The Smile of a Ghost (4 page)

The line went dead, the machine rewound, Merrily nodded.

‘I can call him back.’

‘Would that have been Sergeant Mumford?’ Siân asked. ‘From Hereford CID?’

‘I think he’s about to retire, actually. May already have…’

‘You’ve had some interesting dealings with the police, haven’t you? I was talking the other day to Sergeant Mumford’s superior – DCI Howe?’

‘Oh? Yeah, our paths have… crossed.’

‘So she tells me. I get on very well with her.’

Figured. If glacial Annie had opted for the Church rather than a fast-track police career, Canon Callaghan-Clarke would have been her ideal spiritual director.

‘I’ll make some more tea,’ Merrily said. Nobody had referred again to Huw Owen. Nobody had reacted to her outburst.

‘No, I think we should say goodnight at this point.’ Siân folded her document case, took off her glasses. ‘Given ourselves quite a lot to consider.’

‘Yes.’

‘I think we’ve all accepted that, having inherited a basically medieval structure, our task is to turn it into something practical, efficient and geared to the demands of the twenty-first century. To formulate a set of parameters, so that changes in, say, personnel will not damage the efficacy of the essential Deliverance module.’

Merrily gripped the cigarette packet on her thigh. Deliverance module?

Siân stood up.

‘I think the main decision we’ve made is that, to ease the very obvious pressure on Merrily, all of us should immediately be brought into the loop – the Deliverance e-mail loop, that is. And that each and every new case should be submitted for observations before any action is taken. Correct?’

‘It makes sense,’ Martin Longbeach said. ‘We might not always be able to make a contribution, but it’s a question of sharing.’

‘I’ll… tell Sophie at the Bishop’s office,’ Merrily said.

‘And in my case,’ Nigel Saltash said, ‘in these formative days, I do think it might be rather a good idea for me to tag along and observe some of the people you’re dealing with, Merrily. I mean, purely from an educational point of view?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I want to learn. See how you operate. Had more time on my hands since we sold half the land. Always thought I could settle down, in retirement, as a farmer, but I’m afraid that once a shrink… Would that be in order? I want to understand how you see Deliverance.’

Merrily took a big breath. ‘Nigel, how I see Deliverance… I’m supposed to be a priest, right? I have to operate on the basis of there being a spiritual element – that we’ve got used to calling God – in everything. So I actually believe that things can happen on more than one level.’

‘Indeed,’ Martin Longbeach said. ‘The holistic approach is essential. All aspects of life are interconnected.’

‘And the fact that there are certain things that I’m never going to be able to explain scientifically or psychologically… that doesn’t bother me one way or the other. And I think we should be there to say to the people affected: no, you’re not necessarily going mad—’

‘But if you are’ – Nigel Saltash smiled hugely – ‘we can also help you with that.’

Merrily sighed. ‘As I tried to say, when I was having problems the Church looked at me sideways and raised its eyebrows pityingly. I don’t want anybody out there to feel I’m writing them off as disturbed or deluded.’

‘And I’d absolutely hate to cramp your style, Merrily,’ Saltash said.

Merrily stood up. Her legs felt weak.

‘We’ll see what we can work out.’

‘Of course we will,’ Saltash said.

Dear God
.

2

L
OL HAD A
bunch of new-home cards. He’d put them in the deep sill of the window overlooking the bathroom-sized garden and the orchard beyond. Jane began to read them, holding the first one up to the hurricane lamp hanging from the central beam.

‘Alison, eh? Wooooh!’

The card had a pencil sketch of horses on the front. Alison Kinnersley, who bred them, had lived with Lol for a while before taking up with James Bull-Davies, whose family had once run this village before they ran out of money. Two years ago, even a struggling squire with holes in his farmhouse roof had been a better bargain than Lol.

But now Lol had Mum and a career back on course, and the village more than accepted him, and even Alison was being generous.

