Mean Spirit (5 page)

The door had a bellpull. Grayle looked up at it and turned away. Raised a hand back at Justin –
no problem, everything’s just fine
– and walked right past the door, following a concrete path around the side of the lightless house.

Flattening herself against a wall below a bright yellow burglar alarm, sheltered from the rain by the eaves, she pulled out her phone.

There was a signal. Just.

Call the cops?

Well, no officer, he didn’t exactly
do
anything; he was just conveying an unmistakable menace. The way he talked
…
the kind of questions he asked. And – oh yeah – he grabbed my leg. My thigh … Well, sure, we were going around a tight bend at the time; it’s possible his hand kind of slipped, but I sure don’t think so. Press charges? Uh …

She dumped the phone back in her bag then took it out again, brought up
999
on the little screen, did not press
send.
Shoved the phone, primed for fast action, into a pocket of her raincoat and moved on around the house.

It might be the biggest dwelling in Mysleton, but it wasn’t so big, maybe six bedrooms. It was clear there was nobody living here right now, but if she stayed this side for a while, out of sight, Justin surely would have to accept she’d gotten in.

She came to a glass-walled conservatory. Cane chairs and a sofa inside. Also plants – so somebody must come in to water them.

‘
Grayle
?’

Shit. She clamped a hand around the phone in her pocket and ran away from the conservatory, across a lawn and into some trees, as Justin appeared around the side of the house, his overalls flapping.

‘You all right, Grayle?’

He couldn’t see her, she was sure, but she moved further into the dripping trees, which were soon assembling themselves into a small wood, dark and boggy, Grayle sinking up to an ankle in brown water.

Nightmare, or what? All she could hear now was her own panting breath and the grey noise of the rain which muffled other noises like, say, footsteps coming up behind you and the furtive glide of a zipper.

Gulping back a sob, dragging the sodden foot out of the hole, she stumbled on through all kinds of dank shit, until she came out on to an overgrown footpath running roughly parallel to the black-top track.

There was a wall ahead. She almost ran flat into it – a stone wall with a wrought-iron gate in it. The path stopped here. There was no place to go but through the iron gate and into what looked like a long-untended walled garden, a messy nest of brown bushes. A short gravel path led up to a wooden porch open to a solid back door painted dark green, with no obvious bell, no knocker.

The lodge, right?

Sure. But this was still all wrong. There was going to be nobody
here. Like Persephone Callard – superior, graceful, elegant, supermodel-slim – was going to be holed up in a dump like this?

In fact, the whole set-up … this rich and famous woman issuing a cry for help to an old guy she’d last encountered when he was a world-weary teacher and she was a very weird schoolgirl … what kind of sense did that make? Pushing into the porch, Grayle had a flash picture of Marcus Bacton, hunched over his woodstove, nursing his flu and his fantasies. Asshole.

She stood in the porch, furious and scared, hair hanging like seaweed. She banged and banged on the door, with both fists, until it hurt and then some. No answering footsteps in the hallway, kitchen, whatever; no lights coming on.

But lights were appearing behind her. Headlights. Good old Justin easing his pick-up back down the track, lighting up the trees, scanning the ground for his prey like a poacher lamping a hare. Grayle tried to push open a narrow letterbox, but it was rusted tight.

‘Ms Callard …’ Hissing it, scared to shout.

A rattle and a creak of brakes, a shaft of white at the end of the garden: the pick-up stopping outside the lodge. Justin was bold. Justin had done this stuff before and gotten away with it. Grayle’s knuckles felt frayed and sore. She went down on her knees in the porch, her mouth to the only opening, an enlarged keyhole.

‘Ms Callard, listen, Marcus Bacton sent me. You get that?
Marcus Bacton.
If you’re there, just… please just let me in.’

Justin would go first to the front door, but he’d soon come around back. Grayle got ready to escape down the garden, out the iron gate. Saw herself running through acres of filthy fields to some stark farmhouse, the door answered by this grinning, naked guy who would turn out to be Justin’s insane brother.

She collapsed onto her hands when the back door of the lodge opened unexpectedly into darkness.

IV

WHAT SHE SAW FIRST WAS THE BLADE. IT SLICED CLEAN THROUGH THE
moment of relief at finally gaining access to the lodge.

The blade was wide – wide like a machete – and it had a reddened edge, and there was a figure in shadow behind it that didn’t move.

