The Smile of a Ghost (Merrily Watkins 7), page 45
‘And then he followed you here…’
‘He’d attempted, indirectly, to contact me before he came here. An approach was made, through some agency, to my solicitor from someone claiming to be my son. I told her it was a try-on because my son was dead. Anyway, I refused to meet him. What was the point? I gave birth to him, that was all.’
‘And gave him away for a career.’
‘Lol…’ For the first time her face registered pain. ‘I gave him away because I didn’t expect to see him grow up. The one certainty in my life had always been premature death. What he didn’t know was that I’d made financial provision for him. My will’s always included a substantial bequest to my surviving son.’
‘It wasn’t money he wanted, though, was it? He had money. Like you said, he just wanted to be part of your life.’
‘Well, I didn’t want him. Certainly not after meeting him. He was crass, he was—’
‘Probably the greatest living authority on you. He got to the heart of all your obsessions. Putting himself in a situation where your paths were bound to cross. Buying into the ghost-walk.’
‘No! No, he—’ There was a small breeze like a puff of breath. Bell looked up, smiled faintly. ‘Here’s someone…’
Lol blinked.
‘Listen,’ Bell said, ‘he never told me who he was and I… even when I suspected, I said nothing. There was no future in it. Every time I saw him I saw Eric. Besides, I hardly wanted a murderer—’
‘You really think he was?’ Hadn’t seemed like a murderer to Merrily. Not even a murderer by proxy. He’s… driven. A lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm… likeable. ‘Rather than just a victim of rumours?’
‘He was…’ Bell came to her feet and teetered forward as though she was on stage, a little stoned and about to grasp a mike stand. ‘He was a despicable murderer. He destroyed the most important thing in my life.’
Lol didn’t move. Bell’s voice dropped to a hiss.
‘That boy wouldn’t fall off the Keep. He knew every stone of that castle. He was as sure-footed as a goat. And the suicide theory – that he was afraid to go back to the bullies in Hereford – that’s shit, too. His mother must have told him about our arrangement. His mistake was to tell Jonathan.’
Bell plunged her hands into the pockets of her long coat and wafted it tightly across her, turning away and making the candle flames shiver as if the tower itself was shaking.
Lol thought of what he’d learned from Merrily and what he’d read. It made sense: Jonathan Scole watching Bell form an increasingly intimate relationship with the history boy – whom he had introduced to her, whom he’d made a part of his ghost-walk just to get close to the mother who’d rejected him. Rejected him twice, and now…
… Now the final insult: the adoption of a son.
Lol thought about Andy Mumford and his Plascarreg theories. If this was true, then Mumford was sailing dangerously close to the wrong wind.
‘Bell…’
She turned towards him, strands of white-gold hair across one cheek.
‘When exactly did you come to this conclusion?’ Lol asked.
‘I don’t know. Been staring me in the face for… It came to a head last night. I fell. I was walking… in the churchyard, among the yews, and I fell. Hit my head on a root. I was half stunned and suddenly bitterly angry. Everything was falling apart, on this night of all— I decided on impulse to go to his flat and confront him and… and he was drunk. I told him I’d been attacked in the street. He thought… the crass bastard thought I wanted to sleep with him – so like his miserable father. He said he was going to phone your… Mary. So I walked out.’
‘And then Merrily came.’
‘Found me singing under the castle. It’s the only way I stay sane on nights like this. Singing to Marion. Singing “Wee Willie Winkie” to… Anyway, he must have followed us back. He saw me put the… the mandolin case in the yew tree. And then he came back with a crowbar or something and he forced his way in and he took it.’
She bent down and moved the tray of candles to one side. Not much left of some of them now, flames shrinking down into half an inch of hollowing wax. And Lol saw that the tray had not been on the floor itself but on a small black musical-instrument case, which she lifted now and cradled in her arms.
The mandolin case.
She took it to the battlements. It was almost dark now.
‘You’ll have to go soon,’ Bell said. ‘I can’t let the candles burn away.’
‘Bell… it makes no sense.’
