The Smile of a Ghost

41 Big Bump

WHEN MERRILY CAME hurrying onto Castle Square, the whole space seemed to be vibrating – duss, duss, duss – to the dampened thud of some Saturday busker’s bass drum, set up down by the deli.

Duss, duss, duss: the sound of an execution day.

She crossed the square and stood by the tourist office and looked around through the crowd.

Bell… where the hell are you?

The clarity had gone from the sky. Gauzy, mauvish clouds were smothering the sun, and there was no breeze to flutter the red and white pennants hanging between gables like a row of teeth set in bleeding gums.

She’d been down to the bottom of Corve Street to fetch the Volvo, a parking penalty under one of the wipers. Turned the key seven times, and it kept failing to start – another sign of mortality to join the ticking behind the dash, the rattle under the chassis, the grinding on corners. She’d still been shaking the wheel in frustration when she found that it had somehow started, two wheels crashing down from the kerb.

To charge up the battery or whatever, she’d driven through town, down by the side of the castle to the stooping community of Dinham with its twelfth-century chapel dedicated to murdered St Thomas, and then to the hissing River Teme – a vain search for the woman who wanted to fly like Marion. Back in the car park at the top of town, she’d paid for a full day, near enough, and then found a phone box to call Jane… engaged.

Single-lane vehicles were threading around the square, but the main traffic was people, scurrying about like figures in a Brueghel. So many clothes now – T-shirts, sweatshirts, fleeces and hooded tops – reflecting, in their myriad colours, the outerwear of Merrie Englande. And so many people talking to one another – a sense of community you seldom saw anywhere else.

Robbie Walsh would walk these streets in a state of near-ecstasy. He was happier than any child I ever saw. She felt she was inside Robbie again, seeing images of how things were, how they worked, the nuts and bolts of medieval life. Looking at now and feeling then, as if, in some mystical way, this might point her towards Bell.

‘Mrs Watkins!’

A man was wading through the crowd towards her, a brown overall flapping around his knees like the uniforms of shopkeepers when she was a kid, his eyes glittering under the jutting shelf of his forehead. A prophet from a children’s Bible.

Duss, duss, duss.

‘Mr Mayor.’

‘We told that boy to keep on playing.’ The Mayor nodded towards the busker, who also had a guitar and a harmonica, but it was the drumbeat that carried, like plodding boots, across the square. ‘Anything to make it seem like a normal Saturday.’

‘You haven’t seen Bell, have you?’

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

‘You’ll have seen the papers, I suppose.’

‘Now, look, there was nothing I could do about that. I’ve had three radio stations on already this morning – that’s why I left the house. And now this. My God, Mrs Watkins, is there no end?’

‘About the petition,’ Merrily said. ‘I think it’s time you—’

‘Aren’t you going in?’ He stared down at her.

‘In where?’

‘You only just got here, or what?’

‘I… more or less, yes.’

‘You mean you don’t know about the girl?’

Before Merrily could ask him what he meant, George Lackland had taken her by the elbow and was steering her towards the castle gate. Where, for the first time, she noticed that nobody was going in, which probably accounted for the excess of people on the square. The big gates were open, as if to let vehicles in and out, but the way was blocked by police, two men and a woman, George striding over to address them.

‘Where’s Steve Britton?’

‘Gone back in, Mr Lackland.’

‘Only, I got Mrs Watkins here, from the Bishop’s office.’

The male cop’s expression said, So? Merrily saw that the gift shop, where visitors normally paid their entrance fees, was closed, unattended stands of booklets and postcards, pottery, tapestry, stationery all half-lit.

Again?

‘Top-heavy with clergy already, you ask me,’ the policewoman muttered. But George Lackland wasn’t listening.

‘Can we come in or not?’

The policeman thought about it, maybe remembering George’s top-table seat on the West Mercia Police Committee, but then he shook his head.

‘Can’t, sir. Sorry. Can you wait for the sergeant?’

Merrily followed George Lackland back towards the big cannon and the pollarded trees outside the walls.

Again…?

‘They got scaffolding up, see,’ George said. ‘On the inside of the Hanging Tower – idea being they’re going to bar them windows, stop this happening once and for all.’ His accent was broadening under stress. ‘Fellers doing the work, they gets here ’bout half-nine, so obviously nobody could get up while they was there. Girl – teenager – must’ve known that, too, waits till they breaks for lunch, and then she’s up the scaffolding like a monkey and well up on the ledge before anybody spots her.’

The square seemed to tilt like a giant board game.

‘And she…’ Merrily looked up. This close to the curtain wall, the only tower visible was the Keep, from which Robbie Walsh had fallen. ‘The girl’s still up there?’

‘Far’s I know, aye. They blocked off the footpath, back of the castle. Somebody told me she’d warned ’em if they brought the fire brigade with a ladder, she’d… well, she’d go off.’

‘She’s threatening to jump?’

‘Oh aye. Oh, bloody hell, yes.’

‘They know who she is?’

‘I don’t. They got this psychiatrist there now, reckons he’s got it all worked out. Reckons she’ll come down if they keeps it low-key. Police got all the visitors out, and there’s an ambulance standing by.’

‘This psychiatrist…’

‘I dunno who he is, but what I reckon is, you should be in there.’ George sank his hands into the pockets of his slacks, looking at the ground. ‘It was me rang Bernard, see… I wanted him to come over. But he wouldn’t.’

That was no surprise. Bishops didn’t do hands-on. Certainly not in a situation this public, this critical. And who, apart from George and a handful of cranks, would think it was anything at all to do with the Church?

She looked at the crowded square with a new awareness, saw that most of the shoppers and the tourists knew exactly what was going on but were putting on an act of responsible British disinterest, not glancing at the castle walls at least until they were past the police. And the animated sense of community… that was simply locals and tourists united in veiled voyeurism.

The local kids were less circumspect, small gangs of them gathering, a boy of about eight dancing around the policewoman on the gate.

‘Kelly, how will we know if she jumps, Kelly?’

‘You’ll hear a big bump – now go away.’

Same laconic policewoman who’d dealt with Bell after Phyllis Mumford drowned. The boy looked mildly shocked for a moment, then let out a cackle of laughter.

‘Kids,’ Merrily said. ‘All heart.’

And thought, Bell?

Realizing then that she’d been aware, for some moments, of a familiar BMW sports car parked near the Castle Bookshop. She could see a notice in its window, guessed it would say Doctor on Call.

Well, of course. And she was in no position to say anything. While claiming she was on leave, she’d gone behind Saltash’s back and, worse, Callaghan-Clarke’s, and had had a meeting with George Lackland to discuss the possibility of an exorcism-of-place – must be true, it was in the papers, with a nice big incriminating picture. Merrily Watkins, Deliverance Consultant, had lied from the beginning.

And she couldn’t, in her own defence, mention Bernie Dunmore’s role in the deception because, after she fell, Bernie was likely to be the principal target. All she could do now to save him from an ignominious exit – and the diocese from the possibility of a disastrous successor – was to resign quietly. Take on the extra parishes and disappear.

Just around the corner at the end of the block, an elderly man in a hat and a woman in a pink Puffa jacket were standing outside the Assembly Rooms, a placard made of corrugated cardboard stretched between them, its message scrappily written in thick fibre-tip.

THE INNOCENTS ARE DYING. ONLY THE POWER OF GOD CAN STOP THIS NOW.

‘Friends of yours, Mr Mayor?’

‘I know them.’

‘Mmm.’

‘What you saying, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Why did you want Bernie here, Mr Mayor?’

‘You know why. Because, whatever he says, he believes there’s something evil here.’ George looked over Merrily’s head, across the town. ‘He’s seen it, after all.’

Merrily watched a fire engine rumbling onto the square, no speed, no lights, no warbler. The emergency services apparently did not take their instructions from a disturbed teenager.

And here was the Mayor of Ludlow, still publicly hanging all this on an 800-year-old ghost rather than a living woman in a period shroud – an increasingly pitiable woman who, for some reason, he regarded as his Nemesis. Why?

‘If you’re a real friend of the Bishop’s, George,’ Merrily said, ‘you won’t mention that ten-quid bet ever again.’

Another policeman was approaching the castle gateway from the inside.

‘Ah, here’s Sergeant Britton,’ George said. ‘Let’s see if we can get you in there.’

But she was uncertain. This was no time for a confrontation with Saltash.

And was it really a young girl up there, or…?

Do something, Lucy Devenish had told him. How many times had Lucy said that?

Lol drove due north, up the Welsh border, under an unsure sky in which clouds would gather and then fall away like discarded underwear. Spring was an unbalanced time, made him nervous. He didn’t really know what to do, apart from act as some kind of messenger boy. All he was doing as he drove was thinking about Andy Mumford, without whom none of this – not least that perfidious eye-injury – would ever have happened.

Thinking about Mumford – not something that enough people seemed to have done over the years. What had this glum, anonymous man stirred up?

‘Miserable Andy’ was what Gomer Parry called him because he rarely smiled, never seemed to be particularly enjoying his work. Gomer must be twenty years older and still riding his JCB like he was part of some heavy-metal rodeo, but Gomer was self-employed and could retire if and when he wanted to, while Mumford had been forced into it and, like Dylan Thomas had advised, he wasn’t going gentle. Retirement: maybe this was the most savage rite of passage.

Which made Lol think about himself and the received wisdom that said that if you hadn’t made it in the music business by the time you reached thirty it wasn’t going to happen, ever. So it probably wasn’t going to happen. Was that worse than being like Belladonna, an international cult-figure at twenty and now some eerie Sunset Boulevard ghost?

As he was approaching the lights in the centre of Leominster, Lol’s phone broke ironically into the first bars of ‘Sunny Days’, the nearest he’d ever come to an actual hit. He pulled off the road into the forecourt of the petrol station on the corner, eased up against some second-hand cars, all of them at least ten years younger than the Astra.

Jane said, ‘You’d better pull over, Lol, what I have to tell you could cause an accident.’

‘One moment.’ He switched off the engine. ‘OK.’

‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘First off…’

First off, she told him, he’d be well advised to start looking for Mum in the general area of Ludlow Castle, where a girl was threatening suicide. Yes, another one, and it was no use asking who or why because this was all Sophie had known, therefore it was all Jane knew.

‘Christ,’ Lol said.

‘OK, the second thing. You sure you’re off the road?’

‘Get on with it, Jane.’

‘I’d like to claim total credit for this, but it was Sophie. I didn’t think even Mum meant that much to Sophie – well, not in comparison with the cathedral. Just shows, doesn’t it? So, like, Sophie talked to the Dean.’

‘The Dean.’

‘At the cathedral? The steely-eyed number-cruncher in charge of the cathedral? It’s pretty clear Sophie’s got some serious dirt on the Dean that she’s been, like, saving up, and now it’s really come good. I mean, circumstantial evidence more than anything else, but the Dean is the missing component that connects everybody.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Lol said. ‘What are we talking about? This is about Mumford? Belladonna?’

The line seemed to fracture.

‘… And we checked it on the Net and it’s a bit of a gob-smacker.’

‘Start again, Jane,’ Lol said.

‘Can’t be done,’ Steve Britton said. ‘Sorry. Can’t allow it. Tense as hell in there, George. That girl goes out the hole, there’ll be an inquest on all of us.’

‘The hole?’ George said.

‘Well… window. Jagged hole in the wall. She’s up on this deep window ledge, and they can’t reach her. She made us take away the scaffolding – leaned back, half out the window, said if we didn’t take it away she’d… you know. Don’t look that big a drop from below, but when you’re up there…’

Steve Britton was probably in his forties, nearly as tall as George, with a scrubbed face and invisible eyebrows. He nodded at Merrily, across the castle gate.

‘Friend of Andy Mumford’s, right?’

‘You seen him lately, Mr Britton?’

He laughed. ‘I’m glad to say, no. Poor old boy.’

‘Who’s in with the girl?’

‘Inspector Gee and Dr Saltash. I think you know him, too. My superior suggested he go in, seeing he was around. Also the woman minister. Canon…’

‘Callaghan-Clarke.’

‘That’s it. Seems they been studying the situation,’ Steve Britton said. ‘It’s not an easy one. It’s not normal, this, is it?’

‘Do you think you could tell them I’m here… and I might just be able to help?’

Steve Britton coughed. ‘Like I say, a bit difficult in there just at the moment, Mrs Watkins. Perhaps if you could come back later?’

‘I see.’ Seemed clear he’d been told that if she turned up she definitely wasn’t to be allowed in. She could imagine Saltash briefing Steve Britton, in confidence. Not for me to try to influence you, Sergeant, but a woman with a stress problem in a situation this volatile… would that be wise?

‘Inspector Gee’s also very much the right person for this,’ Steve Britton said. ‘You’ll remember Sandy Gee, George – DC here, four, five years ago? Went back into uniform to take charge of family liaison in Shrewsbury. Plump person. Three kids, now. Needs somebody a bit mumsy, I reckon. Seems very young, this girl.’

‘So it is a girl?’ Merrily said. ‘I mean, you’ve seen her yourself?’

‘Who’d you think it was?’ Steve Britton eyed her, curious.

‘Do you know her name yet?’

Steve Britton pursed his lips.

George Lackland snorted. ‘God’s sake, Stephen, how long you known me, boy?’ He turned to Merrily. ‘People help each other in a small town. It’s how things get done. How good connections get made.’

The Mayor turned back to Steve Britton and gave him a long, considering stare, as if their future relationship and all it might promise was on the line here.

‘Samantha Cornwell,’ Steve said. ‘And it wasn’t me told you.’

‘Goes without saying, Stephen. Local?’

‘Ledbury. Like the other one.’

Merrily blinked. ‘That means she knew Jemmie Pegler?’

Steve Britton looked uneasy; he’d already said too much.

‘Thank you, boy,’ George said. ‘It won’t be forgotten.’

Merrily followed the Mayor back onto the square, everything reshaping.

She’d assembled a scenario in which Bell, betrayed, had fled to Marion’s tower, all ghosts together, but it was wrong. Now the scene in her head was a corner table at the café in a mews across the car park from Hereford Police HQ. On the table, a computer printout, e-mail format:

if i emptied every packet and every bottle in there and swallowed the lot. well just be sick as a dog most likely. how sad is that, sam. im not going out sad. im not. when i go theyll fucking know ive gone.

Samantha Cornwell. Sam?

Over by the tourist office, she saw the eight-year-old boy who was waiting for the big bump. He was staying very close now to a woman pushing a pram, presumably his mother, and he was no longer laughing. Often the way with children, the bravado melting in the suddenly frightening heat of reality. The policewoman, Kelly, had known her psychology: just about the last thing this kid wanted to hear was a big bump that would resound in his room at bedtime.

Merrily, too, but what the hell could she do?

The sun bulged like a damaged eye behind purplish cloud. The couple known to George Lackland had shifted their cardboard placard closer to the castle wall.

ONLY THE POWER OF GOD CAN STOP THIS NOW.

Tell that to Nigel Saltash.

Duss, duss, duss.

Mumford

JUST THE ONCE, after denying everything with his usual contempt and arrogance and bravado, Jason Mebus tried to leg it.

Choosing his moment perfectly, when Mumford – and it could happen to anybody, there was nothing you could do – let go this unstoppable sneeze.

Bringing his knee up into Mumford’s crotch, not quite getting it right but enough to break free. Would have been well away, too, up the river bank, through the grounds of the derelict restaurant under the pines, if he hadn’t stopped for the parting gesture, like he always did on the CCTV pictures.

Vicious sneer and a rigid finger up at the camera.

With what he thought was a safe distance between them, he turned round and did it at Mumford, who was on his knees in the dirt.

Mumford did nothing – made a point, in fact, of showing no pain and looking unimpressed, like he’d merely bent to pick up a coin. Which was when Jason started screaming that if he’d had his way, they’d have finished hanging Robbie Walsh. Finished off the job by the time the Collins kid had started crying and run out of the shed and gone to fetch his dipshit dad.

As it was, they’d cut the little gayboy down and they were out of there. Which was a shame, all the trouble they’d gone to, to fix it up like a suicide, even ripping the hanging page out of the history book so it could be left by the body, and then putting the book back in Walsh’s school bag.

Jason telling him all this just in case Mumford thought he was dealing with an amateur. How it would’ve gone down as suicide, no problem ’cause everybody knew Walshie was having a bad time on the Plascarreg. But enough people would know what had really happened to make it crystal clear that there were certain individuals on this estate that you did not fuck with.

