‘When?’
‘This morning. She thought the media might be after Mum. I forgot. So much was… Do you know what that was about?’
‘I think I do, but this is something else that’s just developed. Merrily probably knows about it already, which is why she hasn’t been in touch. Jane, I can hardly believe it.’
Sophie’s tone indicating that she just had to talk to somebody or she’d go crazy.
‘What’s…?’ Jane raised her eyebrows at Eirion, who was on his feet, face full of questions.
‘It’s the castle again,’ Sophie said bleakly. ‘Another child.’
PART FOUR
Sam
‘If man does survive, does he produce ghosts? I think this could only be assumed if he retained his psyche-field.’
‘Rapping on the windows
And crying through the locks…’
41
Big Bump
WHEN MERRILY CAME hurrying onto Castle Square, the whole space seemed to be vibrating – duss, duss, duss – to the dampened thud of some Saturday busker’s bass drum, set up down by the deli.
Duss, duss, duss: the sound of an execution day.
She crossed the square and stood by the tourist office and looked around through the crowd.
Bell… where the hell are you?
The clarity had gone from the sky. Gauzy, mauvish clouds were smothering the sun, and there was no breeze to flutter the red and white pennants hanging between gables like a row of teeth set in bleeding gums.
She’d been down to the bottom of Corve Street to fetch the Volvo, a parking penalty under one of the wipers. Turned the key seven times, and it kept failing to start – another sign of mortality to join the ticking behind the dash, the rattle under the chassis, the grinding on corners. She’d still been shaking the wheel in frustration when she found that it had somehow started, two wheels crashing down from the kerb.
To charge up the battery or whatever, she’d driven through town, down by the side of the castle to the stooping community of Dinham with its twelfth-century chapel dedicated to murdered St Thomas, and then to the hissing River Teme – a vain search for the woman who wanted to fly like Marion. Back in the car park at the top of town, she’d paid for a full day, near enough, and then found a phone box to call Jane… engaged.
Single-lane vehicles were threading around the square, but the main traffic was people, scurrying about like figures in a Brueghel. So many clothes now – T-shirts, sweatshirts, fleeces and hooded tops – reflecting, in their myriad colours, the outerwear of Merrie Englande. And so many people talking to one another – a sense of community you seldom saw anywhere else.
Robbie Walsh would walk these streets in a state of near-ecstasy. He was happier than any child I ever saw. She felt she was inside Robbie again, seeing images of how things were, how they worked, the nuts and bolts of medieval life. Looking at now and feeling then, as if, in some mystical way, this might point her towards Bell.
‘Mrs Watkins!’
A man was wading through the crowd towards her, a brown overall flapping around his knees like the uniforms of shopkeepers when she was a kid, his eyes glittering under the jutting shelf of his forehead. A prophet from a children’s Bible.
Duss, duss, duss.
‘Mr Mayor.’
‘We told that boy to keep on playing.’ The Mayor nodded towards the busker, who also had a guitar and a harmonica, but it was the drumbeat that carried, like plodding boots, across the square. ‘Anything to make it seem like a normal Saturday.’
‘You haven’t seen Bell, have you?’
‘I don’t go looking for her, Mrs Watkins. Besides—’
‘You’ll have seen the papers, I suppose.’
‘Now, look, there was nothing I could do about that. I’ve had three radio stations on already this morning – that’s why I left the house. And now this. My God, Mrs Watkins, is there no end?’
‘About the petition,’ Merrily said. ‘I think it’s time you—’
‘Aren’t you going in?’ He stared down at her.
‘In where?’
‘You only just got here, or what?’
‘I… more or less, yes.’
‘You mean you don’t know about the girl?’
Before Merrily could ask him what he meant, George Lackland had taken her by the elbow and was steering her towards the castle gate. Where, for the first time, she noticed that nobody was going in, which probably accounted for the excess of people on the square. The big gates were open, as if to let vehicles in and out, but the way was blocked by police, two men and a woman, George striding over to address them.
‘Where’s Steve Britton?’
‘Gone back in, Mr Lackland.’
‘Only, I got Mrs Watkins here, from the Bishop’s office.’
The male cop’s expression said, So? Merrily saw that the gift shop, where visitors normally paid their entrance fees, was closed, unattended stands of booklets and postcards, pottery, tapestry, stationery all half-lit.
Again?
‘Top-heavy with clergy already, you ask me,’ the policewoman muttered. But George Lackland wasn’t listening.
‘Can we come in or not?’
The policeman thought about it, maybe remembering George’s top-table seat on the West Mercia Police Committee, but then he shook his head.
‘Can’t, sir. Sorry. Can you wait for the sergeant?’
Merrily followed George Lackland back towards the big cannon and the pollarded trees outside the walls.
Again…?
‘They got scaffolding up, see,’ George said. ‘On the inside of the Hanging Tower – idea being they’re going to bar them windows, stop this happening once and for all.’ His accent was broadening under stress. ‘Fellers doing the work, they gets here ’bout half-nine, so obviously nobody could get up while they was there. Girl – teenager – must’ve known that, too, waits till they breaks for lunch, and then she’s up the scaffolding like a monkey and well up on the ledge before anybody spots her.’
The square seemed to tilt like a giant board game.
‘And she…’ Merrily looked up. This close to the curtain wall, the only tower visible was the Keep, from which Robbie Walsh had fallen. ‘The girl’s still up there?’
‘Far’s I know, aye. They blocked off the footpath, back of the castle. Somebody told me she’d warned ’em if they brought the fire brigade with a ladder, she’d… well, she’d go off.’
‘She’s threatening to jump?’
‘Oh aye. Oh, bloody hell, yes.’
‘They know who she is?’
‘I don’t. They got this psychiatrist there now, reckons he’s got it all worked out. Reckons she’ll come down if they keeps it low-key. Police got all the visitors out, and there’s an ambulance standing by.’
‘This psychiatrist…’
‘I dunno who he is, but what I reckon is, you should be in there.’ George sank his hands into the pockets of his slacks, looking at the ground. ‘It was me rang Bernard, see… I wanted him to come over. But he wouldn’t.’
That was no surprise. Bishops didn’t do hands-on. Certainly not in a situation this public, this critical. And who, apart from George and a handful of cranks, would think it was anything at all to do with the Church?
She looked at the crowded square with a new awareness, saw that most of the shoppers and the tourists knew exactly what was going on but were putting on an act of responsible British disinterest, not glancing at the castle walls at least until they were past the police. And the animated sense of community… that was simply locals and tourists united in veiled voyeurism.