Mean Spirit

‘Hold it!’ Grayle cried out. ‘He …’ She looked at Seward, her voice dropping to conversation level. ‘You killed him, right, Gary? You did it in the apartment near the Rotunda in Cheltenham.’

Persephone Callard’s eyes came open. She looked stunned.

‘I’m seeing this quite clearly,’ Grayle said firmly. ‘Here’s what happens. First, Kurt hypnotizes him and he plants this … a posthypnotic suggestion that like … when Clarence hears the words, “The lines are open”, he’ll come back from wherever he is. Like, wherever he is. And then, while he’s still in trance, Gary just like … blows him away. From behind.’

‘What…?’ Maiden said.

Sounding, he hoped, as though this was a big shock … that it was taking some getting his mind around. Like the same theory hadn’t been forming in his head most of the night. Forming out of Grayle’s idea that Kurt had hypnotized Seffi. Hardening up at the first sight of the Cheltenham furniture, here in the cellar where Crole and Abblow …

He said, ‘This is what they did to John Hodge, isn’t it? They killed him after ordering him under hypnosis to come back. To return to the place he loved most in all the world. So attached to it his family used to joke about him haunting it when he was dead.’

Seffi Callard said, ‘The first experiment in hypnosis beyond death. The obvious conjunction of spiritualism and mesmerism.’ She gave out a cracked laugh. ‘Only a Victorian English gentleman would see instructing the dead as the best way in.’

Maiden went on looking down those cold black metal corridors.

‘You want to talk about this, Gary?’

The entrance hall, with its vaulted ceiling, its coats of arms and crossed pikes, its stags’ heads on shields, its wrought-iron chandelier with the candles.

And many people. New Agers mingling with the councillors and tourism officials and the local aristocracy — these individuals bemused or offended and pursued by a harrassed, perspiring Francine. No sign of Kurt, but there wouldn’t be. No visible Forcefield uniforms. Occasionally, one of the dignitaries would glance at Cindy, half- recognizing him, but no-one asked about his swollen and bloodied face, his crooked bosom.

Then Maurice Gooch was there, quivering with agitation. ‘Cindy, there’s …’

‘The cellar?’ Cindy snapped. ‘Did you find a way in?’

‘No, but…’

‘There has got to be an entrance!’

‘We’ve been everywhere, man,’ Maurice protested. ‘We’ve been into every room, including two locked ones. We’ve ripped up carpets, we’ve moved dressers, we’ve levered up flagstones. Either there’s no way in, or there’s no cellar. Only, there is, according to my pendulum. It’s got five rooms.’

‘Did you ask Vera in the kitchen?’

‘We’ve asked every bugger, Cindy. I’m sorry. But, listen …’

‘They can’t have blocked them off,’ said Mr Oakley.

‘A gun went off down there,’ Cindy reminded him. ‘We shall have to call the police. No option now.’

‘And how are the police going to find their way in?’ demanded Maurice. ‘Take up t’bloody floor? But, aye, you’d better get ’em in, because of the body.’

Cindy stiffened.

‘In the lavvy.’

‘Where?’

‘The toilet, just along there, through yon place wi’ t’tables. A man. Just lying there by the urinals, wi’ his … Like, he must’ve been having a piss when he were …’

‘Shot,’ said Mr Oakley. ‘Shot in the head. Killed instantly, I reckon.’

‘Not Kurt.’

‘No.’ Maurice shook his head. ‘Older.’

Cindy thought drably of Bobby Maiden.

‘Show me.’

‘St Kurt,’ Bobby said. ‘Remember? All that stuff in Marcus’s cuttings about Campbell giving his services free to help dying people, terminal patients?’

‘Oh, Jesus, he was messing with their minds.’ Grayle found she was staring at the blood-drenched, headless remains of Superintendent Ron Foxworth and it was just another sad, stinking piece of meat, a reminder of why she was vegetarian. What she was hearing about, this was still-active, insidious evil.

‘Kurt was planting stuff on them before they died, wasn’t he? Posthypnotic suggestion. When I call you, wherever you are, you’ll come back to me.’ Bobby turned to Seward. ‘Did it work, Gary?’

‘Nah.’ Seward leaned back in his chair, the shotgun on his knee. ‘None of the sods came back. Kurt figured it was all the morphine and stuff they was getting intravenously at the end. Plus the time lapse. It was often three, four weeks between the hypnosis and when they snuffed it.’

These bastards, Grayle thought. These unbelievable bastards.

‘Crole and Abblow tried the same thing,’ Bobby said. ‘It was noticeable at the time how concerned they always were for the welfare of the local dying. Hovering around deathbeds. Unhealthy. Well, obviously, it didn’t work for them either, and people were getting suspicious. Abblow presumably decided what they needed was someone fit and well who had no idea his card was marked.’

Grayle said, ‘John Hodge.’

‘And he come back,’ said Seward. ‘He did. Loads of people seen the bleeder.’ He looked at Bobby. Grayle saw that he’d never looked at Foxworth’s body; it didn’t disgust him, it didn’t offend him. Like guys around slaughterhalls their whole working lives would fail to register an extra carcass. ‘Where’d you get this stuff, Bobby?’

‘Bloke called Harry. Hodge was his great-grandad.’

‘Yeah, we seen him with his posters. We invited him in for a drink. He wouldn’t come.’

Smarter than us, Grayle thought wretchedly.

‘He told you what they did with Hodge, Bobby?’

‘Seems obvious what they did. Must’ve been obvious to Kurt Campbell from the beginning.’

‘Not quite the beginning. Stories about this place, they been going round for years on the psychic circuits Kurt’s plugged into. It was when we sent a surveyor round and he found these cellars, and a tin box with Crole’s notes, written in his own writing. Exciting, Bobby.’

‘I wonder what the phrase was. The one that was intended to bring Hodge back. Like “The lines are open.”’

‘Gotta be more than a phrase,’ Seward said. ‘We don’t know how they did it, but it must’ve been easier with Abblow being a medium. What we done, we played Clarence a tape of Callard’s voice saying it.’ He gave Seffi a sly glance. ‘Kurt recorded it when you was together. So it had to be you, sweetheart, no substitutes.’

‘This was just before you killed him?’ Bobby said. ‘Or did you have someone else do that?’

‘Nah. I done him, like she said. Only fair. Only decent, poor old love.’

‘What I thought,’ Bobby said. ‘How it seemed to me was that he must’ve been a bit of an embarrassment to you, Gary. Useful in the old days, long as it wasn’t anything too complicated. But you were probably glad when he was put away for the rape. Times were changing. Old-style hardmen like Clarence — the ones you couldn’t take to a party — were getting to be of limited value.’

‘Hadn’t got the GCSEs, Bobby.’

‘And, like I say, by the time he came out, you’d done your book, and you were a public figure. The chat shows. The Rotary Club dinners. No way Clarence was going to fit into that circuit — not very smart, no sense of humour, no particular personality at all. A charmless bastard, on the whole.’

‘You’ll pay for that in a minute, Bobby. But, yeah.’

‘All Clarence is good at is harming people, and suddenly he’s back on the streets and nobody to turn to for work but his old gaffer. Must’ve been a bit trying for you, Gary.’

‘Nah. It was him hated it more than me. Fish out of water. Cops watching every move he makes. Memos about him computered to every nick in the land. He was too innocent for this hi-tech world, Bobby. Would’ve been back inside in no time at all.’

‘And who knows who he’d have accidentally taken with him.’