Mean Spirit (11 page)

The one time Andy had actually met the Superintendent, he was urgently looking for Bobby. Because Riggs knew that Bobby knew. About Riggs.

And about Tony Parker, the ‘businessman’. Friend of Riggs from London, invited to Elham to ‘regularize’ a rather ‘chaotic’ drugs scene. Tony’s new system offering small dealers two simple options: either shelter under the Parker umbrella or get yourself very swiftly shopped to the police – thus providing the new chief with a terrific clean-up rate and a wonderful reputation in no time at all.

That broad, beaming face in the local paper week after week. Guest speaker at the Rotary Club. Guest of honour at the Magistrates’ Association dinner. And a copper’s copper, too, always popular with the troops. Excepting Bobby Maiden. Bobby had known Riggs from when he was with the Met. Known what he was.

Now Tony Parker was dead – natural causes – and Riggs had taken early retirement and calmly walked away before any of the shit could reach the Vent-Axia.

‘Where is he now, Bobby?’ Andy poured herself a killer coffee. ‘Tax exile on the Costa del Crime?’

‘Oh, no. Worcester. You heard of Forcefield Security?’

Andy shook her head. ‘They on the level?’

‘Far as I know, absolutely reputable.’ Bobby sighed. ‘Riggs is executive director. Nothing like a distinguished retired senior police officer to bestow that aura of tough respectability.’

‘Is there no bloody justice, Bobby? That scumbag tried tae have you killed. What about the guys close to him? Beattie?’

‘Still in there. And a few others. You can tell who they are. They’re the ones keep a formal space between you and them. They call you “sir” instead of “boss”.’

No doubt blaming Bobby for having to live off their pay packets again. So now he was going to have to organize guys who saw him as having profited from Riggs’s downfall while their own personal finances had taken a tumble. Who needed that?

‘Can you no’ apply for a transfer?’

Shook his head. ‘Not so soon after being virtually offered promotion. Obviously, I’d like to get out altogether, but what would I do?’ Still shaking his head, the old injury affected by the hard fluorescent light. ‘Sorry, Andy, I didn’t intend to burden you with this. I was just … passing. Just had supper with the old man. Who thinks Riggs was God.’

‘You never told him the truth?’

‘Like he’d believe me?’

‘These other guys know you’ve been offered the job? Beattie?’

‘I don’t know.’

Sister Andy sighed. It was a terrible indictment of how isolated Bobby was in this scrappy, bent little Midlands town. In his personal life too. Mother dead in a road accident when he was a kiddie. Some years divorced now from Lizzie Turner, the avaricious wee nurse he’d met as a sprog cop, on this very ward. And then there was Em, who was funny and smart and would have been so very right for him, had she not become the penultimate victim of the psycho-killer calling himself the Green Man. That whole episode, coming so soon after the personal death experience, throwing Bobby clean off his axis.

It was flattering to think he came back here because of Andy, as some kind of tough mother-figure. More likely he kept returning because this was where his heart stopped and was restarted. Where he’d died and where his second life began.

‘So, how long before you officially start as DCI?’

‘Acting.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘About three weeks,’ Bobby said. He had some leave owing. Was thinking he might go away for a few days.

‘On your own?’

He shrugged. Said he could do some painting. Find a lonely shore. Solway Firth or somewhere. Get really cold and wet and miserable.

Andy had one of Bobby’s paintings in her house. Sea and sky merging in shades of flat grey. The work of a guy who was always looking for the vanishing point. Most people, they had a near-death experience, they became born-again Christians or just wandered around in the warm glow of knowing there was
something else.
Bobby Maiden had to be difficult.

‘Just a thought,’ she said. ‘Would you no’ like to go spend a few days at Marcus Bacton’s place?’

Andy’s office door opened, Nurse Kirsty Brady’s big face in the gap. ‘Mr Trilling …?’ Brady made a face. The wee nurses were all a little scared of Mr Trilling.

‘Aye, I’m coming,’ Andy said. ‘Hey, give it a thought, Bobby. I believe, ah … I gather the wee American girl’s back.’

‘Grayle?’

