Mean Spirit

XLIII

You could see Overcross Castle from a distance of maybe a mile, across countryside which would be lush in summer. Signs told of cider farms and a vineyard a few hundred yards and at least a whole season away. The light-green glaze of new growth on the trees looked like an illusion in the scrabbling wind.

‘I just knew it was gonna be like this.’ Inside the heaterless truck, Grayle rummaged in her bag for her long, woollen scarf.

The house had towers and turrets and battlements and all those other Son of Robin Hood features. Viewed through the spiky trees, it looked stark and threatening, more like a true medieval castle than any of the actual ones she’d seen. Made Marcus’s ruins look like garden ornaments. Behind it you could see, in the distance, the hill of Great Malvern with white houses and hotels strung along it like a necklace of teeth.

Billionaires in California had erected mock castles like this, and she’d marvelled at a couple when she was a kid and her father was lecturing out west.

But California was California and didn’t have the weather for it. Jesus, the first day of spring tomorrow, the vernal equinox, and was that snow on the truck’s windshield?

‘Bobby, is that snow?’

‘It’s not volcanic dust,’ Bobby Maiden said. He looked unhappy and unsure about everything.

As Grayle supposed they both were, since Cindy gave them the news about Marcus. The curse has come upon me, said the Lady of Shalott, Grayle thought drably. Wishing she was anyplace but here, as they came to an old brick wall, about ten feet high, with trees hard against it and a long sign along the top. Experience…THE FESTIVAL OF THE SPIRIT.

MARCH 20–25

And then a gatehouse. There was a cop on duty behind a barrier. Except, when he came over, Grayle saw he wasn’t a cop, although the uniform was damn close; Bobby thought so too, muttering something about take away the red armband and you could have him for impersonation. Bobby wound down the window and Grayle handed him the press passes she’d been given by Francine, Kurt Campbell’s haughty PA.

‘We also have a stall,’ she told the almost-cop, leaning across from the passenger side. ‘Stall thirty-eight?’

‘Hang on a moment.’ He studied the passes before pushing them back. He was a big young guy with an impassive, military kind of look, and Grayle saw the word FORCEFIELD on his red armband. ‘Bacton, is it? Somebody’s already there. Came about an hour ago.’

‘Yeah, we know.’

‘Right — Avenue Three. End of the drive, turn right by the tape and the arrows and you’ll see the way it’s divided — stalls one to fourteen, and so on. It’s your third, right at the end.’

‘Thank you, Constable.’ Bobby wound up the window. You could see an angry fire had been rekindled inside him, could almost smell the smoke.

‘Oh, I really don’t like the way you said that,’ Grayle said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘This is your private obsession taking over. At bottom, you’re just as bad as this guy Foxworth. You have a tenuous connection here between Campbell and this Riggs and Riggs is your personal bogeyman, so you’re thinking like maybe if you can build Seward into the picture … right?’

‘The only picture I’m getting’, Bobby said, ‘is Vic Clutton lying dead outside the house he was finally happy to call home.’

‘Oh boy.’ Grayle wound the big scarf around her neck and tightened the belt of her raincoat as the truck entered the grounds of Overcross Castle.

At close to eleven a.m. on a working day and the festival not due to open until that evening, there were probably fewer than a hundred people there — most of them around an expensive-looking restaurant marquee which, presumably, had heating, and was the only part of the site that looked remotely inviting.

The festival was set up in three sloping fields which might once have been parkland, leading up to the stone terrace surrounding Overcross Castle. Most of the hundred or so stalls were open-fronted display tents with room for about five people. One was being fitted out as an esoteric bookstore, another was figuring to sell aromatic candles which, with the wind and snow and all, nobody could hope to light.

They left Marcus’s faded blue truck next to Cindy’s Honda on a cindered parking lot reserved for stallholders. Hundreds of yards of wooden decking-track had been laid across grass which was destined otherwise to become a boot-churned bog.

Avenue Three was right under the highest part of the castle, a round tower with a conical roof and a lightning conductor which prodded the bruised low cloud like an old-fashioned hypodermic syringe in a junkie’s arm. Stall thirty-eight marked the furthest point of the festival campus and was right next to the toilet block, a line of white Portaloos — already the source of a seriously acrimonious dispute, as Grayle and Bobby approached.

‘… don’t care if it was a late booking, this is not bloody good enough, is it, sonny?’

