The Smile of a Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page A

easily have ended so differently.
    The verdict at the inquest on the guy who’d wanted Alice dead had been Accidental Death – totally correct – although most of what had happened had not come out, the villagers closing ranks around Lol. No longer an outsider, even if it wasn’t publicly acknowledged that he was Mum’s… whatever.
    Couldn’t have worked out better, really. His first album in many years was out, he had respectable gigs scheduled. And he was about to abandon his temporary flat at Prof Levin’s recording studio at Knight’s Frome – like, thirty miles away – for this little terraced house a one-minute stroll from the vicarage. So, like, if his star, for once, was accelerating towards the high point of the heavens… well, nobody could say it had been easy.
    Jane looked up at him. It was getting too dark to paint, and the electricity was still disconnected, but he was going at it like, if he stopped, somebody would come and take the house away and maybe take Mum, too… and then the tour would be cancelled and the album would be savaged in the Guardian or Time Out , and…
    ‘Come on down, Lol. Tomorrow is another day.’
    ‘Need to finish this corner.’
    ‘You can’t even see the corner. Let’s go and get some chips, otherwise I won’t get to eat till breakfast. If Mum gets through with the po-faced gits on the Deliverance Committee before eleven, it’ll be a certifiable miracle.’
    ‘Hate going in the chippie now,’ Lol said. ‘They won’t let me pay.’
    Jane laughed.
    ‘It’s not funny, Jane.’
    ‘Lol, they like you. That’s—’
    ‘Unsettling.’
    Jane sighed. ‘When’s the next gig?’
    ‘Next Thursday. Bristol.’
    ‘Wooh, bigger and bigger. Glastonbury next year?’
    ‘Jane, you trying to make me fall off?’
    Oh God, Nick Drake Syndrome; it never really goes away.
    ‘Bad enough that there’s this guy from Q magazine coming to interview me on Saturday,’ Lol said. ‘I mean, if I’d thought—’
    ‘What?’ Jane went to the foot of the ladder, shouting up like he was on a mountain. ‘Did you actually say… Q magazine? Like, did I hear that correctly? And did you say, “That’s bad enough”? And are you insane?’
    ‘Just there are things I don’t necessarily want people to read about.’
    ‘So like’ – Jane spread her hands wide in frustration – ‘don’t talk about them! Talk about any old crap. Lie. They won’t care, they’re a music mag. When will it be in?’
    ‘Dunno. It’s a monthly. Guy said they work weeks in advance. Maybe it won’t be in at all. They probably do a lot of interviews that get overtaken by better stuff.’
    ‘This diffidence is worrying.’ Jane shook her head. ‘I think I preferred the paranoia.’ She went to put Alice’s card back on the window sill, and found another one lying face down. ‘What’s this, Lol?’
    Actually, this one wasn’t a card, as such: it was a folded paper, lined, like from a writing pad. She opened it out and held it up to the lamp, saw crude line drawings done in thick fibre-tip, of a big house and a little house with two parallel lines between them, suggesting a road. Across the big house was scrawled:
    VICERAGE
    Jane looked up at Lol. ‘Vice-rage?’
    ‘Vicarage.’ Lol started rolling hard at the ceiling. ‘Could be a double meaning there, I suppose, but I wouldn’t think whoever sent it was that smart.’
    There was a double-pointed arrow connecting the two houses across the road. Underneath the drawing was written:
    RECKON YOU CAN FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK?
    ‘Bloody hell,’ Jane said. ‘It’s a poison-pen letter.’
    She looked up the ladder. Lol went on painting.
    Jane smiled thinly. So this was the problem.
    Well, there was always going to be one spiteful bastard, somewhere. Mum got along with most people in Ledwardine, but not everybody approved yet of women priests. And it was a safe bet that not everybody who did approve would accept the idea of the female clergy having