‘It’s all the sense there’s ever been,’ she said. ‘I’ve always had what I regarded as a temporary life. All I’m looking for in death is a kind of permanence.’
She was on her feet, the heavy coat hanging open to reveal a long, cream-coloured dress, soiled now with large, conspicuous stains, their colours indeterminate in the candlelight. Standing close to the wall and hugging the mandolin case to her breast, she began singing, in a tremulous little-girl voice.
Wee Willie Winkie
Running through the town
Upstairs, downstairs in his nightgown
Rapping at the windows
Crying through the lock
Are all the children in their beds?
It’s past eight o’clock.
Sandy Gee was up against the wall of the fat round tower in the Inner Bailey. She had a rubber-covered torch, kept nervously testing its beam on the stonework, having sent one of the uniforms off with a plastic Pepsi bottle, to find a tap.
‘And salt,’ Merrily said.
‘Salt?’
‘Holy water involves salt.’
‘Maybe we should hold it in one of the bloody restaurants,’ Sandy Gee said.
‘I wish we could hold it in there.’ Merrily nodded at the round tower. ‘Plenty of room, and apparently it used to be the medieval chapel of St Mary Magdalene. Not an option, however.’
‘It certainly isn’t. We need to do it now, in that dirty little tower.’
‘Erm, a warning,’ Merrily said. ‘The aim of this is to bring release and create calm. But we don’t know what we’re dealing with. And if there’s any kind of… if you want to call it energy… in there, and the kid’s in a position where she’s very close to a long drop…’
Sandy shone the torch beam into her face. ‘I hope to God you’re not suggesting this might actually have the reverse effect? Longbeach said you knew what you were doing.’
Siân Callaghan-Clarke cleared her throat. ‘Inspector, I think what my colleague is saying is that this is not an exact science.’
‘Or a science at all,’ Merrily said. ‘Perhaps, under cover of the service, you or one of your officers should move closer so that, in the event of any unexpected reaction…’
‘You often get unexpected reactions?’
‘There is no expected reaction,’ Siân said. ‘It’s about faith.’
‘Christ,’ Sandy said.
48
Running Through the Town
SAM SAID, ‘WAS that you in the paper?’
‘It’s a lousy picture, isn’t it?’
Merrily was standing in the beam of Sandy’s torch. All she could see of the girl was a silhouette against the opening in the wall. It was cold and damp in here, colder than outside, a rank and clingy cold.
‘Why aren’t you wearing… you know?’
‘I—’
‘Sam, it’s like the police,’ Siân said. ‘Inspector Gee isn’t in uniform either. Inspector Gee and Mrs Watkins… When you reach their level, you don’t have to wear the uniform.’
Merrily glanced at Siân, stone-faced on the fringe of the torch beam.
Wow.
‘How do I…?’ Sam inched back, towards the window. ‘How do I know it’s not a scam? Why you doing it now?’
‘It’s taken a lot of preparation,’ Merrily said. ‘We don’t take it lightly. We’ve had holy water and things to prepare. And I have to walk all around the area, sealing off points of access. We don’t want to let bad things seep through.’
There was silence – and then Sam said, ‘I’m the bad thing.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘She won’t let me sleep,’ Sam said.
‘Who are we talking about, Sam?’
Siân whispered to Merrily, ‘Give me a moment?’
‘OK. Two minutes, Sam? Some final things to organize.’
Around the corner, in the one-time great hall, Siân said, ‘I don’t know if what Nigel managed to elicit from her might help?’
‘Anything might help. I don’t see this as a cosmetic exercise any more.’
‘In which case… Nigel, I think, also became aware that we might be dealing with something unexpected, to which counselling might not provide a complete solution.’
‘He admitted that?’
‘I said, I think he became aware of it.’
‘Ah. Go on.’
