Mean Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  ‘No.’

  ‘Depressing, or what?’ She started to laugh, bleakly. He thought about Gary Seward who he’d never met – and pushed him away again.

  Quite soon, the laugh went out of Seffi’s voice but remained in her big amber eyes. Where it reflected a different mood: lighter, untroubled.

  Maiden felt a peculiar tingle in his gut.

  Seffi Callard’s eyes were shining with irony. Not her eyes, he thought, and a featherlight shiver started in his spine, a small, tremulous excitement, a feeling of someone coming towards him, weaving lightly through the trees.

  And she said, ‘It’s all right, guv. It’s all right now.’

  Her eyes very much someone else’s eyes.

  The room around them was curtained with shadows and he heard the cracking of the trees in the wind, as though there were no walls.

  No walls. The warm shiver enveloped him; he was aware of them both inside it.

  She put out a hand and he took it.

  She said, ‘Come on, guv, help yourself to the sweet trolley.’

  Bobby Maiden began to weep.

  Part Four

  From Bang to Wrongs: A Bad Boy’s Book,

  by GARY SEWARD

  It amuses me when people say, ‘There ain’t no justice.’ In my world there is, every time. One thing we have always believed in is that people should get what is coming to them, by whatever means may be appropriate at the time.

  Let me tell you the story of Billy Spindler.

  Billy was the scum of the earth. A rapist. By which I don’t mean the kind of poor sod what goes down for seven years on account of getting a bit pissed and not hearing her say no. I mean a real pervert what gets off on degrading ladies. (As you may have gathered, I hate perverts of all persuasions, but that is by the by in this instance.) Another reason Billy was scum was on account of being a grass, and when he was nicked for sexually assaulting a schoolteacher, while wearing a black balaclava, on a building site at Chiswick, he was quick to take the Coward’s Way Out by striking a bargain with the police, as a result of which three of his neighbours were arrested in connection with a very clean raid on a branch of the Bradford and Bingley Building Society, as it was then known. Naturally, the whole community was up in arms about this, but the scum was hard to get at, without an element of personal risk, due to police protection, which was an outrage in itself.

  Now, justice works in peculiar ways and you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. What happened was in some respects regrettable, but the law of karma does not require permission from the Crown Prosecution Service to take effect.

  What happened was that, two months later, to the day and the hour, the same schoolteacher was raped by a man wearing a black balaclava.

  Well, most of the police had been well choked by that deal with Billy Spindler and, alibi or not, there was no way Billy was walking away from this one. He was convicted in record time and done eleven years, and not very pleasant years by all accounts, mostly in Parkhurst, where he ended up in solitary for his own safety and even then discovered he was not totally safe after a screw was bribed to look the other way.

  Billy Spindler learned the hard way that certain behaviour cannot be tolerated, especially if perpetrated by a pervert.

  And in case you were thinking this was hard on the poor schoolteacher, soon after she received an envelope containing ten thousand pounds in clean money from ‘a wellwisher’. So, there you are, everybody was happy, apart from Billy Spindler, which is how it should be.

  XXVIII

  AWAKENING INTO HALF-LIGHT FROM THE CELL-LIKE WINDOW, CINDY put on the bedside lamp and his eyes met the eyes of Kelvyn Kite, sullenly shambling in the chair by the wall at the bottom of the bed.

  You cowardly old tart.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’ Cindy’s voice was morning hoarse. ‘You don’t have to rub it in.’

  What the hell are you doing here?

  ‘I ran. I ran away, all right? Ran away, I did, from the bitter tang of the cold sea.’

  You never learn, boy. Never realize when you’re on top. Always looking down, you are, into the darkness.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Cindy said. ‘Too early for the inquisition.’

  He never wore a watch. He guessed it was not yet seven. Too early, also, to get up and disturb Amy. He reached for something to read and discovered the small, stiff-backed book sent to him in Kurt Campbell’s promotion package: The Mysteries of Overcross Castle by G.L. Mirebrook.

