Mean Spirit

Grayle was white. ‘How could they make him?’

‘Gunpoint? There are situations where you’ll do anything you’re told.’

Marcus said, ‘If they had the car jacked up and then let it down on him … it had no tyres, you say?’

‘Without the tyres, it was going all the way down on him.’

‘God almighty, Maiden.’

‘Maybe it started out as torture. Perhaps they wanted some information.’

The Volkswagen lowered inch by inch, Justin screaming until he had no breath left, telling them everything he knew, gabbling it out, and they probably knew he’d told them everything, but they just went on lowering the car. Maybe quite interested in how it would go because they’d never done it like this before.

‘Who … who were they?’ Grayle’s relief at not being a killer was no longer apparent. ‘Jesus, this is even more awful …’

Maiden shook his head. The air had felt thick with agony and suffocating terror. Of course, he realized he’d generated this atmosphere himself, standing there transfixed, smelling Justin’s last moments. Building up, in the polluted space, images so real that he’d felt like a voyeur, guilty that he was virtually seeing it happen and could do nothing to stop it.

‘You’d better tell me about him,’ he said to Grayle.

As the afternoon closed down, Grayle explained why she’d been in Gloucestershire on Wednesday. Glad that Callard was not in the room. Presumably, having made her kind offer to admit guilt falsely, she’d decided to contain what curiosity she had about Justin, keep a low profile while Bobby was around.

‘Hang on.’ Bobby looked up from fondling his old pal Malcolm. Blinked. ‘This is Persephone Callard, the psychic?’

‘No, Persephone Callard, the hairdresser.’

‘Right. Sorry.’

‘Old friend of Marcus’s.’

‘I never knew that.’

‘Marcus Bacton,’ Grayle said. ‘Confidant of the stars.’

Without going into the Cheltenham stuff, Grayle and Marcus precised the background and Grayle told Bobby about the fraught final leg of her journey to Mysleton House. And what had happened that night.

‘Christ,’ Bobby said. ‘These guys. Do you have any-?’

‘I have no idea. If not Justin, I have no idea at all.’

‘They sound … professional.’

‘What I felt at the time. Kind of SAS-looking.’

‘Whoever killed Justin, that was also …’

‘Jesus, you think there might still be a connection?’

‘Can’t think there’d be too many outfits of that kind operating in one small area of the Cotswolds within the same day or so. Can you, Marcus?’

‘Well … I suppose the fact that Sharpe was also at Mysleton Lodge within hours of these bastards turning up …’

Bobby said, ‘A bloke in the village told me Justin had hard friends. In Gloucester and Cheltenham.’

‘Cheltenham,’ Grayle echoed. Bobby looked at her. ‘Just keeps coming up, is all. Go on.’

‘Justin likes making money without actually working. Plus, as you said, maybe he’s worried about his clock running down. So he’s putting himself about, getting into excitingly bad company. Leaving cards in phone boxes with a view to ripping off stranded motorists and helping ladies in distress into the back of his van. And when he finds out Persephone Callard’s in the area … OK, I don’t suppose even Justin thinks he’s got much chance of scoring there, but …’

‘Unlike with cheap-looking Holy Grayle. Thanks, Bobby.’

‘Aw now, Grayle, I didn’t…’

‘Just kidding,’ Grayle said unsmiling. ‘OK, Justin figured he might’ve been able to make some money out of the information is what you’re saying, with everyone looking for Ms Callard. Me, I’d just go to the press, bargain for a swift ten grand. But unless reporting’s gotten even less responsible these days, those guys were not like any journalists I ever worked with, so I guess-’

‘You’re not Justin,’ Bobby said. ‘What Justin does is brag to his mates, and maybe one of them passes it on to someone he knows is interested, or somebody overhears Justin relating how he had sex with Persephone Callard.’

‘Someone in Cheltenham?’

Bobby shrugged.

‘So Persephone was the target,’ Marcus said. ‘Who, then? Why?’

‘And why did they find it necessary to kill Justin afterwards? That’s just a theory.’ Bobby Maiden’s eyes trapped Grayle’s. ‘I think you’ve got to decide what you want to do about this. Whether you want to bring the police in.’

‘Rather thought we had,’ Marcus said.

‘In your back-door kind of way.’ Bobby was clearly still pissed off at the way Marcus ran him round the block, blind.

‘Be reasonable, Maiden …’ Marcus doing injured innocence with overtones of sick old man. ‘I couldn’t have told you all the background over the phone, now could I? Besides, I saw you as a friend, not …’

‘Anyway, how do you want to play it? You can’t have both of me.’

Marcus humphed. ‘Can hardly make a decision on something like this without consulting Persephone.’

‘With Marcus,’ Grayle said, ‘Callard always gets to call the shots.’

‘What’s she like?’ Bobby messed with Malcolm’s ears. ‘I just think of Doris Stokes, but not as cosy. How sure are you that she didn’t know those blokes?’

Grayle looked over at Marcus. ‘You can’t be sure of anything with Callard. Sometimes you think you’re getting to kind of like her, sometimes you even think you’re starting to understand her. Then she comes out with something so off the wall, and it’s like, hey, come on …’

She tailed off, becoming aware of that dark, slim shape in the study doorway. A woman who’d been too long around ghosts.

Callard glided into the room and put on the lamp. She was wearing the grey cardigan she’d had on when Grayle had first seen her in Mysleton Lodge. The one she didn’t over-button.

Grayle was depressingly aware of Bobby catching his breath.

XXII

Saturday morning, Grayle was so irritated, she just hurled herself into work.

It should have been a really good morning. Another bright, overcast day, the first suggestion of a light green haze over the deep Border hedgerows. And, for the first time in over two weeks, they were working together in the editorial room — Marcus at the trestle table, catching up on most of a week’s papers, Grayle burrowing in back copies of the magazine. Doing what she figured she did best.

And trying, God damn it, to avoid thinking about Bobby Maiden and Callard.

An elderly correspondent called Hedges over in Norfolk had sent in an update on one of those hitchhiking spook stories: dead of night, guy in old-time clothing pops up in front of your car with a hand raised and when you stop he’s disappeared. Grayle thought she might use it to nose off a composite piece, collating a bunch of other hitchhiking ghost stories from the past ten years. It was an old scam, but it filled space, which was what they needed right now, with all the time lost.

‘Try autumn eighty-nine,’ Marcus mumbled, head in the Mirror.

‘OK.’ Grayle started prising apart fifteen-year-old Phenomenologists, which were all moulded together. ‘Marcus, you’re looking better, did I say that?’

‘I may not die,’ Marcus conceded. ‘Not imminently, anyway.’