Mean Spirit

XLVI

‘You wanted to look around,’ Kurt wore a baggy, collarless shirt — snow-white but creased up, to show how loose and expansive he was, ‘so I’m going to show you around.’

‘You sure you can spare the time?’

‘Hey, I’m touring the States in the summer. A little advance publicity in the New York Courier will do no harm at all.’

Cindy had melted away as Kurt approached. Kurt acting like this was to be expected — what did he need with an old broad?

‘Well, I’ll sure do my best to get you some space,’ Grayle lied.

‘Yes, Alice, I’m sure you’ll try your hardest for me.’

Overcross Castle, when you’d been inside a while, was full of give-aways that it wasn’t awfully historic. One was the efficiency with which the rooms had been linked — no poky dead-end passageways, everything fitted and dovetailed. Kurt led her into a huge oblong room to the right of the entrance hall. It also had bare stone walls and two big wrought-iron chandeliers over an oak table, which looked to be thirty or forty feet long, or maybe it was two tables pushed together. There were also sconces, real ones in iron brackets, which could be lit to send real flames leaping up the walls.

‘The banqueting hall.’ The heavy door closing behind them with a thunk-click which spoke of post-Victorian craftsmanship. ‘Now this is exactly how it was in the 1870s. The medieval touch. This is where Daniel Dunglas-Home often appeared.’

‘The medium? What sort of things did he do here?’

‘Oh … summoned endless spirits, obviously.’ Kurt sounding surprisingly dismissive. ‘Sometimes with manifestation. And on one occasion it was said he levitated from a table, almost reaching the chandeliers. Enterprising guy.’

‘Wow. These chandeliers?’

‘Similar ones. There were about ten people here at the time — invited guests, like tonight — and several of them swore they’d seen it happen. But some others said that, as far as they were concerned, it had never taken place at all.’

It had begun to get dark outside now. The two Gothic windows were grey-white and there were no colours in the room. Kurt leaned closer to Grayle. His aftershave was subtly suggestive, like a snuffed-out bedside candle.

‘So which do you believe?’ Grayle asked, like she was supposed to.

‘Ah. Well. Interestingly, Dr Anthony Abblow was here that night. A medium and also a very powerful hypnotist. For his time.’

‘Oh, really.’

‘People sometimes see what, under hypnosis, they’re persuaded to.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Neither do I, Alice. Were some of the guests persuaded to see Dunglas-Home levitate? Or — hey — were some persuaded not to?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You read the little book?’

‘Sure.’

‘It says there that Abblow was responsible for discrediting Dunglas-Home in Crole’s eyes, right? Presumably so he could replace him, so that he could become the key man at Overcross, have access to Crole’s millions, yeah?’

‘Oh. Right. I get it. You’re saying, did Abblow hypnotize some of the guests beforehand to blank out Home’s act or something?’

‘Makes you think doesn’t it, Alice?’

‘I guess.’

‘So guess who our medium’s going to be tonight.’

‘Well, uh, I just met Persephone Callard. So unless you hypnotized me to like see her when she wasn’t there at all …’

‘Oh she was there, all right.’ Kurt grinned. ‘But tonight’s star is going to be Dunglas-Home himself. Come on. I’ll show you the rest of this mausoleum.’

Grayle tightened the belt of her raincoat. Here we go.

When Gary Seward left the castle by the main entrance, Cindy followed him. Remaining fifteen to twenty yards behind, studying the man, the way he moved, the art of being Gary Seward.

From up here you could see that the festival site was bigger than it had first appeared, covering fifteen to twenty acres. Quite a crowd out there now too, despite the weather — an advance contingent for the psychically ravenous multitude. By the weekend, there would be ten, fifteen times as many, thousands having travelled from Birmingham, even London, to catch talks or a promised visit by fashionable psychics and healers.

Seward walked down the drive towards the three lines of huts and tents, each one a bijou business marketing baubles and trinkets of spirituality like fashion accessories, to be worn and discarded, mixed and matched.

Cindy felt more in control. Had begun to build a picture of what was happening here — even if, as yet, it consisted only of darkening smudges.

Seeing Kurt Campbell up close, for the first time since the unfortunate Lottery Show encounter, he realized that bitter circumstance had led him to overestimate the young man. Apart from ambition, greed, lust and the mastery of a particular technique, there really wasn’t all that much to Kurt. Not a profound person, not even a terribly interesting one. His failure to spot the Cindy behind the Imelda suggested that Cindy was, to Kurt, not so much a figure of hate and fear but a mere obstacle to be removed. Hardly flattering — indicative, indeed, of insufficient respect for the shamanic tradition — but at least it reduced Kurt Campbell to something potentially more manageable. And it was to be hoped that the resourceful Grayle would be able to manage him.

Seward, however, was more complex.

Taller than he looked, he was, close to six feet. Excess weight gave him a stocky appearance, and he moved heavily but confidently. As though — Cindy smiled — he owned the place.

Seward was in no hurry. He seemed aimless, in fact, as though he had time to kill, had left the house for no purpose other than to be out of it for a while.

Cindy kept his distance, always mindful of what the man was known to have done — or have had done — to various people. Which, as he admitted at one point in his book, was not the half of it.

Cindy noted how, rather than enter the compound through the turnstiles, Seward braced himself then jumped the barrier, smiling as he landed. This implied two things: that the ageing hard man was proving to himself that he could ‘still do it’. And that barriers, in his view, were for ordinary people. Despite the intermittent fine snow, he was not wearing a jacket over his polo shirt, so perhaps his smile was more in the nature of a grimace.

Through the turnstile went Cindy, displaying his stallholder’s pass, watching Seward inspect various displays, but not part with any money. No-one seemed to recognize him, which he would find annoying.

The autobiography was buoyant with bonhomie and heavy-handed attempts at humour — made slicker, perhaps, by the former News of the World journalist who had ghosted the book. But Cindy could tell now, simply by the way he moved, that Gary Seward was a more ponderous character than the prose suggested — essentially a dogmatic man, with a fixed code of immorality detectable in his repetition of the phrase I could not tolerate …

A combination of the rigidly self-righteous and the constant need to break rules, jump barriers, was perhaps the essence of Gary Seward. Whichever way he jumped would afterwards be seen to have been the right way.

Seward at last went into a tent. One of the larger ones. The book tent in fact. Cindy waited. In less than three minutes Seward was out again and Cindy was able, for the first time, to study his face.

Which would have been quite handsome but for the thickness of the lips, the way the mouth turned down at