The Smile of a Ghost (Merrily Watkins 7), page 44
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.’
‘Ritual,’ Lol said. ‘I quite like you when you talk dirty.’
Siân said, ‘I want to say… that I wouldn’t insult either of you with an apology, but sometimes one’s own gullibility results in the most… indefensible behaviour.’
‘You can get holy water from the church or somewhere,’ Lol said. ‘I was with Merrily at a hop-kiln in the Frome Valley, where something unpleasant had happened. A lot of the routine stayed with me. Good memory for verse and things. Something you develop in my line of work, otherwise you’re liable to dry up in the middle of a gig.’
‘Of course,’ Siân said. ‘What’s your first name? I did know…’
‘Lol. Laurence. Like the poor guy they named the church after. Someone once told me what happened to him, but it’s slipped my mind.’
‘He was roasted on a gridiron over a slow fire.’
‘Yes, now I remember,’ Lol said.
Tinted by the last of an invisible sun, clouds hung like a sandbank over the round tower that sat in the Inner Bailey like a great turreted cake.
‘For God’s sake,’ Siân said, ‘let’s not either of us be bloody stupid. Just have one last attempt to find Merrily.’
Leaving the church’s main door unlocked, Merrily entered through the huge stone porch and found the lights, the acoustics of the great church giving out a sigh as she went in. Entering a church alone at night was disturbing some secret alchemical process and, increasingly, she’d thought that Jane was probably right about this being at least partly connected with the site itself.
Partly a pagan thing, but it was all mixed up in those days.
She knelt in front of the altar in the chapel of St John the Evangelist, took off her fleece to expose the pectoral cross and prayed for the wisdom to see this through, to drop the curtain before the final act in an insane tragedy.
Prayed that a very cursory knowledge of forensic pathology acquired over two extraordinary years had not led her to the wrong conclusion about the death of Jonathan Scole.
Prayed for the courage to go up the tower and face the mad woman of Ludlow.
She had to. No one else would know how to approach it. If the police went up – as, surely, before long, the police would – it would all be horrifyingly over before the first of them put a boot on the parapet.
How long had Belladonna been here? Had she been behind that door when Merrily came in with George Lackland? Had she listened to George’s account of events leading up to their fevered coupling under the weathercock?
Merrily pulled on her fleece, opened the tower door into total darkness.
Obviously, there would be lights here – most likely bulkhead lights at intervals all the way to the top. But if she switched them on she’d be advertising herself.
Not good.
Only one solution. She padded into the nave, came back flicking her Zippo to light a tea-lantern from the gift shop and found she was no longer alone.
‘What are you doing?’ Lol said.
47
Point of Transition
THE CLUSTER OF candles on a small tray on the floor lit up her face like some Renaissance Madonna’s over a glowing crib.
She was sitting with her back to the wall directly below one of the corner stone pinnacles, its conical, notched prong sharp against the last amber in the west.
The pole bearing the weathercock sprouted from the apex of a leaded pyramid that occupied most of this small platform in the sky, a duckboarded walkway around it. It felt isolated, scary if you didn’t like heights, which Lol didn’t, but the gathering of candlelight against the glistening backcloth of new night made it weirdly intimate.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ Belladonna said.
She was wearing a long blue stockman’s coat, hanging open over something light-coloured.
Two hundreds steps did something unprecedented to the backs of your calves. Lol set the lantern down on the deck and sat down behind it, the two of them facing one another across the width of the tower.
‘If you wanted to be alone,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t have gone walking around the battlements with your candles when everyone knows the church is closed.’
‘I’m not alone.’
‘You… been up here long?’
‘Stopped counting the chimes a while ago. Came in with the tourists, decided not to leave. I asked you a question.’
‘Lol. Lol Robinson,’ Lol said.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see.’
‘We almost met once, at a festival. You wouldn’t remember. It wasn’t Glastonbury or anything…’
‘I’m not in the mood for reminiscence,’ Bell said. ‘Go away.’
The half-dozen stubby candles on the tray had probably been taken from the votive table in the church. In their glow, her face looked moist and quietly radiant. She hadn’t changed much, really. The lines seemed to have added movement, vibrancy. Lol felt an electric curiosity and the need to exercise it, as if the Saltash episode had freed him up for this. Do something.
Whatever she’d done, he didn’t want her to be insane.
‘You shouldn’t be alone,’ he said. ‘Not now.’
‘I’m not alone, I told you that.’
‘But they can’t talk to you.’
‘I can talk to them.’
‘They don’t listen,’ Lol said. ‘They don’t care.’
Merrily had said, She’ll be in a bad way. There’s only one reason she’s gone up there. If the police go up to try and bring her down, she won’t even wait for them to reach the top. Can you get that over to them?
‘Is she with you?’ Bell said. ‘Your girlfriend.’
