Mean Spirit

‘Does it have anything to do with those guys last night?’

‘I don’t know.’

Grayle said softly, letting the thought out as it formed, ‘They didn’t come to rob the place, did they? They came for you. They were gonna take you away.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Kidnap her?’ Marcus ramming his glasses back on.

‘I guess. They had her taped up like a parcel. What did you feel about that, Seffi?’

Because Callard had never spoken about what was going through her mind when it was happening. Only describing the assault in purely technical terms.

‘I don’t know.’

‘A ransom thing?’ Marcus said. ‘To get money out of your father?’

‘I don’t know, I …’ Callard shook her head violently. ‘No, that’s ridiculous, this isn’t bloody Sicily.’

‘Maybe they just needed a medium,’ Grayle said. ‘Like they wanted you to contact Blackbeard the Pirate. Find out where he stashed his doubloons.’

Marcus frowned.

‘Or something like that,’ Grayle said.

They both looked at Callard, waiting. She was half in shadow. She sat straight-backed, hands on her knees. This would be how it began at a sitting, Grayle thought, sure she could feel a change in the atmosphere like an electric current. She felt a touch nervous and was annoyed with herself.

‘I’m trying to think of the words you say.’

Callard looked up slowly, eerily showing the whites of her eyes. ‘Words?’

There was a stillness around her. Marcus, oblivious of it, finally blew his nose.

‘Like “Is there anybody there?” Only you don’t say that, do you? You have your own phrase. Like a radio phone-in host. Something like-’

‘No!’

Callard leapt up, rigid.

‘Those are not words I utter lightly.’

A hand sliding instinctively down her blouse, bringing out what was on the end of the leather thong.

Grayle, expecting an ankh or some astrological talisman, was shocked to see the dark gold cross glowing sombrely on the edge of the circle of lamplight.

Callard said, ‘I wanted to … talk. I just wanted to talk. To someone who believed in what I used to be. Who wouldn’t judge me. Who understood where I was coming from. Didn’t despise me … wasn’t jealous of me … didn’t want to get into my knickers … didn’t have a piece of me.’

She looked down at her sandals. Yup, Grayle thought, that’s Marcus Bacton.

‘I do need help.’ Fingering the cross — so alien on her. ‘Only, the people who might be able to help me are not people I’d feel comfortable going to. Old-fashioned mediums, spiritual healers I’ve slagged off, in my arrogance, over the years. Cosy old psychics bringing it down to the level of afternoon tea, I always despised that — the way sittings would begin with these ragged Salvation Army hymns, some old dear on the harmonium.’

‘Grandma’s leisure hour,’ Grayle said. ‘When the bingo hall’s closed. Uncool.’

‘I’ve cut myself off, that’s the problem. Sometimes I’d get word that they wanted to meet me — the late Doris Stokes, people like that. Well, Christ, one had one’s image to consider …’ Ruefully shaking her head. ‘I fucking wish I could talk to Doris Stokes now.’

‘Well, shit, if you really-’ Grayle bit her tongue.

Marcus leaned forward. ‘What would you ask her?’

It got weird then. Grayle found that the palms of her hands, where they were gripping her knees, had become damp.

She looked at Seffi’s cross and imagined hundreds of little crosses on the walls, formed out of the gold leaf and silver glittering from the shadowed spines of the books about poltergeists and leylines and ritual magic.

Talking in this oddly subdued tone, lightly supporting her cross in the palm of her right hand, Persephone Callard said she would ask Doris this:

What do you do, how are you supposed to react, when you achieve the strongest, most defined manifestation of your career … when the closeness and the intensity of it makes you almost cry out, at first, with wonder?

If you were becoming blase, cynical to the point of contempt for your trade, how would you handle what appeared to be clear and unambiguous proof of the reality of the spirit?

And how would you deal with it when the dead thing facing you, across a room full of living people, is also hideously and unambiguously evil?

XIV

‘Clean filth.’ her voice was husky with tears and smoke and gin. ‘That’s what he used to say about you. Maiden’s clean filth. He liked that.’

The Edwardian sitting room was lit by one small Tiffany lamp, and the long velvet curtains were open to the period glow of Danks Street with its imitation gaslights.

Her name was Shelagh Beckett; she sounded like a Londoner. Maiden recognized the voice, thought he’d seen her before, but not for a good while.

‘I can see why he said that, Maiden. You don’t look like a copper. It’s them big, dark eyes. Coppers develop little squidgy eyes, you ever notice that?’

And she laughed. She was saving the real crying, she said. She’d make a night of it, serious grief, then pick herself up at five in the morning, take herself to bed with the gin.

‘How long had it been?’ he asked her. ‘You and Vic.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you, Maiden … me and Victor, it was convenience more than anything, and he’d have told you that himself. What he loved most of all was this address, this big brick townhouse with the high ceilings and the plaster coving. And the mahogany four-poster, Victor loved that four-poster.’

He thought for a second she was going to break her vow on the crying, but she laughed again, and this time he realized: it was the name which had misled him, Shelagh Beckett.

‘Connie?’

‘Blimey,’ she said, ‘you must be older than you look.’

Used to mind the lower bar at the Biarritz. Before that, a regular on the Feeny Park beat, when Maiden was a young copper. Consuela, she’d called herself, accentuating the Latin look: big earrings and black frocks with mega- cleavage.

She peered at him. ‘You never nicked me, did you, Maiden?’

‘Never did,’ he said. And was glad. The hair was shorter and near-white now and she’d put on a couple of stone since Feeny Park. She was spread over the peacock-blue sofa, in her lime-green frilly dressing gown. On the carpet was the jersey dress she’d worn earlier, with Vic’s blood all over it from when she’d cradled his pumping head.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I can’t keep calling you Maiden. What’s your name?’

‘Bobby.’

‘Sweet. We had a cat called Bobby. Listen, Bobby, I know how it is — somebody like Vic goes the way he did, somebody who’s done bird, and the police look into it without much interest for a couple of weeks, and then it’s like: Oh, it don’t involve the general public, it’s an underworld thing, it ain’t worth the candle. If it don’t look like escalating into gang warfare, they just let it go. That’s what happens, isn’t it?’

‘I won’t let it go, Connie,’ he said.

‘I know you wouldn’t, darling, not left to yourself.’

‘It’s why I’m here again.’