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Authors: Phil Rickman

Tags: #Fiction, #Crime, #Mystery & Detective, #General

The Smile of a Ghost (9 page)

BOOK: The Smile of a Ghost
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‘Mam, that was the old bishop. He don’t live here no more.’

‘He can’t tell me why, see! That’s why he don’t wanner come.’ She turned to Saltash. ‘Can’t tell me.’

Mrs Mumford stared at Saltash in silence. Merrily looked away, around the room. The walls were bare, pink anaglypta, except for a wide picture in a gilt frame over a sideboard with silverware on it. But the picture had been turned round to face the wall. All you could see was the brown-paper backing, stretched tight.

What was it a picture of? Ludlow Castle?

‘What would you like the Bishop to tell you?’ Saltash asked.

Mam kept on staring at him, like she knew him but couldn’t place him. You could feel her confusion in the room, like a tangle of grey wool in the air. Her voice went into a whisper.

‘Why did God let her take him?’ Starting to cry now. ‘Why did God let that woman take our boy?’

Saltash leaned forward. ‘Which woman is that, Phyllis?’

‘You’re supposed to be a policeman!’ Mam rounding on Andy, chins quaking. ‘Why din’t you stop her?’

Andy Mumford drew a tight breath through clenched teeth, the veins prominent in his cheeks.

‘The Bishop, when he come round, he sat on that settee with a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit and he never mentioned God nor Jesus, not once.’

Merrily said softly, ‘Mrs Mumford, who was the woman?’

Mam didn’t look at her. ‘I can’t say it.’ She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose. Saltash caught Merrily’s eye.

Andy said, ‘Mam, you can say anything to Mrs Watkins, and it won’t go no further.’

‘What… this girl?’

Mam snorted. Mumford looked helplessly at Merrily.

‘Phyllis,’ Saltash said. ‘I think you were starting to tell us about Robbie.’

‘Oh…’ She smiled suddenly, her face flushed. She sat up, centre stage. ‘He loves it here, he does.’

‘He felt safe here.’

‘He loves it.’

‘He was interested in history, wasn’t he?’

‘He loves all the old houses. He’s always walking up and down, looking at the old houses. He knows when they was all built and he knows who used to live in them. You can walk up Corve Street with him, and he’ll tell you who used to live where, what he’s found out from books. Reads such a lot of books. Reads and reads. I says, you’ll hurt your eyes, reading in that light!’

‘Phyllis,’ Saltash said. ‘Can you see Robbie… reading?’

‘No!’ She reared up, nodding the word out, hard. ‘I don’t need to see him no more. I said, please don’t let me see him. I don’t wanner see him like that…’

‘Like that?’

‘All broken. I don’t wanner— I just hears him now. Nan, Nan… Sometimes he’s a long way away. But sometimes, when I’m nearly asleep, he’ll be real close. Nan…’ She smiled. ‘And he draws them, the old houses. He’s real good. Draws all them old houses. And the church. And the ca—’

She stopped, her mouth open. And then her whole face seemed to flow, like a melting candle, and a sob erupted, and she clawed at her face and then – as Merrily stood up – kicked her chair back, dropping her hands.

‘She took him off.’

‘Mam!’ Andy knelt by the side of the chair, steadying it. ‘You mustn’t—’

‘She pushed him off, Andrew.’

‘No,’ Mumford said. ‘Now, that didn’t happen. Did it?’

‘Pushed him off,’ his mam said. ‘He told me.’

‘What do you mean?’ Mumford staring up into his mother’s swirling face. ‘What are you saying?’

Outside, the sun had gone in and there was a cold breeze. Merrily stared across the car park at the Tesco store. Its roof line had a roller-coaster curve, and she saw how this had been formed to follow the line of the hills beyond the town.

Some town – even Tesco’s having to sing in harmony.

She felt inadequate. Something wasn’t making sense. Or it was making the wrong kind of sense. There was an acrid air of betrayal around the house where the Mumfords lived, in the middle of a brick terrace, isolated now on the edge of one of the new access roads serving Tesco’s and its car park. When they came out, Nigel Saltash had spotted Andy’s dad walking back across the car park with a Tesco’s carrier bag, a wiry old man in a fishing hat.

