The Smile of a Ghost

Mumford

ALL THE PEOPLE who’d told Mumford, It’s a new beginning.

All the beaming faces blurred by pint glasses frosted with froth, all the damp handshakes. Mumford mumbling, Ah, thanks… thank you… very nice… ’course I will… No, I won’t be going nowhere… yes… no… thank you.

Andy Mumford, who didn’t see the point of new beginnings – complete waste of half a lifetime’s experience. Andy Mumford who had just wanted to carry on.

The way this town had carried on: the oldest town he knew – or at least the one that looked oldest. Bent and sagging, and people loved it for that, and nobody looked up at the crooked gables and the worm-riddled beams and said, What this old place needs is A New Beginning.

Mumford felt a gassy fury inside, like in one of the first-ever pictures he could remember – in a children’s encyclopaedia, it was, and it showed the inside of a volcano close to eruption. How many years ago was that now – forty-four, forty-five? God almighty.

Not that anybody would ever know about the volcano in Mumford. Not showing it was the one thing he was real good at. Not showing his excitement when the suspect in the interview room said the wrong thing at the right time, springing the trap. Not showing what he really wanted to do to the rat-eyed rapist with a cellar full of porno videos. Never showing his feelings because he was a professional and because he was…

… imperturbable.

Clumsy old word, bit of a mouthful, but probably the nicest thing anybody ever said about him in all those years in the Job. And that was all right. Imperturbable implied solid, reliable… professional.

Only, what bloody use was being totally professional when you didn’t have a profession any more? What use was imperturbable ever going to be to him again?

Mumford walked up Broad Street, Ludlow, which some folk maintained was the most beautiful street in the most beautiful medieval market town in the country, and it might as well have been a semi-derelict industrial estate for all he noticed.

Warmish evening now, Easter just gone and the town coming alive for the tourists, everybody’s world opening up, Mumford’s closing down. What would he do, day to day, through the summer? And then the autumn and the winter and then another year. Another thirty years, if he was spared. The length of his career all over again. Thirty years of what’s the point?

He reached the top of the wide street, across from the Buttercross, the old market building with its fancy little clock, behind it the tower of St Laurence’s soaring over a tight mesh of streets and alleys. The whole scene warm and golden. Andy Mumford feeling as warm and golden, frankly, as shit.

Ludlow wasn’t his town, mind. Mumford came from Leominster, back in Herefordshire, a dozen or so miles down the A49. It was just that his Mam and Dad had moved here to take over a little shop after the old man retired from the Force (‘Why don’t you get yourself a little shop, Andy?’ some bastard had said in the pub; Andy could’ve nutted him) and now Gail was working part-time as an auxiliary nurse at Ludlow Community Hospital.

Because Gail was still a professional.

For probably the first time ever, Mumford had brought his wife to work this morning and he’d come back now – after what had to have been the longest day of his entire life – to pick her up. Tonight they were going to have a meal at one of the fancy new restaurants that had opened up here.

A celebration meal. A couple of extra glasses of wine for him because Gail would be driving them home. A toast to a new beginning. A meal they wouldn’t normally think of affording in the town that, with all these new eateries, had become the Food Capital of the Welsh Marches – Mumford conceding that, for the town, this probably did, in fact, qualify as a new beginning. Always been prosperous, but it had real wealth now, all these poncy-voiced bastards moving up from London with their silver knives and forks.

Mumford glared, with this new resentment, at the little shops with their blinds down and the dark windows of the Buttercross where the town councillors met and patted each other on the back and swapped the odd Masonic handshake.

He was in his best suit, the suit he’d last worn to collect his commendation from the Chief Constable, and Gail had brought to work some nice clothes to change into at his Mam and Dad’s house down the bottom of town, behind the new Tesco’s.

Which was why Mumford was walking uptown… trying to get himself into the right mood to face his Mam and his bloody Dad for the first time since the Home Office had officially repossessed his warrant card. Needing to sound a bit jovial from now on, on account of imperturbable was no longer enough to see him through. He was expected to become a member of the human race. To become Andy.

