The Smile of a Ghost

hand…’

‘Hang on. Let me get this right. You think Callaghan-Clarke may have been nudged into place as a… an instrument of restraint?’

Merrily heard Huw sniff. She was thinking of what Sian had said about his precarious psychiatric state. Would it help to tell him about that? She stared out into the garden, at the pale buds on the apple trees.

‘And the bottom line,’ she said, ‘is that nothing much gets done, right?’

‘ “But how can we be certain?” ’ Huw doing this delicate, disapproving, posh voice. ‘ “We could so easily look ridiculous, couldn’t we?” And this lad with the candles sounds like window dressing. Bumbling New Ager. Whimsical, but essentially nice and harmless.’

‘Making us seem a little woolly?’

‘That’s a good word, aye.’

‘Let me get this right. You actually think—?’

‘Leave it with me,’ Huw said. ‘I’ll ask around, see what I can find out.’

Merrily made a call about the funeral. Hereford Crem: two p.m., Monday. She’d go and see the family over the weekend. It was always a problem when you didn’t know either the dead person or the bereaved: gently quizzing them about their mum, looking for the one little jewelled detail that would make it meaningful before you slid her through the curtains and the next one came through — another priest, another set of mourners. A line of sad trains on the last platform.

Andy Mumford turned up ten minutes early.

On the phone last night he’d sounded agitated. When he walked in, she was shocked.

He was wearing a fawn-coloured zipper jacket over a yellow polo shirt. She’d never seen him without a suit before, and he looked all wrong. He’d always seemed comfortably plump; now he was sagging and his farmer’s face was less ruddy than red.

‘You had breakfast, Andy? I can do toast—’

‘No, no…’ He waved a hand, said he’d have tea. Weak. No sugar.

So she’d been right: he’d retired from the police.

‘When?’

‘Three weeks back.’ Mumford pulled a chair from under the pine refectory table. ‘Three weeks and two days. CID boys bought me a digital camera.’

‘Oh.’

‘Now I’ll have to get a computer.’ He sat down with his legs apart, hands bunched together between his knees. ‘Like having your leg off.’

‘Sorry…?’

‘People thought I was looking forward to it. Like you look forward to having your leg off. Wake up in the morning and you think it’s still there, and then you realize.’

It was why his clothes didn’t fit; he’d lost the kind of weight you could never quite put back. Poor Andy. She’d seen a lot of him over the past two years, most recently as bag-carrier to Frannie Bliss, the DI. Bag-carrier and local encyclopaedia: an essential role.

‘You’ll get another job?’ Merrily filled the kettle. ‘Security adviser somewhere, or…?’

‘To be honest, Mrs Watkins, I’d rather not be a night-watchman at some battery- chicken plant.’ Mumford looked down at his hands. ‘Might get some chickens of my own, mind. Beehives. Dunno yet. However—’ He looked up at her. ‘How’re you?’

‘I’m all right.’

She smiled. Along the Welsh Border it was some kind of etiquette that you took ten or fifteen minutes to get around to what you’d come about. You tossed pebbles into the pond and, at some stage, the issue would float quietly to the surface. Must have been fascinating to listen to Mumford interrogating a suspect.

‘Your mother don’t live round yere, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Cheltenham. She has a lot of friends there now. We don’t see each other that often.’

‘But you did have some relations yereabouts?’

‘My grandad had a farm and an orchard near Mansell Lacy when I was a kid. All gone now.’

Mumford nodded. ‘My folks moved north into south Shropshire, after my dad retired from the Force. Ludlow. They had a little newsagent’s and sweetshop for a while, then it got too much for them.’

‘Nice place. Historic.’

‘Pretty historic themselves, now, my mam and dad. They’ll expect me to do more for them, now I’m retired.’

‘No brothers… sisters?’

‘Sister. Twelve years younger than me, lives in Hereford with this low-life idle bugger. Her…’ He paused. ‘Her boy, from when she was married, he never got on with this bloke. Always an oddball kid. Used to spend the school holidays with his grandparents. In Ludlow.’

He looked at Merrily, and she met his baggy-eyed gaze and detected ripples in the pond, a circular movement, something coming up.

Mumford said, ‘My sister’s boy, my nephew — Robson Walsh.’

The name broke surface, lay there, the water bubbling around it. Robson Walsh.

‘Suppose you’d still be… dealing with the funny stuff, Mrs Watkins?’ Mumford’s face was a foxier shade of red now, but she saw that his eyes looked anxious.

‘When it comes up.’

She sat down opposite him. Never the most religious of professions, the police. Saw too much injustice, degradation, few signs of divine light. Even Frannie Bliss, raised a Catholic up in Liverpool, had once said that if he ever made it to heaven he wouldn’t be too surprised to see a feller with a trident and a forked tail sitting on a cloud and laughing himself sick.

Whatever this was, it was hard for Mumford.

Robson Walsh. Robbie Walsh, Robbie Walsh…

‘Oh my God, Andy.’ TV pictures: old mellow walls, police tape. A school photograph. ‘The boy who fell —’

‘From Ludlow Castle, aye. I was there.’

‘At the castle?’

‘In the town. Come to pick up the wife — she was working at Ludlow Hospital. We were going out for dinner, celebrate my… celebrate…’ He looked down at the table. ‘Station sergeant at Ludlow spotted me in the street, took me into the castle. Boy’s still lying there, waiting for the pathologist.’

‘God, I’m so sorry, Andy, I just never—’

‘I’ve spent time with a lot of families lost a child.’ He looked up at her. ‘But at the end of it, Mrs Watkins, you always gets to go home.’

‘You said your sister’s son?’

‘Slag.’

‘Oh.’

‘Lives in Hereford with a new bloke — toe-rag. Only too happy to let the boy spend his holidays at his gran’s. Now she blames me.’

‘Your sister? Why?’

‘’Cause we covered up, Robbie and me, covered up how bad the ole girl was getting. He couldn’t stand the thought that he wouldn’t be able to go and stay there. He loved it, see. Ludlow. The history.’

‘They called him The History Boy — in one of the papers.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You and he covered up that your mother was…?’

There was a knocking from the front door, where the bell had packed in again. Merrily didn’t move.

‘What’s the point of putting a long name to it?’ Mumford said. ‘But her mind’s going, and it en’t no better for this.’

‘But didn’t your sister know what your mother was like?’

‘They don’t speak. Not since she went off with the toe-rag. I usually got to take the boy to Ludlow. Hell, he