Mean Spirit

He let his attention shift to the second, which was in the middle of the chest: the emotional centre. Inhaled again. Ten heartbeats. On about the seventh, he became aware of a gentle warmth in his chest but didn’t allow himself to dwell on it.

Next chakra: the solar plexus. Maiden inhaled again as, on the bedside table, the phone rang.

‘Bobby.’

He rolled off the bed. ‘Andy?’

‘You all right, son? You sound a wee bit strange.’

Maiden wanted to tell her about the books he’d been reading on spiritual development but felt embarrassed.

‘I fell asleep,’ he said.

‘Well, have a biscuit and a glass of water, then get yourself over here.’

He ran all the way. By the time he reached the General Hospital, his body felt half-numbed down the left side, lingering side-effect of the brain-stem injury. He was sweating in the cold and the damp. Just outside, under the Accident and Emergency sign, stood plump, trilby-wearing George Barrett, the Division’s longest-serving Detective Constable, lighting one of his small cigars.

‘Thought you was on leave, boss.’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Another day, boss. Another day.’

‘Who’s in there with him, George?’

George fitted a rough grin around his cigar. ‘DS Beattie. And one of the traffics.’

‘Here quickly, was he? Beattie?’

‘Probably here before it fucking happened.’ George blew out a contemptuous ball of smoke. He had less than a year to serve, didn’t give a shit any more.

‘What do we know?’

‘No eye-witnesses. Bloke out dog-walking reckons he saw a car coming out of Danks Street with a bit of tyre-squealing. Didn’t get the number. Poor bugger. You always knew where you were with Vic.’

Maiden’s head was spinning. It was unreal.

He went into Casualty, wondering how he was going to manage to look into Beattie’s face without smashing it with whatever piece of heavy resuscitatory equipment was closest to hand.

XIII

Grayle sat at the end of the sofa, outside of the lamplight, watching Marcus Bacton doing this courtly minuet stuff around Persephone Callard. So annoyed at the way he was behaving — this complete reversal of the one-time teacher-pupil relationship, so that now Callard was the big guru and Marcus the humble acolyte.

Which was just so much bullshit because she was merely someone that weird things happened to. Not a spiritual person, not an exalted human being, not even an authority. Whereas Marcus’s knowledge of the unexplained, in all its aspects, was possibly unrivalled anywhere.

But maybe this was it: Marcus knew everything about paranormal phenomena except how to make them happen. He was perhaps convinced that, between them, he and this haughty broad could evolve some of the answers he’d spent most of his life groping towards. Answers he was perhaps half afraid of.

And if Grayle was less convinced, was she not just envious of Callard’s beauty and her fame and her power over the legendary curmudgeon?

Marcus was saying, ‘Persephone, you had scientists studying you at one point, didn’t you?’

He hadn’t blown his nose or wiped his eyes in a full half-hour. He was hunched at the edge of his chair, from which stuffing was leaking like the so-called ectoplasm in those phoney Victorian spiritualist photos.

‘Oh Lord.’ Callard relaxed into the full Prince Charles drawl. ‘That was frightfully tedious. They’d have one sitting in some little glass room concentrating on an object in a sealed, transparent container and trying to move it with one’s mind. Or there’d be someone in the next room concentrating on a particular image and you’d have to draw it. I mean, what’s the point? What is the point? If you succeed, someone’s always going to say it was a fix.’

‘And did you succeed?’

‘Sometimes. Sometimes I was told what the object was. And sometimes I was lied to.’

‘By the spirits?’

Callard shrugged. ‘I submitted to this nonsense for about four months, in New York and Boston, throwing various professors into paroxysms of joy and then troughs of despair.’

She was leaning against the desk, long legs stretched out in front of her, half out of a long, split skirt, bare feet in scuffed sandals. She’d changed into the skirt and a white silk blouse, for dinner — more soup and tuna sandwiches and a dusty bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon Grayle found behind the fridge.

‘Then one day I said, “That’s it, no more laboratory monkey,” and caught a plane home.’

‘Figuring it was time to start making some money out of it,’ Grayle said cynically.

Persephone Callard turned on her those deep, lazy, amber cat’s eyes. Her lip was still swollen, but otherwise she was casual and sleek and sexy. Her hair, freshly washed, was spread over her shoulders, dense and lustrous. There was a leather thong around her neck, supporting an amulet or something hidden down her blouse.

She looked rested. Cleaned up, softened, detoxified. She would accept only one glass of the wine, signalling that she did not have a drink problem.

‘You think I’m just prostituting myself, don’t you, Grayle?’

‘You made a lotta dough out of this,’ Grayle said flatly.

‘True,’ Callard said, gaze unwavering. ‘The public sittings. The television. The books. Sure. A lot of … dough.’

‘But now you’re gonna give all of that up, right?’

‘I’m apparently supposed to make one more appearance. Kurt Campbell’s international psychic festival in the Malverns around the end of the month.’

‘And after that?’

‘There isn’t an after that. I don’t think I’m going to do it.’

‘What, because you don’t feel the messages you’re relaying are genuine? Or because you’ve made enough money and now it’s becoming, like, tedious?’

‘Uncalled for, Underhill,’ Marcus said.

‘I used to be a journalist,’ Grayle snapped. ‘It’s what we do. Are you scared of what you’re doing to people, Persephone? Is that what you’re saying? All the lives you f-’

‘Look!’ Callard arched forward into the lamplight. ‘If I received a message I thought was going to seriously disturb someone without especially benefiting anyone, I kept it to myself.’

Untrue. If you read the press cuttings you were soon aware that she’d quite often had people leaving her seances in tears. It was why she was considered more convincing than the rest. Also, Grayle recalled the almost sadistic excitement Callard had given off when she was offering to contact Ersula … when she thought she had Grayle halfway to cowering in a corner.

She turned her head away from the amber eyes, tired of firing all the shots. Gave Marcus a glance. Marcus nodded.

‘Persephone …’ taking his glasses off to clean them and maybe so he wouldn’t have to face the gaze ‘has something else happened to you?’

There was silence. Callard came and sat down at the opposite end of the sofa to Grayle.

‘How did you think I could help you?’ Marcus said gently.

Grayle shuffled a cushion. She noticed that Malcolm, who would habitually curl up by Marcus’s feet or on the sofa, was not around.

‘Would you find it easier to talk to Marcus if I wasn’t here?’

‘Harder, probably.’ Callard smiled. Grimly, Grayle thought.