Mean Spirit

for the Sun.

No excuse any more. He looked at page five. Saw a picture of himself wearing a cunning smile and a pointed hat.

Underneath the picture, the caption read:

Cindy the sorcerer: ‘communes with spirits’.

The smile on the face was real, but the hat was a clever and convincing computer graphic. Perhaps a legitimate liberty, under the circumstances.

The feature story had it all. Twisted and sensationalized, of course, but, in essence, true. The Sun had even sent someone to confront one of the Fychans, young Sion, at his farm in Snowdonia. Not that this had proved entirely helpful. Sion had invited the reporter in for tea and generously answered all his questions. In Welsh, of course. Only in Welsh. Cindy allowed himself his first and probably final smile of the day.

The sources of the information which did not require translation were given as ‘close friends’ and anonymous people said to have ‘worked with’ Cindy.

Only one person was actually named in the piece.

TV hypnotist Kurt Campbell, who recently discovered the hard way that Cindy was no easy subject, said last night, ‘I didn’t know any of this, but to be honest, it doesn’t surprise me.‘You can tell that behind all that camp stuff the guy has iron will-power.‘Sure I could believe he’s studied magical techniques. It could explain a lot.’

‘Thank you, boy,’ Cindy murmured grimly. He returned to the payphone in the hallway, redialled Jo’s number.

This time the phone was answered almost immediately. The voice was male and young and cool and assured.

‘I’m sorry, Jo Shepherd isn’t coming in today.’

‘Unwell, is she?’

Jo was always at work on Monday, planning Wednesday night’s show.

‘Far as I know, she’s absolutely fine. Who’s this?’

‘That’s all right,’ Cindy said. ‘Call her at home, I will.’

‘Ah.’ Pause. ‘That’s Mr Mars-Lewis, isn’t it?’

Cindy considered hanging up.

‘Glad you called. My name’s John Harvey. I’ll be taking over as producer for the next few weeks.’

Cindy’s grip on the phone grew tight. ‘I may be wrong, but I don’t recall Jo mentioning that.’

‘Oh, Jo didn’t know until this morning.’

And could not reach Cindy because his phone was lying in some soaking nettlebed at Castle Farm.

‘Swift decision from On High,’ John Harvey said. Smoothly. Triumphantly. ‘They wanted someone more experienced to take over for a while. I don’t think I need to explain the reasons, do I?’

‘Perhaps not,’ Cindy said, then regretted it; these people never thought they needed to explain, they just dictated memos.

John Harvey, sounding all of twenty-six, said, ‘Look, Cindy, I’m going to have to call you back, I’m due-’

‘In a meeting?’ The hand gripping the telephone now shaking.

‘You’ve been in the business a long time, matey. I think you know how these things work.’

‘Not really, boy. Perhaps you can enlighten me when we meet at rehearsal tomorrow.’

John Harvey laughed nervously. Cindy remained silent.

He was going to make the boy say it: that his presence at tomorrow’s rehearsal would be very far from essential.

Grayle had come in with a whole pile of papers, all this crazy stuff about Cindy, portrayed as some kind of jinx figure bringing down darkness and retribution on innocent people for the crime of winning the National Lottery.

What the hell?

Insanity all around her. Hadn’t gotten any sleep until must’ve been four a.m. Lying there, hearing Callard whispering, He’s touching my face. And then the window disintegrating, the exclamations, the scraping of chairs, the stumbling, the feet skidding on glass.

And now here was Bobby Maiden staring in disbelief at the office pad they used for telephone notes.

A drawing on it, another relic of a wild and crazy night.

She hadn’t seen Bobby like that since Emma, his girlfriend, was savagely killed, when he was groping for the light of understanding under the deadening pressure of a lingering head injury.

‘OK … let’s … let’s be calm.’ Easing the pad out of his fingers. ‘Let’s look at it by daylight. Let’s consider the rational options before we get carried away.’

She bore the pad quickly to the back door and out into the farmyard, Bobby following in silence.

The main options were that he was lying, that he’d done this as a scam to give Callard some credibility. Or that Cindy had done it after they left him alone in there last night. She didn’t know too much about Cindy’s level of artistic ability, but the design work on his shamanic drum had some style.

It was good that Marcus had not reappeared. Better not to complicate this by introducing the Big Mystery option.

The wind was blowing, the sky was heavy but there was no rain. Grayle leaned the pad against the stump of an old gatepost. She didn’t like to hold it. She was glad to get it out the house. Well, Jesus, a face like that …

The drawing was rough, done with the kind of broad, scrubbing strokes that Lucas, her old art-dealer friend, might appreciate. She could almost hear Lucas now: Yeah, yeah, bold, confident … what it lacks in finesse it makes up for in raw energy. The pencil shading had been smudged, like Bobby had licked a finger and rubbed at it.

Damn it, this face had life.

Bobby and she stood together examining the picture, like they were figuring whether to buy it.

‘You never said you saw him,’ Grayle said.

‘I didn’t … see him. Grayle, I don’t remember doing this.’ Rubbing hard at his eyes. ‘What the fuck …?’

‘Calm down. Jesus, were you like this when you found Justin’s body? Believe me, this is … this is just… I’ve seen this stuff before, Bobby. It’s just an anomaly.’

‘It was me who did this?’

‘Sure it was. I was vaguely aware of you drawing. I didn’t even think much about it at the time. I must’ve thought, yeah that’s what he does when he’s all strung up. He draws.’

She remembered something else then, something that had gotten wiped from her memory in all the chaos of Marcus trying to break into the dairy.

‘What were you doing in there with Cindy? Afterwards.’

‘Well, he was just … it was a cleansing thing. Didn’t he do it to you?’

‘No. A cleansing thing?’

‘A banishing. He made me stand against a wall and he drew shapes in the air in front of me.’

‘Pentagrams?’

‘I don’t know. I was a bit shaken. Lost track of time. And then,’ Bobby thought back, ‘he told me to stay there and he went off and came back with Malcolm.’

‘Right. He was checking if you were clean. If the dog had growled and backed away or taken a piece out of your ass, there’d still be a problem. He was scared you’d become possessed.’

‘By what?’

‘By …’ Grayle jerked a thumb at the drawing. ‘Look, like I said, I’ve seen this … well, I’ve seen so-called spirit drawings and … I guess none of them were like this. They were all kind of two-dimensional. Or do I mean one- dimensional? Whatever, they didn’t have this level of … of … expression. I mean like the expression on that face. That is … that is some … expression.’

The wind peeled back the page of the flimsy pad — the page made even flimsier by the pencil-scraping and thumb-smudging. Grayle moved to stop it getting torn off, blown away.