Mean Spirit (40 page)
‘Tainted by bad vibes,’ Bobby said.
‘You’re spending too much time with Cindy.’ She leaned back, watching the lights of the town receding in the wing mirror. ‘I guess we’re no further forward, Bobby. We’re just collecting more questions. Maybe some of it’ll hang together with whatever Cindy and Marcus discovered at Overcross.’
When they got back to St Mary’s – around nine p.m., this would be – the wind was up again and a branch had snapped from one of the old trees which clashed like antlers over the mountain road.
The heater in the truck didn’t work. Grayle had on her raincoat, and it was too damn thin.
She thought Kurt Campbell was slick and arrogant and, for all his mastery of the techniques of hypnotism and his knowledge of the history of spiritualism, probably dangerously superficial. She wanted to go to this expensive Victorian seance tomorrow night about as much as she wanted to revisit the place where Ersula’s body had been found.
And there was the problem of Callard. She’d need to get in fast with the Alice D. Thornborough if they came face to face. Be kind of interesting, she supposed, to see how Callard reacted to Kurt’s guest.
For reasons of perversity, Grayle had allowed Bobby to go on thinking she’d found Campbell intriguing, attractive, magnetic, all of that.
They drove through the castle gate. Cindy’s Honda was parked in the yard. She was relieved they’d gotten back.
Then she spotted Cindy himself waiting under the bulkhead light with Malcolm the dog.
Cindy looked bedraggled in his twinset and tweed skirt, truly the maiden aunt fallen on hard times. The truck’s headlights threw his face into hard relief: deep lines and no make-up, the mauve hair blown on end by the wind.
‘Something’s wrong,’ Bobby said.
YOU COULD SEE OVERCROSS CASTLE FROM A DISTANCE OF MAYBE A
mile, across countryside which would be lush in summer. Signs told of cider farms and a vineyard a few hundred yards and at least a whole season away. The light-green glaze of new growth on the trees looked like an illusion in the scrabbling wind.
‘I just knew it was gonna be like this.’ Inside the heaterless truck, Grayle rummaged in her bag for her long, woollen scarf.
The house had towers and turrets and battlements and all those other
Son of Robin Hood
features. Viewed through the spiky trees, it looked stark and threatening, more like a true medieval castle than any of the actual ones she’d seen. Made Marcus’s ruins look like garden ornaments. Behind it you could see, in the distance, the hill of Great Malvern with white houses and hotels strung along it like a necklace of teeth.
Billionaires in California had erected mock castles like this, and she’d marvelled at a couple when she was a kid and her father was lecturing out west.
But California was California and didn’t have the weather for it. Jesus, the first day of spring tomorrow, the vernal equinox, and was that
snow
on the truck’s windshield?
‘Bobby, is that snow?’
‘It’s not volcanic dust,’ Bobby Maiden said. He looked unhappy and unsure about everything.
As Grayle supposed they both were, since Cindy gave them the
news about Marcus.
The curse has come upon me, said the Lady of Shalott,
Grayle thought drably. Wishing she was anyplace but here, as they came to an old brick wall, about ten feet high, with trees hard against it and a long sign along the top.
Experience
…
THE FESTIVAL OF THE SPIRIT.
MARCH 20-25
And then a gatehouse. There was a cop on duty behind a barrier. Except, when he came over, Grayle saw he wasn’t a cop, although the uniform was damn close; Bobby thought so too, muttering something about take away the red armband and you could have him for impersonation. Bobby wound down the window and Grayle handed him the press passes she’d been given by Francine, Kurt Campbell’s haughty PA.
‘We also have a stall,’ she told the almost-cop, leaning across from the passenger side. ‘Stall thirty-eight?’
‘Hang on a moment.’ He studied the passes before pushing them back. He was a big young guy with an impassive, military kind of look, and Grayle saw the word FORCEFIELD on his red armband. ‘Bacton, is it? Somebody’s already there. Came about an hour ago.’
‘Yeah, we know.’
‘Right – Avenue Three. End of the drive, turn right by the tape and the arrows and you’ll see the way it’s divided – stalls one to fourteen, and so on. It’s your third, right at the end.’
‘Thank you, Constable.’ Bobby wound up the window. You could see an angry fire had been rekindled inside him, could almost smell the smoke.
