‘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.’