The Smile of a Ghost (48 page)

Bliss half-rose. ‘She got hairt?’

‘Bruised face. Black eye. Some kids. Mumford found Robbie’s computer, and they were seeing what he had on it there – in this garage. These kids evidently thought there might be something on the computer that could incriminate them, so they… smashed it. Mumford got attacked, and Merrily was hurt trying to get some kid off him. Kid was trying to choke him with a chain.’

Bliss leaned back, breathed down his nose. ‘And she didn’t report this incident to me because…?’

‘Because of Mumford.’

‘Don’t.’ Bliss stood up. ‘Don’t say another word, Laurence. I encounter Mumford, I’m likely to nick the bastard meself. I just urge you, if you talk to Merrily, and she’s in contact with him, to tell him to…’

‘Give himself up? I mean, what’s he actually done?’

‘Impersonated a police officer.’

‘Impersonated himself, in fact.’

‘It’s what he
could
do,’ Bliss said.

‘To whom? I think I need to know, don’t I?’

‘Yeh,’ Bliss said. ‘All right, I’ll have a glass of cider, please. This looks like being a long day.’

‘Holy shit!’ Eirion said. ‘You bastard.’

Somehow, Jane had expected him to have calmed down since last night, but it was clear that his usual chapel-whipped, Welsh-speaking caution had failed to re-engage. What if going out with her had fatally damaged his equilibrium?

Still, she could see that J.D. Fyneham’s home office, occupying the upstairs of what seemed like a whole wing of a very sizeable house, was something to inspire strong feelings – envy, lust, that kind of reaction – in the male of the species.

The room was dotted with pinpoint lights and underlaid with a low hum. It had this blue-mauve ambience, from concealed lighting with daylight-quality bulbs. Most of the stuff in here, Jane was unsure what it actually did. There were three computers – one was an Evesham, and they didn’t come cheap – on plush, kidney-shaped workstations, a cluster of printers and scanners and other hi-tech-looking items of hardware which seemed to be connected with… well, desktop publishing, she guessed.

Like, on an industrial scale.

‘You could…’ Eirion seemed to be having respiratory problems. ‘You could produce bloody
Vogue
up here.’

‘Pays its way, Lewis, pays its way,’ J.D. Fyneham said.

The way he kept calling Eirion ‘Lewis’, it was like that sneering way that Inspector Morse talked to Sergeant Lewis on the TV. He was wearing a deep purple rugby shirt and black trousers in this kind of snakeskin leather.

‘That’s all you need to know,’ he said. ‘Now what do you want? I’m busy.’

‘Obviously,’ Eirion said bitterly.

‘Look, we were a bit pissed last night, all right?’

‘It’s not about last night,’ Eirion said.

Jane had wandered over to a side table stacked with A4-sized glossy magazines. The top one had a picture on the cover of a black and white village that she was sure she ought to recognize. Beside the magazine was a stack of flyers.

‘Come away from those!’ Fyneham snapped, but Jane had grabbed one.

‘Well, well…’

‘It’s a legitimate business,’ Fyneham said sulkily.

‘Jane?’ Eirion walked over.

‘JD seems to be the guy behind Parish Pump, Irene. It offers a service to vicars and parish councils, to turn their parish magazines into, like,
Hello!
’

‘Oh, please,’ Fyneham said. ‘I’m offering to teach them the basic craft of journalism.’

‘I don’t know anything about this,’ Eirion said.

‘He probably hasn’t hit Wales yet. Mum got the package, but decided people wouldn’t want to see pictures of the parish council in the nude and, like, read about the churchwarden’s private habits.’

‘You may take the piss,’ Fyneham said, ‘but seven parishes have already signed up for the introductory package.’

‘And what does that do for them, exactly?’ Eirion said.

