The Smile of a Ghost (58 page)

Sandy Gee folded her arms, bulky in the fleece, and looked at Lol.

‘Guess,’ she said.

Lol shook his head. Behind the clouds, the sun was setting and the stones were full of detail and texture.

‘Robbie Walsh,’ Sandy said. ‘There’s a turn-up, eh?’

In the drabness and dereliction of the Hanging Tower, the first window, the one you could easily reach, was barred.

Or partly. The two bars didn’t reach to the top of the window, so it would be possible for anyone determined enough to climb up and squeeze over them.

This window offered a view of the River Teme and the pine woods where The Weir House, apparently, was hidden. Inside the tower, the window was on the ground floor, but outside there was a very long drop to the path at the bottom of the rocks into which the foundations were sunk.

Was this how Jemmie Pegler had gone?

Above it – it would have been one storey up if the floors and ceilings hadn’t all gone, leaving the tower as a hollow funnel – was another window, the second of four. A window that would have been inaccessible but for the scaffolding.

‘They were going to make it safe,’ Sandy murmured. ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’

The skeleton of galvanized metal tubing ended about three feet under the window, two planks along the top, a brown mug on the end of one. A wooden ladder extended to the top of the scaffolding; a second one had evidently been pushed away and lay at an angle against the wall.

The girl was huddled like a squirrel in the deep recess around the second window, about fifteen feet above the floor. A small girl in a pink hoodie and jeans, short brown hair and the glint of a ring at the end of an eyebrow. The window space almost directly behind her was about four feet high and two or three feet wide, and all you could see through it was the darkening sky.

‘You want another coffee, Sam?’ Sandy called up.

Sam didn’t reply.

‘How about a hot chocolate? You must be getting cold up there.’

‘No, thank you,’ Sam said. They thought she was fourteen or fifteen, but she sounded younger.

‘She must be needing to go to the loo by now,’ Sandy whispered to Lol. Then she called back up to the ledge, ‘Sam, if you want to go to the loo, we can organize something.’

‘No, thank you.’

Lol said tentatively, ‘I’m… Martin.’

Sam didn’t acknowledge him. He wished Steve Britton would get back here, with Merrily.

Sandy whispered in his ear, ‘Try again, eh?’

Lol said, ‘About Robbie… it really wasn’t your fault. I can explain why. Can I do that?’

There was silence. Sandy Gee looked at Lol, showed him fingers crossed on both hands. A bird fluttered at the top of the tower.

‘You just keep telling me lies.’ This small, lost voice from the stone ledge.

Sandy said, ‘This is not a wind-up, Sam. He knows stuff I didn’t know.’

Before they came in, she’d told Lol what Sam had said earlier, when she’d been more talkative. It seemed her mother had come to spend a week in Ludlow before Christmas to look after Sam’s Auntie Kate, who’d broken a leg, and she’d brought Sam with her, as Sam was very miserable at the time, having just found out about Jemmie and Harry.

At first, Sam had been really bored in Ludlow: didn’t know anybody, nothing to do. The turning point was the Friday night her mother had taken her on the ghost-walk this guy ran – which Sam expected would be totally crap, but it had turned out to be kind of fun and scary, too, because she basically believed in ghosts and all that stuff.

And there was this boy there, about Sam’s age, and he’d said if she was interested there were some things he could show her, maybe call for her the next day, and she said yeah, OK. So the next day they went to Gallows Bank, where people used to be hanged, and then this Robbie took her to the castle, where she was quite impressed by him being able to get in for nothing.

Anyway, they’d spent most of the week together. They came here quite a few times, to the Hanging Tower, and Robbie told her about Marion’s ghost being seen, and they’d stood here and listened for the breathing noise, but they hadn’t heard anything.

They were just, like, mates – that was how Sam had seen it. She didn’t want another boyfriend so soon after Harry. But it seemed Robbie was more serious about it than Sam was. When she’d gone home, Robbie had kept writing and e-mailing and sending her stuff about Ludlow, and she was interested, but not
that
interested.

‘Sam?’ Sandy Gee said.

