The Smile of a Ghost (3 page)

He could feel the atmosphere in that room coming out at him like radio static.

Gail was a nurse and knew how to handle people in grief; all Mumford knew was how to catch the people who’d caused it. Which didn’t apply in this case, whatever Ange said, and, even if it had, he wasn’t allowed to do anything no more.

Unless Ange was halfway right, and he was the guilty party.

He leaned his sweating forehead against the back of his hands on top of the steering wheel and let the breath come out of him. Feeling beyond exhaustion.

Aye, he’d known the state she was in, the ole girl, but he’d also known how much it had meant to her having Robbie around. Didn’t know much about degenerative brain disease but he did know his mam would have gone downhill a whole lot faster without the boy.

When he looked up, he saw how pale the night sky was, the big tower of St Laurence’s looming out of the body of the town. And became aware of another person standing out on the edge of the Tesco’s car park, still as a post, looking across the road at the house.

A woman, it was, with pale hair escaping from the hood of a long grey cape that hung to the ground. The night was so still that the cape didn’t move, its folds like the stone pleats of the robe of some religious statue. The only movement was a white flickering like a candle on an altar. And it
was
a candle, Mumford saw, in a metal lantern that hung from the woman’s hand emerging from a slit in the cape.

Mumford experienced a moment of superstitious fear – like he was seeing the angel of death outside the house – and then a bigger fear that he, like the ole girl, was losing his marbles, and he got out of the car in a near-panic.

As he reached the edge of the car park, the woman turned to face him, and there was enough light for him to see that she was entirely human and that she’d been crying.

‘You all right, madam?’ Mumford said.

She didn’t reply, just walked away with the candle-lantern swinging like a captured star in a cage, and Mumford shook his head and crossed the road to his parents’ house.

PART ONE

1

‘N
O – PLEASE –
I want to understand this,’ Siân said. ‘You’re telling us that you yourself have seen one.’

Her pewter hair hung like a warlord’s helmet. She’d found her way to the head of the table, and she was sitting there in judgement. Her expression was like, Say it… say that word again.

The word that Merrily was realizing should be avoided.

‘I once had an experience, that’s the only way I can describe it,’ she said. ‘A series of experiences, if you like, that I couldn’t rationally explain.’

In the vault-like vicarage kitchen, beeswax candles burned low in their saucers, and the empty ashtray mocked her. She’d been trying to tell herself she’d guessed it was likely to turn out this bad, but the truth was, no, not in her worst dreams.

‘And so I went to the Church for advice, and the Church wasn’t exactly helpful. Felt I was being treated like some kind of hysterical loony.’

Siân’s grey eyes blinked once, like the steel shutters on the little windows of a police cell. Merrily stared into them. Sorry – I meant, like some kind of emotionally dysfunctional person with advanced learning difficulties.

‘And where exactly did you have this… series of experiences, Merrily?’

‘Here. At the vicarage. Upstairs. Just after we moved in, a couple of years ago.’

‘This is rather a big house,’ Nigel Saltash said.

‘Huge – certainly compared with anything I’d lived in before.’

‘Just you and your daughter?’

Saltash tilted his head fractionally, as though he needed this slight motion to activate his enormous brain. It also turned his smile on. He had an all-purpose smile: questioning, explaining, sympathizing, patronizing. For many years, he’d been a psychiatrist; some things didn’t change.

‘Just the two of us, yes,’ Merrily said. ‘Me and Jane. Like now.’

‘So, if I were to humbly suggest – and you could say I’m simply playing devil’s advocate, if you like – that you were feeling terribly insecure at the time… a stranger in the village, not yet fully licensed or formally installed as vicar… and you’d been thrown into this enormous, ancient, echoing… rather spooky old house…’

‘Plus, I was not that many years widowed. And we had very little money. Also like now.’

‘And have the experiences stopped now?’

In the candle-glow, Nigel Saltash’s face was taut and tanned from skiing somewhere. His light grey hair was cropped tight and fitted flush into his beard. He was long and lithe and living proof that seventy was the new fifty.

‘Yes, it was all over very quickly,’ Merrily said. ‘Once we’d got certain things sorted out.’

‘You’re playing into my rationalist’s hands, Mrs Watkins. Deliberately, perhaps?’

‘Well, I suppose I’m making the point that someone like you can turn anyone’s circumstances to your professional advantage.’

‘But am I necessarily wrong?’

Merrily shrugged. ‘I’m always going to say “I know what I saw,” and you’re always going to say “But you didn’t really see it at all.” ’

‘And that way, surely, we arrive at something approximating to the truth,’ Siân Callaghan-Clarke said.

‘Do we?’

‘Nine times out of ten, yes.’

‘Anyway,’ Merrily said, ‘that was the main reason why, when I was offered the post of exorcist – Deliverance Consultant – I would have found it hard to say no.’

‘I still cannot believe you’ve been allowed to go on for so long… alone.’ Siân was shaking her head. ‘The danger you’ve been in…’

‘Sorry?’

One of the candles sputtered out, and Merrily ran a forefinger nervously around the rim of her dog collar.

She’d been naive; she’d misread the signs.

Huw Owen had told her at the start what she’d be up against. If women priests were seen as soft plaster patching up the already crumbling walls of the Church, a woman exorcist—

Might as well just paint a great big bull’s-eye between your tits
, Huw had said memorably.

A month or two ago, when the Bishop, Bernie Dunmore, had said,
I’m afraid that, once again, I’ve been asked what you’re doing about establishing a Deliverance advisory panel
, she’d shrugged it off.

