Mean Spirit (26 page)

‘Perhaps you move out of the apartment.’

‘And how would I make a living?’ He looked up at her. She didn’t smile. ‘Is that really all you think this is?’

*       *       *

The cramped, flagged forecourt of the cottage behind St Mary’s Church was big enough for a Mini and virtually nothing made since. There was a feeling of security about this. Anyhow, Grayle had always felt safe here.

Even though it was only a few miles from where Ersula had died.

This hadn’t mattered, somehow, the way it would have if she was living in some modern condo and her sister had been killed in the next block. All to do with the age of the settlement, how many violent deaths it must have absorbed … while the old stone homes huddled snugly together and the church bells still rang out over the rich, pink soil.

Grayle drew the curtains. Checked the door – one lock and a small bolt; in New York she’d had four locks and a big chain and a peephole.

She was OK here, on her own. She’d lived alone, most of the time, in New York. Where was the difference?

Although it was late, she put a match to a wood fire in the living room. Like a campfire in the woods, to keep the bears at bay. The flames lit the inglenook, shadows leaping and shooting up the stones. Living light was caught by the crystals hanging from the big beam, was glinting in the seraphic eyes of the brass Buddha in the hearth.

Bobby and Callard hadn’t returned to Castle Farm.

Which was like … none of her business. Right?

Because she was OK. Grayle sat still and glum. She was fine.

Very tired, Cindy parked the Honda in the little cindered courtyard behind the Ram’s Head and immediately switched off the lights.

The Honda, yes.

The Morris Minor, his totem car, his shamanic chariot, having failed to start. Of course it had. All that time in storage. What did he expect? It meant nothing.

Cindy crept around the side of the pub. He had no wish to disturb Amy. If she had retired for the night, well … resigned, he was, if necessary, to sleeping in the car. It would not be the first time.

The merest glow from the interior. A security lamp, perhaps, for even St Mary’s was no longer too remote to be immune from the predatory attentions of itinerant thieves. Cindy peered through
the bevelled glass into the churchlike glimmerings within the public bar.

A searing pain almost paralyzed his spine.

‘Freeze.’

‘Oh my God,’ Cindy croaked.

‘Turn around …
ve-ry slowly.’

‘Amy, my love,’ Cindy wheezed, ‘if you wanted me to turn round quickly, we would require the services of an osteopath.’

‘Cindy! Oh my God!’ Amy dropped the yard-brush.

Amy Jenkins: little and dark and warm and crinkly, a refugee from the next valley to Cindy’s own in the broken heart of Glamorgan. Divorced these many years from the man known only as
That Bastard.
Now queen of the Tup.

‘You only just caught me, see,’ she said, as if this wasn’t past midnight and she might have gone to the shops. ‘Just having a last look round, I was. Weekend night, you get them in from all over the place – Hereford, Abergavenny. Strangers, and some thinking they can see an opportunity. Always like a last look around, I do, on a Saturday night. And there you was, like a burglar. Well … I can’t get over it – Cindy Mars-Lewis, and so famous now. Wait till I tell—’

‘Nobody,’ Cindy said firmly. ‘Tell nobody.’

‘Oh. Like that, is it?’ Amy was leading him to the oak settle in the woody dimness of the deserted bar then putting more lights on, giving him the once-over. ‘Looking tired, you are, Cindy. Not quite your old self.’

‘I’m fine, lovely. Fine as I could be.’

‘That poor man. The Lottery winner. Did you hear?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Money,’ Amy said. ‘Money makes people careless. Feel invulnerable they do, in the first flush of it.’

‘Yes. That is a profound observation, Amy.’

‘The usual room, is it?’

‘That would be wonderful. I’m not yet sure how many nights. Two, three …’

‘You stay as long as you like, Cindy. And if you don’t want me to tell nobody, nobody gets told.’

‘Little Amy,’ Cindy said wistfully. ‘Marry you, I would, if I was normal.’

*       *       *

‘I’ve been thinking about that laugh,’ Persephone Callard said.

They were drinking whisky by the coal fire. Side by side on the hard Victorian sofa.

‘Ron isn’t best known for his impressions,’ Maiden said.

‘It was just the general tone. On one level. Quite a strong laugh, but one that wasn’t reacting to anything funny, do you know what I mean? It was there. I heard it at Barber’s party.’