No reply. Sam had half-turned so she was looking out of the window space. From below, Lol could hear ragged singing: a hymn, ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past’.

‘Oh no,’ Sandy muttered. ‘It’s this bloody religious group. We blocked off the path at both ends specifically to avoid this kind of thing. They must be on some footpath coming up from the river or somewhere. Damn, damn, damn.’

‘Tell them to go away, or I’ll jump,’ Sam suddenly shouted. ‘Tell them!’ She stood up and leaned out over the drop. ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’

‘We’ll get a message to them,’ Sandy said. ‘All right?’

What else could she say? From less than twelve feet away from them, Sam was holding all the cards. When the kid turned to face them, she was in tears.

This was pitiful. An obvious cry for help. People rarely kill themselves as self-punishment, Dick Lyden, the psychotherapist, had once told Lol. They kill themselves because life isn’t worth living any more. That’s it, basically. Nothing subtle.

But what had begun as a cry for help had often ended in tragedy, Dick had emphasized. A cry for help wasn’t that easy to stage-manage, and they often lost control.

Suddenly, Lol was remembering something that Merrily had told him the night after Mumford’s mother had died.

About a letter that Robbie Walsh had written to a ghost.

‘Sam,’ he said, ‘were you Marion?’

Sandy Gee looked at him in some alarm, like he was suggesting reincarnation. The hymn outside had become ‘Rock of Ages’.

‘Did Robbie call you Marion?’ Lol said. ‘Did he write to you, e-mails and stuff… sent to you as Marion?’

Sam moved away from the window, leaning over the scaffolding.

‘She’s frightened.’

‘Who?’

‘Marion,’ Sam said.

Sandy leaned in, whispered, ‘This is what’s been happening. Be careful.’

Sam looked down at Lol. It was getting quite dark in here now. Her face was white.

‘Tell me about Robbie and Marion,’ Lol said.

Sam sat on the ledge, under the window.

‘We met up one Saturday. After Christmas.’

‘You and Robbie?’

‘He just wanted to come here again. Walk round the town and stuff and then come here. I mean, I liked him, but I couldn’t… I felt…’

‘Did he call you Marion then? While you were with him?’

‘Went home.’

‘You were feeling… bit suffocated?’

‘And then he kept sending me all this stuff from the Net. Pictures that took ages to download. It got… ’Cos this was when she was…’

‘Who was? Jemmie?’

Sam sniffed. ‘Giving me all this grief. How she was going to take an overdose. How she was going to dope herself up and jump in the river. Rings up at night and texting and stuff. I had to switch my phone off, said I’d lost it. And like every time I switched on the computer there’d be like nineteen e-mails and a pile of attachments and stuff.’

‘From Robbie?’

‘Yeah.’ Sam started to cry again. Steve Britton ducked under a low doorway and came in and straightened up, shaking his head – Sandy Gee waving at him to keep quiet.

‘And he’s, like, making plans for the Easter holidays,’ Sam said. ‘How I can get there on the train and what we’ll do, and she’s like, Oh, I’m really depressed, you’re the only friend I’ve ever had, and why don’t we go away together?’

‘That must’ve been… difficult.’

‘Up all night some nights, on the computer. Dear Sam. Dear Marion. It just…’

‘You didn’t tell anybody?’

‘Nnn. I was really tired this night, and I sent Robbie one back, and I’m like, please stop sending me stuff, OK, and no I can’t come to Ludlow at Easter ’cos we’re going to France, and like… I could’ve been nicer about it, you know?’

‘But you were overtired, right?’ Sandy said.

‘Read it back next day, and I thought, like, what’ve I done? So I e-mailed him back and I said I was really, really sorry and how I’d been really tired and I had a headache. But he never replied.’

‘When was this?’ Lol asked.

The kid’s face was moon-pale. ‘Two weeks before he died.’

‘There was no connection,’ Lol said. ‘You’ve got to understand that.’