Andy, the dumpy, middle-aged, genial, smiling, bastard civilian.

We’ll likely be seeing a bit more of you at last, then, Andy, Mam had said the other night on the phone. You can do a bit of decorating for us, if you want to. And Robbie, he wants to show you all his favourite places in the town, don’t you, Robbie? He’s nodding, see. He’s always saying when’s Uncle Andy coming?

Robbie, his young nephew, his sister’s boy from Hereford, who preferred to spend the school holidays with his grandparents in Ludlow, even though his grandad despised him.

I’ll be getting some kind of job, Mumford had snapped back. En’t that old yet.

Guessing that when he got there tonight she’d have forgotten he was even retired. In any other job he wouldn’t have been. If he’d just been a bit more ambitious in the early years, if he’d pushed a bit more, he could’ve made Inspector and stayed on till he was sixty. But he was a plodder, and the plodders didn’t get promoted and so they were forced into retirement at fifty. And everybody thought that, being plodders, they were looking forward to it: crown-green bowls, growing sprouts, bloody line-dancing.

Surprisingly, the only bit of understanding had come from Francis Bliss, his last boss, who was fifteen years younger and, as a senior officer, still had another twenty-odd years to serve if he wanted it.

CID room, Mumford’s last morning, Bliss frowning.

This is all to cock, this system, Andy. We just throw away our best natural resources, like pressing the fuckin’ delete button on thirty years of database.

He’d respected Bliss for that. Realized how much he’d come to respect Bliss as a detective, too, despite him being a smart-mouth from Merseyside. Knew that when the time came, unless the world was a very different place by then, Bliss – never a man you’d call imperturbable – would go out cursing.

Cursing.

Mumford looked up at the hard, shiny evening sky, ready to curse God.

But God got in first.

God pulled the rug from under the slippers that Mumford was never going to wear.

He was turning the corner to walk up to Castle Square when he heard it coming up behind him, a sound that used to make his blood race but now seemed more like a taunt, and he wanted to shut it out. The way this morning he’d punched in the button on his alarm clock – which he’d routinely set without a thought last night – and then lain there staring into the white-skied emptiness of a new day.

Ambulance. He stood on the corner under the dull maroon façade of McCartney’s estate agents, and watched it barrelling through the narrows, a couple of tourists glancing up in annoyance like it ought to be horse-drawn in Ludlow.

He didn’t really mean to follow the thing. It wasn’t even instinct, just that it was heading the same way as he was. In fact, he nearly turned back when he saw the patrol car on the square under the Cheddar-cheese-coloured perimeter wall of Ludlow Castle.

He did, in fact, turn away when the first copper came out of the gateway, near the old cannon from Sevastopol, and he saw it was Steve Britton, station sergeant at Ludlow – no hair left but still a few years yet to serve, and even then they’d probably keep him on as a civilian.

But Steve had seen him.

‘Andy?’

Mumford kept on walking, figuring Steve would think it was a case of mistaken identity or that Mumford hadn’t heard him. But then he heard footsteps – not merely footsteps, police boots – clattering across the empty square, and Steve Britton was shouting now.

‘Andy!’

So he had to stop and stand there, waiting wearily, in front of Woolworths, staring down at the pavement, steeling himself for what was coming: Andy, mate, I’ve only just heard. Free at last then, eh? Look, I get off in an hour, we’ll have a couple of jars.

But when Steve Britton drew level with him it was different.

Steve’s long melon face was damp with sweat and his eyes had a look that Mumford recognized straight off. A look he’d probably had on a few dozen times himself over the years, carrying out just about the worst chore you ever got saddled with as a copper.

Confusing, though, on account of he’d never faced it before.

Never actually been on the receiving end, feeling that sharp, flat punch of dread – a punch deep to the gut, right where, a few minutes ago, the volcano had been simmering.

Andy couldn’t say anything. He just stared at Steve, and at his uniform. Wobbling slightly, experiencing, for the first time ever, what the sight of that uniform on your doorstep meant to the average person with no drugs in the house.

