‘Saltash.’
‘He does seem to be cornering the market in what one might call soundbite psychology,’ Sophie said.
‘He might be right, actually – the teenage pack-mentality, the need to feel that, even in death, you’re not alone. Anyway, someone has to be around to do the psychobabble.’
‘How far have you read?’ Sophie murmured.
‘What?’
and teenage girls are particularly susceptible to the fantasy world of ghosts and the supernatural as an escape from the ordered world of school and the prospect of exams,’ said Dr Saltash, who is also a special adviser on mental health to the Diocese of Hereford, which includes Ludlow.
‘Special adviser on mental—?’ Merrily let the paper drop to the desk.
‘You notice he doesn’t neglect an opportunity to file psychic phenomena under the general heading of fantasy,’ Sophie said, ‘thus detaching it from the Church’s official area of belief.’
‘This isn’t going to stop, is it?’
Merrily slumped down next to the window. It wasn’t warm out there, but there was enough early-afternoon sunshine for a few people on Broad Street to be wearing dark glasses. She took hers off just as the phone rang and Sophie looked up.
‘Ah.’ Sophie’s hand froze over the receiver. ‘I thought there might be some minor aspect of last night that you hadn’t mentioned.’
‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Merrily tilted her head to the window. The sunlight hurt. ‘Purplish last night, now a delicate bottle green.’
‘What are you putting on it?’ Sophie picked up the phone.
‘Just the glasses.’
‘Gatehouse.’ Sophie tucked the phone between shoulder and chin, just above the pearls, leafing through her letters. ‘Yes, Bishop, I’m doing them now, they’ll be in the lunchtime post… Certainly… Well, yes, she’s here now as a matter of fact… I will.’ Sophie put down the phone. ‘He’s coming over later. He wants to talk to you.’
Merrily had started to roll up the Daily Mail into a stiff, tight tube. She stopped, sensing the change, and saw that Sophie’s face had hardened and darkened in a way that… just didn’t happen.
‘God almighty, Merrily! What the hell are you getting into?’
‘It was— OK, it wasn’t exactly an accident, but it—’
‘You do know that’s what’s known as assault causing actual bodily harm? What did they do to Mumford?’
‘Some…’ Merrily let the paper unroll, shaking her head helplessly. ‘Some damage. Nothing serious. We hope.’
Before leaving home, she’d talked on the phone to Mumford’s wife, Gail, who’d sounded cold and guarded, saying Mumford could hardly turn his head this morning. Hardly the first time he’d brought injuries home, but that was supposed to be all over now, wasn’t it?
Sophie wasn’t letting it go, either.
‘Did he even think about what might happen to you last night, when he took on these savages?’
‘I don’t suppose he did.’ Merrily reached for her bag; a woman with a painful black eye was allowed a cigarette. ‘With hindsight, I think he was quite happy when they invaded the garage. He was on home ground. Recognized one.’
‘Can we at least assume this will bring him to his senses?’
‘Sophie, we both know it’s going to make him worse.’
Blokes like Mumford – the bag-carriers, the local-knowledge men, the stoical, taciturn, imperturbable, down-beat, low-key, salt-of-the-earth types – when those guys started to come apart, it was like landmines: you were never sure where the next one was going to explode.
‘We now have – or we had last night, it’s destroyed now – evidence that Robbie Walsh was scared to go home to Plascarreg. We have it from his e-mail correspondence. Also his letters to… We also know he fantasized about Marion de la Bruyère. Saw her as some kind of a confidante and wrote to her.’
The postcard she’d seen, next to Robbie’s sketches, was now making perfect, heartbreaking sense.
Sometimes I pretend you are walking next to me and we are holding hands and it’s brilliant!!!! Everything is all right again, and I never want to leave cos this is our place… I was so miserable I didn’t think I could stand it till the end of term. Its worse than ever there. I hate them, they are stupid and ignorant and they are trying to wreck my whole life. The nearer it gets to the end of the holidays the sadder I feel and don’t want to go back.
‘If there’s anything that makes me feel a very unchristian hatred, it’s bullying. From cruelty to animals to…’ Merrily drew in too much smoke, suppressed a cough as colliding clouds sucked a sunbeam from the desk between her and Sophie. ‘We even know who some of them are, now. They as good as admitted it. But bullying’s not quite a crime, and neither’s suicide any more. Three people dead, and none of them crimes. Doesn’t make them any less dead.’
‘This woman,’ Sophie said. ‘Mrs Pepper…’
‘I don’t know what to think about that any more, Soph. She’s a woman who makes mournful music, evidently chosen as a suicide soundtrack by people who run unsavoury websites and chat-rooms. There’s undoubtedly a cult – or cults – of suicide operating on the Internet. If she is into all that and she talked to Robbie Walsh – as we know she did – and he was suicidal, is it remotely conceivable that she would actually have encouraged him to jump off that tower? I mean, I hate bullying, but I can understand the spiritual vacuum it comes out of. But this…’
‘There are Internet sites that are actually urging people to take their own lives?’
‘That’s the implication, according to Jane. And chat-rooms. Bit like the Samaritans in reverse, isn’t it?’
Sophie’s expression didn’t alter. Sophie was a Samaritan.
‘Merrily, if you think this woman might be connected with one of these organizations, it’s surely our duty to expose it.’
‘In what capacity? It’s not a Deliverance issue, is it?’
‘Isn’t the woman fascinated by ghosts?’
‘That isn’t, in itself, a Deliverance issue, either. Anyway, if I follow agreed procedure and consult the Deliverance Panel, are they going to let me get within ten miles of Mrs Pepper? Mumford’s already been warned off by Annie Howe, with whom Siân Callaghan-Clarke says she “gets on well”. Probably attend the same kick-boxing classes.’
‘This is a mess, Merrily.’ Sophie folded her reading glasses, snapped them in their case. ‘Everything seems to be a mess at the moment.’
The Bishop arrived before lunch. He looked pensive. He sat on the edge of Sophie’s desk, picked up a pen and kept tapping its top into the palm of his left hand.
‘George Lackland, Merrily. You haven’t met him, have you?’
‘Mayor of Ludlow.’ She had her sunglasses back on. ‘Vice-chairman of the Police Committee.’
‘That’s the one.’ He unbuttoned his jacket, and his purple shirt strained over his stomach. ‘Long-standing county councillor, magistrate. George is… the epitome of Old Ludlow.’
‘And your old friend.’
‘Yes. An honourable man. Conservative in every conceivable sense of the word, of course. Retails traditional furniture, as distinct from so-called antiques.’
‘He sounds… very influential,’ Merrily said.
The Bishop looked pained. ‘I realize that, to you, attaining power and influence means being as bent as… as…’
‘A crozier?’
‘Thank you, Merrily, I’m all too conscious of the opportunities for personal gain afforded to an unscrupulous bishop. But some of us do our best, and so does George Lackland.’