was all right there. Better than at home on the bloody Plascarreg, with a latchkey.’
‘Your sister lives on the Plascarreg?’
Not the best address in Hereford.
‘He was capable and intelligent,’ Mumford said. ‘I never had a son, but I couldn’t’ve complained if I’d got one like him. Anyway, Gail works at Ludlow Hospital three days a week, so she pops in, sees they’re all right.’
‘What about your father?’
‘Not the most sympathetic of men. Tells you about all the death he’s seen in his time, how you gotter put it behind you kind of thing. Meanwhile, ole girl goes over and over it in her mind, what’s left of it.’ Mumford glanced over at the door to the hall — more knocking. ‘You better get that.’
‘It’s OK.’
Probably just the postman with a parcel. He’d leave it in the porch.
Robbie Walsh. She recalled the case throwing up questions in the papers. How had he managed to conceal himself in the castle? Had he been alone?
‘So has the inquest…?’
‘Opened and adjourned after medical evidence. Boy was cremated at Hereford. No proof of anything more than an accident. Most popular theory is he got totally absorbed in whatever he was checking out inside the castle, got hisself locked in and went up the tower to try and signal for help. Mabbe leaned over too far.’
‘That feasible?’
‘It’s feasible. But there’s ways out of there for an agile kid, and if anybody knew ’em he would. But… nothing iffy sitting on a plate, the police don’t go looking for it no more. Not enough manpower to handle what they got on the books already. Verdict of misadventure, most likely.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘I reckon it should be an open verdict. Mabbe I’m just saying this on account of it’s destroyed what was left of my bloody family, but I reckon there’s stuff we don’t know. Meanwhile, my mam… this is gonner be hanging over her for the rest of… whatever she’s got left.’
There was more knocking at the front door, insistent.
‘In more ways than one, it looks like,’ Mumford said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Hanging over her. It’s why I’ve come. You better get that this time, it en’t gonner stop.’
Merrily went to open the door.
Just what she needed.
‘Sorry if I got you out of the bath or something, Merrily.’
Nigel Saltash smiling his all-purpose smile.
4
Routine Pastoral
On his training courses at the disused chapel in the Beacons, Huw Owen liked to invent pet names for the unquiet dead.
Insomniac, hitch-hiker, breather, groper…
Exorcist jargon, a touch of black humour for the troops.
Merrily brought over an extra mug, poured three teas and sat down at the head of the table, her back to the window. The sun laid a creamy sheen, like an altar cloth, on the pine table top.
Huw would have called Mumford’s mother’s problem a parting-caller or a day tripper. Throwaway terms for a commonplace phenomenon — loved ones dropping in just to show their faces, let you know they wouldn’t be far away. They tended not to stay long. She remembered Huw saying that, nine times out of ten, they were none of his business.
‘The technical term is “bereavement apparition”,’ she told Mumford. ‘If anybody bothered to do a survey, they’d probably find that at least fifty per cent of bereaved people have similar experiences.’
Usually widows or widowers, or the children or siblings of someone who had recently died. But it could equally be a favourite teacher or a long-time colleague. You’d be doing something mundane around the house when suddenly you’d feel a sharp awareness of whoever had died. Or you’d actually see them passing through the hall or maybe sitting in a favourite chair. Just a glimpse, and then they’d be gone.
‘What we’re saying, Andrew,’ Nigel Saltash said, ‘is that this tends to happen with a person one is used to having around. It’s something I’ve encountered many, many times.’
He was wearing a tracksuit the colour of his hair, and his tanned skin shone. At the door just now, on auto- smile, he’d told Merrily he’d thought they ought to have a chat one-to-one. Didn’t want her, after last night, to run away with the wrong idea. And as this was his day for early-morning jogging with Kent Asprey, the fitness-freak Ledwardine GP… Oh yes, old mates. Hammered the country lanes together every Friday.
Terrific.
So there’d been no alternative to bringing him in and explaining to Mumford about the new Deliverance Advisory Group — giving Mumford an opportunity to say nothing, make an excuse and leave, call her later.
But, of course, it turned out that he and Saltash knew each other from way back, when Saltash had worked at the Stonebow Psychiatric Unit in Hereford. Reminding Mumford of all the times he’d been called across to Police Headquarters to assess some drugged-up prisoner self-harming in the cells. What days, eh? And now both of them retired. Or entering a new life-phase, as it were.
Saltash watched, with a smile conveying mild pain, as Mumford dumped three white sugars in his mug of tea.
‘Essentially, what you’re looking at, Andrew, is grief-projection. The bereaved person is carrying an image of the departed one very close, as it were, to his or her heart. We don’t want to have seen the last of them. A part of us desperately wants them still to be around, in the old familiar places. And so an area of our consciousness responds to the need. This is almost certainly what’s happening with your mother and her visions of the boy. Are we together on this one, Merrily, would you say?’
The tilted head. The smile that was a well-oiled explanatory tool.
But he was probably right. Huw Owen’s advice had always been to leave parting-callers, in general, alone. Didn’t matter whether they were hallucinations or psychological projections or something less explicable, they usually brought comfort rather than fear or distress, and so they were part of the healing mechanism, part of a phase that would pass. And if Mrs Mumford’s mind was on the slide…
‘Can I…?’ Merrily conspicuously sugared her own tea and stirred it noisily. ‘Can I just briefly go over some of it again, Andy? Your mother says she… saw him, first, in the kitchen, right?’
Mumford nodded, glanced at Nigel Saltash, then glanced away.
‘Out of the corner of an eye. Said he was standing by the fridge, like he was about to help himself to a can of pop. When she turned towards him, he… vanished. This was before the funeral.’
Nigel Saltash was nodding eagerly. Merrily wondered, despondent, if he was going to call in every week after jogging with Dr Asprey, to discuss the many areas where so-called spiritual guidance overlapped with nuts-and- bolts psychiatry.
‘And the second time?’ she said to Mumford.
‘In the back garden. Robbie’s standing by the bird bath, looking up at the house. Mam was in the bedroom, says she saw him through the window. But it was… you know, it was like a reflection in the glass. When she stepped back he wasn’t there any more.’
‘A reflection,’ Saltash said. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Same in the town.’ Mumford was mumbling now, like he wanted to get this over. ‘Near the Buttermarket. Shop window.’
‘Oh, really? Another reflection?’
‘Kind of thing. She was with my dad. He didn’t see anything. She was looking in the window and Robbie, he was behind her, but when she turned round…’
Merrily said, ‘Did she think he knew she was there?’