‘Trying to put
The Vision
to rights.’

Bobby Maiden rolled his eyes. ‘Then she’s got enough problems.’

Because he never thought he’d stay long in Elham, he was still living in the same apartment in this grimy Victorian heap in Old Church Street. One day they’d extend the bypass and the Victorian block would vanish.

The flat wasn’t much more than a studio now. He liked it smelling of paints. He liked having the work in progress, a triptych of big canvases, covering a whole wall. Another life in progress.

The sequence was coming together from drawings he’d done, photos he’d taken, the last time he was down at St Mary’s – the three canvases joining up to show the line of the Black Mountains at dawn under mist. The point being that, viewed from St Mary’s, the Black Mountains were featureless, a long bank. But the whole of Wales lay behind them.

He remembered what it was like going up there with Cindy Mars-Lewis. Cindy with his Celtic shaman’s drum and his shaman’s cloak of feathers – ridiculous and yet unexpectedly dramatic, a big bird against the skyline. Cindy starting to chant, and it was like he’d thrown his voice into the mountains.

Meeting place
(THUMP)

Meeting place
(THUMP)

Here the Sky

Here the Earth

HEAR the Earth

Meeting place
(THUMP, THUMP)

A weird bloke in a bird suit stirring up primeval forces. Now also the man with the big-money balls. Bizarre.

Maiden unlocked the communal front door, entering the hallway. Keeping the keys in hand as he strolled across to the door of his ground-floor flat. And found he didn’t need any keys for this one.

OK, he wasn’t expecting it – was anybody, ever? – but it was no big, devastating shock to find the door of his flat splintered again, all around the lock.

The first time this happened to you, even as a copper, you felt sick, invaded. You were never going to settle until you’d seen the bastards in court. The second time, it was a profound inconvenience but it didn’t keep you awake.

This was the fourth time. Maiden felt weary. There was nothing worth stealing in there, except the portable TV and the CD-player. Three hundred quid the lot.

Still, he went carefully. One time, they’d still been inside. A steel toecap had messed up his left eye.

He kicked open the door and stepped back into the hallway.

Nothing. Maiden was sure he could somehow tell these days if a place was empty, that he could sense a presence. He walked in and switched on the lights. Stood in the doorway and looked around.

Nothing. Everything as it was. The CD-player on its shelf, the TV on its stand over by the bricked-up fireplace.

He went back to look at the door. Unsubtle. A crowbar job. There would have been some noise involved, unavoidable, but it didn’t look as though they’d cared. Five flats in the building, but
two of them empty. Students in the others, out most nights.

But why? What was the point? They hadn’t even turned the place over. He went back in, kicking something which skittered across the boards and finished up on the rug.

Stanley knife with the blade out. He didn’t touch it.

He looked across at the wall with the three canvases hanging on it.

Stood gazing at the joined-up picture for nearly a minute.

They must have spent quite some time on it, because the lettering was quite regular, spread over all three canvases, each letter about three inches high, carved out of the misty flank of the Black Mountains.

It looked like the Hollywood sign.

It said

CONGRATULATIONS SIR

X

HAVING BEEN STORMED IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY BY THE WELSH
pretender, Owain Glyndwr, and later plundered for stone by generations of local builders, the castle’s surviving tower was probably only half its original height.

But still the best place from which to observe invaders.

Yes, yes, this was a little early in the year for invasion. Nearly a month before Easter and the first carloads of cretins.
Can I buy a guidebook? Where are the toilets? Do you sell ice-cream?

Read the bloody signs!
Marcus would roar.
Piss off!

Continuing problem when your house was inside the remains of a medieval castle. It seemed entirely beyond the comprehension of the average bloody tourist that not all historic masonry was there to trample over, picnic on, have sex under or turn into a bastard adventure playground.

…
and if that child jumps twenty feet to his death, under the impression that all castles are bloody bouncy castles, I don’t want to hear you whining to
me,
madam!

But all this was weeks away. At six-fifteen on a brisk March morning the highest part of the castle was a place where a sick, congested man could go to breathe.

