The Smile of a Ghost (20 page)

‘I did tell you—’

‘No, you didn’t. You totally did not tell me, Merrily.’

‘I don’t understand…’

‘Mumford’s been in Ludlow today, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Talking to people all over the town about Robbie Walsh and this woman?’

‘Did I mention—’

‘And the reason I know about this is that the DCI told me. And the reason the DCI knows is that she was telephoned by her opposite number in Shrewsbury, a shiny-arsed admin twat called Shaun Eastlake, who was clearly chuffed as a butty at being able to tell her about a… a member of the public stamping around his patch interrogating other members of the public, having identified himself as Detective Sergeant Mumford?’

‘Oh God,’ Merrily said.

‘Now, I think you can probably imagine how the Ice Maiden is reacting to this.’

‘Mmm.’ Danger signals in Merrily’s head blinking amber and red. Before Bliss had been promoted to Inspector and Annie Howe to DCI, Mumford had been her bag-carrier and local-knowledge man – history which, in the present circumstances, would matter not a damn.

‘Frannie, look, I didn’t know. Should have realized, of course… should have realized, if only from personal experience, how hard it is to get information out of people if you haven’t got the weight—’

‘Merrily!’ Bliss’s fist came down on the table, a woman behind the counter glancing anxiously across. ‘It’s an offence. Impersonating a police officer? And if you’ve been a police officer, does that make it better? No, it makes it wairse.’ The Mersey in his accent bursting its banks. ‘Is it conceivable the fat bastard’s forgotten that?’

‘Frannie—’

‘You think I’m kidding? This is Annie Howe we’re talking about, not a human being, and her face is as close as it gets to being pink with embarrassment.’

Merrily sat back. ‘One of the people he talked to told the police?’

‘No, they told George Lackland.’

‘The Mayor, right?

‘And county councillor? And vice-chairman of the West Mercia Police Committee?’

‘Oh God, really? But, apart from the element of deception, why would he – or any of the people Mumford talked to – not want the truth to come out about Robbie Walsh and a woman who—?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe she’s well connected. Let’s just say that Ludlow’s one little town where Mumford would be well advised to walk like the streets are tiled with antique porcelain. Bearing in mind that when it comes to bailing-out time, Steve Britton will no longer be his friend. Best to assume he doesn’t have any friends any more, in or out of uniform, at Ludlow nick.’

‘Policemen don’t just drop their mates.’

‘Times change, Merrily. We didn’t used to have divisional chiefs like Howe. So you tell Mumford: any officer spotted discussing the weather with him, it’s a red-card situation. Do you think you could convey that to him?’

Merrily nodded. There was nothing to be said. Mumford was so far out of line he probably couldn’t even discern a line any more.

‘Good,’ Bliss said. ‘Now let’s talk about poor Jemmie Pegler.’

Merrily winced. ‘Who’s this one to, Frannie?’

‘Girlfriend. Found it on the end of a reply from the other girl. Karen went to talk to the other girl. She seemed genuinely shattered. Said Jemmie Pegler’s e-mails always went over the top – wanted her mates to think she was a woman of the world who’d had so many men she was bored with sex. Girl thought it was all bullshit.’

‘Doesn’t seem like that to me.’

‘In which case…’ Bliss put a stiff-backed photo envelope in front of Merrily with another e-mail on top of it. ‘The girl said she thought this was bullshit, too.’

Merrily read it a second time, then opened the envelope.

It was a flash photo, in colour: a party pic of a fleshy girl, laughing. Short black hair gelled into gold-tipped spikes. A nose-stud with an implausible royal-blue gemstone. She was gripping a bottle by its silvery neck.

‘When did the computer come in, Frannie?’

‘Soon after we got a firm ID. Last night.’

‘And would Karen have been working on it last night?’

‘She was certainly on last night, and it’s much nicer tucked up in an office with a computer and mug of tea than going out on the cold streets, so probably. Why?’

Merrily went back to the e-mail. ‘This line about not going out sad. Seems to echo what someone apparently said on the radio this morning – that this kind of public suicide was a way of saying, “Now you’re all going to know who I am.” ’

‘Who said that?’

‘I’m probably being paranoid. Dr Saltash, interviewed by Radio Hereford and Worcester. Is he officially assisting the police?’

‘Possibly. He’s done it before. The Ice Maiden’s fond of psychological consultants, profilers, all these buggers who’re supposed to be doing our job for us.’

‘Mmm. And Siân Callaghan-Clarke.’

‘Who?’

‘Colleague of mine.’

Callaghan-Clarke on DCI Annie Howe, the night of the Deliverance Panel:
I get on very well with her
.

‘Why paranoid, Merrily?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You said you were probably being paranoid.’

‘Oh, it… it’s just that Nigel Saltash has been inflicted on me as a psychiatric consultant.’

‘He probably volunteered when he saw your picture.’

‘Do you have a reason to say that, or…?’

‘Hmm.’ Bliss did a wry smile. ‘If he is a mate of the Ice Maiden’s, forget I spoke. Have a look at this one.’

Merrily went back to some of the earlier e-mails about Jemima not wanting to go to school any more, but not wanting a job either. Jemima professing to despise girls who stuck with one boy longer than a few weeks – suggesting that boys usually dumped her within that time-span.