‘The Pegler girl was a bully. It’s hardly unknown for someone who is herself subject to emotional bullying to find someone else on whom she can inflict stress. Pegler was taunted by her peers – boys, mostly, I would guess – for being overweight and unattractive. She initially sought solace with Samantha – a slightly younger and somewhat malleable neighbour. But Jemima was a very angry, rather vindictive person, and soon began to control Samantha, making her do things she would not normally have considered at all appropriate behaviour – like experiments with pills and shoplifting. And then, seeing how far she could push it, Jemima lured away Samantha’s boyfriend, with sexual favours, thus enhancing her own power and her superiority.’
‘And then Sam meets Robbie, and, although she might not particularly fancy him, he certainly represents a more innocent, less pressured world. It’s literally a holiday.’
‘But is it less pressured?’ Siân said.
‘Robbie’s fallen in love, maybe for the first time – at least the first time with someone who’s not been dead for centuries. And he wants Sam to share his world. Even calling her Marion. That’s pressure.’
‘Our feeling was that Samantha was finding it disquieting to be associated with Marion, the ghost of a young woman who died in a situation of appalling violence. She’s not particularly interested in medieval history – certainly not even close to Robbie’s level of obsession – and when he kept appealing to her to come back to Ludlow, to spend weekends with him, visiting historic remains she… eventually rebuffed him. And then, unfortunately, he died, and she – already feeling horribly guilty – was unwise enough to share her anguish and became the target for personal taunts by her peers at school. And then… all this came to the notice of Jemima Pegler. Did you see the pictures of her?’
‘I saw some party pictures.’
‘Not those. Nigel had a school photo, in which she’s glowering and looks… almost demonic. You know that famous Myra Hindley photograph, with powerfully hypnotic eyes? I would guess that’s the side of Pegler to which Samantha was exposed. The tactic is that, after stealing the boy, Harry, she professes shame and self-hatred, to wheedle her way back into Samantha’s life. Once she’s there, however, she’s worse than ever. We thought that, at one stage, Sam was on the verge of admitting that the girl had been physically assaulting her. She was certainly a violent person, subject to mood swings and severe depression – of which her parents, by the way, were aware. And, in fact…’ Siân moved away into the darkness, ‘she had been receiving medical attention.’
‘She was seeing a psychiatrist?’
‘For a time, Nigel discovered, she’d been prescribed medication – Seroxat, we understand.’
‘Where have I heard of that?’
‘You probably read about it in the papers.’
‘Serotonin?’
‘Increasing serotonin in the brain as an antiodote to depression. Seroxat was given to thousands of children in the UK. It then began to be linked with suicide and self-harm in some of them.’
‘I’m with you.’
‘Nigel’s initial, somewhat superficial suggestion that Jemima Pegler’s suicide was a form of escape from the mundane…’
‘Was bollocks, basically.’
‘Was a premature reaction because he simply wanted to be involved. When he found out more, it became clear that Jemima’s suicide – as the very circumstances, with an overdose of heroin, suggest – was an act of terminal aggression. And it does seem to have been related to this legend of the woman, Marion – who herself committed an act of extreme violence and then killed herself. Exploiting Samantha’s vulnerability to taunts in the wake of Robbie’s death, Jemima sends her distressing material from a suicide website. Samantha, a little unbalanced by now, sends Jemima in return the Internet material she’s received from Robbie relating to Marion – to which Jemima reacts by suggesting that they “leave behind their bodies”, or some such… I’m probably not putting this very well.’
‘You’re putting it brilliantly,’ Merrily said. ‘What we’re looking at, if we go along with it, is Jemmie first attempting to lure Sam into what might be a suicide pact. Maybe bringing along enough heroin for them both, and then, when Sam doesn’t turn up…’
‘We can’t know what was going through her head. All that matters now is what’s in Samantha’s head.’
‘Which is Jemmie, superimposed over Marion. Sam believes Jemmie is still out there and demanding Sam fulfils her side of the bargain. She’s taken up residence in Sam’s subconscious, she appears in dreams… I think we’re looking at a severe case of bullying from beyond the grave. How did Nigel propose to deal with it?’
‘In the short term,’ Siân said, ‘my guess is he had absolutely no idea.’