‘He killed himself!’ Sam breathed in, like a hollow shudder. ‘They said it was an accident, but I knew it wasn’t. He kept writing to me that he could feel her… me… her… with him. He used to come here at weekends, and he said he could… And I was really like—’

‘Sam…’ Lol moved to the foot of the scaffolding, held on to the bars so she could see his hands, know he wasn’t trying anything. ‘What happened after he died?’

She was a long time in replying. Somebody, thank God, had managed to stop the choir. Through the ground-floor window, half-barred, you could see the river, silver and black.

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Sam said. ‘I had these nightmares. There was this one where I switched on the computer and there were all these e-mails and they all said, Dear Marion, and I’d be like scrolling up and scrolling up, and they’d just like go on for ever. Dear Marion, dear Marion, dear—’

She made a noise like a yawn that pitched up into a kind of squeak of distress.

‘Let me get you some hot chocolate,’ Sandy said.

‘Noooo!’

‘All right… it’s OK.’

‘What happened then?’ Lol said.

It was clear that Steve Britton hadn’t found Merrily. Where was she? This was becoming—

‘Told my friend,’ Sam said. ‘At school. Her name’s Bex. I thought she was my friend. I told her – like in confidence, you know? – and she’s like, Wow, this Marion’s ghost’s taken him. And she went and told these other kids, and then everybody’s like, Oh, you killed Robbie Walsh, you killed Robbie Walsh. You’re like a witch, or something.’

Sandy Gee sighed.

‘So I’m getting all this grief at school and I don’t want to go, and I’m faking being ill and stuff, and I’m getting into rows at home, ’cos my mum and dad, they think I’m going to be like a brain surgeon or something.’

Lol glanced at Sandy:
We’ve managed to find the parents now… insists she doesn’t want to see them
.

‘And then I saw Jemmie Pegler in Ledbury, and she’s telling me how she’s found all these suicide websites about how to kill yourself with a plastic bag and stuff. Copied one of them over.’

‘She copied the suicide site to you?’

‘And like I was sure she’d heard about me and Robbie Walsh and she was just being cruel – ’cos she was like that, you know? And I was like really angry, and I just started sending her all this stuff Robbie had sent me, about Marion and the Hanging Tower and I’m like, why don’t you like try this instead of a poxy plastic bag, and…’

‘Take it easy, Sam,’ Sandy said. ‘This is very important, what you’re telling us.’

‘So she starts phoning me at home on the main phone, and I keep pretending I’m not there, and then somebody tells me at school, like do you know Jemmie’s got a syringe and she’s shooting up, and I thought, like, she’d just told them to tell me that so I’d feel sorry for her again. And then she e-mails and says will you come to Ludlow with me and we’ll throw ourselves off the tower – like together – and become free of our bodies.’

‘What did she mean?’

‘I don’t know. It was all this stuff she’d had off the Net – like somebody got hold of the Robbie story and they’ve twisted it all around. And I couldn’t take any more, and it was late at night, and I sent back, yeah, yeah, we’ll go tomorrow.’

‘Oh God,’ Sandy murmured.

‘And she bloody did. She went. She came here, and I didn’t, and she threw herself—’

Sam let out a wail of despair and spun herself back at the window space, Sandy Gee shouting, ‘Sam!’ but grabbing Lol’s arm as he made a move towards the scaffolding.

He could hear Sam vomiting out of the death-fall window, and then she slumped back down, squatting under the window with her head in her hands.

Sandy hissed, ‘Now, will you do something?’

‘No Merrily?’

‘No sign at all. They’re still looking. You’ll have to do something.’

‘Sandy, listen—’

‘No, you listen to me…’ Sandy pulled him through a doorway he hadn’t noticed, into a chamber the size of a lavatory, steps going up, sealed off with masonry. ‘There was an incident earlier on when we nearly lost her. When she thought Jemmie Pegler was hovering on the other side of the window… as if she’d come rising up again from where she’d fallen – that even spooked me, I can tell you. And it’s what she’s been seeing in dreams, Martin, night after night, and now she’s afraid to go to sleep and she’s keeping herself awake all night. Look at her – she’s overtired, overwrought. We’ll have to bring lamps in soon, or she’ll use the darkness to… Twice she’s started talking to somebody who isn’t there.’