Mean Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  Kurt Campbell actively fancied Grayle.

  Which was … understandable. Grayle was extremely fanciable. In her little red dress. With her hair up, fastened by one of those Indian-type things with a stick through it. With her small face and the sparkle in her eyes and that loose, easy smile, the quick, nervous gestures, the animation of her.

  Maiden concentrated on altering the exposure on his camera. He changed lenses and took a picture of Kurt from floor level, all groin and his head reduced.

  ‘I, uh …’ Grayle turned over her tape, clicked it into the machine, set it running again. ‘What I have to do at this point, Kurt, is get some nuts and bolts stuff, OK?’ Kurt’s PR woman appeared in the doorway. Severe, business-suited, clutching a mobile phone. Probably no older than Kurt, Maiden thought, except in attitude.

  ‘Kurt, you have another appointment at—’

  Kurt looked up only briefly. ‘Delay them, Francine.’

  Francine nodded, scowled at Grayle, disappeared.

  ‘Sure,’ Kurt said. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘Well, about the organization of the festival. Like, is it just you putting up the finance, or do you have backers?’

  ‘I’ve been able to raise most of the finance myself, but sure, there are some people with a strong interest in the subject who’ve given us some … padding.’

  ‘Anyone we’ve heard of? Like anyone famous?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so, Alice. I mean … look, this is not a political movement collecting supportive celebrities. This is in the nature of a serious inquiry.’

  ‘Right. Uh, the medium you’ve got for the seance. Who’s she … or he … gonna be? I’ve heard a few names on the grapevine … Betty Shine, Eileen Drewery, Persephone Callard …’

  Kurt sat back. ‘What I should say here, Alice, is that the name of the medium is not important. It’s the event itself. And the location. We believe there’s a resonance at Overcross because of its history and its actual situation – whether you’re talking about the juxtaposition of so-called leylines or the geophysical properties of the site itself, the rocks the castle’s built on—’

  ‘But this is not the actual castle, is it?’

  ‘It’s a Victorian house built in the castle grounds, in the neo-Gothic style. Built on the site of a medieval chapel, we understand.’

  ‘So, the house itself doesn’t have what you’d call an extensive history.’

  ‘It has what you’d call a concentrated history.’

  ‘It’s haunted?’

  ‘There’s evidence of that, certainly. For instance, a gamekeeper accidentally shot himself with his own gun and his ghost is said to prowl the grounds.’

  ‘John Hodge, right? I, uh, read the booklet. Is your medium gonna try to contact him?’

  ‘He’s one of our projects, yes.’

  ‘Cool,’ Grayle said. ‘You worked a lot with mediums before, Kurt?’

  ‘To an extent.’

  ‘Which brings me back to my question of a few moments ago … which, uh, kind of got lost … What is the connection between hypnotism and mediumship?’

  ‘Well, trance, Alice. They have trance in common. Mediums operate in trance, and the huge interest in hypnotism – which began in your own country, of course – happened to coincide with the Victorian spiritualist boom. Hypnotism was also used for healing, as Mesmer himself did back in the eighteenth century, and this began to be tied in with spiritual healing. What it comes down to is that, at the time, these were two fields of study approached in the same spirit of adventure, and I think the fusion of psychology and spirituality is a good, solid base from which to explore the human condition.’

  ‘So, do you possess mediumistic powers yourself?’

  Kurt smiled. ‘Sadly not. Obviously, I’ve practised self-hypnosis but I’ve never been approached, while in trance, by … outside influences.’

  ‘You’ve been a … friend of Persephone Callard. I think that’s widely known.’

  Kurt shifted.

  ‘Not so widely,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, well, we – the magazine – have connections.’

  ‘Evidently. Sure, yeah, Seffi and I were close for a while and we still have a professional liaison going from time to time, but that’s all.’

  ‘But she’s not one of the festival’s backers?’

  ‘Certainly not. You’re pushing here, aren’t you, Alice? Look, the backers are entitled to their anonymity. There’s still, unfortunately, a stigma attached to spiritualism.’