‘Andy…’ Steve getting his breath back. ‘You been down to your mother’s tonight?’

‘Not yet.’ His mother? Andy felt his own breath catch. ‘Something happened? Something happened, Steve?’

Far from bloody imperturbable, the way that came out. Realizing how scared he was now, how exposed, the streets spinning.

‘Yes,’ Steve said. ‘Something’s happened.’

Walking with Steve Britton back to the castle.

The castle, of all places. Christ.

The castle was ruined but pretty big, a lot of it left. You couldn’t see much from here, the town side, but from down below, across the river, it was still massive and imposing and had been dominating Ludlow for most of the last millennium.

Mumford had probably been in there just twice in the whole of his life, and never in the last twenty years.

But Robbie practically lived here when he was staying with his grandparents, which was every school holiday since his mother moved in with the toe-rag. Robbie, the history buff. Quiet, likeable boy, covering up for his gran, day after day.

Please God, not Robbie. This’ll destroy her.

Couldn’t be, anyway. No logic to it.

‘How’d this boy gain access, Steve?’

‘We figure he stayed in. Hid somewhere after they closed the castle for the night. There’s a hundred places to hide… inside these little passages, the towers… it’s a bloody honeycomb.’

It actually looked like a honeycomb, all yellow and orange in the evening light. The main gates were wide open, a young uniform Mumford didn’t recognize guarding the entrance.

You forgot how big this castle was. Inside the perimeter walls there was a green open space where they had sideshows and medieval-type displays in summer, and then the Christmas Fair. From here a stone footbridge took you over the moat, which was all dried up now, leading into the main fortification with this huge gatehouse tower that had been the old Norman… keep, was that the word?

Robbie would know.

Couldn’t be. One fourteen-year-old boy looked much like another – trainers, baseball cap. This would turn out to be some tourist kid larking around.

Mumford went back to being observational, like he hadn’t retired two days ago and this was still his job. Some part of him knowing that if he was to keep from losing everything that had ever meant anything in his life, he needed to start off how he meant to go on, and that was not as just another member of the bastard public.

Walking with his uniform counterpart, Sergeant Steve Britton, towards another…

… another death scene.

Just another death scene. Nothing to do with him. A mistake.

Red spears of sunlight were bouncing off the ambulance parked near the footbridge. A couple of paramedics were bending over the edge of the dried-up moat.

‘Visitors can go right to the top, see,’ Steve said, talking rapidly, a bit hoarsely. ‘Good… good views.’

‘Robbie Walsh knows his way blindfold, Steve.’

The square tower seemed awful high now, the size of a big block of flats in this part of the world. A St George’s flag was hanging limp up there against the amber sky. The stone bridge had a wooden handrail, and even from here Mumford could see there was blood on it, like a splash of spilt creosote. Should’ve been taped off.

He could see into the moat now, something humped and twisted on the bottom, the fact that they’d left it down there saying everything.

‘Must’ve come down on the handrail, bounced off,’ Steve said.

‘Broken neck?’

‘And the rest.’ Steve swallowed. Likely never had to do this before to one of his own. ‘Andy, I… I hope it’s not. I hope I’m mistaken, that’s all.’

‘Sure t’be,’ Mumford said. ‘Let’s get it over.’

‘We used to see him all over town. Walking up Broad Street, and down Old Street, and past the station. You’d think he’d get sick of it, same streets, day after day.’

Steve making it clear he knew what Robbie Walsh looked like.

‘He never got sick of it,’ Mumford said. ‘Always finding new things, so they reckoned. He loves it here. History-mad. Goes to all the lectures, all the exhibitions. Has some kind of season ticket for this… for the castle. So he can come in and out.’

‘People knew him, Andy. All the local people and the shopkeepers knew him. Always polite. Not like most of the little sods.’

Steve keeping up this street-corner chat routine to delay the moment, prepare Mumford for the worst. One of the paramedics was on his feet now, talking to the cops and shaking his head, likely telling them what they already knew.

