Mean Spirit

postcard. Don’t want to lose touch again. I’ll write … an article or something, for your magazine. Something you could print. That’d make Grayle feel a little better about me, do you think?’

‘I think’, he said, ‘that that would somehow be desperately unsatisfactory. I mean you going off on your own. Into hiding, as it were.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Persephone shrugged awkwardly and twisted away. ‘I’ve behaved like a clinging child. I’ve imposed on you inexcusably. I’ve put a strain on your working relationship with Grayle …’

‘No,’ Marcus said. ‘Not at all. No …’

Suddenly, she seemed so much smaller and even more vulnerable than she had as a teenager. Marcus was afraid for her and all she represented.

He doubted Mars-Lewis would be able to help her.

The sky was starting to darken when Grayle and Bobby Maiden watched Cindy return. He looked like a member of a mature persons’ hiking club back from the hills for his hot broth and his bed in some hostel. He seemed a little brighter.

The new wind carried a spattering of rain. They stood in the shelter of the curtain wall. Cindy looked up at the sky and nodded, then turned to them.

‘Bobby,’ he said. ‘Good to see you again, boy.’

‘How are you, Cindy?’

‘I’m good. Good, yes.’

Grayle frowned. ‘What’s the schedule, Cindy?’

Cindy patted her arm. ‘Begin soon after dark, we will, I think. As the first … occurrence was at night. We need to appear to be dancing to his tune.’

‘His tune?’

Grayle recoiled at the way the wind was rolling at the castle wall. Although it was not a particularly cold wind and even blew a gruff promise of spring.

The dog Malcolm ambled towards them from the back of the farmhouse, pausing to sniff in all the usual places where the grass grew in clumps through fractured flagstones.

‘Keeps his distance from Callard,’ Grayle said. ‘Even Marcus commented on it.’

‘You’re saying this is a sign of what she carries, little Grayle?’

‘How would I know?’

She looked up at him, his face tilted towards the last of the light, the sawn-off tower rearing over him.

‘Right, then.’ Cindy patted Malcolm. ‘Let’s go in. Lead the way, my boy.’

XXXII

‘Ms Callard.’

Cindy met her at last just after seven, when she emerged from Marcus’s study into the ill-lit, stone-walled passageway. He took her hand, bowed formally over it.

He wore his tweed jacket and slacks with crisp creases. His hair was conservatively brushed and carried only a hint of its usual mauve. Bobby Maiden thought he looked like the manager of a slightly faded hotel, approaching retirement. Not really a celebrity, the clothes said. Not quite a loony. But they were just as much of a costume as those spangly frocks.

‘Mr Lewis,’ Seffi Callard said.

The two hands parting civilly.

Seffi, joined now by Marcus, was calm and seemed distant — as though something had been agreed, Maiden thought, but it would be no more than going through the motions.

Seffi didn’t look at Maiden. He watched, with Grayle, from the doorway of the kitchen across the passage. He thought of Em, but she was far away now.

He looked at Grayle in her jeans and a lime and lemon baseball sweater too big for her — a defiant statement; none of this solemn Victorian formality for her. She looked very pretty, her blonde hair bunched like bananas. But also forlorn, Maiden thought. He didn’t think he’d ever met anyone with less to hide, less to feel bad about.

But his gaze, inevitably, was drawn back to Seffi Callard, evoking a longing as strange and raw as the one he sometimes felt for lonely-places — long beaches, estuaries, ante-rooms to infinity.

‘I’m getting the feeling you’d rather keep this formal.’ Cindy’s accent, like his hair, was smoothed down. He and Seffi looking at one another almost like opponents. Not fighters, but maybe international chess champions: same game, different language, different names for the pieces.

‘It’s your show, Mr Lewis,’ Seffi said.

Cindy shook his head gently. ‘No, lovely, your show it is, tonight. You are walking the tightrope. Think of me as a safety net. Or, rather, don’t think of me at all.’ He smiled and ushered her into what had been Mrs Willis’s healing room.

They might have been going in for dinner.

The first time Maiden had been in here, Mrs Willis was recently dead and although he’d never met her there’d been a poignancy about her stripped-down daybed and the rickety shelves still loaded with jars and old Marmite pots full of herbs and potions. Now the shelves were sagging under stacks of back copies of The Vision.

The size of the place, its height, surprised him. Perhaps a partition wall had been taken down since he was last here. It was clear now that the room had once been a small barn or a cowshed attached to the farmhouse. Rafters were exposed where a short hayloft had been; there was a long window which had probably been a doorway, and you could see the ruins out there and hear the wind whining like a trapped banshee in the derelict castle’s sawn-off tower.

A computer, unplugged, had been pushed against a wall on its table. In the centre of the room was a circle of six wooden chairs, some brought in from the study and the kitchen. On a small, round table in the middle of the circle, an earthenware bowl held a stubby candle.

Maiden said, ‘Six chairs, Cindy?’

‘Are there really?’

‘There are five of us.’

‘Hmm,’ Cindy said. ‘A little corny, do you think?’

One time, while she was with the Courier, Grayle had been given special permission to cover a seance given by the exclusive New York medium, Morgan Schuster.

She was real ghostlike: small, white-haired, wore white woollen dresses. She had an apartment in the Dakota Building, the turreted and gargoyled Central Park chateau where Polanski shot Rosemary’s Baby and Mark Chapman shot John Lennon. It was, she said, perhaps the most resonant location in the city, a major spiritual node, a focus of psychic energy, a great amplifier for the inner voice.

Morgan used to operate out of her front parlour in Queens until not too long after Grayle’s column broke the story about her psychic contact with the spirit Beatle. Which — whatever the likes of Lyndon McAffrey said — had seemed genuine enough to Grayle at the time. And, even if it wasn’t, where was the harm? Morgan was a wise, good-natured person who helped people find their true selves. Just that she used to help poor people and now she helped mostly rich people, and had a way of making Grayle feel good about what she did.

See, Grayle, to people all across the nation — distressed, grief-laden people and those who’re just looking for some kind of celestial light in a gloomy world — you’ve become very essential. You are a crucial conduit in a data flow which begins in the unseen world, passes to people like me and reaches the material world through your column. What you’re doing transcends mere journalism.

Grayle nodding weakly, figuring Lyndon McAffrey might see it from a different perspective, regarding her column as a useful conduit through which large amounts of money were siphoned into the bank accounts of people like Morgan Schuster.