the corners, emphasizing the radials astride the nose. Perhaps this was why he smiled so much — he didn’t like the way his mouth turned down, thought perhaps that it made him look a little sulky, not so cheerful and accommodating.
Gary certainly wasn’t smiling now. Incredible! Had he really imagined that a New Age bookshop, specializing in healing and transcendence, would have copies of
Seward looked up when a vehicle horn bipped rapidly, twice. A dark blue van, like a police van, had stopped at the bottom of Avenue Three. Seward looked up, walked across and opened the passenger door. He bent to enter then pulled back. He leaned on the door and turned his head slowly, his gaze panning the assembly.
Until it came to rest on Cindy. Who froze.
Whereupon Gary Seward’s face crinkled into the most carnivorous smile, with a wild glimmering of gold.
All the breath went out of Cindy.
Seward waited until the van began to move before waving gaily to Cindy and swinging smoothly, in his
‘…
Except it wasn’t going to be the rest of it.
His hands either side of Grayle’s waist, Kurt propelled her smoothly through a door into a low-lit room, where there was an electrical hum in the air and a small guy with glasses was messing around at what looked like a recording-studio mixing desk.
‘How goes it, Darren?’ Kurt asked breezily.
The guy gave him a nonchalant thumbs-up and Grayle asked what was happening here, knowing he must be in charge of the special effects Cindy had mentioned. But Kurt just said, ‘Ambience’, and manoeuvred her across the room and out through an archway on the other side.
‘What’s through here?’ Grayle asked brightly, suppressing nerves.
‘The most interesting part,’ Kurt said.
Then they were through another door, to the left, and going up a small, extremely dark, spiralling stone staircase — this place was a warren of stairs — and up and up, scores of stairs, twisting and twisting, Kurt just behind Grayle, and she could hear him flicking switches to put on lights ahead of them — tiny lights set deep into the stone — and, Jesus, for the first time you could really start to believe this was a purpose-built haunted house.
And as she climbed, raincoat flapping, the backs of her legs starting to ache, she was thinking hard about what Kurt Campbell had just told her about the master-medium, Daniel Dunglas-Home, and Anthony Abblow, a man whom Cindy had seemed to compare with Kurt. The use of hypnosis to create or remove the illusion of psychic phenomena. Had Abblow done that? It didn’t matter.
It didn’t freaking
Grayle paused to get her breath, looking over her shoulder at Kurt’s big face with the blond hair flying back.
‘Look, I, uh, I’m getting kinda dizzy, you know? Where are we … where is this …?’
‘Not far now, Alice.’
They must be in the big tower, the big, fat, dark tower which reared over Avenue Three. The Gormenghast tower.
‘Must be, uh … some view from the top of here, huh, Kurt?’
‘Some view,’ Kurt agreed.
And then they were out on what surely must be the final landing, a very short, rounded landing with an electric lantern high up. Doors in stone alcoves to either side.
Now Kurt was beside her, a big, tight-trousered presence, a whole head taller than Grayle and his arm around her waist, a little tighter now, like he was supporting them both, still laughing at their exertions. Though clearly he was less out of breath than she was, must have done these stairs many times. Behind many different people.
Usually female, no doubt.
Kurt steered her into one of the alcoves, reached in front of her with a classic castle-type key — about the size of a can opener, black and gleaming — pushing it into a hole in this squat, Gothic door of solid, seasoned oak, waggling it about a little before it turned. Symbolic.
And then they were — wouldn’t you know it? — in this bedroom.
Well, it wasn’t like she hadn’t been here before. Occupational hazard for young female journalists. Especially, it had turned out, for one specializing in the spiritual. They all tried to set you up: tantric therapists, from whom you expected it, and pot-bellied ‘celibate’ swamis, from whom … anyway, you learned how to deal with it. It seldom ran to attempted rape.
In the room the last of the stormy light had collected through a small square window in the rounded wall. There was a giant four-poster and a dresser with a small tray on it with whisky and, inevitably, a champagne bottle and glasses.
No closet; this was the kind of medieval bedchamber where clothing was left strewn across the polished, oak-boarded floor, abandoned in passion.
‘Must have been a hell of a job getting that bed up here,’ Grayle said. ‘Does it come apart?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Kurt said.
Locking the door behind them.
Sliding the long key into his hip pocket, where it made a matching bulge to the one the other side.
‘You know, I think we need a rest after that,’ Kurt said lazily.
Aw, for heaven’s
Kurt crossed to the bed, slid through the curtains, which did not draw all the way, were just there for effect. Eased himself up, with his back against the big, dark headboard.
Grayle stood by the snow-speckled window, with this sheer seventy — eighty, ninety, a hundred, who-knew- how-many — foot drop to the stone parapet around the castle.
‘Oh well.’ She pulled open the belt, shrugged out of her raincoat. ‘You want I should pour the drinks?’
XLVII
‘No fooling you, Vera, I can see that.’ Cindy peered through the scullery window into a yard with a broken- down wall and, beyond that, outbuildings of brick and stone — a barn, stables — and the wooded hillside.
‘No bloody patronizing me, neither, dear.’ Vera wiping her hands on her white apron. ‘What’s going on? What you been up to, Miss Bacton?’
No real escape route through the back. Only hiding places. The real hiding place would be a change of persona. Imelda had been rumbled. The consequences, given Gary’s background, were not to be contemplated.
‘I believe I have offended the organizers, Vera. Complaining about the situation of the stall, demanding money back, causing unrest among the other stallholders. I think they plan to … invite me to leave.’
Which, he supposed, was the most innocent possible interpretation of Gary Seward’s wild smile.
‘It ain’t a police state,’ Vera said. ‘For all it looks like one, with all these geezers in uniform. They can’t just throw you out.’
‘They will manufacture a pretext, Vera.’
‘So that’s why you’re in hiding, is it? I ain’t too bright, but I can’t believe that.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Cindy looked frankly into Vera’s plump, olive-skinned face; an intelligent woman cast into the lowliest of employment situations on some miserable pittance, for the crime of being widowed. ‘I didn’t want to compromise your position here.’
