The Smile of a Ghost (23 page)

If invited? It was confusing. The walls of the Departure Lounge kept shrinking and expanding, and the doors on both right and left would alternate from black to white, and sometimes they were both grey. This was technically quite a sophisticated site. More sophisticated, at least, than some of the sickos who hung around in the virtual lounge like virtual pimps.

Karone the Boatman, from Nevada? Jane guessed he’d taken his name from Charon, the boatman who ferried the dead across the Styx in Greek myths… only he’d never read any Greek myths; someone had probably just told him the name, mispronouncing it, and he’d never even bothered to check it out. She pictured some earnest, humourless, semi-literate, burger-munching git in a sweaty baseball cap, who was arrogant enough to imagine it was his mission in life to help other people end theirs.

Karone kept printing up a link to his personal website, on which Jane had tentatively clicked, thus learning how to make a foolproof noose. Shutting down the site at this point, before slime could start oozing through the monitor.

She went back and perused the music selection: some classical stuff and a few names Jane hadn’t heard of. Plus Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dress Rehearsal Rag’, which it said Cohen had banned himself from singing – was this a joke? – and a song called ‘Gloomy Sunday’, which definitely was not a joke.

God.

‘Gloomy Sunday’ – also known as ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song’ – had been written and recorded in 1933 by Rezso Seress after breaking up with his girlfriend.

In the song she dies and he decides to follow her. The actual girlfriend later killed herself, leaving a note saying only ‘Gloomy Sunday’. Rezso Seress himself jumped to his death from his apartment in 1968.

‘Jumped to his death.’ Jane found that she’d whispered it.

She was starting not to like this. She learned that the song had been banned by the BBC and other broadcasters because it had been linked to so many suicides, some within the music business – one of the more recent had been one by the Scottish duo, The Associates, who’d recorded it in 1980.

But the most sinister version remained the original, which had recently been cleaned up. It was said to promote nightmares, depression and irrational fear in listeners, but was not available for downloading on this particular site.

However…

The cleaned-up version was not available in 1999, when ‘Gloomy Sunday’ was covered by Belladonna, and the singer insisted that the crackles and scratches on the 1933 recording be scrupulously duplicated on her own version. Record company executives refused to include the Belladonna version on the album
The Pervading Dark –
for which it had been recorded – after a spate of suicides, including an assistant engineer, a secretary and the singer’s former lover, the session musician Eric Bryers, who threw himself from high up in a block of flats in south London.

Jane drank some water. Christ, another one. Did Mum know about this? Somehow she suspected not.

One theory was that the music was part of an occult ritual devised by Seress for purposes unknown, in which his girlfriend was expected to take part. But the implications of it terrified her, and this might have been linked to her suicide.

The words ‘Gloomy Sunday’ were blinking at Jane from the monitor.

Uh-huh. She drew back and clicked away the panel.

Belladonna. There were some artists who’d been big in the 1980s that it was still cool to kind of like: Elvis Costello, Julian Cope and XTC, of course, who would have been totally celestial if they hadn’t stopped touring and been forced to compete against dreary synth bands. But Belladonna…

Belladonna had embraced synthesizers. Her voice even sounded like it had been produced electronically, thin and screechy with occasional pulses – part of the machine. Belladonna was distant, lacked any kind of intimacy. But in its dismal-as-January way, the music did, Jane was forced to concede, sometimes carry you away. Just not to anywhere she could imagine ever wanting to be carried.

Actually, she was being particularly wimpish tonight. Could be something to do with being alone in the vicarage. She really should download Belladonna’s ‘Gloomy Sunday’. It was almost certainly a scam – that whole story sounded phoney.

On the other hand, she was pretty sure The Associates had existed. The trouble with the Net was that it was always very good at half-truth and conjecture.

Jane clicked back to the music panel. Immediately, ‘Gloomy Sunday’ began to flash. Her hand hovered over the mouse.

Mumford calmly put his glasses in their case, tucked it down the inside pocket of his jacket. He stood there, turning his head slowly from face to shadowed face, as if he was matching each one to a mugshot. Then he straightened up, hands by his sides, cleared his throat.

‘Help you boys?’

And Merrily realized that they
were
boys. Mainly young teenagers, plus the kid of eleven or so who’d been here earlier.

The tallest and presumably the oldest of the teenagers peeled himself away from the others. ‘So what’s happening, dad?’ He was about a head taller than Mumford.

‘Heard you was having a garage sale.’ The beefy kid with the chain grinned from inside his hood, like some kind of malevolent gnome. He pulled the chain tight.
Chink
.

‘Con,’ the tall kid said, ‘will you put that fuckin’ thing away?’ He looked mixed-race, had prominent teeth, a stud in the cleft of his chin. His silky black jacket had zips everywhere, like ridged operation scars. ‘Sorry about my mate, dad, he’s seen too many old videos.’

‘Don’t apologize,’ Mumford said mildly. ‘Just take him back to the home and we’ll say no more about it.’

‘Good one, dad. So…’ The tall kid with the zips looked around. ‘This is it, then, is it? The official Robson Walsh closing-down sale? Everything must go, yeah?’

‘Knew Robbie, did you?’

‘We was only his very best mates, dad. We had some awesome laughs with Robbie.’ He turned to the others. ‘Am I right?’

The eleven-year-old giggled. The other small kid – yellow fleece, combat trousers, watchful eyes – looked down at his trainers.

‘You had some laughs.’ Mumford’s voice was a thin, taut line. ‘With Robbie.’

‘So, like, basically, we thought we’d like to buy something to remember him by. Not the books, though. The books are shite.’

‘What kind of laughs you have with Robbie?’

‘See, I was thinking that computer. How much?’

‘Not for sale,’ Mumford said.

‘Tell you what, dad… forty quid.’

