Mean Spirit

XV

Grayle could hear Malcolm outside the study door. He was padding up and down the hallway. She got up to let him in, but Malcolm backed away and sank down, panting, in the doorway of the editorial room, where Mrs Willis had done her healing.

Grayle came back.

‘Happens all the time,’ Callard was saying. ‘Last year, a Sunday paper offered me a quarter of a million to contact Diana.’

‘Tempting?’ Grayle wondered, sitting down.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Which paper was that?’ Marcus asked.

‘I’ve no idea. The offer was made through … well, a PR man you’ll have heard of. The deal was I wouldn’t find out who it was until I’d signed a secrecy agreement. They were obviously afraid I’d tell a rival tabloid I’d been approached and they’d do a story about what a shoddy outfit the first paper was. I say no to everything like that.’

Diana. Out of pure curiosity, Grayle had combed Marcus’s Callard file for anything relating to her sessions with the Princess of Wales. No mention. Even after Diana’s death, Callard had revealed nothing.

‘But you accepted twenty-five grand from this MP, right?’

‘Ex-MP. That’s the point: I’m making. At least he wasn’t trying to conceal his identity.’

‘Who is this guy, Marcus?’

‘Richard Barber? Time-serving back-bencher. Low-profile. Rural constituency. Lost to the Lib-Dems, I think. Where exactly did this happen, Persephone?’

‘A party. Sort of. In Cheltenham. An expensive flat, newly refurbished, in one of those discreet blocks near the Rotunda. I was told Barber had sold his constituency house, bought something in France, plus this pied a terre in Cheltenham, because his daughter lives there, apparently.’

Marcus sniffed. ‘More like dubious business dealings in the area. Never met an MP of any political persuasion who wasn’t a greedy little shit.’

‘Normally, Nancy, my agent, has instructions to bin invitations like this on sight. But the crazy money Barber was offering for a single sitting … plus the fact that this was the eminently respectable former honourable member for somewhere green and quiet. I mean, it was all terribly civilized — a suite booked for me at a hotel in the town centre, Barber sends his … driver to fetch me.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘A month? Five weeks?’

Grayle said, ‘The guy lives most of the time in France, but he keeps a driver over here?’

‘The man certainly wore a chauffeur’s hat. He was very amiable, very chatty. He said his esteemed employer had a great and abiding interest in spiritualism and couldn’t wait to meet me. Which, in hindsight, seemed rather odd because the welcome I got from Barber was lukewarm, to say the least, and the event turned out to be some sort of extremely bland cocktail party — the kind someone like him might host on behalf of a charity. He didn’t appear to know the guests particularly well, he was quite distant — didn’t really know what I did. Just seemed to want to … get it over.’

‘After paying twenty-five grand?’ There were people in the States who’d toss this kind of money about; in England, unlikely, in Grayle’s view.

‘I suppose, by the time I began the sitting, I was feeling rather resentful. There was this dreadful cabaret atmosphere — people drinking rather a lot and some of the men were ogling me as though I was a stripper. So when I had a message through from a boy who’d killed himself, I made no real attempt to filter the information. To the … dismay … of a particular middle-aged couple.’

‘Message?’ Grayle was still finding it hard to get her head around this stuff being entirely routine for Callard.

‘It’s irrelevant really. The boy got in a state and killed himself more in anger after he found out his girlfriend was sleeping with his father.’

Grayle was appalled. ‘The mother didn’t know about this and you told her?’

Persephone Callard scowled. ‘I was in a bad mood.’

‘What if it was bullshit?’ Grayle threw up her arms. ‘Jesus, so much for if you receive a disturbing message you keep it under your ass!’

‘Look,’ Callard snarled, leaning forward, ‘I never claimed to be Mother Teresa. Don’t be so fucking holier than thou, Grayle. Go back and read some of your more lurid columns.’

‘Can we scratch each other’s eyes out later?’ Marcus levered himself up in his armchair. ‘What happened then?’

Callard leaned back. ‘What happened was that the father walked out. Then a couple of the women took the mother upstairs or somewhere. And I was feeling rather sick and disgusted with myself and disgusted with Barber for setting it up. So I decided to leave, too. Told him he could keep his money.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He grovelled.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Kept saying, We want you to carry on. We want you to stay. Please don’t go. That sort of thing.’

‘We?’ Grayle said.

‘That’s what he said. I think he was frightened.’

‘Of what?’

‘I don’t know. I was a bit scared myself by then — had a feeling the father was going to be out there waiting for me. I don’t think he believed it was a message from his son; he thought I’d been given information about the suicide in advance. That he’d been set up. I really didn’t want to run into him in the dark while trying to attract a taxi. So I stayed. I did the sitting, proper. I had them play my music, my spooky Debussy, and I … said the words.’

Grayle remembered. ‘The lines are open.’

‘Yes. It’s become fairly well known now, more of a catchphrase than an invocation. But it’s useful because it acts on the … audience. Shuts them up. I mean on both sides of the curtain.’

‘Shuts up the spirits?’

‘What usually happens then is that I’m aware of almost a throng. Like when you’re tuning a radio — fragments of voices, questions, pleas, and static. Only worse because it’s like half a dozen stations coming at you at once. At this point one can either request a guide or guidance or suggest that they form, I suppose, an orderly queue.’

The lamplight showing up a sheen on her face that hadn’t been there before. She was being deliberately prosaic — all this about radio stations and orderly queues — maybe to keep from spooking herself. It wasn’t working. Grayle became watchful. We’re coming to something.

‘This time, the voices were far back.’ Callard moistened her lips with her tongue. ‘And about as comprehensible as a football crowd when you’re driving past the stadium. I couldn’t bring them up because of him …’

Callard closed her eyes, and Grayle saw her fists tighten on her knees. Outside of her blouse now, the dark gold cross was in shadow.

Marcus said, ‘You mean Barber?’

She blinked. ‘Barber?’

‘You said because of him.’

She sat up. ‘I don’t know who he is. He doesn’t talk.’ The sheen of sweat on her face was dense as tanning oil. ‘Sometimes I think he’s the devil. Satan. Sometimes I think I’ve brought down Satan.’

There was silence.

Outside the door they could hear Malcolm padding up and down the hallway.

‘I don’t understand,’ Marcus said eventually.

‘He was just there,’ Callard said. ‘It was there.’

Grayle and Marcus both stayed silent, Grayle thinking it was maybe only the tea-party approach and the Salvation Army hymns that prevented spiritualism from mutating into some kind of dark necromancy. It was there? Jesus.

‘I smelled it first. This happens sometimes.’

‘A scent of violets.’ Grayle remembering some old country-house ghost story.

‘No. It was rather acrid and oily and spiced with that … that smell one tends to associate with violent, male lust.’

Grayle said, ‘Huh?’

Marcus looked uncomfortable.

Grayle was thinking, Justin. Motor oil. The bitch is making this up.

She said, ‘Maybe, when you’re feeling resentful, you don’t get violets.’

Persephone Callard, not even looking at Grayle, said mildly, ‘The bitch is not making it up.’

Grayle froze. A log shifted inside the stove.

Outside the study door Malcolm howled once — sharply — and then Grayle heard the patter of his heavy paws, receding.