The Smile of a Ghost

Or maybe more than a little. Oh God, yes.

I don’t go looking for her, Mrs Watkins.

‘You can’t bear to be near her, can you, George?’ she said gently.

George walked out of the aisle, his back to the high altar.

A whisper: ‘Can’t bear to see her.’ It seemed to spiral like smoke to the timbered ceiling.

The prostitutes in this town… they knows their place. And you will agree that place is not, for instance, St Leonard’s graveyard.

Could be that nothing of that nature had ever occurred in St Leonard’s graveyard. George, perhaps, had been expanding Bell’s myth for his own reasons. And always living in fear of it coming out.

‘You want her to leave.’

‘I need her to leave,’ he said. ‘She…’

Was still possessing him, like a dark spirit.

And his town as well. Did he know that?

George and Bell fighting for possession of the essence of Ludlow.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

‘Yes, we better had.’ Maybe Lol would be waiting.

He stepped back for her to go past. She wanted to do something vaguely priestly, if it was only patting him on the shoulder, but that would make him freeze up. So she just walked out.

As he stepped down after locking the church, an elderly man was walking up from the direction of the old college, with a German shepherd on a lead, the narrow street a valley of shadows around him.

‘Can’t hardly credit it, can you, George?’

George spun round. ‘Oh… Tom.’

‘Half of them’s touched, you ask me. Youngsters. Drugs, most likely. You ask me, this girl in the castle’s on drugs. That’s what they’re saying about the other one.’

‘Yes,’ George said. ‘I… I’ve heard that, too. Do you know Mrs Watkins, from the diocese? This is Mr Tom Pritchard. Has the hardware shop just down from us.’

‘Got broke into couple of months ago,’ Tom said severely, to Merrily. ‘Drugs again, I reckon. I hears a noise now, I don’t think twice, I sends this young feller in first.’ He patted the dog. ‘Suppose I’ll get sued if one of ’em gets bit, but I reckon I’ll risk it. Gotter protect yourself, ennit?’ He looked up at the Mayor. ‘Town’s not what it was, George. Our shop’s opened every morning, bar Sundays and Christmas, since the War, come snow, flood, flu, you name it. That boy gets drunk of a night, shop’s shut all day.’

‘What’s that, Tom?’ George pocketed the bunch of church keys.

‘Scole. Calls himself a shopkeeper. Makes you laugh.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Merrily said. ‘Jon Scole’s shop’s not been opened all day?’

‘They got too much money, these days, that’s the thing.’ Tom tugged on the lead. ‘Come on, Tyson.’

‘They’re… always called Tyson, aren’t they?’ Merrily said, as Tom disappeared into the alley to the Buttercross.

Her gaze met George’s.

‘We better take a look,’ George said.

44 Lab Rat

Standing with his back to the sandstone, he might have been a Norman baron, his beard like fine chain mail around his face. A baron addressing a serf. Barons, Lol imagined, would seldom actually look at serfs.

And then, when the name of Lord Shipston came out, Saltash did look at him. Really looked at him, for all of a second: at the little round glasses, the too-long hair, the sweatshirt from some minor rural service industry.

Enough for Saltash to avert his eyes, having dismissed him, Lol guessed. Having chosen to forget that Lord Shipston had ever been mentioned, because the one-second inspection had told him that this couldn’t be a contest.

‘I don’t think I know you at all, do I?’ Saltash said.

The Inner Bailey, enclosed in stone, was more extensive than a prison exercise yard but, with police on the gate, just as secure. And it reminded Lol of the psychiatric hospital, although that had been Victorian. But Victorian Gothic, and so just as dominating as the castle, with one tower at least as high as the Keep.

‘I’m Lol Robinson,’ Lol said.

In the hospital, daring to be a person had always been the most difficult part. Remembering you were a person, not just a file, a subject for assessment and monitoring, a lab rat for the multinational pharmaceutical industry.

‘No,’ Saltash said, smiling, starting to walk away across the great courtyard, throwing out ‘Sorry’ in his slipstream.

And if he reached the gatehouse, where two police officers stood, there would be no second chance.

‘All right.’ Lol moved in front of him. ‘If you want to take the scenic route, let’s talk about Gascoigne.’

Saltash expelled a hiss of exasperation.

‘Look, my friend, you probably know that there’s a young girl in there, threatening to take her own life. I don’t have time to talk to you or anyone, about anything. If you want to make an appointment to see me, that might be arranged.’

Only one PC on the gate now, but he was watching them. Vital to keep Saltash down here. If they reached the gate-house and the police, Saltash would have him thrown out, or maybe even…

… Detained.

Don’t go thinking you’re ever going to leave here, Mr Robinson. You see that door? One day, when I’ve been long retired to the south of France, you’ll be straining to get your Zimmer frame through it.

But Gascoigne had not retired to the south of France.

‘Didn’t know…’ Something throbbed in Lol’s gut, and he started talking, too fast, to quell it. ‘Didn’t know, until today, that he’d gone to the Department of Health. And the House of Lords, now… a health spokesman. Bloody hell.’

‘Lord Shipston,’ Saltash said, ‘is a fine psychiatrist and a former pupil of mine. Now, I don’t know how you —’

‘And a good friend?’

‘A very good friend, which is why I don’t propose to discuss him any further with a stranger. Excuse me.’

Saltash pushed Lol. But he’d been half-expecting it and moved in front again.

‘Only, I’m not a stranger.’

‘If you don’t—’

‘Not to him, anyway. Used to see each other every day, once.’

‘Ah. I see.’ Saltash smiled. His mouth smiled. ‘A patient.’

‘Makes you think that? Might have been a psychiatric nurse. Could have been a porter.’

‘You could not have been anything other than a patient. Are you in what some people still like to call the care of the community now?’

‘No, I’m one of the few people lucky enough to leave Dr Gascoigne’s ward almost as sane as when I went in.’

Saltash’s mouth kept smiling but his eyes frowned. Off balance. Lol remembering what he’d learned about facial signals in his period assisting the Hereford therapist, Dick Lyden. You’re in. Keep going.

‘And I was like… so impressed with my treatment that I wrote this song — it’s what I do; bit sad really, but we can’t all… Anyway, it’s about this guy who’s dispensing unnecessary medication like he has shares in the industry, which he probably has, and I… didn’t bother to change the name in the song. Not imagining that