The Smile of a Ghost Read Online Free

it had to involve the right people, didn’t it? People who were sympathetic, who didn’t have an agenda, political or otherwise.
    Only, the ones she’d thought of as the right people hadn’t wanted to know – Simon St John, vicar of Knight’s Frome, backing away in mock terror when she’d asked him, making the sign of the cross with both hands. But the point was, she knew that he would always be there for her, like the wise old owls outside the diocese, Huw Owen and Llewellyn Jeavons. It just wasn’t official; some of these people didn’t do official.
    Whereas people like Siân Callaghan-Clarke and Nigel Saltash didn’t do anything else.
    Saltash was a good friend of the Dean, and giving his professional services free – no better reason for the Dean to take him to meet the Bishop and the Bishop to introduce him to Merrily. In any modern Deliverance circle, a qualified psychiatrist was now fundamental. A free one was a godsend.
    Thank you, God. Thank you so much .
    ‘You mean I’m in spiritual danger?’ Merrily said. ‘As a woman in a male tradition?’
    Now Siân was staring at her, leaning back in her chair like Merrily must be deliberately winding her up. Siân’s mother was a New Labour baroness; she wore her feminist credentials like defiant tattoos. Within five years she’d either be a bishop or out of the Church. Spiritual danger, political danger – all the same to her.
    ‘I meant, like, the first exorcist having been Jesus himself,’ Merrily said lamely.
    She let the silence hang, recalling the reported mutterings of her predecessor, Thomas Dobbs, as he’d prowled the cathedral cloisters trying to engineer her resignation. At the time, she’d been probably the first – certainly the youngest – woman diocesan exorcist in Britain, operating under the customized title Deliverance Consultant. Appointed, it later became evident, largely because the former Bishop of Hereford had wanted to get into her cassock. Siân Callaghan-Clarke, already a well-placed minister in the diocese, would have heard the rumours and stored them away.
    Payback time for bimbo priest?
    Martin Longbeach carefully relit the candle with a taper. Martin, tubby and camp, wore an alb and an outsize pectoral cross and was known to covet the south Herefordshire parish of Hoarwithy because of its exotic Italianate church. It had been his idea that they should light candles tonight, to ‘aid concentration’.
    ‘By danger,’ Siân said, ‘I meant the danger of being compromised and exploited… and of having to make instant decisions that you’re perhaps not…’
    … qualified to make, experienced enough to handle.
    Siân left this unsaid. Merrily sat in the candlelight, images of the past couple of years encircling her like pale smoke – fears, anxieties, faltering hopes, tentative joys. And also the most bewildering and stimulating years of her life.
    There was a stillness in the air. Was this it? Intimations of the end, on a cool April night?
    Siân Callaghan-Clarke clasped her long hands and leaned over them across the table.
    ‘Tonight we’ve tried to go over what we understand by the term “Deliverance”, and the multiplicity of conditions we’re expected to examine – from perceived ghosts and poltergeists, to perceived curses, possession and so-called psychic attack. We’ve considered the cases Merrily has to deal with, day to day: the deluded, the disturbed, the fantastical, the pathological liars—’
    ‘Not forgetting those in need of prayer and non-judgemental understanding. And the ones afflicted by what seemed to be genuine… intrusion,’ Merrily said.
    ‘Seemed to be.’ Nigel Saltash smiled.
    ‘Seemed to me to be. A conclusion not lightly reached.’
    ‘The point is,’ Siân said, ‘that deciding who is deluded and who – however remote that possibility might be – is, ahm, genuinely afflicted… has been Merrily’s sole responsibility. An impossible situation for just one person, who also