The Smile of a Ghost (49 page)

39

T
HE BACKSTAIRS WERE
a dim half-spiral, coldly lit by one vertical slit too high to see through. Merrily was half-expecting the kitchen below to have a greasy spit and dead meat hanging from hooks, but it wasn’t like that.

‘Good morning again,’ the woman said.

The kitchen was warm and glazed with light tinted orange and emerald from illuminated glass in Gothic tracery around the tops of two long, thin windows. Pale ash units with olive-tiled work surfaces were built around a double-oven Aga. A rack of oak shelves displayed an apothecary’s collection of coloured jars and stoppered bottles.

‘Bell asked me to take care of you.’ The woman, who hadn’t yet introduced herself, had tufted brown hair, wore a white-and-grey-checked suit, no jewellery. ‘If not quite, I have to say, in those words.’

Coffee was percolating, and she was making wholemeal toast.

‘Have a seat, Mrs Watkins.’

Oh.

Merrily said nothing. A stone trough of red and orange tulips sent up a warm glow from below the twin windows, which opened up views across the fields to where the town rose in steep tiers to the church tower.

‘It’s rather late for breakfast,’ the woman said, ‘but I don’t suppose you particularly feel like lunch.’

‘Tea or coffee would be’ – Merrily had noticed that the tulips were in fact growing out of a stone coffin, its interior shaped for a body – ‘fine.’

Life directly out of death. Symbolism everywhere.

The woman wrinkled her nose, tapped the coffin with a shoe. ‘I’m still trying to persuade her to put that morbid artefact outside. Having already bribed the plumber to say there was no way it was going to work as a kitchen sink.’

No way she’d have it outside, either. Bell must have been cosying up to death since her teens.

‘She must be a… challenging person to accommodate,’ Merrily said.

‘Actually we accommodate each other fairly well. I call in most days, on the way to or from the office, or for lunch. Organize all the maintenance people and the services and the cleaner and the gardener and everyone else she’s far too vague to deal with. Do grab yourself a seat.’

There was a round table, with wooden chairs reflecting the design of seventeenth-century Glastonbury church chairs, with stubby X-legs. Merrily slid one out and sat down cautiously.

‘I think we spoke on the phone.’

‘Briefly.’ Susannah Pepper put the tray of coffee and toast in the centre of the table and sat down opposite her and smiled.

Ominous. A friendly, relaxed lawyer was rarely a good omen.

‘Where’s Bell?’

‘I don’t know.’ Susannah looked Merrily in the eyes. She was about thirty, and she seemed fit and confident and capable. Her skin was softly furry, like a peach’s. ‘I persuaded her to go out and let me handle things. She’s awfully disappointed in you. Feels betrayed.’

Silence. The sun had come out, setting fire to the orange glass in the tracery at the top of the windows, and the tulips in the stone coffin reached up like small goblets waiting to be filled.

‘All right,’ Merrily said at last. ‘I’m going to have to ask, aren’t I? How did you know who I was?’

Susannah stood up and went out of the room and came back with a leather briefcase, extracting a folded newspaper and tossing it on the table.

‘This morning’s edition.’

Merrily opened the paper and stared down, growing cold with dismay, at two pictures, one of the Hanging Tower, the other of herself, in colour, full face, under the headline:

She looked up. ‘This is crap.’

‘I think you should read it.’

She read it. It was overdramatized and dumbed-down. It was crass. It was full of conjecture. But at the centre of it…

‘OK. It’s not crap. Not entirely.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s misleading, but it’s come from an actual petition sent to George Lackland. Someone obviously sent a copy to the press. But nobody’s spoken to me about it. I mean, one reason I’m here is to try and avoid anything drastic or…’

‘Laughable,’ Susannah said. ‘Holy water and incantations. Or am I misrepresenting your occupation?’

‘Don’t know where this picture came from, either,’ Merrily said. ‘Looks like an old one… couple of years old, anyway.’

She was outside Ledwardine church, and she was in the full kit. It looked like an official picture from the diocese. She didn’t remember it being taken.

And now Bell Pepper had evidently seen it. Bell, who disliked the clergy, had learned that she was not only a minister but a working exorcist, and she wasn’t called Mary. Everything was now entirely clear, and the situation couldn’t be worse.

‘Would you mind if I had a cigarette?’

‘Yes, I would,’ Susannah said. ‘Cigarettes are disgusting. And let’s drop the bullshit, shall we? Why are you associating my client with what you’ve come here to do? Bearing in mind, before you answer, that I’ve talked to George Lackland.’

‘In which case you’ll be aware that it was George Lackland who approached us – the diocese.’

‘George is an old-fashioned man,’ Susannah said. ‘He still thinks the Church should have a role in the way this town is run, and he seems to have fallen for the myth that the deaths of two children and one old woman are manifestations of some kind of spiritual malaise.’

‘And is he entirely wrong there?’

‘He’s in danger of becoming a laughing stock.’

‘Well…’ Now that George had dropped her in it, there seemed little point in dressing this up. ‘A lot of people saw Bell with Robbie Walsh in the days before he died. A woman famously obsessed with death. Last night, she told me she’d been taking steps to adopt him, which would explain quite a lot. Can you confirm that?’

‘I don’t have to confirm anything to you,’ Susannah said. ‘Your ridiculous role with a failing religion gives you no right, legal or moral, to probe into people’s private lives.’

