The Smile of a Ghost

been left as Robbie’s guardian. Not the way anyone would want to start their married life.’

‘Could she die?’

‘That’s her lifetime’s ambition, Frannie. Anyway, you could never prove it about the lawyer. I just wanted to unload it. Sorry.’

‘No, no… I’ll pass it on, discreetly. No doubt the lads in Ludlow will be observing them together when Bell appears in court to face charges of wilful damage to a stiff, or whatever we cobble together. Charge might, of course, get thrown out — who knows?’ Bliss finished his tea. ‘So you’ve placed her in the custody of Huw Owen. Interesting.’

For both of them, Lol thought.

It had been Merrily’s idea to ask Huw Owen to take care of Bell. They’d told her last night that The Weir House was already surrounded by the media, and they’d brought her back here to the vicarage. It was safe enough for her — and safe from her, Lol had thought — in that it wasn’t Ludlow.

Although at one stage she’d become disorientated and appeared to think that it was a country-house hotel, Bell had slept for perhaps the first time in over twenty-four hours. By the time she was awake this morning, around eleven, Huw was already here, looking like the stand-in keyboard player from some acid-rock band that had never made it into the 1970s. Bell had acted strange and subdued and seemed in some way hollow, as though some part of her had indeed rolled like a fireball from the church tower, and was already haunting the back streets of Ludlow.

Well, Huw knew all the spiritual retreats and the sanctuaries that could turn people around. Plus he had a murky kind of charisma. And he liked strange women.

They hadn’t consulted Susannah Pepper.

Just after dawn, Lol had awoken suddenly in Merrily’s bed — well, it had been late when they’d got back here, and there was Belladonna to see to — convinced for a knife-edge moment that he was still up there on that tower and that the remaining two candles hadn’t inexplicably gone out when Bell had lowered herself over them.

It seemed like a bad joke now…

No, it didn’t. It still didn’t seem like any kind of joke. Maybe it had been the sudden disturbance of the air that had done it, or maybe the fact that the flames, already burning very low, had been deprived of air, Bell’s dress acting like a big snuffer. Or maybe…

Maybe it had been an act of God. They had, after all, been votive candles.

You believed what you needed to believe.

All Lol wished was that he hadn’t accidentally glanced into the open mandolin case.

Even though it was early May now, it was still sufficiently cool to justify a fire in the vicarage drawing room, and they sat on the sofa and did things together that you weren’t supposed to do over the age of seventeen, especially if you were a minister of God and this was a Sunday.

Exploring one another, maybe, wondering if they were intact.

‘I still feel happier here, I’m afraid,’ Merrily said. ‘I know this is really stupid, but at your place I always feel Lucy’s watching.’

‘Giving us a slow handclap.’

No, Lucy had a certain decorum.

‘All right — big question,’ Merrily said. ‘Seriously, do you think Lucy could be seeing us in her house, processing the information and responding to it, intellectually or emotionally? A dead person watching. Can someone be earthbound in a benevolent way?’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what this has taught me, if anything, about the nature of ghosts.’

‘Why did Sian suddenly scream when you were there in the Hanging Tower with Sam?’ Lol said. ‘And was this the same moment that the candles on the church tower went out?’

‘Wouldn’t say a word, you know,’ Merrily said. ‘Not to me, anyway.’

‘Sian?’

‘White as a sheet. Said she’d felt faint and gone out for some air. Perhaps thinking — commendably, I suppose — that her own inherent scepticism might damage what we were trying to do. And she walked across the Inner Bailey to the gatehouse.’

‘The Keep? Where Robbie fell.’

‘And Marion, probably. The Hanging Tower wasn’t built in Marion’s time, but the Keep definitely was. Maybe, the evening he died, Robbie had taken someone to the top of the Keep to explain to that someone his theory that this was actually where it happened.’

‘What do you think Sian saw?’

‘Or felt? Whatever, she was terrified. I suppose it’s so much worse for someone who despises… superstition. Maybe she saw whatever remains of Marion. Whatever it was the Bishop once saw. Not terribly benevolent, that. Anyway, Sian wants to resign from her self-appointed role of Deliverance Coordinator.’ Merrily leaned back into a corner of the sofa. ‘I asked her to stay on. Amazed myself.’

‘I liked her,’ Lol said.

‘You like everybody who isn’t a psychiatrist.’

‘Ah,’ Lol said, ‘about that…’

He told her about the call from the ennobled Gavin Gascoigne.

‘Bloody hell,’ Merrily said. ‘Governments scare me more than spooks.’

‘They think they’re protecting themselves for the well-being of the nation.’

‘Is Saltash going to back off?’

‘He’ll do whatever Gascoigne wants. When you think about it, what he did — this kid Fyneham and everything — that was incredibly stupid. People like Saltash and Gascoigne, they’re treated like gods for years, gods who can see into the minds of men. And then they retire.’ And become delinquents, Lol was thinking. ‘Anyway, Saltash is my problem. Unfortunately inflicted on you.’

‘Our problem. A problem shared…’

‘What about Sam? You’ll go and see her?’

‘With Sandy Gee, tomorrow for a start. Pastoral care. Sam’s not out of it yet. She started talking about the e-mails Robbie sent her about the bad time he was having on the Plascarreg. All the things she should have done. And then there’s Jemmie… maybe it’ll need a Requiem for Jemmie. A dark presence there. Needs attention.’

There was also the question of what to do about the contents of the mandolin case. So much to sort out yet. Nothing ever finished.

Jane and Eirion were planning a raid on the Internet suicide sites tonight — well, safer with two of them, Merrily said. She suspected that Belladonna’s ubiquity on death sites and in chat-rooms had been in some way down to Jonathan Scole. Karen Dowell’s first dissection of his hard disk had shown that he’d been posting messages on the Net purporting to be from someone very close to Belladonna. Someone calling himself Revenant.

Death is eternal life without pain.

Know that we must make our own eternity.

How much of that would Scole have understood at the time? Had he adopted that name, Scole, because it was the name of a village in East Anglia where experiments had famously been carried out into the existence of spirits? Something else they’d never know. Scole had been his mother’s son, Merrily said — layered.

‘And what about Robbie Walsh?’ Lol said. ‘Does he get a Requiem?’

‘I’ll see what Andy thinks about it.’

‘Some tension there? Mumford?’

‘Mmm, Bliss… I really think Bliss thought Andy might’ve killed Jason Mebus.’

‘Do retired policemen in Hereford routinely kill suspects they couldn’t nail?’

‘Mumford took him down by the river,’ Merrily said. ‘Near the old Campions Restaurant? Mebus kept insisting he hadn’t, you know, gone to Ludlow to find Robbie. But Mebus is such a smart-arse. Hardened villain already, at Jane’s age. Mumford said he didn’t believe him. Admitted he completely lost it, had Mebus on the edge of the