The Smile of a Ghost (59 page)

‘What did Nigel Saltash say about that?’

‘He talked about hallucinations and psychological projections. He said there are— Look, it doesn’t matter what he—’

‘Drugs he could give her to sort it out?’

‘Yeah, more or less. We sometimes assume if someone’s a highly qualified psychiatrist they’re also experienced in counselling, and if he’d talked to me the patronizing way he talked to her I’d have jumped two hours ago. I’m not trying to discredit what he does, all I’m saying is, if she’s hallucinating Jemmie Pegler and her fat-girl talk, leave our bodies behind—’

‘Jemmie was clearly a dominant, parasitical presence,’ Lol said. ‘From whichever side of the fence you want to see it, that doesn’t necessarily go away with death.’

‘You’d know better than me. But this morning it’s in the papers about the exorcism and, like Steve keeps saying, she’s seen the films. She’s convinced she’s haunted.’

‘Convinced herself she deserves to be haunted.’

‘Exactly. By Jemmie and by Robbie Walsh and by the very thought of this place. So she’s caught a train and she’s here, and she’s in the famous Hanging Tower, saying, why aren’t they doing it? So don’t you tell me to wait any longer, Martin, because it’s going dark and when it’s dark there’s even less reality, isn’t there? And I’m afraid you’re the only priest we’ve got.’

46

M
ERRILY DIDN’T KNOW
what she’d expected, and she’d walked into the doorway of Jon’s flat before she could change her mind, and the smell – the mixture of smells – came out at her, so dense it was like a smearing of dirty colours on her face.

Oh God, God, God…

What she saw… she had nothing to compare it with. You could live in the countryside for years but contrive never to enter an abattoir.

‘Don’t go in,’ George Lackland whispered. ‘Please don’t go in.’

‘No.’

She stood in the doorway. No need at all to go in. Stood in the doorway for… how many seconds, minutes? George’s echo-chamber breathing behind her. And no breathing, no movement at all, inside. Only silence full of stench, as if the atmosphere itself had congealed around it – something so terminally extreme that it had to be environmentally contained.

Oh God, God, God.

What made it worse was that Jonathan – it was Jonathan, wasn’t it? Keep looking, be certain, be absolutely certain – appeared to be naked. No clothing to soak up the blood and obscure the wounds. Only the paper, scattered like toilet tissue in a public lavatory when the drains were blocked.

‘I can’t use the phone in there,’ George said.

‘No. No, we mustn’t touch anything.’

She saw that the papers were newspaper and magazine cuttings and also photocopies of news cuttings and printouts from websites, and there were scores of them… Hundreds, in fact. Most of them about music.

All of them about Belladonna: pictures of her and words about her. Belladonna’s high-grain, monochrome face soaking up the lifeblood of Jonathan Scole who had been Jonathan Swift and was now…

She must have sobbed – it was what happened to your breath in moments of immeasurable stress. Felt George’s hands gripping her shoulders.

She said, ‘Not in my worst…’

The papers had been torn and slashed. Like Jonathan, who was curled on his side, foetal, except for the angle of his head where his throat had been pierced, his face flung back and opened up like a blood orange. A face of multiple expressions, now, like double exposures, like a portrait by Francis Bacon.

Torn-up news cuttings had been scattered over his lower body, glued to it by the blood where Jonathan had been cut and stabbed and slashed, and cut and stabbed and slashed, over and over and—

With the full acceptance that if she was any kind of a real priest she should be saying a prayer for the eternal peace of the savagely, senselessly slain, Merrily stood back and kicked the door shut.

With a wheeze like an explosion of breath, it sprang back, and there was Jonathan again, the wafting of air lifting a piece of newsprint from one of his eyes as if he’d blinked at the repeated intrusion, and Merrily slammed a foot flat against the door and pushed it hard away from her. Keeping the foot clamped there, on the stained panelling, as if she was holding back a tide of blood, until the door clicked. And then she stood at the top of the steps, with George a few steps below her, and just took in air.

