Mean Spirit Part 16

Maiden sat.

'Now,' Bradbury said, 'while n.o.body is suggesting you deliberately planned this man's death, being stupid enough to knock him over with your own car, there has been the more likely suggestion that you and Clutton fell out in the pub and he walked out and you followed him in your motor, in a bit of a rage, and ...'

'Whose theory is that?'

'... quickly abandoning the car and later reporting it stolen.'

'In which case, how did I get back from that layby up the bypa.s.s in time to report the theft to Lisa Starling? No buses. Could have hitched a lift, I suppose, but that would've been a risk.'

'Perhaps you're very fit, Bobby.'

'Not any more.'

'You still made it to the hospital on foot. Who told you about it, by the way?'

'Mutual friend. A nurse. Why don't you just caution me, boss?'

'This is the unofficial chat, Bobby. You see, while I'm a man best noted for not costing the Service any money when it can be avoided, you, on the other hand, are that rarity a copper who's managed to progress through actual thief-catching talent. Which, admittedly, means f.u.c.k all these days it's people like me who are valued by our masters, Home Secretary downwards. However, in these very particular circ.u.mstances, it seemed clear to me that you should be the man to take charge of Elham CID and I still believe that, all right?'

Maiden couldn't form a reply; he was losing touch with Bradbury's reality.

'But if that can gets opened now, Inspector Maiden, there's no way you'll get that job. Your career goes on ice until it's sorted. Which may be a while.'

'I don't really know what you mean.'

'You b.l.o.o.d.y do, Bobby. Now ...' Bradbury slid the thin sheaf of statements into a cardboard file '... I understand you're on leave. Two weeks. Beginning tomorrow morning.'

'Boss?'

'So, off you go. Much as we would value your input on this vexed issue, I'm afraid we can't afford to pay you, Bobby.'

'Pay's not a problem,' Maiden said.

'Go home, lad. I don't believe you murdered b.l.o.o.d.y Clutton, but I'm not having you anywhere near the investigation. Until we pull somebody, we'll tell the media it was a hit and run and the car was nicked, which is why the driver p.i.s.sed off. We won't tell them who it was nicked from.'

'Somebody will,' Maiden said.

'And I shall make it known', Bernard Bradbury half-rose, 'that if anybody leaks this, I will have his b.a.l.l.s on a saucer, next to his warrant card. And you I don't want you muddying waters. I don't want any freelance stuff, any private sniffing around. If you go away which I strongly recommend leave me a note with address and phone number. In fact, take your mobile and keep it charged.'

'What if I disappear?'

'You won't. Will you?'

'No,' Maiden said.

'Right,' Bradbury said. 'Have a nice time.'

'Guy's right,' Sister Anderson said over after-midnight fish and chips in the hospital grounds. 'How's he gonnae get to the bottom of it with you trampling the evidence?'

It was Andy's breaktime. Maiden had bought the chips from a van outside Feeny Park.

'It's a question of what they wanted the most, Bobby you set up or Vic out the way. No' for you to speculate. Get out the place, let the boss guys take care of the cleaning.'

'Except they won't. In the end, they'll just recarpet,' Maiden said gloomily. 'They don't want the scandal and they don't want to spend the money. Nothing changes.'

'In which case, you're no' gonnae change it on your own, are you, son?' Andy stabbed at her chips with a wooden fork. 'Jesus G.o.d, Bobby, for a guy working tae expand his inner consciousness and find enlightenment, you can be a real dense b.a.s.t.a.r.d sometimes. I was doing Sat.u.r.day night patch-up jobs on Victor Clutton when you were still writing to Santa Claus, and I can tell you, this is no' what the guy wid want. And don't you go canonizing him. He'd only p.a.w.n his halo.'

Maiden smiled. Andy looked up as an ambulance came in no flashing lights, so that was OK.

'Mind, y'ought to tell Marcus Bacton Vic's gone. If the auld thug hadnae been around that day at the castle, Marcus's guts'd be spread over his own doorstep.'

'I'll ring him tomorrow.'

