Mean Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Then one day I said, “That’s it, no more laboratory monkey,” and caught a plane home.’

  ‘Figuring it was time to start making some money out of it,’ Grayle said cynically.

  Persephone Callard turned on her those deep, lazy, amber cat’s eyes. Her lip was still swollen, but otherwise she was casual and sleek and sexy. Her hair, freshly washed, was spread over her shoulders, dense and lustrous. There was a leather thong around her neck, supporting an amulet or something hidden down her blouse.

  She looked rested. Cleaned up, softened, detoxified. She would accept only one glass of the wine, signalling that she did not have a drink problem.

  ‘You think I’m just prostituting myself, don’t you, Grayle?’

  ‘You made a lotta dough out of this,’ Grayle said flatly.

  ‘True,’ Callard said, gaze unwavering. ‘The public sittings. The television. The books. Sure. A lot of … dough.’

  ‘But now you’re gonna give all of that up, right?’

  ‘I’m apparently supposed to make one more appearance. Kurt Campbell’s international psychic festival in the Malverns around the end of the month.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘There isn’t an after that. I don’t think I’m going to do it.’

  ‘What, because you don’t feel the messages you’re relaying are genuine? Or because you’ve made enough money and now it’s becoming, like, tedious?’

  ‘Uncalled for, Underhill,’ Marcus said.

  ‘I used to be a journalist,’ Grayle snapped. ‘It’s what we do. Are you scared of what you’re doing to people, Persephone? Is that what you’re saying? All the lives you f—’

  ‘Look!’ Callard arched forward into the lamplight. ‘If I received a message I thought was going to seriously disturb someone without especially benefiting anyone, I kept it to myself.’

  Untrue. If you read the press cuttings you were soon aware that she’d quite often had people leaving her seances in tears. It was why she was considered more convincing than the rest. Also, Grayle recalled the almost sadistic excitement Callard had given off when she was offering to contact Ersula … when she thought she had Grayle halfway to cowering in a corner.

  She turned her head away from the amber eyes, tired of firing all the shots. Gave Marcus a glance. Marcus nodded.

  ‘Persephone …’ taking his glasses off to clean them and maybe so he wouldn’t have to face the gaze ‘has something else happened to you?’

  There was silence. Callard came and sat down at the opposite end of the sofa to Grayle.

  ‘How did you think I could help you?’ Marcus said gently.

  Grayle shuffled a cushion. She noticed that Malcolm, who would habitually curl up by Marcus’s feet or on the sofa, was not around.

  ‘Would you find it easier to talk to Marcus if I wasn’t here?’

  ‘Harder, probably.’ Callard smiled. Grimly, Grayle thought.

  ‘Does it have anything to do with those guys last night?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Grayle said softly, letting the thought out as it formed, ‘They didn’t come to rob the place, did they? They came for you. They were gonna take you away.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Kidnap her?’ Marcus ramming his glasses back on.

  ‘I guess. They had her taped up like a parcel. What did you feel about that, Seffi?’

  Because Callard had never spoken about what was going through her mind when it was happening. Only describing the assault in purely technical terms.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A ransom thing?’ Marcus said. ‘To get money out of your father?’

  ‘I don’t know, I …’ Callard shook her head violently. ‘No, that’s ridiculous, this isn’t bloody Sicily.’

  ‘Maybe they just needed a medium,’ Grayle said. ‘Like they wanted you to contact Blackbeard the Pirate. Find out where he stashed his doubloons.’

  Marcus frowned.

  ‘Or something like that,’ Grayle said.

  They both looked at Callard, waiting. She was half in shadow. She sat straight-backed, hands on her knees. This would be how it began at a sitting, Grayle thought, sure she could feel a change in the atmosphere like an electric current. She felt a touch nervous and was annoyed with herself.

  ‘I’m trying to think of the words you say.’

  Callard looked up slowly, eerily showing the whites of her eyes. ‘Words?’

  There was a stillness around her. Marcus, oblivious of it, finally blew his nose.

