Mean Spirit

XXVII

There was even a metal bracket which had supported the hacker. And, yes, a pale patch on the wall which, even in the meagre glow of a single lamp, gave Bobby Maiden a clear guide to the size and shape of the implement.

‘What now? Get rid of the lot?’ Seffi Callard said. ‘Take out all the brackets, paint the wall?’

‘So that your Mrs …’

‘Dronfield.’

‘… is faced with the smell of fresh paint and-’

‘OK, forget it. No wonder people get caught. They must get themselves caught half the time.’

‘Tangled webs.’ Maiden thought it was incredibly unlikely that Mrs Dronfield would make connections, but … ‘Perhaps if we move the saw across so that, instead of hanging down, it …’ lifting the part-rusted blade ‘… fits horizontally, occupying the vacant bracket and covering the space, where …’

‘Very good,’ she said when he’d repositioned the other tools to close gaps. ‘You realize what you’ve done.’

‘Become a serious accessory. This gets out, end of career.’

‘The feeling I’m getting from you is that that might almost be a relief.’

‘Dunno. How would I make a living?’ He stood in the dim corner between the door to the kitchen and the bottom of the stairs, forming a picture of how it happened. ‘What were your first feelings when you came down and found those guys?’

‘What do you think?’ He couldn’t make out her face, but he saw her shiver. ‘You any good at lighting fires, Bobby?’

‘Did you feel they were expecting you? Waiting for you? Knew you were around?’

‘It was Grayle they didn’t expect.’

Maiden bent over the hearth, picked up a poker and raked at the cinders. Found a pile of old newspapers and a box of firelighters. Wondered where she lived the rest of the time, what classy apartment she’d abandoned for this dim cave.

‘You plan to stay here tonight?’

‘Too late to go back. Do you want to ring Marcus and tell him?’

‘Did you tell anyone else about what happened at the party? Apart from Marcus and Grayle and me?’

‘Only Nancy. And as I was already wondering how far I could actually trust her, I told her no more than she’d learn from anyone who’d been there. The vase breaking, that kind of thing. Nothing about him.’

‘Well,’ he said carefully. ‘He could be a bit irrelevant. To someone else.’

‘Despite your liberal attitudes. Despite your death experiences …’ ice in her voice ‘… this is the one part of it, I suspect, you’d still rather wasn’t there.’

‘I try to understand,’ Maiden said.

She came across the room, stood over him as he knelt at the hearth. ‘Imagine you’re a woman. You’re in a lonely house and every time you pick up the phone to make a call there’s some sickening heavy breather on the line.’

Maiden built a pyramid of coal around a firelighter.

‘Or you’re in a two-roomed apartment,’ she said, ‘and there’s one room you know you can’t go into. A door you can’t open. What do you do?’

‘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?’

‘Ex-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 soiree 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.