  A ring of Enid Blyton, that title. The facsimile edition from 1935 had fewer than fifty pages. Cindy flicked it open near the middle.

  for Abblow, it appears, was both jealous and suspicious of Daniel Dunglas-Home who was, by this time, acquiring an international reputation arising from the extraordinary phenomena which were said to gather around him like moths to a lamp. Home was able to produce not only spectacular visual effects but also sounds, evoking in one instance the tumult of waves and the creaking of a ship’s timbers; he also was able to levitate and had been seen to float around the room; he could even, it was attested, assume the physical size and shape of a particular spirit, appearing, furthermore, to increase his own height by several inches.

  Crole had met Home at Malvern Spa, where the spiritualist was receiving the hydropathic cure for an illness of the nerves brought on by difficulties and upset in his personal life. In the two years up to 1871, Home was a regular visitor to Overcross, where he said he found the atmosphere most conducive to the physical manifestation of spirits.

  This, it should be remembered, was a period when spiritualism was considered by many to be a legitimate extension of science, and when science was advancing in so many other daring directions that many people believed it was only a question of time before mankind was able not only to prove the existence of life after death but to engage in regular meaningful intercourse with the departed. Such a development was felt to be imminent, and Anthony Abblow, who had practised for some years as a medical doctor, was determined that it should be he, a scientist and scholar as well as a medium, and not the likes of Dunglas-Home with his ‘carnival tricks’, who proved the validity of survival on a spiritual plane.

  When Daniel Dunglas-Home ceased to be invited to Overcross, it was widely believed that Barnaby Crole had been ‘poisoned’ against him by Abblow, who had become intimate with Crole to the extent of being invited to set up his own apartment within the castle. It was here that the two men began to experiment in earnest – and in secret. Many were the rumours that circulated in Overcross and the neighbouring villages and even in Great Malvern itself, it being alleged that Crole and Abblow had experimented on animals. However, this was dismissed as nonsense by Crole, who invited the vicar and senior parishioners to dinner with Abblow and himself to explain that their activities were in no way irreligious and would be seen, when ultimately published, to have made a substantial contribution to the sum of human knowledge. However, nothing was ever published and the experiments seemed to have ceased shortly after the death of a gamekeeper, John Hodge, as a result of the misfiring of his shotgun, and the rumour that his ghost was haunting the castle grounds. These rumours persisted even after the departure of Abblow and the eventual death of Crole, who became a recluse but continued to make large donations towards the upkeep and development of the community.

  Cindy smiled. How many people would be prepared to pay dearly to watch whichever medium Kurt Campbell had hired go strolling through the midnight woods attempting to have ‘meaningful intercourse’ with the restless spirit of Old Jack, the gamekeeper?

  Hadn’t told little Grayle this, mind, but even as a shaman he’d always been a touch contemptuous of spiritualism. The shamanic way was to achieve intercourse with the elements and the spirits of the ancestors – in a more abstract sense – in order to attain continuity and oneness with the earth. The nurturing of a sticky relationship with a dead individual was unnatural and usually led to psychological problems. Indeed, something must have caused Daniel Dungl
as-Home to have his nervous breakdown …

  In fact, Cindy’s own research had indicated Dunglas-Home to be, for the most part, quite genuine – the Uri Geller, or the Matthew Manning of his day.

  Or even, perhaps, the Persephone Callard?

  Miss Callard. Yes. Cindy rose. Remembering also that he needed to buy some newspapers, he felt a plummeting of the soul.

  Kelvyn Kite glared spitefully from his chair.

  Grayle collected the Sunday papers and by nine was driving between the castle walls to find …

  … still no Cherokee in the yard! Shit.

  She found Marcus in his study, delving into a book. Grayle tossed her raincoat on the sofa, dumped the string-bound bundle of papers on the desk.

  ‘So they didn’t come back.’

  ‘Appears not,’ he said, like this was of only marginal consequence.

  ‘I knew it.’

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘From the moment she was showing him her tits, right there on that sofa.’

  Marcus looked up from his book, shocked. ‘Maiden and Persephone?’