‘Witnesses?’ Mumford said.

‘Feller seen it from over the river, top of Whitcliffe. Artist bloke. Paints pictures of the castle. Watching a buzzard through binoculars. Said it was… Ah, you don’t wanner know this stuff…’

‘I wanner know everything.’

‘Just make sure first, eh?’

‘I wanner know everything,’ Mumford snarled, knowing that he was shaking like a civilian.

That night, Angela, his sister, did some screaming.

The Hereford boys had finally found Ange and her partner in the Orchard Gardens, the city’s most misnamed pub, out on the edge of the Plascarreg. So it was getting on for midnight when they got to the Community Hospital, and Ange must have drunk a fair bit, which didn’t help.

In the hospital mortuary, Mumford, for all his experience, had turned away, biting his lip. Lying there, with only his not-too-damaged face exposed, the boy had looked all of eight. Ange had taken one quick glance and then it was the full hand-wringing dramatics: It’s him, it’s him… oh shit, shit, shit, look what they done to him!

During this performance, Mumford had found himself watching the scumbag partner, Lennox Mathiesson, hunched up with his hands in his pockets, nodding his head, half-fascinated, ear-trinkets clinking. It sickened Mumford that Angela was three months pregnant with this rubbish’s baby.

Tomorrow morning, the body of her first child would be taken to Shrewsbury for the post-mortem. Tonight, outside the hospital, Ange shelved her grief and set about doing what Mumford reckoned she’d been doing since before she could walk, which was generously apportioning the blame so that there was none of it left for her.

‘That selfish ole bitch, I just hope she’s satisfied. I gotter come all this way to see my son lying dead, killed, because she wasn’t fit to look after him. She robbed me… robbed me of my son. I hope she’s fuckin’ satisfied now.’

Ange in the car park, legs apart, arms folded and a sawn-off top advertising her navel and her condition. Thirty-nine years old.

‘I reckon you better get off home, Angela,’ Mumford said. ‘I’ll phone for a taxi.’

‘Happier yere than he ever was with you? You remember when she come out with that one? What did you say? Nothing, as usual.’

‘She’s not right,’ Mumford said quietly. ‘You know that.’

Except on that occasion, Mam had been dead right. Mumford drew away from the alcohol fumes, stumbling back into a tree trunk as his sister stuck her wet, smudgy face up to his.

‘She en’t fit to look after a child, that’s for sure. And you never said a word, so I hope you’re satisfied too, mister smart-arse fuckin’ detective.’

‘He en’t a detective no more.’

Knowing smirk from Lennox Mathiesson, ten years younger than Angela, two convictions for burglary, one aggravated, plus an ABH. Well, Mam’s mind might be on the blink but she could still recognize a bad bastard when she saw one, and that was why her and Ange hadn’t spoke for the best part of two years, since Ange had left Robbie’s dad – decent enough bloke, worked at Burton’s men’s-shop – for Mathiesson.

Mumford got out his mobile, putting in the number of this taxi firm he knew in Leominster. It’d cost, but he just wanted an end to this night.

‘Oh yeah, get me out.’ Ange staring at him with contempt. ‘Get me out, ’fore I makes trouble. Well, we’re gonner make trouble, mister, you count on it. We can sue that castle, for a start.’ Hands on her hips now, body arched, belly swelling out. ‘Letting him run wild all day in dangerous ole ruins that oughter be fuckin’ pulled down.’

Run wild? Robbie? Mumford was thinking of all the times he’d heard her say, I wonder sometimes where he came from, hiding away with his books, no proper friends. It’s not like having a normal child, is it?

‘Angela,’ he said, ‘obviously you’re terrible upset, but let’s just get one thing straight: there’s no case to sue the castle. Robbie was there illegally, when it was closed for the night.’

‘Well, we’ll fuckin’ see about that, won’t we, mister smart-arse fuckin’ ex-detective.’

Mumford nodded, standing with his heels in a flower bed, taking it. What else could he do?