‘Doesn’t want to live at home, but she thinks it must be crap to have a place of your own and have to clean it. So… she’s overweight and has a reputation as an easy lay because she must be desperate. Self-esteem at rock bottom. Bored with going out with blokes who nick cars because there’s nowhere worth driving to in them. Was she ever diagnosed as clinically depressed?’

‘Parents say not.’

‘Drugs?’

‘In normal life… possibly. Hard to say. When she died, however— This is well off the record, right?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘The window in the ruins we’re fairly sure she went out of is not actually that high up. Certainly not compared with the top of the tower that Robbie Walsh came off. You can’t get to the top of Jemmie’s tower without a ladder – it’s hollow. So you’re going out of one of the reachable windows – quite a drop the other side, and it
could
kill you, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. Unless, that is, you’ve already shot yourself full of enough heroin to make Keith Richards play the wrong chords.’

Merrily looked up, blinking.

‘She shot up before she jumped,’ Bliss said. ‘Threw the syringe out the window first, it looks like. SOCO found it underneath a yew tree, with her mobile a few feet away, both some distance from the body. PM this afternoon showed cardiac arrest.’

‘Is that—?’

‘Common enough, with an inexperienced user. More often than you’d think, the first fix is the last. Sometimes they don’t even have time to take the needle out before they’ve gone. Dr Grace thinks she might’ve been dead before she hit the ground, but we’ll never know that.’

‘God.’

‘So for all the drama, it’s a sad little death, Merrily. Mobile shows she tried to call her mate, Sam, before she did it. See, we know she wouldn’t have had any problem at all getting the stuff. A useful by-product of getting into Jemmie’s computer was it led us directly to a dealer we didn’t even know about in Ledbury. She’d had Es and dope from the same guy. So delightfully indiscreet, these kiddies.’

Ledbury: pleasant, picturesque old place at the foot of the Malverns. You didn’t think of it happening there. But then, it happened more or less everywhere now.

‘And some links to bigger players in Hereford,’ Bliss said. ‘For all she never spoke to her parents, she’s chatting away to us, from the other side of the grave. Talking of which…’ Bliss spread out some typescript. ‘Read this.’

‘You can also read about the delights of hanging yourself,’ Bliss said.

‘This is an Internet chat-room, right?’

‘A specialist suicide chat-room. Adults advising unhappy kids on how to top themselves. Can’t describe what I’d like to do to these bastards with a few plastic bags, but then a few of us Catholics still think suicide’s a sin.’

‘Did Jemmie Pegler join in the discussions in the suicide chat-rooms?’

‘Just eavesdropped, I think. Lurking, as they say. Been doing it, on and off, for weeks, it looks like. Downloaded quite a lot. So we know she’d been dwelling on the possibility of suicide for quite a while.’

‘But no clues as to why she chose this method, this place? No mention of Robbie Walsh? Or Ludlow Castle?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You see, the point is that Robbie fell from the big tower, the Norman keep. No history to that. But Jemima wasn’t the first to go off the Hanging Tower.’

‘Tell me,’ Bliss said.

Merrily told him about Marion.

‘Long time ago, that.’ Bliss reached down to his briefcase.

‘You’ve already indicated this particular tower isn’t best suited to suicide, yet Jemima was determined to go that way. Did she use all that heroin to give her courage, or was it to make sure she died if the fall wasn’t enough?’

‘Interesting question,’ Bliss said.

‘How about Robbie Walsh – did he have a computer?’

‘Apparently not. Karen checked this afternoon.’

‘You’re having second thoughts about Robbie Walsh because of this?’

‘You got me thinking,’ Bliss said. ‘However, according to his mother, he wasn’t the computer type. An old-fashioned reader. Certainly enough books around the place, according to Karen. History books. No personal CD collection, either. Very old-fashioned little lad. An old-fashioned family, the Mumfords. Well, most of them.’ Bliss laid a folder on the pile in front of Merrily. ‘There you go. All ends tied?’

It contained a colour printout from a website.

LUDLOW GHOSTOURS

‘You knew,’ Merrily said.

‘Just thought I’d see if you did. It’s all there. Marion of the Heath. For a small fee, this feller will even guide you to the spot.’

‘She’d downloaded it.’

‘And more besides. Plan of the castle. She knew exactly where she was going and what she was gonna do when she got there.’

‘Anything else you haven’t told me because you wanted to see if I knew it already?’

Bliss smiled.

Before leaving Hereford, Merrily had called Mumford on his mobile, from the car, sitting in the Gaol Street car park with the rain beginning.

‘Aye,’ Mumford said wearily. ‘I know.’

‘Who told you?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Pointless me asking why you felt you had to pass yourself off as still a copper.’

There was silence. She thought she’d lost the signal. The rain pooled in a dent on the Volvo’s bonnet; when Mumford’s voice came back it sounded dried-up, like a ditch in summer.

‘Can’t talk to people. Simple as that. Never could. Can’t do small talk. Walk into a shop, I can just about ask for what I wanner buy. What do I say? “I’m Robbie Walsh’s uncle and I’m feeling guilty as hell and please can you help me?” Can’t do it. Never could.’

In the same way he could only call her Mrs Watkins. In the same way he’d addressed Gerald Osman as ‘sir’, but not out of politeness. His whole identity had been written on his warrant card.