‘Now that’s a lie, ennit, Jason?’ Mumford said, back on his feet, strolling nonchalantly towards the vermin. ‘No way, see, that you’d leave a body in a shed next to a crack factory.’

‘Nah, that was gonner be over, anyway,’ Jason said. ‘Couldn’t trust that unit no more. He might’ve told somebody. Might even’ve told you, dad.’

Jason backing off the whole time, along the edge of the water. Knowing he was safe, with his long legs, from this overweight old bastard. Telling Mumford that if his fat face was ever seen on the Plascarreg again it was gonner get sliced off.

Bringing his hand down like a guillotine.

‘Sliced off like a side of bacon, dad.’

And it was as he was saying these actual words, making the gesture, that he backed into an empty petrol can with one of his heels and turned round too quickly and lost his footing and nearly went in the river.

Thank you, boy.

Mumford – brain inflamed with the images of Robbie’s suffering that Jason had so lovingly invoked, and moving pretty near as fast as when he was a promising athlete in his teens and early twenties – went to rescue the boy, at the same time taking him down with a sharp little knuckle-punch to the throat.

Jason retching pitifully, but all Mumford could hear was him saying, with his casual, hard-boy confidence, We was only his very best mates, dad. We had some awesome laughs with Robbie.

The last laugh being at the top of the Keep, at Ludlow Castle.

All added up. They wouldn’t have known about the significance, to Robbie, of the Hanging Tower. The Keep, with steps all the way to the top, was so much easier. What was also useful was that, instead of landing on the public footpath outside, for all to see, the body would drop privately into what they called the Outer Bailey, all locked up for the night.

Jason or, more likely, two of them – Jason and Chain-boy, say – would’ve hidden out somewhere in the castle with Robbie till the place was closed and then taken him up there, thrown him off, quietly vacated the premises, with all the time in the world. No, they weren’t amateurs, these boys.

So why hadn’t Robbie told anybody about the hanging?

Or had he? Could be Robbie had told Mathiesson. Mumford could hear the toe-rag laughing. Gotter be a man… stand up to ’em. Telling himself that Robbie had exaggerated the story. Not telling Angela anything.

Mumford drew back his foot as Jason tried to get up. Pity it was only a trainer.

Still, Jason was cowering away, his eyes alive with fear. Or mabbe it was the look on Mumford’s face that did that – Mumford listening to his poor drowned mother.

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?

Uncle Andy, who could easily have gone that very morning to the house opposite Tesco’s and had a long and meaningful chat with Robbie, probably ending with a full statement and Robbie not having time to go to the castle that afternoon and therefore still being alive.

Had this not been the same Uncle Andy who just couldn’t face the thought of his old man formally welcoming him to the wonderful world of retirement.

Another time, another place, Andy was going to weep.

And he wasn’t stupid. Knew that what he was doing now was no substitute, was unlikely to make him feel any better.

But at least Uncle Andy was finally here for Robbie Walsh and all the other Robbie Walshes who would be hanged, cut, beaten by this scum who had every reason to think the useless, bureaucratic, CPS-constricted police service was never gonner touch him.

Mumford looked down at him.

‘This river, Jason, the Wye. When I was a boy, much younger than you, folks used to say the River Wye demanded a sacrifice every year. Used to say the mothers was always scared to let their kids go anywhere near the water till somebody somewhere had been pulled out dead. You yeard that one?’

Jason said nothing. There was drool all over his mouth, and his eyes were wet. His famous jacket, with all the zips, had split under an arm.

‘Some very old man was considered best,’ Mumford said. ‘Or a drunk. Or a tramp.’

Jason snuffled and rolled away from the water’s edge.

‘Or anybody that wouldn’t be missed,’ Mumford said, thinking how primitive and tribal this had been for the 1950s.

‘But we was told we better be good kiddies else we might be the ones wouldn’t be missed.’

A few minutes later, as he began a more formal interrogation of the suspect, the possibility that this would not end with Jason’s death and disposal in the River Wye had dwindled to a minuscule point of light at the end of a very long tunnel already fogged with a suffocating rage against a world that had no further use for the imperturbable Detective Sergeant Mumford.

42 Like Heat

SHE LOOKED SO lonely when he found her, this small figure hunched up in the fleece with the torn pocket. She’d been trying to get it over to a policewoman on the castle gate that the girl in the castle was linked with the last one, Jemima Pegler, and the policewoman had looked at her like she was just another voyeur determined to get in on the action.

‘Thank you,’ the policewoman said coldly. ‘They know.’

That was it, a blank snub: you are irrelevant to this, you’re as useless as the people with the power-of-God placard. You are wasting my valuable time.

Go.

Nobody else wanted to talk to her. She said she’d been looking for Belladonna, but there was no sign of her either.

This was Merrily Watkins: any responsibility going spare, she’d accept it.

Lol virtually dragged her into the Assembly Rooms. There was a café upstairs, with big windows from which you could see the edge of the square, and they sat close together like sad young lovers, watching the light beginning to fade, although it was still two hours to sunset.

‘You shouldn’t have come all this way.’

‘You shouldn’t have forgotten your mobile,’ Lol said. ‘Who poisoned the local cops against you? Saltash?’

He was watching her eat, guessing this was the first time today. She was forking up salad in a desultory way as though, if he turned away, she might empty her plate into a pot plant.

‘And where is Saltash?’

‘In the castle. Dispensing psychological wisdom.’

She’d explained about Jemima’s e-mails to the girl called Sam and told him a lot about Belladonna, as if she had to justify her continued presence here even to him.

When Merrily was starting to seem less fraught, Lol ordered some more tea and told her about Jonathan Scole and the killing of the Ghostours man’s parents.

She pushed her plate to one side, staring at him. Bombshell.

‘He said they’d died in their car. I was thinking, road accident…’

‘Don’t know where the car comes in. Unless they were shot getting into it after leaving the café.’

‘The police think Jon Scole killed his own parents?’

‘Couldn’t have done it himself – he had an alibi,’ Lol said. ‘But the proceeds of the robbery were so meagre, the shooting so professional, that the cops were thinking cut-price contract killing. He just seems to have been the only one likely to profit from having them dead.’

‘What about…’ She scrabbled around. ‘I dunno, protection. Maybe they refused to pay protection money. Or a rival café-owner with a grudge?’

‘Sure, or they were dealing drugs under the counter. But you’d expect the police up there to have checked all those angles, wouldn’t you? Do you like this Scole?’

‘He’s…’ Merrily was looking around – for ashtrays, he guessed, to see if it was OK to smoke in here; apparently not. ‘He’s driven. A lot of energy, enthusiasm. Yes, he’s likeable. Someone who could have both his parents killed? A monster? No.’

Lol said perhaps Scole had been forced to leave the area to escape the damaging gossip. Understandable, in that case, that he’d changed his name. Understandable, too, that he’d simply say that his parents had died rather than have to go into it all with strangers, over and over again.

‘I just thought you should know,’ Lol said, aware that, for Merrily, more knowledge was more responsibility.

But the main responsibility tonight was his.

He finished his tea. ‘What was the name of that other guy?’

‘What other guy?’

‘The guy who came to you with Saltash and the woman.’ Lol stood up. ‘Maybe I can get us into the castle.’

Merrily was disturbed. Yes, it felt so much better with Lol here, it always did, but there was something he wasn’t telling her. He had this almost startled air, like someone reanimated after a long time in hibernation, this sense of purpose coming off him like heat – a guy who normally felt safer in the shadows and who wasn’t, as far as she knew, familiar with this town.

She stood with her back to the castle wall, out of sight while Lol talked softly to the policewoman, Kelly. A big sign said: CASTLE CLOSED. Almost all the shops were shut by now, and the crowds had thinned and the busker had gone.

And cautious, low-key Lol was chatting up a policewoman in a futile bid to get inside the castle. It was not like him.

‘I don’t get this with you guys,’ Kelly said to Lol. ‘I don’t see it.’

‘Trust me,’ Lol said.

‘I don’t trust anybody outside my own family, and I wouldn’t trust them with any money,’ Kelly said. ‘Stay there.’

A man was walking quickly up to the top of Mill Street, something swinging by his side that reminded Merrily, at first, of Bell’s mandolin case, and then she saw it was a TV camera. Had to happen at some stage.

Lol came back to stand with Merrily. The day’s spring heat was spent, and he held one of her cold hands between both of his, as George Lackland strode up from the direction of Woolworths. George without his overall: dark grey suit, tie, watch-chain, a newspaper under his arm. Mr Mayor. She saw the reporter, with a short boom-mike attached to the camera, homing in on him: Amanda Patel, of BBC Midlands Today.

‘That woman knows me.’ She pulled Lol behind the big cannon, as the cameraman positioned George with his back to the castle gate.

‘Rolling,’ the cameraman said to Amanda, and then George was telling her he didn’t know who the girl in there was, and it was beyond devastating that this should happen again.

‘We’re all praying they can talk her down. There are people in the church now, praying.’

‘Mr Lackland,’ Amanda said, a small audience, mainly kids, forming behind her, ‘you were reported this morning to be calling for an exorcism here. And now this happens. Do you see a connection?’

‘Not in so many words,’ George said. ‘You know me, Amanda, we’ve had many a drink together in the Feathers, and you know I only act on what I believe the majority of people here would want me to—’

‘I’m sorry, George,’ Amanda said. ‘Could we start again, without the personal stuff; this is likely to go network.’ She turned to the cameraman. ‘Can you wipe that, Neil?’

George had clearly done this before, many times, knew how to kill a question he didn’t want to answer. Amanda was repositioning them for a second take when Merrily heard the voice of the policewoman, Kelly, from the other side of the castle gate.

‘Where’s he gone? Mr Longbeach!’

Lol hugged Merrily quickly and went to the gate.

‘All right, you can go in, Mr Longbeach,’ Kelly said. ‘Across the green, over the bridge, through the gate at the big tower. Sergeant Britton will be there. Don’t talk to anyone but Sergeant Britton, you understand?’

‘Thank you,’ Lol said.

The sun was hanging like a tarnished penny over distant Mid-Wales hills as they opened the castle gate for Lol, a diminutive figure in his Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt.

Merrily stared: what was he doing?

His interview over, George spotted Merrily and came across. They were almost alone on the square now, except for police, press people and the couple with the Power of God placard, who had been away and come back. The cameraman was trying to shoot the placard, instructing them not to look into the camera.

‘Come and have a coffee, Mrs Watkins,’ George said.

‘Just had some tea, thanks. I’m fine.’

‘You’re wasting your time, they’re not gonner let you in.’

‘No.’ She knew how pathetic she must be looking. ‘George…

‘You want to come back to the house, talk to Nancy?’

‘George, what happened between you and Bell?’

She was watching his face and saw it flinch. Saw his whole frame rock, the way a telegraph pole sometimes seemed to when hit by a sudden gust. But George recovered quickly.

‘Mrs Watkins, I think I told you and Bernard that I have as little as possible to do with the woman.’

‘Yes, but why?’

‘Because she’s not my type of person.’

‘All right. The petition, then.’ She leaned against the great cannon. ‘Why did you feel the need to manufacture that petition? What do you care about exorcizing Marion de la Bruyère? Reflecting public demand? Bollocks, George. There virtually isn’t any.’

‘Not the most seemly language from a lady of the cloth.’

‘Why don’t you let those poor people take their placard home? They’d much rather be watching Casualty.’

‘Not very well disposed towards you, are they?’ the Mayor said. ‘Those folks in the castle.’

‘You’re changing the subject.’

‘Woman with white hair and a dog collar? Doesn’t seem to like you at all.’

‘Nice try, George.’ She looked across at the TV team, on the corner of Mill Street. ‘Could be a long night for Amanda. I wonder if she’d like another interview, expressing serious doubts that anyone’s interested in disposing of Marion. As such. Only that someone might be hoping someone else might be damaged in the… in the slipstream of an exorcism. Or is cleansing a better word? A general cleansing. The removal of something dirty. Which wouldn’t necessarily be my word, but might be yours, Mr Mayor.’

George adjusted his watch-chain. ‘Leave this alone, Mrs Watkins. You’re on your own here. Even Bernard’s keeping his head down. Besides, you’re not even wearing your clerical uniform.’ He looked across at Amanda. ‘She wouldn’t—’

‘Amanda knows me. I’m like you, done this before. Learned how to use the media to put the cat among the pigeons. And sometimes to take the cat away before it does any damage. Not that I normally go in for that. I just… don’t seem to have much to lose tonight.’

‘I can’t talk about it.’ George backed away. ‘Not to a woman.’

‘Oh, you can,’ Merrily said softly. ‘I’m very non-judgemental. And awfully discreet.’

‘Please…’

‘And it’s not as if you were the first. Just the first citizen.’

The Inner Bailey was more impressive and better preserved than you would have expected from outside. A serious bit of building: walls and towers, archways and openings. Defensive holes expanded into stone window frames, entrances exposing stone stairways spiralling into the dark.

And it was quite dark in here; the retreating sun, already cloaked in aspiring rain clouds, had slipped away behind the outer walls, and Lol was feeling the chill of second thoughts.

‘Just that they weren’t expecting you,’ Sergeant Britton told him.

‘No. Sorry about the casual…’ Lol tugged at his Gomer Parry sweatshirt. ‘I just had the message from the Bishop’s office, and I thought, better not waste any time.’

‘Not to worry – they said you were slightly unconventional, sir.’

In the centre of the inner space was a squat round tower with a Norman arch and a mullioned window but no roof. A group of people had assembled outside it, mainly uniformed police and paramedics. Lol kept his distance.

‘How’s the girl?’

‘Sitting tight. Nearly four hours now. Dr Saltash is convinced she has absolutely no intention of doing it, just wants an audience.’ Steve Britton sniffed. ‘Wouldn’t bet on it, meself. She’ll be quite rational one minute, accepting a pack of sandwiches, can of Coke… and then she’s back up into the window space, all hunched up. And you know that all she’s gotter do is lean gently back and it’s all over.’

‘Salt— Nigel’s talking to her himself?’

‘Sandy Gee, our family liaison officer – she’s doing most of the talking, sometimes the Canon, when the girl starts on about being possessed. Dr Saltash is watching and making observations, offering advice. He says he’ll come out and talk to you in a few minutes, if you just hang on here. There’s really not that much space in there, and they don’t want her to feel crowded or threatened.’

‘When you say possessed? Things were a bit rushed. The Bishop’s office didn’t have time to explain much on the phone.’

‘They watch too much TV, sir. Too many DVDs. And what was in the morning papers didn’t help, obviously. All I know is she apparently turned up this morning, hung around for a couple of hours, found nothing was happening and got herself in a state. Then she sees the scaffolding in the tower, and up she goes. First she’s come to kill herself, then she’s waiting for the exorcism. Confused.’

‘Have they… done anything? Any kind of…’

‘Mumbo-jumbo? Sorry, sir, forgetting who I’m talking to. Long day. No, Dr Saltash advises against it, and I think he’s probably right. In my experience, you need to calm people like this down, not overexcite them.’

‘Sarge!’ The policewoman, Kelly, appeared by the gatehouse, holding up a mobile phone. ‘DI Bliss, Hereford. They’ve found the parents. They were shopping in Worcester.’

‘OK,’ Steve Britton said. ‘Better have a word. Excuse me, Mr Longbeach.’

And so Lol was on his own when Saltash came out of the castle.

Never seen him before, but there could be no mistake. Something in the walk, something in the cursory inspection of the police and paramedics gathered by the sawn-off round tower.

Sometimes, Lol wondered if there really was some trait, some aspect of demeanour, that united psychiatrists or if it was simply something that he projected on men once he knew that this was what they did. And they were men, nearly all of them. Maybe most women didn’t have the arrogance for it. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to sleep so easily.

Saltash wore a cream-coloured cotton suit. His tie was loosened. His face was narrow and evenly tanned, lined rather than wrinkled, and his grey beard was barbered to the length of his grey hair. He stood on the short, tufted grass, where shadows converged, looking around for a man whom Merrily had said was plump and friendly and conspicuously camp. He didn’t move, expecting the man to approach him.

Lol wandered over. ‘Dr Saltash?’

Saltash stared through him. ‘I’m looking for Martin Longbeach. Is he here?’

