The Smile of a Ghost (31 page)

‘Well, I… yeah.’

‘You don’t look a lot like Max Von Whatsisname.’

‘I’m a disappointment to everyone.’

‘There isn’t some silly bugger wants you to go in and exorcize the castle, is there?’

‘Nothing formal, as yet.’

‘Because that…’ Jon was lifting his glass. He put it down with a bang. ‘That would be fuckin’ insane, Mary! Apart from what it’d do to my business, you’d be undermining the very essence of Ludlow. Bell would go spare.’

‘For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t like to do that either,’ Merrily said. ‘But I’m interested in why you think it would be insane.’

‘Really? All right. Come with me, then.’

‘Where?’

‘Not far.’ He stood up and put on his motorbike jacket. Its chains rattled like an alarm, and two retired-looking couples at the next table all turned round at once.

Jon Scole wiped his mouth and beard with the back of a hand. ‘You psychic yourself, Mary?’

‘No more than anybody.’

‘As long as you’re receptive, you’ll feel it. There’s some places with more resonance than others, especially in this town. Not sure why, but it’s fact. Physically, it’s got a lot to set it apart – built on a kind of promontory, two rivers, a very ancient church… and I mean
very
ancient. And, like, the whole atmosphere here, you can feel it… it’s rich and heavy, like it’s drenched in some ancient incense, you know what I’m saying?’

‘Actually, I do. Especially in the evening.’

‘You don’t need the evening.’

25

D
OWN PAST
T
ESCO
’
S
, towards the bottom of Corve Street, yew trees overhung a high stone wall and they could see the roof of the chapel.

‘Dogs,’ Jon Scole said. ‘They reckon the dogs know.’

He had to shout over an old yellow furniture van clattering out of town. It had one word diagonally on the side: LACKLAND.

‘Dogs?’ Merrily said.

‘Dogs are supposed to go bonkers this end of the Street. Out of control. Well, I’ve seen it. Some old dear hauling on the lead: Brutus! Heel! No chance. Very strong atmosphere. Accumulation of psychic energy. So, anyway, this is where she walks.’

‘Sorry… who?’

‘Who do you think?’

Jon Scole led her through the gateway, where cars were parked next to a circle of youngish yews, gloomily wrestling for the light. The chapel was set back, regular and Victorian-looking like the chapels you found in cemeteries, which was what it appeared to have been.

There was an information board on a lectern. It told you that the chapel had been built partly on the site of a Carmelite friary dating back to 1349, in use until suppressed by Henry VIII in 1539 when its buildings were sold and demolished. And then came the cemetery.

‘No, don’t read it, Mary, come and see it.’

Jon Scole led her down past the chapel, which was some kind of print workshop now – and that was good, she thought, much better than dereliction, brought a flow of people down here, kept up a flow of energy.

Merrily blinked. Bloody hell, she was thinking like Jane.

But there was an energy in Ludlow, the kind you didn’t find in too many ancient towns, and even the rolling roof of Tesco’s was urging it in. The town was prosperous, sure, but not in any self-conscious way, and what Bernie Dunmore had said about the buildings being preserved in aspic was misleading. Nothing that she’d seen here was in aspic; it was all still in use, and it buzzed, and it hummed, and it chattered.

Even the graveyard. A path ran down the middle; Jon Scole was strolling along it, but Merrily had stopped. There were cemeteries and there were graveyards, and the thing about cemeteries was that most of them weren’t places you’d want to end up.

Jon Scole turned and came back. He was beaming.

‘Surprising, eh? When they ran out of room at St Laurence’s this was where they came. And then this one got full. There’s supposed to be fourteen hundred graves here.’

Very few of them were fully visible any more because someone had taken an inspired decision. The result was that St Leonard’s graveyard was vibrantly alive: a tangly, scuffling, mossy-green delirium, busy with birdsong, rich with moisture and slime. Merrily looked around, saw a fat, hollowed-out yew tree and two shiny, rippling domes of ivy that probably used to be headstones. In the summer, the air would be shimmering with butterflies, haunted at night by bats and moths.

