Mean Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  ‘This is Bobby Maiden,’ Seffi said. ‘My fiancé.’

  Mr Hole didn’t smile, making it clear he wasn’t mellowing. ‘I accept the material compensations might be considerable,’ he said bluntly, not looking at Maiden, ‘but how does he stand it?’

  ‘I’ve got no imagination, Mr Hole.’ Maiden sat next to Seffi on a sofa with a banana pattern. He was somehow reminded of Consuela’s sitting room in Elham.

  Mr Hole kept on looking at Seffi and came directly to the point. ‘My wife wrote to you.’

  Seffi’s eyes widened. ‘You know about that?’

  ‘Of course I bloody know about it. Twenty-six years of marriage, a phoney stage act don’t destroy that, lady. We did a lot of talking and we decided we ought to take steps to find out who put you up to it.’

  ‘Put me—?’

  ‘We came to the conclusion’, he said, ‘that it was somebody’s idea of a joke.’

  ‘Doesn’t strike me as that funny, somehow,’ Maiden said.

  ‘Some people have a mighty strange sense of humour.’ Mr Hole came to sit in a sofa opposite them. It had a citrus fruit design. He’d never stopped looking at Seffi. ‘You could save a lot of trouble, Miss Callard, if you just told me who it was. And don’t give me any of that spirit world crap. I don’t take any moral stance on how you make your living, but I know a set-up when I see one.’

  ‘Now, look …’ Seffi Callard began to rise. Maiden put a fiancé’s hand on her arm.

  ‘Let’s hear what Mr Hole has to say. You see, what happened, Mr Hole, was that Seffi was given a lot of money by Sir Richard Barber to come along on the night, and she—’

  ‘Quite a lot of money, I’d guess.’

  ‘And she doesn’t really know what that was all about. So if you’re talking set-up, perhaps she was the one set up.’

  Hole still didn’t look at him. ‘I would like a name. I think you owe me a name.’

  Seffi said nothing.

  ‘Not Sir Richard Barber, that’s for sure. What about Gary?’

  ‘Gary?’ Maiden said.

  ‘You stay out of this.’

  ‘Gary who?’ Seffi said.

  ‘You know who I bloody mean, you’re not that stupid. Listen, if it’s Gary I won’t tell him. I won’t tell him you told me. I just need to know. If it’s Gary, it’s all right. You know what I’m saying?’

  ‘Oh,’ Maiden said. ‘That Gary.’

  And Mr Hole finally turned and looked at him. It was a long, hard look designed to tell Maiden he might have just made a mistake.

  ‘Who are you, my friend?’ Mr Hole said coldly.

  ‘You’re a mate of Gary’s then, Mr Hole?’

  Mr Hole came slowly to his feet.

  ‘Only, if Gary—’

  ‘Out,’ said Mr Hole.

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  Mr Hole’s fists bunched. They were big, hard fists which had been bunched before. ‘Problem’s gonner be all yours, boy, you push it any further with me.’

  Maiden rather thought he meant it. This was where you had either to blow your cover and bring out your warrant card or leave quietly.

  Seffi Callard prodded the Jeep back on to the road. Big, solid clouds were walling up the sky in the east; over the hills a weak sun was trying to get its fingers in the cracks.

  ‘He’s interesting,’ Maiden said. ‘He’s extremely interesting.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you think so, Bobby. I found him merely repellant. What the hell were you talking about? Who’s Gary?’

  ‘Don’t know. But he frightens Mr Hole.’

  ‘Detective games,’ Seffi Callard said.

  ‘And how many times did he tell you how wrong you were about him and his son’s girlfriend?’

  ‘No. He didn’t, did he?’ She took a right, signposted for Cheltenham. ‘Go on. Get it over.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You need to ask if I was pre-informed, by anyone called Gary or anyone else about Hole and this girl.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘No. Do you believe me?’

  ‘As a copper or as me?’

  On the way here, she’d asked him if his death experience had made it harder to be a policeman. A very perceptive question.

  ‘But that’s irrelevant right now,’ he said. ‘Hole evidently thinks this Gary might have given you the information, but he’s saying if it was Gary, then that’s OK. He just wants to know. So Hole’s relationship with Gary is a bit risky. Uncertain. He doesn’t know where he is with Gary, but if it’s Gary playing a little joke, then Mr Hole’s going to laugh along with him.’

