Mean Spirit

XI

Grayle shivered deeply — like to the bone — and hunkered over the opened stove in Marcus’s study, close to hugging the blazing logs. Maybe she’d finally picked up his flu.

‘Had a sleep?’ Marcus appeared in the doorway.

‘Oh sure, what do you think?’ Folding her arms for warmth, noting that he’d been upstairs, changed into the retired-colonel-style tweed suit. And the bow tie. Still haggard with the flu but making a bid for the old dapper Bacton.

All for Persephone.

Who, after a haphazard meal prepared by Grayle and involving mainly toast and Marcus’s disgusting instant coffee, had been shown to the Castle Farm guest apartment, the small, whitewashed building which used to be a dairy.

Persephone. Finally, a person Marcus didn’t address by her surname. Grayle didn’t like this one bit.

On the lumpy sofa, she’d had four hours of anxiety dreams involving Justin with a red opening where his moustache had been and Ersula, liquefying in the red soil.

Woke up shivering and Callard had not reappeared.

‘You’d better tell me,’ Marcus said. ‘Don’t you think?’

She could see it all again, like a slow-motion sequence. Because that was how it had seemed to happen, real slow. No big explosion, just a dampening, the blood soaking through the guerrilla-mask.

‘But … like massively. All of it soaked. And he … he’s just standing there … like he can’t believe it.’

The glass chinking against her teeth. Water. Just when you needed whisky, Marcus had no whisky left.

‘And I’m there with this … big, heavy blade hanging from my hand, like … like an executioner, you know?’

Marcus just nodded. Well, thanks, Marcus.

‘And then he like … he raises one hand to his face and when his hand touches where the wound is he just screams. This one long, awful scream. And he’s wheeling round now and trying to tear off the hood, and there’s blood all over his hands, and he can’t do it, it’s too painful and … and when his head turns there’s this like mist of blood spraying off of it. And he starts to sob, he lets out this long, shuddering kind of sob, and he suddenly rushes out the room and through the kitchen and out the house.’

She took a drink and coughed.

‘Leaving the other guy, right? The other guy’s standing very still and like just staring at me through his eye holes, like he’s taking in every detail of my face, and I want to drop the big knife but I can’t, and I … this single drop of blood falls from the blade to the floor. Like plop. His friend’s blood. And this guy, he’s just looking at me and it’s real still, you know, the atmosphere is soooo still, and the guy goes, he looks straight at me through the holes and he goes — and this is just like a whisper, I wouldn’t even know that voice again, and he goes … You … are dead.’

Grayle stood up, walked across to the window and looked out towards the castle walls for signs of life, imagining the second guy clambering through the ruins with a twelve-gauge shotgun. She turned back to Marcus.

‘And then he goes after his friend and like … Well, he turns just once in the doorway and he points at me … his finger real stiff and steady … Then he walks out, and after a while there’s the sound of a car starting up. And it’s like whole hours have passed, but just a couple seconds I guess, and I see Callard all trussed up, edging herself upright in the corner, and I… drop the knife. And I just like burst into tears.’

‘He didn’t touch you?’

‘I figure only because I was still holding the big knife.’

‘And Persephone? What had they done to her?’

‘Bust her lip was all. I think to shock her, stop her screaming. We were both pretty … fraught. I wanted to call the cops, but Callard’s like, “Don’t be stupid, you hurt that guy bad, they’ll haul you in, you’ll be all night making statements, they’ll have you saying stuff that isn’t true.” She just wanted out of there.’

They’d spent about an hour cleaning themselves and the house up. Following the trail of blood to the back door. They’d nailed some hardboard over the window in the door which the men had broken getting in.

‘All the time I’m thinking, What if they come back? but I guess that was pretty unlikely. The guy would’ve needed hospital treatment. Marcus …’ Grayle felt herself begin to come apart again ‘… suppose he’s dead? I mean, suppose I put the knife into his brain? Suppose, when they cut off the hood, half his damned face came away like … like a piecrust?’

‘These things are never as bad as you imagine,’ Marcus said inadequately. ‘You can get an enormous amount of blood from a common nosebleed.’

‘You don’t know. Do you?’

‘Well, no. I suppose not. Did Persephone say what happened before you came downstairs?’

‘She said she woke up and heard noises downstairs, and she thought it must be me, and she listens out for me coming back upstairs, and I don’t and she goes down and into the kitchen where there’s a light on, and one of them grabs her, the other hits her. They don’t speak, they don’t … touch her sexually or stuff like that. They’re businesslike. They tape her mouth and then they tape her hands.’

‘Look, I …’ Marcus was groping for a tissue and his senses. ‘I don’t understand. Who were these men?’

She told him about Justin, who’d come to attend to her car, had made sexual overtures and expressed a possibly prurient interest in Persephone Callard. But she knew it didn’t fit, somehow.

‘And you’re saying this man could have been one of them? You recognized his voice?’

‘No, I … the one guy, I heard him talking to Callard, saying he didn’t wanna hurt her, calling her a slag. I didn’t recognize his voice, it wasn’t Justin. The other one, I only heard him scream, and that didn’t even sound human.’

