife, Gail, who’d sounded cold and guarded, saying Mumford could hardly turn his head this morning. Hardly the first time he’d brought injuries home, but that was supposed to be all over now, wasn’t it?

Sophie wasn’t letting it go, either.

‘Did he even think about what might happen to you last night, when he took on these savages?’

‘I don’t suppose he did.’ Merrily reached for her bag; a woman with a painful black eye was allowed a cigarette. ‘With hindsight, I think he was quite happy when they invaded the garage. He was on home ground. Recognized one.’

‘Can we at least assume this will bring him to his senses?’

‘Sophie, we both know it’s going to make him worse.’

Blokes like Mumford – the bag-carriers, the local-knowledge men, the stoical, taciturn, imperturbable, down-beat, low-key, salt-of-the-earth types – when those guys started to come apart, it was like landmines: you were never sure where the next one was going to explode.

‘We now have – or we had last night, it’s destroyed now – evidence that Robbie Walsh was scared to go home to Plascarreg. We have it from his e-mail correspondence. Also his letters to… We also know he fantasized about Marion de la Bruyère. Saw her as some kind of a confidante and wrote to her.’

The postcard she’d seen, next to Robbie’s sketches, was now making perfect, heartbreaking sense.

Sometimes I pretend you are walking next to me and we are holding hands and it’s brilliant!!!! Everything is all right again, and I never want to leave cos this is our place… I was so miserable I didn’t think I could stand it till the end of term. Its worse than ever there. I hate them, they are stupid and ignorant and they are trying to wreck my whole life. The nearer it gets to the end of the holidays the sadder I feel and don’t want to go back.

‘If there’s anything that makes me feel a very unchristian hatred, it’s bullying. From cruelty to animals to…’ Merrily drew in too much smoke, suppressed a cough as colliding clouds sucked a sunbeam from the desk between her and Sophie. ‘We even know who some of them are, now. They as good as admitted it. But bullying’s not quite a crime, and neither’s suicide any more. Three people dead, and none of them crimes. Doesn’t make them any less dead.’

‘This woman,’ Sophie said. ‘Mrs Pepper…’

‘I don’t know what to think about that any more, Soph. She’s a woman who makes mournful music, evidently chosen as a suicide soundtrack by people who run unsavoury websites and chat-rooms. There’s undoubtedly a cult – or cults – of suicide operating on the Internet. If she is into all that and she talked to Robbie Walsh – as we know she did – and he was suicidal, is it remotely conceivable that she would actually have encouraged him to jump off that tower? I mean, I hate bullying, but I can understand the spiritual vacuum it comes out of. But this…’

‘There are Internet sites that are actually urging people to take their own lives?’

‘That’s the implication, according to Jane. And chat-rooms. Bit like the Samaritans in reverse, isn’t it?’

Sophie’s expression didn’t alter. Sophie was a Samaritan.

‘Merrily, if you think this woman might be connected with one of these organizations, it’s surely our duty to expose it.’

‘In what capacity? It’s not a Deliverance issue, is it?’

‘Isn’t the woman fascinated by ghosts?’

‘That isn’t, in itself, a Deliverance issue, either. Anyway, if I follow agreed procedure and consult the Deliverance Panel, are they going to let me get within ten miles of Mrs Pepper? Mumford’s already been warned off by Annie Howe, with whom Siân Callaghan-Clarke says she “gets on well”. Probably attend the same kick-boxing classes.’

‘This is a mess, Merrily.’ Sophie folded her reading glasses, snapped them in their case. ‘Everything seems to be a mess at the moment.’

The Bishop arrived before lunch. He looked pensive. He sat on the edge of Sophie’s desk, picked up a pen and kept tapping its top into the palm of his left hand.

‘George Lackland, Merrily. You haven’t met him, have you?’

‘Mayor of Ludlow.’ She had her sunglasses back on. ‘Vice-chairman of the Police Committee.’

‘That’s the one.’ He unbuttoned his jacket, and his purple shirt strained over his stomach. ‘Long-standing county councillor, magistrate. George is… the epitome of Old Ludlow.’

‘And your old friend.’

‘Yes. An honourable man. Conservative in every conceivable sense of the word, of course. Retails traditional furniture, as distinct from so-called antiques.’

‘He sounds… very influential,’ Merrily said.

The Bishop looked pained. ‘I realize that, to you, attaining power and influence means being as bent as… as…’

‘A crozier?’

‘Thank you, Merrily, I’m all too conscious of the opportunities for personal gain afforded to an unscrupulous bishop. But some of us do our best, and so does George Lackland.’

‘Sorry, Bernie.’

‘Anyway, he’s been in touch. Called me last night, and we spoke again this morning. As you can imagine, George is very concerned – as are many people in the town – about these deaths at the castle. Everything that happens in Ludlow, he takes personally, always has. It’s that kind of town – people feel privileged to belong to it.’

‘Mmm.’

‘That part of the castle – the Hanging Tower – has now been closed to the public, for obvious reasons. But already, sightseers have been turning up on the other side of the wall – where this girl fell. Can’t do anything about that: it’s a public right of way.’

‘What sort of people?’

‘Young people, mainly. A group of them were observed last night. They’d gathered with candles. Singing and chanting. There’s an old yew tree. They were clustered around it. Near where she fell.’

‘Jemima.’

‘And, ah, the other one.’

‘Robbie?’

‘Marion,’ the Bishop said.

‘Why would they gather there, Bernie?’

‘Would you expect a coherent reason? Everything seems to become a shrine these days.’

‘Well, perhaps if they knew the full facts, they’d find it less romantic.’

There’d been nothing in the
Mail
or anywhere else, presumably, about the heroin overdose.

‘They’ll draw their own conclusions, anyway. As some people in the town are now doing.’ The pen was going tap-tap on the Bishop’s palm again: agitation. ‘You see, George Lackland’s always been a man of the Church. Senior churchwarden until his civic duties became too onerous. Seen by many of the older residents as something of a figurehead, and not only in a temporal sense, especially with David Cook still in convalescence. So George has… been approached.’

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t look at me like that, it’s how things are done there. People worried about the town’s reputation have made… approaches.’

‘Tourist association?’

‘Well, yes, but also church people. All kinds, not just us. The RC church, various Nonconformist chapels. Individuals who fear for the spiritual health of the community. People who might feel happier talking to the Mayor than to each other.’

‘And what are they saying?’

‘ “Hinting” would be a safer word. No more than whispers. Undercurrents.’

‘Mmm?’

‘You’re not getting me to say it, Merrily.’

‘Some people are suggesting that the recent spate of tragedy is somehow rooted in… whatever happened on the same site over eight hundred years ago?’

‘Ah…’ The Bishop cleared his throat, uncomfortable. ‘I don’t imagine anyone’s expressed it with that degree of… exactitude. Rumours trickle through the streets about a place becoming unlucky, and they gather momentum. Even when I was there, you’d get people saying the town was becoming ungodly, selling out to Mammon – new restaurants, rich incomers.’

‘How does that relate to two teenagers and an elderly woman?’

‘Well, it… That is, George says some people were suggesting the Walsh boy had become a little too obsessed with the past. Aspects of the past, that is, that should be left to, ah…’