  ‘A psychologist, too.’

  ‘And consider Mr Hole. Is he a wimp? Is he a big softy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s that say about Gary, then?’

  ‘What sort of people are these, Bobby?’

  ‘Iffy.’

  ‘You mean criminal?’

  ‘Well… Most people, if they want you off the premises, they start threatening to call the police. He didn’t.’

  ‘Now just a minute …’ She suddenly swung the Jeep into the side of the road, half on the grass verge, stopped with a judder. He saw she was sweating lightly. ‘I don’t mix with people like that.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Maiden said.

  She closed her eyes tight, moistening her lips. ‘And I didn’t mean that how it sounded. This … this is a complete nightmare.’

  Maiden thought about Justin with his chest pushed in like a toothpaste tube. He thought about someone having Grayle’s name, trying to find her. He nodded.

  Seffi turned in her seat to face him, breathed hard, all that world-weary, languorous cool in rags. ‘I … swear … I swear to God, Bobby, if there’s something bad going on, involving me, I swear to you I don’t—’

  She put out a hand to him and then drew it back; her skin was glistening like dark honey.

  ‘I know Grayle thinks I’m holding out. I am not. What I do … OK, it’s a profession full of frauds and liars and self-deluded people and mad people. But I haven’t lied to Grayle or Marcus and I’m not lying to you now. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know where to turn. I don’t have any … mystical insights about it. I’m scared. I’m scared in this world and I have no refuge …’

  ‘… anywhere else,’ Maiden said softly. ‘I wouldn’t claim to understand about that. Or maybe I would, I don’t know.’ He reached on to the back seat for his jacket, pulled out a scuffed notebook, a mobile phone. ‘Let’s find out what we can.’

  ‘Who are you calling?’

  ‘DCI in Gloucester, Ron Foxworth.’

  ‘Is that altogether safe?’

  ‘It’s taking a small chance.’ Maiden prodded out the number. ‘But we shared secrets once. Back in the Met.’

  Meaning Martin Riggs; knowing about Riggs still constituted a kind of bond. He asked Gloucester Police for Foxworth’s extension, gave his name.

  ‘Might be a waste of time, of course. It’s just a feeling.’

  ‘You’re going to tell him about Justin Sharpe?’

  ‘God, no. Let them find Justin in their own time. Or if it looks like dragging out too long, maybe we’ll give them an anonymous nudge. I’ll have to tell him this is informal. I’m on leave, helping a friend. Though whether he’ll be in this time on a Sat … Ron?’

  ‘Bobby Maiden? You pick your bloody times, son. Is this anything urgent?’

  ‘It’s just a quick question. Off the record.’

  ‘What bloody record’s that? Nah, see, I’ve got a murder on, Bobby. I hate murders at weekends, don’t you? Where are you?’

  Justin?

  ‘No problem, Ron. I’ll call you again. I was only going to ask if you knew a bloke called Hole.’

  Brief silence.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Cheltenham area. Well-off bloke. Nice bungalow with a long drive. I’ve just left there, as it happens.’

  ‘Les Hole? You’ve bloody—’

  ‘Could be.’

&nbs
p; ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, Bobby,’ Ron said, collecting himself together. ‘I’ve got a press conference at half-seven. Want to do that myself, make sure we get the right points over. I’ll be free about… eight, eight-thirty? Where’d you wanna meet up? Somewhere quiet, yeah?’

  ‘Wherever. I don’t know this area too well.’

  ‘We’re setting up the incident room at Stroud, so … Look, gimme your mobile number, I’ll call you back. I really do have to do this presser.’

  ‘You won’t get much in the Sundays, Ron. Not at that time.’

  ‘Bobby, I’m desperate for an ID, and there’s gonna be no nice, peaceful pictures of this poor bugger to show around.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Axe job, it looks like. Geezer found in a ditch, face split like a bloody walnut.’

  ‘Right,’ Maiden said. ‘Mmm.’

  XXIV

  ‘WELL, WE’LL BE HAVING A HOLIDAY FIRST,’ ONE OF LAST WEEK’S Lottery winners says – this is a syndicate of five school-dinner ladies from Basingstoke. ‘Taking the kids to Disney World. And, of course, we’ve already bought ourselves a BMW.’