‘Now we can talk,’ Bell said. ‘Now I feel safe.’
Just looking at her turned Lol’s stomach cold.
She was sitting up on the wall between two raised battlements. She’d slipped off her shoes, the way she used to do on stage, and she was rubbing her bare heels against the stone through the hem of her long dress.
She’d casually leaned the mandolin case against the wall and then… he couldn’t believe how lightly she’d swung herself up there. Couldn’t believe how anyone who wasn’t a seasoned steeplejack could sit where she was sitting, with her back to that drop.
All she had to do was tip herself gently back – a hundred and thirty-five feet to the street.
Unless some jagged stonework broke her fall and her spine.
‘They let me hold him,’ Bell said, ‘in the hospital. Private hospital – my father paid. I had a room.’
‘The… dead one.’
‘I’d asked for a guitar, to take my mind off what was to come, but I found I couldn’t handle one over my huge pregnant belly, so somebody brought me a mandolin. I couldn’t play it properly, but I could fumble out simple tunes, and when they brought him in I laid him there and played to him: “Wee Willie Winkie”.’
‘When did you know there were going to be two of them?’
He had to keep her talking now.
‘I became aware of a death having taken place inside me.’ Pulling the mandolin case up onto her knees. ‘Turned out that one baby was strangled, I think, by the cord – I didn’t ask too many questions, wasn’t about to become a student of obstetrics. I know they were non-identical, or apparently they might both have died. I didn’t want to see the survivor, he was going to be someone else’s. But this one… he’d died inside me. I’d absorbed his spirit, you see.’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course you see. You’re a sensitive soul, I’ve always known that from your songs. So, yes, I played to him. He lay dead on the bed, and I played to him and told him that one day we’d go to Wee Willie Winkie’s town.’
‘I’m not sure I understand that reference,’ Lol said.
Bell leaned forward. ‘When I was a baby, I had a book of nursery rhymes, and each one had a full-page coloured picture, and the one I loved the most was of Wee Willie Winkie gliding through an old, old town with tall chimneys and houses of warm brick and timbered gables, and lights shining in mullioned windows. I would look at it for hours, entranced. It was where I wanted to be. Often, I’d dream of floating through that town. It was this town. Soon as I got out of the car, that magical connection was made with my earliest memory… I think I wept with happiness.’
‘You kept the baby’s body,’ Lol said. ‘How was that possible?’
‘When I was a little older,’ Bell said, as if she hadn’t heard the question, ‘and I began to realize there was something wrong with me and it was quite serious, I said to my mother, What happens when you die? And she said, You go to heaven. And I said, What’s heaven like? And she said, Heaven’s like the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen. So there you are…’
She lifted the mandolin case and folded her coat over her dress and began to swing backwards and forwards in the air, with the case across her knees, and all Lol could hope for was that somebody down there would see her and…
And what?
‘I got to know the undertaker. We had a big, phoney funeral. The undertaker was a fan – a Nico fan, actually. Do you remember Nico? She was with the Velvet Underground.’
‘Gothic… Teutonic. Played the harmonium.’
‘Deliciously doomy. That’s how it happens, you know. You move on from nursery rhymes to Grimm’s Fairy Tales… and they have the same kind of pictures: ancient, moonlit towns with spiky churches and towers and cobbled streets. Only it grows darker. And all the children who love the Wee Willy Winkie picture rather than the Jack and Jill picture with the green fields and the big sun, they’re the ones who become goths. They’re the ones who grow to love death.’
‘Willie Winkie had a candle in a lantern.’
‘And his nightgown was like a shroud. You’re right, of course. Willie Winkie was death… a ghostly presence. I recorded the song once.’
‘I remember. This heavy, bombastic, thunder-and-lightning rock and suddenly it all stops, and there are these little, light footsteps, and…’
‘Wee Willie Winkie, running through the town…’ Bell giggled, her face upturned. And then she frowned. ‘Some soulless philistine in the NME wrote that it was sexual. A song about a sexual predator. They spit on innocence.’