'Why don't you just go call on him. Stay awhile in his wee dairy, borrow some of his weirdy books and contemplate your immortal soul.'

'What, like you contemplated yours?' Maiden said. 'Aw, ah'm gettin' oot o' this, Bobby. Ah'm awa tae the sticks tae be a healer. See, when it comes down to it, you're still here and I'm still here because we're half-afraid it's where we're meant to be.'

'No' a problem. I'll jump when I'm ready, but I may have to push you out the hatch. Meanwhile, you go off on your own to some sodden sh.o.r.e you'll just think about it the whole time. Go listen to Bacton rant. Consider the Big Mysteries. Take a stroll in the hills with wee Grayle Underhill.'

'I'll think about it.'

'No, you won't. You'll think about b.l.o.o.d.y Riggs and b.l.o.o.d.y Beattie. I'll tell y'another thing you', Andy pointed the fork, 'need a woman. You cannae fret over Em till you're too old tae get it up.'

'Who brought that up?'

'Go home, Bobby. You want a herbal sleeping pill?'

'No thanks.'

When he'd gone, Andy went back to Accident and Emergency and smoked a cigarette, hanging out of the sluiceroom window.

Remembering the night, not so long ago, when Bobby Maiden lay on his back, the crash team backing off, despondent three minutes gone, three and a half. Andy refusing to call off the defib, hands on the top of his head, his hair all stiff with blood. Feeling, inside her own head, the sun rising beyond St Mary's, through the gap in the stones of the High Knoll burial chamber, the heat travelling down to her fingers.

A healing place.

Despite the best efforts of the Health Service bureaucrats, Elham General was a healing place, too though this was sometimes harder to credit than the legend of the Holy Virgin's appearance at High Knoll.

Andy dropped back into the room, looked down at the watch on her breast pocket: 2.25 a.m. She'd call Marcus when she came off shift, before Bobby could get around to it.

She dunked her ciggy in the sink, went to take a look at Mr Trilling on the ward.

XVII.

'SO NOW WE KNOW,' GRAYLE SAID.

Laying on the cynicism like mayonnaise because she really didn't want Marcus to think she believed any of this stuff.

The study looked tired and bleary. The fire in the stove was down to a bed of ash. Marcus put on a small log from the depleted basket and hauled his chair closer.

'Great story, though,' Grayle said, not allowing herself to think about it. She yawned and lay full length on the sofa, kicking off her shoes.

Around half-past midnight Callard had elected to return to the dairy, maybe realizing that Marcus and Grayle would have a lot to discuss. Standing by the bulkhead light, Marcus had watched her cross the yard under the shadows of the ruins. He'd looked tired, weak, hopeless.

'It's late, Marcus, and you're sick.' Grayle pulled a cushion under her head. 'Go get some sleep.'

'Not tired. Or rather, I am, but...'

'You want some cocoa?'

'No, thank you.'

'What do you want?'

'I want to know what you really think about this.'

'Me? You're asking the help?'

'Don't p.i.s.s about, Underhill.'

'Let's talk about this tomorrow.'

'I want to b.l.o.o.d.y talk about it now,' Marcus thundered, s.n.a.t.c.hing off his gla.s.ses, mopping his eyes and nose, thrusting the gla.s.ses back on.

'You really don't.'

'You mean you don't.'

'OK.' Grayle sighed. 'Whatever.' Swung her feet to the floor and sat up, hands clasping on her knees like in prayer. 'Let's lay this thing out.'

'Go ahead.'

'Me?'

'I want your opinion, dammit!'

Grayle shrugged. 'OK. Well ... essence of it is, after like fifteen years as this cool, fashionable, high-society psychic, Ms Persephone Callard can't cut it any more on account of, whenever she tries to do a seance, only one spirit comes through and this is a bad spirit and it's real close, closer than anything she ever experienced before and she's like ... soiled and full of fear, and the next day she's debilitated, feels like s.h.i.t. How'm I doing?'

'Go on.' Marcus opened the stove, put on a second log to produce flames.

'What do you want me to add? All of this goes back to a particular night at the home of this former MP, Sir Barber, who's paid out big money for no good reason.'