‘No. She’s in the castle.’
‘Has she done it yet?’
Did she mean Sam? He didn’t reply.
‘It’s a gesture,’ Bell said. ‘A meaningless gesture. She’s wasting her time. What’s here’s too powerful.’
He realized that she must mean the exorcism. Maybe she didn’t know about Sam.
He saw that each of the stone pinnacles was tipped with a tiny cross. ‘But this is the centre of it, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘This is the soul of the town. The point of…’
‘Transition.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean by that. Would it… would you mind if I stood up? I think I can feel a bit of a cramp coming on.’
‘As long as you don’t come near me,’ Belladonna said.
‘Sure.’
Tell them to keep right away from her, Merrily had said. She might still have the knife.
This was after he’d reminded her that he couldn’t stand heights. She’d been worried about walking away from this. He’d told her he’d stay in the church and try and explain to the police if they showed up. Holding one another for a few seconds and then she’d walked away, kept looking back.
There was, of course, no reason the police would think Bell or anyone was up here, now the tray of candles was in the shadow of the walls.
Lol looked over the battlements once before turning away. Lights were coming on all around the church. When he turned his head, it was like a Catherine wheel, dizzying. He caught a thin, sharp smell from somewhere.
‘One hundred and thirty-five feet,’ Bell said. ‘I watched the police cars converging on Jonathan’s shop. Did you find him?’
‘Merrily and the Mayor. After the ironmonger told them his shop hadn’t been open all day.’
‘Garrulous old fool.’
‘She… what can I say about this?’
‘Rage gives you unlimited strength,’ Bell said.
He guessed she’d raised her voice to deal with the tremor, but it was there.
‘What had he done to you?’
‘I don’t have to answer your questions.’
‘No.’ He looked over the town to where arrows of pale pink were enfolded in a cloud bank over Clee Hill in the east. ‘I was talking to a couple of people about you. Tom Storey?’
‘How is he?’
‘Still working. Still a bit scary.’
Bell laughed. ‘He was always scared of me.’ She turned to look up at Lol. ‘Why aren’t you? What do you want?’
‘I’m just scared of what you might do. That is what you meant by the point of transition, isn’t it?’
She didn’t reply. He felt the hours she’d been up here had been spent coming down from something, some wild and terrifying trip she couldn’t quite believe she’d made.
‘You knew about Scole’s parents, I suppose. How they died?’
A pause, then she sighed.
‘You mean his adoptive parents? Or his parents?’
He stared at her. She was watching a distant plane, barely audible, crossing a clear patch of night sky like a firefly.
‘Jonathan’s father was a man called Eric Bryers,’ she said.
Lol gripped one of the battlements.
‘Bloody junkie tracked him down,’ Bell said. ‘Vindictive little smackhead bastard.’
‘But…’
He watched the plane disappear into cloud, emerge the other side. There were two versions of this story. Moira Cairns had told him the baby had died. It was Tom who’d maintained she’d given up the child for adoption on learning she had a recording contract.
But Tom was neurotic – his version had been the least likely.
‘Scole was your son?’
‘Eric tracked him down a couple of years ago, not long before he died.’ Bell pulled her coat across her knees and gazed into the mesh of candlelight. ‘The revelation rather altered Jonathan’s view of himself. Or, I suppose, he would have said it confirmed what he’d always felt. His adoptive parents were working the clock round in their seedy little greasy spoon and just wanted a son who’d take over the business – perhaps buy another greasy spoon – so they could retire to Morecambe or some other windswept purgatory. Sent him to college to learn business studies. All desperately short of glamour. He hated it. Thought he’d been born for better.’
‘Especially when he found out who his mother was, I imagine,’ Lol said. ‘And what his mother had… denied him.’
‘Oh yes, he hated me. And presumably Eric filled him up with bile before he… did what he did.’
‘Jumped from a high building.’
‘You ever work with Eric, Lol?’
‘Never.’
‘I saw him last when he came back to play bass on my determinedly faithful version of “Gloomy Sunday”. I was told he carried a copy with him everywhere, like a form of temptation.’ Bell laughed, far back in her throat. ‘Like a secret agent with a poison capsule. But, of course, that’s the sort of person Eric was. Jonathan wouldn’t have known that.’
‘Not a lot to discover on the Internet about Eric, I suppose. Not like you. That would’ve been a serious voyage of discovery.’
Cuttings everywhere, Merrily had said, face twisting at the images in her head. Papers, fanzines, website printouts… scattered over his body like some kind of sick confetti.
‘Oh yes,’ Bell said. ‘He’d compiled quite a dossier on the woman who’d deprived him of a life in various mansions… the California coast… the company of rock stars… unlimited lines of coke, strings of delicious girlfriends. Leaving him with a dreary business-studies course and a future serving burgers to fucking truck drivers.’
