‘She didn’t feel’ – Lol took a chance – ‘the way some people… feel. But she wanted to?’
Tom was quiet, Lol half-expecting him to ring off. And then,
‘Story is, she had meningitis as a kid. Teens, anyway. Came close to checking out, had some death’s-door experience, changed her life. Kept wanting to tell me about it, following me around. Sent me a card wiv… you know, a picture inside. Of her. That kind of picture. I don’t fink so. Outta my face, you crazy woman!’
‘So when was the last time you actually spoke to her?’
‘Gawd… few years ago? She wanted to work wiv me this time. Like I’d be that insane? Didn’t seem to be able to decode the phrase piss off. Kept ringing, bending Shelley’s ear, the missus – I wasn’t gonna talk to her, no way; it’s why we was ex-directory, Gawdsake. We had the number changed, in the end. Mad, sick, stupid woman. And the music… atrocious.’
‘Where was she living, the last you heard?’
‘Moves around. Always moved around, couldn’t settle. I fink – Shelley would know this – I fink, the last we heard, she was on her daughter’s back. Nah, nah, not her daughter, Saul Pepper’s daughter. The poor bastard she married. He had a daughter already. Bell went to live near the daughter, that’s the last we heard.’
‘Would that have been in Ludlow?’
‘Where?’
‘In Shropshire.’
‘Shit,’ Tom said. ‘That ain’t too far away from here, is it? Listen, you ever run into the mad bitch, you never spoke to me in your life, Laurence.’
Lol put a log on the fire.
‘The marriage to Saul Pepper ended, apparently, about six years ago,’ Merrily said. ‘He went to America to work. Has a new family now. One website says the split was amicable. Pepper said she was too’ – Merrily sighed – ‘too weird for him. In the end. Seems to have been too weird for people all her life.’
‘But not too weird for Saul Pepper’s daughter.’
‘Nor, it seems, for Robbie Walsh. Erm… what Tom Storey told you about the near-death experience – that’s interesting. The Church has a strange attitude towards all that. The most common perceived experience of an afterlife, but we’re oh so wary.’
‘You?’
‘Me, no. I’d love to have a near-death experience. Well, not too near, not just yet, but I mean most people who’ve had them – the long tunnel, the glorious light – they immediately seem to lose all fear of dying.’
‘I thought the clergy naturally would have no f—’
‘You’re kidding.’
Lol smiled. ‘Doesn’t really explain Belladonna’s music, though, does it? Her old stage act. Which was not about the delights of the afterlife as much as the trappings of death itself: coffins, biers, all that. What kind of near-death experience accounts for that?’
‘Good point. None of this adds up, does it? I mean, that’s the problem… nothing here adds up. Nothing quite connects. Pieces missing, everywhere.’
‘What about the dead girl?’
‘Especially that. That’s… horrific.’ Merrily stood up, steadying her mug of tea. ‘I’m going to suggest that Mumford talk to Frannie Bliss, see if he can find out what the police have uncovered. I think what Bernie’s saying is that it needs to be sorted – explained – before local people start putting a superstitious slant on it.’
‘Does that really happen any more, in our secular society?’
‘Especially in our secular society,’ Merrily said. She reached out for Lol’s hand. ‘Nothing wrong, is there?’
‘I… no.’
‘You’re OK about the Bristol gig?’
‘I’ll just take lots of drugs,’ Lol said.
She peered at him to see if he was smiling. He smiled.
A few minutes later, he watched from the front window as she moved across the edge of the cobbled square to the vicarage gate. He felt vacant, spare. She was working seven days a week, letting herself be used to further other people’s agendas. In the past week, he’d written about half a song that was never going to be more than a filler track on the next album, if there was a next album. He felt incomplete, worthless.
The fire was burning low and the room was laden with shadows as dense as old clothes. It was time he got the electricity connected.
15
Ghost-Walk
MUMFORD DIDN’T WANT to talk to Frannie Bliss.
Well, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to Bliss, he said on the phone, just that he didn’t want to put the DI in a difficult position.
Mumford, reluctantly, as Joe Public: a crisis of confidence.
‘You do want to find out about this?’ Merrily said. ‘How this girl’s suicide ties in. If it does.’
‘Suppose I wouldn’t mind, aye.’
Almost certainly Welsh Border-speak for, Yes, I will never rest again until I know. Outside the scullery window, the apple trees’ budded branches dangled uncertainly, and the grey-green moss gleamed coldly on the stone wall between the vicarage garden and the churchyard. Spring had stalled in frosty spurts of morning mist, the exhaust of winter.
‘You heard the local radio, Mrs Watkins?’
‘Some of the early stuff.’
The breakfast lead on Radio Hereford and Worcester had been an extended report live from Ledbury. Not unexpectedly, the parents weren’t talking. Anonymous neighbours said that the dead girl, Jemima Pegler, used to be a helpful, friendly kid, once, but she’d changed. Neighbours in small towns didn’t like to use words like sullen. They said more withdrawn lately.
‘You leave it on for the studio discussion?’ Mumford said.
‘Didn’t have time.’
‘Your friend Dr Saltash?’
Merrily gripped the wooden arms of her chair, Ethel the cat taking off from the desk and raking up a page of the sermon pad.
‘Introduced as a retired consultant psychiatrist with Hereford hospitals, special consultant to the Department of Health, and the author of a paper on self-harming in children and teenagers.’
‘Andy, was this man always bloody ubiquitous, or is it just my paranoia?’
‘Said he couldn’t really comment on an individual case but in the general way of things this particular method of suicide – public place – it was usually a cry for attention. A child saying, You’re all gonner know who I am now, kind of thing.’
‘And two near-identical deaths in more or less the same spot?’
‘Didn’t make much of that. Once a place gets known for it… like scores of folk jumping off Beachy Head, ennit?’
‘He mention your mother?’
‘Not in so many words. Old folk, that’s not so emotive, is it? Not like kids.’
‘And we still don’t know what the police think.’
Giving Mumford another opportunity to say he’d contact Bliss.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I gotter go into Ludlow this afternoon, see about the inquest, get an undertaker on standby for the ole girl. Might talk to some other people while I’m there. Let you know what I find out, all right?’
‘Please.’
‘’Course,’ Mumford said, ‘no partic’lar reason why you shouldn’t give the boss a call.’
‘Bliss?’
‘Always got time for you, as I recall.’
‘And then, like… tell you what he says.’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Mumford said.
‘Andy Mumford,’ Frannie Bliss said nostalgically. ‘Merrily, I just can’t tell you how much I miss the miserable bastard. The faded rugby-club ties, the knackered tweed jackets he probably inherited from his dad…’
‘His dad’s still alive, Frannie.’
‘Figure of speech, Merrily.’
‘Unlike his mother.’