‘Oh, I really don’t like the way you said that,’ Grayle said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘This is your private obsession taking over. At bottom, you’re just as bad as this guy Foxworth. You have a tenuous connection here between Campbell and this Riggs and Riggs is your personal bogeyman, so you’re thinking like maybe if you can build Seward into the picture … right?’
‘The only picture I’m getting’, Bobby said, ‘is Vic Clutton lying
dead outside the house he was finally happy to call home.’
‘Oh boy.’ Grayle wound the big scarf around her neck and tightened the belt of her raincoat as the truck entered the grounds of Overcross Castle.
At close to eleven a.m. on a working day and the festival not due to open until that evening, there were probably fewer than a hundred people there – most of them around an expensive-looking restaurant marquee which, presumably, had heating, and was the only part of the site that looked remotely inviting.
The festival was set up in three sloping fields which might once have been parkland, leading up to the stone terrace surrounding Overcross Castle. Most of the hundred or so stalls were open-fronted display tents with room for about five people. One was being fitted out as an esoteric bookstore, another was figuring to sell aromatic candles which, with the wind and snow and all, nobody could hope to light.
They left Marcus’s faded blue truck next to Cindy’s Honda on a cindered parking lot reserved for stallholders. Hundreds of yards of wooden decking-track had been laid across grass which was destined otherwise to become a boot-churned bog.
Avenue Three was right under the highest part of the castle, a round tower with a conical roof and a lightning conductor which prodded the bruised low cloud like an old-fashioned hypodermic syringe in a junkie’s arm. Stall thirty-eight marked the furthest point of the festival campus and was right next to the toilet block, a line of white Portaloos – already the source of a seriously acrimonious dispute, as Grayle and Bobby approached.
‘… don’t care if it was a late booking, this is not bloody good enough, is it, sonny?’
Young guy with a clipboard backing off. ‘Look, it’s the best we—’
‘Four yards …
four yards …
from the stinking toilets? Can you imagine the state those makeshift shithouses are going to be in by next Sunday? I mean, have you thought for one bloody second what this
means,
from our point of view? Well, I’ll tell you … It means that whenever anybody who’s been here comes across a copy of
The Vision
in future, they’re going to associate it immediately with the stink of stale piss and probably steaming vomit.’
‘Now look, those loos are the most hygienic—’
‘Makes no odds, sonny. By Saturday morning we’ll still all be swilling diarrhoea from the canvas.’
‘I can definitely assure you these toilets will be cleaned every—’
‘Pah!’ And Malcolm the dog barked once, as if in support.
‘Look, if you’ve got a complaint, you’ll have to put it in writing.’ The boy tucking his clipboard under his arm, turning away. Bad move, Grayle thought.
‘Don’t … think … you’re … walking … away … from … this.’ The force of nature in the glasses and the tweed suit, and the dog, advancing on the poor kid, planting a foot in front of his. ‘I want another site.’
‘I keep telling you, we haven’t
got
another site.’
‘In that case, I want two hundred pounds off the charge. Or I’ll be obliged to take this to Kurt bloody Campbell himself.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll
show the smarmy bastard what a hypnotic trance feels like.’
‘Did you really say two hundred pounds?’
‘Seems eminently bloody reasonable to me. And I’m sure you wouldn’t like the good vibes to be soiled by the sound of me telling everyone, including the press and the local television, what a shoddy little sideshow this is, organized by a slimy tosser with no—’
‘All right!’ The kid held up both hands, dropping his clipboard in the mud. ‘I’ll go across to the admin office and see what I can do.’
He started to walk back along the decking then turned around. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’
Grayle fought for control as the bottle blonde in the tweed suit glared at this hapless kid through plain-glass spectacles.
‘Bacton,’ Cindy snarled. ‘Imelda.
Miss.’
A short while later Grayle went back to the cold comfort of the truck and called the infirmary in Worcester on Bobby’s mobile.
‘Are you a relative?’ the staff nurse demanded.
The snow had stopped. It was never going to stick, but it was so bitter that Grayle’s hand was numb around the cellphone.
‘Well, I … Yeah, I’m … I’m his niece. Alice Thornborough.’
‘Well, all I can tell you, Miss Thornborough,’ the nurse’s voice was unexpectedly clipped and frigid, ‘is that he’s as comfortable as can be expected.’
‘And in plain English, that means?’
‘It means’, the sister said, ‘that everything about him is weak except his language.’
