Mean Spirit

XXXIX

In the early evening Bobby Maiden borrowed Marcus’s truck and drove down to the village, to Grayle’s cottage. He’d never been here before. The windchimes gave it away — two sets, hanging either side of a lantern over the old, studded door.

The cottage was in the middle of the terrace which lined one side of the short street, with the church wall on the other. The tiny forecourt space was filled by the Mini. Maiden parked the truck in the rutted road.

It was dark; the wind had died but the air was colder. There was a dim light in the squat-towered church. It was all very quiet, no kids around, no dogs barking. The lantern came on and by the time he reached the front door Grayle had it open.

‘Isn’t New York, is it?’ Maiden said.

‘Guy in the shop says the last time the council retarred the village street it was for Queen Victoria’s carriage.’

She wore a dress tonight: woollen, red, long-sleeved. Maiden guessed that after today — Grayle in the baseball jersey, Cindy in the twinset — she was reclaiming her gender.

He paused on the threshold. ‘You really feel you belong here?’

Grayle frowned. ‘You know how much I hate small talk, Bobby. Why don’t you ask something heavy?’

‘You annoyed with me?’

She didn’t smile. ‘I’m annoyed with everybody. Why I came home early. Put it down to time of the month. Like, it isn’t, but it tends to satisfy guys, you tell them that.’

‘There many guys around here?’

‘Sure. Farm guys. Retired guys. Rich guys with weekend cottages and two kids. Who needs guys anyway? All guys are stupid. Come in.’

He saw crystals on the windowsill, a brass Buddha in the small inglenook fireplace next to a bed of ash. Reflected in a long mirror opposite, he saw, to the left of the front door, a plaster statue of Anubis, dog-faced Egyptian god of the dead, wearing a jewelled poodle collar.

Grayle said, ‘Cindy still up there with Marcus?’

‘Examining the psychic history of Overcross Castle. Driven men. It’s like they’re planning a siege. I needed to get away for a while.’

‘Maybe this is a good thing for Marcus, I don’t know. Anyhow, welcome to the bijou dwelling. Siddown, grab a crystal, strengthen your vibes. I have water boiled for herbal tea. Or you can have coffee.’

‘Herbal tea? Wonderful.’

‘New Age freaking cop. Oh boy.’

Maiden didn’t sit down; he followed her into the kitchen, where bunches of dried hops hung from the ceiling beams.

‘Speaking as a cop, I don’t know whether it’s a good thing for Marcus or not. A psychic festival run by a TV hypnotist doesn’t worry me a lot. But if the spiritual input somehow involves Gary Seward …’

‘You feel that, in spite of two killings and all that horrific violence surrounding Clarence Judge, Cindy and Marcus are not taking him seriously enough.’

‘The whole nation doesn’t take him seriously enough any more. If you smile on TV, people think you’re their friend. As for Marcus and Cindy, is there an age after which you just don’t care any more?’

‘It’s my fault.’ Grayle poured boiling water into a small brown pot. ‘I wish I’d never remembered we’d had an invite to that thing.’

How YOU can be part of The Overcross Experience…

Grayle had found the leaflet in the boxfile she’d marked Probably junk, but who knows?

The leaflet said the organizers of the Festival of the Spirit were offering the magazine a unique opportunity to meet its public face to face by taking a stand at the most prestigious event of its kind ever staged on British soil.

Marcus had gone ape when he saw what they were charging for a stand. Bloody grasping little con-man — all this and more. Which was just as well, far as Grayle was concerned. The way she saw it, if they took a stand at the festival, readers would indeed have a unique opportunity to meet with Marcus. After which The Vision would have no circulation worth a damn.

The leaflet promised a world-famous medium for the re-creation of a Victorian seance. Today Callard’s agent had confirmed to Marcus that she was the one and now under heavy pressure from Kurt Campbell not to renege — Campbell even suggesting he might be able to solve her problem.

How did he know what the problem was?

Because he used, until recently, to sleep with her. Ah. Right. Well, no big surprise there, given Callard’s reputation and that they were both tied into the entertainment industry — tight enough in the States, over here it was claustrophobic. Also, Campbell was a male person under ninety years of age with links to paranormal research.

And also, in a negative kind of way, to Cindy.

Oh boy. When Cindy came down from the Knoll and heard about Callard and Campbell and Overcross, he became real weird, weirder than last night when he’d come out with all that stuff about getting old and washed up. It swiftly became clear that Cindy figured it was Campbell who had fucked him over with the papers.

