The Smile of a Ghost (Merrily Watkins 7), page 27
‘Well, she certainly goes into the church, even if she doesn’t go to actual services.’
‘There you go. She’s opening herself up to the vibrations.’
‘Opening herself up, all right.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Never mind.’ Ethel jumped into Merrily’s lap and started to wash her paws. ‘What exactly is she doing, do you think, Jane? Where’s she coming from? We looking at witchcraft, or what?’
‘She on her own?’
‘There are some young people who seem to have formed some sort of attachment to her. When I first saw her, she was with, I think, four of them – two men, two women, all wearing Edwardian-type gear, slightly funereal.’
‘Could be part of a coven. Doesn’t seem too likely, though.’
‘They just struck me as basic goths.’
‘OK, listen…’ Jane leaned into the corner of the sofa. ‘I’ve been thinking about this… Could she have any ancestry in the town? Are there any family roots she maybe wants to pick up on? Because that might explain why she was always with Robbie Walsh – he could’ve been helping research it, couldn’t he? That seems to have been the kind of thing he enjoyed.’
‘That’s actually not a bad theory,’ Merrily said.
‘Or, if you want to extend it in a more mystical direction, could she have been, like, hypnotically regressed into recalling some past life in Ludlow? For instance – and this makes sense – suppose she believes she’s the reincarnation of somebody like, for instance…’
Merrily brought her hands together. ‘Marion de la Bruyère!’
‘Well…?’
‘It’s a fascinating thought, flower.’
‘And it explains the suicide links,’ Jane said. ‘And it’s exactly the kind of bollocks a mad old slapper like Belladonna would go for.’
Afterwards, Lol followed Moira back up the M4 to the Severn Bridge services, where she was spending the night. They sat in the café by the big windows where you could see the sweep of the suspension bridge into Wales and the lights bouncing off the estuary’s dark water.
‘I’ve never done that before,’ Lol said. ‘Never.’
Two verses in, freezing up in the heat of the lights, standing quivering, like the mental patient he was singing about.
‘You mean it wasnae deliberate?’ Moira raised an eyebrow, cup of hot chocolate held in both hands, like a chalice. ‘Even I thought it was part of the act. And when you started laughing like that…’
‘Couldn’t stop.’
Doubled up, he’d noticed her watching him from the shadows at the side of the stage, in her long, sea-green dress, the strand of white in her hair like the crack of light down a doorway at night. Expecting her to walk on, gently detach the mike and salvage his set.
Not necessary, as it turned out. The audience had started laughing with him, with no idea why. In the lobby afterwards, Moira’s merchandising guy had sold over sixty copies of Alien. Now he was higher than the Severn Bridge and, every so often, he would shiver at the memory.
‘It was a wild moment, but you never looked back,’ Moira said. ‘You were soaring like a gull. I’m thinking, Jesus, he’s become a performer at last – wee Lol. However, just for the record… why?’ She’d put down her cup. Her hair was tied up now. She wore a grey woolly sweater and white jeans. ‘Go on… just out of interest. For m’ personal files…’
‘Must’ve been the song,’ Lol admitted. ‘It’s always that song. It’s got… something in it I can’t always control.’
‘ “Heavy Medication Day”?’
‘The day I refused to take the pills,’ Lol remembered, ‘Dr Gascoigne said… and I remember him leaning over me, I was sitting in a high-backed chair in the main day-room, and I’d turned it away from the TV, and he leaned over me and he said in my ear, “Don’t go thinking you’re ever going to leave here, Mr Robinson. You see that door? One day, when I’ve been long retired to the south of France, you’ll be straining to get your Zimmer frame through it.” ’
‘Jesus. This is a shrink? This is how they talk?’
‘Well, it’s been said before, but it’s true…’
‘That if it wasnae for the white coat you’d never know which were the patients, right? I tell you what… by the time you’d finished laughing and you did the whole song again, they were with you for the duration.’
‘Um, to change the subject – slightly – I was talking to Tom Storey.’