‘I think you’re looking for me.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Saltash said. ‘Because you don’t appear to be Martin Longbeach.’

‘And you don’t appear to be Lord Shipston,’ Lol said, aware of so many years tumbling into this moment. ‘But I think you know him.’

43 Nobody but God

THE PALMERS’ WINDOW told its tale in reds and blues and gold.

Merrily made out a ship bound for the Holy Land, a stylized ship like a floating horn, with people far too big to fit into it. She saw King Edward the Confessor and St John the Evangelist, whose chapel was dominated by this window. The mystical ring passing between St John and the King, via the Palmers, all dressed in blue.

Mostly myth and wishful thinking. The Saxon King Edward had predated the first of the Ludlow Palmers by about two centuries.

The Chapel of St John, the original Palmers’ chapel, was to the left of the high altar in St Laurence’s, a dark three-aisle palace of a church, not far short of a cathedral. George Lackland stood at the entrance to the chapel, his back to a narrow door set in stone. Looking down, Merrily saw she was standing on an inscribed tombstone.

‘Guild wardens buried under here,’ George said.

He and Merrily were alone in the church, George having obtained the keys from the verger on his way out. Who could anyone trust with the keys more than George, former churchwarden and a merchant of quality who, in the Middle Ages, would surely have been a prominent Palmer himself?

Not that the Lacklands had been in Ludlow in the Middle Ages; they hadn’t left East Anglia until the eighteenth century. But George, with his tiered face and his slow-burn eyes, looked like part of the story, part of the myth.

It would have been enough for Bell.

‘One weekend – a Saturday – we were all here… in the church.’ His voice was dry and ashy. ‘Nancy and Susannah and Stephen and me. And her.’

Merrily recalled George’s description of Bell on that day or a similar one: dressed decently and conservatively. Her Edwardian summer dress, her blonde hair neatly styled. Quite girlish, rather attractive.

A day in the rosy dawn of Bell’s love affair with Ludlow. Tripping and gliding around the Buttercross, her smiling face upturned to the sun.

‘Like a buttercup,’ George said now, his voice laden with a damp sorrow. ‘And then she wanted to go to the top of the tower.’ He turned to the narrow door behind him. ‘This is the way, behind here, see.’

‘Famous viewpoint,’ Merrily said, ‘I’d guess.’

‘Spectacular. See for miles. But it’s a long old haul – couple of hundred steps, and it seems like more. Bell said would someone like to go up with her? Nancy said, no, thanks, once was enough, and her legs ached for days afterwards. Susannah wasn’t particularly interested either, so I said – because, I suppose, I didn’t want her to think I was an old man – I said, Aye, I’ll go. I’ll go up with you.’

George turned his back on the door. He said the steps were very narrow and twisty, so it was necessary to go up in single file. There was a rope that you could hold on to, to help pull yourself up.

Bell went first. You can catch me if I fall, George, she said.

‘She didn’t fall. She was very light on her feet.’

‘Oh yes.’ Merrily recalled the stage act – split black skirts, bare feet.

‘I tried to leave a bit of space between us, see, but when you’re on a tight spiral the person in front’s apt to disappear around a bend. You know what I mean?’

‘Mmm.’ Vicars knew about church spirals.

‘So, three or four times, Bell would come to a sudden stop on a bend, and I’d go bumping up against her. Which was embarrassing for me, but she’d just laugh. That laugh that she has, far back in her throat.’

George wouldn’t look at Merrily while he was talking. His gaze was raised to the Palmers’ window, as if he was wishing he could sail away to the Holy Land or anywhere. Merrily felt that the closer George’s story took them to the top of the tower, the more it was plummeting to the bottom of his own deepest well.

He’d refused to tell her about this in the street, insisted on coming into the church, knowing it was about to close for the night, as if it was part of his penance to unload it all before God and a woman young enough to be his daughter, who also happened to be an ordained priest.

George in purgatory.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘when we finally emerged at the top, Bell starts dancing around, with her arms thrown out. Well… there’s not much room up there – big sort of pyramid coming out the middle with the weathercock sticking out the top.’

Such a proud cock, Bell had said and giggled outrageously, the sleeves of her dress rippling up her arms.

George’s half-shadowed face was blushing a deeper red than King Edward’s footstool in the Palmers’ window as he described how he’d turned away from the woman and gone to look out at the view to the west, doing a bit of a commentary.

Over there in the west, behind those hills, that’s towards Knighton, see, which is in Radnorshire – and that’s Wales. Not many folks know that Ludlow, although it’s in England, used to be the main administrative centre for Wales – the military capital.’

When he’d stopped talking, there had been no sound from behind him, no rustling of her papery frock. When he turned, she was nowhere in sight. Ludlow was spread out far below them, like a model village, and his heart had lurched and he’d shouted, in alarm, Bell!

And heard her laughing again, a dry, brittle, chattering sound. Looking down in horror to see her coiled on the stones at his feet, those arms and hands weaving in and out of his legs like white serpents.

‘Serpents,’ George spat.

There was an inviting-looking gift shop at the foot of the vast nave, with cards and all the books and pamphlets about Ludlow and its church. Merrily went to stand there while George stood in the nearest aisle, with his feet together and his head hanging down, like a victim of self-crucifixion.

Of course, it went without saying that he’d never behaved like that in his life before, not even when he was a young man, before he’d been married to Nancy.

Well, no.

George was… the epitome of Old Ludlow… An honourable man. Conservative in every conceivable sense of the word.

‘And on the church.’ A bony hand tightening on a pew end. ‘Of all places, on the tower itself, where…’

Where nobody could see them but God.

As if they were putting on a show for Him.

‘On the Monday,’ George said. ‘I formally handed in my resignation as senior churchwarden. Said I was not able to perform the duties as assiduously as was necessary, due to my impending mayoral year. And this, I’m afraid, is the first time I’ve been in here since, apart from services. And even then I feel dirty… soiled. Every Sunday, soiled, a disgrace.’

‘I’m the first person you’ve told?’

‘Other than in my prayers.’

Merrily didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t exactly a huge surprise. There had to have been something. She wondered if Susannah had actually known, from Bell, or if she’d just suspected.

‘George,’ she said. ‘Bell… well, she’s a bit of an expert at this sort of thing. Knows how to…’

‘There can be no excuse!’ George’s knuckles shone like marbles. ‘If I hadn’t already been mayor-elect I’d have turned that down as well.’

‘But surely you realize it was…’

But how could he? How much could he possibly have known or even surmised about Bell’s behaviour?

Not for her to explain to him the probable truth about why Belladonna had seduced him… here…

… That the tower was the spindle in the centre of the wheel of Ludlow and he was its human equivalent. Bell gathering in all her magic, her charisma, and spraying it out in what Jon Scole had called blue sparks. Spraying her sparks all over poor George Lackland, first citizen.

Sympathetic magic, Huw Owen had said. All magic’s sympathetic magic.

‘George…’ Merrily moved away from the table of books. ‘Erm… it was… just the once, wasn’t it?’

George sprang away from the pew. ‘Good God, Mrs Watkins, what do you take me for?’

‘A bloke, George.’ She smiled. ‘You’re just a bloke.’

And, for all his local-government guile, a very naive bloke, even for his generation. He hadn’t seen it coming: the innocent Edwardian dress, the childlike glee at being in his town. And then his sudden exposure, on the top of his world, to this scented siren from another planet.

And what else was there besides the guilt and the shame at betraying his wife, his church, his status and his town? Had he also fallen – hopelessly, disgracefully, unforgivably – just a little in love with Mrs Pepper?

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 Gascoigne would ever hear it or I’d ever record it. It was just’ – Lol grinned – ‘therapy. And then suddenly, there it was on the CD, without me really thinking of the implications. But you knew about that, anyway.’

Saltash didn’t react. A woman came out of the castle, carrying a tray with mugs on it, as if there was nothing going on in there except minor conservation work.

‘I mean, it was bound to get back. It’s had a few reviews, and of course the reviews tend to mention the singer’s history, and a couple referred to that song specifically because it’s the only explicit loony-bin song on the album. Maybe it’s been followed up on the Net, I don’t know. Maybe another of Gascoigne’s ex-patients picked up on it. Maybe several. Things spread so much faster these days, don’t they? Who was it played you the song, Saltash? Gascoigne himself? Or maybe you just heard about it from young Fyneham.’

‘If you actually think…’ Saltash’s smile went into an incredulous slant as he shook his head. ‘If you think that a man in Lord Shipston’s position has time to even listen to some piffling pop record, you’re not exactly supporting your assertion of sanity, Mr—’

‘Robinson. It’s the name on the album.’

‘Well, get out of my way, now, please, Mr Robinson, I’ve listened to enough of this drivel.’

‘Anyway, some friends of mine… they had a long chat with the Fynehams. The Fynehams, of Breinton? Who produce a magazine in which it appears that you have a stake, along with its founder, Lord Shipston?’

Saltash sighed. ‘You’re on such thin ice, my friend.’

‘I’ll be honest,’ Lol said. ‘I don’t quite know what you’re doing, but then I’m not sure you do either. But I strongly suspect Gascoigne, as a public figure now, would feel a lot happier if my recording career ended here and neither Merrily nor I retained any kind of respect or credibility…’

‘This is—’

‘A start. A complete loss of respect in the eyes of the community would be a start, wouldn’t it? Just in case it ever got out.’

‘Do you—?’

‘And I’m guessing – because this is not the kind of smear campaign that Gascoigne, or even you, would want to be involved in – that you helped finance Jack’s little business venture and left the details to him. Sadly, he’s nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is.’

‘And neither are you,’ Saltash said.

‘No? I think I’ve become a fairly harsh judge of my own limitations.’

Saltash looked at him again. His eyes were like stone, but not this stone, not sandstone, colder than that.

‘Mr Robinson, do you know how easy it would be for me to have you removed to a… place of safety? I mean removed now. This evening. We have most of the people for the preliminaries we need close at hand. And I can tell them whatever I consider to be pertinent.’

Memory jolt. Gascoigne, who must have been quite young then – no more than late thirties – murmuring, In here, I can say what I like about you, never forget that, Laurence, and everyone here listens to me and acts accordingly, and no one will listen to you.

And Gascoigne had said many things, and written them too, and had them duplicated, passed them into the heart of the system: reports, assessments. If Gascoigne hadn’t moved on first, Lol sometimes wondered if he might still be there, on Victoria Ward, on extra medication.

‘I could tell them, for instance,’ Saltash said, ‘about your personal grudge, amounting to dangerous obsession, against people in my profession. And I can tell them about your absurd – but clinically quite explicable – suspicion that I had seduced your lady friend…’

Lol stepped back. ‘I’m sorry? What did you just say?’

‘… Your very attractive lady friend, already under immense strain after being appointed to a post for which she was quite clearly emotionally unsuitable. As a result of which I and my colleague, a senior cleric, had been unofficially assigned to try and advise her and perhaps restrain her from the kind of erratic behaviour that—’

‘You really are psychotic, aren’t you?’ Lol said.

The policeman by the gatehouse looked up.

Saltash smiled. ‘Oh, no, Mr Robinson. I’m not the one who, consumed by jealousy and a sense of inadequacy, attacked my girlfriend, causing at least one serious facial injury. For which, with regard to her social position, she will no doubt have attempted to concoct a plausible explanation, but, of course, it fools nobody in her parish, certainly not my good friend Dr Asprey. Do you think that policeman’s about to come over?’

No need to go back into town, George Lackland said, there was a quicker way to Jonathan’s place. He led Merrily through the churchyard, down a path with yew trees either side, six of them, through a garden with the small stones of the cremated, flowers everywhere, and the ancient Reader’s House opposite.

An entry led down to an inn yard where horse-drawn coaches must once have been unloaded. It was enclosed by black and white brick and timbered buildings, given a mauve cast by the evening sky.

‘The Bull Hotel.’ George strode across the courtyard and then they were on Corve Street, close to Lackland Modern Furnishings and Tom Pritchard’s hardware shop, so much a part of the town that she hadn’t noticed it before, only its swinging sign, like a pub sign, with a painting of a shire-horse on it.

‘Oldest-established ironmonger’s in Ludlow. Eighteenth century, maybe earlier. And a farrier’s before that, same site.’ George stopped. ‘What’s going on, Mrs Watkins? I been straight with you. Told you the truth, before God.’

‘George, I don’t know. Most of it’s in Bell’s head. She’s feeling persecuted… betrayed.’

‘By who?’

‘You… the women who may or may not have assaulted her in the streets last night…’

‘In the streets? When did—?’

‘I don’t know if that even happened. Forget it. And by me. I spent some time with her under… under false pretences. Then she sees that nice picture of me in the paper, and now I’m the enemy. And the person who introduced me to her – therefore the real traitor – is Jon Scole. There’s a hollow yew she’s had a door put into, with a lock, where she keeps items of importance to her, and it was broken into last night and something was stolen.’

‘She thinks that’s Scole?’

‘Even I’m beginning to think it’s Scole.’

And, oh God, it was true. Who else would have followed them last night?

His own song started playing in his head:

Tuesdays on Victoria Ward,

We always hated Tuesdays.

Reminding him how that song, those opening lines, had conquered his concert-block at the Courtyard in Hereford, because of the suppressed rage behind them… the spontaneous reaction of the audience making it suddenly all right.

Someone’s got to pay

Now Dr Gascoigne’s on his way

And it’s another

Heavy medication day…

The police constable who’d been walking across to them had stopped and had begun talking into a radio or a mobile phone. Lol looked at Saltash, with the round tower behind him in the middle of the Inner Bailey, with its Norman arched doorway. The tower was roofless, hollow, a shell.

‘It’s not enough, is it?’ Lol said. ‘It wouldn’t hold water. There’s no way you can touch me, you arrogant bastard.’

The sky was low and tight and red-veined, and he was aware of his own voice, crisp and contained, like in a recording studio with acoustic panels.

‘And Gascoigne – he’s not worried about that song, because, even with the very remote possibility that the album got into the outer reaches of the charts, the song doesn’t really say anything apart from describing his fondness for handing out pills. It’s what’s not in the song that he’s worried about. And I really wasn’t going to do anything about that – not my place. Especially with him out of hands-on psychiatry… which, considering some of the places his hands went, is no bad thing—’

‘Constable!’ Saltash shouted. ‘Excuse me, Constable!’

The policeman was still talking. He looked up, lifted a hand to Saltash.

‘So I suppose, normally, I’d just have left it at that,’ Lol said, ‘glad that at least the poor sods who’d been sectioned were no longer exposed to his attentions. Especially the women. Like Helen Weeks.’

‘Because I don’t have time to deal with you now, Mr Robinson,’ Saltash said softly, ‘I might simply tell the police you’re a journalist who’s talked his way in by assuming a false identity.’

‘I used to wander around the hospital as much as I could,’ Lol said, ‘watching ordinary people – people who worked there. Just to stay familiar with normal behaviour, the outside world. Helen Weeks was schizophrenic, so nobody ever believed what she said. She was very pretty and heard voices, and sometimes what the voices were telling her to do, she needed to be protected from that. So, yes’ – in case he was wondering – ‘I did see Gascoigne giving her a special consultation that wasn’t exactly my idea of protection. I climbed on a chair to look over the horrible frosted glass of his office and through the clear glass over the top.’

‘You sad little man,’ Saltash said.

And Lol finally hated him enough to start lying.

‘Well, Nigel, I don’t think that’s how they’ll see it at the Three Counties News Service. You know them? News agency in Gloucester, serving national papers – the Sun… Mirror… News of the World? The thing about the Three Counties, it’s all about money to them. If one paper turns it down, they’ll try another and then another, until everybody knows. Or, a story like this, they’ll maybe just send it all round.’

‘Not if I obtain an injunction to prevent you—’

‘You’re too late. A friend of mine has a long e-mail that we put together, detailing the full story, including a phone number for Helen Weeks and her sister who looks after her and two former porters we contacted who knew of other cases. If this friend doesn’t hear from me by ten tonight, the e-mail goes to the Three Counties.’

Lol looked into Saltash’s eyes and felt a surprising calm in his spine, like a soft shiver.

‘Try me, Nigel. Have me thrown out. Attempt to have me detained. Sectioned. Oh, and you’re in the e-mail, too, of course, in an attachment – transcript of a recorded conversation with Jack Fyneham. I think he’s – God forbid – your godson, isn’t he?’

