‘Doesn’t want to live at home, but she thinks it must be crap to have a place of your own and have to clean it. So… she’s overweight and has a reputation as an easy lay because she must be desperate. Self-esteem at rock bottom. Bored with going out with blokes who nick cars because there’s nowhere worth driving to in them. Was she ever diagnosed as clinically depressed?’
‘Parents say not.’
‘Drugs?’
‘In normal life… possibly. Hard to say. When she died, however— This is well off the record, right?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘The window in the ruins we’re fairly sure she went out of is not actually that high up. Certainly not compared with the top of the tower that Robbie Walsh came off. You can’t get to the top of Jemmie’s tower without a ladder – it’s hollow. So you’re going out of one of the reachable windows – quite a drop the other side, and it could kill you, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. Unless, that is, you’ve already shot yourself full of enough heroin to make Keith Richards play the wrong chords.’
Merrily looked up, blinking.
‘She shot up before she jumped,’ Bliss said. ‘Threw the syringe out the window first, it looks like. SOCO found it underneath a yew tree, with her mobile a few feet away, both some distance from the body. PM this afternoon showed cardiac arrest.’
‘Is that—?’
‘Common enough, with an inexperienced user. More often than you’d think, the first fix is the last. Sometimes they don’t even have time to take the needle out before they’ve gone. Dr Grace thinks she might’ve been dead before she hit the ground, but we’ll never know that.’
‘God.’
‘So for all the drama, it’s a sad little death, Merrily. Mobile shows she tried to call her mate, Sam, before she did it. See, we know she wouldn’t have had any problem at all getting the stuff. A useful by-product of getting into Jemmie’s computer was it led us directly to a dealer we didn’t even know about in Ledbury. She’d had Es and dope from the same guy. So delightfully indiscreet, these kiddies.’
Ledbury: pleasant, picturesque old place at the foot of the Malverns. You didn’t think of it happening there. But then, it happened more or less everywhere now.
‘And some links to bigger players in Hereford,’ Bliss said. ‘For all she never spoke to her parents, she’s chatting away to us, from the other side of the grave. Talking of which…’ Bliss spread out some typescript. ‘Read this.’
with a plastic bag u can tie it round your neck but its not really necessary and it will take u much longer to get it off if u change your mind!!! Wot is good about plastic bags is that u dont look really horrible when they find you like with some methods of suffocation cos your eyes dont come out all bloody.
‘You can also read about the delights of hanging yourself,’ Bliss said.
‘This is an Internet chat-room, right?’
‘A specialist suicide chat-room. Adults advising unhappy kids on how to top themselves. Can’t describe what I’d like to do to these bastards with a few plastic bags, but then a few of us Catholics still think suicide’s a sin.’
‘Did Jemmie Pegler join in the discussions in the suicide chat-rooms?’
‘Just eavesdropped, I think. Lurking, as they say. Been doing it, on and off, for weeks, it looks like. Downloaded quite a lot. So we know she’d been dwelling on the possibility of suicide for quite a while.’
‘But no clues as to why she chose this method, this place? No mention of Robbie Walsh? Or Ludlow Castle?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You see, the point is that Robbie fell from the big tower, the Norman keep. No history to that. But Jemima wasn’t the first to go off the Hanging Tower.’
‘Tell me,’ Bliss said.
Merrily told him about Marion.
‘Long time ago, that.’ Bliss reached down to his briefcase.
‘You’ve already indicated this particular tower isn’t best suited to suicide, yet Jemima was determined to go that way. Did she use all that heroin to give her courage, or was it to make sure she died if the fall wasn’t enough?’
‘Interesting question,’ Bliss said.
‘How about Robbie Walsh – did he have a computer?’
‘Apparently not. Karen checked this afternoon.’
‘You’re having second thoughts about Robbie Walsh because of this?’
‘You got me thinking,’ Bliss said. ‘However, according to his mother, he wasn’t the computer type. An old-fashioned reader. Certainly enough books around the place, according to Karen. History books. No personal CD collection, either. Very old-fashioned little lad. An old-fashioned family, the Mumfords. Well, most of them.’ Bliss laid a folder on the pile in front of Merrily. ‘There you go. All ends tied?’
It contained a colour printout from a website.
LUDLOW GHOSTOURS
‘You knew,’ Merrily said.
‘Just thought I’d see if you did. It’s all there. Marion of the Heath. For a small fee, this feller will even guide you to the spot.’
‘She’d downloaded it.’
‘And more besides. Plan of the castle. She knew exactly where she was going and what she was gonna do when she got there.’
‘Anything else you haven’t told me because you wanted to see if I knew it already?’
Bliss smiled.
Before leaving Hereford, Merrily had called Mumford on his mobile, from the car, sitting in the Gaol Street car park with the rain beginning.
‘Aye,’ Mumford said wearily. ‘I know.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Pointless me asking why you felt you had to pass yourself off as still a copper.’
There was silence. She thought she’d lost the signal. The rain pooled in a dent on the Volvo’s bonnet; when Mumford’s voice came back it sounded dried-up, like a ditch in summer.
‘Can’t talk to people. Simple as that. Never could. Can’t do small talk. Walk into a shop, I can just about ask for what I wanner buy. What do I say? “I’m Robbie Walsh’s uncle and I’m feeling guilty as hell and please can you help me?” Can’t do it. Never could.’
In the same way he could only call her Mrs Watkins. In the same way he’d addressed Gerald Osman as ‘sir’, but not out of politeness. His whole identity had been written on his warrant card.
‘What did Bliss say?’ Mumford asked.
‘He said you should stay out of Ludlow. He was probably hyping it up a little.’
‘Mabbe not.’
Merrily sighed. ‘OK, here’s what else I found out.’
She told him about Jemmie Pegler’s computer and the suicide chat-rooms. Emphasizing that, although his name had appeared briefly on the chat pages, there had been no obvious personal connection with Robbie Walsh. Hopefully, this would keep Mumford out of Ledbury.
‘Computer, eh?’ He let out a slow hiss. ‘Never thought. Damn.’
‘Bliss said Robbie didn’t have a computer.’
‘Of course he had a computer. His grandparents bought it for him. Had me collect it from PC World. Packard Bell.’
‘Well, he hadn’t got it any more, Andy.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ Mumford said.
Driving home, with the rain starting up, Merrily wondered how much was actually known about Marion de la Bruyère, ‘a lady of the castle’. You thought of flowing robes, one of those funnel-shaped headdresses, with a ribbon.
But Bernie Dunmore had been right. You were probably talking about a child. Those precious teenage years were also very much bypassed in the Middle Ages; by Jane’s age you could be a mother of three. Marion was probably about fifteen herself when she died, or even younger. Young enough, certainly, to be fooled by a smart operator she thought was in love with her.