‘Poor Tom,’ Moira said. ‘Wasnae so rich and famous he’d probably have been under the shrinks years ago.’
Moira had once, way back, been in a band with Tom Storey. It was a very small pond, the British folk-rock scene.
Lol told her how he’d wound up talking to Tom. Moira rolled her eyes.
‘Belladonna, eh? The extraordinary Bell. Used to fancy the hell out of Tom, simply because he was rumoured to be, you know…?’
‘Sensitive?’
‘Amazing the number of women went after him because of that. To guys, a guitar hero. To women, a psychic guitar hero. None of them realizing it was the best way to have the poor guy heading for the airport. Bell couldnae figure it at all – she could’ve had anybody at that time.’
‘You knew her?’
‘Nobody knew her. We did a couple of the same festivals – you did one, I recall. This’d be before America discovered her. She was older than me and always kind of superior – she’s an artist, slumming, and I’m this folk-club kid on the make. And she resented me, probably for the same reason she fancied Tom.’
‘Because she’d heard you were…’
‘A touch fey, aye. Oh, and she’d made a wee pass at me and got soundly rebuffed. That didnae help.’
‘Went both ways?’
‘She went a hundred ways, Laurence, although I tend to think the allegations of actual necrophilia were no more than malicious gossip. It was all a major fetish thing. Other bands and singers, it was a phase. Her, it went on when goth stuff was no longer big-money cool, so…’
‘So there had to be a cause,’ Lol said.
‘Always a cause. They’re saying even schizophrenia’s no’ something you’re born with. The guy I did know was Eric Bryers, her boyfriend way back. Session bass-player, absolutely besotted with Bell. Do anything for her – coke, smack, acid. If you get ma point. She was gonnae have his child and everything, and it was all cosy-cosy, then she suddenly disappears – this is Eric’s version of events – and the next he hears of her she’s in LA and a big star, with no mention of a baby.’
‘Had it adopted, Tom said. He was furious.’
‘Ah, the adoption story, that’s one version. What I heard, the baby was stillborn, and she had a big funeral for it, fancy Gothic grave – that would be more in keeping. Last time I saw Eric, he… Aw, he was busking with another guy in Manchester – I had a gig at the Free Trade Hall, and there he was busking. I’m ashamed to say I couldnae face him, so I walked past quick, with ma scarf around ma head, and slipped all the cash I had on me intae his hat. Talked to a guy some time later, said Eric used to follow Bell’s gigs around the country, busking near the theatres, and getting arrested and moved on. I think he had a solid habit by then, and nobody was using him.’
‘Dead now.’
‘Aye. They got him off the smack and he turned to drink and his behaviour became erratic, and one day the poor devil threw himself off the top of a skyscraper block in London.’
‘Like Seress.’ Lol started to feel a little weird.
‘What?’
‘Rezso Seress – “Gloomy Sunday”?’
‘It’s late,’ Moira said. ‘Start again.’
‘There was this song about suicide which, according to the urban myths, has been leading to people actually topping themselves. By a Hungarian, Rezso Seress. He also died by throwing himself off a building. The Hungarian Suicide Song. Occasionally gets covered by artists feeling a bit daring.’
‘Bell?’
‘Very faithful version. Exactly like the original, down to the scratches.’
‘See, that’s just the kind of fuckin’ stupid thing that woman would do,’ Moira said. ‘The way Eric was, I can actually imagine him sitting there playing the damn thing over and over and refilling his glass. I’d like to give her a good slap.’
‘You ever see her now?’
‘Not in years, she’s well off the circuit – doesnae need it; weird kids keep rediscovering her. They also began using her music on commercials a lot – when TV commercials started becoming so diffuse and surreal you weren’t sure what they were advertising. Stroke me, poke me, invoke me – however that shit went. Only it would be a car. You staying here tonight?’
‘Going home, I think. It’s only just over an hour.’
‘Home,’ Moira said. ‘That’s such a nice word, isn’t it?’
It seemed unlikely he’d be back yet, but around midnight Merrily went to the end of the vicarage drive to see if there was a light on at Lol’s.
