Mean Spirit

‘I don’t know. I hate going into anything blind.’ He drank some herbal tea, didn’t wince. ‘I wondered about going to see Kurt Campbell.’

‘Now?’

‘Well, tomorrow.’

‘On what pretext?’

‘I thought that I could take a temporary job with The Vision. Request an interview about the festival, with its founder.’

‘Sure. Except the next Vision doesn’t come out till next month.’

‘He doesn’t know that. I could say it’s out on Thursday, and I’ve just got time to get an article in.’

‘You don’t know too much about production schedules, do you, Bobby?’

‘Yeah, well, he probably doesn’t either.’

‘And interviewing? What do you know about interviewing?’

‘Done thousands, Grayle. In depth.’

‘Oh, yeah, sure. Like, “Where were you on the night of the fifteenth and don’t give me no shit or I’ll slap you around the cell?” What are you, crazy? He’d have you sussed in like four minutes. Listen, I’ll go. I shoulda thought of this. I’ll do the interview. Which is why you came here, right?’

‘It is not why I came. Besides, they very likely know your name.’

‘So you think this would, uh, expose me to some risk?’

‘Well, no, not particularly. That just happens in movies, but-’

‘Like the movies where they crush you to death with an old car? What the hell, the way I’m feeling I could use risk.’

‘Bad attitude, Underhill. Consider yourself off the case.’

‘Screw you. Listen, OK, here’s what’s gonna happen. We both go. I’m Alice D. Thornborough of The Vision. And you could be … you could be like Lenny Lens, the photographer. You can handle a camera, aside from mugshots and pictures of DOAs in chalk outlines?’

‘I can handle a camera. We don’t do chalk outlines.’

‘Well, as it happens, I have a camera here. A Nikon, ex-Courier. Convincingly professional. We’ll do it. Hell, let’s go interview Seward too. Let’s stir some shit.’

‘That’s a very bad attitude,’ Bobby said.

‘Yeah?’

Grayle caught sight of herself in the long mirror, amid the crystals, the Tree of Life poster, the Egyptian dog of the dead. For all the tough talk, she looked small and lonely in her red frock, a lost kid in a fairy grotto. She was just four miles from where her sister was murdered.

She coughed. ‘This herbal tea’s making me feel sick. Let’s get some serious coffee. Old-cop strength.’

XL

‘Guy’s a saint, it appears.’

On the editorial room table, Grayle gathered together the cuttings on Kurt Campbell. Say what you like about Marcus, he was assiduous in compiling files on anything and anybody connected to the paranormal.

Just that these clippings were hardly firming up the image of a man who would facilitate a not-necessarily-ex criminal’s plan to contact the spirit of his psychopathic buddy.

‘Seems Campbell once flew to Belfast to give hypnotherapy free of charge to a kid of four who’d become mute after both his parents were shot in front of him by the IRA.’

‘Worked too, as I recall,’ Marcus said.

‘Apparently.’

At nine a.m., she’d called the PR firm handling the Overcross Festival and left a message requesting an interview with Kurt. In case The Vision sounded too smalltime, she’d given the name of the New York Courier — well, they had invited her to submit freelance pieces after she quit.

‘Also, Campbell gives his services to all kinds of youth charities, and he’s worked with terminally ill people to calm their minds, and ease pain to the extent that some of them no longer needed drugs. Gee, Cindy,’ Grayle looked up in dismay, ‘you’re a guy really knows how to choose his enemies.’

‘Indeed,’ Cindy said gloomily. ‘Even though — as all too few will now remember — the saintly Kurt, it was, who chose me.’

He still wore yesterday’s twinset, but without the pearls and fewer bangles. No defiance today, Grayle thought, this was comfort-dressing.

None of today’s papers actually said he was finished. They didn’t have to.

The Mirror’s lead headline was

Lotto-phobia!

The angle was that outlets and agents all over Britain were reporting that the sale of Lottery tickets had slumped to an all-time low because so many people were now ‘afraid to win’.

‘It gets worse,’ Bobby said glumly. ‘Look at this.’

Grayle peered over his shoulder. One of the tabloids had found another bunch of ‘victims’ of the curse of Kelvyn Kite, two pages’ worth.

“’I haven’t had a day’s luck since I won two million,”’ Grayle read out. ‘“The day after we were featured on the Lottery Show, I discovered my wife was having an affair with her boss. Now we’re getting divorced and she’s demanding half my money and the new house.”’

Bobby said, ‘“My partner’s health seemed to break down all at once, and we had to cancel the cruise …’”

‘”… and the money meant we were able to fly to Houston, Texas for the fertility treatment, but it all went horribly wrong …’”

‘Stop,’ Cindy cried weakly. ‘I can take no more.’ He passed a limp hand over his forehead, half-hearted theatrics. Tried to call up his former producer again this morning. No answer, no machine switched on. Like she was avoiding having to speak to Cindy or call him back.

‘Well, I’ve seen this happen before,’ Grayle said, as brightly as she could. ‘You plant the idea of a jinx and all these jerks suddenly realize they never knew what bad luck was till they got lucky. Perverse. People are assholes. And, you know, it snowballs for a couple days and then it’s just like it never-. Oh, Jesus, will you look at this? The Sun just opened a Lotto Curseline. You believe that?’

‘Interestingly,’ Marcus said, ‘the broadsheets barely mention Lewis. The Guardian quotes a psychologist who says a major surge of disillusion with the Lottery was inevitable after a few years and people are simply using this nonsense as a vehicle for expressing it.’

Nonsense? This sounded like Marcus actually trying to cheer Cindy up. Wow.

‘Hey, they actually use the word nonsense, Marcus? Gotta be a step toward sanity.’

‘I’m afraid, my friends,’ Cindy said in a voice full of finality, ‘that it doesn’t matter what they call it now.’

And Grayle knew he was right. The BBC would fire him, change the show around and everything would be just fine again inside a couple of months … except, of course, if you were Cindy, for whom the Lottery Show meant more than he was ever going to admit. He loved it when people loved him despite that he was weird. And he knew that this time he was too old to come back.

Cindy straightened his cuffs, half-smiling like some elderly maiden aunt with no stake in the present, no hope for the future. The future was Kurt Campbell — a couple years younger than Grayle, a lot of money and a reputation that was firming up again after a minor hiccup. Caused by an old guy who wasn’t coming back.

The phone rang.

Kurt Campbell’s PR firm, for Grayle.

‘It’s gonna be tight,’ she told Bobby, hanging up. ‘Kurt’s doing an interview at BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham late morning, then he’s over to Radio Gloucester this afternoon. Bottom line is he can give us twenty minutes at his