Mean Spirit

own security.’ Ron chuckled. ‘Go on. Do your psychic intuition bit.’

‘It’s coming to me through a kind of mist, Ron. Word beginning with … F?’

‘Your powers blind me, son. Don’t suppose she’s got an older sister, has she, your psychic?’

‘You never did answer the question about Seward and Kurt Campbell,’ Maiden said.

Grayle had gotten Bobby to remind her about former Superintendent Riggs and his arrangement with the ‘entrepreneur’, Parker, Emma’s father, now also dead. She hadn’t thought corruption on this scale could happen in English towns, undetected, but if the detectives were taking a slice, who was there to do the detecting?

Bobby had told her that Vic Clutton, just before he died, had said Riggs blamed Bobby for making it too hot for him to stay in the police. Riggs was still real sore. Grayle figured Bobby was becoming just a little paranoid, seeing Forcefield, therefore Riggs, everywhere.

They went up the bronze-carpeted stairs of the mansion house. No-one tried to stop them.

Grayle said, only half-seriously, ‘Well, I sure hope we don’t run into any of Riggs’s guys. On account of they aren’t going to feel too well disposed toward the woman carved up one of their colleagues.’

Bobby glared at her to shut up, but there truly was no-one around, no-one at all. At the top of the stairs was a big, bright, Georgian window with a terrific view across rooftops, with church towers, pinnacles and such.

And more doors.

‘This is it,’ Bobby whispered, pointing to the left-hand door. ‘Apartment Six.’

It was weird, standing outside the wide, cream-painted, Georgian-style door out of which an uncharacteristically panicked Persephone Callard had rushed on a dark February night, the bronze velvet drapes drawn across the Georgian window, the wall lights on, the corners in shadow, footsteps behind her.

‘And it’s open,’ Bobby said.

It was true. The cream door was open a crack. Like, pulled to.

‘Sir’s back home?’

Or maybe had never left. Callard had told Bobby he was in France, but how true had that been?

There were big footsteps on the stairs behind them. Bobby spun around as two of the removal guys appeared, a young one and an older, foreman-type guy with a bald head and glasses. The young guy pushed open the door of Apartment Six, walked straight in.

‘Excuse me,’ Bobby said to the older guy. ‘Sir Richard isn’t moving out, is he?’

The guy stopped, looked at him. ‘I wouldn’t know, pal.’

The young removal guy had left the door open, and they could see a short hallway and then another door opened into what seemed like a big room, with dust covers visible.

‘So you’re just kind of taking his furniture out for a while,’ Bobby said.

‘No. We’re taking this furniture.’

‘Out of Sir Richard Barber’s flat.’

‘No, pal. Sir Richard Barber’s flat’s the next floor up. I know that for a fact, on account of we moved him in.’

‘So whose is this?’

The foreman stood with his hands on his hips. ‘With all respect, pal, what’s it to you?’

‘We’re supposed to see Sir Richard,’ Bobby said. ‘We were told to come here.’

‘Well you were told wrong, because Sir Richard …’

‘Next floor up, yeah. But I was definitely given this number. So who lives here?’

‘What you got here is a show apartment for Bright Horizon Developments, and if you don’t mind we’ve got half an hour to get this room cleared.’

‘You’re moving the stuff to another apartment?’

‘You want to know everything, don’t you, mate?’

‘Uh, Barber,’ Grayle said, ‘that is Richard, was getting us some information about this block. See, we were hoping to get an apartment here ourselves …’

The removal guy relaxed. The American accent seemed to make it all right.

‘I, uh … I’m having a baby,’ Grayle said.

‘Congratulations.’ The guy started looking for the bump.

‘In late summer … Uh, I just thought. Honey, if this is the show apartment, maybe that’s where Richard said he’d meet us. My husband, he’s a lawyer,’ patting Bobby on the arm. ‘He gets things wrong a lot. Could we …?’

The guy sighed. ‘Yeah, all right … just for a couple of minutes.’

‘Oh, you are so good,’ Grayle said.

And so they walked around all the rooms, Grayle clinging to Bobby’s arm and looking thrilled. The bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen were all fully equipped and furnished. The bedroom had a four-poster and a faint but unmistakable smell of marijuana. Grayle and Bobby exchanged glances.

The main room — the parlour, the drawing room — was almost cleared. Just a few small tables, two boxes full of ornaments and framed photos and bric-a-brac and a Cotswold village watercolour in a gilt frame. The two Georgian windows had the same view as from the top of the stairs.

‘This is wonderful.’ Grayle looked blissfully around, her gaze coming to rest on an empty alcove with a tasteful plaster moulding. ‘Oh, look, honey, wouldn’t that be just the perfect place for the big Chinese vase?’

‘Perfect, darling.’ Bobby gave the removal guy a these women kind of long-suffering smile.

‘Used to be one there last time we was here, I think,’ the removal guy said. ‘Maybe it got broke.’

‘It happens,’ Bobby agreed.

It happened so bloody quickly, you would not have believed it.

Marcus and Lewis had parked in Malvern Link, no more than five miles from Overcross Castle. It was a straggle of mainly modern shops hanging loosely from the famous priory town on its steep hillside. Marcus needed money from a cashpoint, also an Ordnance Survey map of the area. Never liked to go anywhere without a large- scale OS map.

He could have been away from Lewis’s car no more than seven minutes.

As he turned away from the cashpoint, squinting at his receipt, he heard a young chap say, ‘Oh yeah, sure it is … and that’s the Pope cleaning them windows.’

‘No, honest to God,’ another man said excitedly, ‘I’m not kidding. It bloody is … ’

Marcus stuffed the notes into his wallet, pocketed it crossing the street. Couldn’t see any shop likely to sell maps. Never mind, he’d get one somewhere else.

Lewis’s charcoal-grey Honda Accord was parked on a corner of the shopping street and a side road leading to a housing estate. When Marcus returned, there was a small crowd around it, as though it had been in an accident.

Marcus groaned. God almighty, Lewis had been discovered. You tended to forget he had a famous face these days. There’d be bloody autographs and jokes about Kelvyn bloody Kite and this curse nonsense, and they wouldn’t get away from here for a good half-hour.

But as he drew closer, it became apparent that the situation was not quite like that. There was a woman shouting at Lewis through a gap in the driver’s side window. She was in her thirties, buxom, in a green leather coat. A teenage boy with her was grinning inanely.

But the expression on the woman’s face, Marcus saw, was one of explicit, self-righteous rage.

‘… ripped them up, my mother did! Ripped ’em up! Twenty quid’s worth! She says, “I’m not taking no chances.” Two weeks after her operation, this is, you swine. That’s what you’ve done — destroyed a simple pleasure for ordinary folk. Destroyed their only little dream. Twenty quid’s worth of tickets! That’s nothing to you, is it? That’s small change to the likes of you!’

‘What the bloody hell…?’ Marcus tried to squeeze between two pushchairs.

‘Yow won’t get him, mate,’ a man said. ‘He’ll not come out, he won’t. He’s locked the doors.’

Marcus looked at the man’s reddening face and, in an appalled moment, realized that this was not just one belligerent bitch, but the whole bunch of them. He could see tomorrow’s tabloid headlines: Lottery Rage. Virtually overnight Lewis had become — in other circumstances this would have been almost