Young guy with a clipboard backing off. ‘Look, it’s the best we-’

‘Four yards … four yards … from the stinking toilets? Can you imagine the state those makeshift shithouses are going to be in by next Sunday? I mean, have you thought for one bloody second what this means, from our point of view? Well, I’ll tell you … It means that whenever anybody who’s been here comes across a copy of The Vision in future, they’re going to associate it immediately with the stink of stale piss and probably steaming vomit.’

‘Now look, those loos are the most hygienic-’

‘Makes no odds, sonny. By Saturday morning we’ll still all be swilling diarrhoea from the canvas.’

‘I can definitely assure you these toilets will be cleaned every-’

‘Pah!’ And Malcolm the dog barked once, as if in support.

‘Look, if you’ve got a complaint, you’ll have to put it in writing.’ The boy tucking his clipboard under his arm, turning away. Bad move, Grayle thought.

‘Don’t … think … you’re … walking … away … from … this.’ The force of nature in the glasses and the tweed suit, and the dog, advancing on the poor kid, planting a foot in front of his. ‘I want another site.’

‘I keep telling you, we haven’t got another site.’

‘In that case, I want two hundred pounds off the charge. Or I’ll be obliged to take this to Kurt bloody Campbell himself.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll show the smarmy bastard what a hypnotic trance feels like.’

‘Did you really say two hundred pounds?’

‘Seems eminently bloody reasonable to me. And I’m sure you wouldn’t like the good vibes to be soiled by the sound of me telling everyone, including the press and the local television, what a shoddy little sideshow this is, organized by a slimy tosser with no-’

‘All right!’ The kid held up both hands, dropping his clipboard in the mud. ‘I’ll go across to the admin office and see what I can do.’

He started to walk back along the decking then turned around. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

Grayle fought for control as the bottle blonde in the tweed suit glared at this hapless kid through plain-glass spectacles.

‘Bacton,’ Cindy snarled. ‘Imelda. Miss.’

A short while later Grayle went back to the cold comfort of the truck and called the infirmary in Worcester on Bobby’s mobile.

‘Are you a relative?’ the staff nurse demanded.

The snow had stopped. It was never going to stick, but it was so bitter that Grayle’s hand was numb around the cellphone.

‘Well, I … Yeah, I’m … I’m his niece. Alice Thornborough.’

‘Well, all I can tell you, Miss Thornborough,’ the nurse’s voice was unexpectedly clipped and frigid, ‘is that he’s as comfortable as can be expected.’

‘And in plain English, that means?’

‘It means’, the sister said, ‘that everything about him is weak except his language.’

‘Uh, yeah, that figures. He kind of hates hospitals and doctors. Doesn’t even have a thing about nurses in uniform.’

‘He wanted to discharge himself this morning, but when he found out how much pain was involved in getting out of bed, I think he finally understood that he needed us rather more than we need him.’

‘But he is gonna be OK? Isn’t he?’

‘If he accepts this as a severe warning.’

‘Yeah,’ Grayle said pessimistically. How was this woman supposed to understand that if there was anything to which Marcus Bacton reacted badly, it was a severe warning?

‘Can I see him?’

‘Tonight, if you like, but only for a short time. We’ve had to put him in a side ward, for the sake of the other patients, so if you ask the nurse who-’

‘Tonight could be a problem,’ Grayle said quickly. ‘But if you could tell him not to worry, that everything’s being looked after this end?’

And his sister sends her best wishes?

Maybe not.

‘He wanted to be here. Cindy sat on the counter, hitched up his tweed skirt, lit a cigarette. ‘And so he is. The shamanic solution, I suppose you might call it.’

‘Nothing to do with you not wanting to be recognized, then,’ Bobby said, patting the masterless Malcolm, poor confused creature.

‘Well, that too, naturally.’ Cindy blew a spontaneous smoke ring into the cold air. Cindy didn’t smoke, but Imelda Bacton apparently did.

Subtle padding made him stocky. His blond wig was shoulder-length. His foundation cream was a deep bronze, his lipstick scarlet, his glasses black-rimmed and businesslike. He was sitting on one of the packing cases they’d fetched from the truck. It contained a couple of thousand copies of The Vision and, for display purposes, a set of atmospheric colour photos of High Knoll taken by a woman called Magda Ring, who’d been Bobby’s girlfriend for a — mercifully, in Grayle’s view — short time. In one of the pictures, blown up big, a formation of white clouds resembled two praying hands. The picture had been taken just after the Green Man killings had ended.