‘They learn the basics of journalism. How to spot a story, how to write it. I spend a couple of weekends in the parish and sub the first issue for them. Or produce the whole thing, for a fee. It’s a shit-hot idea, Lewis, and it’s working. If a parish magazine looks halfway decent, local businesses are more inclined to advertise, and they can charge more for display ads. That way they get the new steeple before the rest of the church falls down.’

Jane was forced to concede that it wasn’t such a bad concept.

‘You do it all yourself?’

‘So far, but I expect I’ll soon be able to employ some of the guys from the media studies group on a part-time basis. Not that Lewis would be interested…’

‘This is all your dad’s kit?’ Eirion said. ‘He produces real glossies – trade stuff, right?’

‘Nah, this is just overspill. He’s got a proper plant down in town, with a few staff.’ Fyneham shrugged. ‘We help each other out.’

There was a noticeboard at the end of the long room, with some magazine covers pinned to it:
Microlite Monthly. You and Your DigiCam. The Clinical Therapist. International Readers’-Group Forum. What Hereford Council Can Do for You.

All crap, really.

‘Tell the truth, the old man hates what he does,’ Fyneham said. ‘He’d rather be a real journalist any day of the week, but real journalists don’t have a pad like this with five acres and a pool. It’s swings and roundabouts, Lewis. The old man goes on about secure income. If I have this to fall back on, I can go out there and, like, soar.’

Eirion looked faintly contemptuous – but then his family had been loaded since for ever. Jane started to wonder if Fyneham would maybe give her a weekend job. Hadn’t earned a penny of her own since the maid thing at Stanner Hall.

But then she remembered why they were here.

‘Does your dad own
Q
, then?’

Fyneham stared down at her, eyes narrowing. She noticed a faint sheen on his face, above the weekend stubble that Eirion said some guys in his year started cultivating from about Wednesday.

‘We’re talking about Lol Robinson,’ Eirion said.

‘Aw…’ Fyneham shuffled out this crooked grin. ‘Look, maybe it’ll get in, maybe it won’t.’

‘You’re saying you did it on spec?’

‘You’ve never done that? Written a piece for a magazine and just sent it in, see if it gets used?’

‘Can’t say I have, JD.’

‘Scared of rejection, huh? I’ve had quite a few pieces published – OK, not in
Q
yet, but some of the others.’

‘Fanzines?’

‘Oh, better than that. Look, somebody tells me about this guy who’s just brought an album out and how he used to be halfway famous, way back, and how he used to be a mental patient with a police record. Burns me a CD. Like, I don’t personally go for that acoustic shit, but I get onto the Net, dredge up some background and think, yeah, I’ll go and interview him.’

‘You told him you worked for
Q
,’ Eirion said.

‘I told him I was a freelance. What’s wrong with that?’

‘You told him it was definitely going in,’ Jane said.

‘I told him I couldn’t be sure when it would go in. And I couldn’t.’

Jane looked at Eirion. He was red-faced and tight-lipped and looking far younger than he had when he was smarming the second wife at the door. It was all turning out to be no big deal; just another wannabe chancing his arm. OK, a wannabe with a head start… well, a head start on Eirion, anyway.

She wished they’d never come now. She wished she was in Ludlow with Mum. She wished they could just get out of here.

‘Anyway, it wasn’t fair,’ she said to Fyneham, more for Eirion’s sake than anything. ‘Lol Robinson’s a really decent guy, with a lot of talent, and you conned him.’

‘You won’t say that if it makes it into the magazine.’ Fyneham knowing he was on top now, his grin turning into a sneer or maybe it had been a sneer all along. ‘Anyway, why should you be worried about the guy being conned, when he’s beating the shit out of your mother?’

A few seconds later, Jane was hearing Eirion saying, like from a long way away, ‘Jane, no…’

But it was like when she’d tried on Mum’s new glasses: the whole room had gone red – all the printers and the binders, and the scanners and the copiers and the state-of-the-art flat-screen computers.

