Mean Spirit

LIV

It wasn’t long before Maiden became aware that whatever Seffi Callard usually did, she wasn’t doing. Whatever customarily happened was not happening.

She would close her eyes, throw back her head, as though someone was pulling on the rope of her hair, draw in another slow breath. But when he looked at her again, the amber glow would be back in her eyes, wide open again, desperate.

Pleading. Saying, Someone has to stop this. Knowing that no-one could.

Maybe ten minutes passed. Gary Seward watched in silence from outside the handcuffed seance.

All he wanted was to see Clarence Judge again. In the end it was that simple: Gary Seward and Kurt Campbell wanted proof, for themselves, of a certain kind of life after death. Abblow’s kind. The transference of the human essence to a parallel, godless existence where Victorian values survived the grave, where a life of crime would not rebound on you, where the spirit of Clarence Judge remained unsinged by the fires of hell.

The thought of it made Maiden scared and depressed. It too much resembled the colourless, ill-formed memories of his own death experience. And he was going back there very soon; death as the end of everything would be an infinitely more appealing prospect.

His eyes met Seffi’s before she closed them again. He eased his hand over hers and their fingers enfolded, slippery with cold sweat and despair. When he closed his own eyes and tried to pray, what came to him was an image of the salmon-coloured dawn at High Knoll, layers of cloud interwoven with the distant Malvern Hills. Which was here. From the Knoll, this was where the dawn began. And none of them were going to see the next one, were they, not from anywhere?

He didn’t know Seward was behind him until the barrel of the shotgun came down and broke three of his fingers.

The whisper was close to his left ear. ‘Now, that ain’t how we arranges our hands, is it, cock?’

Kurt Campbell must have been well away before they came — Maurice and Lorna and Harry Oakley. Well away before Cindy was able to pull together his thoughts and was struggling to say, Find him … stop him. He’s the only one who can tell us where …

But it was far too late. This was Kurt’s house. A thousand places to go, including the dreadful cellars.

Lorna Crane was trying to clean up Cindy’s face with his own lavender-scented handkerchief. ‘I’m all right,’ he was telling her through bruised lips. ‘I’m all right, lovely.’

‘You want to bloody see yourself,’ said Maurice.

‘Maurice … listen to me, boy … you have to find the entrance to the cellars.’

Lorna muttering. ‘God, I think he’s lost a couple of teeth. Oh Christ, could his jaw be broken?’

‘Do you understand?’

Maurice said, ‘Because of that shot?’

‘Find the entrance, but do not, on any account, go in. Fetch me at once. It may be a flight of steps, it may be a trapdoor. The most obvious area is the kitchens, but it could be anywhere … at the side of a fireplace, beneath a carpet, in a cupboard under stairs to the first floor … Look everywhere.’

‘All of us?’

‘Everyone. Go in groups. Fours and fives. Don’t let anyone put you off.’

‘The dungeons,’ Mr Oakley said. ‘Crole and Abblow’s dungeons.’

‘Do you know where they might be?’ Cindy demanded, his whole face ablaze with pain.

Mr Oakley shook his head. ‘Only that it was where they murdered my great-grandad. They’ve killed someone else now, haven’t they?’

‘Just find the entrance. Tell me. I shall be in the great hall.’

‘I’ll stay with you,’ Lorna said.

‘Thank you. And … pray, all of you. Pray to your several gods that we are not too late.’

But he thought they were.

‘This is good,’ Seward confided to Maiden. ‘This is excellent, how that happened. I once saw Clarence do a geezer’s hands. Some nonce. Not wiv a sawn-off, mind. Wiv a piece of pipe, but still …’

Seffi was staring down at the table. Their hands were separated. Maiden’s fingers were turning black. The pain was dull and distant.

Across the table, Grayle was unnaturally still. Shock. Behind her, Clarence’s grey suit hung limply from its hanger. Maiden thought he could see smoke from the oil heaters funnelled from its collar. He thought he could see part of Ron Foxworth’s white jaw, with teeth, on the table bearing the sepia photograph of Clarence Judge. The face became, for a moment, very clear, and it seemed to Maiden that the bulb had become much brighter.

