The Smile of a Ghost (Merrily Watkins 7), page 4
She told him about Martin Longbeach, and Huw laughed – the noise milk would make if you could hear it curdling.
Merrily looked up at the wall clock: nearly nine a.m., and a difficult funeral to organize – an elderly woman who’d moved to the village no more than a fortnight ago to live with her daughter and son-in-law, themselves comparative newcomers. And Andy Mumford was due here around ten. It was looking like another day when she wouldn’t see much of Lol.
‘Back-up’s one thing,’ Huw said. ‘You need a witness sometimes, no question, and somebody to watch your back. But an ill-matched committee operating in an area where nothing, at the best of times, is ever a bloody certainty…’
‘We all accept the need for a psychiatrist…’
‘There are good shrinks,’ Huw said, ‘and there are dangerous shrinks.’
‘You come across Nigel Saltash before?’
‘Never.’
‘Me neither.’ Merrily gazed out of the window at the unmown lawn, vividly green against the grey sky with its seeping sun. ‘He’s a regular churchgoer, however.’
Huw laughed again. ‘You know your problem, lass? Had your picture in the papers once too often, and you take a very nice picture. They don’t like that. And they weren’t happy at all when you were cosying up to the pagans against Ellis.’
‘Oh, Huw, Ellis was the kind of humourless, dangerous, fundamentalist bigot who brings the Church into—’
‘Ellis was part of the Church,’ Huw said. ‘Whereas pagans are pagans. Any road, I’m just planting the thought.’
‘Who doesn’t like it? Not the Bishop?’
‘Dunmore’s a time-server. He wouldn’t even be consulted. Think higher.’
‘Huh?’ She was thrown.
‘You want a list of all the embittered, back-stabbing bastards who hate the whole concept of Deliverance? Hey, God forbid that priests should meddle in metaphysics. Somebody’s happen saying, we need to keep an eye on that little Watkins in Hereford… could be getting carried away… too much, too soon. Needs a steadying hand…’
‘Hang on. Let me get this right. You think Callaghan-Clarke may have been nudged into place as a… an instrument of restraint?’
Merrily heard Huw sniff. She was thinking of what Siân had said about his precarious psychiatric state. Would it help to tell him about that? She stared out into the garden, at the pale buds on the apple trees.
‘And the bottom line,’ she said, ‘is that nothing much gets done, right?’
‘ “But how can we be certain?” ’ Huw doing this delicate, disapproving, posh voice. ‘ “We could so easily look ridiculous, couldn’t we?” And this lad with the candles sounds like window dressing. Bumbling New Ager. Whimsical, but essentially nice and harmless.’
‘Making us seem a little woolly?’
‘That’s a good word, aye.’
‘Let me get this right. You actually think—?’
‘Leave it with me,’ Huw said. ‘I’ll ask around, see what I can find out.’
Merrily made a call about the funeral. Hereford Crem: two p.m., Monday. She’d go and see the family over the weekend. It was always a problem when you didn’t know either the dead person or the bereaved: gently quizzing them about their mum, looking for the one little jewelled detail that would make it meaningful before you slid her through the curtains and the next one came through – another priest, another set of mourners. A line of sad trains on the last platform.
Andy Mumford turned up ten minutes early.
On the phone last night he’d sounded agitated. When he walked in, she was shocked.
He was wearing a fawn-coloured zipper jacket over a yellow polo shirt. She’d never seen him without a suit before, and he looked all wrong. He’d always seemed comfortably plump; now he was sagging and his farmer’s face was less ruddy than red.
‘You had breakfast, Andy? I can do toast—’
‘No, no…’ He waved a hand, said he’d have tea. Weak. No sugar.
So she’d been right: he’d retired from the police.
‘When?’
‘Three weeks back.’ Mumford pulled a chair from under the pine refectory table. ‘Three weeks and two days. CID boys bought me a digital camera.’
‘Oh.’
‘Now I’ll have to get a computer.’ He sat down with his legs apart, hands bunched together between his knees. ‘Like having your leg off.’
‘Sorry…?’