There wasn’t. There were no lights on anywhere in Church Street. It was a warm night, with no moon. She lit a cigarette, looked up at the window of Jane’s attic apartment, and there was no light there either. Good. The kid had done enough research for one night.
Kid. It wasn’t respectful even to think of her as a kid any more. She was smart and funny and perceptive and increasingly good to have around. And in eighteen months’ time she’d almost certainly be leaving home.
Home. Merrily turned her back on the vicarage. It had never really felt like home. Seven bedrooms – how the hell could she live here alone? Maybe one of the other five parishes she’d be invited to take on would have a smaller vicarage. Or maybe, when Jane finished school, it would be time to move on, out of the diocese. Maybe the writing was already on the wall, next to a hazy outline sketch of Siân Callaghan-Clarke in episcopal purple.
The image made her angry and she thought, Sod it, I’m going to do it – Mary the bloody psychic.
‘You know the way to be really convincing as a psychome-trist?’ Jane had said as she went up to bed. ‘Just wander around and don’t say a thing. Don’t claim you’ve had any visions or sensations at all. Say absolutely nothing.’
‘What good will that do?’
‘Because all phoney psychics come out with a mass of crap, and when you respond to some detail they snatch on it, and that’s how it works. If you say nothing she’ll think either you don’t want to reveal what you’ve picked up until you’re absolutely certain, or you know it would scare the pants off her.’
Made sense. Merrily pinched out her cigarette and went in.
Lol drove across the bridge into Wales and slowly up the border, along the deep, moon-tinted, green-washed Wye Valley into the lights of Monmouth and back into England and up towards…
Home, yes.
It would be overstating it to say that Moira could read you like a book, but she could see all the big words in your life as if they were spelled out in neon on your forehead.
Home… that was one of them. The last time he’d lived in Ledwardine, it had been a refuge, the place he’d hidden rather than lived in. Now… well, now he actually felt he was probably the right person to be in the house of Lucy Devenish.
And Merrily… that would work itself out. It had to.
Because she was the real meaning of home.
He left the Astra on the square, alongside the oak-pillared market hall. Perhaps he should think about renting a garage somewhere. Tonight, they’d sold more copies of his album than they’d sold of Moira’s. Well, OK, most of the audience would already have had all Moira’s albums, so that was understandable, but sixty copies…
It was twenty to two in the morning. Friday morning, Ledwardine hanging in timeless silence, a bat flittering overhead. Lol stood for a moment on the cobbles, looking across at the vicarage drive – a small, dim light on somewhere in the woody heart of the old house. There should always, he thought, be a light in there.
Tears came into his eyes and he hurried away.
Remembering, as he often would, the first night he’d met Merrily, when Ethel the cat had been given a kicking by Karl Windling and Lol had wound up carrying her to the vicarage. And Merrily had tended Ethel and, although it had been a very bad night for her in ways that he hadn’t yet known about, she’d sat down and lit a cigarette and had said, in a voice full of ironic uncertainty, Talk to me, Mr Robinson… I’m a priest.
Lol unlocked the door and stumbled through the darkness towards the parlour, until he remembered he had power.
He had power.
He clicked the switch and the bulb over the foot of the stairs drizzled out its low-wattage light. Lampshade, Lol thought. Lampshade tomorrow.
A rectangle of white.
Shit.
Before he’d picked the envelope off the mat, he knew what it was.
Somehow he’d forgotten. He really had forgotten. Hadn’t thought about it for ages. It belonged to the days of oil lamps and paint-trays, before he had power.
He almost crumpled it up and threw it away. But the night had already darkened. He tore it open at the door and held it under the bulb.
Your a sick man.
How long you been hitting her
30
Victim
NEXT MORNING, AS soon as Jane had left for school, Merrily drove straight to Hereford, letting herself into the gatehouse office with her own key before Sophie had arrived.
Dressed-down again, jeans and fleece, as yesterday, she sat at Sophie’s desk and rang Lol on his mobile. Still switched off. She left her second so-how-did-it-go? message of the morning. She knew he was back; she’d seen his car on the square.
