Mean Spirit

machinery.’

He had a scary image of unmanned conveyor belts, chemical reprocessing.

‘And most of the ones who come out to me, they don’t know either. They’re the ones who don’t realize they’re over. Or they have unfinished business here and because of that — this really petty crap — they can’t see … the fullness of it. Sometimes I can help them deal with that, clear the blockage. But I don’t know … I couldn’t tell you what happens to them afterwards. Perhaps they evaporate into pure energy. Go for recycling. Perhaps — God help us — perhaps they don’t exist at all outside my head. I … I was never one of your evangelical mediums. Never tell anyone it’s going to be all springtime and church bells. I don’t know.’ She paused. ‘And neither do you, apparently. No glorious lights when you died, Bobby.’

‘No.’

‘Depressing, or what?’ She started to laugh, bleakly. He thought about Gary Seward who he’d never met — and pushed him away again.

Quite soon, the laugh went out of Seffi’s voice but remained in her big amber eyes. Where it reflected a different mood: lighter, untroubled.

Maiden felt a peculiar tingle in his gut.

Seffi Callard’s eyes were shining with irony. Not her eyes, he thought, and a featherlight shiver started in his spine, a small, tremulous excitement, a feeling of someone coming towards him, weaving lightly through the trees.

And she said, ‘It’s all right, guv. It’s all right now.’

Her eyes very much someone else’s eyes.

The room around them was curtained with shadows and he heard the cracking of the trees in the wind, as though there were no walls.

No walls. The warm shiver enveloped him; he was aware of them both inside it.

She put out a hand and he took it.

She said, ‘Come on, guv, help yourself to the sweet trolley.’

Bobby Maiden began to weep.

Part Four

From Bang to Wrongs: A Bad Boy’s Book,

by GARY SEWARD

It amuses me when people say, ‘There ain’t no justice.’ In my world there is, every time. One thing we have always believed in is that people should get what is coming to them, by whatever means may be appropriate at the time.

Let me tell you the story of Billy Spindler.

Billy was the scum of the earth. A rapist. By which I don’t mean the kind of poor sod what goes down for seven years on account of getting a bit pissed and not hearing her say no. I mean a real pervert what gets off on degrading ladies. (As you may have gathered, I hate perverts of all persuasions, but that is by the by in this instance.) Another reason Billy was scum was on account of being a grass, and when he was nicked for sexually assaulting a schoolteacher, while wearing a black balaclava, on a building site at Chiswick, he was quick to take the Coward’s Way Out by striking a bargain with the police, as a result of which three of his neighbours were arrested in connection with a very clean raid on a branch of the Bradford and Bingley Building Society, as it was then known. Naturally, the whole community was up in arms about this, but the scum was hard to get at, without an element of personal risk, due to police protection, which was an outrage in itself.

Now, justice works in peculiar ways and you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. What happened was in some respects regrettable, but the law of karma does not require permission from the Crown Prosecution Service to take effect.

What happened was that, two months later, to the day and the hour, the same schoolteacher was raped by a man wearing a black balaclava.

Well, most of the police had been well choked by that deal with Billy Spindler and, alibi or not, there was no way Billy was walking away from this one. He was convicted in record time and done eleven years, and not very pleasant years by all accounts, mostly in Parkhurst, where he ended up in solitary for his own safety and even then discovered he was not totally safe after a screw was bribed to look the other way.

Billy Spindler learned the hard way that certain behaviour cannot be tolerated, especially if perpetrated by a pervert.

And in case you were thinking this was hard on the poor schoolteacher, soon after she received an envelope containing ten thousand pounds in clean money from ‘a wellwisher’. So, there you are, everybody was happy, apart from Billy Spindler, which is how it should be.

XXVIII

Awakening into half-light from the cell-like window, Cindy put on the bedside lamp and his eyes met the eyes of Kelvyn Kite, sullenly shambling in the chair by the wall at the bottom of the bed.

You cowardly old tart.

‘Yes, yes, I know.’ Cindy’s voice was morning hoarse. ‘You don’t have to rub it in.’

What the hell are you doing here?

‘I ran. I ran away, all right? Ran away, I did, from the bitter tang of the cold sea.’

You never learn, boy. Never realize when you’re on top. Always looking down, you are, into the darkness.

‘Leave me alone,’ Cindy said. ‘Too early for the inquisition.’

He never wore a watch. He guessed it was not yet seven. Too early, also, to get up and disturb Amy. He reached for something to read and discovered the small, stiff-backed book sent to him in Kurt Campbell’s promotion package: The Mysteries of Overcross Castle by G.L. Mirebrook.

A ring of Enid Blyton, that title. The facsimile edition from 1935 had fewer than fifty pages. Cindy flicked it open near the middle.

for Abblow, it appears, was both jealous and suspicious of Daniel Dunglas-Home who was, by this time, acquiring an international reputation arising from the extraordinary phenomena which were said to gather around him like moths to a lamp. Home was able to produce not only spectacular visual effects but also sounds, evoking in one instance the tumult of waves and the creaking of a ship’s timbers; he also was able to levitate and had been seen to float around the room; he could even, it was attested, assume the physical size and shape of a particular spirit, appearing, furthermore, to increase his own height by several inches.Crole had met Home at Malvern Spa, where the spiritualist was receiving the hydropathic cure for an illness of the nerves brought on by difficulties and upset in his personal life. In the two years up to 1871, Home was a regular visitor to Overcross, where he said he found the atmosphere most conducive to the physical manifestation of spirits.This, it should be remembered, was a period when spiritualism was considered by many to be a legitimate extension of science, and when science was advancing in so many other daring directions that many people believed it was only a question of time before mankind was able not only to prove the existence of life after death but to engage in regular meaningful intercourse with the departed. Such a development was felt to be imminent, and Anthony Abblow, who had practised for some years as a medical doctor, was determined that it should be he, a scientist and scholar as well as a medium, and not the likes of Dunglas-Home with his ‘carnival tricks’, who proved the validity of survival on a spiritual plane.When Daniel Dunglas-Home ceased to be invited to Overcross, it was widely believed that Barnaby Crole had been ‘poisoned’ against him by Abblow, who had become intimate with Crole to the extent of being invited to set up his