The Smile of a Ghost

And then busking it.

‘God, we pray for the release of Marion’s spirit from the deluded and the misguided and those who would use her to further their own… agendas. We pray that Marion may…’

It was very cold now, in the Hanging Tower. Sam crept close to Merrily; she was shaking. Her face was in shadow but the tiny ring glittered at the edge of an eyebrow.

‘… Fly,’ Merrily said.

Quite prepared to become aware of long, slow breathing in the tower, or even what Bernie Dunmore had described as more like an absence of smile. A smile so cold, so bleak, so devoid of hope… only this perpetual, bitter… terminality.

Unprepared for a long and hollow scream from somewhere else.

50 Dead Person Watching

Coming up to sunset, Lol’s living room was like the inside of a terracotta plant-pot. Even Jane didn’t like it any more.

‘Who gave you this number?’ Lol said into his mobile.

‘That doesn’t matter.’

‘I’ll have to change it now.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Lord Shipston said. ‘I doubt you’ll be hearing from me again. I just wanted to say, do you really want to start all this?’

‘Well,’ Lol said, ‘the album’s already out.’

‘I don’t care about the album. If I’m ever asked, I think I shall accuse you of, shall we say, political satire. Anything beyond that, we’ll see each other in court. And I’ll win because I can afford the best.’

‘You’re threatening me again,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing changes.’

‘I’m just pointing out to you the problems of a long and costly libel action.’

‘It’s nothing to do with courts, Gavin,’ Lol said. ‘In the end, mud just sticks.’

It went on like that for a while. Lol considered the options but, with guys like this, compromise was not one of them.

‘The situation is that I’m quite happy for you to remain with all the other iffy bastards in the House of Lords,’ he said eventually. ‘I’d just be worried if I’d heard you’d gone back to having direct responsibility for psychiatric patients.’

‘That isn’t likely to happen,’ Shipston said.

‘In that case, as long as neither Merrily nor I have any further problems with Saltash or Fyneham or anybody else who may have been unknowingly dragged into it, you won’t hear from me again. Or from Helen Weeks.’

‘Is that blackmail, Mr Robinson?’

‘Is that paranoia?’ Lol said, and Shipston cut the call, Lol just hoping he didn’t go so far as to check out poor Helen Weeks and find out that she’d died in one of those notorious train crashes on the outskirts of London some years ago. She’d been going back to hospital at the time, accompanied by her sister.

Some people never had any luck.

The sun was setting behind the stubby-pillared market hall as Lol crossed the cobbles to the vicarage. Sunday evening and the street was full of people, but very few of them coming from the church where, in the absence of Ledwardine’s own vicar, the Rev. Dennis Beckett was conducting evensong.

Lol didn’t recognize most of these people or their posh four-by-fours.

It’s all changing, Laurence, Lucy Devenish murmured at his shoulder, frowning down her nose, which had been a little like Belladonna’s, except not so… well, not so attractive, not that Lucy would care.

The new type of incomer, Lol reflected. In the days, not so long ago, when property in Herefordshire and Shropshire and mid-Wales was still relatively cheap, you’d get the pioneer type, the urban romantics with rural dreams who wanted a smallholding, their own veg garden, a few sheep and chickens. Now the Border had become the new Cotswolds and it was the wealthy people who were moving in, and they were not satisfied with a low-key existence, side by side with the farmers and the old village families.

They wanted to possess.

There were two more modest cars in the vicarage drive, and he thought he recognized both of them.

* * *

‘We’re not here, Laurence,’ Frannie Bliss said. ‘Neither of us.’

‘Ghosts?’ Lol pulled out a chair next to Merrily’s at the refectory table. ‘Everybody’s a ghost.’

Mumford looked up from his tea, his eyes muddy.

‘Andy here didn’t want to come to HQ,’ Bliss explained. ‘And I didn’t want to be seen with him, either — Annie Howe’s much too close to that prick from Shrewsbury.’

Lol didn’t understand, and couldn’t see any reason why he might need to.

‘Jane’s out with Eirion.’ Merrily poured him some tea. ‘I think they’re celebrating something. So I thought it would be a good time to, you know…

‘Complicate my life,’ Bliss said.

‘It might be rubbish, Frannie. Bell might be absolutely right in her belief that Jon Scole killed Robbie. Maybe, but I just don’t want it to be him. I don’t think he had his adoptive parents killed, either. The people you liked, you don’t want them to have been the bad guys. Whereas the people you don’t like…’

Merrily looked at Mumford, who, for his part, had wanted it to be this Jason Mebus. Mumford didn’t even look up. He was wearing a suit and tie, and didn’t look retired. He looked safe again. Retired people, Lol had decided, were the new delinquents. Lol had heard that, following a phone call from Gomer Parry, Mumford might soon be head-hunted by Jumbo Humphries, Welsh Border garage-owner, feed dealer and private investigator. It would keep Mumford off the streets.

‘You must be awful glad you didn’t kill the twat, Andy,’ Bliss said.

Mumford grunted. ‘Was never on the cards.’

Bliss smiled, looked at Lol and Merrily, and lifted his eyebrows.

Merrily said, ‘I’m probably just being stupid.’

‘Look,’ Bliss said. ‘It’s pretty clear that nobody thought Robbie was an accident, and suicide looks increasingly unlikely. So if there has to be a third suspect, fair enough, I’m always happy to get another lawyer out of the system.’

‘I just lay awake thinking about it, and then I woke up thinking about it.’ Merrily shook out a cigarette. ‘I thought that, well, if Jon Scole wasn’t bothered about all the money going to Robbie, here was somebody who definitely was.’

‘Go on, then. Spell it out.’

‘Well… her childhood was disrupted after her father dumped her mother for Bell. She was virtually expected to be Bell’s nursemaid whenever she spent any time with them. And, after her father went off to America, it was her real mother who got her the job with Smith, Sebald. And then she gets saddled with Bell again.’

‘She could’ve said no, Merrily.’

‘With Bell in the same town, and her father saying please look after her? OK, on the one hand a good client, but it must have been hell constantly covering things up, wondering what the firm’s good name was going to be dragged into next. And then there’s her future father-in-law, who… well, a lot of unexplained alienation there that must already be putting a strain on her relationship with Stephen Lackland.’

‘And then,’ Bliss said, ‘the mad woman announces that she’s adopting the son of — pardon me, Andy — this grasping bint from the Plascarreg, and making arrangements to ensure he and the new Palmers’ Guild get the bulk of her considerable estate. Do we know if Susannah Pepper attempted to talk Belladonna out of it?’

Merrily shook her head. ‘Dunno, but — something else that occurred to me — if Bell died, Susannah would’ve