‘People thought I was looking forward to it. Like you look forward to having your leg off. Wake up in the morning and you think it’s still there, and then you realize.’
It was why his clothes didn’t fit; he’d lost the kind of weight you could never quite put back. Poor Andy. She’d seen a lot of him over the past two years, most recently as bag-carrier to Frannie Bliss, the DI. Bag-carrier and local encyclopaedia: an essential role.
‘You’ll get another job?’ Merrily filled the kettle. ‘Security adviser somewhere, or…?’
‘To be honest, Mrs Watkins, I’d rather not be a night-watchman at some battery-chicken plant.’ Mumford looked down at his hands. ‘Might get some chickens of my own, mind. Beehives. Dunno yet. However—’ He looked up at her. ‘How’re you?’
‘I’m all right.’
She smiled. Along the Welsh Border it was some kind of etiquette that you took ten or fifteen minutes to get around to what you’d come about. You tossed pebbles into the pond and, at some stage, the issue would float quietly to the surface. Must have been fascinating to listen to Mumford interrogating a suspect.
‘Your mother don’t live round yere, Mrs Watkins?’
‘Cheltenham. She has a lot of friends there now. We don’t see each other that often.’
‘But you did have some relations yereabouts?’
‘My grandad had a farm and an orchard near Mansell Lacy when I was a kid. All gone now.’
Mumford nodded. ‘My folks moved north into south Shropshire, after my dad retired from the Force. Ludlow. They had a little newsagent’s and sweetshop for a while, then it got too much for them.’
‘Nice place. Historic.’
‘Pretty historic themselves, now, my mam and dad. They’ll expect me to do more for them, now I’m retired.’
‘No brothers… sisters?’
‘Sister. Twelve years younger than me, lives in Hereford with this low-life idle bugger. Her…’ He paused. ‘Her boy, from when she was married, he never got on with this bloke. Always an oddball kid. Used to spend the school holidays with his grandparents. In Ludlow.’
He looked at Merrily, and she met his baggy-eyed gaze and detected ripples in the pond, a circular movement, something coming up.
Mumford said, ‘My sister’s boy, my nephew – Robson Walsh.’
The name broke surface, lay there, the water bubbling around it. Robson Walsh.
‘Suppose you’d still be… dealing with the funny stuff, Mrs Watkins?’ Mumford’s face was a foxier shade of red now, but she saw that his eyes looked anxious.
‘When it comes up.’
She sat down opposite him. Never the most religious of professions, the police. Saw too much injustice, degradation, few signs of divine light. Even Frannie Bliss, raised a Catholic up in Liverpool, had once said that if he ever made it to heaven he wouldn’t be too surprised to see a feller with a trident and a forked tail sitting on a cloud and laughing himself sick.
Whatever this was, it was hard for Mumford.
Robson Walsh. Robbie Walsh, Robbie Walsh…
‘Oh my God, Andy.’ TV pictures: old mellow walls, police tape. A school photograph. ‘The boy who fell—’
‘From Ludlow Castle, aye. I was there.’
‘At the castle?’
‘In the town. Come to pick up the wife – she was working at Ludlow Hospital. We were going out for dinner, celebrate my… celebrate…’ He looked down at the table. ‘Station sergeant at Ludlow spotted me in the street, took me into the castle. Boy’s still lying there, waiting for the pathologist.’
‘God, I’m so sorry, Andy, I just never—’
‘I’ve spent time with a lot of families lost a child.’ He looked up at her. ‘But at the end of it, Mrs Watkins, you always gets to go home.’
‘You said your sister’s son?’
‘Slag.’
‘Oh.’
‘Lives in Hereford with a new bloke – toe-rag. Only too happy to let the boy spend his holidays at his gran’s. Now she blames me.’
‘Your sister? Why?’
‘’Cause we covered up, Robbie and me, covered up how bad the ole girl was getting. He couldn’t stand the thought that he wouldn’t be able to go and stay there. He loved it, see. Ludlow. The history.’
‘They called him The History Boy – in one of the papers.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You and he covered up that your mother was…?’
There was a knocking from the front door, where the bell had packed in again. Merrily didn’t move.
