The Smile of a Ghost (55 page)

‘Just that they weren’t expecting you,’ Sergeant Britton told him.

‘No. Sorry about the casual…’ Lol tugged at his Gomer Parry sweatshirt. ‘I just had the message from the Bishop’s office, and I thought, better not waste any time.’

‘Not to worry – they said you were slightly unconventional, sir.’

In the centre of the inner space was a squat round tower with a Norman arch and a mullioned window but no roof. A group of people had assembled outside it, mainly uniformed police and paramedics. Lol kept his distance.

‘How’s the girl?’

‘Sitting tight. Nearly four hours now. Dr Saltash is convinced she has absolutely no intention of doing it, just wants an audience.’ Steve Britton sniffed. ‘Wouldn’t bet on it, meself. She’ll be quite rational one minute, accepting a pack of sandwiches, can of Coke… and then she’s back up into the window space, all hunched up. And you know that all she’s gotter do is lean gently back and it’s all over.’

‘Salt— Nigel’s talking to her himself?’

‘Sandy Gee, our family liaison officer – she’s doing most of the talking, sometimes the Canon, when the girl starts on about being possessed. Dr Saltash is watching and making observations, offering advice. He says he’ll come out and talk to you in a few minutes, if you just hang on here. There’s really not that much space in there, and they don’t want her to feel crowded or threatened.’

‘When you say possessed? Things were a bit rushed. The Bishop’s office didn’t have time to explain much on the phone.’

‘They watch too much TV, sir. Too many DVDs. And what was in the morning papers didn’t help, obviously. All I know is she apparently turned up this morning, hung around for a couple of hours, found nothing was happening and got herself in a state. Then she sees the scaffolding in the tower, and up she goes. First she’s come to kill herself, then she’s waiting for the exorcism. Confused.’

‘Have they… done anything? Any kind of…’

‘Mumbo-jumbo? Sorry, sir, forgetting who I’m talking to. Long day. No, Dr Saltash advises against it, and I think he’s probably right. In my experience, you need to calm people like this down, not overexcite them.’

‘Sarge!’ The policewoman, Kelly, appeared by the gatehouse, holding up a mobile phone. ‘DI Bliss, Hereford. They’ve found the parents. They were shopping in Worcester.’

‘OK,’ Steve Britton said. ‘Better have a word. Excuse me, Mr Longbeach.’

And so Lol was on his own when Saltash came out of the castle.

Never seen him before, but there could be no mistake. Something in the walk, something in the cursory inspection of the police and paramedics gathered by the sawn-off round tower.

Sometimes, Lol wondered if there really was some trait, some aspect of demeanour, that united psychiatrists or if it was simply something that he projected on men once he knew that this was what they did. And they
were
men, nearly all of them. Maybe most women didn’t have the arrogance for it. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to sleep so easily.

Saltash wore a cream-coloured cotton suit. His tie was loosened. His face was narrow and evenly tanned, lined rather than wrinkled, and his grey beard was barbered to the length of his grey hair. He stood on the short, tufted grass, where shadows converged, looking around for a man whom Merrily had said was plump and friendly and conspicuously camp. He didn’t move, expecting the man to approach him.

Lol wandered over. ‘Dr Saltash?’

Saltash stared through him. ‘I’m looking for Martin Longbeach. Is he here?’

‘I think you’re looking for me.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Saltash said. ‘Because you don’t appear to be Martin Longbeach.’

‘And you don’t appear to be Lord Shipston,’ Lol said, aware of so many years tumbling into this moment. ‘But I think you know him.’

43

T
HE
P
ALMERS’ WINDOW
told its tale in reds and blues and gold.

Merrily made out a ship bound for the Holy Land, a stylized ship like a floating horn, with people far too big to fit into it. She saw King Edward the Confessor and St John the Evangelist, whose chapel was dominated by this window. The mystical ring passing between St John and the King, via the Palmers, all dressed in blue.