  ‘But you’re clearly not afraid of that yourself.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of anything,’ Kurt said. He glanced down at Maiden, like he’d noticed a bluebottle on his trousers. ‘That’s enough pictures, OK, matey?’

  ‘Bloke thinks he’s a god,’ Bobby Maiden said, unlocking the truck.

  ‘Well, you know,’ climbing in, Grayle hid a small smile, ‘he undoubtedly has – to use Mesmer’s own term – a certain animal magnetism.’

  Bobby switched on the lights, pulled away from the parking area into the centre of Cheltenham. ‘I’m not entirely sure about you going to this seance.’

  ‘Oh, you’re not, huh? The little defenceless female walking into the dark castle?’

  ‘We don’t know that he hasn’t realized who you really are. That he wasn’t bluffing.’

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t bluffing, Bobby. Women can tell this kind of thing.’

  Smiling into the darkness.

  Bobby said nothing.

  ‘It’s a real shame they won’t allow photographers in, but you can understand that – all those flashes.’

  She decided not to bring up the question of whether they should doorstep Seward – she had no idea where he lived, guessed Bobby did but that he’d had enough for tonight.

  They headed out of town through sparse traffic.

  ‘Curious Callard never mentioned Kurt.’

  ‘Why should she?’

  ‘No reason, I guess. Unless there’s still something between them.’

  ‘Blokes try to use her’, Bobby said, ‘in all kinds of ways.’

  ‘Aw, poor kid,’ Grayle said.

  They approached the roundabout in the area known as the Rotunda, where Chatterton Mansions was.

  ‘You worked it all out yet about the apartment, Bobby?’

  What with talking to the removal guys and getting to look around the place, then dashing directly over to Kurt Campbell’s hotel, they hadn’t had much opportunity to discuss what they’d found out at Chatterton Mansions.

  ‘If it wasn’t even his flat,’ Bobby said, ‘it’s just further proof that Seward was using Barber as a respectable front to get Seffi to do the seance.’

  ‘We established that. But why not use Barber’s own apartment if it’s in the same building?’

  ‘Probably because he didn’t want all those people – people like that – in his home.’

  ‘But if Seward was in a position to put the bite on Barber, was Barber in a position to argue over details?’

  ‘What other reason could there be?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Grayle said. ‘Hey, you get a whiff of the dope in that bedroom?’

  ‘Tart’s boudoir,’ Bobby said. ‘Wardrobe full of handcuffs and rubberwear.’

  ‘You looked?’

  ‘I’m guessing, Grayle.’

  ‘What did those guys call the apartment?’

  ‘A show flat.’

  ‘Like, an example of what you could expect if you bought an apartment in the block?’

  ‘It’s bollocks, isn’t it? But why are they moving the furniture?’

  ‘Somebody actually bought the place?’

  ‘One room only?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Grayle said. ‘That doesn’t add up. It’s like they were getting rid of all the stuff in there on account of it was messed up or something.’

  ‘Tainted by bad vibes,’ Bobby said.

  ‘You’re spending too much time with Cindy.’ She leaned back, watching the lights of
the town receding in the wing mirror. ‘I guess we’re no further forward, Bobby. We’re just collecting more questions. Maybe some of it’ll hang together with whatever Cindy and Marcus discovered at Overcross.’

  When they got back to St Mary’s – around nine p.m., this would be – the wind was up again and a branch had snapped from one of the old trees which clashed like antlers over the mountain road.

  The heater in the truck didn’t work. Grayle had on her raincoat, and it was too damn thin.

  She thought Kurt Campbell was slick and arrogant and, for all his mastery of the techniques of hypnotism and his knowledge of the history of spiritualism, probably dangerously superficial. She wanted to go to this expensive Victorian seance tomorrow night about as much as she wanted to revisit the place where Ersula’s body had been found.

  And there was the problem of Callard. She’d need to get in fast with the Alice D. Thornborough if they came face to face. Be kind of interesting, she supposed, to see how Callard reacted to Kurt’s guest.

  For reasons of perversity, Grayle had allowed Bobby to go on thinking she’d found Campbell intriguing, attractive, magnetic, all of that.

