Mean Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Typical.’

  ‘Yeah. And when Marcus heard about it, he was … well … You know Marcus.’

  ‘Furious.’ Callard looking amused now. The wind blew her tobacco hair across her face.

  ‘See, for Marcus, this story … these stones, symbolized a whole lot of things about how it all went wrong. About people closing their eyes to the miraculous – turning a blind eye to the Big Mysteries. The establishment clamping down on whatever it can’t fit between its own cramped parameters.’

  ‘’Twas ever thus, Grayle.’

  ‘He hasn’t had a lot of luck, Persephone. His wife and his little daughter both died; there was some talk of medical negligence, which is how come he hates doctors. Doctors and lawyers and politicians and scientists and … teachers.’

  ‘Yes. A teacher who hated teachers. I remember.’

  ‘So when The Phenomenologist came up for sale … and also Castle Farm, which at the time was even more rundown … Marcus grabbed the chance to get out of formal education and into … into finding out stuff, undermining received wisdom, spreading a sense of wonder. He likes to be called a crank, an anarchist, an old curmudgeon. And maybe … maybe a crank is a fine thing to be, you know?’

  Persephone Callard pulled the hair out of her face. Her amber eyes glittered. ‘Let me try and analyse what you’re saying, Grayle. Why you brought me here.’

  ‘Well, I’ve come to realize what part you played in all this, is all.’ Grayle turned away, watching a buzzard wheel and mew. ‘You were his first big breakthrough. Incontrovertible evidence of the world being a bigger place. Marcus’s Philosopher’s Stone. If Annie Davies was the legend and the inspiration, you were the proof. And maybe, all the time he was scraping together the money, he was holding you in front of him, just as much as Annie.’

  ‘Whereas you know I’m just spoiled and neurotic.’

  ‘Aw, look, I never …’ Grayle tugged her hair into bunches. ‘I’m not a sceptical person. I’m a gullible person. Holy Grayle, remember? Mind so wide open you could store a Freightliner in there. Underneath, I wanna believe what you’re saying, what you represent, just as much as he does.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ Callard walked around the burial chamber until she was facing Grayle across the capstone. ‘But you also want to protect him. Because suppose Callard’s lying. Or fooling herself. Or become a psychiatric case? Or always was? Suppose she’s not a Big Mystery at all, just a medical anomaly? What’s that going to do to poor old Marcus – finding out that everything he cares about is founded on angel dust?’

  Grayle bent and rested her cheek on the cold stone. She felt suddenly near to tears. It sometimes happened at High Knoll.

  Callard said, more softly, ‘There’s something else about this place, isn’t there? It means something to you.’

  ‘It …’ Grayle sighed. ‘This was also the place Ersula – my sister – came. When she was a research archaeologist at Cefn-y-bedd. The University of the Earth?’

  She straightened up, folded her arms on top of the stone.

  ‘They had a research programme into the effects of ancient monuments on human consciousness, which involved sleeping out at places like this and recording your dreams. It was how she got killed.’

  Callard stepped back from the stones. ‘Here?’

  ‘I don’t think she was killed here. They found her body in a shallow grave, a co-worker at the centre and a police detective, Bobby Maiden … But that’s all over, the killer dealt with and all. You read about it. Everybody read about it.’

  ‘But this is why you came back here, to work? To be near …?’

  ‘Or in spite of being near. I’d got to know Marcus, I liked what he believed in …’

  ‘Until now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Callard said, ‘You want me to leave.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know that he can help you. He has a lot of books and a lot of contacts. He’ll find out if any other mediums ever got stuck with a … presence … they couldn’t lose. He’ll find out how they handled it. But in the end, I—. Look, you don’t need to involve Marcus. He’s sick. Why can’t I help you?’

  Callard blinked. ‘How?’

  ‘Practical stuff. Seems to me if there’s an immediate problem it relates to you and me and what happened the other night. Like, personally, I’m not gonna be able to rest until I find out what that was all about and what I did to that guy … who he was, all of that.’

  ‘Don’t go thinking that’s your problem. It isn’t.’