Seward straightened up.

‘Is he here? Is that him?’

At that moment Foxworth’s body slid a few inches down in the armchair and the cuffs dragged painfully on Maiden’s left hand, and the bulb was dark again, under its skin of dried blood.

Seffi Callard didn’t react. Her eyes were closed again. The cellar smelled sweetly foul.

Seward hissed, ‘You see him?’

Seffi gulped air through her mouth. There were tears on her face.

Grayle said, ‘I see him.’

Seward swung round, the sawn-off at his hip.

Grayle stayed motionless, opposite Maiden, her back straight, both hands on the table, one pulled slightly askew by the slippage of the corpse but she seemed no longer affected by its proximity.

‘Hi, Clarence.’ Grayle giggled.

Oh, no, Maiden thought. He watched the expressions — scepticism, suspicion, hope, yearning, hunger — chasing across Seward’s face like a speeded-up film of storm clouds. This was the real, unpublic face: charmless, cheerless, flabby, the mouth turned down, the dyed hair sweated to the forehead. The bow tie was off, the shirt undone.

Seward said, ‘You?’

Grayle was staring past him with a lopsided smile. ‘You don’t scare me, Clarence.’

Seward moved back against the wall, the shotgun pointed upwards. ‘What’s he look like? You tell me exactly what he looks like!’

‘You do not freaking scare me!’ Grayle screamed.

‘What’s he look like, bitch?’

‘He, uh … he’s just like … I … I don’t know … He’s not here, not like you and I are … Oh Jesus … He is here. Now he is. Now he’s like … he’s really freaking here. He’s just … standing here. He’s wearing a suit. And a white shirt. And like a thin, black tie. Like a funeral tie. Maybe …’ Grayle let out a wild peal of laughter. ‘Maybe he just went to his own funeral …’

Seward’s breath was coming faster. ‘You better not be fucking wiv me, lady. Go on. What else? His shoes. Describe his shoes.’

‘I can’t see his shoes. He like … he isn’t too defined down there. It’s like he goes into mist, and his … he’s off the ground is what I’m saying. It’s like he’s maybe six inches off the ground. Jesus, he’s … you know, he’s awful. This is a dead man.’

‘Ask him if he can see us.’

‘Yeah …’

‘Ask him!’

‘I’m asking him! In my head. You can’t just …’

‘What’s he say?’

‘He isn’t saying anything. He’s just there, is all. All he is is there.’

‘Then why can’t I see him?’

“Cause you’re an insensitive asshole, how the fuck should I know?’

‘All right.’ Seward was feverishly breaking and snapping shut his shotgun. ‘You said you can see him now, yeah? Clear?’

‘I can see him very well.’

‘So you tell me what he looks like. His face.’

‘All right, he … he’s got a thin face and this hooked kind of Roman nose. His hair is slicked back. It’s that style that was fashionable for guys over here not all that long ago. Like shaven hard up both sides and real thick on top. Only you can tell this isn’t one of those fashion cuts, this is how it’s always been. His eyes are … pale, I guess. Like watery. And no colour … no colour that I can make out. His whole face has no colour. He’s a dead man. Uh, he has this scar.’

As Grayle talked, Maiden was picturing his drawing. She was describing it. And because there’d been no published photograph of Clarence Judge since he was scarred in prison by the fish-slice bloke, this was where Grayle started walking the tightrope. Suppose the scar was nothing like the drawing?

‘OK, the scar … Clarence, will you stop freaking looking at me like you wanna …?’

‘The scar,’ Seward hissed.

‘It … it’s cutting across the side of his head from the left eye … the left eye as you look at him. It runs almost but not quite horizontally from the eye to the ear, like half of a pair of glasses.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, that’s it, it’s a scar. Oh. Except, about three-quarters along, it kind of disappears under a fold of skin. Like, it’s not a pretty scar, but this part is … it’s like you would say it was stitched up by two different guys working from different ends and they didn’t quite meet up. Plus, it looks kind of livid.’

‘Christ,’ Seward said.

‘Maybe … I don’t see that part too well, he never turns his head … maybe that’s not part of the scar at all.’

