Mean Spirit

me some copies. You really wrote that drivel?’

‘Don’t feel you have to patronize me,’ Grayle said.

Callard snorted, took a graceless slurp from her glass. She sat up, grabbed a poker, stabbed at the coals until a feeble white flame spurted.

Outside it was getting too close to dark. Time, Grayle figured, to cut to the chase.

‘Ms Callard, why did you write to Marcus?’

‘Did I?’

‘Marcus Bacton.’

In the wan firelight, you could see her navel between the bottom of the cardigan and the top of her dark jeans, then a fold of skin creased over it. She was anorectically thin.

‘Marcus Bacton’, she said, ‘was the only person in my entire fucking life who ever pitied me.’

She dug a bare hand into a bucket and came up with a clutch of small lumps of coal, scattering them over the fire, wiping her hand on her jeans.

‘People are suspicious of me. Or afraid. Or they want a piece of me. But I mean, pity … that was something new, even at the time. I was profoundly offended at first.’

‘Best of all,’ Grayle said, ‘Marcus likes to offend.’

‘When I think about him … I picture him striding up and down the corridors, with his wide shoulders and his little pot belly. Glaring through his glasses and roaring at pupils. Teachers too, sometimes.’

‘Uh huh.’ Grayle finished her whisky, gratefully put down the glass in the hearth. She noticed that Callard’s tumbler remained half-full. She’d drunk hardly any.

‘One night — this is on record … in the books — a big window just exploded in the dormitory. Glass everywhere. I was at the other end of the room, but they knew … the staff knew things happened around me. They actually put me into a room no bigger than a cupboard. Locked the door, as you would with a dangerous mental patient. This was the headmaster and the matron. Didn’t know how else to handle it. Mr Bacton was furious. Came out in his dressing gown, and when they wouldn’t give him the key he kicked the door in and brought me out and we went for a long walk in the grounds. Talking. For hours, it seemed like. He resigned soon after that, and I was taken away from the school. I haven’t seen him since.’

‘What did you talk about?’

Callard didn’t reply. Whatever they’d discussed, that must have been the night Marcus connected, showed her he understood what it was like having psychic ability — although he had none himself. The bond between them had been formed that night, and Grayle was no kind of substitute.

Callard poked at the fire again. ‘Flu, you said.’

‘Marcus has this theory that men get it worse than women. He’s real low. But he was flattered, I guess, when you wrote to the magazine, trying to reach him. He’s been feeling a touch insecure.’

‘Marcus Bacton insecure?’

‘In his way,’ Grayle said. ‘Feels he wasted too much of his life not doing what he wanted to do … investigating the Big Mysteries, showing people that the world was so much wilder than the scientists and the politicians wanted them to think. And now he’s past sixty, running this small-time magazine that the right people don’t read, and he doesn’t think he’s ever gonna get where he wants to be.’

Callard rose unsteadily. It didn’t show in her voice, but she must already have drunk plenty today. Reaching that stage where it no longer made you happier, just kept the fires of hell tamped down. But now she’d stopped drinking and the alcohol in the glass didn’t seem to be tempting her.

‘And what do you do exactly, Grayle?’

‘Oh, I … came over from the States for … personal reasons, and I met Marcus and I started helping him with the magazine. Which was seriously rundown. And like now we’ve changed the name and it’s starting to make this very small profit, which I thought would make him happy. But perhaps he feels it’s being taken out of his hands. Or losing its peculiar integrity. I don’t know. He’s a complex individual.’

‘And where is this?’ Callard moved to the window, pulled thick, dark curtains across. ‘Apart from on the Welsh border?’

‘He has this farmhouse inside the ruins of a medieval castle. Which sounds grander than it is. But it’s Marcus’s fortress against the cold, rational world.’

‘Nothing’s changed then.’

‘I guess.’

‘He was a hero to me at the time.’ Callard sat down again. ‘When they threw me out of the school and my father was advised to hire a private tutor, I wanted it to be Mr Bacton. I’ve never been entirely sure whether he turned down the job or my father lied about offering it to him. My father was … diffident … about the psychic world. He’d worked in the Diplomatic Service in too many strange places to dismiss it entirely, but he didn’t want anything to do with it.’

‘Your father was still working abroad?’

‘No, Foreign Office. When he married my mother he came back, bought Mysleton.’

‘Your mother died, right?’

‘My mother died when I was four. I don’t think she could stand the cold and the drabness and stiffness. A black woman in the Cotswolds, even then …’ A match flared. Callard applied it to a candle on the mantelpiece. ‘They said she died of cancer, but I think she withered.’

‘Withered?’

‘Like an exotic flower,’ Callard said heavily.

‘You remember her?’

‘I remember her essence.’

‘Right.’

Callard slumped back into the sofa, said snappishly, ‘When people keep saying “right”, it usually means they haven’t understood anything and don’t propose to.’

The candle sat crookedly in a pewter tray. It looked warmer than the fire.

‘I don’t think you want to tell me what this is about, do you?’ Grayle said.

‘I don’t know you. I don’t trust journalists. I might be reading about it in the New York Courier next week.’

‘You might be reading about it in The Vision.’

Callard smiled. ‘That I could cope with.’

Grayle thought, Me too. I could just about cope with this if it was gonna make a feature for The Vision. She’d never even dared suggest that to Marcus, but yeah, it had been at the back of her mind.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want to come here. You contact a guy after twenty years, no way are you gonna want to talk to the help. I came because Marcus was too sick to come, and Marcus felt you were in some kind of trouble, and he didn’t want it to be … too late. Or something.’

‘Do I look like I’m in trouble?’

‘You don’t look too good, if I can say that. You look like the papers had it right.’

‘The papers are suggesting I’m mentally ill.’

‘Not necessarily that.’

‘Of course, that. No journalist who wants to stay on the national press can be seen to accept the spiritual.’

‘I did.’

‘Quite,’ Callard said. She laughed.

Grayle stood up. ‘Maybe I’ll call Justin, find out if he tracked down an exhaust for my car.’

In the candlelight, she saw Callard shrug. She reached for her bag and dug out Justin’s card.

‘That was rude of me,’ Callard said wearily. ‘Don’t go.’

Grayle didn’t look at her. Held the phone up to the candle, punched out the number, which she now realized was a mobile. Clearly, the rundown garage was no longer on the phone.

Callard said, ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’

‘That’s not possible.’ She heard the phone ringing at the other end.

‘Look,’ Callard said, ‘as soon as the oaf picks up your scent again, he’ll start reviewing his options. First, he’ll