  ‘It is now,’ Grayle insisted. ‘Also, on the most basic level, I need to get my car back. So … what I figured … maybe you could take me over there this morning, while Marcus is poring over his files and phoning his mediums. And then when we get the car or … or we deal with that in some way … we could go over to Cheltenham, see this Barber …’

  ‘He’s in France.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t want to go back there.’

  ‘Isn’t that just the place you oughta go? He has to know stuff that could help you. Like suppose his apartment was like haunted – infested with this … this presence? How do you know he didn’t plan to unload the shit on you? Seffi, however you look at it, that bastard was holding out.’

  ‘And what do I do? Offer to give it back to him? No. It was a bad place. I couldn’t go back.’

  ‘Bad place? What’s that mean?’

  ‘Oppressive. I don’t know.’ Across the big, flat stone, Callard looked vague. ‘I’m just a receiver, a monitor. I’m not the whole computer.’

  She turned her back on the stones, walked away to the new stile and the pathway down the hill.

  Grayle followed, pausing to pat the capstone. ‘Wait there, OK?’

  It was Marcus’s long-term plan, if The Vision ever made real money, to try and buy this scrubby field and this monument and then erect a pedestal with a glass case on top to relate the story of Annie Davies and the day the sun rolled across the hill.

  The former dairy had four small rooms, including a kitchen with a hotplate and grill and a refrigerator. The living area was basic, with a pine-framed sofa like a child’s cot with the side down, a chair and a low table. Apparently, Marcus’s friend Andy Anderson, the nurse, had fixed this place up for him as a source of extra income. It was done out in her favourite colour: hospital white, bright and sterile, halogen wall lights reflecting the dazzling whitewashed stones back at each other.

  The door to the bedroom was ajar. From the chair, Grayle could see Callard’s suitcase open on the floor; she hadn’t even properly unpacked.

  ‘I do expect a bill for the use of this place’, Callard said from the kitchen, ‘before I leave. You have sugar in your tea?’

  ‘Two. I don’t put on weight, I use nervous energy.’

  She was, as yet, unsure about how successful the expedition to High Knoll had been. On the one hand, she was on the way to getting this basket case off Marcus’s back. On the other – disturbingly – she was less sure that Callard was a basket case.

  Grayle said, ‘Uh, this may be simplistic, but did you ever think maybe a priest—’

  ‘God, no!’ Callard flung back from the kitchen. ‘Not having anybody gleefully wheeling out the bloody bell, book and candle trolley for me.’

  ‘But you wear the cross.’

  ‘It’s different,’ she said quickly.

  ‘I guess so.’ Marcus would understand that: the radiant symbol transcending all the dogma and the liturgy and the politics. ‘But there are other kinds of priests is what I was thinking. Guy we know … he has abilities in this general area. He’s helped people. I guess.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Hard to know how to describe it. But he’s had results.’

  ‘This is someone Marcus trusts?’

  ‘Uh …’ bloody prancing pervert, deranged deviant ‘… trust may not be the appropriate word in this instance. I’ll need to think about this. Look, should I tell Marcus we�
��re driving over to Stroud, or what?’

  Callard came in with two mugs of tea. ‘I’m not entirely happy about it, but I can’t see an alternative. We’d have to go carefully.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘I …’ Callard hesitated. ‘I’ve been thinking about Barber. And that party. There is another possibility. I’d forgotten about this, but we had a letter from the woman whose son committed suicide. Coral … Coral Hole. Asking if she could see me again. A private consultation.’

  ‘You didn’t follow up on it?’

  ‘Nancy sent the usual reply – I’m committed for the foreseeable future, but if she’d care to write again in six months’ time. They never do.’

  ‘So,’ Grayle drank some sugary tea, ‘if you were to get her address from your agent, maybe we could get some information out of this woman. How this party came to be organized, what was behind it, who was invited and why.’

  Callard nodded.

  ‘So what was the tone of the letter?’ Grayle asked. ‘She mention her husband? I mean … nothing to suggest they might no longer be … together?’

  ‘She just asked for an appointment. What are you getting at?’