Realizing that, OK, sooner or later there was going to have to be a support group within the diocese, but it had to involve the right people, didn’t it? People who were sympathetic, who didn’t have an agenda, political or otherwise.

Only, the ones she’d thought of as the right people hadn’t wanted to know – Simon St John, vicar of Knight’s Frome, backing away in mock terror when she’d asked him, making the sign of the cross with both hands. But the point was, she knew that he would always be there for her, like the wise old owls outside the diocese, Huw Owen and Llewellyn Jeavons. It just wasn’t official; some of these people didn’t do official.

Whereas people like Siân Callaghan-Clarke and Nigel Saltash didn’t do anything else.

Saltash was a good friend of the Dean, and giving his professional services free – no better reason for the Dean to take him to meet the Bishop and the Bishop to introduce him to Merrily. In any modern Deliverance circle, a qualified psychiatrist was now fundamental. A free one was a godsend.

Thank you, God. Thank you so much
.

‘You mean I’m in spiritual danger?’ Merrily said. ‘As a woman in a male tradition?’

Now Siân was staring at her, leaning back in her chair like Merrily must be deliberately winding her up. Siân’s mother was a New Labour baroness; she wore her feminist credentials like defiant tattoos. Within five years she’d either be a bishop or out of the Church. Spiritual danger, political danger – all the same to her.

‘I meant, like, the first exorcist having been Jesus himself,’ Merrily said lamely.

She let the silence hang, recalling the reported mutterings of her predecessor, Thomas Dobbs, as he’d prowled the cathedral cloisters trying to engineer her resignation. At the time, she’d been probably the first – certainly the youngest – woman diocesan exorcist in Britain, operating under the customized title Deliverance Consultant. Appointed, it later became evident, largely because the former Bishop of Hereford had wanted to get into her cassock. Siân Callaghan-Clarke, already a well-placed minister in the diocese, would have heard the rumours and stored them away.

Payback time for bimbo priest?

Martin Longbeach carefully relit the candle with a taper. Martin, tubby and camp, wore an alb and an outsize pectoral cross and was known to covet the south Herefordshire parish of Hoarwithy because of its exotic Italianate church. It had been his idea that they should light candles tonight, to ‘aid concentration’.

‘By danger,’ Siân said, ‘I meant the danger of being compromised and exploited… and of having to make instant decisions that you’re perhaps not…’

… qualified to make, experienced enough to handle.

Siân left this unsaid. Merrily sat in the candlelight, images of the past couple of years encircling her like pale smoke – fears, anxieties, faltering hopes, tentative joys. And also the most bewildering and stimulating years of her life.

There was a stillness in the air. Was this it? Intimations of the end, on a cool April night?

Siân Callaghan-Clarke clasped her long hands and leaned over them across the table.

‘Tonight we’ve tried to go over what we understand by the term “Deliverance”, and the multiplicity of conditions we’re expected to examine – from perceived ghosts and poltergeists, to perceived curses, possession and so-called psychic attack. We’ve considered the cases Merrily has to deal with, day to day: the deluded, the disturbed, the fantastical, the pathological liars—’

‘Not forgetting those in need of prayer and non-judgemental understanding. And the ones afflicted by what seemed to be genuine… intrusion,’ Merrily said.

‘Seemed to be.’ Nigel Saltash smiled.

‘Seemed to me to be. A conclusion not lightly reached.’

‘The point is,’ Siân said, ‘that deciding who is deluded and who – however remote that possibility might be – is, ahm, genuinely afflicted… has been Merrily’s sole responsibility. An impossible situation for just one person, who also has a parish to run.’

‘I’ve not been without back-up. Huw Owen’s always on the end of a phone.’

Merrily felt the outline of the unopened packet of Silk Cut in a pocket of her denim skirt. The other back-up.

‘Ah yes,’ Siân said, looking over her half-glasses. ‘Huw Owen.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Saltash said. ‘Who is Huw Owen?’

‘Nigel, I’m not sure you’ll want to know.’

Siân’s eyes were still and neutral. Merrily was furious but bit down on it. She really, really needed a cigarette. They were all looking at her.

‘Huw was my primary tutor. Me and a bunch of others. He runs training courses for the Deliverance Ministry in a former Nonconformist chapel in a remote part of the Brecon Beacons.’

‘Where nobody can hear you scream,’ Siân said. ‘My understanding is that Huw Owen, while living the life of a fourth-century hermit, has himself been in such a precarious psychiatric state for so long that—’

Merrily felt herself arch like a cat. ‘That’s ridic—’

‘—that not only can he no longer be relied upon to remain au fait with current thinking—’

‘And fucking defamatory!’ Merrily said.

In the silence, the phone rang in the scullery, which she used as her office.

Siân looked up, said mildly. ‘You want to get that?’

‘I’ll… let the machine take it.’ Merrily glanced at the scullery door, which was ajar. ‘If it’s not urgent…’

They all sat there uncomfortably as the machine in the office played Merrily’s outgoing message through the open door, Nigel Saltash giving her a look that was professionally wry and sympathetic.

It was Saltash who’d introduced Siân, who’d worked with him when she was standing in as a hospital chaplain. She said she’d been wary of Deliverance work up to now, but if Nigel was going to be involved…

Siân, in turn, had brought in Martin Longbeach, once her curate, who was clearly a placid and malleable guy. And, no doubt, guaranteed not to fancy Merrily.

This was a nightmare.

There was a bleep from the answering machine and a cough.

‘Mrs Watkins. Mumford. Andy Mumford. I’ll… call you later, if that’s all right with you.’