Mean Spirit Part 46

'Accident?' Maiden stumbled out.

'She's just over in the first-aid tent.'

'Where's that?'

'This way, sir.'

He led Maiden around the side of the toilet block, where a second Forcefield man was peering nonchalantly at the gra.s.s around his boots. He looked up when Bobby Maiden appeared.

's.h.i.t,' Maiden said.

The bearded man hit him in the gut. As Maiden doubled up, the other man hit him in the face. At the same time, Maiden felt a foot pulled from under him.

He was lying, hurting, with his face in the cold mud. He couldn't move; there was a heavy boot on his neck. Something which felt both hard and sharp, like an axe, went agonizingly into his back.

He felt very cold. I've been stabbed, he thought. I'm going to die.

It was as quick as that.

XLVI.

'YOU WANTED TO LOOK AROUND,' KURT WORE A BAGGY, COLLARLESS shirt snow-white but creased up, to show how loose and expansive he was, 'so I'm going to show you around.'

'You sure you can spare the time?'

'Hey, I'm touring the States in the summer. A little advance publicity in the New York Courier will do no harm at all.'

Cindy had melted away as Kurt approached. Kurt acting like this was to be expected what did he need with an old broad?

'Well, I'll sure do my best to get you some s.p.a.ce,' Grayle lied.

'Yes, Alice, I'm sure you'll try your hardest for me.'

Overcross Castle, when you'd been inside a while, was full of give-aways that it wasn't awfully historic. One was the efficiency with which the rooms had been linked no poky dead-end pa.s.sageways, everything fitted and dovetailed. Kurt led her into a huge oblong room to the right of the entrance hall. It also had bare stone walls and two big wrought-iron chandeliers over an oak table, which looked to be thirty or forty feet long, or maybe it was two tables pushed together. There were also sconces, real ones in iron brackets, which could be lit to send real flames leaping up the walls.

'The banqueting hall.' The heavy door closing behind them with a thunk-click which spoke of post-Victorian craftsmanship. 'Now this is exactly how it was in the 1870s. The medieval touch. This is where Daniel Dunglas-Home often appeared.'

'The medium? What sort of things did he do here?'

'Oh ... summoned endless spirits, obviously.' Kurt sounding surprisingly dismissive. 'Sometimes with manifestation. And on one occasion it was said he levitated from a table, almost reaching the chandeliers. Enterprising guy.'

'Wow. These chandeliers?'

'Similar ones. There were about ten people here at the time invited guests, like tonight and several of them swore they'd seen it happen. But some others said that, as far as they were concerned, it had never taken place at all.'

It had begun to get dark outside now. The two Gothic windows were grey-white and there were no colours in the room. Kurt leaned closer to Grayle. His aftershave was subtly suggestive, like a snuffed-out bedside candle.

'So which do you believe?' Grayle asked, like she was supposed to.

'Ah. Well. Interestingly, Dr Anthony Abblow was here that night. A medium and also a very powerful hypnotist. For his time.'

'Oh, really.'

'People sometimes see what, under hypnosis, they're persuaded to.'

'I don't understand.'

'Neither do I, Alice. Were some of the guests persuaded to see Dunglas-Home levitate? Or hey were some persuaded not to?'

'I'm sorry?'

'You read the little book?'

'Sure.'

'It says there that Abblow was responsible for discrediting Dunglas-Home in Crole's eyes, right? Presumably so he could replace him, so that he could become the key man at Overcross, have access to Crole's millions, yeah?'

'Oh. Right. I get it. You're saying, did Abblow hypnotize some of the guests beforehand to blank out Home's act or something?'

'Makes you think doesn't it, Alice?'

'I guess.'

'So guess who our medium's going to be tonight.'

'Well, uh, I just met Persephone Callard. So unless you hypnotized me to like see her when she wasn't there at all ...'

'Oh she was there, all right.' Kurt grinned. 'But tonight's star is going to be Dunglas-Home himself. Come on. I'll show you the rest of this mausoleum.'

Grayle tightened the belt of her raincoat. Here we go.

When Gary Seward left the castle by the main entrance, Cindy followed him. Remaining fifteen to twenty yards behind, studying the man, the way he moved, the art of being Gary Seward.

From up here you could see that the festival site was bigger than it had first appeared, covering fifteen to twenty acres. Quite a crowd out there now too, despite the weather an advance contingent for the psychically ravenous mult.i.tude. By the weekend, there would be ten, fifteen times as many, thousands having travelled from Birmingham, even London, to catch talks or a promised visit by fashionable psychics and healers.