  ‘Just I was thinking, if my marriage had been broken up by a passing remark from a spiritualist medium … if she’d destroyed my life, set me up for a costly divorce, well, maybe I wouldn’t feel too well disposed towards her.’

  ‘What are you—?’ Callard’s hand shook slightly, had to put down her mug. ‘You think the husband might be behind the attack?’

  ‘You said he stormed out of the apartment. You said he was an aggressive kind of guy and you were afraid to leave in case he was waiting for you. Could he have been one of them? One of them spoke. Called you a slag?’

  ‘That wasn’t him. The accent wasn’t the same.’

  ‘What about the other one?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘In light of that possibility, would you still be prepared to go see that woman?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d need to think.’

  ‘Let’s put it to Marcus. He should be up and about.’

  ‘All right. I’ll ring Nancy and get the woman’s address.’

  ‘Good.’ Grayle stood up. This was practical. This was movement. This was getting Callard and her ghost out of Marcus’s space. Although hard into Grayle’s – and this particular relationship still had some way to go before mutual trust was in sight.

  ‘Persephone, would you tell me one thing? When we were at the lodge, you seemed to get a … a sense of Ersula.’

  Callard sipped her tea, eyes watchful over the mug. ‘Perhaps I was getting a sense of you.’

  ‘Please don’t try and deflect this. You were ready to let Ersula come through, right? Why would you do that, knowing that if you went into trance, the bad thing would come up like shit out of a drain? Why would you take that chance?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t a sitting. It wasn’t formal.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What’s the difference?’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand, Grayle. There’s no logic to any of this or, if there is, I can’t see it. I’m a sensitive, yah? Things come. I may wake in the night and something’s there, on the periphery. Or, meeting someone for the first time, I’m aware of another someone. But never – thank Christ – him. That would be possession, and that’s not what this is. If it was, I’d probably kill myself.’

  ‘You’re saying it only happens …’ tamping down the incredulity in her voice ‘… when you sit down formally. Play the music, say the words?’

  Callard said nothing, didn’t blink.

  Always, with this woman, just when you thought you were halfway to connecting, the walls of the old credibility canyon got pushed back again, leaving you with one foot hanging stupidly in space.

  * * *

  But Marcus looked a little better. Not much colour in his face beyond the raw redness of his nose; his body still sagging, rather than plump. But the will to eat and a little mild walking on the hills would maybe deal with both problems.

  ‘You sleep OK, Marcus?’

  ‘Some of the time.’ He was sitting at his desk. He had books out. He looked up beyond Grayle at Callard and then beyond her to the door, like she might have brought someone unpleasant in with her.

  ‘Coffee?’ Grayle said. ‘Breakfast, even?’

  ‘Give it a try, I suppose.’

  ‘Try hard, Marcus. Listen, I’ve been giving some thought to the problem of the car.’

  ‘Sorted,’ Marcus said, eyes directed back to the page.

  ‘Persephone’s gonna drive me over there and we’re gonna check out the situation. OK?’

  Marcus looked up. ‘Don’t you ever listen to me, Underhill? I said it’s sorted. Arranged. Your vehicle will be picked up by lunchtime.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And brought here by tonight.’

  ‘Marcus …’

  ‘Yes?’

  Grayle facing him, hands on hips. ‘By whom, for Chrissakes?’

  ‘By the police,’ Marcus said.

  XIX

  A MONTH SHORT OF THE TOURIST SEASON, ONLY ONE OF THE THREE village shops seemed to be open: a newsagent’s and general self-service store. When an elderly man in a pale blue bobble hat came out, Bobby Maiden walked over the cobbled street to intercept him.

  ‘Garage? Lord, no.’ The old man gathered up his bicycle from the shop wall, stowed a box of eggs in its saddlebag. ‘You want a garage, Stroud’s about your nearest.’

  ‘Bloke called Justin runs this place.’

  The old man laughed, began to push his bike up the street. ‘Sorry, I thought you said a garage.’

  Maiden walked alongside, half-smiling.