‘It’s another scar,’ Seward said, almost breathlessly, to Maiden. There was either a shadow or a big patch of sweat across his shirt. ‘About two months before he died, he was moaning about the scar irritating him, pulling down his eye. Reckoned it was affecting his sight. He got mad with it. One night, he takes a kitchen knife, slices into it. Sews it up hisself, different. He could do fings like that and hardly feel it. How would she know about that, Bobby? She never knew Clarence. You bleedin’ swear to me she never knew him?’

‘She’s American, Gary.’

‘You think she’s seeing him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you see?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Tell him I wanna see him!’ Seward roared. ‘Tell him I need to fucking see his ugly face!’

‘You don’t get through to him, OK?’ Grayle said testily. ‘He does not respond. It’s just like he’s a dummy. A dead dummy. This is … He doesn’t hear me. Jesus, did Campbell hypnotize him to just … be like something out the basement at Madame Tussaud’s?’

Seward moved nearer the circle. He stopped.

‘What did you say?’

‘I … said … I … the basement at Madam …’

‘Before that.’

Maiden said quickly, ‘Ask him if he knows who killed him. Ask him if he knows who shot him from behind.’

Seward spun, crouching, with the shotgun outstretched. Maiden staring down the two black holes. He’s going to kill me anyway. It’s got nothing to do with any of this. He’s doing it for Riggs. Payback for Crewe. An arrangement.

He said, ‘Grayle, ask Clarence if he remembers who shot him and where it …?’

‘Hold it!’ Grayle cried out. ‘He …’ She looked at Seward, her voice dropping to conversation level. ‘You killed him, right, Gary? You did it in the apartment near the Rotunda in Cheltenham.’

Persephone Callard’s eyes came open. She looked stunned.

‘I’m seeing this quite clearly,’ Grayle said firmly. ‘Here’s what happens. First, Kurt hypnotizes him and he plants this … a posthypnotic suggestion that like … when Clarence hears the words, “The lines are open”, he’ll come back from wherever he is. Like, wherever he is. And then, while he’s still in trance, Gary just like … blows him away. From behind.’

‘What…?’ Maiden said.

Sounding, he hoped, as though this was a big shock … that it was taking some getting his mind around. Like the same theory hadn’t been forming in his head most of the night. Forming out of Grayle’s idea that Kurt had hypnotized Seffi. Hardening up at the first sight of the Cheltenham furniture, here in the cellar where Crole and Abblow …

He said, ‘This is what they did to John Hodge, isn’t it? They killed him after ordering him under hypnosis to come back. To return to the place he loved most in all the world. So attached to it his family used to joke about him haunting it when he was dead.’

Seffi Callard said, ‘The first experiment in hypnosis beyond death. The obvious conjunction of spiritualism and mesmerism.’ She gave out a cracked laugh. ‘Only a Victorian English gentleman would see instructing the dead as the best way in.’

Maiden went on looking down those cold black metal corridors.

‘You want to talk about this, Gary?’

The entrance hall, with its vaulted ceiling, its coats of arms and crossed pikes, its stags’ heads on shields, its wrought-iron chandelier with the candles.

And many people. New Agers mingling with the councillors and tourism officials and the local aristocracy — these individuals bemused or offended and pursued by a harrassed, perspiring Francine. No sign of Kurt, but there wouldn’t be. No visible Forcefield uniforms. Occasionally, one of the dignitaries would glance at Cindy, half-recognizing him, but no-one asked about his swollen and bloodied face, his crooked bosom.

Then Maurice Gooch was there, quivering with agitation. ‘Cindy, there’s …’

‘The cellar?’ Cindy snapped. ‘Did you find a way in?’

‘No, but…’

‘There has got to be an entrance!’

‘We’ve been everywhere, man,’ Maurice protested. ‘We’ve been into every room, including two locked ones. We’ve ripped up carpets, we’ve moved dressers, we’ve levered up flagstones. Either there’s no way in, or there’s no cellar. Only, there is, according to my pendulum. It’s got five rooms.’

‘Did you ask Vera in the kitchen?’

‘We’ve asked every bugger, Cindy. I’m sorry. But, listen …’

‘They can’t have blocked them off,’ said Mr Oakley.