Mostly myth and wishful thinking. The Saxon King Edward had predated the first of the Ludlow Palmers by about two centuries.

The Chapel of St John, the original Palmers’ chapel, was to the left of the high altar in St Laurence’s, a dark three-aisle palace of a church, not far short of a cathedral. George Lackland stood at the entrance to the chapel, his back to a narrow door set in stone. Looking down, Merrily saw she was standing on an inscribed tombstone.

‘Guild wardens buried under here,’ George said.

He and Merrily were alone in the church, George having obtained the keys from the verger on his way out. Who could anyone trust with the keys more than George, former churchwarden and a merchant of quality who, in the Middle Ages, would surely have been a prominent Palmer himself?

Not that the Lacklands had been in Ludlow in the Middle Ages; they hadn’t left East Anglia until the eighteenth century. But George, with his tiered face and his slow-burn eyes, looked like part of the story, part of the myth.

It would have been enough for Bell.

‘One weekend – a Saturday – we were all here… in the church.’ His voice was dry and ashy. ‘Nancy and Susannah and Stephen and me. And her.’

Merrily recalled George’s description of Bell on that day or a similar one: dressed decently and conservatively. Her Edwardian summer dress, her blonde hair neatly styled. Quite girlish, rather attractive.

A day in the rosy dawn of Bell’s love affair with Ludlow. Tripping and gliding around the Buttercross, her smiling face upturned to the sun.

‘Like a buttercup,’ George said now, his voice laden with a damp sorrow. ‘And then she wanted to go to the top of the tower.’ He turned to the narrow door behind him. ‘This is the way, behind here, see.’

‘Famous viewpoint,’ Merrily said, ‘I’d guess.’

‘Spectacular. See for miles. But it’s a long old haul – couple of hundred steps, and it seems like more. Bell said would someone like to go up with her? Nancy said, no, thanks, once was enough, and her legs ached for days afterwards. Susannah wasn’t particularly interested either, so I said – because, I suppose, I didn’t want her to think I was an old man – I said, Aye, I’ll go. I’ll go up with you.’

George turned his back on the door. He said the steps were very narrow and twisty, so it was necessary to go up in single file. There was a rope that you could hold on to, to help pull yourself up.

Bell went first.
You can catch me if I fall, George
, she said.

‘She didn’t fall. She was very light on her feet.’

‘Oh yes.’ Merrily recalled the stage act – split black skirts, bare feet.

‘I tried to leave a bit of space between us, see, but when you’re on a tight spiral the person in front’s apt to disappear around a bend. You know what I mean?’

‘Mmm.’ Vicars knew about church spirals.

‘So, three or four times, Bell would come to a sudden stop on a bend, and I’d go bumping up against her. Which was embarrassing for me, but she’d just laugh. That laugh that she has, far back in her throat.’

George wouldn’t look at Merrily while he was talking. His gaze was raised to the Palmers’ window, as if he was wishing he could sail away to the Holy Land or anywhere. Merrily felt that the closer George’s story took them to the top of the tower, the more it was plummeting to the bottom of his own deepest well.

He’d refused to tell her about this in the street, insisted on coming into the church, knowing it was about to close for the night, as if it was part of his penance to unload it all before God and a woman young enough to be his daughter, who also happened to be an ordained priest.

George in purgatory.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘when we finally emerged at the top, Bell starts dancing around, with her arms thrown out. Well… there’s not much room up there – big sort of pyramid coming out the middle with the weathercock sticking out the top.’

Such a proud cock, Bell had said and giggled outrageously, the sleeves of her dress rippling up her arms.

George’s half-shadowed face was blushing a deeper red than King Edward’s footstool in the Palmers’ window as he described how he’d turned away from the woman and gone to look out at the view to the west, doing a bit of a commentary.

