Mean Spirit

Sound of a key struggling in a door. Like the tower room, a big key, a thick door. But an old, resistant lock.

‘Stay back, sunshine,’ the northern guy said, ‘or you’ll get your face kicked in.’

Then nobody was touching Grayle any more and there was the sound of the door shutting, the key grinding in the lock.

And this other northern voice, quiet and sad.

‘It’s OK, Grayle. It’s OK.’

The voice really saying, You’re still alive, but it’s not OK.

Grayle went rapidly all around the walls, like a fly, feeling the rough, damp stone, pat, pat, pat … but it was no good: no more doors, no boarded-up windows. It was a dungeon, in the original sense; you reached up you could even feel the ceiling — stone or concrete, no boards, no plaster.

‘We’re screwed, right? We’re gonna die.’

A small, black, cold cube, like the hole in the middle of a concrete block, and stinking of earth and mould and some kind of decay.

‘They put us down here just until it’s like the middle of the night and everybody’s off the site, and it’s safe to take out the bodies. Our bodies. Like, there’s a hundred acres out there to bury us in.’

The one merciful aspect of absolute darkness was that nobody could see you cry, and she let it come, in floods.

‘Grayle, listen …’

‘Oh, dear God, this is not the way I planned to go out.’

‘Killing people …’ his voice came from the corner from which he hadn’t once moved ‘… Killing people is no big ceremony for these people. They don’t have to wait for midnight, they don’t have to worry about getting rid of bodies, they just-’

‘Wow. Jesus. I’m so comforted by that, Bobby.’

She sniffed. Her tissues were in her raincoat pocket, up in Kurt’s tower; she used the cuff of her sweater.

Bobby said, ‘All I’m saying is if they’d wanted to kill us, we’d be long gone.’

If he came out with much more of this crap, he’d be maybe halfway to convincing himself. The instant of relief at finding she was in here with Bobby had been swiftly cancelled by the knowledge that he was no longer out there and able to resume as a cop, call in other cops and move against these bastards.

She still couldn’t see him. He’d pulled off her bag and stripped off her tape, and they’d rubbed the circulation back into her wrists and she’d told him about Kurt, how really fucking smart she’d been.

‘Where are we?’ She’d thought her eyes would adjust, but no light was no light; it was like being in an immersion tank, most of what you could see was what you imagined, the forms your mind gave to the invisible.

‘I came in bagged like you,’ he said, ‘but I’m assuming we’re under the house. Crole had these cellars built for … I dunno, for his coal, probably.’

‘Oh sure, we all lock up our coal.’ Grayle breathed in deeply through her nose. ‘I’m sorry, Bobby. It’s just people in this situation, in the movies and stuff, they sit down and they say, hey, we gotta be practical here. And that’s when they find the hidden trapdoor. Or they feel around the walls, and these stones suddenly slide out and there’s this secret passage, and, OK, it’s waterlogged and full of snakes, but it’s a way out. And I just went over the walls, feeling and patting, and there is no way out of here except through that door for which we do not have a key. Oh God.’

The pressure that wasn’t going to ease.

Bobby said, ‘Erm, if this is … I mean, obviously I can’t see you or anything.’ His voice was stripped down to the accent you weren’t that much aware of when you could see him. ‘All I, er …. I mean, would it help if I was to put my fingers in my ears?’

‘Uh … yeah,’ she said. ‘I guess that would help.’

‘OK. I’m doing it. I can’t hear anything.’

She went tight into the opposite corner from where he was sitting, and laid down the bag she’d had over her head. At least that would absorb most of it.

When she was through, she stood up and shuddered with relief, and then she went and sat down next to Bobby Maiden and took his fingers out of his ears and gently kissed what she hoped was the side of his mouth.

‘Thank you. That was the nicest thing anybody …’

She broke out laughing then, for a blessedly insane moment, and they held each other, sitting on his jacket on the stone floor in the cold and the darkness and the ammonia fumes.

After a while, her hands warm in his sweater, she said, ‘You know what Cindy said to me earlier? He said this was all about big egos. Egos wanting to survive death. He said you could see it being of like cosmic proportions or really small and sordid. He said it was about Kurt and Seward, but also Crole and Abblow.’

Bobby told her what Harry Oakley had alleged about Crole and Abblow. How they liked to watch the lights go out.

‘This John Hodge …’ she shivered in his arms. ‘They messed with him down here? Maybe where we’re sitting. What did they do to him?’

‘I don’t know. But maybe Campbell and Seward do. If we assume that Seward’s fascination with spiritualism is the main reason he’s bankrolling Kurt … because he thinks Kurt’s the man who can prove something to him …’

‘… then it’s in Kurt’s interest to show he can come up with the goods,’ Grayle said.

She told him what Kurt had said earlier about Abblow and Dunglas-Home; how some people had claimed to have seen him levitate, others had denied it. About the question she’d put to Kurt.

‘I think he wanted me to know. Though he couldn’t admit it, he wanted me to know how clever he’d been. I would bet money that he was with Callard until just days before the Cheltenham party and that he hypnotized her.’

‘What?’

‘I guess it was down to auto-suggestion. He wouldn’t even need to be there. You think about this. She’s psychic — I’m not gonna deny she’s psychic, she’s proved it in all kinds of ways.’

‘Yes.’

‘And … and the drawing, right? Sure, I know you could’ve gotten that from the picture in the book, but I think you got it from her. She has it. Whatever it is, she still has it. She talks about being washed up and all, but she still gets these spontaneous …’

‘She was Em,’ Bobby said.

‘You don’t have to talk about that. Bottom line is Marcus was right about Callard. She is an extraordinary person. But she’s also human and stupid enough to get involved with a slimeball like Kurt. She always said that the men who came on to her, half of them wanted to get into her pants, the other half wanted into her career. Maybe Kurt looked attractive because he already had a career, was making even more money than she was, in kind of a similar area. And maybe he was therapy.’

‘Hypnosis.’

‘Like Campbell said to me just now, he can relax you. Hypnosis can take away stress and make you feel good about yourself, all that stuff. So maybe it started with her submitting freely to it, all strung up with the stresses of communication with the dead. And then he gets into her mind and he can plant all kinds of stuff in there. Plus, all that about how you can’t hypnotize someone against their will is just smoke, you ask any professional hypnotist — if you’re a suitable subject, they can get you … any time they want. So, like, Kurt has this financially fruitful relationship going with Gary Seward — does Seward have an awful lot of money?’

‘More than anyone’s ever likely to know about. They all have, these guys. The taxman just gets the occasional gratuity …’

‘So Kurt has this thing going with the most famous and glamorous medium in the Western world. And he’s into her mind. And he knows what could really blow Seward away. What if … what if Callard could be shown to have contact with the newly murdered Clarence Judge? Think about it, Bobby. Callard’s still getting the spontaneous spirit contacts, everything’s normal… until she does a formal sitting. And then, instantly, there he is … there’s Clarence. Every time, on cue. So suppose Kurt put her