  Doing that tone of voice again. Like Callard was serious royalty, or – worse – sacred and untouchable. How could he possibly have read all those magazine stories about her and failed to take in any details of a rich, varied and predatory sex life?

  ‘One assumes they hit on something interesting. Stayed in a hotel.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘Man’s still a policeman, Underhill. Just about.’ Marcus began untying the papers. ‘And Persephone, I fear, was probably glad to get out of here, for all the use I was being.’

  ‘Jesus.’ With some effort, Grayle calmed herself. ‘Uh, no-one else called, did they?’

  ‘You mean apart from the anonymous man asking if there was a small blonde with a hatchet on the premises?’

  ‘Don’t joke, Marcus.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nobody called. Neither did the dog bark in the night. And neither … bloody hell, look at this …’ laying the People flat on the desk. ‘Some poor bastard Lottery winner died after crashing his plane, around the same time that Mars-Lewis was virtually predicting it on television.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Obviously, that’s not what it says as such, but the inference is pretty clear.’

  Grayle leaned over Marcus’s shoulder. The main piece was a straight news story about the airfield tragedy. There was also a sidebar:

  CINDY’S KITE

  QUIP FALLS

  FLAT…

  ‘Fortunate for him that they didn’t know of his … precognitive powers,’ Marcus said heavily.

  ‘Aw, Marcus, he doesn’t claim to have precognitive powers. Read it. Look, it was just an off-the-cuff one-liner. It’s all a piece of crap.’

  ‘If they knew the creature’s history,’ Marcus said, ‘they’d be making rather more of it.’

  ‘Aw, he never actually hides his interests. Anyhow, what kind of big deal is that any more? If you’re famous, you’re expected to have off-the-wall beliefs. Like Shirley McLaine and her spooks, Travolta’s Scientology … I used to write about that stuff all the time, nobody was shocked.’

  But, yeah, maybe it was a little odd that nothing so far seemed to have been written about Cindy’s Celtic wizardry. Maybe this was what was meant by the shaman’s cloak of invisibility.

  ‘Well,’ Grayle said, ‘who can say?’ Keen to get off the subject of Cindy lest, when he showed up right out the blue, Marcus might suspect collusion. It was gonna be real perilous anyway. And at this rate there’d be no Callard around when Cindy showed. It was just too bad of Bobby Maiden not to have called. Also unlike him.

  She had this awful image: a naked, post-coital Bobby, all doe-eyed and compliant, his brain turned to gloop by the witchy woman.

  Marcus was looking at her, his face still pouchy after the flu.

  ‘What?’ she said warily.

  ‘Hmm,’ Marcus murmured, as though he’d read her thoughts, which like, no way, not in a million years …

  ‘What?’ she snapped. ‘What?’

  She was standing in the doorway. She wore a pale-blue robe, like a sari, and the small glimmering was a pendant around her neck, a tiny golden cross he hadn’t noticed before.

  Maiden swung his legs down from the Victorian sofa, sat up. The orange sun came out of the diamond-paned window and into Seffi Callard’s amber eyes.

  ‘I think …’ She looked half-asleep and vaguely unsatisfied. ‘Susan, would it be?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Not quite right, is it?’

  Something slid heavily to the floor over his feet. A yellow and red striped duvet. He didn’t remember there being one last night. He sat on the edge of the sofa, naked apart from his briefs – feeling exposed now, but still bathed in strangeness.

  ‘To be quite honest, Bobby, she was becoming rather irritating.’ Seffi smiled at his unease. ‘Made her first moves within an hour of us meeting. You and I. Tiresome. How on earth is one supposed to compete with a pale, fragile little hand reaching delicately through the veil?’

  She made a weaving motion with her left hand, and the memory came back like a silver thread winding up his spine. She came and sat next to him on the sofa.

  ‘I do tend to forget. Sometimes it can be even better than sex. The afterglow. Ah …’ She glanced up. ‘What about Suzanne?’

  Bobby Maiden almost leapt from the sofa.

