Free The Smile of a Ghost by Phil Rickman Page A

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