The Smile of a Ghost (62 page)

‘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.’

‘The undertaker…’

‘It’s not really illegal. Some health regulations might have been infringed, that’s all. He squared it with some guy at the crem, and they burned a coffin with a doll inside. And the baby was embalmed and sealed in the mandolin case, and I kept him in yew trees. Nobody could understand why I’d buy particular houses – ugly houses in unsuitable locations – but there was always an ancient yew tree with a hollow big enough for a mandolin case, and I’d seal him there and know his spirit was being kept alive. He’d have been buried here, though. I thought we’d both found a home.’

‘Robbie had his spirit… is that what you’re saying?’

‘It seemed so right. If I died, it didn’t matter any more. The spirit would go on. And he’d keep seeing me. Just like he saw the others. Robbie Walsh saw life in four dimensions. The thought of Robbie Walsh seeing
me
, growing up to administer the trust, with the money to conserve the environment in which we both…’

‘This heart condition,’ Lol said.

‘I don’t know. Haven’t seen a doctor in years. I don’t want to know.’

‘Why did you take the baby with you? On your walk through the town. Last night. You don’t normally do that, do you?’

Bell smiled. ‘It was his birthday.’

‘Yesterday?’

‘Today. The early hours. Caesarean. They wanted to do it in the daytime, I said no, this is a night baby. Cost extra.’

She looked down. The cluster of candles was about a foot below her feet.

‘Bell,’ Lol said. ‘Should I move the candles?’

She laughed at him. Then she was serious. ‘I don’t want you to see this, Lol. You are sensitive. You’ll never forget it. Please go down. Go down now.’

‘No.’

‘It’ll be very quick, I promise you.’

‘Bell—’

‘The Beacon of the Marches – did you know they called it that?’

‘I… possibly.’

‘I’m going to make it a beacon again. Bright light and no pain. When it kicks in I’ll smile and I’ll wave… and flip over. Like a fireball. And become, in that one climactic moment, a brilliant part of history.’ Her voice softened. ‘And fly like Marion.’

‘You can’t.’

‘There’s nothing left now, but this.’

When he moved towards her, she put up both hands.

‘You wouldn’t make it, Lol. Can’t you smell it?’

‘Bell—’

‘The bottom of my dress is soaked in lighter fuel,’ Belladonna said.

49

M
ERRILY SAID
, ‘L
ORD
, you gave your Church authority to act in your name. We ask you therefore to visit tonight what we visit and bless whatever we bless… and grant that all power of evil may be put to flight and the Angel of Peace enter in. Defend from harm all who enter and leave this door… doorway. And give us protection in our coming in and our going out.’

People had come in and people had gone out, using the two narrow openings. There was so little room in here. Sandy Gee, hands together as if concentrating on prayer, had moved next to the scaffolding, within just a few feet of Sam. One of the paramedics was a Christian and he’d joined them, and so had Steve Britton, holding up a hurricane lamp.

No harsh light, if possible, Merrily had said. No criss-crossing beams.

Quiet light.

The kid had her eyes wide open, her back to the window. She was calm, and looked a little shell-shocked and vacant. She’d refused to have her parents in, said she’d tried to tell them about it and had been accused of making it all up to get out of school.

It would be necessary to talk to the parents afterwards – preferably with Sandy Gee present, because people were suspicious of religion and you could easily be accused of indoctrination and mind-bending. If Sam needed personal attention… this was usually a long-term process, with repeated sessions.

‘In the faith of Christ Jesus, we claim this place for God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’

A minor exorcism of place was not enough. Merrily looked around for Siân, but she must have stepped out of the tower. It was already crowded in here. And perhaps she was still doubtful about this: exorcism would never be Siân’s thing.

Her gaze met Sandy Gee’s and Sandy’s was saying hurry it up.

Heightened pressure now, Sandy getting some hassle from CID. Before they began in here, she’d said the DCI was on his way from Shrewsbury in connection with… something else? Did Merrily just happen to know anything about something else? Well… yes, she did. Had they spoken to Lol?

Lol?

Martin Longbeach, Merrily had said. At the church.

And the word had gone out.

‘Amen,’ Merrily said, and the people in the tower repeated it; not much echo, as if the voices had been sucked out like smoke.

Merrily prayed for help. Praying for a foothold on this. Where should it be directed?
What
needed to be brought to peace? Ideally there should be a Requiem for Jemmie Pegler, but without the cooperation of her family this was not an option. Anyway, no time.

Robbie?