  They drove through the castle gate. Cindy’s Honda was parked in the yard. She was relieved they’d gotten back.

  Then she spotted Cindy himself waiting under the bulkhead light with Malcolm the dog.

  Cindy looked bedraggled in his twinset and tweed skirt, truly the maiden aunt fallen on hard times. The truck’s headlights threw his face into hard relief: deep lines and no make-up, the mauve hair blown on end by the wind.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Bobby said.

  XLIII

  YOU COULD SEE OVERCROSS CASTLE FROM A DISTANCE OF MAYBE A mile, across countryside which would be lush in summer. Signs told of cider farms and a vineyard a few hundred yards and at least a whole season away. The light-green glaze of new growth on the trees looked like an illusion in the scrabbling wind.

  ‘I just knew it was gonna be like this.’ Inside the heaterless truck, Grayle rummaged in her bag for her long, woollen scarf.

  The house had towers and turrets and battlements and all those other Son of Robin Hood features. Viewed through the spiky trees, it looked stark and threatening, more like a true medieval castle than any of the actual ones she’d seen. Made Marcus’s ruins look like garden ornaments. Behind it you could see, in the distance, the hill of Great Malvern with white houses and hotels strung along it like a necklace of teeth.

  Billionaires in California had erected mock castles like this, and she’d marvelled at a couple when she was a kid and her father was lecturing out west.

  But California was California and didn’t have the weather for it. Jesus, the first day of spring tomorrow, the vernal equinox, and was that snow on the truck’s windshield?

  ‘Bobby, is that snow?’

  ‘It’s not volcanic dust,’ Bobby Maiden said. He looked unhappy and unsure about everything.

  As Grayle supposed they both were, since Cindy gave them the news about Marcus. The curse has come upon me, said the Lady of Shalott, Grayle thought drably. Wishing she was anyplace but here, as they came to an old brick wall, about ten feet high, with trees hard against it and a long sign along the top.

  Experience…

  THE FESTIVAL OF THE SPIRIT.

  MARCH 20-25

  And then a gatehouse. There was a cop on duty behind a barrier. Except, when he came over, Grayle saw he wasn’t a cop, although the uniform was damn close; Bobby thought so too, muttering something about take away the red armband and you could have him for impersonation. Bobby wound down the window and Grayle handed him the press passes she’d been given by Francine, Kurt Campbell’s haughty PA.

  ‘We also have a stall,’ she told the almost-cop, leaning across from the passenger side. ‘Stall thirty-eight?’

  ‘Hang on a moment.’ He studied the passes before pushing them back. He was a big young guy with an impassive, military kind of look, and Grayle saw the word FORCEFIELD on his red armband. ‘Bacton, is it? Somebody’s already there. Came about an hour ago.’

  ‘Yeah, we know.’

  ‘Right – Avenue Three. End of the drive, turn right by the tape and the arrows and you’ll see the way it’s divided – stalls one to fourteen, and so on. It’s your third, right at the end.’

  ‘Thank you, Constable.’ Bobby wound up the window. You could see an angry fire had been rekindled inside him, could almost smell the smoke.

  ‘Oh, I really don’t like the way you said that,’ Grayle said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘This is your private obsession taking over. At bottom, you’re just as bad as this guy Foxworth. You have a tenuous connection here between Campbell and this Riggs and Riggs is your personal bogeyman, so you’re thinking like maybe if you can build Seward into the picture … right?’

  ‘The only picture I’m getting’, Bobby said, ‘is Vic Clutton lying dead outside the house he was finally happy to call home.’

  ‘Oh boy.’ Grayle wound the big scarf around her neck and tightened the belt of her raincoat as the truck entered the grounds of Overcross Castle.

  At close to eleven a.m. on a working day and the festival not due to open until that evening, there were probably fewer than a hundred people there – most of them around an expensive-looking restaurant marquee which, presumably, had heating, and was the only part of the site that looked remotely inviting.

  The festival was set up in three sloping fields which might once have been parkland, leading up to the stone terrace surrounding Overcross Castle. Most of the hundred or so stalls were open-fronted display tents with room for about five people. One was being fitted out as an esoteric bookstore, another was figuring to sell aromatic candles which, with the wind and snow and all, nobody could hope to light.