‘You en’t listening, son.’

‘All right – sixty. You en’t gonner get sixty for a second-hand computer that old, are you?’ The tall kid unzipped his jacket, felt in a pocket of his jeans, took out an amazingly dense wad of notes. ‘OK, I’ll go seventy. Seventy quid. How’s that?’

Merrily saw that the boys had arranged themselves in a rough semicircle around Mumford and her, the width of the garage, so that nobody was going to get past them.

‘Lot of notes you got there, Jason.’ Mumford’s face was set like cement, his eyes steady on the tall kid. ‘Been nicking little children’s dinner money again, is it?’

Jason? Mumford knew him? Merrily kept quiet, staying in the corner beside the workbench. They were only boys, after all. The eleven-year-old… he could even be ten. The other younger one, maybe twelve or thirteen, kept glancing nervously at the tall kid, as if he was worried about where this was going.

Merrily felt the heat of sweat on her forehead.

‘You talking to me?’ the tall kid said. ‘Is that my name, dad?’

‘Ah well…’ Mumford reached up and unplugged the computer from a socket over the workbench; the screen sighed and faded. ‘Could be I made a mistake. Just you reminded me for a minute of Jason Mebus, star of a whole stack of CCTV nasties – urinating in High Town… nicking
Big Issues
from a disabled man. Jason’s just waiting for his seventeenth birthday, he is, so he can be in prison videos.’

‘Fuck are you?’ the tall kid said.

He might as well have pinned on a lapel badge that said
Jason
.

‘Then again, it’s a bit dark now.’ Mumford looked into the black screen. ‘So I might’ve been mistaken. And if you was all gone from yere ’fore I had a chance to get a good look…’

Good. Merrily breathed slowly. That was sensible.

Jason didn’t move. The gnome with the chain stifled a laugh.

Merrily saw something dance into Jason’s eyes. He reached out a hand, laid it on Mumford’s shoulder.

‘You a cop, dad?’

‘Take your hand off me, boy,’ Mumford said mildly.

Jason’s grip tightened. ‘No, come on, dad… are you a c—?’

Mumford came round faster than Merrily could have imagined, had the boy’s arm down behind his back, had him swinging round and rammed up – smack – hard against the side wall, squashing his open mouth into one of its concrete blocks.

‘No. For your information, I en’t.’ Mumford’s forearm in the back of Jason’s neck. ‘Which means I can do what I like to you, ennit, boy?’

Merrily saw a bloody imprint on the wall where Jason’s mouth had kissed it.

‘Andy…’ She came out of the corner. If Mumford had smashed this boy’s front teeth, they were in trouble. ‘Let’s just—’

‘You can start by explaining why you want the computer, Jason,’ Mumford said, ‘or mabbe who sent you in to get it for them, and then—’

And then Merrily was dragged aside from behind, and stumbled to her knees, and saw across the bench that the boy in the yellow fleece had hold of the plug on the computer lead and had started to pull on it, his face red with effort and a kind of panic in his eyes.

By the time she was back on her feet, the dog-chain was around Mumford’s throat, the fat kid tugging on it from behind, swinging on it, both feet leaving the ground, and Mumford’s eyes bulging out of his veined, florid face.

19

S
ADGIRL.
OK,
IT
wasn’t sophisticated, but it was simple and it sounded vulnerable and inoffensive: SADGIRL, HEREFORD, ENGLAND.

It would do.

So Sadgirl left a message in the Departure Lounge.

Rest for ever with my child. Jane thought this was moving and resonant. She felt better hiding behind Sadgirl. Putting her own name in there would have been awful: planting some part of herself in the electronic depths – a suicide seed.

Sadgirl was cyber-bait. It just needed someone to come through and harden the link between Belladonna and suicide. Jane had a picture of the dragon lady lurking, logged on from Ludlow, waiting to entrap damaged people.

Which wasn’t entirely ridiculous. She instinctively didn’t like this woman. OK, she hadn’t even been born when Belladonna was famous, and she hated almost all 1980s music on principle, but it went beyond that now. She’d logged on to the Belladonna websites – surprised at how many there were, mostly unofficial – and they were all creep sites. You had an immediate sense of something unhealthy, sexually perverse and kind of slick and clammy, like those things people put up to catch flies.

And the woman – her music, at least – was sharing the same cyberspace as Karone the Boatman, sultan of sickos.

Maybe – and the idea wasn’t total fantasy because anything was possible in cyberspace and everyone was equal – Sadgirl could lure Belladonna into the open. She just needed to know more. Mum had not divulged enough to give her much of a handle, and Mum was out of reach, which left…

Lol.

It was useful, not to say comforting, to have Lol just across the street. Jane stayed connected to the Net and phoned him on her mobile.

Lol said, ‘She’s out with Mumford? At this time of night?’

‘It’s not a date, Lol. And like, I’m sure that, while a certain kind of woman wouldn’t be able to resist that gruff, monosyllabic—’

‘I’m backing off, all right?’ Lol said. ‘Just because I’m across the road—’

‘No, I like you to be concerned about her. It’s old-fashioned.’

‘Meanwhile, what exactly is bothering you about Belladonna?’

‘Just need a clearer picture of where she fits in. Like, why is she in Ludlow? What’s she doing there?’

‘Everybody’s got to live somewhere, Jane. It’s a very sought-after place these days. However… apart from the fact that her stepdaughter’s in the area, we really don’t know.’

‘But there
is
a definite connection between her and Robbie Walsh, right?’

‘Seems that way. However—’

‘Therefore, if I was to firmly link her with Jemmie Pegler, as well…’

‘You haven’t…?’

‘Got to be close. Mum says Pegler was visiting suicide chat-rooms, and if they’re the ones I’ve just peered into, they’re more or less recommending Belladonna as, like…’