Mean Spirit

have been so much easier for you.’

Grayle found that she was still holding the champagne bottle. She lifted it, hefted it like an axe.

‘OK. Either you give me that key …’ her hand was trembling; the bottle was almost full, champagne glugging out, splashing on the floor. ‘Or I hurl this through the window.’

‘So?’

‘Everybody’s gonna hear it. Everybody down there.’

‘No, they aren’t.’

‘Or I’ll smash it against the wall and I’ll … I’ll cut you up.’

‘No, you won’t.’

‘Yeah, I will.’ Don’t look at his eyes. ‘I damn well will. You … you better believe that, you asshole.’

‘OK,’ Kurt said lightly. He picked up the key and tossed it to her. It fell at her feet. ‘There you go.’

‘All right.’ She bent down, still clutching the bottle. Maybe he was thinking about what she’d done that night with the hedge hacker, what she could do to his pretty TV face with a broken bottle. She snatched up the key, poked around for the lock, glancing back at him on the bed, but not at his eyes.

He didn’t move. He just looked disappointed, cheated.

She found the keyhole. The key turned at once.

‘And don’t you come after me, you hear?’

‘Christ,’ Kurt said, ‘what do you think I am?’

And she turned the door handle, and she was out of there on to the little landing, panting with a mixture of fear and elation.

OK … so what she’d do, she’d go right down the stairs, but at the bottom of the tower she’d turn the other direction, away from the banqueting hall and the entrance hall; what she had to do was find the kitchen where that nice woman Vera was and maybe Cindy, also; or she’d get out the back way and if she couldn’t find Cindy or Bobby, she’d avoid the truck and get over a wall, run to a cottage or a farmhouse, and she’d call the cops, no messing around this time. So terribly small and sordid. Cindy was right. And Kurt, he was mixing out of his league; Kurt was no killer, but he’d downshifted, gotten involved, maybe out of greed, with people for whom killing was a small thing, a tidying up.

Grayle hurried on to the spiral staircase and went down three steps, and then stopped, in sick dismay, the stomach bile really rising into her throat this time.

Two of them.

Just like at Mysleton Lodge, only this time they were in uniform.

And not cops.

Part Seven

From Bang to Wrongs: A Bad Boy’s Book,

by GARY SEWARD

I done all right.

That’s what I always say. I mean, nobody, no matter how they spent their life, is going to say I done all wrong, are they? I’ve robbed people and I’ve hurt people, but most of the people I’ve robbed, well, they had it to spare, didn’t they? And most of the people I hurt, they done things what could not be tolerated in a civilized society, in terms of being too cocky and grassing up straight villains and whatnot. All you need to understand is that our world is a rigid and conservative world and we never got around to banning corporal punishment nor, indeed, the Final Deterrent.

Now, I don’t want to give you all that Frank Sinatra stuff, but it’s true. I done it my way. You’ll never hear me bleating, Oh, it’s my social background, I was abused as a child and all that old toffee. Everything I done was considered and decided on, and that’s the way it will always be.

I suppose that’s why death still bothers me a bit. ‘Cos you lose control, don’t you? I really hate the thought of losing control, and if anything keeps me awake at night it’s that.

I just cannot bleeding tolerate the thought of losing control.

XLIX

They were never very rough with her, but when she overcame her initial fear and became frantic and garrulous and started bouncing questions off of them (‘How many of you guys are there here? Is this your full-time job, or are you just on a retainer for special events? Is it a good organization to work for, Forcefield? Are there fringe benefits? Do you get overtime for this?’) they taped her mouth.

The bastards taped her freaking mouth!

Using this stuff about two and a half inches wide, so it covered from her chin to her nose, and she guessed she recognized it from someplace deep in the Cotswolds, and when the bile rose again she was convinced she was going to choke to death on it, on her own puke, a sad, disgusting death.

All this time they were using thinner stuff — electrical tape from a roll, ripping it out and biting it off — to secure her hands, wrist to wrist, tight and chafing behind her back.

This was after they’d all come down the stairs, one in front of her, one behind, and, ironically, had turned exactly the way she’d been aiming to go, and the building was dumping whole centuries again, switching from medieval Gothic to dingy early-twentieth-century industrial.

And then they put a bag over her head.

Which was just so disgusting — slimed and smelling of someone else’s sweat and clinging to her face, getting sucked in — that she could hardly breathe and could only make this high-pitched puppy whine in the back of her throat.

All of this happening within a hundred yards of the gentle New Age fiesta, folk discussing the journeys of the soul, to the floating woodwinds of the Andean band. Overlaid in her head by the voice she now knew to be Gary Seward’s, coming at the end of a long, awful, blood-misted silence and flat with cold certainty. You … are dead.

Stumbling, tripping over her own feet, a big hand in the centre of her back, blackness in her eyes. The sounds of doors being opened but no voices; wherever they were headed, people seldom came this way, leastways not people who might be moved to question the sight of a trussed woman dragged along by two big men dressed like para-cops. She tried to bring up a picture of these two men’s faces; one had a beard, this was all she could recall.

And then she knew, by the coldness of her bound-up hands and the sound of the wind through the bag, that they were outside, and she recalled horror stories of IRA executions, the hood over the head, the moment of silence before the bullet through the brain, and she suddenly wanted to pee very badly.

A door creaked. Inside again. A close, flat atmosphere. Another door. ‘Steps,’ one of them said. ‘You take it slowly, luv, or you’ll gerra broken leg.’

Northern accent, a good deal heavier than Bobby Maiden’s, but the same general area, Grayle guessed — Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, someplace … don’t pee, don’t pee …

The steps seemed to be wide and short, but she kept tripping and the big hands went up under her arms. So, if they’d come down from the tower to the ground, then this meant … Jesus, just when you thought you weren’t claustrophobic … they were going underground. Lips taped, head bagged and earth all around, Grayle began to puppy whine again.

‘Take it easy. Nearly there.’