The upshot was that Cindy had offered to pay half the fee if they could still hire a stall for The Vision at the Festival of the Spirit. Which started, as it happened, in two days’ time, Wednesday through to the weekend.

Like this was part of his destiny. He’d been up to the Knoll to ask for an answer, and when he got back to the farm, there they all were around a marketing circular headed,

Overcross Castle: The Veil is Lifted

Some kind of shamanic signpost.

Jesus.

‘This Kurt Campbell,’ Grayle said, putting down the teatray in the living room, ‘he isn’t really known in the States. He’s like David Copperfield?’

‘He’s not a magician,’ Bobby said, ‘he’s just a hypnotist. Has his own consultancy. But also does TV. These shows where people come on to be made to do humiliating things. Bit like Paul McKenna?’

‘Right. So the thing he did with Cindy — or tried to do — on the Lottery Show …’

‘That was his routine act. But there’s also a serious side to the hypnotism. And this interest in the paranormal, which led to the Overcross project.’

‘So apart from that Seward’s into spiritualism, do we know of a connection between him and Campbell?’ Grayle put the pot on the tray between two mugs with Cottingley fairy faces on them. ‘I’ve been trying to read his book, but it’s all written in dialect and jargon, so presumably ghost-written from taped interviews. Jeez, I don’t even understand the title.’

‘Clumsy pun on London villain-speak. The only mention of Campbell is a passing reference to him and Seward once appearing together on a TV talkshow.’

‘So?’ Grayle shrugged. ‘Showbiz is a small world. Seward’s plugged into the same circuit. It means squat.’

She thought Bobby looked tired. Sitting there by the inglenook, all dark eyed and unreadable. Was his agenda linked to amber eyes and brown breasts and hair you could use to tie up a boat in a storm?

She poured pink tea. ‘So what’s gonna happen at this seance?’

‘That’s what bothers Marcus. What happens when she goes into trance and Clarence — if it is Clarence — takes over?’

‘But if Seward’s behind this, isn’t that what he wants?’

‘But if this Victorian seance is a highly public event … I mean really public, as distinct from an invited audience of Midlands villains.’

‘It’s a conundrum, Bobby. I guess you want to be there, too, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know. I hate going into anything blind.’ He drank some herbal tea, didn’t wince. ‘I wondered about going to see Kurt Campbell.’

‘Now?’

‘Well, tomorrow.’

‘On what pretext?’

‘I thought that I could take a temporary job with The Vision. Request an interview about the festival, with its founder.’

‘Sure. Except the next Vision doesn’t come out till next month.’

‘He doesn’t know that. I could say it’s out on Thursday, and I’ve just got time to get an article in.’

‘You don’t know too much about production schedules, do you, Bobby?’

‘Yeah, well, he probably doesn’t either.’

‘And interviewing? What do you know about interviewing?’

‘Done thousands, Grayle. In depth.’

‘Oh, yeah, sure. Like, “Where were you on the night of the fifteenth and don’t give me no shit or I’ll slap you around the cell?” What are you, crazy? He’d have you sussed in like four minutes. Listen, I’ll go. I shoulda thought of this. I’ll do the interview. Which is why you came here, right?’

‘It is not why I came. Besides, they very likely know your name.’

‘So you think this would, uh, expose me to some risk?’

‘Well, no, not particularly. That just happens in movies, but-’

‘Like the movies where they crush you to death with an old car? What the hell, the way I’m feeling I could use risk.’

‘Bad attitude, Underhill. Consider yourself off the case.’

‘Screw you. Listen, OK, here’s what’s gonna happen. We both go. I’m Alice D. Thornborough of The Vision. And you could be … you could be like Lenny Lens, the photographer. You can handle a camera, aside from mugshots and pictures of DOAs in chalk outlines?’

‘I can handle a camera. We don’t do chalk outlines.’

‘Well, as it happens, I have a camera here. A Nikon, ex-Courier. Convincingly professional. We’ll do it. Hell, let’s go interview Seward too. Let’s stir some shit.’

‘That’s a very bad attitude,’ Bobby said.

‘Yeah?’

Grayle caught sight of herself in the long mirror, amid the crystals, the Tree of Life poster, the Egyptian dog of the dead. For all the tough talk, she looked small and lonely in her red frock, a lost kid in a fairy grotto. She was just four miles from where her sister was murdered.

She coughed. ‘This herbal tea’s making me feel sick. Let’s get some serious coffee. Old-cop strength.’