  ‘Like “Is there anybody there?” Only you don’t say that, do you? You have your own phrase. Like a radio phone-in host. Something like—’

  ‘No!’

  Callard leapt up, rigid.

  ‘Those are not words I utter lightly.’

  A hand sliding instinctively down her blouse, bringing out what was on the end of the leather thong.

  Grayle, expecting an ankh or some astrological talisman, was shocked to see the dark gold cross glowing sombrely on the edge of the circle of lamplight.

  Callard said, ‘I wanted to … talk. I just wanted to talk. To someone who believed in what I used to be. Who wouldn’t judge me. Who understood where I was coming from. Didn’t despise me … wasn’t jealous of me … didn’t want to get into my knickers … didn’t have a piece of me.’

  She looked down at her sandals. Yup, Grayle thought, that’s Marcus Bacton.

  ‘I do need help.’ Fingering the cross – so alien on her. ‘Only, the people who might be able to help me are not people I’d feel comfortable going to. Old-fashioned mediums, spiritual healers I’ve slagged off, in my arrogance, over the years. Cosy old psychics bringing it down to the level of afternoon tea, I always despised that – the way sittings would begin with these ragged Salvation Army hymns, some old dear on the harmonium.’

  ‘Grandma’s leisure hour,’ Grayle said. ‘When the bingo hall’s closed. Uncool.’

  ‘I’ve cut myself off, that’s the problem. Sometimes I’d get word that they wanted to meet me – the late Doris Stokes, people like that. Well, Christ, one had one’s image to consider …’ Ruefully shaking her head. ‘I fucking wish I could talk to Doris Stokes now.’

  ‘Well, shit, if you really—’ Grayle bit her tongue.

  Marcus leaned forward. ‘What would you ask her?’

  It got weird then. Grayle found that the palms of her hands, where they were gripping her knees, had become damp.

  She looked at Seffi’s cross and imagined hundreds of little crosses on the walls, formed out of the gold leaf and silver glittering from the shadowed spines of the books about poltergeists and leylines and ritual magic.

  Talking in this oddly subdued tone, lightly supporting her cross in the palm of her right hand, Persephone Callard said she would ask Doris this:

  What do you do, how are you supposed to react, when you achieve the strongest, most defined manifestation of your career … when the closeness and the intensity of it makes you almost cry out, at first, with wonder?

  If you were becoming blasé, cynical to the point of contempt for your trade, how would you handle what appeared to be clear and unambiguous proof of the reality of the spirit?

  And how would you deal with it when the dead thing facing you, across a room full of living people, is also hideously and unambiguously evil?

  XIV

  ‘CLEAN FILTH.’ HER VOICE WAS HUSKY WITH TEARS AND SMOKE AND gin. ‘That’s what he used to say about you. Maiden’s clean filth. He liked that.’

  The Edwardian sitting room was lit by one small Tiffany lamp, and the long velvet curtains were open to the period glow of Danks Street with its imitation gaslights.

  Her name was Shelagh Beckett; she sounded like a Londoner. Maiden recognized the voice, thought he’d seen her before, but not for a good while.

  ‘I can see why he said that, Maiden. You don’t look like a copper. It’s them big, dark eyes. Coppers develop little squidgy eyes, you ever notice that?’


  And she laughed. She was saving the real crying, she said. She’d make a night of it, serious grief, then pick herself up at five in the morning, take herself to bed with the gin.

  ‘How long had it been?’ he asked her. ‘You and Vic.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you, Maiden … me and Victor, it was convenience more than anything, and he’d have told you that himself. What he loved most of all was this address, this big brick townhouse with the high ceilings and the plaster coving. And the mahogany four-poster, Victor loved that four-poster.’

  He thought for a second she was going to break her vow on the crying, but she laughed again, and this time he realized: it was the name which had misled him, Shelagh Beckett.

  ‘Connie?’

  ‘Blimey,’ she said, ‘you must be older than you look.’

  Used to mind the lower bar at the Biarritz. Before that, a regular on the Feeny Park beat, when Maiden was a young copper. Consuela, she’d called herself, accentuating the Latin look: big earrings and black frocks with mega-cleavage.