It’s definitely the right thing to do
, she’d written.
You can’t hide it for ever. Even James thinks that now, and I don’t need to tell you how conservative James is.

‘Wow,’ Jane said, ‘if it goes on like this, they’ll be inviting you to run for the Parish Council.’

Lol looked down from the stepladder, the overloaded paint-roller in his hand dribbling burnt orange onto the flagstones. Jane had chosen the ceiling colour; it looked wrong now, but she was never going to admit that. Lol just looked uncomfortable. He had orange smudges down the front of his Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt, tiny spots on his round, brass-rimmed glasses.

‘Then again,’ Jane said, ‘maybe not.’

There was a card from the Prossers at the Eight till Late and one from Gomer Parry and Danny Thomas –
Welcome back, boy
– with a sheep on the front driving a JCB.

Finally, one from Alice Meek.
God bless you in your new home, Mr Robinson
. Big letters full of stroke victim’s shake. Alice was only alive because of Lol, and the village knew it, and that was why he was so welcome here now.

And, of course, it was making him wary. Lol didn’t wear medals. Finding the old girl half-frozen over a grave in the churchyard, carrying her into the vicarage, and all the heavy stuff that had happened afterwards… he didn’t even like to talk about any of that. It could easily have ended so differently.

The verdict at the inquest on the guy who’d wanted Alice dead had been Accidental Death – totally correct – although most of what had happened had not come out, the villagers closing ranks around Lol. No longer an outsider, even if it wasn’t publicly acknowledged that he was Mum’s… whatever.

Couldn’t have worked out better, really. His first album in many years was out, he had respectable gigs scheduled. And he was about to abandon his temporary flat at Prof Levin’s recording studio at Knight’s Frome – like, thirty miles away – for this little terraced house a one-minute stroll from the vicarage. So, like, if his star, for once, was accelerating towards the high point of the heavens… well, nobody could say it had been easy.

Jane looked up at him. It was getting too dark to paint, and the electricity was still disconnected, but he was going at it like, if he stopped, somebody would come and take the house away and maybe take Mum, too… and then the tour would be cancelled and the album would be savaged in the
Guardian
or
Time Out
, and…

‘Come on down, Lol. Tomorrow is another day.’

‘Need to finish this corner.’

‘You can’t even see the corner. Let’s go and get some chips, otherwise I won’t get to eat till breakfast. If Mum gets through with the po-faced gits on the Deliverance Committee before eleven, it’ll be a certifiable miracle.’

‘Hate going in the chippie now,’ Lol said. ‘They won’t let me pay.’

Jane laughed.

‘It’s not funny, Jane.’

‘Lol, they like you. That’s—’

‘Unsettling.’

Jane sighed. ‘When’s the next gig?’

‘Next Thursday. Bristol.’

‘Wooh, bigger and bigger. Glastonbury next year?’

‘Jane, you trying to make me fall off?’

Oh God, Nick Drake Syndrome; it never really goes away.

‘Bad enough that there’s this guy from
Q
magazine coming to interview me on Saturday,’ Lol said. ‘I mean, if I’d thought—’

‘What?’ Jane went to the foot of the ladder, shouting up like he was on a mountain. ‘Did you actually say…
Q
magazine? Like, did I hear that correctly? And did you say, “That’s bad enough”? And are you insane?’

‘Just there are things I don’t necessarily want people to read about.’

‘So like’ – Jane spread her hands wide in frustration – ‘don’t talk about them! Talk about any old crap. Lie. They won’t care, they’re a music mag. When will it be in?’

‘Dunno. It’s a monthly. Guy said they work weeks in advance. Maybe it won’t be in at all. They probably do a lot of interviews that get overtaken by better stuff.’

‘This diffidence is worrying.’ Jane shook her head. ‘I think I preferred the paranoia.’ She went to put Alice’s card back on the window sill, and found another one lying face down. ‘What’s this, Lol?’