‘Whoever did this…’ George looking up at her, the knuckle-bump in his forehead gleaming like a big pearl, ‘must look like… like a bloody butcher. How can she be walking the streets?’

‘In a long coat.’ She followed him down the steps.

At the bottom they just stood there, and George said, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Well, no,’ she said. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Come to my house.’

Merrily sagged. Her lighter fell from the torn pocket of her fleece and bounced on the cobbles.

‘I made a terrible mistake, George.’ She bent to pick up the lighter, but denied herself a cigarette. ‘The worst mistake I’ve ever made, and, by God, I’ve made some.’

‘Mrs Watkins—’

‘I have a qualified, not to say eminent, psychiatrist I’m supposed to work with. And, because I didn’t like him much, I kept him completely in the dark about most of this.’

‘Mrs Watkins, we all kept people out of this. I wanted Bernard to see to it, as a friend, and Bernard passed it on to you. It was all in confidence. I wanted to keep the lid on – that’s the top and bottom of it.’

‘And I resisted’ – putting a hand to the top of her chest to try and stop herself panting – ‘every inclination to think this woman was clinically insane.’

Even as she’d stood clamping the door shut with her foot, she’d been resisting it. Thinking, could this have been someone else? Some enemy from back home in the north? Someone who’d been trying to find him? If his parents’ murder had been contracted…

Oh, sure. And plastered him with Belladonna cuttings. There was no story-book twist here; it was as messy and unfathomable as any open-and-shut killing. The level of rage that could have driven a woman to this was beyond all comprehension, but wasn’t that always the case? Dear God.

‘We’ll go to my house,’ George said, as though he was helping a child to cross the road. ‘Phone the police from there. Come on.’

They came out of the alley into Corve Street, into George Lackland’s town. Plenty of people still around in the powdery dusk, Tesco’s still open. A tourist coach waiting at the lights.

Over the gravelly sound of the coach engine came the church clock chiming eight. Instinctively, Merrily glanced up to the tower and glimpsed movement at the top: a figure in Palmers’ Guild blue moving across from one corner pinnacle to another. Or the distinctive blue of a stockman’s coat.

They had reached the first narrow window of Lackland Modern Furnishings.

‘George,’ she said, casual as she could manage. ‘Do you think
you
could report it?’

‘I was going to.’

‘I mean without mentioning me. Not yet. Please? I need some time.’

He stared down at her. ‘You’re feeling ill.’

‘No, I’m—’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Do you think I could borrow the keys to the church? I have to… work something out.’

As if she meant she needed to pray. She hoped he would understand that. And anyway, he’d know the truth of it soon enough.

Everybody would.

Lol leaned against the wall outside and knew why Merrily smoked.

He felt faintly sick. He wanted to be on the other side of these walls, looking for her. She would not just have walked off. She would wait. She was good at waiting. He needed her, and the girl needed her, needed someone who could…

… legitimately intercede.

The movements of police and paramedics around the Inner Bailey were becoming shadowed. The Keep, now the gatehouse, was a charcoal monolith.

‘I hope you know what you’ve done, Mr Robinson.’

He didn’t know how long the woman had been standing by his side.

‘Where’s Saltash?’

‘He’s gone.’ She didn’t look at him. ‘I don’t think he’ll be coming back tonight. He suggested I might be wise to leave also. Let Mrs Watkins’ – the name was expelled like prune stones – ‘take over.’

‘You’ve seen her?’

‘No. I thought she might already be here. Or perhaps she’s with the television people. Doing what she does so well.’

Lol looked at her austere profile. The clouds that had suffocated the sun were relaxing into evening, admitting a wafery moon. Her hair was curling up from the collar of her jacket.

‘What is it with you, Ms…’ Couldn’t remember her damn name.