Grayle came unsteadily to her feet, backing up against the wooden door – a heavy
thack
from the latch as she closed it with her ass.

‘Who are you?’

This harsh, low voice. Grayle blinking in the gloom of a low room with small, square, leaded windows.

A woman. With blades.

She was not holding the big blade, but she was standing next to where it hung from this like torture-chamber wall. It was on the end of a thick wooden handle bound with cord, the whole item like a butcher’s weighty, stubby chopping knife for splintering bone. Next to this knife was a rusty sickle with no handle. Above them, a razor-edged hook on a five-foot wooden pole.

Some kind of rustic armoury. Grayle saw, with faint relief, that the red on the butcher’s blade had been a reflection from a low-burning fire – little coals glowering sullenly out of a black, sunken grate.

‘Uh …’ Trying to make out the face as the woman moved out from the wall. ‘You’re Pers … Persephone?’

Not a stupid question because this did not look too much like a cool, silky fox with skin like Galaxy chocolate and calm, penetrating eyes. Maybe her older, embittered sister.

‘I
said
… who are
you?’
Arms hanging loose, sleeves pushed up, like she was still ready to pull down a lethal weapon from the wall. ‘Your
name.’

‘I … Grayle Underhill. I told you, I work for … with … Marcus Bacton.’

‘As what?’

‘As a writer.’

‘So where is he?’

‘Sick. The flu. He’s existing on whisky and paracetamol. You wouldn’t want to catch it.’

But when the woman stepped out, she looked like she already had: in the grey light from the window, she seemed fleshless, a scarecrow in a powder-blue cashmere cardigan, half-buttoned over probably nothing. Hair like a coil of oily rope. Eyes burning far back, like the coals in the black grate.

‘Who’s that in the truck?’

‘That’s, uh … the garage guy.’ Grayle was picking up a tired and sickly smell of booze. ‘My car broke down a few miles back. The guy drove me here.’

‘And naturally you’re terrified of the man who’s repairing your car.’

‘Well, not
terrified
exactly, I—’

‘Look at you!’

‘OK, yeah, he was … he was kind of forward. On the way here.’

Grayle fumbling out an explanation about the exhaust system. The card in the phone box. Fred West. All of that. Sounding completely half-assed, like she was just now making it all up. Often the way of it with the truth.

‘He doesn’t know I’m in here. He thinks the lodge is empty.’

‘That case, you’d better keep your voice down and stay away from the window. Sit in that chair, if you like, next to the fire. Dry off.’

Dry
orf
was how she said it. She looked wrecked, but she talked like out of the royal family. Grayle sat. The chair had a high back and faced away from the window. The fire was probably kept low so there’d be no glow on the room. Siege procedure. The woman was living here in darkness, like a ghost. It could only be Persephone Callard.

‘All right, be quiet, he’s coming.’

She slipped back into the shadows beyond the armoury – actually, Grayle realized, a collection of rustic, rusted hedging implements. There was an old bowsaw beneath the butcher’s-type hacking tool and then the wall ended in a wooden stairway.

‘Don’t speak until I tell you. Don’t move.’

The greasy squeak of Justin’s fingertips on the window made Grayle stop breathing. A coal fell out of the grate.

‘Stupid, huh?’ Outside, the truck’s engine was starting up. ‘He’s probably a nice man.’

‘No, you’re probably right,’ Callard said. ‘He imagined he was on to a shag. How will you get your car back?’

‘Call him in an hour or two, I guess. I don’t know. He works till seven or eight, he says. What else can I do?’

‘You had him drop you at the house.’ Pronouncing it
hice,
like Prince Charles. ‘So he knows you were coming here? He knows why? That man knows I’m here?’

‘I’m afraid he does,’ Grayle admitted. ‘I let it out I was coming to meet with you. That was indiscreet. I’m sorry. I have no excuse. Marcus fully apprised me of the situation.’

Persephone Callard found a small smile. Then a clutch of bottles on a table. ‘Vodka, gin, Scotch?’

‘Well, maybe a Scotch … Plenty of water? Thank you. You don’t have a car here?’

‘It’s in one of the garages up at the house.’

Grayle peered out at the walled wilderness. ‘How long you been here?’

‘Just over a week. I don’t want to open up the house.’

‘Too big, I guess.’

‘Too obvious. This is more discreet. Have to be out of here in a couple of weeks, however. From Easter, we let it out as holiday accommodation. Have to be out even sooner now, if your friend Justin shoots his mouth off.’