‘Uh, yeah, that figures. He kind of hates hospitals and doctors. Doesn’t even have a thing about nurses in uniform.’
‘He wanted to discharge himself this morning, but when he found out how much pain was involved in getting out of bed, I think he finally understood that he needed us rather more than we need him.’
‘But he is gonna be OK? Isn’t he?’
‘If he accepts this as a severe warning.’
‘Yeah,’ Grayle said pessimistically. How was this woman supposed to understand that if there was anything to which Marcus Bacton reacted badly, it was a severe warning?
‘Can I see him?’
‘Tonight, if you like, but only for a short time. We’ve had to put him in a side ward, for the sake of the other patients, so if you ask the nurse who—’
‘Tonight could be a problem,’ Grayle said quickly. ‘But if you could tell him not to worry, that everything’s being looked after this end?’
And his sister sends her best wishes?
Maybe not.
‘He wanted to be here. Cindy sat on the counter, hitched up his tweed skirt, lit a cigarette. ‘And so he is. The shamanic solution, I suppose you might call it.’
‘Nothing to do with you not wanting to be recognized, then,’ Bobby said, patting the masterless Malcolm, poor confused creature.
‘Well, that too, naturally.’ Cindy blew a spontaneous smoke ring into the cold air. Cindy didn’t smoke, but Imelda Bacton apparently did.
Subtle padding made him stocky. His blond wig was shoulder-length. His foundation cream was a deep bronze, his lipstick scarlet, his glasses black-rimmed and businesslike. He was sitting on one of the packing cases they’d fetched from the truck. It contained a couple of thousand copies of
The Vision
and, for display purposes, a set of atmospheric colour photos of High Knoll taken by a woman called Magda Ring, who’d been Bobby’s girlfriend for a – mercifully,
in Grayle’s view – short time. In one of the pictures, blown up big, a formation of white clouds resembled two praying hands. The picture had been taken just after the Green Man killings had ended.
‘You saw it coming, didn’t you?’ Bobby said.
‘I don’t …’ Tears threatened Cindy’s make-up. ‘I felt
something
coming. I didn’t realize it was going to be Marcus. Marcus was … invulnerable.’
‘A force of nature,’ Grayle said.
‘It was one of the absolute worst moments of my life. About to try mouth to mouth, I was, until I saw the look in his eyes.’
Cindy found a smile. Last night he’d been a mess. Prowling the windy ruins, a ragged spectre of despair. He’d killed Marcus, just like he’d killed the BMW family and the plane guy and the guy who’d married a gold-digger less than half his age. Killed them all. Cindy, the walking curse.
After talking it over with Bobby, Grayle had called the hospital at midnight, learned that Marcus was sleeping. She’d told Cindy that Marcus had whispered to a nurse to tell Lewis that it wasn’t his fault, that he had to pull himself together, see it through. A necessary lie.
This morning they’d had a call from Amy at the pub to say Cindy had left for Overcross before six a.m.
‘We’re gonna have trouble with him, though, Cindy.’
‘Marcus? Yes. Taking it easy, obeying doctor’s orders … not his way. Mind, I didn’t even know he had a heart problem.’
‘Nor did he,’ said Grayle. ‘He hadn’t seen a doctor in twenty years. He just saw Mrs Willis. Like, if he did have a heart problem, maybe it didn’t matter with her around.’
Bobby looked at Cindy, who really didn’t look at all like Cindy. ‘Does he
have
a sister?’
‘I have no idea, Bobby.’ Cindy pulled up a wrinkle in his tights, flexed a leg. ‘But if he did, this is what she would be like, and if she doesn’t achieve a fifty per cent reduction in Marcus’s stall rental, she won’t consider herself worthy of the family name. Now, listen to me, children – close those tent flaps – there are things you need to know.’
Arriving early was always useful, Cindy said. It was barely light when he got here and freezing cold and the restaurant marquee
wasn’t open. So Imelda Bacton had gone up to the house, where the woman who cleaned the kitchens had taken pity on her.
This cleaner was one of the temporary staff hired for the festival, a big, cheerful cockney lady called Vera, who made coffee for Cindy and herself in the vault-like kitchen where dinner was to be prepared each night by a catering company from Worcester. And, of course, they’d gotten talking and Imelda had said she was only managing the stall for her brother, who’d had a heart attack, and Vera said she’d been forced to take this miserable job because her husband had died recently, leaving her short.
