Mean Spirit

‘Thank you. And … pray, all of you. Pray to your several gods that we are not too late.’

But he thought they were.

‘This is good,’ Seward confided to Maiden. ‘This is excellent, how that happened. I once saw Clarence do a geezer’s hands. Some nonce. Not wiv a sawn-off, mind. Wiv a piece of pipe, but still …’

Seffi was staring down at the table. Their hands were separated. Maiden’s fingers were turning black. The pain was dull and distant.

Across the table, Grayle was unnaturally still. Shock. Behind her, Clarence’s grey suit hung limply from its hanger. Maiden thought he could see smoke from the oil heaters funnelled from its collar. He thought he could see part of Ron Foxworth’s white jaw, with teeth, on the table bearing the sepia photograph of Clarence Judge. The face became, for a moment, very clear, and it seemed to Maiden that the bulb had become much brighter.

Seward straightened up.

‘Is he here? Is that him?’

At that moment Foxworth’s body slid a few inches down in the armchair and the cuffs dragged painfully on Maiden’s left hand, and the bulb was dark again, under its skin of dried blood.

Seffi Callard didn’t react. Her eyes were closed again. The cellar smelled sweetly foul.

Seward hissed, ‘You see him?’

Seffi gulped air through her mouth. There were tears on her face.

Grayle said, ‘I see him.’

Seward swung round, the sawn-off at his hip.

Grayle stayed motionless, opposite Maiden, her back straight, both hands on the table, one pulled slightly askew by the slippage of the corpse but she seemed no longer affected by its proximity.

‘Hi, Clarence.’ Grayle giggled.

Oh, no, Maiden thought. He watched the expressions — scepticism, suspicion, hope, yearning, hunger — chasing across Seward’s face like a speeded-up film of storm clouds. This was the real, unpublic face: charmless, cheerless, flabby, the mouth turned down, the dyed hair sweated to the forehead. The bow tie was off, the shirt undone.

Seward said, ‘You?’

Grayle was staring past him with a lopsided smile. ‘You don’t scare me, Clarence.’

Seward moved back against the wall, the shotgun pointed upwards. ‘What’s he look like? You tell me exactly what he looks like!’

‘You do not freaking scare me!’ Grayle screamed.

‘What’s he look like, bitch?’

‘He, uh … he’s just like … I … I don’t know … He’s not here, not like you and I are … Oh Jesus … He is here. Now he is. Now he’s like … he’s really freaking here. He’s just … standing here. He’s wearing a suit. And a white shirt. And like a thin, black tie. Like a funeral tie. Maybe …’ Grayle let out a wild peal of laughter. ‘Maybe he just went to his own funeral …’

Seward’s breath was coming faster. ‘You better not be fucking wiv me, lady. Go on. What else? His shoes. Describe his shoes.’

‘I can’t see his shoes. He like … he isn’t too defined down there. It’s like he goes into mist, and his … he’s off the ground is what I’m saying. It’s like he’s maybe six inches off the ground. Jesus, he’s … you know, he’s awful. This is a dead man.’

‘Ask him if he can see us.’

‘Yeah …’

‘Ask him!’

‘I’m asking him! In my head. You can’t just …’

‘What’s he say?’

‘He isn’t saying anything. He’s just there, is all. All he is is there.’

‘Then why can’t I see him?’

“Cause you’re an insensitive asshole, how the fuck should I know?’

‘All right.’ Seward was feverishly breaking and snapping shut his shotgun. ‘You said you can see him now, yeah? Clear?’

‘I can see him very well.’

‘So you tell me what he looks like. His face.’

‘All right, he … he’s got a thin face and this hooked kind of Roman nose. His hair is slicked back. It’s that style that was fashionable for guys over here not all that long ago. Like shaven hard up both sides and real thick on top. Only you can tell this isn’t one of those fashion cuts, this is how it’s always been. His eyes are … pale, I guess. Like watery. And no colour … no colour that I can make out. His whole face has no colour. He’s a dead man. Uh, he has this scar.’

As Grayle talked, Maiden was picturing his drawing. She was describing it. And because there’d been no published photograph of Clarence Judge since he was scarred in prison by the fish-slice bloke, this was where Grayle started walking the tightrope. Suppose the scar was nothing like the drawing?

‘OK, the scar … Clarence, will you stop freaking looking at me like you wanna …?’

‘The scar,’ Seward hissed.

‘It … it’s cutting across the side of his head from the left eye … the left eye as you look at him. It runs almost but not quite horizontally from the eye to the ear, like half of a pair of glasses.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, that’s it, it’s a scar. Oh. Except, about three-quarters along, it kind of disappears under a fold of skin. Like, it’s not a pretty scar, but this part is … it’s like you would say it was stitched up by two different guys working from different ends and they didn’t quite meet up. Plus, it looks kind of livid.’

‘Christ,’ Seward said.

‘Maybe … I don’t see that part too well, he never turns his head … maybe that’s not part of the scar at all.’

‘It’s another scar,’ Seward said, almost breathlessly, to Maiden. There was either a shadow or a big patch of sweat across his shirt. ‘About two months before he died, he was moaning about the scar irritating him, pulling down his eye. Reckoned it was affecting his sight. He got mad with it. One night, he takes a kitchen knife, slices into it. Sews it up hisself, different. He could do fings like that and hardly feel it. How would she know about that, Bobby? She never knew Clarence. You bleedin’ swear to me she never knew him?’

‘She’s American, Gary.’

‘You think she’s seeing him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you see?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Tell him I wanna see him!’ Seward roared. ‘Tell him I need to fucking see his ugly face!’

‘You don’t get through to him, OK?’ Grayle said testily. ‘He does not respond. It’s just like he’s a dummy. A dead dummy. This is … He doesn’t hear me. Jesus, did Campbell hypnotize him to just … be like something out the basement at Madame Tussaud’s?’

Seward moved nearer the circle. He stopped.

‘What did you say?’

‘I … said … I … the basement at Madam …’

‘Before that.’

Maiden said quickly, ‘Ask him if he knows who killed him. Ask him if he knows who shot him from behind.’

Seward spun, crouching, with the shotgun outstretched. Maiden staring down the two black holes. He’s going to kill me anyway. It’s got nothing to do with any of this. He’s doing it for Riggs. Payback for Crewe. An arrangement.

He said, ‘Grayle, ask Clarence if he remembers who shot him and where it …?’