The Smile of a Ghost Read Online Free PDF

intimate relationships unsanctified by marriage – like the clergy was supposed to stay in the Victorian era, Mum and Lol walking out together, with a chaperone.
    This would be one of the areas of his life that Lol would prefer to be kept out of Q magazine.
    ‘Who sent it?’
    ‘I don’t think that’s supposed to be obvious, Jane. That’s possibly why it isn’t signed.’
    ‘But there’s an element of threat. I mean, I realize it’s probably just some semi-literate tosser…’
    Lol came down from the stepladder, ducking under the beam that divided the room. The beam was dark brown oak, well woodwormed – a big chocolate flake. The hurricane lamp swayed, shadows rolled. Jane wanted to crumple up the paper, but on the other hand…
    ‘Can I keep it?’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘Might be an opportunity to compare the writing. Like with the parish noticeboard? The cards in the shop window? Or even the prayer board in the church. I mean, it’s always useful to know who your friends aren’t. Anyway’ – she folded the paper – ‘nothing really to worry about. I don’t think Mum’s worried. I mean, the Bishop knows.’
    Jane picked up a paint rag and dabbed up some blotches from the flagged floor, recalling the first time she’d seen Lol, when he was looking after Lucy Devenish’s old shop, Ledwardine Lore. Lol peering out between racks of apple-shaped candles in the orchard-scented air. Like a mouse. He’d been really messed up back then.
    Jane had been fifteen, just a kid. Now she was facing A levels and a driving test, and she wasn’t a virgin, and Lol and Mum were some kind of tentative, nervous item.
    And Lucy Devenish was dead.
    Hard to accept that, even now. No matter what colours the crooked walls and sloping ceilings were repainted, this was Lucy’s house and always would be. When you stood in the hall you could imagine you still saw her old poncho hanging over the post at the foot of the stairs. If it was really dark when you came in, you could imagine Lucy herself there, wearing the poncho, her arms lifting it like batwings.
    The people from London who’d agreed to buy the house when it first came on the market last year had given back word after their five-year-old asthmatic kid had asked who the old woman was on the landing.
    Scary. Lucy hadn’t been scary, not really. Formidable, certainly. Maybe a little witchy, in the best, most traditional sense, and…
    … OK, she had been a little scary. But she’d liked Lol and supported him when he needed it, and she’d been some kind of mentor to Jane, and…
    … And this was OK. Lol finally getting the house – this was meant. Everything finally was going to be OK for Lol and for Mum, who’d been a widow for long enough. Yeah, in one way it was ridiculous, Lol living in this little house and Mum across the road in the huge vicarage, with seven bedrooms, but it was an arrangement that would work, for the time being.
    And it would have Lucy’s blessing. Lucy who, though dead, still somehow spoke for Ledwardine.
    Jane allowed herself a shiver. Lol carried the roller and paint tray into the kitchen and put them in the sink.
    ‘How about you get the chips?’
    ‘Lol, you wimp.’
    ‘Wallet’s on the mantelpiece.’
    Jane found it and took out a tenner.
    ‘Mushy peas?’
    ‘Why not? Just don’t say they’re for me.’
    Jane shoved the tenner down a back pocket of her jeans, along with the vice-rage note, and shrugged on her fleece.
    ‘You’ll be all right on your own for a few minutes, then? You and Lucy?’
    Lol said, ‘Sometimes – did I tell you? – sometimes I try out a new song on her. If she likes it, she joins in. A bit croaky and out of tune, of course, but you can’t—’
    Jane threw the paint rag at him.

3
     
Pebbles
     
    N EXT MORNING, WHEN Jane had left for school, Merrily phoned Huw Owen. She hadn’t slept well, was feeling frayed and edgy, sitting in the scullery in the kid’s old pink fleece. Outside the window, the day