The Smile of a Ghost (2 page)

Ambulance. He stood on the corner under the dull maroon façade of McCartney’s estate agents, and watched it barrelling through the narrows, a couple of tourists glancing up in annoyance like it ought to be horse-drawn in Ludlow.

He didn’t really mean to follow the thing. It wasn’t even instinct, just that it was heading the same way as he was. In fact, he nearly turned back when he saw the patrol car on the square under the Cheddar-cheese-coloured perimeter wall of Ludlow Castle.

He did, in fact, turn away when the first copper came out of the gateway, near the old cannon from Sevastopol, and he saw it was Steve Britton, station sergeant at Ludlow – no hair left but still a few years yet to serve, and even then they’d probably keep him on as a civilian.

But Steve had seen him.

‘Andy?’

Mumford kept on walking, figuring Steve would think it was a case of mistaken identity or that Mumford hadn’t heard him. But then he heard footsteps – not merely footsteps, police boots – clattering across the empty square, and Steve Britton was shouting now.

‘Andy!’

So he had to stop and stand there, waiting wearily, in front of Woolworths, staring down at the pavement, steeling himself for what was coming: Andy, mate, I’ve only just heard. Free at last then, eh? Look, I get off in an hour, we’ll have a couple of jars.

But when Steve Britton drew level with him it was different.

Steve’s long melon face was damp with sweat and his eyes had a look that Mumford recognized straight off. A look he’d probably had on a few dozen times himself over the years, carrying out just about the worst chore you ever got saddled with as a copper.

Confusing, though, on account of he’d never faced it before.

Never actually been on the receiving end, feeling that sharp, flat punch of dread – a punch deep to the gut, right where, a few minutes ago, the volcano had been simmering.

Andy couldn’t say anything. He just stared at Steve, and at his uniform. Wobbling slightly, experiencing, for the first time ever, what the sight of that uniform on your doorstep meant to the average person with no drugs in the house.

‘Andy…’ Steve getting his breath back. ‘You been down to your mother’s tonight?’

‘Not yet.’ His mother? Andy felt his own breath catch. ‘Something happened? Something happened, Steve?’

Far from bloody imperturbable, the way that came out. Realizing how scared he was now, how exposed, the streets spinning.

‘Yes,’ Steve said. ‘Something’s happened.’

Walking with Steve Britton back to the castle.

The castle, of all places. Christ.

The castle was ruined but pretty big, a lot of it left. You couldn’t see much from here, the town side, but from down below, across the river, it was still massive and imposing and had been dominating Ludlow for most of the last millennium.

Mumford had probably been in there just twice in the whole of his life, and never in the last twenty years.

But Robbie practically lived here when he was staying with his grandparents, which was every school holiday since his mother moved in with the toe-rag. Robbie, the history buff. Quiet, likeable boy, covering up for his gran, day after day.

Please God, not Robbie. This’ll destroy her.

Couldn’t be, anyway. No logic to it.

‘How’d this boy gain access, Steve?’

‘We figure he stayed in. Hid somewhere after they closed the castle for the night. There’s a hundred places to hide… inside these little passages, the towers… it’s a bloody honeycomb.’

It actually looked like a honeycomb, all yellow and orange in the evening light. The main gates were wide open, a young uniform Mumford didn’t recognize guarding the entrance.

You forgot how big this castle was. Inside the perimeter walls there was a green open space where they had sideshows and medieval-type displays in summer, and then the Christmas Fair. From here a stone footbridge took you over the moat, which was all dried up now, leading into the main fortification with this huge gatehouse tower that had been the old Norman… keep, was that the word?

Robbie would know.

Couldn’t be. One fourteen-year-old boy looked much like another – trainers, baseball cap. This would turn out to be some tourist kid larking around.

Mumford went back to being observational, like he hadn’t retired two days ago and this was still his job. Some part of him knowing that if he was to keep from losing everything that had ever meant anything in his life, he needed to start off how he meant to go on, and that was not as just another member of the bastard public.

Walking with his uniform counterpart, Sergeant Steve Britton, towards another…

… another death scene.