‘You saw it coming, didn’t you?’ Bobby said.

‘I don’t …’ Tears threatened Cindy’s make-up. ‘I felt something coming. I didn’t realize it was going to be Marcus. Marcus was … invulnerable.’

‘A force of nature,’ Grayle said.

‘It was one of the absolute worst moments of my life. About to try mouth to mouth, I was, until I saw the look in his eyes.’

Cindy found a smile. Last night he’d been a mess. Prowling the windy ruins, a ragged spectre of despair. He’d killed Marcus, just like he’d killed the BMW family and the plane guy and the guy who’d married a gold-digger less than half his age. Killed them all. Cindy, the walking curse.

After talking it over with Bobby, Grayle had called the hospital at midnight, learned that Marcus was sleeping. She’d told Cindy that Marcus had whispered to a nurse to tell Lewis that it wasn’t his fault, that he had to pull himself together, see it through. A necessary lie.

This morning they’d had a call from Amy at the pub to say Cindy had left for Overcross before six a.m.

‘We’re gonna have trouble with him, though, Cindy.’

‘Marcus? Yes. Taking it easy, obeying doctor’s orders … not his way. Mind, I didn’t even know he had a heart problem.’

‘Nor did he,’ said Grayle. ‘He hadn’t seen a doctor in twenty years. He just saw Mrs Willis. Like, if he did have a heart problem, maybe it didn’t matter with her around.’

Bobby looked at Cindy, who really didn’t look at all like Cindy. ‘Does he have a sister?’

‘I have no idea, Bobby.’ Cindy pulled up a wrinkle in his tights, flexed a leg. ‘But if he did, this is what she would be like, and if she doesn’t achieve a fifty per cent reduction in Marcus’s stall rental, she won’t consider herself worthy of the family name. Now, listen to me, children — close those tent flaps — there are things you need to know.’

Arriving early was always useful, Cindy said. It was barely light when he got here and freezing cold and the restaurant marquee wasn’t open. So Imelda Bacton had gone up to the house, where the woman who cleaned the kitchens had taken pity on her.

This cleaner was one of the temporary staff hired for the festival, a big, cheerful cockney lady called Vera, who made coffee for Cindy and herself in the vault-like kitchen where dinner was to be prepared each night by a catering company from Worcester. And, of course, they’d gotten talking and Imelda had said she was only managing the stall for her brother, who’d had a heart attack, and Vera said she’d been forced to take this miserable job because her husband had died recently, leaving her short.

Like old friends, the two of them, in no time at all. Vera was cynical about the Festival of the Spirit and appalled at the amount being paid by the house guests attending the Victorian seance.

And the thing was, she said, it was all going to be a complete con. She’d taken Cindy up to the baronial dining hall where, behind screens and false bookcases, all was revealed.

‘Projection equipment,’ Cindy said, ‘for the creation of ghosts. Hidden spotlights to illuminate the muslin and chiffon gauze used to simulate ectoplasm. Tables with mechanical rapping devices built into the legs, a platform with a floorboard that rises when a foot pedal is pressed, thus causing the table to rock. Need one go on?’

Grayle’s eyes widened. ‘A scam? The whole thing’s gonna be a scam?’

‘And a rather obvious one, it seemed to me. Obvious to us, today, that is, but convincing enough, evidently, to the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and other believers in the early part of last century.’

‘But — hold on — how does this equate with all the bullshit Campbell’s giving us about seeking the scientific solution?’

‘Perhaps he wishes to demonstrate how those early researchers were frequently fooled, which they undoubtedly were. Such was the craving for mystical experience that there was considerable money to be made in those days.’

‘In New York’, Grayle said, ‘there was a woman had a hole in the front of her dress, used to pull this glowing ribbon from a roll she kept up her snatch. Sure. All kinds of scams. But why would Campbell wanna bother with this garbage?’

Cindy moved to the tent flap, peered out to ensure they were alone. He took a small notebook from his fitted tweed jacket, opened it.