  ‘Yaaaaaaaak,’ Kelvyn Kite shrieks, stabbing a scornful talon at the monitor.

  The audience whoops. The apparent need of so many Lottery winners to rush out and buy a BMW has become a running joke of Kelvyn’s ever since the appalling Sherwin family, from Banbury, immediately bought five of them – his, hers, teenage kids’, granny’s … and granny didn’t even drive.

  ‘Stop it, now.’ Cindy frowns at the bird, pointedly ignoring the autocue. ‘It’s none of your business. People are allowed to buy whatever cars they like when they win two million pounds.’

  ‘Watch it, Cindy,’ Jo says in the earpiece. ‘I think you’ve taken this one far enough, don’t you?’

  ‘This has gone far enough,’ Cindy tells the bird.

  ‘Awk,’ says the cynical Kelvyn Kite.

  ‘Anyway, I like the Lada,’ Cindy says.

  Laughter. Kelvyn sulks, beak in the air. Cindy ignores him, turning to the autocue.

  ‘But one of last week’s big winners has gone one better than a BMW. Colin Seymour is the headmaster of a school in Shropshire for children with learning difficulties. He’s also a newly qualified pilot … So what was the first thing Colin did with his one point seven million …? Why, he bought the very plane in which he’d learned to fly!’

  Cue VT. Up it comes on the monitor. A little Cessna winging in to a rural airstrip. Stirring music. Cut to genial Colin Seymour stepping out, grinning. He is tall, lean and bearded and wears a Second World War flying ace’s leather jacket.

  ‘Just under two minutes for this one, Cindy,’ Jo reminds him. ‘And – remembering what he does for a living – no jokes at all.’

  ‘Wilco, chief.’ Cindy is relaxed about this. Reckless he might be, but he’s not stupid. Camelot, the BBC and BMW, however, are big targets; they might not like it, but they can’t appear mean-spirited enough to censure a man in late middle-age and a midnight-blue diamanté evening dress.

  Cindy goes for a little sit down, off set – you don’t want the audience laughing at the wrong time, even if they aren’t being transmitted – until Jo says, ‘Thirty seconds, Cindy. Get ready to brandish the bird.’

  Cindy slips his right arm into Kelvyn and walks out, an eye on the monitor. Colin Seymour is surrounded by happy children from his school. He’s showing them his plane. Finally, in close up, Colin says, ‘And what I’m planning to do this summer is to buy a slightly bigger aircraft in which I’ll be able to take small groups of the kids up for short flights. Which will, you know, be a really fantastic experience for all of us.’

  Jo says, ‘Five seconds … Kelvyn.’

  Colin Seymour turns to an engaging gap-toothed youngster. ‘What are we going to do, then, Charlie? We’re going to fly like …’

  Charlie beams. ‘A kite!’

  And Camera One goes in tight on Kelvyn, who snaps his beak modestly.

  Cindy can’t resist it. He looks dubious.

  ‘Fly like him, lovely, and you’ll never find the blessed airstrip!’

  Kelvyn shuts his beak and sulks; the audience roars.

  With his habitual sigh of satisfaction at being able to drive west, beyond the hard lights of London, Cindy tossed Kelvyn’s pink suitcase on to the back seat of his new saloon car. A Honda Accord, it was, he could never have a BMW now.

  However, before leaving the car park, he put on the Honda’s interior light and tore open the bulky envelope which had arrived for him, care of the BBC. Young Jo had handed it to him with something of a grimace.

  For, at the foot of the expensive, parchment-coloured envelope was inscribed,

  Overcross: experience it.

  Inside was a leaflet and a small, stiff-backed book. No covering letter, so perhaps he was just one person among several hundred on some marketing firm’s mailing list.

  The leaflet showed a photograph of towers against a red sunset. It was headed,

  Overcross Castle:

  The Veil is Lifted

  On page two there was a brief explanation.

  Overcross Castle, in the foothills of the Malverns, was built in the 1860s (on the site of a medieval castle) by the Midlands industrialist Barnaby Crole, who made his fortune from the South Wales mining industry.

  The Victorian Gothic castle was named Overcross after the nearby hamlet, but for Crole this had a deeper meaning: it was a place where, he believed, our world and the world of spirits might overlap.