Just another death scene. Nothing to do with him. A mistake.

Red spears of sunlight were bouncing off the ambulance parked near the footbridge. A couple of paramedics were bending over the edge of the dried-up moat.

‘Visitors can go right to the top, see,’ Steve said, talking rapidly, a bit hoarsely. ‘Good… good views.’

‘Robbie Walsh knows his way blindfold, Steve.’

The square tower seemed awful high now, the size of a big block of flats in this part of the world. A St George’s flag was hanging limp up there against the amber sky. The stone bridge had a wooden handrail, and even from here Mumford could see there was blood on it, like a splash of spilt creosote. Should’ve been taped off.

He could see into the moat now, something humped and twisted on the bottom, the fact that they’d left it down there saying everything.

‘Must’ve come down on the handrail, bounced off,’ Steve said.

‘Broken neck?’

‘And the rest.’ Steve swallowed. Likely never had to do this before to one of his own. ‘Andy, I… I hope it’s not. I hope I’m mistaken, that’s all.’

‘Sure t’be,’ Mumford said. ‘Let’s get it over.’

‘We used to see him all over town. Walking up Broad Street, and down Old Street, and past the station. You’d think he’d get sick of it, same streets, day after day.’

Steve making it clear he knew what Robbie Walsh looked like.

‘He never got sick of it,’ Mumford said. ‘Always finding new things, so they reckoned. He loves it here. History-mad. Goes to all the lectures, all the exhibitions. Has some kind of season ticket for this… for the castle. So he can come in and out.’

‘People knew him, Andy. All the local people and the shopkeepers knew him. Always polite. Not like most of the little sods.’

Steve keeping up this street-corner chat routine to delay the moment, prepare Mumford for the worst. One of the paramedics was on his feet now, talking to the cops and shaking his head, likely telling them what they already knew.

‘Witnesses?’ Mumford said.

‘Feller seen it from over the river, top of Whitcliffe. Artist bloke. Paints pictures of the castle. Watching a buzzard through binoculars. Said it was… Ah, you don’t wanner know this stuff…’

‘I wanner know everything.’

‘Just make sure first, eh?’

‘I wanner know everything,’ Mumford snarled, knowing that he was shaking like a civilian.

That night, Angela, his sister, did some screaming.

The Hereford boys had finally found Ange and her partner in the Orchard Gardens, the city’s most misnamed pub, out on the edge of the Plascarreg. So it was getting on for midnight when they got to the Community Hospital, and Ange must have drunk a fair bit, which didn’t help.

In the hospital mortuary, Mumford, for all his experience, had turned away, biting his lip. Lying there, with only his not-too-damaged face exposed, the boy had looked all of eight. Ange had taken one quick glance and then it was the full hand-wringing dramatics:
It’s him, it’s him… oh shit, shit, shit, look what they done to him!

During this performance, Mumford had found himself watching the scumbag partner, Lennox Mathiesson, hunched up with his hands in his pockets, nodding his head, half-fascinated, ear-trinkets clinking. It sickened Mumford that Angela was three months pregnant with this rubbish’s baby.

Tomorrow morning, the body of her first child would be taken to Shrewsbury for the post-mortem. Tonight, outside the hospital, Ange shelved her grief and set about doing what Mumford reckoned she’d been doing since before she could walk, which was generously apportioning the blame so that there was none of it left for her.

‘That selfish ole bitch, I just hope she’s satisfied. I gotter come all this way to see my son lying dead, killed, because she wasn’t fit to look after him. She robbed me… robbed me of my son. I hope she’s fuckin’ satisfied now.’

Ange in the car park, legs apart, arms folded and a sawn-off top advertising her navel and her condition. Thirty-nine years old.

‘I reckon you better get off home, Angela,’ Mumford said. ‘I’ll phone for a taxi.’

‘Happier yere than he ever was with you? You remember when she come out with that one? What did you say? Nothing, as usual.’

‘She’s not right,’ Mumford said quietly. ‘You know that.’

