Mean Spirit

‘This ain’t the house. This is only the lodge, Grayle. You can tell it’s empty. Look — no lights. Tiny little windows like that, this time of day there’d be lights.’

Marcus had said, There’ll be no lights, no sign of life, no car visible. She doesn’t want the press to think there’s anyone at home because, if anyone sees her, the word’ll spread like wildfire and there’ll be a dozen bloody photographers peering through the windows.

Justin was waiting, revving the engine in short, kind of masturbatory bursts.

Grayle plucked at the passenger-door handle.

‘Maybe I’ll walk from here.’

‘In this? Don’t be daft, girl.’ Justin accelerated through the trees, past the lodge, along a level black-top track. ‘House is round this bend, ’bout a hundred yards.’

‘Thanks, but there was no …’

Aw, leave it; she’d just have to get out at the house, thank him graciously and smile. Walk right back to the lodge, just as soon as he’d driven away.

Mysleton House sat firmly at the end of the track, open fields behind it. It was no stately home, but no chalet either: one of those substantial stone-built rural dwellings that didn’t answer to any particular style and tended to escape the attentions of those English Heritage guys Marcus Bacton hated worse than tax inspectors.

And, of course, no smoke issued from its tall chimneys and there were no cars parked outside. Justin stopped the truck in front of a five-barred gate dividing the track from a garden with trees and stuff.

He was looking so damned smug.

‘Ain’t nobody here, my sweet.’

‘They’ll be around back,’ Grayle said confidently. ‘Look, I’ll call you about the car. What time do you close?’

‘Seven … eight. Sometimes later. Countryside hours. I’m a hardworking man.’ Justin didn’t smile.

‘I’m sure you are. Look, I really would be grateful if you could get it fixed tonight. Could I give you a … a deposit?’

‘I got the car, Grayle. And I trust you.’

‘Right. Well, thank you for, uh, for all you did.’

She backed out of the truck, shouldering her bag. Walked through the rain to the five-barred gate, which — thank Christ — did not have a padlock, only a latch. She glanced back at Justin as she lifted the latch. He was just sitting there, watching through the snapping wipers. Seeing her safely to a front door which he knew was not going to be opened.

The door had a bellpull. Grayle looked up at it and turned away. Raised a hand back at Justin — no problem, everything’s just fine — and walked right past the door, following a concrete path around the side of the lightless house.

Flattening herself against a wall below a bright yellow burglar alarm, sheltered from the rain by the eaves, she pulled out her phone.

There was a signal. Just.

Call the cops?

Well, no officer, he didn’t exactly do anything; he was just conveying an unmistakable menace. The way he talked … the kind of questions he asked. And — oh yeah — he grabbed my leg. My thigh … Well, sure, we were going around a tight bend at the time; it’s possible his hand kind of slipped, but I sure don’t think so. Press charges? Uh …

She dumped the phone back in her bag then took it out again, brought up 999 on the little screen, did not press send. Shoved the phone, primed for fast action, into a pocket of her raincoat and moved on around the house.

It might be the biggest dwelling in Mysleton, but it wasn’t so big, maybe six bedrooms. It was clear there was nobody living here right now, but if she stayed this side for a while, out of sight, Justin surely would have to accept she’d gotten in.

She came to a glass-walled conservatory. Cane chairs and a sofa inside. Also plants — so somebody must come in to water them.

‘Grayle?’

Shit. She clamped a hand around the phone in her pocket and ran away from the conservatory, across a lawn and into some trees, as Justin appeared around the side of the house, his overalls flapping.

‘You all right, Grayle?’

He couldn’t see her, she was sure, but she moved further into the dripping trees, which were soon assembling themselves into a small wood, dark and boggy, Grayle sinking up to an ankle in brown water.

Nightmare, or what? All she could hear now was her own panting breath and the grey noise of the rain which muffled other noises like, say, footsteps coming up behind you and the furtive glide of a zipper.

Gulping back a sob, dragging the sodden foot out of the hole, she stumbled on through all kinds of dank shit, until she came out on to an overgrown footpath running roughly parallel to the black-top track.

There was a wall ahead. She almost ran flat into it — a stone wall with a wrought-iron gate in it. The path stopped here. There was no place to go but through the iron gate and into what looked like a long-untended walled garden, a messy nest of brown bushes. A short gravel path led up to a wooden porch open to a solid back door painted dark green, with no obvious bell, no knocker.

The lodge, right?

Sure. But this was still all wrong. There was going to be nobody here. Like Persephone Callard — superior, graceful, elegant, supermodel-slim — was going to be holed up in a dump like this?

In fact, the whole set-up … this rich and famous woman issuing a cry for help to an old guy she’d last encountered when he was a world-weary teacher and she was a very weird schoolgirl … what kind of sense did that make? Pushing into the porch, Grayle had a flash picture of Marcus Bacton, hunched over his woodstove, nursing his flu and his fantasies. Asshole.

She stood in the porch, furious and scared, hair hanging like seaweed. She banged and banged on the door, with both fists, until it hurt and then some. No answering footsteps in the hallway, kitchen, whatever; no lights coming on.

But lights were appearing behind her. Headlights. Good old Justin easing his pick-up back down the track, lighting up the trees, scanning the ground for his prey like a poacher lamping a hare. Grayle tried to push open a narrow letterbox, but it was rusted tight.

‘Ms Callard …’ Hissing it, scared to shout.

A rattle and a creak of brakes, a shaft of white at the end of the garden: the pick-up stopping outside the lodge. Justin was bold. Justin had done this stuff before and gotten away with it. Grayle’s knuckles felt frayed and sore. She went down on her knees in the porch, her mouth to the only opening, an enlarged keyhole.

‘Ms Callard, listen, Marcus Bacton sent me. You get that? Marcus Bacton. If you’re there, just… please just let me in.’

Justin would go first to the front door, but he’d soon come around back. Grayle got ready to escape down the garden, out the iron gate. Saw herself running through acres of filthy fields to some stark farmhouse, the door answered by this grinning, naked guy who would turn out to be Justin’s insane brother.

She collapsed onto her hands when the back door of the lodge opened unexpectedly into darkness.

IV

What she saw first was the blade. It sliced clean through the moment of relief at finally gaining access to the lodge.

The blade was wide — wide like a machete — and it had a reddened edge, and there was a figure in shadow behind it that didn’t move.

Grayle came unsteadily to her feet, backing up against the wooden door — a heavy thack from the latch as she closed it with her ass.

‘Who are you?’