Seward walked down the drive towards the three lines of huts and tents, each one a bijou business marketing baubles and trinkets of spirituality like fashion accessories, to be worn and discarded, mixed and matched.

Cindy felt more in control. Had begun to build a picture of what was happening here even if, as yet, it consisted only of darkening smudges.

Seeing Kurt Campbell up close, for the first time since the unfortunate Lottery Show encounter, he realized that bitter circ.u.mstance had led him to overestimate the young man. Apart from ambition, greed, l.u.s.t and the mastery of a particular technique, there really wasn't all that much to Kurt. Not a profound person, not even a terribly interesting one. His failure to spot the Cindy behind the Imelda suggested that Cindy was, to Kurt, not so much a figure of hate and fear but a mere obstacle to be removed. Hardly flattering indicative, indeed, of insufficient respect for the shamanic tradition but at least it reduced Kurt Campbell to something potentially more manageable. And it was to be hoped that the resourceful Grayle would be able to manage him.

Seward, however, was more complex.

Taller than he looked, he was, close to six feet. Excess weight gave him a stocky appearance, and he moved heavily but confidently. As though Cindy smiled he owned the place.

Seward was in no hurry. He seemed aimless, in fact, as though he had time to kill, had left the house for no purpose other than to be out of it for a while.

Cindy kept his distance, always mindful of what the man was known to have done or have had done to various people. Which, as he admitted at one point in his book, was not the half of it.

Cindy noted how, rather than enter the compound through the turnstiles, Seward braced himself then jumped the barrier, smiling as he landed. This implied two things: that the ageing hard man was proving to himself that he could 'still do it'. And that barriers, in his view, were for ordinary people. Despite the intermittent fine snow, he was not wearing a jacket over his polo shirt, so perhaps his smile was more in the nature of a grimace.

Through the turnstile went Cindy, displaying his stallholder's pa.s.s, watching Seward inspect various displays, but not part with any money. No-one seemed to recognize him, which he would find annoying.

The autobiography was buoyant with bonhomie and heavy-handed attempts at humour made slicker, perhaps, by the former News of the World journalist who had ghosted the book. But Cindy could tell now, simply by the way he moved, that Gary Seward was a more ponderous character than the prose suggested essentially a dogmatic man, with a fixed code of immorality detectable in his repet.i.tion of the phrase I could not tolerate ...

A combination of the rigidly self-righteous and the constant need to break rules, jump barriers, was perhaps the essence of Gary Seward. Whichever way he jumped would afterwards be seen to have been the right way.

Seward at last went into a tent. One of the larger ones. The book tent in fact. Cindy waited. In less than three minutes Seward was out again and Cindy was able, for the first time, to study his face.

Which would have been quite handsome but for the thickness of the lips, the way the mouth turned down at the corners, emphasizing the radials astride the nose. Perhaps this was why he smiled so much he didn't like the way his mouth turned down, thought perhaps that it made him look a little sulky, not so cheerful and accommodating.

Gary certainly wasn't smiling now. Incredible! Had he really imagined that a New Age bookshop, specializing in healing and transcendence, would have copies of Bang to Wrongs?

Seward looked up when a vehicle horn bipped rapidly, twice. A dark blue van, like a police van, had stopped at the bottom of Avenue Three. Seward looked up, walked across and opened the pa.s.senger door. He bent to enter then pulled back. He leaned on the door and turned his head slowly, his gaze panning the a.s.sembly.

Until it came to rest on Cindy. Who froze.

Whereupon Gary Seward's face crinkled into the most carnivorous smile, with a wild glimmering of gold.

All the breath went out of Cindy.

He knew I was there. The whole time.

Seward waited until the van began to move before waving gaily to Cindy and swinging smoothly, in his I can still do it way, into the pa.s.senger seat. The van went out through the gates and Cindy shaken now, worried returned to the castle kitchens to retrieve Malcolm from Vera.

'... show you the rest of this mausoleum.'

Except it wasn't going to be the rest of it.

His hands either side of Grayle's waist, Kurt propelled her smoothly through a door into a low-lit room, where there was an electrical hum in the air and a small guy with gla.s.ses was messing around at what looked like a recording-studio mixing desk.

'How goes it, Darren?' Kurt asked breezily.

