Mean Spirit

And he’d seen the incomprehension in her eyes.

His head full of fever, Marcus glared out of the window at the farmyard and the castle ruins. Feeling like a bloody prisoner. Dripping a little single malt into his glass. Which left just under an inch in the bottom of the bottle. How the hell was he supposed to survive flu on an inch of whisky?

‘BOTTLE OF SCOTCH!’ he’d bawled at the static surrounding Underhill’s bastard mobile phone. ‘BRING BACK A BOTTLE OF FUCKING SCOTCH!’

All right: if he was honest, the whisky had also been an excuse. He’d assumed Underhill had reached Persephone Callard by now. Had hoped she’d be able to pass the phone over to Persephone, so that he might explain why he was not there in person. And make sure that Persephone understood that, contrary to her appearance and general attitude, Underhill was, in fact, relatively trustworthy.

Another week — another three days, even — and he might have been fit enough to drive over there. Right now, he was too fucking ill to walk to the pub in St Mary’s for a bottle of Scotch. He couldn’t think straight and Persephone’s letter was burning up his brain.

… know we haven’t spoken since my departure many years ago from A Certain School. Perhaps you feel disappointed or offended by my subsequent commercial exploitation of my God-given Abilities.… surrounded by leeches, parasites, false lovers. You remain the only person who has ever been there when I needed understanding, tolerance and common sense…

The letter pleaded for Marcus to come and see her at the lodge at her father’s house. Not to write or phone — she was afraid her calls were being monitored.

‘Crazy,’ Underhill had said. ‘She’s blown it, you only need to read the papers. You don’t need this shit. Call her up when you’re on your feet, but play it cool. Don’t get involved.’

… I still recall our talks with the deepest gratitude. If you only knew how often I’ve wished that there was someone like you with whom I could discuss my grimmest fears …

‘Oh Marcus, you were like a father to me.’ Underhill raising her eyes to the oak beams. ‘Like the father I never had on account of he was always across the sea in some God-forsaken consulate …’

‘She’s never-’

‘Subtext, Marcus.’

‘Underhill, I was simply a teacher at her boarding school. A teacher who listened. She thought she was going mad, with all the things that were happening to her, and I was the only teacher who was prepared to consider the alternatives.’

‘Twenty years!’ Underhill yelled. ‘You haven’t seen her for twenty years! Like, did she come for your advice when they were touring her all over Europe and the States? When Diana was calling her up in the middle of the night, did she ask you how to handle it?’

‘She’s in trouble. I know this girl.’

‘Well, precisely. You knew a girl. This is a grown woman now and by all accounts she’s manipulative and paranoid in equal measure.’

‘You don’t know her.’

‘I know a lot of people like her.’

‘Believe me, you don’t.’

Underhill had looked stubborn.

‘She’s in trouble,’ Marcus insisted. ‘We can’t let this hang fire. I need you to go and talk to her.’

‘Like, she’s gonna talk to me? She’s in hiding from the media, she won’t take phone calls, and you think-?’

‘What else can we do?’ Marcus had started coughing, and the coughing had gone on for a long time and Underhill had sighed and given in.

Marcus pulled off his glasses, clutched the Kleenex to his streaming eyes. Never seemed to get colds or flu when Mrs Willis was alive and keeping house for him — first sniffle and the dear old soul had always been there with some mysterious, brown, stoppered bottle. Now he’d been forced back on the inhalers, expectorants and headache pills produced by fiendish pharmaceutical multinationals which, he was convinced, directed a meaningful element of their astronomical profits into the development of new and virulent strains of influenza.

Bastards.

He sagged back into his old chair, and the castle disappeared from the window, displaced by the last weak sun seeping into the Black Mountains. The study door edged open and Malcolm, the bull terrier, ambled in.

‘What are you grinning at?’ Marcus dragged the phone from the desk. A recorded message told him it was not at present possible to reach the mobile phone he was calling and he should try again later.

Waste of bastard time, mobile phones.

III

What she’d hoped for was that the community of Mysleton would be another pleasant, cheerful, big village with yellow-stone cottages and a pretty pub with tables outside and a scattering of early tourists trailing kids and dogs.

Oh, sure.

Clouds like industrial smoke banked over clay-coloured ploughed fields. The rain came in tough spatters, like abuse.

‘This … this is the place?’

Justin didn’t reply. Justin had become real silent; his lips had vanished into his moustache. He looked bigger, somehow.

Mysleton was not any kind of village. It was just like … a name. On a map, presumably; there wasn’t even a sign. You could see a few farms, well back from the road, but no two dwellings appeared to be within about three hundred yards of one another.

They came to this gap in the roadside hedge and, about ten yards in, two broken-down gateposts, no gate.

‘Mysleton House,’ Justin said.

But like suppose this wasn’t Mysleton House at all? Suppose that at the end of the track there was just some place which Justin knew was derelict, where no-one could hear you scream?

In what already seemed like standard Mysleton policy, there was no sign on the gateposts. Justin drove between them, into an avenue of bare poplar trees. Though it was only about four-thirty, the day was darkening rapidly on account of the rain, and the rain was coming harder — one of the truck’s wipers squeaking to this awful, chugging rhythm, like it was trying for an orgasm.

Grayle clenching her fists. Come on … even if he’d worked out that the call had not been from Persephone Callard, nothing was going to happen. This was Gloucestershire, England.

Jesus, what is that supposed to mean? Frederick West, the leering, sex-driven builder and repeat killer of women and girls, operated out of freaking Gloucester …

Always the same: when you saw olde-English-quaint, you saw harmless. A mistake.

And what you did not do, when your car broke down, was call up the number on the scuffed card that was always stuck up in the lonesome callbox. Because the guy on the other end of the phone knew that callbox, and if it was a woman’s voice he could guess she was alone. Maybe Frederick West had his card in lonely callboxes: F. West, general builder; cellar conversions a specialty.

‘OK, stop!’

They’d reached a low, smallish house, enclosed by trees and bushes and well covered with ivy creeper. Dirty stone in between the creeper, no Cotswold glow. Didn’t look so very old by English standards, maybe Victorian. Could this be it? The lodge?

Justin braked, but didn’t switch off his engine.