Including the big, handsome one that she was holding in her arms, maybe sixteen hundred quid’s worth, its cables wrenched out of their sockets and dragging along the carpet as she backed away towards the window.

Fyneham snarling, ‘You’re insane! You’ll be paying for that for the rest of your—’

‘It fell off the desk,’ Jane said through her teeth. ‘Our word against yours. Keep away from me, you scumbag!’

She tripped over an extension cable and had to go down on one knee to prevent the computer slipping out of her arms, and Fyneham let out a screech.

‘For Christ’s sake, Lewis, do something about this bitch!’

‘Out of my hands, JD.’

‘And it’ll be out of mine,’ Jane said, ‘if you take one more step.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know where you got it from.’

‘Got what?’

‘You know what. You’ve been trying to bullshit us all along. You think we’re like hicks or something, and you’re this big-time professional journalist…’

‘I don’t know what you’re—’

‘You…’ Jane hefting the computer above the level of her chin: further to fall, more damage. ‘You do!’

‘Put it down!’ Fyneham like went into spasm. ‘Put it down and we’ll talk.’

‘We’ll talk first.’

‘It’s not paid for, you stupid bitch!’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Look,’ Fyneham said, ‘I was just told what to ask, OK, and he bought me—’

Eirion came over then, and Jane clutched the computer to her chest in case he snatched it. But he just stood between her and Fyneham, who looked close to tears, Eirion just looking puzzled.

‘Bought you what?’

Fyneham looked down at his trainers, arms stiffened, fists clenched by his sides.

‘The Evesham.’

‘Your dad bought you the Evesham?’

‘He bought it, and I’m paying him off week by week. My dad… he came up the hard way. He doesn’t do anything for nothing.’

‘But he got you the Evesham if you asked Lol some questions?’

‘He’ll kill me.’

‘Is that what happened?’

‘Lewis, will you please tell that bi— your girlfriend to put it down?’

‘Could you put it down, Jane?’

Jane stood for a few moments trying to work out what was coming out here, when all she’d wanted to know was who’d told Fyneham this evil crap about Lol giving Mum the black eye.

‘Jane?’

She looked into Eirion’s worried eyes, and picked up what they were saying: If you drop that thing now, we’ve lost it…

… Whatever it is.

She carried the big computer across the room to the nearest table to the door and let it down slowly, keeping her hands on the base in case she had to snatch it up again. This was a relief, frankly, but it was Fyneham who nearly sobbed.

‘All right, let’s go right back to the beginning, JD,’ Eirion said.

Bliss said there were some small factories, not much more than workshops, on the edge of the Barnchurch industrial estate. Not the halfway respectable part, where the shops and warehouses were, but at the rough end, where it joined the Plascarreg.

Only one of these had ever been let. A light-engineering plant there had gone bust fairly soon, but a ‘small business syndicate’ on the Plascarreg had paid the tenants to pretend otherwise and sublet part of their unit for the preparation and distribution of crack cocaine and other commodities.

It was a relatively foolproof arrangement, and nobody had ever disturbed this enterprise until Robbie Walsh discovered that the site to the rear of the workshop was of archaeological importance, being a one-time place of execution.

Such was Robbie’s enthusiasm for first-hand knowledge of the past that he was disinclined to take ‘Piss off, son, and forget all this exists’ as a useful piece of advice. And so particular youngsters on the estate were encouraged to take an interest in Robbie and his leisure pursuits, to the extent of borrowing some of his books.

‘What did they do to him?’ Lol asked eventually, wanting to get this over with.

‘Each of the workshops has a storage shed at the rear,’ Bliss said. ‘Wood shed, traditional design with exposed cross-beam.’

Bliss stared into his glass of Gomer Parry’s cloudy homemade cider, the colour of rust and border clay. Threw down names that Lol had never heard before: Jason Mebus, Connor Boyd, Shane Nicklin.

‘The first time they hanged him,’ Bliss said, ‘they cut him down fairly quickly.’