‘What’s the point of putting a long name to it?’ Mumford said. ‘But her mind’s going, and it en’t no better for this.’
‘But didn’t your sister know what your mother was like?’
‘They don’t speak. Not since she went off with the toe-rag. I usually got to take the boy to Ludlow. Hell, he was all right there. Better than at home on the bloody Plascarreg, with a latchkey.’
‘Your sister lives on the Plascarreg?’
Not the best address in Hereford.
‘He was capable and intelligent,’ Mumford said. ‘I never had a son, but I couldn’t’ve complained if I’d got one like him. Anyway, Gail works at Ludlow Hospital three days a week, so she pops in, sees they’re all right.’
‘What about your father?’
‘Not the most sympathetic of men. Tells you about all the death he’s seen in his time, how you gotter put it behind you kind of thing. Meanwhile, ole girl goes over and over it in her mind, what’s left of it.’ Mumford glanced over at the door to the hall – more knocking. ‘You better get that.’
‘It’s OK.’
Probably just the postman with a parcel. He’d leave it in the porch.
Robbie Walsh. She recalled the case throwing up questions in the papers. How had he managed to conceal himself in the castle? Had he been alone?
‘So has the inquest…?’
‘Opened and adjourned after medical evidence. Boy was cremated at Hereford. No proof of anything more than an accident. Most popular theory is he got totally absorbed in whatever he was checking out inside the castle, got hisself locked in and went up the tower to try and signal for help. Mabbe leaned over too far.’
‘That feasible?’
‘It’s feasible. But there’s ways out of there for an agile kid, and if anybody knew ’em he would. But… nothing iffy sitting on a plate, the police don’t go looking for it no more. Not enough manpower to handle what they got on the books already. Verdict of misadventure, most likely.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘I reckon it should be an open verdict. Mabbe I’m just saying this on account of it’s destroyed what was left of my bloody family, but I reckon there’s stuff we don’t know. Meanwhile, my mam… this is gonner be hanging over her for the rest of… whatever she’s got left.’
There was more knocking at the front door, insistent.
‘In more ways than one, it looks like,’ Mumford said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Hanging over her. It’s why I’ve come. You better get that this time, it en’t gonner stop.’
Merrily went to open the door.
Just what she needed.
‘Sorry if I got you out of the bath or something, Merrily.’
Nigel Saltash smiling his all-purpose smile.
4
Routine Pastoral
ON HIS TRAINING courses at the disused chapel in the Beacons, Huw Owen liked to invent pet names for the unquiet dead.
Insomniac, hitch-hiker, breather, groper…
Exorcist jargon, a touch of black humour for the troops.
Merrily brought over an extra mug, poured three teas and sat down at the head of the table, her back to the window. The sun laid a creamy sheen, like an altar cloth, on the pine table top.
Huw would have called Mumford’s mother’s problem a parting-caller or a day tripper. Throwaway terms for a commonplace phenomenon – loved ones dropping in just to show their faces, let you know they wouldn’t be far away. They tended not to stay long. She remembered Huw saying that, nine times out of ten, they were none of his business.
‘The technical term is “bereavement apparition”,’ she told Mumford. ‘If anybody bothered to do a survey, they’d probably find that at least fifty per cent of bereaved people have similar experiences.’
Usually widows or widowers, or the children or siblings of someone who had recently died. But it could equally be a favourite teacher or a long-time colleague. You’d be doing something mundane around the house when suddenly you’d feel a sharp awareness of whoever had died. Or you’d actually see them passing through the hall or maybe sitting in a favourite chair. Just a glimpse, and then they’d be gone.
‘What we’re saying, Andrew,’ Nigel Saltash said, ‘is that this tends to happen with a person one is used to having around. It’s something I’ve encountered many, many times.’
He was wearing a tracksuit the colour of his hair, and his tanned skin shone. At the door just now, on auto-smile, he’d told Merrily he’d thought they ought to have a chat one-to-one. Didn’t want her, after last night, to run away with the wrong idea. And as this was his day for early-morning jogging with Kent Asprey, the fitness-freak Ledwardine GP… Oh yes, old mates. Hammered the country lanes together every Friday.