  They left Marcus’s faded blue truck next to Cindy’s Honda on a cindered parking lot reserved for stallholders. Hundreds of yards of wooden decking-track had been laid across grass which was destined otherwise to become a boot-churned bog.

  Avenue Three was right under the highest part of the castle, a round tower with a conical roof and a lightning conductor which prodded the bruised low cloud like an old-fashioned hypodermic syringe in a junkie’s arm. Stall thirty-eight marked the furthest point of the festival campus and was right next to the toilet block, a line of white Portaloos – already the source of a seriously acrimonious dispute, as Grayle and Bobby approached.

  ‘… don’t care if it was a late booking, this is not bloody good enough, is it, sonny?’

  Young guy with a clipboard backing off. ‘Look, it’s the best we—’

  ‘Four yards … four yards … from the stinking toilets? Can you imagine the state those makeshift shithouses are going to be in by next Sunday? I mean, have you thought for one bloody second what this means, from our point of view? Well, I’ll tell you … It means that whenever anybody who’s been here comes across a copy of The Vision in future, they’re going to associate it immediately with the stink of stale piss and probably steaming vomit.’

  ‘Now look, those loos are the most hygienic—’

  ‘Makes no odds, sonny. By Saturday morning we’ll still all be swilling diarrhoea from the canvas.’

  ‘I can definitely assure you these toilets will be cleaned every—’

  ‘Pah!’ And Malcolm the dog barked once, as if in support.

  ‘Look, if you’ve got a complaint, you’ll have to put it in writing.’ The boy tucking his clipboard under his arm, turning away. Bad move, Grayle thought.

  ‘Don’t … think … you’re … walking … away … from … this.’ The force of nature in the glasses and the tweed suit, and the dog, advancing on the poor kid, planting a foot in front of his. ‘I want another site.’

  ‘I keep telling you, we haven’t got another site.’

  ‘In that case, I want two hundred pounds off the charge. Or I’ll be obliged to take this to Kurt bloody Campbell himself.’

  ‘What?’<
br />
  ‘I’ll show the smarmy bastard what a hypnotic trance feels like.’

  ‘Did you really say two hundred pounds?’

  ‘Seems eminently bloody reasonable to me. And I’m sure you wouldn’t like the good vibes to be soiled by the sound of me telling everyone, including the press and the local television, what a shoddy little sideshow this is, organized by a slimy tosser with no—’

  ‘All right!’ The kid held up both hands, dropping his clipboard in the mud. ‘I’ll go across to the admin office and see what I can do.’

  He started to walk back along the decking then turned around. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

  Grayle fought for control as the bottle blonde in the tweed suit glared at this hapless kid through plain-glass spectacles.

  ‘Bacton,’ Cindy snarled. ‘Imelda. Miss.’

  A short while later Grayle went back to the cold comfort of the truck and called the infirmary in Worcester on Bobby’s mobile.

  ‘Are you a relative?’ the staff nurse demanded.

  The snow had stopped. It was never going to stick, but it was so bitter that Grayle’s hand was numb around the cellphone.

  ‘Well, I … Yeah, I’m … I’m his niece. Alice Thornborough.’

  ‘Well, all I can tell you, Miss Thornborough,’ the nurse’s voice was unexpectedly clipped and frigid, ‘is that he’s as comfortable as can be expected.’

  ‘And in plain English, that means?’

  ‘It means’, the sister said, ‘that everything about him is weak except his language.’

  ‘Uh, yeah, that figures. He kind of hates hospitals and doctors. Doesn’t even have a thing about nurses in uniform.’

  ‘He wanted to discharge himself this morning, but when he found out how much pain was involved in getting out of bed, I think he finally understood that he needed us rather more than we need him.’

  ‘But he is gonna be OK? Isn’t he?’

  ‘If he accepts this as a severe warning.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Grayle said pessimistically. How was this woman supposed to understand that if there was anything to which Marcus Bacton reacted badly, it was a severe warning?

  ‘Can I see him?’