‘Think I’ll have a word, if that’s all right.’

Mumford nodding glumly, sitting on the brick front wall of his parents’ home, looking out across what seemed to be as close as Ludlow got to messy. The train station, small and discreet, sat on higher ground opposite the supermarket. Lower down was an old feed-mill, beautifully preserved, turned into apartments or something. Then tiers of Georgian and medieval roofs and chimney stacks and, above everything, the high tower of St Laurence’s, like a column of sepia smoke.

‘The doc says she needs assessment,’ Mumford said. ‘Should have had assessment some while back. See the way he looked at me?’

‘It’s how he looks at everybody,’ Merrily said. ‘He’s a psychiatrist.’

Her hands were clasped across her stomach, damming the cold river of doubt that awoke her sometimes in the night – the seeping fear that most of what she did amounted to no more than a ludicrously antiquated distraction from reality.

‘Checking out the old feller now, see,’ Mumford said. ‘Next thing, he’ll have the bloody social services in. This is—’ His hands gripping the bricks on either side. ‘She’s got worse, much worse, since the boy died.’

‘A dreadful shock can do it. Reaction can be delayed. It doesn’t necessarily mean she’s on the slippery slope.’

‘At her age,’ Mumford said, ‘what else kind of slope is there?’

Merrily paced a semicircle. She saw Saltash, just out of earshot. His head was on one side, and he was pinching his chin and nodding, flashing his mirthless smile as Mumford’s dad talked, his carrier bag at his feet. She was remembering Huw Owen’s primary rule: never walk away from a house of disturbance without leaving a prayer behind.

Had she left without a prayer because she was afraid it might have inflamed the situation? Or because Nigel Saltash was there?

‘Just because I’m working with a psychiatrist doesn’t mean other possible interpretations go out of the window.’ She bit her lip, uncertain. Hoping she wasn’t just fighting her corner for the sake of it. ‘What do you think she meant about a woman pushing him off the castle?’

Mumford shook his head. ‘She never said that before.’

‘Does it make any sense?’

‘There was a witness – bloke lives over the river. Steve Britton showed me the statement. Bloke saw him fall. Nothing about anybody else. I… Where’s she get this stuff from? Never said nothing like that before. I don’t… Christ, I need to check this out, now, don’t I? You’re right, it’s easy enough to say she’s losing it.’ He sprang up from the wall. ‘I dunno… at every stage of your bloody life you become somebody you said you was never gonner be.’

‘In what way?’

‘Ah… you’d be on an investigation: murder, suicide, missing person, and there’d always be some pain-in-the-arse busybody relative – never the father, always someone a bit removed from it – who’d be trying to tell you your job. Have you looked into this or that aspect, have you talked to so-and-so, why en’t you done this? You wanted to strangle them after a bit. But the truth is there aren’t enough cops to do half of what needs doing. And so things don’t come out the way they should, things gets left, filed, ignored…’

‘Be careful, Andy,’ Merrily said, for no good reason, knowing she wouldn’t be careful in a situation like this.

‘Airy-fairy sort of feller, apparently – writes poems and publishes them hisself.’

‘Who?’

‘The witness. I’ll mabbe go see him. Got time now, ennit? Got time to be the busybody pain-in-the-arse uncle. Nobody bothered about the kid when he was alive, except for one ole woman.’

‘Andy, I’m hardly the person to be disparaging it, but if she does think she’s been given this information by a… by Robbie…’

‘Could be something he told her days before, ennit? Before he died. Something that’s suddenly clicked. I been agonizing about Robbie’s death for three weeks now. Thinking, leave it till after the funeral, wait for the inquest. Now even Mam’s on at me to do something.
Why din’t you stop her?
Where the hell did she get that from, Mrs Watkins?’

On the edge of the car park, Mumford’s dad had picked up his carrier bag and he and Saltash had started back towards the house in the wake of Saltash’s all-concealing smile.

‘Andy.’ Merrily beckoned Mumford into his parents’ tiny front garden. ‘I think we should try and deal with this… Go back in. But not with him. Think of something.’

7

 
I’ll Be Waiting
 

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER
clear reason why the implications of retirement were terrifying Andy Mumford.

His dad.

