Mean Spirit

lie about your car …’

‘Mayfield Garage,’ Justin said.

‘Uh … it’s Grayle Underhill.’

‘Hello, Grayle!’ Real jovial. ‘You find Miss Seffi Callard then, did you?’

‘Yes. Listen, I wondered if you managed to hunt down any kind of exhaust.’

A pause. A chuckle. ‘Ah dear,’ Justin said. ‘I rang round six mates between here and Swindon. No can do tonight, but one of them reckons he might put his hands on something tomorrow.’

‘Oh.’ Not on me he won’t.

‘You’ll have to spend a night in the glorious Cotswolds, my sweet. Look, there’s a good country-house hotel not far from where you are. I could pick you up, take you there …’

‘That’s kind of you,’ Grayle said quickly, ‘but I already made a provisional reservation. In … in Stroud, I … Ms Call … Seffi’s gonna take me there.’

‘Fair enough,’ Justin said neutrally. ‘Fair enough.’

‘So I’ll call you from there tomorrow.’

‘Whatever you like.’

‘Well, uh … do your best with the exhaust.’ Grayle pressed end. ‘He can’t fix it tonight. I need to find a hotel.’

‘I told you,’ Callard said. ‘There’s a spare room here. Terribly twee and rustic.’

Grayle shook her head. ‘I’ll call a cab. You have a phone book. Yellow Pages?’

Persephone Callard didn’t move. Except to close her eyes.

‘Forget it.’ Grayle took the phone to the candle. ‘I’ll call Inquiries.’

No reaction from Callard. She was kind of breathing heavily. Jesus, she fell asleep? She fell asleep from all the booze?

Callard’s glass, still untouched, stood on the mantelpiece. Grayle punched out 192. ‘Directory Inquiries,’ a woman’s voice said brightly. ‘What name, please?’

Persephone Callard sat up on the couch and her breath came out in a long, hollow whooooosh. Grayle jumped. Somehow, it was like a corpse rising.

‘Directory Inquiries.’

The candle went out. Just went out. On its own.

Grayle said, too loudly, ‘Uh, could you give me the number of a hotel in Stroud, please? A big hotel.’

‘Tell me, Grayle,’ Persephone Callard said softly, ‘what was the awful thing that happened to a young woman very close to you?’

V

The room which had been, until her death, the bedsit occupied by Mrs Willis, Marcus’s housekeeper and resident healer, was now the editorial suite of The Vision. Marcus stumbled in with a glass and his dying bottle of Glenmorangie, brushing a hand down the light switches, gazing around in bleary despair.

The shelves which had held the herbal potions were dense with box files — Underhill having bought them as a job lot from a local farming accountant who was switching to computers.

The boxes contained — for the first time alphabetically sorted and categorized — the many years of handwritten case histories sent in by an ageing army of correspondents the length and breadth of Britain.

Loonies to a man, Marcus thought morosely. Although, in truth, most of them seemed to be women. Many of whom had, over the years, made vague proposals of marriage to the editor, whom they’d never even seen. And who were now expressing dismay at the large number of young women who appeared to be working with him.

Meryl Taylor-Whitney, Alice D. Thornborough and the rest.

All the pseudonyms of Grayle Underhill, who was changing everything.

For most of its life the flimsy pages of The Phenomenologist, as it was then known, had been grey with dense and smudgy type, its headlines not much larger. A typical one might read,

Report of Presumed Fairy Ring Received from Central Cornwall

‘And what the hell’s so wrong with that?’ Marcus had demanded of Underhill during their first, tempestuous editorial conference last year. ‘It’s straightforward, accurate and a direct statement of fact. The magazine has received, from an old biddy in Truro, a garbled letter relating to what is probably a mildly anomalous circle of mushrooms on her front lawn, but which she, in her precarious mental state, presumes to be a nocturnal meeting place for tiny men with bells in their little bloody hats.’

Underhill had let her unkempt, blonde head fall forward into her hands and had groaned. He’d stared at her, baffled and resentful.

‘Marcus,’ he’d heard from under the hair, ‘it just isn’t … it isn’t sexy, is it? And what are we doing with a magazine title that most people connect with a bunch of crazy German philosophers pre-World War Two?’

And so, just over six months ago, to surprisingly few complaints from the residual readership, The Phenomenologist had been relaunched as The Vision.

Marcus poured himself a quarter-inch of Scotch, held the whisky in his mouth as long as he could taste it. Sitting in the high-backed chair behind the bastard computer he refused to use, he leaned his head — thick grey hair lank with sweat — into its soulless foam-rubber padding.

Underhill had energy, enthusiasm and — though he was never going to admit this to her face — a certain dexterity with the written word. A touch flip, a trifle coarse — but what could one expect from a New York tabloid hack?

Hey, you know, this is fun, Marcus. We’re gonna make it happen, I can feel it. Like, if we start by bringing it out like bi-monthly … like six times a year? Then we go to monthly … Oh, sure you have the material … You just got to stop cramming it all together … have bigger type, photographs. And bigger headlines which are more, uh … evocative. Plus, you need to attract advertising. And also, of course, you have to start trying to sell it to people other than the correspondents themselves. Hold on to the subscribers, sure, but get it into the newsagents. You appreciate what I’m saying?

Well, of course he did. Known all this for years. If it had happened with Fortean Times, it could, presumably, happen to The Vision. As she told him, there was a market for ‘this sort of thing’.

But should it?

Look here, he’d told her. You know I can’t possibly pay you a decent wage.

She’d shrugged. Then she’d have to make it so that he could start to pay her. It’s gonna happen, Marcus. It was meant to happen.

Because Underhill, in her ingenuous American way, believed in destiny: coming to Britain, initially, in search of her sister, an archaeologist, who had gone missing; who, it later emerged, had been an early victim of an obscene ritual murderer residing perilously close to Castle Farm itself; Underhill accompanying the decayed remains of her sister home to the United States, where their father was a prominent academic … and then making an unexpected return within three months, arriving on Marcus’s doorstep with two large suitcases and a pale, shy, unsure smile.

Destiny.

And now The Vision was bi-monthly and designed on a computer, and each issue carried several stories investigated and written by Meryl Taylor-Whitney and Alice D. Thornborough. Underhill was volatile and frantic, and there were times when Marcus suspected she was no more balanced than the crazed biddies who wrote to him about their haunted coalsheds and their stigmata.

Yet the journal’s circulation had already increased by forty per cent and, even after the expense of the computer and sundry publishing software, there was a small but appreciable profit.

But was the magazine’s destiny compatible with Underhill’s? Was The Vision, any