  She peered at him. ‘You never nicked me, did you, Maiden?’

  ‘Never did,’ he said. And was glad. The hair was shorter and near-white now and she’d put on a couple of stone since Feeny Park. She was spread over the peacock-blue sofa, in her lime-green frilly dressing gown. On the carpet was the jersey dress she’d worn earlier, with Vic’s blood all over it from when she’d cradled his pumping head.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I can’t keep calling you Maiden. What’s your name?’

  ‘Bobby.’

  ‘Sweet. We had a cat called Bobby. Listen, Bobby, I know how it is – somebody like Vic goes the way he did, somebody who’s done bird, and the police look into it without much interest for a couple of weeks, and then it’s like: Oh, it don’t involve the general public, it’s an underworld thing, it ain’t worth the candle. If it don’t look like escalating into gang warfare, they just let it go. That’s what happens, isn’t it?’

  ‘I won’t let it go, Connie,’ he said.

  ‘I know you wouldn’t, darling, not left to yourself.’

  ‘It’s why I’m here again.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘I was here earlier. With George Barrett?’

  ‘So you was.’ She shook her head as if to clear it. ‘Georgie Barrett. He nicked me once. Never again, though – I done him a quickie in his Panda, and I said if he bothered me again I’d tell ’em down the station. Give a description and everything, you know what I mean? I would have too. See, there I go … I’m telling you that ’cause you don’t look like a copper.’

  ‘Can you tell me who did it, Connie?’

  ‘Victor?’

  ‘Who was driving the car?’

  ‘I never seen it and that’s God’s honest truth. If I’d seen it, I’d tell you. I didn’t know nothing till the neighbours come banging on the door. They seen more than me … Mr … what’s his name … Parsons. He seen the back end of the car.’

  ‘George talked to Mr Parsons. What I’m thinking of, Connie, is not so much what you saw as what might’ve occurred to you. Having had a couple of hours to think about it.’

  She gave him a shrewd look over the cigarette she was lighting. ‘You’re on your own, ain’tcha? You got history too, you and Vic, I’d say. Things he never told me. Well, Bobby, I wish I could help you. Don’t you go thinking I wouldn’t love to grass up the cowardly vermin, after I’ve been down there in the road with Victor, thinking, if he’s got to die, please God let him die in my arms. But he’d already gone, hadn’t he? I reckon he’d gone. I hope he’d gone. State of him.’

  She curled her legs underneath her on the sofa.

  ‘I knew who did it, Bobby, I’d be telling you and if you couldn’t make it stick I’d be waiting for him in a dark alley some night, with a ballpin hammer … There I go again. But I would. I’d do it. What’s to lose?’

  ‘More than there used to be, maybe?’ Maiden looked around the room.

  ‘Yeah. Nice, innit?’ She smiled. ‘It’s an address. A real address. Victor thought he’d died and gone to … Oh Gawd, now he has, poor love. Listen, you wait till you see the funeral I’ll give him. Nothing naff, none of your Victor spelled out in white carnations kind of crap. Class. Real oak coffin. Marble headstone, proper verse. I knew him twenty years, on and off.’

  Maiden said, ‘But only on again quite recently?’

  ‘Like I said, convenience. When you get to our age, comfort and convenience is important.’

  ‘Vic implied an old boyfriend died and left you the house.’

  ‘He implied that, did he? Connie shook her head, chuckling. ‘You know who give me this place? Dorothy Parker.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tony’s wife. Widow. The one he kept in style, down the swish end of Essex, away from all this murky stuff and who never come up here, not once, not till he snuffed it. Well, of course, shocked when she seen it all – the scale of it, for a start. All the property. Forgetting you can buy a palace up here for the price of a bungalow down there. But she didn’t want it, any of it. Didn’t like the town, didn’t like the atmosphere, didn’t like the picture she was getting of Tony as Little Caesar. So she hires a fresh solicitor to organize flogging the clubs. And the odd properties, she just … give away.’

  ‘This house was Tony Parker’s?’