Except on that occasion, Mam had been dead right. Mumford drew away from the alcohol fumes, stumbling back into a tree trunk as his sister stuck her wet, smudgy face up to his.

‘She en’t fit to look after a child, that’s for sure. And you never said a word, so I hope you’re satisfied too, mister smart-arse fuckin’ detective.’

‘He en’t a detective no more.’

Knowing smirk from Lennox Mathiesson, ten years younger than Angela, two convictions for burglary, one aggravated, plus an ABH. Well, Mam’s mind might be on the blink but she could still recognize a bad bastard when she saw one, and that was why her and Ange hadn’t spoke for the best part of two years, since Ange had left Robbie’s dad – decent enough bloke, worked at Burton’s men’s-shop – for Mathiesson.

Mumford got out his mobile, putting in the number of this taxi firm he knew in Leominster. It’d cost, but he just wanted an end to this night.

‘Oh yeah, get me out.’ Ange staring at him with contempt. ‘Get me out, ’fore I makes trouble. Well, we’re gonner make trouble, mister, you count on it. We can sue that castle, for a start.’ Hands on her hips now, body arched, belly swelling out. ‘Letting him run wild all day in dangerous ole ruins that oughter be fuckin’ pulled down.’

Run wild? Robbie?
Mumford was thinking of all the times he’d heard her say, I wonder sometimes where he came from, hiding away with his books, no proper friends. It’s not like having a normal child, is it?

‘Angela,’ he said, ‘obviously you’re terrible upset, but let’s just get one thing straight: there’s no case to sue the castle. Robbie was there illegally, when it was closed for the night.’

‘Well, we’ll fuckin’ see about that, won’t we, mister smart-arse fuckin’
ex
-detective.’

Mumford nodded, standing with his heels in a flower bed, taking it. What else could he do?

‘And what’s disgusting, like I say, is she never knew where he was. I bet she even forgot he was stayin’ yere.’

Laughable, that, coming from Ange. It had always been Mumford himself who’d picked Robbie up and brought him over to Ludlow for his holidays, and his most sorrowful image of the boy was not the lolling body under the tower but the pale kid with a suitcase waiting like an orphan at the top of the steps at the Plascarreg.

Different boy altogether when he got to Ludlow, but Ange was never going to want reminding of that.

He got the taxi firm on the mobile. ‘Soon’s you can, Paul, eh?’

‘And I’ll tell you what, mister – you can tell the ole bitch she can pay for the fuckin’ funeral…’

‘God almighty, Angela!’

It had been like this for as long as he could remember. Mam had been forty-five when she’d had Ange, and the gap was always too wide – Mumford always in the middle, covering his ears.

‘Wasn’t fit to look after nothin’, and you never seen it, or you pretended not to, more like, ’cause you was always too busy persecuting folks just wanted a bit of pleasure outer life.’

Meaning the time he and Bliss had had Mathiesson’s brother for enough crack to lay out half the estate. Personal use. The balls they expected you to swallow. Mumford had never set foot in Ange’s flat from that day to this.

‘You bloody let her take him away from his own mother just when I needed the help. You robbed me, she robbed me, every—’

Ange had started to cry again then, tottering across to Lennox Mathiesson, who gathered her into his tattooed arms, giving Mumford this thin smile over her quaking shoulders.

Time he was off. Needed to pick Gail up from poor bloody Mam’s. Gail in her best frock for the celebration dinner. Christ.

‘Anyway, you know where I am,’ Mumford said and walked away, Angela screaming at his back.

‘You tell her I hope she never sleeps again!’

All the lights were on in his mam and dad’s house, the last neighbour walking away. They were good to her, the neighbours in this short, terraced row down at the bottom of the town, between the station and the new Tesco’s.

Mumford sat in his car and just wanted to stay there. He could see Gail and his dad through the extended front window, its curtains still drawn back. His dad had a hand on his forehead, likely with exasperation by now; his dad had never had much patience with female emotions. Gail had a cardigan over her new frock, and she was bending down, like she was bending over a sickbed. Below the level of the window frame, his mam would be sitting in her chair and the TV would be on with the sound turned down.