Mean Spirit

impassive, military kind of look, and Grayle saw the word FORCEFIELD on his red armband. ‘Bacton, is it? Somebody’s already there. Came about an hour ago.’

‘Yeah, we know.’

‘Right — Avenue Three. End of the drive, turn right by the tape and the arrows and you’ll see the way it’s divided — stalls one to fourteen, and so on. It’s your third, right at the end.’

‘Thank you, Constable.’ Bobby wound up the window. You could see an angry fire had been rekindled inside him, could almost smell the smoke.

‘Oh, I really don’t like the way you said that,’ Grayle said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘This is your private obsession taking over. At bottom, you’re just as bad as this guy Foxworth. You have a tenuous connection here between Campbell and this Riggs and Riggs is your personal bogeyman, so you’re thinking like maybe if you can build Seward into the picture … right?’

‘The only picture I’m getting’, Bobby said, ‘is Vic Clutton lying dead outside the house he was finally happy to call home.’

‘Oh boy.’ Grayle wound the big scarf around her neck and tightened the belt of her raincoat as the truck entered the grounds of Overcross Castle.

At close to eleven a.m. on a working day and the festival not due to open until that evening, there were probably fewer than a hundred people there — most of them around an expensive-looking restaurant marquee which, presumably, had heating, and was the only part of the site that looked remotely inviting.

The festival was set up in three sloping fields which might once have been parkland, leading up to the stone terrace surrounding Overcross Castle. Most of the hundred or so stalls were open-fronted display tents with room for about five people. One was being fitted out as an esoteric bookstore, another was figuring to sell aromatic candles which, with the wind and snow and all, nobody could hope to light.

They left Marcus’s faded blue truck next to Cindy’s Honda on a cindered parking lot reserved for stallholders. Hundreds of yards of wooden decking-track had been laid across grass which was destined otherwise to become a boot-churned bog.

Avenue Three was right under the highest part of the castle, a round tower with a conical roof and a lightning conductor which prodded the bruised low cloud like an old-fashioned hypodermic syringe in a junkie’s arm. Stall thirty-eight marked the furthest point of the festival campus and was right next to the toilet block, a line of white Portaloos — already the source of a seriously acrimonious dispute, as Grayle and Bobby approached.

‘… don’t care if it was a late booking, this is not bloody good enough, is it, sonny?’

Young guy with a clipboard backing off. ‘Look, it’s the best we-’

‘Four yards … four yards … from the stinking toilets? Can you imagine the state those makeshift shithouses are going to be in by next Sunday? I mean, have you thought for one bloody second what this means, from our point of view? Well, I’ll tell you … It means that whenever anybody who’s been here comes across a copy of The Vision in future, they’re going to associate it immediately with the stink of stale piss and probably steaming vomit.’

‘Now look, those loos are the most hygienic-’

‘Makes no odds, sonny. By Saturday morning we’ll still all be swilling diarrhoea from the canvas.’

‘I can definitely assure you these toilets will be cleaned every-’

‘Pah!’ And Malcolm the dog barked once, as if in support.

‘Look, if you’ve got a complaint, you’ll have to put it in writing.’ The boy tucking his clipboard under his arm, turning away. Bad move, Grayle thought.

‘Don’t … think … you’re … walking … away … from … this.’ The force of nature in the glasses and the tweed suit, and the dog, advancing on the poor kid, planting a foot in front of his. ‘I want another site.’

‘I keep telling you, we haven’t got another site.’

‘In that case, I want two hundred pounds off the charge. Or I’ll be obliged to take this to Kurt bloody Campbell himself.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll show the smarmy bastard what a hypnotic trance feels like.’

‘Did you really say two hundred pounds?’

‘Seems eminently bloody reasonable to me. And I’m sure you wouldn’t like the good vibes to be soiled by the sound of me telling everyone, including the press and the local television, what a shoddy little sideshow this is, organized by a slimy tosser with no-’

‘All right!’ The kid held up both hands, dropping his clipboard in the mud. ‘I’ll go across to the admin office and see what I can do.’

He started to walk back along the decking then turned around. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

Grayle fought for control as the bottle blonde in the tweed suit glared at this hapless kid through plain-glass spectacles.

‘Bacton,’ Cindy snarled. ‘Imelda. Miss.’

A short while later Grayle went back to the cold comfort of the truck and called the infirmary in Worcester on Bobby’s mobile.

‘Are you a relative?’ the staff nurse demanded.

The snow had stopped. It was never going to stick, but it was so bitter that Grayle’s hand was numb around the cellphone.

‘Well, I … Yeah, I’m … I’m his niece. Alice Thornborough.’

‘Well, all I can tell you, Miss Thornborough,’ the nurse’s voice was unexpectedly clipped and frigid, ‘is that he’s as comfortable as can be expected.’

‘And in plain English, that means?’

‘It means’, the sister said, ‘that everything about him is weak except his language.’

‘Uh, yeah, that figures. He kind of hates hospitals and doctors. Doesn’t even have a thing about nurses in uniform.’

‘He wanted to discharge himself this morning, but when he found out how much pain was involved in getting out of bed, I think he finally understood that he needed us rather more than we need him.’

‘But he is gonna be OK? Isn’t he?’

‘If he accepts this as a severe warning.’

‘Yeah,’ Grayle said pessimistically. How was this woman supposed to understand that if there was anything to which Marcus Bacton reacted badly, it was a severe warning?

‘Can I see him?’

‘Tonight, if you like, but only for a short time. We’ve had to put him in a side ward, for the sake of the other patients, so if you ask the nurse who-’

‘Tonight could be a problem,’ Grayle said quickly. ‘But if you could tell him not to worry, that everything’s being looked after this end?’

And his sister sends her best wishes?

Maybe not.

‘He wanted to be here. Cindy sat on the counter, hitched up his tweed skirt, lit a cigarette. ‘And so he is. The shamanic solution, I suppose you might call it.’

‘Nothing to do with you not wanting to be recognized, then,’ Bobby said, patting the masterless Malcolm, poor confused creature.

‘Well, that too, naturally.’ Cindy blew a spontaneous smoke ring into the cold air. Cindy didn’t smoke, but Imelda Bacton apparently did.

Subtle padding made him stocky. His blond wig was shoulder-length. His foundation cream was a deep bronze, his lipstick scarlet, his glasses black-rimmed and businesslike. He was sitting on one of the packing cases they’d fetched from the truck. It contained a couple of thousand copies of The Vision and, for display purposes, a set of atmospheric colour photos of High Knoll taken by a woman called Magda Ring, who’d been Bobby’s girlfriend for a — mercifully, in Grayle’s view — short time. In one of the pictures, blown up big, a formation of white clouds resembled two praying hands. The picture had been taken just after the Green Man killings had ended.

‘You saw it coming, didn’t you?’ Bobby said.