  ‘He bought it about three months before he passed on. Repossession job put his way by Laurie Argyle, the estate agent. Tony was going to divide it into bedsits. Asked me was I interested in looking after a couple of good-class girls here. Small, respectable set-up, nothing sordid, no drugs. Well, see, I was the one went around with Mrs Parker, giving her the grand tour, so I told her all about it. What was to hide any more?’

  Maiden had heard about Dorothy Parker’s grand tour. He’d been away at the time, compiling the file on the Green Man.

  ‘Took a shine to me, I think,’ Connie said. ‘Must’ve been the accent. Plus I told her nothing but the truth, and all the bits of it she didn’t know. Next thing she’s bunging me the house.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that. Start a guesthouse, she says, make an honest living. Worth over a hundred grand now, apparently. Deeds made over in my name, Shelagh Beckett. Blimey, I thought Tony’s ashes’d come spurting out the casket.’

  Maiden smiled.

  ‘Course, there was a good bit of fuming among certain people about the things she done, disposal-wise,’ Connie said, ‘but she didn’t want none of it. Wanted it off her hands for good and all, and the quicker the better. So Victor and me, we moves in, figure we’ll live in style for a while before doing the guesthouse bit. Victor done most of the decorating. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s very tasteful, Connie.’

  Maiden felt a lump in his throat, knew he wasn’t ever going to let this one go.

  ‘Victor wouldn’t have nothing for nothing, Bobby, not ever. I says here, take my credit card, go out and buy yourself a new suit. He comes back with this bright blue number, fifteen quid from the Oxfam shop. That’s the kind of bloke he was.’

  ‘Yes. Connie, when you said certain people were put out by what Dorothy was doing …’

  ‘People with investments in the businesses.’

  ‘The businesses.’

  ‘The businesses she couldn’t sell on account of there being no books, no spreadsheets. Them businesses. You know?’

  ‘Got you.’ Maiden nodded.

  ‘See, she’d made them businesses unmanageable by destroying the infra … what’s the word?’

  ‘Infrastructure.’

  ‘Right. Now, one person in particular was thinking to take over the Biarritz, through a third party. Because, without the Biarritz … But you probably know this.’

  ‘No,’ he said honestly.

  ‘Bet you know the person we’re talking about, though.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Victor learned about it. What this person was after. Victor told me, I told
Dorothy. See, Tony I could work for. Tony, I knew where he was coming from. But you have a geezer you know you’re never gonna know where he’s coming from …’

  ‘Vic knew exactly where he was coming from.’

  Vic’s switch of allegiance, following the death of his son, had been slow and careful and linked to his esteem for Parker’s daughter, Emma. His removal of a killer – probably hired by Riggs through an intermediary to deal with Maiden – had been, fortunately, unprovable.

  ‘Connie, did this person know the extent to which Vic messed up his long-term plans?’

  Connie pushed herself back into the cushions of the peacock-blue sofa. She still had style. He wondered who Vic’s successor would be.

  ‘This is what you really come about, innit, Bobby?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘This is the geezer I should be after with the ballpin hammer. Martin Riggs, yeah?’ Connie said. ‘Just to confirm it?’

  ‘Shhhhh,’ Maiden said softly.

  In the CID room, when he walked in, coming up to nine p.m., DS Beattie was on the phone.

  ‘Rear offside tyre,’ Beattie said. ‘Right, OK. And it’s not hedgehog blood, is it?’ He laughed. ‘Yeah. Absolutely.’

  George Barrett beckoned Maiden into the passage and told him the worst.

  Traffic had found Maiden’s car tucked into a layby two miles down the bypass. A meaningfully dented wing, a significantly smashed offside tail lamp.

  The vehicle which had mounted the pavement and broken both Vic Clutton’s legs, before being fast reversed over Vic Clutton’s top half, had then clipped a brick gatepost on the corner of Danks Street and Ironbridge Road. Shards of tail-lamp cover had been hoovered up by SOCO within a few yards of the post and Vic’s squashed and leaking head.

  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.’