‘Siân will do. What’s up with me, as I think you already know, is that my and Merrily’s attitudes to the practice of Christianity in a secular age are… incompatible. Never made much of a secret of that. Putting it simplistically, I think there’s no room for superstition in what we do, while she appears to nurture it.’

‘In which case – sorry to be so naive – why would you want to be connected with Deliverance? What’s your agenda?’

Siân looked across the enclosure, dark as a stagnant pond now, towards the Keep with its drooping flag. She sighed.

‘It begins to look,’ she said, ‘as if the agenda was Mrs Watkins herself. Doesn’t it? The ubiquitous, self-effacing, photogenic Merrily Watkins.’

‘Had her picture in the paper too often? Well…’ Lol shrugged. ‘That was always going to happen. She hates it. But if you do what she does and… and you look like she looks, then you’re going to get your picture in the papers.’

‘Who wasn’t here when we – the women of Hereford – were battling for the priesthood. Wasn’t out there with her placard. Wasn’t part of the movement. And was then presented with this outdated but inherently sexy role by a rogue bishop, subsequently discredited. Managing to emerge after his inevitable departure smelling of lavender and honeysuckle. And continuing, for heaven’s sake, to get away with it.’

‘Not always. And not undamaged.’

‘And all of it built on superstition.’ Siân finally turned towards Lol. ‘Do you know what really got to me? How, when she restored evensong in Ledwardine Church – evensong with a fashionably esoteric tweak – it became an immediate talking point because some local woman had apparently been cured of a life-threatening condition.’

‘Which she probably hadn’t had in the first place. Misdiagnosis, or the medical records got mixed up.’

‘Doesn’t matter. It was still all over the Internet, apparently, that the mystical vicar of Ledwardine had healing powers. And the following week it was reported – not in the
Church Times
, thank God, one of the other rags – that her congregation had doubled.’

‘Trebled, I think. But she squashed the rumours and it slumped again. So everyone’s happy. Except I expect you were really pissed off that she hadn’t run with it, gone the way of all the other messianic cranks.’

‘Always one step ahead,’ Siân said.

‘You make it sound political. She doesn’t think like that. She offended you just by being there.’

‘Yes,’ Siân said. ‘I suppose she did.’

‘So when you were approached by the Dean, whose good friend Saltash had decided he should make his skills available to the Church—’

‘No. The approach came from Nigel himself.’

‘What did he tell you just now?’

‘He didn’t have to tell me anything. He’d walked out on a disturbed child. That was enough. Whatever Merrily may think of me, I’m still a Christian. Of sorts.’ She looked down at her hands, crossed on her abdomen. ‘So I’ve come back. And I don’t quite know what to do about this, Mr Robinson.’

‘You’re asking me? A recovering psychiatric patient? An abuser of women?’

Siân was silent.

‘They can’t find Merrily,’ Lol said. ‘And they think my name’s Longbeach and I’m qualified to dispel spirits. They’re now telling the girl that I’ll do it.’

‘Do what, exactly?’

‘I was thinking about an exorcism of place. Seems appropriate. Doesn’t target anything in particular. Lightens things. Takes away the tension and produces a feeling of calm. Psychology rather than superstition. Also it’s the only one I’ve ever watched.’

Siân looked into the pool of darkness in front of them. ‘Is that what Merrily would do?’

Lol shrugged.

‘I couldn’t,’ Siân said.

Lol didn’t say anything.

‘I’m not sure I’d know where to start.’

‘If you were planning to reform it, you must have done some research with the Deliverance handbook.’

‘It appalled me. It’s fundamentally medieval.’

‘This is a medieval town. We’re in a medieval castle.’

‘I don’t carry a copy, anyway.’

‘As I understand it,’ Lol said, ‘it’s only a set of guidelines, that book.’

‘One can hardly make it up.’

‘You don’t have to make it all up.’

‘Yes, I do realize that elements such as the Lord’s Prayer are mainstays of all Deliverance… ritual.’