‘Up to you, Susannah, but adoption at least offers a plausible explanation for—’

‘All right, yes.’ Susannah leaned back and opened her jacket. ‘It was already in progress. It was to have been a substantial settlement, and the mother was practically biting our hands off. Kept ringing me up, just to make sure we weren’t going off the idea.’

‘Figures.’ Merrily thought of all the things Mumford had said about his sister: the extreme bitterness towards their own mother after the boy died. Big money, maybe life-changing money, had just gone down the pan.

‘He’d have moved in here,’ Susannah said, ‘and gone to school in Ludlow. And his gran – of whom he was fond but who was becoming unfit to look after him – would have seen far more of him than she already did. I don’t claim to have fully fathomed out the relationship between Bell and the boy. But they certainly had shared interests which he seems to have been unable to pursue at home.’

‘And perhaps she needed an heir? Of sorts. Would that be…?’

‘You mean for the New Palmers’ Guild Trust?’

‘What exactly is that?’

‘No big secret. The Trust, into which most of Bell’s assets will pass when she dies, will support, in perpetuity, specific historic features of the town.’

Merrily nodded. ‘Like the maintenance of the St Leonard’s cemetery as a wilderness with corpses?’

‘Be assured that I and my successors will administer the Trust entirely according to my client’s wishes.’

‘And the conservation of certain yew trees? Preservation of public rights of way connecting sacred places? And perhaps keeping particular viewpoints open, in the face of possible future development?’

‘The specific details have yet to be sorted out. And you still haven’t explained what you’re doing here.’

‘I’m getting to it,’ Merrily said. ‘But I’m trying to find out how much you know and how much you understand about Bell’s other plans for when she dies.’

‘Don’t know what you mean.’

‘Don’t you? I mean, you really don’t?’

‘Perhaps you should spell it out.’

‘I’m wary,’ Merrily said. ‘I think I’d rather be speaking to her stepdaughter than her lawyer. I mean, what does your father say about all this?’

‘Dad? Dad says be kind to her, never exploit her – and keep me the hell out of it.’ Susannah’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you know about my dad?’

‘Music producer… bewitched by Bell’s obvious charms… maybe liked unusual music, but couldn’t handle the extreme lifestyle which, in her case, went with it.’

‘He lives in Sacramento now, has three children, plays golf.’

‘Your mother was his first wife?’

‘Whom he left for Bell, but that’s all well in the past. My mother’s second husband, if you want the full nepotism bit, is David Sebald, brother of Peter Sebald, one of the original partners in the firm I’m working for.’

‘But you and Bell—’

‘Never got on all that well with David’s other kids, so I used to spend quite a few weekends with Dad and Bell. Who was so completely out of it most of the time that I sometimes felt, at the age of about fifteen, like her step
mother
. Like I said, we’ve always accommodated each other. I’m not judgemental.’

‘Mmm.’ Bringing Smith, Sebald one of their wealthiest private clients would have done Susannah no harm at all with the firm.

‘That’s to say, where no criminal law or local statutes are infringed, I don’t question her behaviour,’ Susannah said. ‘This town’s full of eccentrics.’

‘You must be worried about her, though.’

‘Put it this way, my private life would have been a whole lot easier if the firm had been based in Birmingham.’

‘Because then Bell would have come to visit and gone home the next day. But this being where it is, she doesn’t want to leave. Not ever, in fact. Do you know what I’m saying?’

Through the long window, the town glittered on its hill, the sun gilding the pinnacles on the church tower and coating what you could see of the castle walls with crusted honey. No motor vehicles visible. A living dream of Olde Englande.

‘That’s pretty ridiculous.’ Susannah finally looked unnerved. ‘You must realize that.’

‘If I started dismissing ideas that seemed ridiculous, I wouldn’t get very far in this job.’

‘Then it’s a ridiculous job.’

‘It’s apparently been estimated,’ Merrily said, ‘that one in three people has had a paranormal experience, and one in ten has seen a ghost. It all makes perfect sense to Bell.’

‘You’re saying she’s become completely insane?’

‘No, I don’t think she— OK, it’s not good, it’s not healthy, it’s spiritually… a bit squalid, frankly. But it’s not insane. In fact, it’s all been worked out very practically.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Susannah backed away, folding her arms. ‘But if there was any truth in what you’ve just outlined, she’d… in my view, she’d be guaranteed certifiable.’

‘Then how do you explain it? How do you explain her nocturnal perambulations?’

‘She’s a night person. In every sense – her albums are dark and doomy, she likes to mix with goths and weirdos and she’s a bloody exhibitionist.’

‘An exhibitionist who wants to protect her private life and won’t talk to the media, except the local media?’

‘That’s not so unusual. It’s part of the star-mentality. They like to have it both ways.’

‘Look,’ Merrily said. ‘She’s led what she calls a temporary kind of life. She says she was diagnosed at an early age with a congenital heart defect and she’s lived her whole life with the angel of death standing outside the door, sharpening his scythe. I don’t know if that’s true or not—’

‘I’d like to get her to a heart specialist, but she won’t. She has a fear of dying in hospital.’

‘Or anywhere but here. She’s moved from place to place – she’s had the money to do that – and she can’t settle anywhere. Until she arrives in the place of her dreams. Literally. All right, whether she
had
been dreaming about Ludlow for years is anybody’s guess, but she’s convinced herself she had. And she comes here and she connects. It’s a town where you can walk from century to century, and it’s not been over-cosmeticized. It’s as it was. And for Bell the atmosphere everywhere is dense with… eternity.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s pretty and it’s a good place to work. I can understand her falling in love with it.’