‘They gave it back to nature,’ she said. ‘They just… let it go.’

‘What you got here, Mary, is part of a kind of secret passageway linking the oldest parts of town – and the two rivers. The Corve down at this end, which is this narrow, private kind of river, and the big one, the Teme, at the other.’

Between the trees, over the bushes and the rooftops, you could see the tower of St Laurence’s, as if this graveyard was still intimately linked to it. Which, in a way, it was. Merrily was enchanted. Not in some flimsy, poetic way; there was a real and powerful enchantment happening here.

Maybe it was a combination of the rose-coloured glasses and her own disconnection from the diocese: Jane’s pagan forces reaching out for her. Maybe this was just an overgrown graveyard.

‘We’re going the opposite way from the way she walks,’ Jon said, back on the path. ‘She comes up from The Weir House, up the steps and into The Linney, which goes from just above the Teme, up to the church and then starts again on the other side of the church and comes down again, and you wind up here. Magic.’

‘How often does she… walk?’

‘Whenever the mood takes her. No, that’s wrong, she probably follows some pattern. Late at night, or in the hour before dawn. Something’s got to be turning her on, though, hasn’t it?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Well… you know. There’s obviously a lot of places she finds a bit of a turn-on. That’s why she came here. Like I say, this is just a very haunted town, and it feels like it, know what I mean?’

‘It feels nice.’

‘It feels
haunted
, Mary. Everywhere you go. Look at all the stories… you got an old woman in a dressing gown in the churchyard, and heavy footsteps. You got Catherine of Aragon – allegedly – at the Castle Lodge. Summat shivery at The Reader’s House. You got haunted shops, a hairdresser’s with a poltergeist. And… look over there…’

A view had opened on the left, the kind of view that seemed like it was planned. Anywhere else, there’d have been a viewing point with a telescope that you could feed 10p coins into.

It was the castle, as she’d never seen it before. It was away on the other side of the town but, from here, it appeared to be nestling in lush greenery, the scene uninterrupted by modern buildings or, in fact, any buildings – as if you were viewing it along a wooded valley. As if you were back then, when there was only the castle.

‘Jon, it’s like this place – this cemetery – is linked with everywhere. You turn a corner and…’

‘Magic,’ Jon Scole said. ‘Everything in this town is connected up. Like electric wires. Like a circuit. If you know how, you can plug yourself in.’

‘Bell told you that?’

‘Just once. And then she shut up, like she were giving too much away. Links through time – all the sacred places interlinked, and there are special spots where all the… like the eras of time come together. When she walks here, it’s like… you know?’

‘Like she doesn’t walk alone? Or at least she feels…’

‘Feels, yeah. Doesn’t see nowt, but… I tell you, if I could get that woman into the ghost-walks, as a regular, I’d bloody clean up. As it is, I’m just taking it all in, I feel like I’m tapping into her consciousness.’

Merrily remembered Lol suggesting that inside Belladonna’s consciousness was not a safe place to be.

‘… Learned a lot about Bell,’ Jon was saying. ‘I mean, the music, that’s only half of it. This is a heavy lady, Mary.’ He paused, nodding his head. ‘’Course, she’s also halfway out of her fuckin’ tree.’

They went and stood under the dark, feathery awning of the yew, and she felt stupid with her glasses on, turning everything the colour of ripening plums.

‘Presumably,’ she said, ‘you’ve heard about the other things she’s supposed to have done. I mean, apart from walk.’

‘Naked!’ He laughed. ‘With a feller. Just over there, it was, apparently, where the ivy’s all thick on the ground. You’ve got to hand it to her, at her age. They must’ve been scratched to buggery.’

‘The Mayor was not amused.’

‘Well, what d’you expect? I mean, George Lackland… his generation… he’s not exactly a left-wing espouser of liberal values, is he? I mean, she was in rock music. They don’t operate according to George’s rules. They don’t live on the same planet.’