‘But you don’t remember Seward. You weren’t introduced?’

‘Wasn’t introduced to anybody. Quite odd, now I think about it.’

‘Having a celebrated villain at your party,’ Maiden said, ‘wouldn’t that be a bit dangerous for a politician?’

‘E
x
-politician. Ex-villain, for that matter.’

‘Probably no such items. Like you can’t be an ex-alcoholic. Just because Seward’s doing after-dinner talks and guesting on quiz shows …’

‘You ever encountered him, Bobby?’

Maiden shook his head. ‘He’d have been doing his seven years when I was in London. Listen, say he engineered himself an invitation from Barber because of his interest in spiritualism. He was there because
you
were going to be there. Why no introduction? Seward loves celebrity. Unless—’

‘There was something else. Now I think about it…’ Seffi hunched up on the Victorian sofa, tapping a knee with stiffened fingers. ‘I’m remembering him from another context. Damn.’

‘Unless it was
his
party,’ Maiden said.

‘What?’

‘Unless Sir Richard Barber was figureheading Seward’s party. Say Barber knows Seward, or Seward has something on him. Seward wants you – but if you’d been invited to conduct a sitting at a soirée hosted by Gary Seward the East End villain, would you have done it? Even for twenty-five K?’

‘No chance.’

‘There you go, then.’

‘Yes. It makes sense. It would explain why Barber didn’t appear to know anybody particularly. The fact that they didn’t seem to be his kind of people.’

‘Could they have been Seward’s kind of people? We know Les Hole was, for a start.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Gary Seward’s party,’ Maiden said. ‘The place full of iffy entrepreneurs and general villains. All those people with bad secrets. All those bodies buried. And you were the floorshow. Why?’

There was silence. She sat very still, her face sheened in the firelight, heavy hair down one side of her face like a hawser.

Remembering the commitment he’d made, telling Ron Foxworth,
I believe she does this
…
thing.
Which had been said mainly to support her against Ron’s impending sneers, and not necessarily because he …

If you
believed
she did this thing, that she truly had access to the dead, the implications were vast. Thinking about it now, just the two of them here, it was as though the walls of the room had dissolved and the night was in.

‘Persephone,’ he said. ‘She was the woman who married the king of the Underworld, right?’

‘And spent half her life among the dead,’ she said.

Whenever Maiden thought of the dead, he thought of Em.

Seffi looked at him, firelight flickering in her eyes.

‘And if that’s what you were about to ask, it
is
my real name. My mother chose it.’

‘She was psychic too?’

‘I don’t know. I ask my father, he just smiles. Yes, of course she was. I know she was.’

‘So, have you ever …?’

‘Had contact? Not for a long time. I think she’s moved on, beyond my reach. I think she was there in the few years after she died, when I was a child. Guarding the portal. From adolescence, I guess I was on my own. Which was when it became disruptive.’

He said, ‘Are you still afraid to die? Knowing what you … know?’

Her faint smile twisted. ‘Oh, come on, Bobby, what do I know? What do I really
know?
It’s all too big in there, a huge, endless factory. I’m just standing there, looking at all this strange machinery.’

He had a scary image of unmanned conveyor belts, chemical reprocessing.

‘And most of the ones who come out to me, they don’t know either. They’re the ones who don’t realize they’re over. Or they have unfinished business here and because of that – this really petty crap – they can’t see … the fullness of it. Sometimes I can help them deal with that, clear the blockage. But I don’t
know
… I couldn’t tell you what happens to them afterwards. Perhaps they evaporate into pure energy. Go for recycling. Perhaps – God help us – perhaps they don’t exist at all outside my head. I … I was never one of your evangelical mediums. Never tell anyone it’s going to be all springtime and church bells. I don’t know.’ She paused. ‘And neither do you, apparently. No glorious lights when you died, Bobby.’

‘No.’

‘Depressing, or what?’ She started to laugh, bleakly. He thought about Gary Seward who he’d never met – and pushed him away again.

Quite soon, the laugh went out of Seffi’s voice but remained in her big amber eyes. Where it reflected a different mood: lighter, untroubled.

Maiden felt a peculiar tingle in his gut.