Robbie was not, somehow, quite part of this. And Robbie had fallen from the Keep. He still, in some way, stood for an innocence.

It left Marion.

Marion who had made a mistake and accepted the consequences. Marion who so many people – Robbie and Bell and Jemmie Pegler – had moulded to match their own requirements.

Poor Marion.

‘Erm… Thank you. I’d like everybody to leave now.’

Sandy Gee’s eyes flashed urgently in the light of the hurricane lamp.

‘I’d like to work with Sam.’

Sandy’s stare told her that she’d better know what she was doing.

She didn’t.

When they’d all left, Steve leaving behind, at her request, his hurricane lamp, she said, ‘OK if I come up there with you, Sam?’

Lol stood up. He could see, lit up like a distant doll’s house, the complex chessboard façade of the Feathers, the main street a chain of lights, the whole town like a jeweller’s counter.

He’d have to deal with his own fear, make a rush at her. It was unlikely he’d get close enough even to reach for her before she let the inflammable dress brush the candlelight. But what else could he do?

What else?

‘Bell…’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you really think Marion flies?’

‘If you’re going to throw your girlfriend’s dogma at me—’

‘No… No, it’s not, but… we’ve all heard endless accounts of what a ghost looks like, what a ghost sounds like, what a ghost does, but we don’t – and nor does anyone – know what a ghost feels.’

‘And what do
you
think they feel?’

‘I doubt they feel anything, they just exist. Transient, two-dimensional, in flickering shades of grey… Just existing, in little cold pockets of nothing.’

‘Beautiful.’

‘It’s not immortality.’

‘Existence without pain.’

‘But without any prospect of happiness.’

‘I sometimes think our highest aspiration is the avoidance of pain.’

‘That’s deeply sad,’ Lol said, ‘coming from an artist.’

And, saying that, he realized that being an artist was the explanation of most of it. It was not spiritual, not about transcendence… only a projection of a grand design, developed over many years from a single lurid image in a picture book. She’d found a place on which to impose her vision of a multidimensional heaven. An old-fashioned concept album in a beautiful gatefold sleeve.

Not madness, but it was a fine distinction.

Something else occurred to him then, something far more prosaic. If it was the dead baby’s birthday, it was also Jon Scole’s. No wonder the poor sod had got drunk.

‘Bell… how did Jonathan die?’

He was thinking of Merrily’s vague suspicion about the blood. How there had not been enough of it.

‘You’re a creator,’ he said. ‘You’re not a killer. You couldn’t kill. Could you?’

Because it was clear she didn’t see her own death as an act of self-destruction; it was a great display, a rush of ferocious light that would launch her spirit into an intimate form of eternity.

She’d gone still, with her head on one side, like a Halloween mannequin someone had wedged between the battlements as a joke.

Lol said, ‘Did he kill himself? Did he take an overdose or something? Did he prise open the mandolin case, on his birthday, and see where all your maternal love had been going?’

She tilted suddenly, and he thought she was going over, unlit, and he ran at the wall.

‘No!’ Throwing her hands out, then slapping them back down when the case began to slip, tugging it into her lap.

He stopped.

‘He… must have gone on drinking, taken his clothes off and gone to bed, and then… I don’t know… Maybe he got up to make a phone call…’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because there was a message on my machine this morning. It was full of bile. So drunk he could hardly speak. It was like, “You fucking old bitch… you gave away a baby and kept…” ’

Lol could hear voices in the streets and alleys below, guessed that Bell finally had an audience. Without one, there would be no point.

‘ “… Kept something…” ’ She began to play with the clasp on the mandolin case, flicking it up and down with her fingers. ‘ “… Something looks like a Kentucky fried chicken.” ’

‘He was dead when you found him, right? Come on, Bell, everybody’s going to know after the post-mortem.’

She let the clasp snap back. Her sigh was irritable.

‘Maybe he went on drinking and choked on his own vomit. I don’t know. I was just so angry at him. He’d killed Robbie and he’d got away with it… for what? Such a sordid, ignominious… such a
little
death… He wouldn’t… even he wouldn’t have wanted that. I… I went into his hovel of a kitchen and I found a knife in a drawer.’

Lol imagined the resulting scene like a concept-art tableau: Tracey Emin meeting Damien Hirst in their own perfect purgatory.

Bell said, ‘It’s how I imagined Arnold de Lisle dying. Naked. Cut to pieces. Jonathan, if he was nothing else, at least he looked like a warrior. Like Eric. All they ever had was their looks.’