‘A gun went off down there,’ Cindy reminded him. ‘We shall have to call the police. No option now.’

‘And how are the police going to find their way in?’ demanded Maurice. ‘Take up t’bloody floor? But, aye, you’d better get ’em in, because of the body.’

Cindy stiffened.

‘In the lavvy.’

‘Where?’

‘The toilet, just along there, through yon place wi’ t’tables. A man. Just lying there by the urinals, wi’ his … Like, he must’ve been having a piss when he were …’

‘Shot,’ said Mr Oakley. ‘Shot in the head. Killed instantly, I reckon.’

‘Not Kurt.’

‘No.’ Maurice shook his head. ‘Older.’

Cindy thought drably of Bobby Maiden.

‘Show me.’

‘St Kurt,’ Bobby said. ‘Remember? All that stuff in Marcus’s cuttings about Campbell giving his services free to help dying people, terminal patients?’

‘Oh, Jesus, he was messing with their minds.’ Grayle found she was staring at the blood-drenched, headless remains of Superintendent Ron Foxworth and it was just another sad, stinking piece of meat, a reminder of why she was vegetarian. What she was hearing about, this was still-active, insidious evil.

‘Kurt was planting stuff on them before they died, wasn’t he? Posthypnotic suggestion. When I call you, wherever you are, you’ll come back to me.’ Bobby turned to Seward. ‘Did it work, Gary?’

‘Nah.’ Seward leaned back in his chair, the shotgun on his knee. ‘None of the sods came back. Kurt figured it was all the morphine and stuff they was getting intravenously at the end. Plus the time lapse. It was often three, four weeks between the hypnosis and when they snuffed it.’

These bastards, Grayle thought. These unbelievable bastards.

‘Crole and Abblow tried the same thing,’ Bobby said. ‘It was noticeable at the time how concerned they always were for the welfare of the local dying. Hovering around deathbeds. Unhealthy. Well, obviously, it didn’t work for them either, and people were getting suspicious. Abblow presumably decided what they needed was someone fit and well who had no idea his card was marked.’

Grayle said, ‘John Hodge.’

‘And he come back,’ said Seward. ‘He did. Loads of people seen the bleeder.’ He looked at Bobby. Grayle saw that he’d never looked at Foxworth’s body; it didn’t disgust him, it didn’t offend him. Like guys around slaughterhalls their whole working lives would fail to register an extra carcass. ‘Where’d you get this stuff, Bobby?’

‘Bloke called Harry. Hodge was his great-grandad.’

‘Yeah, we seen him with his posters. We invited him in for a drink. He wouldn’t come.’

Smarter than us, Grayle thought wretchedly.

‘He told you what they did with Hodge, Bobby?’

‘Seems obvious what they did. Must’ve been obvious to Kurt Campbell from the beginning.’

‘Not quite the beginning. Stories about this place, they been going round for years on the psychic circuits Kurt’s plugged into. It was when we sent a surveyor round and he found these cellars, and a tin box with Crole’s notes, written in his own writing. Exciting, Bobby.’

‘I wonder what the phrase was. The one that was intended to bring Hodge back. Like “The lines are open.”’

‘Gotta be more than a phrase,’ Seward said. ‘We don’t know how they did it, but it must’ve been easier with Abblow being a medium. What we done, we played Clarence a tape of Callard’s voice saying it.’ He gave Seffi a sly glance. ‘Kurt recorded it when you was together. So it had to be you, sweetheart, no substitutes.’

‘This was just before you killed him?’ Bobby said. ‘Or did you have someone else do that?’

‘Nah. I done him, like she said. Only fair. Only decent, poor old love.’

‘What I thought,’ Bobby said. ‘How it seemed to me was that he must’ve been a bit of an embarrassment to you, Gary. Useful in the old days, long as it wasn’t anything too complicated. But you were probably glad when he was put away for the rape. Times were changing. Old-style hardmen like Clarence — the ones you couldn’t take to a party — were getting to be of limited value.’

‘Hadn’t got the GCSEs, Bobby.’