  With its romantic towers and turrets looming from the woods, Overcross quickly became famous for weekend gatherings, at which distinguished mediums of the day, including the revered Daniel Dunglas-Home, would conduct seances attended by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and an ardent spiritualist.

  The eminent scientist and psychologist Dr Anthony Abblow, himself an experienced trance-medium, became so enamoured of Overcross Castle and its unique atmosphere that he took an apartment in the castle, where he spent many years engaged in experiments into the meaning of life and death.

  Huge and increasingly difficult to heat, the castle ceased to be a private home, became a school and then a hotel and was then derelict for many years before being purchased by the celebrated consultant-mesmerist, paranormal investigator and television presenter Kurt Campbell.

  Now Kurt Campbell is ready to reopen Overcross to continue the work begun by Crole and Abblow in the Victorian heyday of psychic studies.

  And from Wednesday 18 March, when Overcross hosts its first Festival of the Spirit for over a century, you can join an exclusive house party, a recreation of a Victorian spiritualist gathering with Kurt Campbell himself and one of the world’s most celebrated mediums as guest of honour.

  Cindy’s eye travelled to the very much smaller print at the foot of page three, where he learned that one might become a privileged house guest on the night of this extraordinary psychic soirée for a mere £500 for a double room.

  Perhaps this reflected the deficit in Kurt’s finances, resulting from his failure to become the most expensive presenter in the history of the Lottery Show.

  Barnaby Crole would turn in his grave.

  And indeed, perhaps Kurt was hoping for that. Or for some kind of psychic fireworks, anyway.

  Cindy glanced at the booklet. It was a reprint of a small history of Overcross Castle and its founder, originally published in 1936. He pushed book and leaflet back into the envelope.

  On reflection, he suspected the mailing list had been drawn up prior to Kurt’s appearance on the Lottery Show. He wondered what Kurt’s reaction would be if he actually turned up.

  Meanwhile … home.

  Only a humble caravan, mind, but think of the location. And the bonus, this time, of a visit to little Grayle and her irascible employer – that somewhat lesser known castle owner – with rather an intriguing purpose. For which one would require energy and attunement.

  Therefore, at first light t
omorrow, taking his painted shamanic drum, he would follow the shining path to the gorse-prickled hill overlooking the sea on one side and, on the other, the Preselis. Perhaps even as high as the great magnetic centre Carn Ingli, which he was presumptuous enough to consider his power base.

  He would stand alone in the stiff, wiry, sheep-munched grass and give thanks to the elements, to the forces of earth and air, sea and sky which, together, became something approximating to God.

  And pray. In his fashion.

  Avoiding the horrors of the M25, Cindy found his way to the M4, the motorway of the west. Before the junction, as usual, he put on the radio to catch the ten o’clock news on ‘Five Live’.

  And with that shamanic flair for pinpointing the moment which, in more pleasant circumstances, would be termed serendipitous, the switch clicked on this:

  ‘… and it’s just been confirmed that the pilot who died when his two-seater aircraft overshot a runway and smashed into a barn in Shropshire has been named as Lottery jackpot winner, Colin Seymour.

  ‘42-year-old Mr Seymour was headmaster of a special school for children with learning difficulties, and earlier tonight millions of viewers of the BBC’s National Lottery Live saw him showing pupils the plane he’d bought with his one point seven million pound win …’

  Cindy drove numbly into the mesh of lights at the M4 junction.

  He was tasting the bitter tang from the sea.

  XXV

  RON WAS WAITING FOR THEM IN A LAYBY ABOVE STROUD, AS arranged. Seffi flashed the headlights and Ron lumbered across from his Rover, a bulky bloke in an old anorak. Maiden got into the back of the Jeep so he could stretch his legs in the passenger seat and appraise Seffi by the interior lights.

  ‘They were right about you having exotic friends these days, Bobby. I’m sorry, love, you don’t mind exotic, do you? Ron Foxworth, my name.’

  ‘Hello.’ Seffi a touch guarded.

  ‘You’re the one I been reading about. The one who’s disappeared.’

  ‘Psychic Seffi,’ she said with distaste.

  ‘Better watch what I’m thinking then, hadn’t I?’ Ron said.

  ‘It doesn’t work like that, Mr Foxworth.’