The Smile of a Ghost

‘Actually, she normally tells me everything,’ Jane said, ‘but I’m afraid I got in rather late last night myself — the bus broke down — and I, um, overslept. She’s usually up very early, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the church floor, or visiting the sick, and I’m afraid I have to go out again in a minute, so…’

‘Hmm.’

‘I could leave a note for her.’

‘You’re sure she hasn’t gone to Ludlow, Jane?’

‘Ludlow.’ Jane paused. ‘That’s in Shropshire, isn’t it?’

‘Thank you,’ Sian Callaghan-Clarke said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

Mistake.

‘So something’s gone down,’ Jane said to Lol. ‘And I don’t know what it is. And Mum hasn’t rung and I can’t get hold of her because bloody Belladonna’s ex-directory. And Eirion’s gonna be here any minute to pick me up.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Maybe you could come over to the vicarage and just like… stay here? Man the phone and stuff?’

‘You think I’m responsible enough?’

‘Please, Lol, it really is the best thing you could do right now. Something’s happened, and I don’t know what it is. I’ve got the radio on — Hereford and Worcester — and there’s nothing. Lol, please…’

In the dream — and she knew all along that it was a dream — Merrily was at a junction of several old streets with gilded buildings on either side. They had timbers like bars of dull gold and small bricks like jewels, and the entrance of each street, as she approached it, was aglow with enticing lights, the air perfumed with applewood smoke. But the further in she went, the darker and closer it all became, the brickwork crumbling, the beams blackening and the perfume gradually corrupted by a rising stench of dampness and rot. And ahead of her — slapping of sandals on dry flagstones — a woman with a musical-instrument case swinging like a censer from one hand.

Scared, Merrily began wading out of the dream. She opened her eyes, and one of them hurt. The light was grey and rationed, sweat congealing on her face like a sour syrup. She pushed the plain cream duvet away, tentatively lowered her bare feet to bare boards.

No splinters on this floor. This was very old wood, worn smooth long before it had been laid here. Could have come from anywhere. Had its own history.

The Weir House. Hundreds of disparate histories mingled here, their vibrations filtered through reclaimed timbers and the stones of demolished barns from miles away and nothing would be—

God, what time is it?

In bra and pants and small pectoral cross, she stumbled across to the only window, a Gothic slit with just one pane, and peered out.

She saw a short track with a metal gate at the end. There was a flat field, a glint of river and, above it all, sprouting out of the wooded bank and a sky that was as cold and hard as marble, something like a ragged and monstrous clump of giant brown mushrooms.

Use the castle room. Bell Pepper opening the door for her but not entering. An engaging smile through twisted teeth. But if you see Marion, be careful. She’s unstable.

Merrily had not wanted, at that time, to see Marion. She remembered sitting down on the bed, alone, to think and to pray: St Patrick’s Breastplate — Hold me safe from the forces of evil. On each of my dyings shed your light.

Must have slept, for… She went back to the bed. The rest of her clothes — T-shirt, jeans, fleece — were in a heap beside it, her watch on top. It was nearly eleven-thirty a.m. She’d slept for nearly six hours.

She had to start talking to people — Jane, Lol, Mumford, the Bishop.

Recalling a bathroom somewhere, mercifully modern, she grabbed her clothes into a bundle and unlocked the oak door — yes, it did have a key and she had locked it — and went out into a short passage that was daylight-dim: interior lime-plastered walls of wattle and daub, which was basically clay and cow muck over a framework of branches and twigs. Clay and cow muck and animal fat and whatever other personal ingredients—

Merrily stopped, clutching the bundle to her chest. The woman standing at the end of the passage was not Belladonna.

38 Like Hello!

Breinton was on the western side of Hereford in sloping, wooded countryside that managed to conceal most of the city’s lower, more modern buildings, so that from the road outside the Fyneham residence you could see the cathedral apparently poking out of greenery, as if the city centre was a neighbouring village.

Eirion parked his Peugeot half on the grass verge, just out of sight of the solid wooden gates that were like castle gates: all you could see of the house was a brick wall, a chimney and a burglar alarm. Homes up here cost an arm and a leg now.

‘Hereford’s Beverly Hills,’ Jane said sourly. She was seriously uptight, the world full of invisible hostility. If she’d been a hedgehog she’d have been rolled up in a ball, spikes out.

‘If that’s meant to be an insult, it would escape Fyneham.’ Eirion locked the car. ‘He’s a Beverly Hills kind of person. How do you reckon we get to the front door?’

‘You need one of those little battering-ram things the cops have.’

‘Jane…’ Eirion was looking at her as though she might have been secretly carrying one. ‘Don’t do anything, right? Leave this to me.’

‘You know me, Irene.’ Jane put on an icy smile. ‘Walking definition of the word discretion. Look — dinky little door in the wall.’

There was a black iron ball-handle; when Eirion turned it, the door opened onto a short gravel drive and this imposing, blindingly white conservatory porch with a Victorian type of bell pull that turned out to be electric and sent Big Ben chimes bonging through the house.

The woman who responded was serious second-wife material: bleached blonde, about thirty-five, and dressed for hovering hopelessly with hi-tech secateurs. She stayed inside, keeping a hand on the door, Eirion treating her to his winning smile.

‘Oh, hi. Sorry to just turn up like this, but Jack said if we were ever passing…’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘This is the right house, isn’t it? Jack Fyneham?’

‘Jack?’ She looked blank for a moment and then she said, ‘Oh, you mean Johnno.’

‘Actually, we just know him as JD at school.’

‘Oh, I see, you’re—’

‘This for me, Tessa?’ J.D. Fyneham appeared in person at her shoulder, wearing a half-smile that faded with gratifying speed into this oh-shit expression when he saw who was outside. Jane smiled at him.

‘Why don’t you take them up to your rooms, Johnno?’ Tessa said. ‘I’ve got this guy coming about the pool, which your dad, of course, conveniently forgot about…’

‘Cool.’ Eirion beamed. ‘JD’s told us so much about his rooms.’

In the first hour, nobody rang. Lol went upstairs to Merrily’s bedroom and brought down the Washburn he kept there and tuned it and played fingerstyle to Ethel, the way he had when he’d lived in Blackberry Lane and Ethel had been his cat and he’d probably still been half-mental.

Walking across to the vicarage, he’d seen a woman looking at him and then she’d frowned and looked away and Lol had thought, Jesus, no… and put his head down and almost run across and into the driveway. Jane, in the doorway with Eirion, waiting to leave, had glared at him with a kind of furious pity.

And now there was a knock on the front door, and he put down the guitar and didn’t know whether or not to answer it.