‘A look at tonight’s guest list — which the delightful Vera showed to me with a certain contempt — offers a possible explanation. I copied down a few names. For instance, we have the Chairperson of the Heart of England Tourist Board, the MP for Worcester, officials of the Malvern Chamber of Trade, the Elgar Society, the Chief Executive of Forcefield Security. Also, Lord …’

Bobby looked up, like a bird just took a shit in his lap.

‘… and Lady Colwall. I don’t think I need go on. It’s a collection of local dignitaries and notables to launch the event. None of them will be paying, of course, they’re here to bestow upon it Establishment credibility. And, because attitudes have changed considerably since Victorian times, one can’t imagine any of these people accepting the invitation if they thought it was to be a real seance.’

‘So they’re not even gonna pretend?’

‘Of course not. It’s to be a civilized after-dinner entertainment, an exhibition of deception and human folly. We see how the magic lantern was used to project phantoms, how sound effects and the deployment of light and shadow would simulate the atmosphere of a haunted house …’

‘Big deal.’

‘Ah, but then …’ Cindy laid down the notebook ‘… what if, at some point in the evening, there is an imperceptible change? What if we shift from simulation to an invocation of … who knows what? What if the obviously fake gives way to the semi-convincing and then — in front of this august assembly — to the terrifyingly inexplicable? And what if afterwards, as the somewhat timid applause dies down, the guests come to realize that what they have just witnessed is …’ Cindy raising his hands, fingers moving like undersea creatures ‘… the reality of it?’

‘This is where Callard comes in?’

‘I don’t know, little Grayle. I won’t be there. Only you will be there, among the dignitaries.’

Grayle moistened her cold lips.

Bobby said, ‘But that’s just what you surmise will happen?’

‘Of course,’ Cindy said lightly. ‘And if nothing happens but the fakery, nothing is lost, no reputations are damaged. But if it does, particularly in front of this distinguished group, think of the kudos for Kurt’s venture.’

‘Hold on here,’ Grayle said. ‘Are we talking about Clarence Judge? Because that’s what they’re gonna get from Callard. Just Clarence freaking Judge and his slimeball smell. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, Cindy.’

‘No,’ Cindy said. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t.’

‘Maybe we put two and two together and made sixteen.’

Bobby said, ‘I don’t suppose Seward was on that guest list?’

Cindy looked disparaging. ‘I know he’s a popular figure now, but is that really likely, Bobby? Even rejected for the Lottery Show once, he was. I think it was the idea of the big money balls in the hands of a known felon … Hush a moment …’

Cindy lifted a finger. There came the unlikely sound of ragged, unaccompanied singing. Bobby stood up, walked over and spread the tent flap. Grayle went to peer over his shoulder.

‘Aw, this always happens.’

Over on the cindered parking lot, a minibus had drawn up, a bunch of people gathered around it. They were singing a hymn. Two of them carried a banner between two poles. In black stencilled lettering, it carried a not unfamiliar appeal.

IN THE NAME OF JESUS, STOP THIS EVIL!

The banner took some holding steady in the wind, but maybe they had support from above.

‘Whenever you advertise any kind of big New Age event, you get these militant evangelicals,’ Grayle said. ‘Happens a lot back home.’

Cindy joined her and Bobby in the opening. Quite a few more New Age stallholders had emerged, so there was some kind of audience — if not the kind likely to be on the side of the protesters.

‘Open your minds, why don’t you?’ yelled this woman in a long, grey woollen cloak. ‘There’s more than one narrow little way to God!’

The evangelicals carried on singing, led by two guys in clerical collars.

‘How long will they keep this up?’ Bobby wondered.

‘Oh hell, Bobby, they’ll be here all day and then I guess another bunch’ll take over. Less, of course, the security guys move into action, but that’s not too likely. Throwing out a Christian on his ass is not what you’d call good PR.’

‘Now there’s interesting,’ Cindy said.

‘Huh?’

‘See the person on the end with the handwritten placard?’

Small guy in a suit and tie, not singing, just standing there holding up his placard.

‘What’s it say? Oh.’

The sign said

THEY MURDEREDJOHN HODGE

‘The gamekeeper?’ Grayle said. ‘The shotgun accident?’

Cindy turned to Bobby.

‘Go and have a word, boy. You are the detective, go and detect. Grayle and I will mind the shop.’ He seemed suddenly alive with an excitement Grayle hadn’t seen in him in such a long time. ‘This is what we’ve been waiting for. The answers always lie in history. Get him out of here, Bobby. Don’t let anyone see you.’