‘Is there a problem, Dr Saltash?’ the policeman said.

‘And the Dean of Hereford,’ Lol said to Saltash. ‘He’s quoted too. Quite extensively.’

Saltash’s smile was like glass. ‘Everything’s fine now, officer, thank you.’

‘Always knew there was something not quite right about this boy,’ George said, low-voiced, when they were in the alley at the side of the shop. ‘Someone that age just turns up in town, goes round the estate agents inquiring about flats to rent, cheap, and then he takes a shop at the kind of rent would turn me pale.’

‘How do you know that?’ Merrily asked, but he was walking up the steps with the wrought-iron lamp at the top and didn’t answer. She thought, Masons, or perhaps some Old Ludlow traders’ network that was even more mutually supportive and exchanged intelligence on outsiders.

George took the steps two at a time, and she had a picture of him not going up the steps of the church tower that overheated afternoon, but coming down, very fast, and collapsing against the wall at the bottom, blinded by shame and some forbidden, guilt-gilded exultation that he didn’t, to this day, dare acknowledge.

‘Jonathan!’ Banging the door with a knobbly fist. ‘We’d like a word, boy. Councillor Lackland and Mrs Watkins.’

No answer.

‘Try the door, George.’

Recalling how it had sprung open when she’d flipped the handle from inside, and how glad she’d been because Jonathan had been coming on to her, in the wake of his apparent rejection of Bell’s advances. She’s all over me. Hot and… you know. Anybody could see she were burnin’ up…

‘It’s open!’ George went in. ‘Jonathan? It’s Councillor Lackland!’

She heard him tramping around, a door opening inside. A muffled ‘Jonathan?’ A silence. By the time she was halfway up the stairs, he was out again.

‘Let’s go,’ he said hoarsely.

‘George?’

He gripped the iron rail and then breathed in sharply and let go of the rail as though it were white-hot. He drove her down the steps, waving both arms as if he was herding ewes.

‘Go down.’

Her first thought was that he must have walked into something of a sexual nature, but then, when he began to step carefully down himself, keeping close to the wall, away from the rail, she saw the blood on the hand that had touched it.

There was a bulge like a knuckle in the Mayor’s forehead, and it was pulsing.

‘Some things a woman shouldn’t see,’ he said.

45 Marion

‘LOOK, SIÂN,’ SALTASH said. ‘Martin’s here.’

They were in a high but roofless space, some one-time great hall, with the remains of huge fireplaces, one above the other, time-blurred stone heads projecting from the walls along with the weeds. The sergeant, Steve Britton was there, too, as Siân Callaghan-Clarke’s pewter-eyed gaze flicked across to Lol and then back to Saltash, where she must have caught a warning look.

‘Hello, Martin,’ she said, finally.

A woman with presence and authority, Lol thought, but not comfortable here, in her dark grey business suit over the clerical shirt and collar. Not at home in ruins.

‘Look.’ Saltash jangled keys or something in a trouser pocket. ‘I’m afraid I shall have to leave you for a short while. I need to make some phone calls.’

This time Siân didn’t need a signal; she followed him out. Saltash’s calls would be to Lord Shipston, the Fynehams, his friend the Dean. Plans to make, defences to erect. Only the jittery keys expressing nerves.

‘I don’t think the Canon’s happy with this,’ Steve Britton said.

‘No.’ Lol saw two lightless, narrow openings; one of them had to be the way in to the Hanging Tower.

‘Mr Longbeach, let me be frank with you.’ Steve Britton’s hands moved as though he was hefting invisible weights. ‘There’s a very disturbed little girl in there, and we don’t want it to get dark on her. We don’t want to have to bring lights in, make a circus of it. So what I’d like to know – are you the bloke who does this stuff? I mean, I don’t know what you do, and I’m pretty damn sure that kid in there doesn’t, either. You know what I’m saying? If you haven’t got the full bell, book and candle with you, just…’

‘Fake it?’

‘Fake something.’

‘We don’t need to fake it,’ Lol said. ‘There’s someone—’

‘Not liking this, Steve.’ A plump woman in an orange fleece with a reindeer motif had come through one of the dark doorways. Black Country accent. ‘I thought we were getting somewhere, now she’s gone back into herself. Getting just a bit spooky again, if I must use that word.’

‘This is Mr Martin Longbeach, Sandy,’ Britton said. ‘Another, er, colleague of our friends out there. This is Inspector Sandy Gee, from our family liaison unit.’

Sandy Gee narrowed her eyes at Lol. ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before, haven’t I? Never forget a face, Martin. It’ll come to me. Meanwhile, I hope you’re prepared to do something. Thought we were getting somewhere, but I’m getting a teensy bit anxious. I think the doctor was right about her being delusional, but if we have to go along with a delusion to save her life, let’s do that, eh?’

Lol nodded at the opening from which Inspector Gee had emerged. ‘She’s on her own?’

‘Hell, no. Female paramed’s in with her. More than two people, she feels threatened, moves further into the window space. We’re trying to keep her talking because once or twice she’s nearly fallen asleep. Now you’d think that would mean we could nip up and snatch her, but she’s so very close to the opening it could just as easily mean she’d rock backwards and… gone.’

Sandy Gee shuddered. She was about Lol’s age, had frizzy hair, dyed a deep red, and earrings like joined-up multicoloured paper clips. Family liaison: was this the halfway point between policing and social work?

‘What I’d like to do,’ he said, ‘is bring in someone—’

‘To be quite honest, Martin, for the reasons I’ve just outlined, we really don’t want the world and his wife in there.’

‘One person…’ He hesitated. ‘Merrily Watkins?’

Sandy and Steve swapped glances. Sandy said, ‘Dr Saltash and the Canon—’

‘Have changed their minds about her,’ Lol said. ‘They’re probably discussing it now.’

Sandy Gee sucked in her small mouth, thought about it.

‘All right, go and find her, Steve.’ She turned to Lol. ‘Both of them were very firmly of the opinion that any kind of ceremonial would only fortify the fantasy that Sam’s constructed. Dr Saltash insisted that the only sensible strategy would be to gradually make her aware of the reality of her situation.’

‘And the fantasy is…?’

‘She seems to think that a number of… I don’t know, spirits? Dead people want her to join them. That’s over-simplifying it. It’s a lot to do with guilt at what she thinks she’s done, which Dr Saltash tried to tackle. But, in the end, she feels crowded by… influences she can’t get rid of.’ Sandy glanced over at the entrance to the tower. ‘We’ve managed to find the parents now, and we’re bringing them across, although she insists she doesn’t want to see them, but we’ll argue about that later. You know she was Jemima Pegler’s best friend?’

Lol nodded. ‘I know about the e-mails.’

‘Do you know about the boyfriend situation?’

Lol shook his head. Sandy took his arm and guided him up to the main way out. A police van was parked in the Inner Bailey now, near the separate round tower.

‘Jemmie Pegler, the only friend she had was Sam. But then she stole Sam’s boyfriend, Harry, so that was the end of that. Sam says Jemmie was letting him have sex with her, which Sam wouldn’t. This obviously gave Jemmie a feeling of power – short-lived when she heard what the other boys were saying. Jemmie was fat, you see, like me and, when you’re a fatty at school, life is hell, your self-esteem’s rock-bottom and you absolutely know you’ll never find a boyfriend because you’re so disgusting. If anybody ever got round to compiling statistics on this, I’m pretty sure they’d find that well over half the teenage pregnancies are fat girls. We don’t want to be chubby and mumsy, Martin, we want to be lithe and slinky and do parties, but in the end we go for what we think we can get.’

‘Sam and Jemmie had a falling out?’

‘Sam didn’t like her any more at all because Jemmie, even before she pinched Sam’s boyfriend, had been going well off the rails for a long time. I think Sam was getting frightened of her at this stage. Big girls, when they cease to be jolly and philosophical, can be very dark and threatening. Doing drugs doesn’t help. Nothing heavy at that stage, in Jemmie’s case – Es and whizz, a bit of blow, but she was moving up, you know? Also hitching rides with stupid little younger boys who’d nicked cars – very ominous. Taking risks. Doesn’t care what happens to her – maybe hoping something will happen to her. Jemmie was coming apart, no question about that.’

‘Didn’t having a boyfriend…?’

‘Oh well, that didn’t last, did it? Thinks she’s finally got something steady with Sam’s ex-boyfriend… Hoo! Terrific! I’m a real woman! And then, having had his evil way, this lovely Harry dumps her like an old sofa. So Jemmie is now very depressed indeed, because she’s lost the feller, and she’s also lost her very best friend, the only real friend she’s had. So then she’s desperately trying to get back with Sam, bombarding her with pitiful, wheedling e-mails, the way these kids do. They were at different schools, you see?’

‘Jemmie was manic-depressive?’

‘That was certainly what Dr Saltash thought. Now Sam… the thing with her, she’s a very soft-hearted girl, basically. She’s quite pretty, but not too pretty, and perhaps a bit short on confidence – this is my opinion, you understand, from talking to her and listening to what she’s got to say. I’d guess that Sam was friends with Jemmie very much out of pity, in the early days. Because Sam doesn’t yet have the confidence to make her own way, she’s drawn to the underdogs – well, it’s nice to be needed, isn’t it? But at the end of the day she’s a little girl, she’s not a saint, and she’s really not going to forgive Jemmie that easily – if at all – for the business over the boy. And I think she was very glad, actually, to be free of Jemmie. Only to find herself, I’m afraid, with another underdog on her hands.’

Sandy Gee folded her arms, bulky in the fleece, and looked at Lol.

‘Guess,’ she said.

Lol shook his head. Behind the clouds, the sun was setting and the stones were full of detail and texture.

‘Robbie Walsh,’ Sandy said. ‘There’s a turn-up, eh?’

In the drabness and dereliction of the Hanging Tower, the first window, the one you could easily reach, was barred.

Or partly. The two bars didn’t reach to the top of the window, so it would be possible for anyone determined enough to climb up and squeeze over them.

This window offered a view of the River Teme and the pine woods where The Weir House, apparently, was hidden. Inside the tower, the window was on the ground floor, but outside there was a very long drop to the path at the bottom of the rocks into which the foundations were sunk.

Was this how Jemmie Pegler had gone?

Above it – it would have been one storey up if the floors and ceilings hadn’t all gone, leaving the tower as a hollow funnel – was another window, the second of four. A window that would have been inaccessible but for the scaffolding.

‘They were going to make it safe,’ Sandy murmured. ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’

The skeleton of galvanized metal tubing ended about three feet under the window, two planks along the top, a brown mug on the end of one. A wooden ladder extended to the top of the scaffolding; a second one had evidently been pushed away and lay at an angle against the wall.

The girl was huddled like a squirrel in the deep recess around the second window, about fifteen feet above the floor. A small girl in a pink hoodie and jeans, short brown hair and the glint of a ring at the end of an eyebrow. The window space almost directly behind her was about four feet high and two or three feet wide, and all you could see through it was the darkening sky.

‘You want another coffee, Sam?’ Sandy called up.

Sam didn’t reply.

‘How about a hot chocolate? You must be getting cold up there.’

‘No, thank you,’ Sam said. They thought she was fourteen or fifteen, but she sounded younger.

‘She must be needing to go to the loo by now,’ Sandy whispered to Lol. Then she called back up to the ledge, ‘Sam, if you want to go to the loo, we can organize something.’

‘No, thank you.’

Lol said tentatively, ‘I’m… Martin.’

Sam didn’t acknowledge him. He wished Steve Britton would get back here, with Merrily.

Sandy whispered in his ear, ‘Try again, eh?’

Lol said, ‘About Robbie… it really wasn’t your fault. I can explain why. Can I do that?’

There was silence. Sandy Gee looked at Lol, showed him fingers crossed on both hands. A bird fluttered at the top of the tower.

‘You just keep telling me lies.’ This small, lost voice from the stone ledge.

Sandy said, ‘This is not a wind-up, Sam. He knows stuff I didn’t know.’

Before they came in, she’d told Lol what Sam had said earlier, when she’d been more talkative. It seemed her mother had come to spend a week in Ludlow before Christmas to look after Sam’s Auntie Kate, who’d broken a leg, and she’d brought Sam with her, as Sam was very miserable at the time, having just found out about Jemmie and Harry.

At first, Sam had been really bored in Ludlow: didn’t know anybody, nothing to do. The turning point was the Friday night her mother had taken her on the ghost-walk this guy ran – which Sam expected would be totally crap, but it had turned out to be kind of fun and scary, too, because she basically believed in ghosts and all that stuff.

And there was this boy there, about Sam’s age, and he’d said if she was interested there were some things he could show her, maybe call for her the next day, and she said yeah, OK. So the next day they went to Gallows Bank, where people used to be hanged, and then this Robbie took her to the castle, where she was quite impressed by him being able to get in for nothing.

Anyway, they’d spent most of the week together. They came here quite a few times, to the Hanging Tower, and Robbie told her about Marion’s ghost being seen, and they’d stood here and listened for the breathing noise, but they hadn’t heard anything.

They were just, like, mates – that was how Sam had seen it. She didn’t want another boyfriend so soon after Harry. But it seemed Robbie was more serious about it than Sam was. When she’d gone home, Robbie had kept writing and e-mailing and sending her stuff about Ludlow, and she was interested, but not that interested.

‘Sam?’ Sandy Gee said.

No reply. Sam had half-turned so she was looking out of the window space. From below, Lol could hear ragged singing: a hymn, ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past’.

‘Oh no,’ Sandy muttered. ‘It’s this bloody religious group. We blocked off the path at both ends specifically to avoid this kind of thing. They must be on some footpath coming up from the river or somewhere. Damn, damn, damn.’

‘Tell them to go away, or I’ll jump,’ Sam suddenly shouted. ‘Tell them!’ She stood up and leaned out over the drop. ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’

‘We’ll get a message to them,’ Sandy said. ‘All right?’

What else could she say? From less than twelve feet away from them, Sam was holding all the cards. When the kid turned to face them, she was in tears.

This was pitiful. An obvious cry for help. People rarely kill themselves as self-punishment, Dick Lyden, the psychotherapist, had once told Lol. They kill themselves because life isn’t worth living any more. That’s it, basically. Nothing subtle.

But what had begun as a cry for help had often ended in tragedy, Dick had emphasized. A cry for help wasn’t that easy to stage-manage, and they often lost control.

Suddenly, Lol was remembering something that Merrily had told him the night after Mumford’s mother had died.

About a letter that Robbie Walsh had written to a ghost.

‘Sam,’ he said, ‘were you Marion?’

Sandy Gee looked at him in some alarm, like he was suggesting reincarnation. The hymn outside had become ‘Rock of Ages’.

‘Did Robbie call you Marion?’ Lol said. ‘Did he write to you, e-mails and stuff… sent to you as Marion?’

Sam moved away from the window, leaning over the scaffolding.

‘She’s frightened.’

‘Who?’

‘Marion,’ Sam said.

Sandy leaned in, whispered, ‘This is what’s been happening. Be careful.’

Sam looked down at Lol. It was getting quite dark in here now. Her face was white.

‘Tell me about Robbie and Marion,’ Lol said.

Sam sat on the ledge, under the window.

‘We met up one Saturday. After Christmas.’

‘You and Robbie?’

‘He just wanted to come here again. Walk round the town and stuff and then come here. I mean, I liked him, but I couldn’t… I felt…’

‘Did he call you Marion then? While you were with him?’

‘Went home.’

‘You were feeling… bit suffocated?’

‘And then he kept sending me all this stuff from the Net. Pictures that took ages to download. It got… ’Cos this was when she was…’

‘Who was? Jemmie?’

Sam sniffed. ‘Giving me all this grief. How she was going to take an overdose. How she was going to dope herself up and jump in the river. Rings up at night and texting and stuff. I had to switch my phone off, said I’d lost it. And like every time I switched on the computer there’d be like nineteen e-mails and a pile of attachments and stuff.’

‘From Robbie?’

‘Yeah.’ Sam started to cry again. Steve Britton ducked under a low doorway and came in and straightened up, shaking his head – Sandy Gee waving at him to keep quiet.

‘And he’s, like, making plans for the Easter holidays,’ Sam said. ‘How I can get there on the train and what we’ll do, and she’s like, Oh, I’m really depressed, you’re the only friend I’ve ever had, and why don’t we go away together?’

