Mean Spirit

This harsh, low voice. Grayle blinking in the gloom of a low room with small, square, leaded windows.

A woman. With blades.

She was not holding the big blade, but she was standing next to where it hung from this like torture-chamber wall. It was on the end of a thick wooden handle bound with cord, the whole item like a butcher’s weighty, stubby chopping knife for splintering bone. Next to this knife was a rusty sickle with no handle. Above them, a razor-edged hook on a five-foot wooden pole.

Some kind of rustic armoury. Grayle saw, with faint relief, that the red on the butcher’s blade had been a reflection from a low-burning fire — little coals glowering sullenly out of a black, sunken grate.

‘Uh …’ Trying to make out the face as the woman moved out from the wall. ‘You’re Pers … Persephone?’

Not a stupid question because this did not look too much like a cool, silky fox with skin like Galaxy chocolate and calm, penetrating eyes. Maybe her older, embittered sister.

‘I said … who are you?’ Arms hanging loose, sleeves pushed up, like she was still ready to pull down a lethal weapon from the wall. ‘Your name.’

‘I … Grayle Underhill. I told you, I work for … with … Marcus Bacton.’

‘As what?’

‘As a writer.’

‘So where is he?’

‘Sick. The flu. He’s existing on whisky and paracetamol. You wouldn’t want to catch it.’

But when the woman stepped out, she looked like she already had: in the grey light from the window, she seemed fleshless, a scarecrow in a powder-blue cashmere cardigan, half-buttoned over probably nothing. Hair like a coil of oily rope. Eyes burning far back, like the coals in the black grate.

‘Who’s that in the truck?’

‘That’s, uh … the garage guy.’ Grayle was picking up a tired and sickly smell of booze. ‘My car broke down a few miles back. The guy drove me here.’

‘And naturally you’re terrified of the man who’s repairing your car.’

‘Well, not terrified exactly, I-’

‘Look at you!’

‘OK, yeah, he was … he was kind of forward. On the way here.’

Grayle fumbling out an explanation about the exhaust system. The card in the phone box. Fred West. All of that. Sounding completely half-assed, like she was just now making it all up. Often the way of it with the truth.

‘He doesn’t know I’m in here. He thinks the lodge is empty.’

‘That case, you’d better keep your voice down and stay away from the window. Sit in that chair, if you like, next to the fire. Dry off.’

Dry orf was how she said it. She looked wrecked, but she talked like out of the royal family. Grayle sat. The chair had a high back and faced away from the window. The fire was probably kept low so there’d be no glow on the room. Siege procedure. The woman was living here in darkness, like a ghost. It could only be Persephone Callard.

‘All right, be quiet, he’s coming.’

She slipped back into the shadows beyond the armoury — actually, Grayle realized, a collection of rustic, rusted hedging implements. There was an old bowsaw beneath the butcher’s-type hacking tool and then the wall ended in a wooden stairway.

‘Don’t speak until I tell you. Don’t move.’

The greasy squeak of Justin’s fingertips on the window made Grayle stop breathing. A coal fell out of the grate.

‘Stupid, huh?’ Outside, the truck’s engine was starting up. ‘He’s probably a nice man.’

‘No, you’re probably right,’ Callard said. ‘He imagined he was on to a shag. How will you get your car back?’

‘Call him in an hour or two, I guess. I don’t know. He works till seven or eight, he says. What else can I do?’

‘You had him drop you at the house.’ Pronouncing it hice, like Prince Charles. ‘So he knows you were coming here? He knows why? That man knows I’m here?’

‘I’m afraid he does,’ Grayle admitted. ‘I let it out I was coming to meet with you. That was indiscreet. I’m sorry. I have no excuse. Marcus fully apprised me of the situation.’

Persephone Callard found a small smile. Then a clutch of bottles on a table. ‘Vodka, gin, Scotch?’

‘Well, maybe a Scotch … Plenty of water? Thank you. You don’t have a car here?’

‘It’s in one of the garages up at the house.’

Grayle peered out at the walled wilderness. ‘How long you been here?’

‘Just over a week. I don’t want to open up the house.’

‘Too big, I guess.’

‘Too obvious. This is more discreet. Have to be out of here in a couple of weeks, however. From Easter, we let it out as holiday accommodation. Have to be out even sooner now, if your friend Justin shoots his mouth off.’

‘I’m sorry. You’re here all alone?’

‘As I’m sure Marcus Bacton’s told you …’ Persephone Callard’s voice put on a weight of irony ‘… people like me are never entirely alone.’

One time, Grayle had done a piece for the Courier on how many mediums were practising in New York City. She’d established two hundred and thirty-five, which was just over twice as many as there’d apparently been in 1850, when the first boom had been on.

Even in those early days, most of the mediums had been exposed as fakes … inventors of table-rapping devices, experts at pulling strings of muslin ‘ectoplasm’ out their nostrils.

Sure, Justin had been largely right. It was exploitation of the bereaved. About taking the sting out of death, like your loved ones were just a phone call away. Always a ready audience for that.

Some of the working mediums Grayle had talked to were kind of genuine — even though a lot of the information they relayed was inaccurate, they seemed to have contact with something. Just that they usually came over just as gullible as their sad clients, needing to believe they were bonding with the departed. Plus they did tend to be so pious and all knowing, putting on the air of church ministers.

And sure, in those years as a New Age columnist, Grayle had never encountered anyone she could honestly believe was in contact with the dead.

Callard had come to sit on a Victorian sofa on the other side of the fireplace from Grayle’s chair, facing the window. She had a tumbler half-filled with some kind of immoderate Martini mixture.

‘You know why I drink too much?’

Grayle said nothing. It was so dark in here, now, that you didn’t like to move in case you knocked something over. She began to feel cold, edged her chair closer to the underfed fire.

‘Because when I’m pissed I don’t receive.’

‘Right,’ Grayle said uncertainly.

‘Nothing significant gets through alcohol.’

‘That’s interesting.’

‘Don’t feel …’ Callard leaned back, with her head against the wall, maybe observing Grayle for the first time ‘… that you have to fucking patronize me. What did you say your name was?’

‘Grayle Underhill.’

‘Grayle?’

‘Underhill.’ She sipped weak whisky from a glass that felt greasy.

‘Oh my God.’ Callard did this short snort of a laugh. ‘Not that dreadful … You don’t have a column in one of those ghastly American tabloids. Under the name …’

Grayle sighed. ‘Holy Grayle. But not any more.’

‘Holy Grayle.’ Callard threw an arm behind her head and peered at Grayle across the murk. ‘Oh my God. I was in New York doing some television and my agent brought