‘George lives on Planet Ludlow,’ Merrily said. ‘Isn’t that where Bell wants to be, too?’

‘She wants to be part of it, that’s true. But like, if she gets off on doing it in places where’ – making quote marks in the air with crooked fingers – ‘The Veil is Thin… I can connect with that. Sex produces a lot of psychic energy. And if there’s this vortex of energy there already, you probably get a top buzz. ’Least, you do if you’re Bell. You know what I mean?’

‘In a way.’

It was still a graveyard, though. Death-fixated erotomania was how Nigel Saltash might describe it. The yew tree was draped around them, exposing its insides. Ancient yews always looked like they’d been dead and come through it.

‘She’s built a career around an obsession,’ Jon Scole said. ‘If you’ve heard the music you’ll know that. She’s made a shitload of money, but she’s had a couple of brushes with the big D along the way, so she knows what a tightrope life is, even if you’re loaded. And she’s not getting any younger. So she’s not playing any more, and she doesn’t care what people think. She wants to know what she’s got coming.’

‘We all want to know,’ Merrily said. ‘Even the clergy.’

‘Yeah, but you got distractions. You got other things to do. This woman… she’s done the lot. Every way you can gratify yourself in this life, she’s done it. What’s left? Think about it.’

‘You sound as if you understand her.’

‘I try. I mean, she’s here… I’m here… there’s potential.’

‘But you said she was out of her tree?’

‘Halfway out of her tree.’

‘How would I get to meet her?’

‘You don’t meet her. She meets you… if she wants to. You can hang round here all night, and it’s like waiting for some rare creature – you might get lucky, you probably won’t. When she first came to live in Ludlow, reporters’d show up, full of themselves, and they’d all go back with nowt. Unless she wanted to talk. Which mostly she didn’t. Talked to the
Journal
’cos that were the local paper. Wouldn’t even talk to the
Star
, ’cos it circulates outside.’

‘And that’s why local people protect her?’

‘That’s one of the reasons. She’s eccentric, Mary. This town likes eccentrics.’

‘George doesn’t. And a few others.’

‘No. Well…’

‘So if I wanted to meet her?’

‘You’d have to be someone she was interested in.’

‘Like Robbie Walsh?’

‘Let’s get back into the light, eh?’ Jon Scole said.

They stood inside the chapel gateway, near the information board, their backs to the surrounding wall and Corve Street. A young man came out of the print-shop with two carrier bags, smiled at Merrily.

‘Don’t believe a word this feller tells you. Most frightening thing you’ll ever see in Ludlow is him at closing time.’

‘Right…’ Jon Scole levelled a finger. ‘That order for four hundred Ghostours leaflets? Consider it bloody cancelled!’

He dropped his grin as the guy walked away. Turned to Merrily and shook his head.

‘What happened to Robbie, that were the worst thing of all. Great kid. Great to have around, you know? All that knowledge, he was like a wassername, prodigy. You’d see him wandering around, world of his own, and you’d go, All right, Robbie? You OK, mate? Be like he was coming down off something. Blink, blink – where am I?’

‘He used to go on the ghost-walk?’

‘Towards the end, he were practically a fixture. At first, he’d just tag along – well, I couldn’t charge him, could I? ’Sides, people liked him. He used to do half my job – knew everything about every building we came to. I didn’t, hadn’t been here long enough. Loved telling people about the past. In his element.’

‘He was interested in ghosts?’

‘Not so much the ghosts as the ’ist’ry. I did the ghosts, he did the ’ist’ry. We were quite a team, all through Easter. See… he could give you a picture. He was like a kid that’d just walked out of the Middle Ages. When he died, I were just fuckin’ gutted, Mary.’

Jon recalled the funeral – only right the service should be at St Laurence’s; even though he wasn’t local, he’d made himself local. Jon had waited to talk to old Mrs Mumford afterwards, telling her how much they’d all thought of Robbie.

‘Including Mrs Pepper?’

‘What do you think?’