‘That must’ve been… difficult.’

‘Up all night some nights, on the computer. Dear Sam. Dear Marion. It just…’

‘You didn’t tell anybody?’

‘Nnn. I was really tired this night, and I sent Robbie one back, and I’m like, please stop sending me stuff, OK, and no I can’t come to Ludlow at Easter ’cos we’re going to France, and like… I could’ve been nicer about it, you know?’

‘But you were overtired, right?’ Sandy said.

‘Read it back next day, and I thought, like, what’ve I done? So I e-mailed him back and I said I was really, really sorry and how I’d been really tired and I had a headache. But he never replied.’

‘When was this?’ Lol asked.

The kid’s face was moon-pale. ‘Two weeks before he died.’

‘There was no connection,’ Lol said. ‘You’ve got to understand that.’

‘He killed himself!’ Sam breathed in, like a hollow shudder. ‘They said it was an accident, but I knew it wasn’t. He kept writing to me that he could feel her… me… her… with him. He used to come here at weekends, and he said he could… And I was really like—’

‘Sam…’ Lol moved to the foot of the scaffolding, held on to the bars so she could see his hands, know he wasn’t trying anything. ‘What happened after he died?’

She was a long time in replying. Somebody, thank God, had managed to stop the choir. Through the ground-floor window, half-barred, you could see the river, silver and black.

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Sam said. ‘I had these nightmares. There was this one where I switched on the computer and there were all these e-mails and they all said, Dear Marion, and I’d be like scrolling up and scrolling up, and they’d just like go on for ever. Dear Marion, dear Marion, dear—’

She made a noise like a yawn that pitched up into a kind of squeak of distress.

‘Let me get you some hot chocolate,’ Sandy said.

‘Noooo!’

‘All right… it’s OK.’

‘What happened then?’ Lol said.

It was clear that Steve Britton hadn’t found Merrily. Where was she? This was becoming—

‘Told my friend,’ Sam said. ‘At school. Her name’s Bex. I thought she was my friend. I told her – like in confidence, you know? – and she’s like, Wow, this Marion’s ghost’s taken him. And she went and told these other kids, and then everybody’s like, Oh, you killed Robbie Walsh, you killed Robbie Walsh. You’re like a witch, or something.’

Sandy Gee sighed.

‘So I’m getting all this grief at school and I don’t want to go, and I’m faking being ill and stuff, and I’m getting into rows at home, ’cos my mum and dad, they think I’m going to be like a brain surgeon or something.’

Lol glanced at Sandy: We’ve managed to find the parents now… insists she doesn’t want to see them.

‘And then I saw Jemmie Pegler in Ledbury, and she’s telling me how she’s found all these suicide websites about how to kill yourself with a plastic bag and stuff. Copied one of them over.’

‘She copied the suicide site to you?’

‘And like I was sure she’d heard about me and Robbie Walsh and she was just being cruel – ’cos she was like that, you know? And I was like really angry, and I just started sending her all this stuff Robbie had sent me, about Marion and the Hanging Tower and I’m like, why don’t you like try this instead of a poxy plastic bag, and…’

‘Take it easy, Sam,’ Sandy said. ‘This is very important, what you’re telling us.’

‘So she starts phoning me at home on the main phone, and I keep pretending I’m not there, and then somebody tells me at school, like do you know Jemmie’s got a syringe and she’s shooting up, and I thought, like, she’d just told them to tell me that so I’d feel sorry for her again. And then she e-mails and says will you come to Ludlow with me and we’ll throw ourselves off the tower – like together – and become free of our bodies.’

‘What did she mean?’

‘I don’t know. It was all this stuff she’d had off the Net – like somebody got hold of the Robbie story and they’ve twisted it all around. And I couldn’t take any more, and it was late at night, and I sent back, yeah, yeah, we’ll go tomorrow.’

‘Oh God,’ Sandy murmured.

‘And she bloody did. She went. She came here, and I didn’t, and she threw herself—’

Sam let out a wail of despair and spun herself back at the window space, Sandy Gee shouting, ‘Sam!’ but grabbing Lol’s arm as he made a move towards the scaffolding.

He could hear Sam vomiting out of the death-fall window, and then she slumped back down, squatting under the window with her head in her hands.

Sandy hissed, ‘Now, will you do something?’

‘No Merrily?’

‘No sign at all. They’re still looking. You’ll have to do something.’

‘Sandy, listen—’

‘No, you listen to me…’ Sandy pulled him through a doorway he hadn’t noticed, into a chamber the size of a lavatory, steps going up, sealed off with masonry. ‘There was an incident earlier on when we nearly lost her. When she thought Jemmie Pegler was hovering on the other side of the window… as if she’d come rising up again from where she’d fallen – that even spooked me, I can tell you. And it’s what she’s been seeing in dreams, Martin, night after night, and now she’s afraid to go to sleep and she’s keeping herself awake all night. Look at her – she’s overtired, overwrought. We’ll have to bring lamps in soon, or she’ll use the darkness to… Twice she’s started talking to somebody who isn’t there.’

‘What did Nigel Saltash say about that?’

‘He talked about hallucinations and psychological projections. He said there are— Look, it doesn’t matter what he—’

‘Drugs he could give her to sort it out?’

‘Yeah, more or less. We sometimes assume if someone’s a highly qualified psychiatrist they’re also experienced in counselling, and if he’d talked to me the patronizing way he talked to her I’d have jumped two hours ago. I’m not trying to discredit what he does, all I’m saying is, if she’s hallucinating Jemmie Pegler and her fat-girl talk, leave our bodies behind—’

‘Jemmie was clearly a dominant, parasitical presence,’ Lol said. ‘From whichever side of the fence you want to see it, that doesn’t necessarily go away with death.’

‘You’d know better than me. But this morning it’s in the papers about the exorcism and, like Steve keeps saying, she’s seen the films. She’s convinced she’s haunted.’

‘Convinced herself she deserves to be haunted.’

‘Exactly. By Jemmie and by Robbie Walsh and by the very thought of this place. So she’s caught a train and she’s here, and she’s in the famous Hanging Tower, saying, why aren’t they doing it? So don’t you tell me to wait any longer, Martin, because it’s going dark and when it’s dark there’s even less reality, isn’t there? And I’m afraid you’re the only priest we’ve got.’

46 Gridiron

MERRILY DIDN’T KNOW what she’d expected, and she’d walked into the doorway of Jon’s flat before she could change her mind, and the smell – the mixture of smells – came out at her, so dense it was like a smearing of dirty colours on her face.

Oh God, God, God…

What she saw… she had nothing to compare it with. You could live in the countryside for years but contrive never to enter an abattoir.

‘Don’t go in,’ George Lackland whispered. ‘Please don’t go in.’

‘No.’

She stood in the doorway. No need at all to go in. Stood in the doorway for… how many seconds, minutes? George’s echo-chamber breathing behind her. And no breathing, no movement at all, inside. Only silence full of stench, as if the atmosphere itself had congealed around it – something so terminally extreme that it had to be environmentally contained.

Oh God, God, God.

What made it worse was that Jonathan – it was Jonathan, wasn’t it? Keep looking, be certain, be absolutely certain – appeared to be naked. No clothing to soak up the blood and obscure the wounds. Only the paper, scattered like toilet tissue in a public lavatory when the drains were blocked.

‘I can’t use the phone in there,’ George said.

‘No. No, we mustn’t touch anything.’

She saw that the papers were newspaper and magazine cuttings and also photocopies of news cuttings and printouts from websites, and there were scores of them… Hundreds, in fact. Most of them about music.

All of them about Belladonna: pictures of her and words about her. Belladonna’s high-grain, monochrome face soaking up the lifeblood of Jonathan Scole who had been Jonathan Swift and was now…

She must have sobbed – it was what happened to your breath in moments of immeasurable stress. Felt George’s hands gripping her shoulders.

She said, ‘Not in my worst…’

The papers had been torn and slashed. Like Jonathan, who was curled on his side, foetal, except for the angle of his head where his throat had been pierced, his face flung back and opened up like a blood orange. A face of multiple expressions, now, like double exposures, like a portrait by Francis Bacon.

Torn-up news cuttings had been scattered over his lower body, glued to it by the blood where Jonathan had been cut and stabbed and slashed, and cut and stabbed and slashed, over and over and—

With the full acceptance that if she was any kind of a real priest she should be saying a prayer for the eternal peace of the savagely, senselessly slain, Merrily stood back and kicked the door shut.

With a wheeze like an explosion of breath, it sprang back, and there was Jonathan again, the wafting of air lifting a piece of newsprint from one of his eyes as if he’d blinked at the repeated intrusion, and Merrily slammed a foot flat against the door and pushed it hard away from her. Keeping the foot clamped there, on the stained panelling, as if she was holding back a tide of blood, until the door clicked. And then she stood at the top of the steps, with George a few steps below her, and just took in air.

‘Whoever did this…’ George looking up at her, the knuckle-bump in his forehead gleaming like a big pearl, ‘must look like… like a bloody butcher. How can she be walking the streets?’

‘In a long coat.’ She followed him down the steps.

At the bottom they just stood there, and George said, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Well, no,’ she said. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Come to my house.’

Merrily sagged. Her lighter fell from the torn pocket of her fleece and bounced on the cobbles.

‘I made a terrible mistake, George.’ She bent to pick up the lighter, but denied herself a cigarette. ‘The worst mistake I’ve ever made, and, by God, I’ve made some.’

‘Mrs Watkins—’

‘I have a qualified, not to say eminent, psychiatrist I’m supposed to work with. And, because I didn’t like him much, I kept him completely in the dark about most of this.’

‘Mrs Watkins, we all kept people out of this. I wanted Bernard to see to it, as a friend, and Bernard passed it on to you. It was all in confidence. I wanted to keep the lid on – that’s the top and bottom of it.’

‘And I resisted’ – putting a hand to the top of her chest to try and stop herself panting – ‘every inclination to think this woman was clinically insane.’

Even as she’d stood clamping the door shut with her foot, she’d been resisting it. Thinking, could this have been someone else? Some enemy from back home in the north? Someone who’d been trying to find him? If his parents’ murder had been contracted…

Oh, sure. And plastered him with Belladonna cuttings. There was no story-book twist here; it was as messy and unfathomable as any open-and-shut killing. The level of rage that could have driven a woman to this was beyond all comprehension, but wasn’t that always the case? Dear God.

‘We’ll go to my house,’ George said, as though he was helping a child to cross the road. ‘Phone the police from there. Come on.’

They came out of the alley into Corve Street, into George Lackland’s town. Plenty of people still around in the powdery dusk, Tesco’s still open. A tourist coach waiting at the lights.

Over the gravelly sound of the coach engine came the church clock chiming eight. Instinctively, Merrily glanced up to the tower and glimpsed movement at the top: a figure in Palmers’ Guild blue moving across from one corner pinnacle to another. Or the distinctive blue of a stockman’s coat.

They had reached the first narrow window of Lackland Modern Furnishings.

‘George,’ she said, casual as she could manage. ‘Do you think you could report it?’

‘I was going to.’

‘I mean without mentioning me. Not yet. Please? I need some time.’

He stared down at her. ‘You’re feeling ill.’

‘No, I’m—’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Do you think I could borrow the keys to the church? I have to… work something out.’

As if she meant she needed to pray. She hoped he would understand that. And anyway, he’d know the truth of it soon enough.

Everybody would.

Lol leaned against the wall outside and knew why Merrily smoked.

He felt faintly sick. He wanted to be on the other side of these walls, looking for her. She would not just have walked off. She would wait. She was good at waiting. He needed her, and the girl needed her, needed someone who could…

… legitimately intercede.

The movements of police and paramedics around the Inner Bailey were becoming shadowed. The Keep, now the gatehouse, was a charcoal monolith.

‘I hope you know what you’ve done, Mr Robinson.’

He didn’t know how long the woman had been standing by his side.

‘Where’s Saltash?’

‘He’s gone.’ She didn’t look at him. ‘I don’t think he’ll be coming back tonight. He suggested I might be wise to leave also. Let Mrs Watkins’ – the name was expelled like prune stones – ‘take over.’

‘You’ve seen her?’

‘No. I thought she might already be here. Or perhaps she’s with the television people. Doing what she does so well.’

Lol looked at her austere profile. The clouds that had suffocated the sun were relaxing into evening, admitting a wafery moon. Her hair was curling up from the collar of her jacket.

‘What is it with you, Ms…’ Couldn’t remember her damn name.

‘Siân will do. What’s up with me, as I think you already know, is that my and Merrily’s attitudes to the practice of Christianity in a secular age are… incompatible. Never made much of a secret of that. Putting it simplistically, I think there’s no room for superstition in what we do, while she appears to nurture it.’

‘In which case – sorry to be so naive – why would you want to be connected with Deliverance? What’s your agenda?’

Siân looked across the enclosure, dark as a stagnant pond now, towards the Keep with its drooping flag. She sighed.

‘It begins to look,’ she said, ‘as if the agenda was Mrs Watkins herself. Doesn’t it? The ubiquitous, self-effacing, photogenic Merrily Watkins.’

‘Had her picture in the paper too often? Well…’ Lol shrugged. ‘That was always going to happen. She hates it. But if you do what she does and… and you look like she looks, then you’re going to get your picture in the papers.’

‘Who wasn’t here when we – the women of Hereford – were battling for the priesthood. Wasn’t out there with her placard. Wasn’t part of the movement. And was then presented with this outdated but inherently sexy role by a rogue bishop, subsequently discredited. Managing to emerge after his inevitable departure smelling of lavender and honeysuckle. And continuing, for heaven’s sake, to get away with it.’

‘Not always. And not undamaged.’

‘And all of it built on superstition.’ Siân finally turned towards Lol. ‘Do you know what really got to me? How, when she restored evensong in Ledwardine Church – evensong with a fashionably esoteric tweak – it became an immediate talking point because some local woman had apparently been cured of a life-threatening condition.’

‘Which she probably hadn’t had in the first place. Misdiagnosis, or the medical records got mixed up.’

‘Doesn’t matter. It was still all over the Internet, apparently, that the mystical vicar of Ledwardine had healing powers. And the following week it was reported – not in the Church Times, thank God, one of the other rags – that her congregation had doubled.’

‘Trebled, I think. But she squashed the rumours and it slumped again. So everyone’s happy. Except I expect you were really pissed off that she hadn’t run with it, gone the way of all the other messianic cranks.’

‘Always one step ahead,’ Siân said.

‘You make it sound political. She doesn’t think like that. She offended you just by being there.’

‘Yes,’ Siân said. ‘I suppose she did.’

‘So when you were approached by the Dean, whose good friend Saltash had decided he should make his skills available to the Church—’

‘No. The approach came from Nigel himself.’

‘What did he tell you just now?’

‘He didn’t have to tell me anything. He’d walked out on a disturbed child. That was enough. Whatever Merrily may think of me, I’m still a Christian. Of sorts.’ She looked down at her hands, crossed on her abdomen. ‘So I’ve come back. And I don’t quite know what to do about this, Mr Robinson.’

‘You’re asking me? A recovering psychiatric patient? An abuser of women?’

Siân was silent.

‘They can’t find Merrily,’ Lol said. ‘And they think my name’s Longbeach and I’m qualified to dispel spirits. They’re now telling the girl that I’ll do it.’

‘Do what, exactly?’

‘I was thinking about an exorcism of place. Seems appropriate. Doesn’t target anything in particular. Lightens things. Takes away the tension and produces a feeling of calm. Psychology rather than superstition. Also it’s the only one I’ve ever watched.’

Siân looked into the pool of darkness in front of them. ‘Is that what Merrily would do?’

Lol shrugged.

‘I couldn’t,’ Siân said.

Lol didn’t say anything.

‘I’m not sure I’d know where to start.’

‘If you were planning to reform it, you must have done some research with the Deliverance handbook.’

‘It appalled me. It’s fundamentally medieval.’

‘This is a medieval town. We’re in a medieval castle.’

‘I don’t carry a copy, anyway.’

‘As I understand it,’ Lol said, ‘it’s only a set of guidelines, that book.’

‘One can hardly make it up.’

‘You don’t have to make it all up.’

‘Yes, I do realize that elements such as the Lord’s Prayer are mainstays of all Deliverance… ritual.’

