Mean Spirit

Although it was late, she put a match to a wood fire in the living room. Like a campfire in the woods, to keep the bears at bay. The flames lit the inglenook, shadows leaping and shooting up the stones. Living light was caught by the crystals hanging from the big beam, was glinting in the seraphic eyes of the brass Buddha in the hearth.

Bobby and Callard hadn’t returned to Castle Farm.

Which was like … none of her business. Right?

Because she was OK. Grayle sat still and glum. She was fine.

Very tired, Cindy parked the Honda in the little cindered courtyard behind the Ram’s Head and immediately switched off the lights.

The Honda, yes.

The Morris Minor, his totem car, his shamanic chariot, having failed to start. Of course it had. All that time in storage. What did he expect? It meant nothing.

Cindy crept around the side of the pub. He had no wish to disturb Amy. If she had retired for the night, well … resigned, he was, if necessary, to sleeping in the car. It would not be the first time.

The merest glow from the interior. A security lamp, perhaps, for even St Mary’s was no longer too remote to be immune from the predatory attentions of itinerant thieves. Cindy peered through the bevelled glass into the churchlike glimmerings within the public bar.

A searing pain almost paralyzed his spine.

‘Freeze.’

‘Oh my God,’ Cindy croaked.

‘Turn around … ve-ry slowly.’

‘Amy, my love,’ Cindy wheezed, ‘if you wanted me to turn round quickly, we would require the services of an osteopath.’

‘Cindy! Oh my God!’ Amy dropped the yard-brush.

Amy Jenkins: little and dark and warm and crinkly, a refugee from the next valley to Cindy’s own in the broken heart of Glamorgan. Divorced these many years from the man known only as That Bastard. Now queen of the Tup.

‘You only just caught me, see,’ she said, as if this wasn’t past midnight and she might have gone to the shops. ‘Just having a last look round, I was. Weekend night, you get them in from all over the place — Hereford, Abergavenny. Strangers, and some thinking they can see an opportunity. Always like a last look around, I do, on a Saturday night. And there you was, like a burglar. Well … I can’t get over it — Cindy Mars-Lewis, and so famous now. Wait till I tell-’

‘Nobody,’ Cindy said firmly. ‘Tell nobody.’

‘Oh. Like that, is it?’ Amy was leading him to the oak settle in the woody dimness of the deserted bar then putting more lights on, giving him the once-over. ‘Looking tired, you are, Cindy. Not quite your old self.’

‘I’m fine, lovely. Fine as I could be.’

‘That poor man. The Lottery winner. Did you hear?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Money,’ Amy said. ‘Money makes people careless. Feel invulnerable they do, in the first flush of it.’

‘Yes. That is a profound observation, Amy.’

‘The usual room, is it?’

‘That would be wonderful. I’m not yet sure how many nights. Two, three …’

‘You stay as long as you like, Cindy. And if you don’t want me to tell nobody, nobody gets told.’

‘Little Amy,’ Cindy said wistfully. ‘Marry you, I would, if I was normal.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that laugh,’ Persephone Callard said.

They were drinking whisky by the coal fire. Side by side on the hard Victorian sofa.

‘Ron isn’t best known for his impressions,’ Maiden said.

‘It was just the general tone. On one level. Quite a strong laugh, but one that wasn’t reacting to anything funny, do you know what I mean? It was there. I heard it at Barber’s party.’

‘But you don’t remember Seward. You weren’t introduced?’

‘Wasn’t introduced to anybody. Quite odd, now I think about it.’

‘Having a celebrated villain at your party,’ Maiden said, ‘wouldn’t that be a bit dangerous for a politician?’

‘Ex-politician. Ex-villain, for that matter.’

‘Probably no such items. Like you can’t be an ex-alcoholic. Just because Seward’s doing after-dinner talks and guesting on quiz shows …’

‘You ever encountered him, Bobby?’

Maiden shook his head. ‘He’d have been doing his seven years when I was in London. Listen, say he engineered himself an invitation from Barber because of his interest in spiritualism. He was there because you were going to be there. Why no introduction? Seward loves celebrity. Unless-’

‘There was something else. Now I think about it…’ Seffi hunched up on the Victorian sofa, tapping a knee with stiffened fingers. ‘I’m remembering him from another context. Damn.’

‘Unless it was his party,’ Maiden said.

‘What?’

‘Unless Sir Richard Barber was figureheading Seward’s party. Say Barber knows Seward, or Seward has something on him. Seward wants you — but if you’d been invited to conduct a sitting at a soiree hosted by Gary Seward the East End villain, would you have done it? Even for twenty-five K?’

‘No chance.’

‘There you go, then.’

‘Yes. It makes sense. It would explain why Barber didn’t appear to know anybody particularly. The fact that they didn’t seem to be his kind of people.’

‘Could they have been Seward’s kind of people? We know Les Hole was, for a start.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Gary Seward’s party,’ Maiden said. ‘The place full of iffy entrepreneurs and general villains. All those people with bad secrets. All those bodies buried. And you were the floorshow. Why?’

There was silence. She sat very still, her face sheened in the firelight, heavy hair down one side of her face like a hawser.

Remembering the commitment he’d made, telling Ron Foxworth, I believe she does this … thing. Which had been said mainly to support her against Ron’s impending sneers, and not necessarily because he …

If you believed she did this thing, that she truly had access to the dead, the implications were vast. Thinking about it now, just the two of them here, it was as though the walls of the room had dissolved and the night was in.

‘Persephone,’ he said. ‘She was the woman who married the king of the Underworld, right?’

‘And spent half her life among the dead,’ she said.

Whenever Maiden thought of the dead, he thought of Em.

Seffi looked at him, firelight flickering in her eyes.

‘And if that’s what you were about to ask, it is my real name. My mother chose it.’

‘She was psychic too?’

‘I don’t know. I ask my father, he just smiles. Yes, of course she was. I know she was.’

‘So, have you ever …?’

‘Had contact? Not for a long time. I think she’s moved on, beyond my reach. I think she was there in the few years after she died, when I was a child. Guarding the portal. From adolescence, I guess I was on my own. Which was when it became disruptive.’

He said, ‘Are you still afraid to die? Knowing what you … know?’

Her faint smile twisted. ‘Oh, come on, Bobby, what do I know? What do I really know? It’s all too big in there, a huge, endless factory. I’m just standing there, looking at all this strange