After – at best – a fitful night’s sleep, Marcus had woken at five, his nasal tubes like concrete and his temper in rags. He’d gone stumping across the farmyard to the sawn-off tower, stumbling up
the remaining spiralled stone steps to emerge into the grey-pink dawn sky and the high, fresh air.

Recipe for surviving influenza: start with fresh air, progress to single malt … if you could get it.

In his ancient naval officer’s duffel coat, he and Malcolm were slumped over a stone slab smoothed by the centuries, waiting for the red sun to flare over the Malvern Hills and suspecting it wasn’t going to happen …

… when the car appeared.

Marcus sat up. It was unusual for any vehicles, even Land-Rovers and tractors, to use the narrow, mountain road this early in the day, especially this early in the year. Marcus recalled, with an unpleasant tingle, the time he’d been occupying this very spot, with only a damaged pitchfork to use against two armed, homicidal thugs who’d arrived in a featureless white van.

This vehicle was dark, possibly green, and as big as the van had been. Seemed to be one of those posh Jeeps beloved of obnoxious city dwellers with weekend cottages. Marcus didn’t know anyone in this area who owned one. When the Jeep slowed at the final bend, he tensed. Couldn’t possibly be coming
here.

But it bloody well could … curving into the damned entrance and out of his line of sight. Marcus moved to the edge of the tower, leaned over, heard someone get out and open the gate, then watched the big green vehicle cross the yard twenty-five feet below.

Malcolm quivered, and Marcus clamped a hand over the dog’s muzzle as the car stopped and the person who had opened the gate came into view.

Marcus sprang up.

‘Underhill!
What the bloody hell—?’

And, oh Lord, who was that with her?

Several times on the journey, the horrific green-pepper moment had sprung up at her and she’d shaken her head and said despairingly,
‘We have to call the cops.’

‘No way.’ Persephone Callard steering the Grand Cherokee with one hand low on the wheel, eyes fixed on the road and maybe some other place that Grayle couldn’t even imagine. ‘Out of the question.’

‘But what if he—?’

‘So?’

‘Well, OK,
you
can say that. You didn’t do anything. You were just a victim and you stayed a victim the whole time. Me …’

Callard had packed a case and then they’d cleared up the lodge and hung dust covers so it looked like no-one had been living there. Callard had an apartment in London but could not go back, she said, because of the media.

But it wasn’t just the media now, was it? The media were the goddamn least of it.

Grayle had thought at once of the dairy at Castle Farm, where visitors stayed, where – fate, destiny? – Persephone Callard could become reacquainted with
the only person in my entire fucking life who ever pitied me.
And where Grayle might just find out what all this was really about before the cops took her away.

How could she hang it on Marcus, a sick man?

On the other hand, it was Marcus got her into this.

‘Grayle, for Christ’s sake, what else could you have done?’ Callard had demanded, as they came down from Gloucester towards the M50, with the first amber lines of morning in the southern sky. ‘What else could you have done sufficiently drastic to get us out of there?’

‘Maybe I could’ve explained that to the cops …?’

‘You do not deserve’, Callard said firmly, ‘to spend hours in some smelly police interview room for
that
…’

‘The interview room I could take. If it ended there.’

‘Yes, well I’m afraid one can’t necessarily trust the police any more. Or, indeed, believe in British justice.’

The famous Seffi Callard driving coolly on, her hands unshaking on the wheel. Her upper lip was swollen where one of them had hit her and then squeezed her face before applying the masking tape. But she seemed already separated from the terror. She actually looked less gaunt than last night, less hollowed. Driving efficiently, with purpose. Maybe she also had that sense of fate and destiny, was thinking that Marcus Bacton would know what to do, make things all right.

‘I just want to believe the two halves of that guy’s face are still joined together, is all,’ Grayle had said miserably.

*       *       *

She stepped down from the big, plushy, air-conditioned Jeep.

The air was hard and made everything real again. Her legs felt like saplings.

She watched Marcus and Persephone Callard approaching each other slowly across the yard, which was still half-shadowed from the night.

Marcus’s eyes were wet. Just the flu, Grayle hoped.