‘Ritual,’ Lol said. ‘I quite like you when you talk dirty.’

Siân said, ‘I want to say… that I wouldn’t insult either of you with an apology, but sometimes one’s own gullibility results in the most… indefensible behaviour.’

‘You can get holy water from the church or somewhere,’ Lol said. ‘I was with Merrily at a hop-kiln in the Frome Valley, where something unpleasant had happened. A lot of the routine stayed with me. Good memory for verse and things. Something you develop in my line of work, otherwise you’re liable to dry up in the middle of a gig.’

‘Of course,’ Siân said. ‘What’s your first name? I did know…’

‘Lol. Laurence. Like the poor guy they named the church after. Someone once told me what happened to him, but it’s slipped my mind.’

‘He was roasted on a gridiron over a slow fire.’

‘Yes, now I remember,’ Lol said.

Tinted by the last of an invisible sun, clouds hung like a sandbank over the round tower that sat in the Inner Bailey like a great turreted cake.

‘For God’s sake,’ Siân said, ‘let’s not either of us be bloody stupid. Just have one last attempt to find Merrily.’

Leaving the church’s main door unlocked, Merrily entered through the huge stone porch and found the lights, the acoustics of the great church giving out a sigh as she went in. Entering a church alone at night was disturbing some secret alchemical process and, increasingly, she’d thought that Jane was probably right about this being at least partly connected with the site itself.

Partly a pagan thing, but it was all mixed up in those days.

She knelt in front of the altar in the chapel of St John the Evangelist, took off her fleece to expose the pectoral cross and prayed for the wisdom to see this through, to drop the curtain before the final act in an insane tragedy.

Prayed that a very cursory knowledge of forensic pathology acquired over two extraordinary years had not led her to the wrong conclusion about the death of Jonathan Scole.

Prayed for the courage to go up the tower and face the mad woman of Ludlow.

She had to. No one else would know how to approach it. If the police went up – as, surely, before long, the police would – it would all be horrifyingly over before the first of them put a boot on the parapet.

How long had Belladonna been here? Had she been behind that door when Merrily came in with George Lackland? Had she listened to George’s account of events leading up to their fevered coupling under the weathercock?

Merrily pulled on her fleece, opened the tower door into total darkness.

Obviously, there would be lights here – most likely bulkhead lights at intervals all the way to the top. But if she switched them on she’d be advertising herself.

Not good.

Only one solution. She padded into the nave, came back flicking her Zippo to light a tea-lantern from the gift shop and found she was no longer alone.

‘What are you doing?’ Lol said.

47 Point of Transition

THE CLUSTER OF candles on a small tray on the floor lit up her face like some Renaissance Madonna’s over a glowing crib.

She was sitting with her back to the wall directly below one of the corner stone pinnacles, its conical, notched prong sharp against the last amber in the west.

The pole bearing the weathercock sprouted from the apex of a leaded pyramid that occupied most of this small platform in the sky, a duckboarded walkway around it. It felt isolated, scary if you didn’t like heights, which Lol didn’t, but the gathering of candlelight against the glistening backcloth of new night made it weirdly intimate.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ Belladonna said.

She was wearing a long blue stockman’s coat, hanging open over something light-coloured.

Two hundreds steps did something unprecedented to the backs of your calves. Lol set the lantern down on the deck and sat down behind it, the two of them facing one another across the width of the tower.

‘If you wanted to be alone,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t have gone walking around the battlements with your candles when everyone knows the church is closed.’

‘I’m not alone.’

‘You… been up here long?’

‘Stopped counting the chimes a while ago. Came in with the tourists, decided not to leave. I asked you a question.’

‘Lol. Lol Robinson,’ Lol said.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see.’

‘We almost met once, at a festival. You wouldn’t remember. It wasn’t Glastonbury or anything…’

‘I’m not in the mood for reminiscence,’ Bell said. ‘Go away.’

The half-dozen stubby candles on the tray had probably been taken from the votive table in the church. In their glow, her face looked moist and quietly radiant. She hadn’t changed much, really. The lines seemed to have added movement, vibrancy. Lol felt an electric curiosity and the need to exercise it, as if the Saltash episode had freed him up for this. Do something.

Whatever she’d done, he didn’t want her to be insane.

‘You shouldn’t be alone,’ he said. ‘Not now.’

‘I’m not alone, I told you that.’

‘But they can’t talk to you.’

‘I can talk to them.’

‘They don’t listen,’ Lol said. ‘They don’t care.’

Merrily had said, She’ll be in a bad way. There’s only one reason she’s gone up there. If the police go up to try and bring her down, she won’t even wait for them to reach the top. Can you get that over to them?

‘Is she with you?’ Bell said. ‘Your girlfriend.’

‘No. She’s in the castle.’

‘Has she done it yet?’

Did she mean Sam? He didn’t reply.

‘It’s a gesture,’ Bell said. ‘A meaningless gesture. She’s wasting her time. What’s here’s too powerful.’

He realized that she must mean the exorcism. Maybe she didn’t know about Sam.

He saw that each of the stone pinnacles was tipped with a tiny cross. ‘But this is the centre of it, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘This is the soul of the town. The point of…’

‘Transition.’

‘I’m not sure what you mean by that. Would it… would you mind if I stood up? I think I can feel a bit of a cramp coming on.’

‘As long as you don’t come near me,’ Belladonna said.

‘Sure.’

Tell them to keep right away from her, Merrily had said. She might still have the knife.

This was after he’d reminded her that he couldn’t stand heights. She’d been worried about walking away from this. He’d told her he’d stay in the church and try and explain to the police if they showed up. Holding one another for a few seconds and then she’d walked away, kept looking back.

There was, of course, no reason the police would think Bell or anyone was up here, now the tray of candles was in the shadow of the walls.

Lol looked over the battlements once before turning away. Lights were coming on all around the church. When he turned his head, it was like a Catherine wheel, dizzying. He caught a thin, sharp smell from somewhere.

‘One hundred and thirty-five feet,’ Bell said. ‘I watched the police cars converging on Jonathan’s shop. Did you find him?’

‘Merrily and the Mayor. After the ironmonger told them his shop hadn’t been open all day.’

‘Garrulous old fool.’

‘She… what can I say about this?’

‘Rage gives you unlimited strength,’ Bell said.

He guessed she’d raised her voice to deal with the tremor, but it was there.

‘What had he done to you?’

‘I don’t have to answer your questions.’

‘No.’ He looked over the town to where arrows of pale pink were enfolded in a cloud bank over Clee Hill in the east. ‘I was talking to a couple of people about you. Tom Storey?’

‘How is he?’

‘Still working. Still a bit scary.’

Bell laughed. ‘He was always scared of me.’ She turned to look up at Lol. ‘Why aren’t you? What do you want?’

‘I’m just scared of what you might do. That is what you meant by the point of transition, isn’t it?’

She didn’t reply. He felt the hours she’d been up here had been spent coming down from something, some wild and terrifying trip she couldn’t quite believe she’d made.

‘You knew about Scole’s parents, I suppose. How they died?’

A pause, then she sighed.

‘You mean his adoptive parents? Or his parents?’

He stared at her. She was watching a distant plane, barely audible, crossing a clear patch of night sky like a firefly.

‘Jonathan’s father was a man called Eric Bryers,’ she said.

Lol gripped one of the battlements.

‘Bloody junkie tracked him down,’ Bell said. ‘Vindictive little smackhead bastard.’

‘But…’

He watched the plane disappear into cloud, emerge the other side. There were two versions of this story. Moira Cairns had told him the baby had died. It was Tom who’d maintained she’d given up the child for adoption on learning she had a recording contract.

But Tom was neurotic – his version had been the least likely.

‘Scole was your son?’

‘Eric tracked him down a couple of years ago, not long before he died.’ Bell pulled her coat across her knees and gazed into the mesh of candlelight. ‘The revelation rather altered Jonathan’s view of himself. Or, I suppose, he would have said it confirmed what he’d always felt. His adoptive parents were working the clock round in their seedy little greasy spoon and just wanted a son who’d take over the business – perhaps buy another greasy spoon – so they could retire to Morecambe or some other windswept purgatory. Sent him to college to learn business studies. All desperately short of glamour. He hated it. Thought he’d been born for better.’

‘Especially when he found out who his mother was, I imagine,’ Lol said. ‘And what his mother had… denied him.’

‘Oh yes, he hated me. And presumably Eric filled him up with bile before he… did what he did.’

‘Jumped from a high building.’

‘You ever work with Eric, Lol?’

‘Never.’

‘I saw him last when he came back to play bass on my determinedly faithful version of “Gloomy Sunday”. I was told he carried a copy with him everywhere, like a form of temptation.’ Bell laughed, far back in her throat. ‘Like a secret agent with a poison capsule. But, of course, that’s the sort of person Eric was. Jonathan wouldn’t have known that.’

‘Not a lot to discover on the Internet about Eric, I suppose. Not like you. That would’ve been a serious voyage of discovery.’

Cuttings everywhere, Merrily had said, face twisting at the images in her head. Papers, fanzines, website printouts… scattered over his body like some kind of sick confetti.

‘Oh yes,’ Bell said. ‘He’d compiled quite a dossier on the woman who’d deprived him of a life in various mansions… the California coast… the company of rock stars… unlimited lines of coke, strings of delicious girlfriends. Leaving him with a dreary business-studies course and a future serving burgers to fucking truck drivers.’

‘And then he followed you here…’

‘He’d attempted, indirectly, to contact me before he came here. An approach was made, through some agency, to my solicitor from someone claiming to be my son. I told her it was a try-on because my son was dead. Anyway, I refused to meet him. What was the point? I gave birth to him, that was all.’

‘And gave him away for a career.’

‘Lol…’ For the first time her face registered pain. ‘I gave him away because I didn’t expect to see him grow up. The one certainty in my life had always been premature death. What he didn’t know was that I’d made financial provision for him. My will’s always included a substantial bequest to my surviving son.’

‘It wasn’t money he wanted, though, was it? He had money. Like you said, he just wanted to be part of your life.’

‘Well, I didn’t want him. Certainly not after meeting him. He was crass, he was—’

‘Probably the greatest living authority on you. He got to the heart of all your obsessions. Putting himself in a situation where your paths were bound to cross. Buying into the ghost-walk.’

‘No! No, he—’ There was a small breeze like a puff of breath. Bell looked up, smiled faintly. ‘Here’s someone…’

Lol blinked.

‘Listen,’ Bell said, ‘he never told me who he was and I… even when I suspected, I said nothing. There was no future in it. Every time I saw him I saw Eric. Besides, I hardly wanted a murderer—’

‘You really think he was?’ Hadn’t seemed like a murderer to Merrily. Not even a murderer by proxy. He’s… driven. A lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm… likeable. ‘Rather than just a victim of rumours?’

‘He was…’ Bell came to her feet and teetered forward as though she was on stage, a little stoned and about to grasp a mike stand. ‘He was a despicable murderer. He destroyed the most important thing in my life.’

Lol didn’t move. Bell’s voice dropped to a hiss.

‘That boy wouldn’t fall off the Keep. He knew every stone of that castle. He was as sure-footed as a goat. And the suicide theory – that he was afraid to go back to the bullies in Hereford – that’s shit, too. His mother must have told him about our arrangement. His mistake was to tell Jonathan.’

Bell plunged her hands into the pockets of her long coat and wafted it tightly across her, turning away and making the candle flames shiver as if the tower itself was shaking.

Lol thought of what he’d learned from Merrily and what he’d read. It made sense: Jonathan Scole watching Bell form an increasingly intimate relationship with the history boy – whom he had introduced to her, whom he’d made a part of his ghost-walk just to get close to the mother who’d rejected him. Rejected him twice, and now…

… Now the final insult: the adoption of a son.

Lol thought about Andy Mumford and his Plascarreg theories. If this was true, then Mumford was sailing dangerously close to the wrong wind.

‘Bell…’

She turned towards him, strands of white-gold hair across one cheek.

‘When exactly did you come to this conclusion?’ Lol asked.

‘I don’t know. Been staring me in the face for… It came to a head last night. I fell. I was walking… in the churchyard, among the yews, and I fell. Hit my head on a root. I was half stunned and suddenly bitterly angry. Everything was falling apart, on this night of all— I decided on impulse to go to his flat and confront him and… and he was drunk. I told him I’d been attacked in the street. He thought… the crass bastard thought I wanted to sleep with him – so like his miserable father. He said he was going to phone your… Mary. So I walked out.’

‘And then Merrily came.’

‘Found me singing under the castle. It’s the only way I stay sane on nights like this. Singing to Marion. Singing “Wee Willie Winkie” to… Anyway, he must have followed us back. He saw me put the… the mandolin case in the yew tree. And then he came back with a crowbar or something and he forced his way in and he took it.’

She bent down and moved the tray of candles to one side. Not much left of some of them now, flames shrinking down into half an inch of hollowing wax. And Lol saw that the tray had not been on the floor itself but on a small black musical-instrument case, which she lifted now and cradled in her arms.

The mandolin case.

She took it to the battlements. It was almost dark now.

‘You’ll have to go soon,’ Bell said. ‘I can’t let the candles burn away.’

‘Bell… it makes no sense.’

‘It’s all the sense there’s ever been,’ she said. ‘I’ve always had what I regarded as a temporary life. All I’m looking for in death is a kind of permanence.’

She was on her feet, the heavy coat hanging open to reveal a long, cream-coloured dress, soiled now with large, conspicuous stains, their colours indeterminate in the candlelight. Standing close to the wall and hugging the mandolin case to her breast, she began singing, in a tremulous little-girl voice.

Wee Willie Winkie

Running through the town

Upstairs, downstairs in his nightgown

Rapping at the windows

Crying through the lock

Are all the children in their beds?

It’s past eight o’clock.

Sandy Gee was up against the wall of the fat round tower in the Inner Bailey. She had a rubber-covered torch, kept nervously testing its beam on the stonework, having sent one of the uniforms off with a plastic Pepsi bottle, to find a tap.

‘And salt,’ Merrily said.

‘Salt?’

‘Holy water involves salt.’

‘Maybe we should hold it in one of the bloody restaurants,’ Sandy Gee said.

‘I wish we could hold it in there.’ Merrily nodded at the round tower. ‘Plenty of room, and apparently it used to be the medieval chapel of St Mary Magdalene. Not an option, however.’

‘It certainly isn’t. We need to do it now, in that dirty little tower.’

‘Erm, a warning,’ Merrily said. ‘The aim of this is to bring release and create calm. But we don’t know what we’re dealing with. And if there’s any kind of… if you want to call it energy… in there, and the kid’s in a position where she’s very close to a long drop…’

Sandy shone the torch beam into her face. ‘I hope to God you’re not suggesting this might actually have the reverse effect? Longbeach said you knew what you were doing.’

Siân Callaghan-Clarke cleared her throat. ‘Inspector, I think what my colleague is saying is that this is not an exact science.’

‘Or a science at all,’ Merrily said. ‘Perhaps, under cover of the service, you or one of your officers should move closer so that, in the event of any unexpected reaction…’

‘You often get unexpected reactions?’

‘There is no expected reaction,’ Siân said. ‘It’s about faith.’

‘Christ,’ Sandy said.

48 Running Through the Town

SAM SAID, ‘WAS that you in the paper?’

‘It’s a lousy picture, isn’t it?’

Merrily was standing in the beam of Sandy’s torch. All she could see of the girl was a silhouette against the opening in the wall. It was cold and damp in here, colder than outside, a rank and clingy cold.

‘Why aren’t you wearing… you know?’

‘I—’

‘Sam, it’s like the police,’ Siân said. ‘Inspector Gee isn’t in uniform either. Inspector Gee and Mrs Watkins… When you reach their level, you don’t have to wear the uniform.’

Merrily glanced at Siân, stone-faced on the fringe of the torch beam.

Wow.

‘How do I…?’ Sam inched back, towards the window. ‘How do I know it’s not a scam? Why you doing it now?’

‘It’s taken a lot of preparation,’ Merrily said. ‘We don’t take it lightly. We’ve had holy water and things to prepare. And I have to walk all around the area, sealing off points of access. We don’t want to let bad things seep through.’

There was silence – and then Sam said, ‘I’m the bad thing.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘She won’t let me sleep,’ Sam said.

‘Who are we talking about, Sam?’

