The Smile of a Ghost (Merrily Watkins 7) Read online

  Smile of a Ghost

  PHIL RICKMAN was born in Lancashire and lives on the Welsh border. He is the author of the Merrily Watkins series and The Bones of Avalon. He has won awards for his TV and radio journalism and writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf for BBC Radio Wales.

  ALSO BY

  PHIL

  RICKMAN

  THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

  The Wine of Angels

  Midwinter of the Spirit

  A Crown of Lights

  The Cure of Souls

  The Lamp of the Wicked

  The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

  The Smile of a Ghost

  The Remains of an Altar

  The Fabric of Sin

  To Dream of the Dead

  The Secrets of Pain

  THE JOHN DEE PAPERS

  The Bones of Avalon

  OTHER TITLES

  Candlenight

  Curfew

  The Man in the Moss

  December

  The Chalice

  First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Macmillan.

  This paperback edition first published in the UK in 2012 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Phil Rickman, 2005.

  The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-0-85789-015-3 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-0-85789-022-1 (eBook)

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  The Smile of a Ghost

  Contents

  Mumford

  PART ONE: Robbie

  1. Into the Loop

  2. Vice-rage

  3. Pebbles

  4. Routine Pastoral

  5. Saturday Sun

  6. On the Slippery Slope

  7. I’ll Be Waiting

  8. Imbalance

  9. The Bishop’s Tale

  10. Leave God Out of It

  11. Nightshades

  12. Esoteric

  PART TWO: Jemmie

  13. Extreme

  14. Black Poppies

  15. Ghost-Walk

  16. Kindred Spirit

  17. Outcast

  18. Departure Lounge

  19. The Joy of Death

  20. Old Ludlow

  21. Tradition

  22. Stepmother

  23. Duality

  PART THREE: Bell

  24. Ancient Incense

  25. His Element

  26. The Mix

  27. Carrying a Light

  28. Tonguing the Yew

  29. All the Big Words

  30. Victim

  31. Smoke

  32. Media Studies

  33. Lift Shaft into Heaven

  Mumford

  34. Old Stock

  35. A Resort for the Dead

  36. The Legend

  37. Like in the Belfry

  38. Like Hello!

  39. Raw Madness

  Mumford

  40. Heavier Than You Know

  PART FOUR: Sam

  41. Big Bump

  Mumford

  42. Like Heat

  43. Nobody but God

  44. Lab Rat

  45. Marion

  46. Gridiron

  47. Point of Transition

  48. Running Through the Town

  49. An Intimate Eternity

  50. Dead Person Watching

  Mumford

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

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

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

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

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

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

  … imperturbable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Because Gail was still a professional.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Cursing.

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

  But God got in first.

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

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

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

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

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

  But Steve had seen him.

  ‘Andy?’

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

  ‘Andy!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Walking with Steve Britton back to the castle.

  The castle, of all places. Christ.

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

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

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

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

  Couldn’t be, anyway. No logic to it.

  ‘How’d this boy gain access, Steve?’

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

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

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

  Robbie would know.

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

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

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

  … another death scene.

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

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

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

  ‘Robbie Walsh knows his way blindfold, Steve.’

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

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

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

  ‘Broken neck?’

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

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

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

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

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

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