Mean Spirit Part 27

A searing pain almost paralyzed his spine.

'Freeze.'

'Oh my G.o.d,' Cindy croaked.

'Turn around ... ve-ry slowly.'

'Amy, my love,' Cindy wheezed, 'if you wanted me to turn round quickly, we would require the services of an osteopath.'

'Cindy! Oh my G.o.d!' Amy dropped the yard-brush.

Amy Jenkins: little and dark and warm and crinkly, a refugee from the next valley to Cindy's own in the broken heart of Glamorgan. Divorced these many years from the man known only as That b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Now queen of the Tup.

'You only just caught me, see,' she said, as if this wasn't past midnight and she might have gone to the shops. 'Just having a last look round, I was. Weekend night, you get them in from all over the place Hereford, Abergavenny. Strangers, and some thinking they can see an opportunity. Always like a last look around, I do, on a Sat.u.r.day night. And there you was, like a burglar. Well ... I can't get over it Cindy Mars-Lewis, and so famous now. Wait till I tell-'

'n.o.body,' Cindy said firmly. 'Tell n.o.body.'

'Oh. Like that, is it?' Amy was leading him to the oak settle in the woody dimness of the deserted bar then putting more lights on, giving him the once-over. 'Looking tired, you are, Cindy. Not quite your old self.'

'I'm fine, lovely. Fine as I could be.'

'That poor man. The Lottery winner. Did you hear?'

'Yes, I did.'

'Money,' Amy said. 'Money makes people careless. Feel invulnerable they do, in the first flush of it.'

'Yes. That is a profound observation, Amy.'

'The usual room, is it?'

'That would be wonderful. I'm not yet sure how many nights. Two, three ...'

'You stay as long as you like, Cindy. And if you don't want me to tell n.o.body, n.o.body gets told.'

'Little Amy,' Cindy said wistfully. 'Marry you, I would, if I was normal.'

'I've been thinking about that laugh,' Persephone Callard said.

They were drinking whisky by the coal fire. Side by side on the hard Victorian sofa.

'Ron isn't best known for his impressions,' Maiden said.

'It was just the general tone. On one level. Quite a strong laugh, but one that wasn't reacting to anything funny, do you know what I mean? It was there. I heard it at Barber's party.'

'But you don't remember Seward. You weren't introduced?'

'Wasn't introduced to anybody. Quite odd, now I think about it.'

'Having a celebrated villain at your party,' Maiden said, 'wouldn't that be a bit dangerous for a politician?'

'Ex-politician. Ex-villain, for that matter.'

'Probably no such items. Like you can't be an ex-alcoholic. Just because Seward's doing after-dinner talks and guesting on quiz shows ...'

'You ever encountered him, Bobby?'

Maiden shook his head. 'He'd have been doing his seven years when I was in London. Listen, say he engineered himself an invitation from Barber because of his interest in spiritualism. He was there because you were going to be there. Why no introduction? Seward loves celebrity. Unless-'

'There was something else. Now I think about it...' Seffi hunched up on the Victorian sofa, tapping a knee with stiffened fingers. 'I'm remembering him from another context. d.a.m.n.'

'Unless it was his party,' Maiden said.

'What?'

'Unless Sir Richard Barber was figureheading Seward's party. Say Barber knows Seward, or Seward has something on him. Seward wants you but if you'd been invited to conduct a sitting at a soiree hosted by Gary Seward the East End villain, would you have done it? Even for twenty-five K?'

'No chance.'

'There you go, then.'

'Yes. It makes sense. It would explain why Barber didn't appear to know anybody particularly. The fact that they didn't seem to be his kind of people.'

'Could they have been Seward's kind of people? We know Les Hole was, for a start.'

'I suppose.'

'Gary Seward's party,' Maiden said. 'The place full of iffy entrepreneurs and general villains. All those people with bad secrets. All those bodies buried. And you were the floorshow. Why?'

There was silence. She sat very still, her face sheened in the firelight, heavy hair down one side of her face like a hawser.

Remembering the commitment he'd made, telling Ron Foxworth, I believe she does this ... thing. Which had been said mainly to support her against Ron's impending sneers, and not necessarily because he ...

If you believed she did this thing, that she truly had access to the dead, the implications were vast. Thinking about it now, just the two of them here, it was as though the walls of the room had dissolved and the night was in.

'Persephone,' he said. 'She was the woman who married the king of the Underworld, right?'

'And spent half her life among the dead,' she said.

Whenever Maiden thought of the dead, he thought of Em.

Seffi looked at him, firelight flickering in her eyes.

'And if that's what you were about to ask, it is my real name. My mother chose it.'

'She was psychic too?'

'I don't know. I ask my father, he just smiles. Yes, of course she was. I know she was.'

'So, have you ever ...?'

'Had contact? Not for a long time. I think she's moved on, beyond my reach. I think she was there in the few years after she died, when I was a child. Guarding the portal. From adolescence, I guess I was on my own. Which was when it became disruptive.'

He said, 'Are you still afraid to die? Knowing what you ... know?'

Her faint smile twisted. 'Oh, come on, Bobby, what do I know? What do I really know? It's all too big in there, a huge, endless factory. I'm just standing there, looking at all this strange machinery.'

He had a scary image of unmanned conveyor belts, chemical reprocessing.

'And most of the ones who come out to me, they don't know either. They're the ones who don't realize they're over. Or they have unfinished business here and because of that this really petty c.r.a.p they can't see ... the fullness of it. Sometimes I can help them deal with that, clear the blockage. But I don't know ... I couldn't tell you what happens to them afterwards. Perhaps they evaporate into pure energy. Go for recycling. Perhaps G.o.d help us perhaps they don't exist at all outside my head. I ... I was never one of your evangelical mediums. Never tell anyone it's going to be all springtime and church bells. I don't know.' She paused. 'And neither do you, apparently. No glorious lights when you died, Bobby.'

'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 sc.u.m 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 p.i.s.sed 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 sc.u.m was on account of being a gra.s.s, and when he was nicked for s.e.xually a.s.saulting 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 sc.u.m 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 hoa.r.s.e. 'You don't have to rub it in.'

What the h.e.l.l 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 t.i.tle. 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, a.s.sume 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 Dunglas-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.