Reg Mumford was taller than his son and held himself stiff-backed and upright, but it was hard to believe now that he’d ever been a policeman. Still wearing his fishing hat, he was standing with his hands on the shoulders of his wife’s chair, as if it was a wheelchair. Merrily’s feeling was that this was because he didn’t want to look at her.

‘I reckon they’ve started watering the beer again, Andrew.’

‘You said.’

‘Have you found that?’

‘No, Dad.’

‘Always start doing it this time of year when the tourists come.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Prices goes up, too. Don’t seem two minutes since it was one and six a pint.’

‘Before my time, Dad.’

‘Hee, hee!’ Reg Mumford pointed at Andy, who was standing uncomfortably up against the sideboard near the picture that was turned to the wall. ‘You en’t gonner be saying that for long. Now you’re retired, see, time’s gonner speed up, time’s gonner flash by, you mark my words, boy.’

‘Mrs Watkins would like to talk to you again,’ Mumford said.

‘I’d be delighted to talk to this young lady, Andrew. Shall we go out for a drink, the three of us?’

‘She wants to talk to Mam, Dad.’

‘Won’t get no sense out of her,’ Reg said. ‘I can tell you that much.’

Merrily, still standing by the door, glanced at Andy Mumford, watched his lips retract, a sign of extreme frustration. They were getting nowhere here. Nigel Saltash had suggested lunch in one of the splendid new restaurants which, he said, now made visits to Ludlow such an unexpected pleasure. At least she’d got out of that, saying that she had a sermon to write, and then Mumford telling Saltash he had to pick his wife up in Dilwyn, not far from Ledwardine, so he could give the vicar a lift back.

She came over from the door and knelt on the rug in front of Mrs Mumford’s chair. Mrs Mumford contemplated her for a while and then began to nod, light graduating into her eyes as if the action of nodding was powering a small dynamo.

‘Now then. Now. I know who you are. I was a bit confused, the way that man kept smiling at me, but I know who you are now, my dear.’

Merrily smiled back. Somehow she didn’t think Mrs Mumford was going to get this right.

‘You were at the funeral, weren’t you?’

‘Erm…’

‘You’re the teacher. Yes. Robbie’s teacher. You was his favourite, you’re…’ Mrs Mumford started to prise herself up. ‘You’re his… history teacher!’

‘Well, I—’

‘’Course you are.’ Reg Mumford was leaning over the chair from behind and pointing a forefinger at his own head, making screwing motions. ‘And we’re very glad to see you, aren’t we, Phyllis?’

‘He loved history,’ Mrs Mumford said.

‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘Yes, he did.’

‘Much bloody good it did him.’ Reg snorted. ‘Should’ve been out playing football. If he’d played football like a normal boy he’d still be alive. I’ve always said that.’

‘Dad, for Christ—’

‘Andrew, we gotter face facts. We’re all terrible sorry ’bout what happened, but it en’t no use blamin’ ourselves for ever and a day, is it? Boy was a bloody dreamer, head in the clouds, no gettin’ round it.’

‘All right, Dad,’ Mumford said, desperate. ‘We’ll go to the pub, you and me, eh? Half an hour, Mrs Watkins, will that be all right?’

Merrily nodded, grateful.

‘Now, I know I had something to show you,’ Mrs Mumford said. ‘Where did I put it?’

Merrily had made tea for them both. The kitchen wasn’t as clean as it might have been; she’d wondered if there was a home help. Mrs Mumford didn’t seem to be disabled, but she was very overweight.

‘Look in that top drawer, would you?’ She seemed to be accepting Merrily, now they were on their own, but not as a priest; she wouldn’t be ready for that. ‘No, no, not that one… the long one… that’s it.’

‘This?’ Merrily opened the drawer and found a hard-backed sketch pad inside.

‘There it is. Will you bring it over?’

‘Phyllis… why’s this picture turned to the wall?’

‘Eh?’

‘The picture.’ Merrily touched it.

‘No! You leave that alone!’

‘OK.’ She drew back, took the sketch pad to Mrs Mumford who put it flat on her knees. Merrily pulled up a dining chair. An envelope fell out of the sketch pad and she caught it and put it on the chair arm.

BOOK: The Smile of a Ghost
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