The guy gave him a nonchalant thumbs-up and Grayle asked what was happening here, knowing he must be in charge of the special effects Cindy had mentioned. But Kurt just said, 'Ambience', and manoeuvred her across the room and out through an archway on the other side.

'What's through here?' Grayle asked brightly, suppressing nerves.

'The most interesting part,' Kurt said.

Then they were through another door, to the left, and going up a small, extremely dark, spiralling stone staircase this place was a warren of stairs and up and up, scores of stairs, twisting and twisting, Kurt just behind Grayle, and she could hear him flicking switches to put on lights ahead of them tiny lights set deep into the stone and, Jesus, for the first time you could really start to believe this was a purpose-built haunted house.

And as she climbed, raincoat flapping, the backs of her legs starting to ache, she was thinking hard about what Kurt Campbell had just told her about the master-medium, Daniel Dunglas-Home, and Anthony Abblow, a man whom Cindy had seemed to compare with Kurt. The use of hypnosis to create or remove the illusion of psychic phenomena. Had Abblow done that? It didn't matter.

It didn't freaking matter. It was now that mattered ... and Abblow's evident influence on Kurt Campbell.

Grayle paused to get her breath, looking over her shoulder at Kurt's big face with the blond hair flying back.

'Look, I, uh, I'm getting kinda dizzy, you know? Where are we ... where is this ...?'

'Not far now, Alice.'

They must be in the big tower, the big, fat, dark tower which reared over Avenue Three. The Gormenghast tower.

'Must be, uh ... some view from the top of here, huh, Kurt?'

'Some view,' Kurt agreed.

And then they were out on what surely must be the final landing, a very short, rounded landing with an electric lantern high up. Doors in stone alcoves to either side.

Now Kurt was beside her, a big, tight-trousered presence, a whole head taller than Grayle and his arm around her waist, a little tighter now, like he was supporting them both, still laughing at their exertions. Though clearly he was less out of breath than she was, must have done these stairs many times. Behind many different people.

Usually female, no doubt.

Kurt steered her into one of the alcoves, reached in front of her with a cla.s.sic castle-type key about the size of a can opener, black and gleaming pushing it into a hole in this squat, Gothic door of solid, seasoned oak, waggling it about a little before it turned. Symbolic.

And then they were wouldn't you know it? in this bedroom.

Well, it wasn't like she hadn't been here before. Occupational hazard for young female journalists. Especially, it had turned out, for one specializing in the spiritual. They all tried to set you up: tantric therapists, from whom you expected it, and pot-bellied 'celibate' swamis, from whom ... anyway, you learned how to deal with it. It seldom ran to attempted rape.

In the room the last of the stormy light had collected through a small square window in the rounded wall. There was a giant four-poster and a dresser with a small tray on it with whisky and, inevitably, a champagne bottle and gla.s.ses.

No closet; this was the kind of medieval bedchamber where clothing was left strewn across the polished, oak-boarded floor, abandoned in pa.s.sion.

'Must have been a h.e.l.l of a job getting that bed up here,' Grayle said. 'Does it come apart?'

'I wouldn't know,' Kurt said.

Locking the door behind them.

Sliding the long key into his hip pocket, where it made a matching bulge to the one the other side.

'You know, I think we need a rest after that,' Kurt said lazily.

Aw, for heaven's sake ... this was like Justin level, G.o.d rest his greased-up soul.

Kurt crossed to the bed, slid through the curtains, which did not draw all the way, were just there for effect. Eased himself up, with his back against the big, dark headboard.

Grayle stood by the snow-speckled window, with this sheer seventy eighty, ninety, a hundred, who-knew-how-many foot drop to the stone parapet around the castle.

'Oh well.' She pulled open the belt, shrugged out of her raincoat. 'You want I should pour the drinks?'

XLVII.

'NO FOOLING YOU, VERA, I CAN SEE THAT.' CINDY PEERED THROUGH the scullery window into a yard with a broken-down wall and, beyond that, outbuildings of brick and stone a barn, stables and the wooded hillside.

'No b.l.o.o.d.y patronizing me, neither, dear.' Vera wiping her hands on her white ap.r.o.n. 'What's going on? What you been up to, Miss Bacton?'

No real escape route through the back. Only hiding places. The real hiding place would be a change of persona. Imelda had been rumbled. The consequences, given Gary's background, were not to be contemplated.