Siân whispered to Merrily, ‘Give me a moment?’

‘OK. Two minutes, Sam? Some final things to organize.’

Around the corner, in the one-time great hall, Siân said, ‘I don’t know if what Nigel managed to elicit from her might help?’

‘Anything might help. I don’t see this as a cosmetic exercise any more.’

‘In which case… Nigel, I think, also became aware that we might be dealing with something unexpected, to which counselling might not provide a complete solution.’

‘He admitted that?’

‘I said, I think he became aware of it.’

‘Ah. Go on.’

‘The Pegler girl was a bully. It’s hardly unknown for someone who is herself subject to emotional bullying to find someone else on whom she can inflict stress. Pegler was taunted by her peers – boys, mostly, I would guess – for being overweight and unattractive. She initially sought solace with Samantha – a slightly younger and somewhat malleable neighbour. But Jemima was a very angry, rather vindictive person, and soon began to control Samantha, making her do things she would not normally have considered at all appropriate behaviour – like experiments with pills and shoplifting. And then, seeing how far she could push it, Jemima lured away Samantha’s boyfriend, with sexual favours, thus enhancing her own power and her superiority.’

‘And then Sam meets Robbie, and, although she might not particularly fancy him, he certainly represents a more innocent, less pressured world. It’s literally a holiday.’

‘But is it less pressured?’ Siân said.

‘Robbie’s fallen in love, maybe for the first time – at least the first time with someone who’s not been dead for centuries. And he wants Sam to share his world. Even calling her Marion. That’s pressure.’

‘Our feeling was that Samantha was finding it disquieting to be associated with Marion, the ghost of a young woman who died in a situation of appalling violence. She’s not particularly interested in medieval history – certainly not even close to Robbie’s level of obsession – and when he kept appealing to her to come back to Ludlow, to spend weekends with him, visiting historic remains she… eventually rebuffed him. And then, unfortunately, he died, and she – already feeling horribly guilty – was unwise enough to share her anguish and became the target for personal taunts by her peers at school. And then… all this came to the notice of Jemima Pegler. Did you see the pictures of her?’

‘I saw some party pictures.’

‘Not those. Nigel had a school photo, in which she’s glowering and looks… almost demonic. You know that famous Myra Hindley photograph, with powerfully hypnotic eyes? I would guess that’s the side of Pegler to which Samantha was exposed. The tactic is that, after stealing the boy, Harry, she professes shame and self-hatred, to wheedle her way back into Samantha’s life. Once she’s there, however, she’s worse than ever. We thought that, at one stage, Sam was on the verge of admitting that the girl had been physically assaulting her. She was certainly a violent person, subject to mood swings and severe depression – of which her parents, by the way, were aware. And, in fact…’ Siân moved away into the darkness, ‘she had been receiving medical attention.’

‘She was seeing a psychiatrist?’

‘For a time, Nigel discovered, she’d been prescribed medication – Seroxat, we understand.’

‘Where have I heard of that?’

‘You probably read about it in the papers.’

‘Serotonin?’

‘Increasing serotonin in the brain as an antiodote to depression. Seroxat was given to thousands of children in the UK. It then began to be linked with suicide and self-harm in some of them.’

‘I’m with you.’

‘Nigel’s initial, somewhat superficial suggestion that Jemima Pegler’s suicide was a form of escape from the mundane…’

‘Was bollocks, basically.’

‘Was a premature reaction because he simply wanted to be involved. When he found out more, it became clear that Jemima’s suicide – as the very circumstances, with an overdose of heroin, suggest – was an act of terminal aggression. And it does seem to have been related to this legend of the woman, Marion – who herself committed an act of extreme violence and then killed herself. Exploiting Samantha’s vulnerability to taunts in the wake of Robbie’s death, Jemima sends her distressing material from a suicide website. Samantha, a little unbalanced by now, sends Jemima in return the Internet material she’s received from Robbie relating to Marion – to which Jemima reacts by suggesting that they “leave behind their bodies”, or some such… I’m probably not putting this very well.’

‘You’re putting it brilliantly,’ Merrily said. ‘What we’re looking at, if we go along with it, is Jemmie first attempting to lure Sam into what might be a suicide pact. Maybe bringing along enough heroin for them both, and then, when Sam doesn’t turn up…’

‘We can’t know what was going through her head. All that matters now is what’s in Samantha’s head.’

‘Which is Jemmie, superimposed over Marion. Sam believes Jemmie is still out there and demanding Sam fulfils her side of the bargain. She’s taken up residence in Sam’s subconscious, she appears in dreams… I think we’re looking at a severe case of bullying from beyond the grave. How did Nigel propose to deal with it?’

‘In the short term,’ Siân said, ‘my guess is he had absolutely no idea.’

‘Now we can talk,’ Bell said. ‘Now I feel safe.’

Just looking at her turned Lol’s stomach cold.

She was sitting up on the wall between two raised battlements. She’d slipped off her shoes, the way she used to do on stage, and she was rubbing her bare heels against the stone through the hem of her long dress.

She’d casually leaned the mandolin case against the wall and then… he couldn’t believe how lightly she’d swung herself up there. Couldn’t believe how anyone who wasn’t a seasoned steeplejack could sit where she was sitting, with her back to that drop.

All she had to do was tip herself gently back – a hundred and thirty-five feet to the street.

Unless some jagged stonework broke her fall and her spine.

‘They let me hold him,’ Bell said, ‘in the hospital. Private hospital – my father paid. I had a room.’

‘The… dead one.’

‘I’d asked for a guitar, to take my mind off what was to come, but I found I couldn’t handle one over my huge pregnant belly, so somebody brought me a mandolin. I couldn’t play it properly, but I could fumble out simple tunes, and when they brought him in I laid him there and played to him: “Wee Willie Winkie”.’

‘When did you know there were going to be two of them?’

He had to keep her talking now.

‘I became aware of a death having taken place inside me.’ Pulling the mandolin case up onto her knees. ‘Turned out that one baby was strangled, I think, by the cord – I didn’t ask too many questions, wasn’t about to become a student of obstetrics. I know they were non-identical, or apparently they might both have died. I didn’t want to see the survivor, he was going to be someone else’s. But this one… he’d died inside me. I’d absorbed his spirit, you see.’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course you see. You’re a sensitive soul, I’ve always known that from your songs. So, yes, I played to him. He lay dead on the bed, and I played to him and told him that one day we’d go to Wee Willie Winkie’s town.’

‘I’m not sure I understand that reference,’ Lol said.

Bell leaned forward. ‘When I was a baby, I had a book of nursery rhymes, and each one had a full-page coloured picture, and the one I loved the most was of Wee Willie Winkie gliding through an old, old town with tall chimneys and houses of warm brick and timbered gables, and lights shining in mullioned windows. I would look at it for hours, entranced. It was where I wanted to be. Often, I’d dream of floating through that town. It was this town. Soon as I got out of the car, that magical connection was made with my earliest memory… I think I wept with happiness.’

‘You kept the baby’s body,’ Lol said. ‘How was that possible?’

‘When I was a little older,’ Bell said, as if she hadn’t heard the question, ‘and I began to realize there was something wrong with me and it was quite serious, I said to my mother, What happens when you die? And she said, You go to heaven. And I said, What’s heaven like? And she said, Heaven’s like the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen. So there you are…’

She lifted the mandolin case and folded her coat over her dress and began to swing backwards and forwards in the air, with the case across her knees, and all Lol could hope for was that somebody down there would see her and…

And what?

‘I got to know the undertaker. We had a big, phoney funeral. The undertaker was a fan – a Nico fan, actually. Do you remember Nico? She was with the Velvet Underground.’

‘Gothic… Teutonic. Played the harmonium.’

‘Deliciously doomy. That’s how it happens, you know. You move on from nursery rhymes to Grimm’s Fairy Tales… and they have the same kind of pictures: ancient, moonlit towns with spiky churches and towers and cobbled streets. Only it grows darker. And all the children who love the Wee Willy Winkie picture rather than the Jack and Jill picture with the green fields and the big sun, they’re the ones who become goths. They’re the ones who grow to love death.’

‘Willie Winkie had a candle in a lantern.’

‘And his nightgown was like a shroud. You’re right, of course. Willie Winkie was death… a ghostly presence. I recorded the song once.’

‘I remember. This heavy, bombastic, thunder-and-lightning rock and suddenly it all stops, and there are these little, light footsteps, and…’

‘Wee Willie Winkie, running through the town…’ Bell giggled, her face upturned. And then she frowned. ‘Some soulless philistine in the NME wrote that it was sexual. A song about a sexual predator. They spit on innocence.’

‘The undertaker…’

‘It’s not really illegal. Some health regulations might have been infringed, that’s all. He squared it with some guy at the crem, and they burned a coffin with a doll inside. And the baby was embalmed and sealed in the mandolin case, and I kept him in yew trees. Nobody could understand why I’d buy particular houses – ugly houses in unsuitable locations – but there was always an ancient yew tree with a hollow big enough for a mandolin case, and I’d seal him there and know his spirit was being kept alive. He’d have been buried here, though. I thought we’d both found a home.’

‘Robbie had his spirit… is that what you’re saying?’

‘It seemed so right. If I died, it didn’t matter any more. The spirit would go on. And he’d keep seeing me. Just like he saw the others. Robbie Walsh saw life in four dimensions. The thought of Robbie Walsh seeing me, growing up to administer the trust, with the money to conserve the environment in which we both…’

‘This heart condition,’ Lol said.

‘I don’t know. Haven’t seen a doctor in years. I don’t want to know.’

‘Why did you take the baby with you? On your walk through the town. Last night. You don’t normally do that, do you?’

Bell smiled. ‘It was his birthday.’

‘Yesterday?’

‘Today. The early hours. Caesarean. They wanted to do it in the daytime, I said no, this is a night baby. Cost extra.’

She looked down. The cluster of candles was about a foot below her feet.

‘Bell,’ Lol said. ‘Should I move the candles?’

She laughed at him. Then she was serious. ‘I don’t want you to see this, Lol. You are sensitive. You’ll never forget it. Please go down. Go down now.’

‘No.’

‘It’ll be very quick, I promise you.’

‘Bell—’

‘The Beacon of the Marches – did you know they called it that?’

‘I… possibly.’

‘I’m going to make it a beacon again. Bright light and no pain. When it kicks in I’ll smile and I’ll wave… and flip over. Like a fireball. And become, in that one climactic moment, a brilliant part of history.’ Her voice softened. ‘And fly like Marion.’

‘You can’t.’

‘There’s nothing left now, but this.’

When he moved towards her, she put up both hands.

‘You wouldn’t make it, Lol. Can’t you smell it?’

‘Bell—’

‘The bottom of my dress is soaked in lighter fuel,’ Belladonna said.

49 An Intimate Eternity

MERRILY SAID, ‘LORD, you gave your Church authority to act in your name. We ask you therefore to visit tonight what we visit and bless whatever we bless… and grant that all power of evil may be put to flight and the Angel of Peace enter in. Defend from harm all who enter and leave this door… doorway. And give us protection in our coming in and our going out.’

People had come in and people had gone out, using the two narrow openings. There was so little room in here. Sandy Gee, hands together as if concentrating on prayer, had moved next to the scaffolding, within just a few feet of Sam. One of the paramedics was a Christian and he’d joined them, and so had Steve Britton, holding up a hurricane lamp.

No harsh light, if possible, Merrily had said. No criss-crossing beams.

Quiet light.

The kid had her eyes wide open, her back to the window. She was calm, and looked a little shell-shocked and vacant. She’d refused to have her parents in, said she’d tried to tell them about it and had been accused of making it all up to get out of school.

It would be necessary to talk to the parents afterwards – preferably with Sandy Gee present, because people were suspicious of religion and you could easily be accused of indoctrination and mind-bending. If Sam needed personal attention… this was usually a long-term process, with repeated sessions.

‘In the faith of Christ Jesus, we claim this place for God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’

A minor exorcism of place was not enough. Merrily looked around for Siân, but she must have stepped out of the tower. It was already crowded in here. And perhaps she was still doubtful about this: exorcism would never be Siân’s thing.

Her gaze met Sandy Gee’s and Sandy’s was saying hurry it up.

Heightened pressure now, Sandy getting some hassle from CID. Before they began in here, she’d said the DCI was on his way from Shrewsbury in connection with… something else? Did Merrily just happen to know anything about something else? Well… yes, she did. Had they spoken to Lol?

Lol?

Martin Longbeach, Merrily had said. At the church.

And the word had gone out.

‘Amen,’ Merrily said, and the people in the tower repeated it; not much echo, as if the voices had been sucked out like smoke.

Merrily prayed for help. Praying for a foothold on this. Where should it be directed? What needed to be brought to peace? Ideally there should be a Requiem for Jemmie Pegler, but without the cooperation of her family this was not an option. Anyway, no time.

Robbie?

Robbie was not, somehow, quite part of this. And Robbie had fallen from the Keep. He still, in some way, stood for an innocence.

It left Marion.

Marion who had made a mistake and accepted the consequences. Marion who so many people – Robbie and Bell and Jemmie Pegler – had moulded to match their own requirements.

Poor Marion.

‘Erm… Thank you. I’d like everybody to leave now.’

Sandy Gee’s eyes flashed urgently in the light of the hurricane lamp.

‘I’d like to work with Sam.’

Sandy’s stare told her that she’d better know what she was doing.

She didn’t.

When they’d all left, Steve leaving behind, at her request, his hurricane lamp, she said, ‘OK if I come up there with you, Sam?’

Lol stood up. He could see, lit up like a distant doll’s house, the complex chessboard façade of the Feathers, the main street a chain of lights, the whole town like a jeweller’s counter.

He’d have to deal with his own fear, make a rush at her. It was unlikely he’d get close enough even to reach for her before she let the inflammable dress brush the candlelight. But what else could he do?

What else?

‘Bell…’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you really think Marion flies?’

‘If you’re going to throw your girlfriend’s dogma at me—’

‘No… No, it’s not, but… we’ve all heard endless accounts of what a ghost looks like, what a ghost sounds like, what a ghost does, but we don’t – and nor does anyone – know what a ghost feels.’

‘And what do you think they feel?’

‘I doubt they feel anything, they just exist. Transient, two-dimensional, in flickering shades of grey… Just existing, in little cold pockets of nothing.’

‘Beautiful.’

‘It’s not immortality.’

‘Existence without pain.’

‘But without any prospect of happiness.’

‘I sometimes think our highest aspiration is the avoidance of pain.’

‘That’s deeply sad,’ Lol said, ‘coming from an artist.’

And, saying that, he realized that being an artist was the explanation of most of it. It was not spiritual, not about transcendence… only a projection of a grand design, developed over many years from a single lurid image in a picture book. She’d found a place on which to impose her vision of a multidimensional heaven. An old-fashioned concept album in a beautiful gatefold sleeve.

Not madness, but it was a fine distinction.

Something else occurred to him then, something far more prosaic. If it was the dead baby’s birthday, it was also Jon Scole’s. No wonder the poor sod had got drunk.

‘Bell… how did Jonathan die?’

He was thinking of Merrily’s vague suspicion about the blood. How there had not been enough of it.

‘You’re a creator,’ he said. ‘You’re not a killer. You couldn’t kill. Could you?’

Because it was clear she didn’t see her own death as an act of self-destruction; it was a great display, a rush of ferocious light that would launch her spirit into an intimate form of eternity.

She’d gone still, with her head on one side, like a Halloween mannequin someone had wedged between the battlements as a joke.

Lol said, ‘Did he kill himself? Did he take an overdose or something? Did he prise open the mandolin case, on his birthday, and see where all your maternal love had been going?’

She tilted suddenly, and he thought she was going over, unlit, and he ran at the wall.

‘No!’ Throwing her hands out, then slapping them back down when the case began to slip, tugging it into her lap.

He stopped.

‘He… must have gone on drinking, taken his clothes off and gone to bed, and then… I don’t know… Maybe he got up to make a phone call…’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because there was a message on my machine this morning. It was full of bile. So drunk he could hardly speak. It was like, “You fucking old bitch… you gave away a baby and kept…” ’

Lol could hear voices in the streets and alleys below, guessed that Bell finally had an audience. Without one, there would be no point.

