The Smile of a Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page B

was crazed with April chemistry: white sunlight soaking through holes in the foaming cloud.
    ‘So when did this happen, lass?’
    Huw had been up north on what he liked to call a retreat, working with a gang of hard-nosed clerics in the badlands of south Manchester. She wasn’t yet ready to hear his horror stories.
    ‘Think it happened when I wasn’t looking. Can’t say you didn’t warn me – if you don’t pick a team, somebody picks one for you. Just that my guys didn’t want to be picked.’
    He was silent. She could hear the kindling detonating his living-room fire. Pictured his feet in peeling trainers on the hearth, the volatile sunlight in his old hippy’s shaggy hair. She was getting the feeling that his Manchester time had left him energized rather than wearied.
    Precarious psychiatric state . Bitch.
    ‘I feel pathetic,’ she said, ‘ringing you with this stuff. I just wondered if you’d – you know – heard anything.’
    Huw had been born in rural Wales but brought up in Yorkshire, returning to the Beacons in middle age as a parish priest and a personal trainer in the practice of exorcism. Where nobody can hear you scream. Merrily heard the creak of his chair as he stretched, thinking.
    ‘Callaghan-Clarke. Wasn’t she one of the bints who did a circle-dance round the tombs of the old bishops in Hereford Cathedral to celebrate the ordination of women?’
    ‘If she was, she’s calmed down now.’
    ‘The calming power of naked ambition. Get their feet under the table, next thing they want’s a bigger table. Where exactly does she stand in your… Deliverance circle?’
    ‘Given herself a title: Diocesan Deliverance Coordinator. We voted on it. Every case we get from now on has to be submitted to the group before any action’s taken. We voted on that, too. Three in favour, one bemused abstention.’
    ‘Bugger,’ Huw said.
    ‘Quite.’
    ‘A little focus group. It’s just what you need, isn’t it?’
    ‘We light candles and concentrate. I’m not kidding.’
    She told him about Martin Longbeach, and Huw laughed – the noise milk would make if you could hear it curdling.
    Merrily looked up at the wall clock: nearly nine a.m., and a difficult funeral to organize – an elderly woman who’d moved to the village no more than a fortnight ago to live with her daughter and son-in-law, themselves comparative newcomers. And Andy Mumford was due here around ten. It was looking like another day when she wouldn’t see much of Lol.
    ‘Back-up’s one thing,’ Huw said. ‘You need a witness sometimes, no question, and somebody to watch your back. But an ill-matched committee operating in an area where nothing, at the best of times, is ever a bloody certainty…’
    ‘We all accept the need for a psychiatrist…’
    ‘There are good shrinks,’ Huw said, ‘and there are dangerous shrinks.’
    ‘You come across Nigel Saltash before?’
    ‘Never.’
    ‘Me neither.’ Merrily gazed out of the window at the unmown lawn, vividly green against the grey sky with its seeping sun. ‘He’s a regular churchgoer, however.’
    Huw laughed again. ‘You know your problem, lass? Had your picture in the papers once too often, and you take a very nice picture. They don’t like that. And they weren’t happy at all when you were cosying up to the pagans against Ellis.’
    ‘Oh, Huw, Ellis was the kind of humourless, dangerous, fundamentalist bigot who brings the Church into—’
    ‘Ellis was part of the Church,’ Huw said. ‘Whereas pagans are pagans. Any road, I’m just planting the thought.’
    ‘Who doesn’t like it? Not the Bishop?’
    ‘Dunmore’s a time-server. He wouldn’t even be consulted. Think higher.’
    ‘Huh?’ She was thrown.
    ‘You want a list of all the embittered, back-stabbing bastards who hate the whole concept of Deliverance? Hey, God forbid that priests should meddle in metaphysics. Somebody’s happen saying, we need to keep an eye on that little Watkins in Hereford… could