But if it wasn’t Justin and some sicko friend of his, then who were they? Burglars? Not much worth stealing in the lodge, but maybe they were figuring Callard had keys to Mysleton House. Tie her up and strip the big house?

‘You should’ve gone to the police.’

‘What I feel, Marcus, is Callard will do anything to avoid publicity. They’d gone, they weren’t gonna come back with the cops and, Yeah, that’s the broad carved up my friend after we broke in and blah, blah, blah …’

‘What did you do with this hedge hacker?’

‘Dropped it in the River Wye at Ross.’

Marcus closed his eyes.

‘So there’s no way we can go to the cops now. We left the scene, we destroyed evidence.’

‘Well,’ Marcus said, ‘I suppose you can explain all that, if necessary. You were in shock. Let me think about this … That’s Persephone’s vehicle outside, is it? In which case, where’s-?’

‘Still at the damn garage,’ Grayle said miserably. ‘Still at Justin’s place.’

Marcus sighed. ‘So if this man’s found …’

‘Dead.’

‘… badly injured and they find your car at his garage …’

‘What do you suggest? Like I go back, and the guy who told me I’m dead, he’s there? You gonna come with me, Marcus, threaten him with your nasal spray? Listen, I’m gonna go home for a while, think this over.’

The little terraced cottage in St Mary’s had never seemed more appealing. Bar the door, light a fire, banish all thoughts of last night.

Marcus looked alarmed. ‘You can’t do that. You can’t leave me alone with …’ He glanced behind him.

‘What? In case she seduces you for old time’s sake? What’s the matter with you, Marcus?’

‘This man … this Justin … have you tried to ring him?’

‘OK, I’ll do it now.’

She found Justin’s card in her bag, picked up the phone, punched out the anonymity code then the number.

A computer told her the mobile phone she was calling had been switched off. Well, sure, he might be out someplace, helping extricate cars from a smash up; didn’t have to be getting his head sewn together under major anaesthetic — cops waiting outside for news of his death, other cops tracing the number of the antique Mini in the garage. After which … the banging on the cottage door. Grayle Underhill? Would you come with us, please, Ms Underhill? The statements, the hearing, the whatever passed these days for deportation.

Grayle cut the line.

‘Bit of a bloody nightmare really,’ Marcus conceded.

‘Can I borrow your car to get home?’

‘Can’t you just stay here tonight?’

‘On this sofa? No way. Keys, Marcus?’

‘Underhill-’

She peered hard at him. ‘Why don’t you want to be alone with her?’

‘That’s nonsense.’ Marcus’s use of the word displayed his lack of conviction. If he’d meant it, he’d have said balls or bullshit.

‘Maybe she isn’t quite the person you remember?’

‘People change. Obviously. She was a child.’

‘Naw,’ Grayle said. ‘She’s spooky in ways you didn’t expect.’

Silence. The study was lined by about four thousand books on aspects of the paranormal. The unexplained: always safer sandwiched between hard covers.

Marcus looked old and stressed.

‘What does she want, Underhill? You haven’t even mentioned that. What does she think I can do for her? What did she tell you?’

Nothing, she told him. Nothing that accounts for anything.

She stayed. The police never came. The day grew gloomy, the fire in the stove grew brighter. The two of them had a small lunch — can of soup.

Marcus kept glancing up at the door, blinking and blowing his nose, maybe wondering if Callard had been some fever dream, the screwed-up schoolgirl metamorphosed into this strange, austere, beautiful woman.

‘You want me to go knock on the dairy door, Marcus? See she’s OK?’

‘No. Don’t … don’t disturb her.’

Like he was scared that if Grayle knocked on the door the windows would blow out. He grunted, pulled off his glasses and began to wipe the lenses. Stared into the fire, which must, without his glasses, look like some misty sunset. Persephone Callard had been his inspiration. His first signpost to the Black Mountains and Castle Farm, The Phenomenologist and the miracle healing of Mrs Willis. Callard was the shining saucer in the sunset sky. The Holy Mother on the bleak mountain.

Grayle recalled Marcus’s story of Callard and Chaucer and Sir Topaz. She sniffed.

‘Callard told me last night she had Einstein through one time and it turned out to be total horseshit.’

Marcus hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Look. Whether it comes from the Undersigned or not is essentially a side issue. The fact is, it was coming from somewhere … some exterior source. Just because the — for want of a less contentious term — spirits may not invariably be who they say they are doesn’t necessarily reduce her status as a medium.’

‘So she stops herself being a patsy for poltergeists, having windows explode on her, all this, by letting the … entities communicate with her. By acting as a mouthpiece for the dead. And, incidentally, making a lot of money out of it.’

‘You make it sound sordid,’ Marcus said.

‘Well, some people would say that. Like, how long has she known that half the stuff she’s passing on to the bereaved might be horseshit? From the picture you’re giving me of her, I think she has a lot of explaining to do, Marcus.’

And then they both saw the shadow in the study doorway.

‘Whenever you want,’ Persephone Callard said.