Outside it was raining hard, Broad Street speckled with umbrellas. In the dullness of the office, the figure 2 was glowing from the message window on the answering machine.
No glow, however, in the messages.
‘Sophie, I think we must talk on the subject of office reorganization – and Mrs Watkins. Call me, please. Thank you.’
Callaghan-Clarke, clipped, concise and ominous. The teacher: see me.
And so barefaced about it, because Mrs Watkins was on holiday. Finding she could hardly get her breath, Merrily was close to phoning back herself. Instead she lit a cigarette, her hands unsteady, fumbling with the Zippo, listening to the second message: Andy Mumford.
‘Mrs Watkins, tried to get you before you left. Don’t know whether you listened to the local radio…’
Actually, in the car on the way here, she’d been listening to Lol’s album with the volume well up, his breathy vocals on ‘Camera Lies’ reassuring with their sense of his need: the camera lies, she might vaporize. A song he’d written in the tingling dawn of their relationship.
‘… Big dawn raid on the Plascarreg,’ Mumford was saying.
Sophie arrived, turning in the doorway and shaking her umbrella over the stone stairwell. She heard the answering machine, left the umbrella outside and came in to listen.
‘Large selection of Class A drugs removed. Three dealers nicked, it looks like. Well… too much of a coincidence, see. Wouldn’t surprise me if Mebus and his little mates hadn’t grassed up their neighbours with a view to avoiding prosecution. I been trying to get my relative on the phone, without success so far, but I’ll keep you informed. Thank you.’
Merrily put the machine on hold and then played the message again. Mumford had not sounded exactly euphoric. But, then, if Jason Mebus was back on the streets without a stain…? And where had Jason found the nerve to grass up his neighbours? Something didn’t sound right.
‘Long overdue,’ Sophie said. ‘Half the drugs in Hereford seem to have come through that estate. I had the radio on just before leaving the house, and it’s now five arrests. Quantities of heroin and crack-cocaine with a street value of somewhere around three-quarters of a million pounds.’
‘That’s huge, for Hereford.’
‘There’ll be large, and possibly liquid, breakfasts in the police canteen, no doubt.’ Sophie slipped out of her coat, hung it behind the door.
‘There’s also a message from Siân Callaghan-Clarke,’ Merrily said. ‘Wants to talk to you about office reorganization.’
‘One can hardly contain one’s anticipation,’ Sophie said.
‘And about me.’
‘In which case, I ought to call her back while you’re still here. However, you didn’t come in to pass on my messages, did you?’
‘I’m in a quandary,’ Merrily said. ‘Need advice from a wise and entirely balanced individual.’
Sophie nodded. It wouldn’t be arrogance that stopped her denying these qualities; she just didn’t believe in wasting time. She sat down on what was usually Merrily’s side of the desk.
‘Tell me.’
Merrily had taken it as far as the encounter with Belladonna outside the castle walls – more bizarre the more she thought about it – when the phone rang. She motioned for Sophie to take it.
‘Gatehouse,’ Sophie said. ‘Ah. Good morning, Canon Callaghan-Clarke.’
Merrily pulled her bag across the desk, took out the cigarettes and the Zippo.
The call lasted less than five minutes but seemed longer. Most of Sophie’s replies were monosyllabic and negative – No… not at all… never – but her minimal facial responses sent out signals of extreme danger. At one point, a corner of her mouth twitched sharply, as though a wasp had landed there.
Finally she said calmly, ‘Canon Clarke, I think you’ll find that such a conclusion is absolutely and utterly preposterous.’
When she put the phone down, the rain was stopping, and a gauzy sunlight powdered part of the room. When Sophie reached out and clicked on the desk lamp, Merrily sensed this was, as was customary with Siân, going to be worse than she could have imagined.
Sophie straightened the notepad on the desk, took a long breath and let it escape slowly.
‘As you’ve probably guessed, Merrily, that wasn’t about office reorganization, it was entirely about you.’
‘There’s flattering.’