‘And what’s disgusting, like I say, is she never knew where he was. I bet she even forgot he was stayin’ yere.’

Laughable, that, coming from Ange. It had always been Mumford himself who’d picked Robbie up and brought him over to Ludlow for his holidays, and his most sorrowful image of the boy was not the lolling body under the tower but the pale kid with a suitcase waiting like an orphan at the top of the steps at the Plascarreg.

Different boy altogether when he got to Ludlow, but Ange was never going to want reminding of that.

He got the taxi firm on the mobile. ‘Soon’s you can, Paul, eh?’

‘And I’ll tell you what, mister – you can tell the ole bitch she can pay for the fuckin’ funeral…’

‘God almighty, Angela!’

It had been like this for as long as he could remember. Mam had been forty-five when she’d had Ange, and the gap was always too wide – Mumford always in the middle, covering his ears.

‘Wasn’t fit to look after nothin’, and you never seen it, or you pretended not to, more like, ’cause you was always too busy persecuting folks just wanted a bit of pleasure outer life.’

Meaning the time he and Bliss had had Mathiesson’s brother for enough crack to lay out half the estate. Personal use. The balls they expected you to swallow. Mumford had never set foot in Ange’s flat from that day to this.

‘You bloody let her take him away from his own mother just when I needed the help. You robbed me, she robbed me, every—’

Ange had started to cry again then, tottering across to Lennox Mathiesson, who gathered her into his tattooed arms, giving Mumford this thin smile over her quaking shoulders.

Time he was off. Needed to pick Gail up from poor bloody Mam’s. Gail in her best frock for the celebration dinner. Christ.

‘Anyway, you know where I am,’ Mumford said and walked away, Angela screaming at his back.

‘You tell her I hope she never sleeps again!’

All the lights were on in his mam and dad’s house, the last neighbour walking away. They were good to her, the neighbours in this short, terraced row down at the bottom of the town, between the station and the new Tesco’s.

Mumford sat in his car and just wanted to stay there. He could see Gail and his dad through the extended front window, its curtains still drawn back. His dad had a hand on his forehead, likely with exasperation by now; his dad had never had much patience with female emotions. Gail had a cardigan over her new frock, and she was bending down, like she was bending over a sickbed. Below the level of the window frame, his mam would be sitting in her chair and the TV would be on with the sound turned down.

He could feel the atmosphere in that room coming out at him like radio static.

Gail was a nurse and knew how to handle people in grief; all Mumford knew was how to catch the people who’d caused it. Which didn’t apply in this case, whatever Ange said, and, even if it had, he wasn’t allowed to do anything no more.

Unless Ange was halfway right, and he was the guilty party.

He leaned his sweating forehead against the back of his hands on top of the steering wheel and let the breath come out of him. Feeling beyond exhaustion.

Aye, he’d known the state she was in, the ole girl, but he’d also known how much it had meant to her having Robbie around. Didn’t know much about degenerative brain disease but he did know his mam would have gone downhill a whole lot faster without the boy.

When he looked up, he saw how pale the night sky was, the big tower of St Laurence’s looming out of the body of the town. And became aware of another person standing out on the edge of the Tesco’s car park, still as a post, looking across the road at the house.

A woman, it was, with pale hair escaping from the hood of a long grey cape that hung to the ground. The night was so still that the cape didn’t move, its folds like the stone pleats of the robe of some religious statue. The only movement was a white flickering like a candle on an altar. And it was a candle, Mumford saw, in a metal lantern that hung from the woman’s hand emerging from a slit in the cape.

Mumford experienced a moment of superstitious fear – like he was seeing the angel of death outside the house – and then a bigger fear that he, like the ole girl, was losing his marbles, and he got out of the car in a near-panic.

As he reached the edge of the car park, the woman turned to face him, and there was enough light for him to see that she was entirely human and that she’d been crying.

‘You all right, madam?’ Mumford said.

She didn’t reply, just walked away with the candle-lantern swinging like a captured star in a cage, and Mumford shook his head and crossed the road to his parents’ house.