'So you didn't find it convincing.'

Grayle didn't reply. Callard's evocation of the scene had thrown her a full and clear picture of this Barber's sumptuous drawing room on an extraordinary night. A movie, with sounds: voices and a music track.

And a smell. Callard describing how several people in the room had picked it up simultaneously distaste on women's faces. Then the drop in temperature, as though the heating had cut out, the same women reaching for jackets, cardigans, evening shawls.

Persephone had looked up and seen a man sitting there, at the back of the room, clear as Marcus was now, she said.

The man gazing impa.s.sively into her eyes.

And his eyes were cold and cloudy and almost white, and seemed to lead nowhere. And while Callard had been describing it, Grayle was seeing it and feeling it. Deeply, deeply chilled, a cold worm in the spine, but doing her d.a.m.nedest not to let it show.

As she looked into the empty s.p.a.ce suggested by the near-white eyes, she realized she was seeing into a s.p.a.ce where the man had been. And then Callard had felt his freaking hands on her freaking face moist, precise, surgical hands.

Her voice cool, precise and clinical as she described it, but Grayle knew that same worm was also deep into Seffi's spine.

So. Why couldn't she just have lost the trance-state, dropped out of it? A medium does not become possessed; the medium remains in control. The essence, the spirit, is dependent upon the medium for energy. Whereas this ...

This was so close and clear and impressively defined that even Callard had been in thrall to it. Although she knew it was entirely negative, it had an incredible ... a compelling physicality, and some sick, greedy part of her didn't want to let it go.

Grayle shuddered now and tried to smother it by leaning forward and hugging Malcolm, who, now they were alone, had sidled into the room. 'You didn't like her, did you, honey? Freaked you out, right?' Dogs almost invariably picked up disturbance, whether psychic or psychological.

'OK, what spooked me', she said to Marcus, 'was the way she was able to describe the face. But then I'm thinking, if you were trying to dream up a really evil face it would look something like that.'

A dark face. Thin-featured. Callard shaking her head in a swirl of lamp-l.u.s.tred hair. Hooked nose. Hair flat, slicked back. When he first appeared, he was looking away from me, looking to the side, and I thought he was wearing gla.s.ses, and then he turned slowly, to face me. And then he smiled ... he smiled at me. And when his face crinkled, I saw that it wasn't gla.s.ses, it was a scar. Almost encircling one eye and running all the way back to his ear.

Marcus asking, How far away was he from you?

I should think, ten, fifteen feet...

Yet he was able to ... you thought he was somehow touching you with his hands.

How fast does a thought travel?

Hmm. What was he wearing?

A grey suit. Three b.u.t.ton, all the b.u.t.tons fastened. Neat.

'I mean, a scar?' Grayle said to Marcus. 'A G.o.dd.a.m.n scar?'

'Be interesting to talk to someone who was at the party,' Marcus said. 'Someone else who saw ... saw it.'

Someone who saw what happened when Callard twisted out of her chair. Someone who heard the loud crack in the air, like a gunshot. Who witnessed the dislodging of a large Chinese vase from a niche in a corner of the room where n.o.body was sitting shards of it everywhere, panic, people leaping up and running for cover, as though they imagined everything in the room was going to start exploding.

For Callard, it must, at first, have been a merciful release of energy.

... and then, being thrown, jerked, out of trance like that, I immediately experienced a wave of self-disgust. It was as though I'd been a willing partic.i.p.ant in some ghastly s.e.xual violence, some perverse crime. I felt like ... I don't know ... Myra Hindley or somebody.

Grayle recalled how she'd lost her l.u.s.tre as she talked, had been hunched up into a corner of the sofa, her arms around her knees. h.e.l.l of an actress, if she was making this up.

What did you do? What did you do then?

I got out of there, Marcus. In the middle of the chaos, I slipped away and into the lift. I caught a taxi in Cheltenham and had him take me directly home ... not to the hotel, all the way back to Mysleton.

'And also, how come Sir Barber didn't follow this up?' Grayle demanded now. 'Apart from to send the cheque ... like, he actually sent the cheque.'