Terrific.
So there’d been no alternative to bringing him in and explaining to Mumford about the new Deliverance Advisory Group – giving Mumford an opportunity to say nothing, make an excuse and leave, call her later.
But, of course, it turned out that he and Saltash knew each other from way back, when Saltash had worked at the Stonebow Psychiatric Unit in Hereford. Reminding Mumford of all the times he’d been called across to Police Headquarters to assess some drugged-up prisoner self-harming in the cells. What days, eh? And now both of them retired. Or entering a new life-phase, as it were.
Saltash watched, with a smile conveying mild pain, as Mumford dumped three white sugars in his mug of tea.
‘Essentially, what you’re looking at, Andrew, is grief-projection. The bereaved person is carrying an image of the departed one very close, as it were, to his or her heart. We don’t want to have seen the last of them. A part of us desperately wants them still to be around, in the old familiar places. And so an area of our consciousness responds to the need. This is almost certainly what’s happening with your mother and her visions of the boy. Are we together on this one, Merrily, would you say?’
The tilted head. The smile that was a well-oiled explanatory tool.
But he was probably right. Huw Owen’s advice had always been to leave parting-callers, in general, alone. Didn’t matter whether they were hallucinations or psychological projections or something less explicable, they usually brought comfort rather than fear or distress, and so they were part of the healing mechanism, part of a phase that would pass. And if Mrs Mumford’s mind was on the slide…
‘Can I…?’ Merrily conspicuously sugared her own tea and stirred it noisily. ‘Can I just briefly go over some of it again, Andy? Your mother says she… saw him, first, in the kitchen, right?’
Mumford nodded, glanced at Nigel Saltash, then glanced away.
‘Out of the corner of an eye. Said he was standing by the fridge, like he was about to help himself to a can of pop. When she turned towards him, he… vanished. This was before the funeral.’
Nigel Saltash was nodding eagerly. Merrily wondered, despondent, if he was going to call in every week after jogging with Dr Asprey, to discuss the many areas where so-called spiritual guidance overlapped with nuts-and-bolts psychiatry.
‘And the second time?’ she said to Mumford.
‘In the back garden. Robbie’s standing by the bird bath, looking up at the house. Mam was in the bedroom, says she saw him through the window. But it was… you know, it was like a reflection in the glass. When she stepped back he wasn’t there any more.’
‘A reflection,’ Saltash said. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Same in the town.’ Mumford was mumbling now, like he wanted to get this over. ‘Near the Buttermarket. Shop window.’
‘Oh, really? Another reflection?’
‘Kind of thing. She was with my dad. He didn’t see anything. She was looking in the window and Robbie, he was behind her, but when she turned round…’
Merrily said, ‘Did she think he knew she was there?’
‘I don’t… I don’t know.’
‘I mean, does she ever think he wants to communicate with her?’
Mumford shook his head. ‘Don’t know.’
‘Does it frighten her at all?’
‘Frighten her?’ The corner of Mumford’s mouth twitched. ‘Robbie?’
‘Right.’
‘I see what you’re getting at, Merrily,’ Nigel Saltash said. ‘There’s clearly a contributory element of perceived guilt here – whether or not that guilt is misplaced. And also’ – he leaned across the table, holding his hands like bookends – ‘a desperate need to know exactly what happened.’
‘Does she know you were coming here, Andy?’ Merrily said.
‘I…’ Mumford shook his head. ‘She don’t like a fuss. Like she was very embarrassed at the size of turnout for the funeral – people from the castle, councillors, the Press. Like they were sitting in judgement, she thought. But all it was… it’s still a small town, see. They take something like this to heart. Bishop insisted on conducting the funeral hisself—’
‘David Cook?’
The Suffragan Bishop of Ludlow. Number two in the Hereford diocese. Bernie Dunmore, now Bishop of Hereford, had previously held the post. But surely David Cook…
‘—Even though it was only about a week before he went in for his heart bypass,’ Mumford said. ‘Not a well man, and he looked it.’