  Peaceful, golden village. Stone footbridge over the little rippling river. A platoon of ducks waddling up the bank. Maiden had come by taxi from Gloucester station. He felt the cool air all around him, a sense of detachment, a strange freedom. With a car, you were always somehow umbilically connected to the place where you’d parked it.

  ‘Justin Sharpe you’re after, is it?’ The old man swirled his lips, looked like he wanted to spit.

  A set-up.

  Maiden shouldered his canvas overnight bag. He’d been set up.

  Putting it all together, it seemed that Andy Anderson had phoned her old friend Marcus Bacton early this morning. By eight-thirty, Marcus had phoned Maiden. They hadn’t spoken for six months, but Marcus came on like they’d been cut off thirty seconds earlier. Look, word has it, Maiden, that you’re without a car at the present time. As it happens; Underhill needs a vehicle, ah, retrieving … silly cow lost her exhaust in the middle of the Cotswolds. Course, I’d see to this myself if I wasn’t at death’s bloody door …

  Well, OK, Maiden accepted that Andy had his best interests at heart, was unhappy at the thought of him being solitary on the Solway Firth.

  Marcus, however …

  He found the screen of fast-growing conifers on the edge of the village, and what they were concealing: derelict petrol pumps, cracked concrete forecourt, a crumbling grey utility building with big double doors.

  Nobody around. He strolled across the forecourt. Saw what the old guy had meant about the definition of the word garage. No way were these working business premises. But when he reached the grey building and peered through a window thick with sagging cobwebs, he thought he saw a small red vehicle in there.

  Grayle’s Mini?

  Just pay for the car and then get a receipt, would you, Maiden? If the chap’s reluctant to hand it over to you, give me a call and I’ll let Underhill talk to him. Absolutely straightforward.

  ‘You’re some piece of work, Marcus. How could you do this?’

  Marcus put on an innocent, wounded expression. Grayle had seen it too many times.

  ‘Are you insane? Are you one hundred per cent freaking insane? Bobby’s a cop. Cops operate according to some cop version of the Hippocratic Oath. They learn about a crime, they are obliged to
file a report.’

  ‘Of course he won’t file a bloody report!’ Marcus fished out a bunch of tissues. ‘Man’s on our side now. Stared into the abyss. Eyes opened to the larger truths. Anyway …’ shuffling a stack of notes ‘… if there’s a problem, he could find out for us, couldn’t he? Through the police computer. If there’s anything known on this Justin fellow. If anyone’s been taken into hospital with severe facial injuries and no adequate explanation.’

  ‘Aw, yeah, great.’

  ‘And if there isn’t a problem, then … no problem.’ Marcus blew his nose.

  ‘How much did you tell him?’

  ‘Told him the address.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t even suggest that Justin might be a vaguely dubious character?’

  ‘Should I have?’

  ‘Bobby’s walking into this blind?’

  ‘Well …’ Marcus grunted. ‘I mean, how much does he need to know? Picks up the car, brings it over here, you take him out to dinner at the pub or something and …’

  ‘You shit.’

  Back on the road, he found the old man leaning on his bike under the conifers.

  ‘Not there?’

  ‘Not there,’ Maiden confirmed.

  ‘It’s a bit early for Justin, mind.’

  ‘It’s lunchtime.’

  ‘Aye. Try his house, I would. Even his wife knows where he is, sometimes. Well, I say wife … But if she doesn’t know where he is, if you go in the Lion around half-one and you ask for young Scott Ferris, he knocks around with Justin, at nights. Scott Ferris. Big lad, ginger hair. Now then, mine of information, aren’t I? Eyes and ears. What would your business be with Justin, you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘He’s repairing a car for this friend of mine, broke down a few miles from here. She found his card in a phone box.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘’Bout your age?’

  ‘Few years younger.’

  ‘Oh, dear me,’ the old man said. ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

  On the western rim of the village was an estate of former council houses, mostly sold to tenants now – you could tell by all the porches, cladding and extensions. There were more signs of life here: washing lines, toys and bikes in the gardens. Maiden guessed many of the old cottages in the village centre were holiday and weekend homes.