‘And, like I say, by the time he came out, you’d done your book, and you were a public figure. The chat shows. The Rotary Club dinners. No way Clarence was going to fit into that circuit — not very smart, no sense of humour, no particular personality at all. A charmless bastard, on the whole.’

‘You’ll pay for that in a minute, Bobby. But, yeah.’

‘All Clarence is good at is harming people, and suddenly he’s back on the streets and nobody to turn to for work but his old gaffer. Must’ve been a bit trying for you, Gary.’

‘Nah. It was him hated it more than me. Fish out of water. Cops watching every move he makes. Memos about him computered to every nick in the land. He was too innocent for this hi-tech world, Bobby. Would’ve been back inside in no time at all.’

‘And who knows who he’d have accidentally taken with him.’

‘He wouldn’t grass nobody, you know that. Nah, this was a sweet way to go. And if we coulda told him he was coming back, we would’ve.’

‘The flat,’ Bobby said. ‘The one you later passed off as Barber’s. Why did you kill Clarence there?’

‘Well, we had all them flats, didn’t we? Used for this and that. How it happened, Clarence’s chest was bad when he come out, wiv all them years of bad snout. So he wants to give up the weed. I says, “’Ere, I know just the geezer.” We takes him up the flat, sits him down all comfy, then Kurt puts him under. A jewel of a subject. Like that!’ Seward snapped his fingers.

‘A faithful servant,’ Bobby said. ‘Foot soldier.’

‘Yeah.’

Grayle was blown away by the bizarre glint of tears in Seward’s hard eyes. No remorse — just nostalgia, sentiment, warm affection. If there was anything left down there in her shrunken gut she could’ve thrown up all over again.

‘And you played him the tape,’ Bobby said. ‘“The lines are open.” Seffi’s voice. And you told him that when he heard it, he would come back. And then …’

‘One shot. Pffft! Clean as a whistle. I cried afterwards, it was so swift and clean. Moving, know wha’ mean?’

‘And then you packaged him up and loaded him in a van and drove him down to the Thames Valley, left him in a skip.’

‘He’d’ve understood. A memorial service wouldn’t’ve been appropriate, would it, seeing none of us reckoned much to the All bleedin’ mighty? But we had a few beers down Clarence’s old boozer in Saxton Gate, and that was very nice.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘A very pleasant night.’

He stood up. He went and stood with his back to the oak door.

‘You never saw him, did you? You never saw a bleedin’ thing, you bitch. You was pissing right up my leg.’

‘You can believe what you want,’ Grayle said.

‘And that black slapper, she conned me too.’

‘They don’t realize all the trouble you went to,’ Bobby said. ‘I don’t know how you tolerate it.’

Seward hefted the sawn-off, turned on Bobby.

‘I warned you.’

‘So you did, Gary,’ Bobby said wearily. He put his head back, closed his eyes. ‘So you did.’

Grayle thought, I would rather go first than see or hear this.

‘Open your eyes, cock. I want you to see. I want you staring down the little black tunnels.’

‘Piss off, Gary. Ron was right. You’re just a toerag in a fantasy world.’

‘What if I’m doing it now, Bobby? What if I’m aiming for just over your belt, so you die wiv your guts in your hands? What if I’m coming in close? What if I’m giving you the countdown. Three. Two …’

‘Look!’ Grayle screamed. ‘Can’t you see him? Can’t you see Clarence? He’s staring right at you, Gary! And you know the reason you can’t see him?’

Seward breathed out roughly. ‘You know I’m tired of you and your games. How about, if I turn around, and if I don’t see Clarence, I do you? How you feel about that?’

‘The … the reason you don’t see him … is you’d just be looking at yourself. You and Kurt. What you made. That’s not Clarence, it never was. All you’d see is what you made.’

‘I turn round and if I don’t see him, I blow you through the wall. Is that a deal, darlin’?’

Grayle said steadily, ‘That’s perfectly fine.’

Seward began slowly to turn.

Bobby threw himself at Seward, dragging the corpse and Grayle and Seffi Callard, pulled the whole damn table over but Seward moved easily away and stood with his back to the door and his shotgun at his hip, fully turned and cold and relaxed. In the dimness Grayle saw the fire from both barrels.