‘I’m sorry. You’re here all alone?’

‘As I’m sure Marcus Bacton’s told you …’ Persephone Callard’s voice put on a weight of irony ‘… people like me are never
entirely
alone.’

*       *       *

One time, Grayle had done a piece for the
Courier
on how many mediums were practising in New York City. She’d established two hundred and thirty-five, which was just over twice as many as there’d apparently been in 1850, when the first boom had been on.

Even in those early days, most of the mediums had been exposed as fakes … inventors of table-rapping devices, experts at pulling strings of muslin ‘ectoplasm’ out their nostrils.

Sure, Justin had been largely right. It was exploitation of the bereaved. About taking the sting out of death, like your loved ones were just a phone call away. Always a ready audience for that.

Some of the working mediums Grayle had talked to were kind of genuine – even though a lot of the information they relayed was inaccurate, they seemed to have contact with
something.
Just that they usually came over just as gullible as their sad clients, needing to believe they were bonding with the departed. Plus they did tend to be so pious and all knowing, putting on the air of church ministers.

And sure, in those years as a New Age columnist, Grayle had never encountered anyone she could honestly believe was in contact with the dead.

Callard had come to sit on a Victorian sofa on the other side of the fireplace from Grayle’s chair, facing the window. She had a tumbler half-filled with some kind of immoderate Martini mixture.

‘You know why I drink too much?’

Grayle said nothing. It was so dark in here, now, that you didn’t like to move in case you knocked something over. She began to feel cold, edged her chair closer to the underfed fire.

‘Because when I’m pissed I don’t receive.’

‘Right,’ Grayle said uncertainly.

‘Nothing significant gets through alcohol.’

‘That’s interesting.’

‘Don’t feel …’ Callard leaned back, with her head against the wall, maybe observing Grayle for the first time ‘… that you have to fucking patronize me. What did you say your name was?’

‘Grayle Underhill.’

‘Grayle?’

‘Underhill.’ She sipped weak whisky from a glass that felt greasy.

‘Oh my God.’ Callard did this short snort of a laugh. ‘Not that
dreadful … You don’t have a column in one of those ghastly American tabloids. Under the name …’

Grayle sighed. ‘Holy Grayle. But not any more.’

‘Holy
Grayle.’
Callard threw an arm behind her head and peered at Grayle across the murk. ‘Oh my
God.
I was in New York doing some television and my agent brought me some copies. You really wrote that drivel?’

‘Don’t feel you have to patronize me,’ Grayle said.

Callard snorted, took a graceless slurp from her glass. She sat up, grabbed a poker, stabbed at the coals until a feeble white flame spurted.

Outside it was getting too close to dark. Time, Grayle figured, to cut to the chase.

‘Ms Callard, why did you write to Marcus?’

‘Did I?’

‘Marcus Bacton.’

In the wan firelight, you could see her navel between the bottom of the cardigan and the top of her dark jeans, then a fold of skin creased over it. She was anorectically thin.

‘Marcus Bacton’, she said, ‘was the only person in my entire fucking life who ever pitied me.’

She dug a bare hand into a bucket and came up with a clutch of small lumps of coal, scattering them over the fire, wiping her hand on her jeans.

‘People are suspicious of me. Or afraid. Or they want a piece of me. But I mean,
pity …
that was something new, even at the time. I was profoundly offended at first.’

‘Best of all,’ Grayle said, ‘Marcus likes to offend.’

‘When I think about him … I picture him striding up and down the corridors, with his wide shoulders and his little pot belly. Glaring through his glasses and roaring at pupils. Teachers too, sometimes.’

‘Uh huh.’ Grayle finished her whisky, gratefully put down the glass in the hearth. She noticed that Callard’s tumbler remained half-full. She’d drunk hardly any.

‘One night – this is on record … in the books – a big window just exploded in the dormitory. Glass everywhere. I was at the other end of the room, but they knew … the staff knew things happened around me. They actually put me into a room no bigger than a
cupboard. Locked the door, as you would with a dangerous mental patient. This was the headmaster and the matron. Didn’t know how else to handle it. Mr Bacton was furious. Came out in his dressing gown, and when they wouldn’t give him the key he kicked the door in and brought me out and we went for a long walk in the grounds. Talking. For hours, it seemed like. He resigned soon after that, and I was taken away from the school. I haven’t seen him since.’