‘ “… Kept something…” ’ She began to play with the clasp on the mandolin case, flicking it up and down with her fingers. ‘ “… Something looks like a Kentucky fried chicken.” ’

‘He was dead when you found him, right? Come on, Bell, everybody’s going to know after the post-mortem.’

She let the clasp snap back. Her sigh was irritable.

‘Maybe he went on drinking and choked on his own vomit. I don’t know. I was just so angry at him. He’d killed Robbie and he’d got away with it… for what? Such a sordid, ignominious… such a little death… He wouldn’t… even he wouldn’t have wanted that. I… I went into his hovel of a kitchen and I found a knife in a drawer.’

Lol imagined the resulting scene like a concept-art tableau: Tracey Emin meeting Damien Hirst in their own perfect purgatory.

Bell said, ‘It’s how I imagined Arnold de Lisle dying. Naked. Cut to pieces. Jonathan, if he was nothing else, at least he looked like a warrior. Like Eric. All they ever had was their looks.’

‘Arnold de Lisle, huh?’ Lol was suddenly furious at her. ‘Except that with Arnold there’d have been masses of blood. When someone’s already dead, nothing pumping, you can cut through arteries and just get a dribble.’

‘I didn’t know. Or if I did, I didn’t think.’

‘So that was pretty sordid, too, really. And you know something else? With your luck, you could throw yourself off this roof and… and land on the porch or something and just wind up a paraplegic.’

‘We’ll see,’ Bell said. She straightened up with a kind of magisterial calm and flicked up the catch and opened the mandolin case, releasing a very strong smell of what could only be more lighter fuel.

‘The other difference with Arnold,’ Lol said in desperation, ‘was that at least he had some love first.’

Bell smiled sadly, with those lovely crooked teeth, a glint of moving light in her eyes as she came down, with the open coffin, to the candles.

Side by side, looking out of the window space towards the river and just a few lights, Merrily and Sam prayed together for Marion de la Bruyère, Merrily murmuring snatches from the Requiem Eucharist.

‘We’ve come to remember, before God, our sister Marion…’

Robbie Walsh had probably chosen well. Marion might well have resembled Sam physically even if, in a border fortress full of tense, wary men, she’d have grown up faster and probably harder.

You promised eternal life to those who believe:

Remember your servant Marion,

as we also remember her.

Bring all who rest in Christ

Into the fullness of your Kingdom

where sins have been forgiven

and death is no more…

And then busking it.

‘God, we pray for the release of Marion’s spirit from the deluded and the misguided and those who would use her to further their own… agendas. We pray that Marion may…’

It was very cold now, in the Hanging Tower. Sam crept close to Merrily; she was shaking. Her face was in shadow but the tiny ring glittered at the edge of an eyebrow.

‘… Fly,’ Merrily said.

Quite prepared to become aware of long, slow breathing in the tower, or even what Bernie Dunmore had described as more like an absence of smile. A smile so cold, so bleak, so devoid of hope… only this perpetual, bitter… terminality.

Unprepared for a long and hollow scream from somewhere else.

50 Dead Person Watching

COMING UP TO sunset, Lol’s living room was like the inside of a terracotta plant-pot. Even Jane didn’t like it any more.

‘Who gave you this number?’ Lol said into his mobile.

‘That doesn’t matter.’

‘I’ll have to change it now.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Lord Shipston said. ‘I doubt you’ll be hearing from me again. I just wanted to say, do you really want to start all this?’

‘Well,’ Lol said, ‘the album’s already out.’

‘I don’t care about the album. If I’m ever asked, I think I shall accuse you of, shall we say, political satire. Anything beyond that, we’ll see each other in court. And I’ll win because I can afford the best.’

‘You’re threatening me again,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing changes.’

‘I’m just pointing out to you the problems of a long and costly libel action.’

‘It’s nothing to do with courts, Gavin,’ Lol said. ‘In the end, mud just sticks.’

It went on like that for a while. Lol considered the options but, with guys like this, compromise was not one of them.

‘The situation is that I’m quite happy for you to remain with all the other iffy bastards in the House of Lords,’ he said eventually. ‘I’d just be worried if I’d heard you’d gone back to having direct responsibility for psychiatric patients.’

‘That isn’t likely to happen,’ Shipston said.

‘In that case, as long as neither Merrily nor I have any further problems with Saltash or Fyneham or anybody else who may have been unknowingly dragged into it, you won’t hear from me again. Or from Helen Weeks.’

‘Is that blackmail, Mr Robinson?’

‘Is that paranoia?’ Lol said, and Shipston cut the call, Lol just hoping he didn’t go so far as to check out poor Helen Weeks and find out that she’d died in one of those notorious train crashes on the outskirts of London some years ago. She’d been going back to hospital at the time, accompanied by her sister.

Some people never had any luck.

The sun was setting behind the stubby-pillared market hall as Lol crossed the cobbles to the vicarage. Sunday evening and the street was full of people, but very few of them coming from the church where, in the absence of Ledwardine’s own vicar, the Rev. Dennis Beckett was conducting evensong.

Lol didn’t recognize most of these people or their posh four-by-fours.

It’s all changing, Laurence, Lucy Devenish murmured at his shoulder, frowning down her nose, which had been a little like Belladonna’s, except not so… well, not so attractive, not that Lucy would care.

The new type of incomer, Lol reflected. In the days, not so long ago, when property in Herefordshire and Shropshire and mid-Wales was still relatively cheap, you’d get the pioneer type, the urban romantics with rural dreams who wanted a smallholding, their own veg garden, a few sheep and chickens. Now the Border had become the new Cotswolds and it was the wealthy people who were moving in, and they were not satisfied with a low-key existence, side by side with the farmers and the old village families.

They wanted to possess.

There were two more modest cars in the vicarage drive, and he thought he recognized both of them.

‘We’re not here, Laurence,’ Frannie Bliss said. ‘Neither of us.’

‘Ghosts?’ Lol pulled out a chair next to Merrily’s at the refectory table. ‘Everybody’s a ghost.’

Mumford looked up from his tea, his eyes muddy.

‘Andy here didn’t want to come to HQ,’ Bliss explained. ‘And I didn’t want to be seen with him, either – Annie Howe’s much too close to that prick from Shrewsbury.’

Lol didn’t understand, and couldn’t see any reason why he might need to.

‘Jane’s out with Eirion.’ Merrily poured him some tea. ‘I think they’re celebrating something. So I thought it would be a good time to, you know…

‘Complicate my life,’ Bliss said.

‘It might be rubbish, Frannie. Bell might be absolutely right in her belief that Jon Scole killed Robbie. Maybe, but I just don’t want it to be him. I don’t think he had his adoptive parents killed, either. The people you liked, you don’t want them to have been the bad guys. Whereas the people you don’t like…’

Merrily looked at Mumford, who, for his part, had wanted it to be this Jason Mebus. Mumford didn’t even look up. He was wearing a suit and tie, and didn’t look retired. He looked safe again. Retired people, Lol had decided, were the new delinquents. Lol had heard that, following a phone call from Gomer Parry, Mumford might soon be head-hunted by Jumbo Humphries, Welsh Border garage-owner, feed dealer and private investigator. It would keep Mumford off the streets.

‘You must be awful glad you didn’t kill the twat, Andy,’ Bliss said.

Mumford grunted. ‘Was never on the cards.’

Bliss smiled, looked at Lol and Merrily, and lifted his eyebrows.

Merrily said, ‘I’m probably just being stupid.’

‘Look,’ Bliss said. ‘It’s pretty clear that nobody thought Robbie was an accident, and suicide looks increasingly unlikely. So if there has to be a third suspect, fair enough, I’m always happy to get another lawyer out of the system.’

‘I just lay awake thinking about it, and then I woke up thinking about it.’ Merrily shook out a cigarette. ‘I thought that, well, if Jon Scole wasn’t bothered about all the money going to Robbie, here was somebody who definitely was.’

‘Go on, then. Spell it out.’

‘Well… her childhood was disrupted after her father dumped her mother for Bell. She was virtually expected to be Bell’s nursemaid whenever she spent any time with them. And, after her father went off to America, it was her real mother who got her the job with Smith, Sebald. And then she gets saddled with Bell again.’

‘She could’ve said no, Merrily.’

‘With Bell in the same town, and her father saying please look after her? OK, on the one hand a good client, but it must have been hell constantly covering things up, wondering what the firm’s good name was going to be dragged into next. And then there’s her future father-in-law, who… well, a lot of unexplained alienation there that must already be putting a strain on her relationship with Stephen Lackland.’

‘And then,’ Bliss said, ‘the mad woman announces that she’s adopting the son of – pardon me, Andy – this grasping bint from the Plascarreg, and making arrangements to ensure he and the new Palmers’ Guild get the bulk of her considerable estate. Do we know if Susannah Pepper attempted to talk Belladonna out of it?’

Merrily shook her head. ‘Dunno, but – something else that occurred to me – if Bell died, Susannah would’ve been left as Robbie’s guardian. Not the way anyone would want to start their married life.’

‘Could she die?’

‘That’s her lifetime’s ambition, Frannie. Anyway, you could never prove it about the lawyer. I just wanted to unload it. Sorry.’

‘No, no… I’ll pass it on, discreetly. No doubt the lads in Ludlow will be observing them together when Bell appears in court to face charges of wilful damage to a stiff, or whatever we cobble together. Charge might, of course, get thrown out – who knows?’ Bliss finished his tea. ‘So you’ve placed her in the custody of Huw Owen. Interesting.’

For both of them, Lol thought.

It had been Merrily’s idea to ask Huw Owen to take care of Bell. They’d told her last night that The Weir House was already surrounded by the media, and they’d brought her back here to the vicarage. It was safe enough for her – and safe from her, Lol had thought – in that it wasn’t Ludlow.

Although at one stage she’d become disorientated and appeared to think that it was a country-house hotel, Bell had slept for perhaps the first time in over twenty-four hours. By the time she was awake this morning, around eleven, Huw was already here, looking like the stand-in keyboard player from some acid-rock band that had never made it into the 1970s. Bell had acted strange and subdued and seemed in some way hollow, as though some part of her had indeed rolled like a fireball from the church tower, and was already haunting the back streets of Ludlow.

Well, Huw knew all the spiritual retreats and the sanctuaries that could turn people around. Plus he had a murky kind of charisma. And he liked strange women.

They hadn’t consulted Susannah Pepper.

Just after dawn, Lol had awoken suddenly in Merrily’s bed – well, it had been late when they’d got back here, and there was Belladonna to see to – convinced for a knife-edge moment that he was still up there on that tower and that the remaining two candles hadn’t inexplicably gone out when Bell had lowered herself over them.

It seemed like a bad joke now…

No, it didn’t. It still didn’t seem like any kind of joke. Maybe it had been the sudden disturbance of the air that had done it, or maybe the fact that the flames, already burning very low, had been deprived of air, Bell’s dress acting like a big snuffer. Or maybe…

Maybe it had been an act of God. They had, after all, been votive candles.

You believed what you needed to believe.

All Lol wished was that he hadn’t accidentally glanced into the open mandolin case.

Even though it was early May now, it was still sufficiently cool to justify a fire in the vicarage drawing room, and they sat on the sofa and did things together that you weren’t supposed to do over the age of seventeen, especially if you were a minister of God and this was a Sunday.

Exploring one another, maybe, wondering if they were intact.

‘I still feel happier here, I’m afraid,’ Merrily said. ‘I know this is really stupid, but at your place I always feel Lucy’s watching.’

‘Giving us a slow handclap.’

No, Lucy had a certain decorum.

‘All right – big question,’ Merrily said. ‘Seriously, do you think Lucy could be seeing us in her house, processing the information and responding to it, intellectually or emotionally? A dead person watching. Can someone be earthbound in a benevolent way?’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what this has taught me, if anything, about the nature of ghosts.’

‘Why did Siân suddenly scream when you were there in the Hanging Tower with Sam?’ Lol said. ‘And was this the same moment that the candles on the church tower went out?’

‘Wouldn’t say a word, you know,’ Merrily said. ‘Not to me, anyway.’

‘Siân?’

‘White as a sheet. Said she’d felt faint and gone out for some air. Perhaps thinking – commendably, I suppose – that her own inherent scepticism might damage what we were trying to do. And she walked across the Inner Bailey to the gatehouse.’

‘The Keep? Where Robbie fell.’

‘And Marion, probably. The Hanging Tower wasn’t built in Marion’s time, but the Keep definitely was. Maybe, the evening he died, Robbie had taken someone to the top of the Keep to explain to that someone his theory that this was actually where it happened.’

‘What do you think Siân saw?’

‘Or felt? Whatever, she was terrified. I suppose it’s so much worse for someone who despises… superstition. Maybe she saw whatever remains of Marion. Whatever it was the Bishop once saw. Not terribly benevolent, that. Anyway, Siân wants to resign from her self-appointed role of Deliverance Coordinator.’ Merrily leaned back into a corner of the sofa. ‘I asked her to stay on. Amazed myself.’

‘I liked her,’ Lol said.

‘You like everybody who isn’t a psychiatrist.’

‘Ah,’ Lol said, ‘about that…’

He told her about the call from the ennobled Gavin Gascoigne.

‘Bloody hell,’ Merrily said. ‘Governments scare me more than spooks.’

‘They think they’re protecting themselves for the well-being of the nation.’

‘Is Saltash going to back off?’

‘He’ll do whatever Gascoigne wants. When you think about it, what he did – this kid Fyneham and everything – that was incredibly stupid. People like Saltash and Gascoigne, they’re treated like gods for years, gods who can see into the minds of men. And then they retire.’ And become delinquents, Lol was thinking. ‘Anyway, Saltash is my problem. Unfortunately inflicted on you.’

‘Our problem. A problem shared…’

‘What about Sam? You’ll go and see her?’

‘With Sandy Gee, tomorrow for a start. Pastoral care. Sam’s not out of it yet. She started talking about the e-mails Robbie sent her about the bad time he was having on the Plascarreg. All the things she should have done. And then there’s Jemmie… maybe it’ll need a Requiem for Jemmie. A dark presence there. Needs attention.’

There was also the question of what to do about the contents of the mandolin case. So much to sort out yet. Nothing ever finished.

Jane and Eirion were planning a raid on the Internet suicide sites tonight – well, safer with two of them, Merrily said. She suspected that Belladonna’s ubiquity on death sites and in chat-rooms had been in some way down to Jonathan Scole. Karen Dowell’s first dissection of his hard disk had shown that he’d been posting messages on the Net purporting to be from someone very close to Belladonna. Someone calling himself Revenant.

Death is eternal life without pain.

Know that we must make our own eternity.

How much of that would Scole have understood at the time? Had he adopted that name, Scole, because it was the name of a village in East Anglia where experiments had famously been carried out into the existence of spirits? Something else they’d never know. Scole had been his mother’s son, Merrily said – layered.

‘And what about Robbie Walsh?’ Lol said. ‘Does he get a Requiem?’

‘I’ll see what Andy thinks about it.’

‘Some tension there? Mumford?’

‘Mmm, Bliss… I really think Bliss thought Andy might’ve killed Jason Mebus.’

‘Do retired policemen in Hereford routinely kill suspects they couldn’t nail?’

‘Mumford took him down by the river,’ Merrily said. ‘Near the old Campions Restaurant? Mebus kept insisting he hadn’t, you know, gone to Ludlow to find Robbie. But Mebus is such a smart-arse. Hardened villain already, at Jane’s age. Mumford said he didn’t believe him. Admitted he completely lost it, had Mebus on the edge of the water. He told Bliss he thought Mebus must’ve hit him with a stone or something and got away.’

‘Mebus did get away?’

‘Not for long, however. He and Chain-boy nicked a car last night and turned it over on the A49. Chain-boy has head injuries, Mebus broke his collar bone and fractured two ribs.’

‘Karma,’ Lol said.

‘Don’t go there.’

Lol heard a car door slam and then Jane outside, laughing. Jane had a laugh like a firework going off.

‘So what did Mumford say to you at the door, after Bliss had left?’

Lol remembered seeing them together by the print of The Light of the World. Mumford looking uncomfortable, mumbling something quickly and then leaving without turning back. Merrily standing on the mat, exchanging thoughtful looks with Jesus.

‘He said something about… about the face he’d seen reflected in the Wye, when he was forcing Mebus’s head down towards the water.’

‘Not Mebus?’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘Not Mebus.’