Seffi Callard’s eyes were shining with irony.
Not her eyes,
he thought, and a featherlight shiver started in his spine, a small, tremulous excitement, a feeling of someone coming towards him, weaving lightly through the trees.

And she said,
‘It’s all right, guv. It’s all right now.’

Her eyes very much someone else’s eyes.

The room around them was curtained with shadows and he heard the cracking of the trees in the wind, as though there were no walls.

No walls. The warm shiver enveloped him; he was aware of them both inside it.

She put out a hand and he took it.

She said,
‘Come on, guv, help yourself to the sweet trolley.’

Bobby Maiden began to weep.

Part Four

From
Bang to Wrongs: A Bad Boy’s Book,

by
GARY SEWARD

It amuses me when people say, ‘There ain’t no justice.’ In my world there is, every time. One thing we have always believed in is that people should get what is coming to them, by whatever means may be appropriate at the time.

Let me tell you the story of Billy Spindler.

Billy was the scum of the earth. A rapist. By which I don’t mean the kind of poor sod what goes down for seven years on account of getting a bit pissed and not hearing her say no. I mean a real pervert what gets off on degrading ladies. (As you may have gathered, I hate perverts of all persuasions, but that is by the by in this instance.) Another reason Billy was scum was on account of being a grass, and when he was nicked for sexually assaulting a schoolteacher, while wearing a black balaclava, on a building site at Chiswick, he was quick to take the Coward’s Way Out by striking a bargain with the police, as a result of which three of his neighbours were arrested in connection with a very clean raid on a branch of the Bradford and Bingley Building Society, as it was then known. Naturally, the whole community was up in arms about this, but the scum was hard to get at, without an element of personal risk, due to police protection, which was an outrage in itself.

Now, justice works in peculiar ways and you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. What happened was in some respects regrettable, but the law of karma does not require permission from the Crown Prosecution Service to take effect.

What happened was that, two months later, to the day and the hour, the same schoolteacher was raped by a man wearing a black balaclava.

Well, most of the police had been well choked by that deal with Billy Spindler and, alibi or not, there was no way Billy was walking away from this one. He was convicted in record time and done eleven years, and not very pleasant years by all accounts, mostly in Parkhurst, where he ended up in solitary for his own safety and even then discovered he was not totally safe after a screw was bribed to look the other way.

Billy Spindler learned the hard way that certain behaviour cannot be tolerated, especially if perpetrated by a pervert.

And in case you were thinking this was hard on the poor schoolteacher, soon after she received an envelope containing ten thousand pounds in clean money from ‘a wellwisher’. So, there you are, everybody was happy, apart from Billy Spindler, which is how it should be.

XXVIII

AWAKENING INTO HALF-LIGHT FROM THE CELL-LIKE WINDOW, CINDY
put on the bedside lamp and his eyes met the eyes of Kelvyn Kite, sullenly shambling in the chair by the wall at the bottom of the bed.

You cowardly old tart.

‘Yes, yes, I know.’ Cindy’s voice was morning hoarse. ‘You don’t have to rub it in.’

What the hell are you
doing
here?

‘I ran. I ran away, all right? Ran away, I did, from the bitter tang of the cold sea.’

You never learn, boy. Never realize when you’re on top. Always looking down, you are, into the darkness.

‘Leave me alone,’ Cindy said. ‘Too early for the inquisition.’

He never wore a watch. He guessed it was not yet seven. Too early, also, to get up and disturb Amy. He reached for something to read and discovered the small, stiff-backed book sent to him in Kurt Campbell’s promotion package:
The Mysteries of Overcross Castle
by G.L. Mirebrook.

A ring of Enid Blyton, that title. The facsimile edition from 1935 had fewer than fifty pages. Cindy flicked it open near the middle.

for Abblow, it appears, was both jealous and suspicious of Daniel Dunglas-Home who was, by this time, acquiring an international reputation arising from the extraordinary phenomena which were said to gather around him like moths to a lamp. Home was able to
produce not only spectacular visual effects but also sounds, evoking in one instance the tumult of waves and the creaking of a ship’s timbers; he also was able to levitate and had been seen to float around the room; he could even, it was attested, assume the physical size and shape of a particular spirit, appearing, furthermore, to increase his own height by several inches.