  ‘Good.’ She clapped her hands lightly. ‘Good.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Maiden said. ‘What are you doing?’

  Seffi did a small, rueful smile, touched his cheek with a forefinger. ‘Suzanne, yah? And she made you cry. I tell you, Bobby, that was a hell of an aphrodisiac, but it …’ she smiled wryly ‘… it might’ve ruined everything. Not worth taking the chance.’

  He remembered reaching for her, and she was gone. He remembered her waving goodnight, a small wiggle of the fingers at the doorway. Sometime in the night she must have come down and put the duvet over him.

  ‘And, to be honest, it kind of gives me the creeps. Wouldn’t have been … me, would it? And I’m such a proud bitch.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Maiden said.

  ‘Come on, guv,’ Seffi said softly. ‘It’s only fucking spiritualism. Tell me.’

  He blinked, shook his head. ‘Her name was Em. Emma. But the first time I met her she was calling herself … Suzanne.’

  She nodded.

  ‘She liked to put on this cockney persona … TV cop-talk. Guv. What’s happening, guv? You know?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘We met … erm … in the course of the job. Kind of.’ Maiden closed his eyes, his throat tightening. ‘Nothing happened. But it was going to. About to. That night. We booked into this hotel in South Wales and—’

  ‘No.’ The tips of her fingers on his lips. ‘Don’t. Don’t talk about that.’

  He wanted her to know about the sweet trolley. How, in the hotel dining room, he and Em had agreed to dispense with the sweet trolley, the last thing before …

  Him coming back into the room. Too late. Coming back to blood-soaked sheets.

  Seffi said, ‘All right. Let it go.’

  ‘Where …?’

  He wanted to ask, Where is she? Where is she now? Powerfully aware, for the first time, of why people went back to mediums, kept on going back, in a delirium of longing.

  ‘I felt it was all right. For the first time, I felt she …’

  Wasn’t blaming me.

  ‘Slept like …’ Without dreams about her.

  ‘You mustn’t want her,’ Seffi Callard said. ‘You mustn’t want her back.’

  ‘No. I mean … I know.’

  He wanted Em to go on, to fly, never to look down at him floundering.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. Half-amazed at himself.

  Seffi stood up.

  ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘there never was a Mrs Dronfield.’

  XXIX

  ‘YOU ALONE, BOBBY? I MEAN, REALLY ALONE?’

  To try and i
mprove the signal to the mobile, Maiden moved out from the wall towards the Jeep, which had been parked all night, half-concealed, on the edge of the wood.

  Nine-fifteen. Seffi upstairs, bathing and changing.

  ‘I’m alone.’

  ‘You all right, Bobby?’ Ron suspicious.

  ‘Mmm,’ Maiden said uncertainly. ‘Sure.’

  Was he alone? Was Em gone? Was he no longer carrying her death? Did he believe that?

  Or had his need for her been transferred … to someone else?

  A slippery slope. More things in heaven and earth. Oh God.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ron. Not been up long.’

  ‘I bet. Fucking hell, Bobby, you picked up a package there, my son. Everybody was saying you got religion or something, into weird beliefs, but, this …’

  ‘Seffi Callard,’ Maiden said.

  Who, for wild, incandescent moments, had been … someone else.

  Ron said, ‘See, you hanging out with a notorious voodoo lady who takes money off people for another chat with Uncle Horace who’s passed on, that’s a potentially difficult situation. The Archangel, bless him, is very much on your side right now. You don’t want to blow it.’

  The Archangel: Alan Gabriel, noted lay-preacher and Chief Constable of West Mercia. Who, as head of CID, had gathered his whole team for prayer before a major drugs raid, in order to imbue the troops with the spirit of the crusaders of old.

  ‘After your remarkable recovery from death, Bobby, and then the Green Man result, closely followed by the discreet departure of Riggs – who everybody says they spotted was a wrong-un even though nobody did – well, you were up there and gliding. Plus, Bradbury likes you. And when word floats up to Mr Gabriel that you’re religious – am I telling you something new here, Bobby?’