Actually, this one wasn’t a card, as such: it was a folded paper, lined, like from a writing pad. She opened it out and held it up to the lamp, saw crude line drawings done in thick fibre-tip, of a big house and a little house with two parallel lines between them, suggesting a road. Across the big house was scrawled:

VICERAGE

Jane looked up at Lol. ‘Vice-rage?’

‘Vicarage.’ Lol started rolling hard at the ceiling. ‘Could be a double meaning there, I suppose, but I wouldn’t think whoever sent it was that smart.’

There was a double-pointed arrow connecting the two houses across the road. Underneath the drawing was written:

RECKON YOU CAN FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK?

‘Bloody hell,’ Jane said. ‘It’s a poison-pen letter.’

She looked up the ladder. Lol went on painting.

Jane smiled thinly. So this was the problem.

Well, there was always going to be one spiteful bastard, somewhere. Mum got along with most people in Ledwardine, but not everybody approved yet of women priests. And it was a safe bet that not everybody who did approve would accept the idea of the female clergy having intimate relationships unsanctified by marriage – like the clergy was supposed to stay in the Victorian era, Mum and Lol walking out together, with a chaperone.

This would be one of the areas of his life that Lol would prefer to be kept out of
Q
magazine.

‘Who sent it?’

‘I don’t think that’s supposed to be obvious, Jane. That’s possibly why it isn’t signed.’

‘But there’s an element of threat. I mean, I realize it’s probably just some semi-literate tosser…’

Lol came down from the stepladder, ducking under the beam that divided the room. The beam was dark brown oak, well woodwormed – a big chocolate flake. The hurricane lamp swayed, shadows rolled. Jane wanted to crumple up the paper, but on the other hand…

‘Can I keep it?’

‘What for?’

‘Might be an opportunity to compare the writing. Like with the parish noticeboard? The cards in the shop window? Or even the prayer board in the church. I mean, it’s always useful to know who your friends aren’t. Anyway’ – she folded the paper – ‘nothing really to worry about. I don’t think Mum’s worried. I mean, the Bishop knows.’

Jane picked up a paint rag and dabbed up some blotches from the flagged floor, recalling the first time she’d seen Lol, when he was looking after Lucy Devenish’s old shop, Ledwardine Lore. Lol peering out between racks of apple-shaped candles in the orchard-scented air. Like a mouse. He’d been really messed up back then.

Jane had been fifteen, just a kid. Now she was facing A levels and a driving test, and she wasn’t a virgin, and Lol and Mum were some kind of tentative, nervous item.

And Lucy Devenish was dead.

Hard to accept that, even now. No matter what colours the crooked walls and sloping ceilings were repainted, this was Lucy’s house and always would be. When you stood in the hall you could imagine you still saw her old poncho hanging over the post at the foot of the stairs. If it was really dark when you came in, you could imagine Lucy herself there, wearing the poncho, her arms lifting it like batwings.

The people from London who’d agreed to buy the house when it first came on the market last year had given back word after their five-year-old asthmatic kid had asked who the old woman was on the landing.

Scary. Lucy hadn’t been scary, not really. Formidable, certainly. Maybe a little witchy, in the best, most traditional sense, and…

… OK, she
had
been a little scary. But she’d liked Lol and supported him when he needed it, and she’d been some kind of mentor to Jane, and…

… And this was OK. Lol finally getting the house – this was meant. Everything finally was going to be OK for Lol and for Mum, who’d been a widow for long enough. Yeah, in one way it was ridiculous, Lol living in this little house and Mum across the road in the huge vicarage, with seven bedrooms, but it was an arrangement that would work, for the time being.

And it would have Lucy’s blessing. Lucy who, though dead, still somehow spoke for Ledwardine.

Jane allowed herself a shiver. Lol carried the roller and paint tray into the kitchen and put them in the sink.

‘How about you get the chips?’

‘Lol, you wimp.’

‘Wallet’s on the mantelpiece.’