Over there in the west, behind those hills, that’s towards Knighton, see, which is in Radnorshire – and that’s Wales. Not many folks know that Ludlow, although it’s in England, used to be the main administrative centre for Wales – the military capital.’

When he’d stopped talking, there had been no sound from behind him, no rustling of her papery frock. When he turned, she was nowhere in sight. Ludlow was spread out far below them, like a model village, and his heart had lurched and he’d shouted, in alarm,
Bell!

And heard her laughing again, a dry, brittle, chattering sound. Looking down in horror to see her coiled on the stones at his feet, those arms and hands weaving in and out of his legs like white serpents.

‘Serpents,’ George spat.

There was an inviting-looking gift shop at the foot of the vast nave, with cards and all the books and pamphlets about Ludlow and its church. Merrily went to stand there while George stood in the nearest aisle, with his feet together and his head hanging down, like a victim of self-crucifixion.

Of course, it went without saying that he’d never behaved like that in his life before, not even when he was a young man, before he’d been married to Nancy.

Well, no.

George was… the epitome of Old Ludlow… An honourable man. Conservative in every conceivable sense of the word.

‘And on the church.’ A bony hand tightening on a pew end. ‘Of all places, on the tower itself, where…’

Where nobody could see them but God.

As if they were putting on a show for Him.

‘On the Monday,’ George said. ‘I formally handed in my resignation as senior churchwarden. Said I was not able to perform the duties as assiduously as was necessary, due to my impending mayoral year. And this, I’m afraid, is the first time I’ve been in here since, apart from services. And even then I feel dirty… soiled. Every Sunday, soiled, a disgrace.’

‘I’m the first person you’ve told?’

‘Other than in my prayers.’

Merrily didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t exactly a huge surprise. There had to have been something. She wondered if Susannah had actually known, from Bell, or if she’d just suspected.

‘George,’ she said. ‘Bell… well, she’s a bit of an expert at this sort of thing. Knows how to…’

‘There can be no excuse!’ George’s knuckles shone like marbles. ‘If I hadn’t already been mayor-elect I’d have turned that down as well.’

‘But surely you realize it was…’

But how could he? How much could he possibly have known or even surmised about Bell’s behaviour?

Not for her to explain to him the probable truth about why Belladonna had seduced him… here…

… That the tower was the spindle in the centre of the wheel of Ludlow and he was its human equivalent. Bell gathering in all her magic, her charisma, and spraying it out in what Jon Scole had called blue sparks. Spraying her sparks all over poor George Lackland, first citizen.

Sympathetic magic
, Huw Owen had said.
All magic’s sympathetic magic.

‘George…’ Merrily moved away from the table of books. ‘Erm… it was… just the once, wasn’t it?’

George sprang away from the pew. ‘Good God, Mrs Watkins, what do you take me for?’

‘A bloke, George.’ She smiled. ‘You’re just a bloke.’

And, for all his local-government guile, a very naive bloke, even for his generation. He hadn’t seen it coming: the innocent Edwardian dress, the childlike glee at being in his town. And then his sudden exposure, on the top of his world, to this scented siren from another planet.

And what else was there besides the guilt and the shame at betraying his wife, his church, his status and his town? Had he also fallen – hopelessly, disgracefully, unforgivably – just a little in love with Mrs Pepper?

Or maybe more than a little. Oh God, yes.

I don’t go looking for her, Mrs Watkins.

‘You can’t bear to be near her, can you, George?’ she said gently.

George walked out of the aisle, his back to the high altar.

A whisper: ‘Can’t bear to see her.’ It seemed to spiral like smoke to the timbered ceiling.

The prostitutes in this town… they knows their place. And you will agree that place is not, for instance, St Leonard’s graveyard.

Could be that nothing of that nature had ever occurred in St Leonard’s graveyard. George, perhaps, had been expanding Bell’s myth for his own reasons. And always living in fear of it coming out.

‘You want her to leave.’

‘I need her to leave,’ he said. ‘She…’