Mean Spirit

‘Oh, you can, darlin’. Just consider the alternatives.’

‘Oh God. Oh God.’

‘Thank you.’

Maiden stared into the blackness, telling himself that if Seward was going to execute them he wouldn’t use a sawn-off shotgun.

Would he?

A fumbling behind him. For a moment his hands were free. His heart leapt, his body tensed, he wanted to lash out, go for it.

‘Stay still, cock!’ Seward, hard-voiced. ‘No resistance.’

Maiden’s right hand hung by his side. His left was jerked up. Handcuffs snapped.

‘You can all open your eyes now,’ Seward said.

Maiden opened his into a grotto-like gloom. The strip light was off, the cellar was now feebly lit by the hanging bulb. Seward was hunched on the hard chair, he and the shotgun fused into the same bulky shadow.

‘And you can leave us now, lads,’ he said to Ballantyne and his mate. ‘Go and find Kurt. Tell him I want that toffee-nosed bitch down here asap.’

A tug on the left wrist told Maiden he was handcuffed to Ron Foxworth. He saw that Ron was handcuffed on the other side to Grayle.

Foxworth glared angrily at Maiden. ‘You know why else I came down here, you tosser?’ Like them being bound at the wrist had unblocked him. ‘Because a lad called Scott Ferris was telling us how a bloke with copper’s ID was asking after Justin Sharpe. Described you to a T.’

‘You had me in the frame for Justin?’

‘I had you in the frame for a lying bastard. Had you in the frame for pissing up my leg.’

‘Ron, I tried to call you …’

‘Stop bleedin’ whingeing, Ron,’ Seward said. ‘I never took to you, you know that? You was always such a miserable git.’

Maiden said, ‘Why the chain gang, Gary?’

‘It’s a circle, Bobby. Or it will be. Put your hands on the table, palms down, little fingers touching. It’s incomplete, but that’ll be rectified.’

‘It’s a seance,’ Grayle said softly. ‘He wants to hold a seance.’

‘Give the little girl a coconut,’ Seward said.

Cindy stopped at the edge of the parapet and looked back at the golden light in the tall, Gothic windows, and didn’t know how he was going to get back into the house now. Little Grayle was in there alone. He had to find Bobby.

He hurried down into the festival site, lit up below him like a fairground, strings of coloured bulbs between the bare trees. The punters were thinning out, drifting away. Soon the stalls would close, the stallholders returning to their hotels and guesthouses in Great Malvern, some to their camper-vans on a site near the road.

There was an arc of applause from the main marquee, where a writer on alien abduction was concluding her lecture. Or was it the demonstration of pendulum dowsing?

While, inside Overcross Castle … two spiritualist gatherings: the mock seance in the banqueting hall, some actor-magician performing the stunts of Daniel Dunglas-Home, as he would tomorrow and the rest of the week for paying audiences. And, somewhere in the heart of the house, the secret ceremony over which Persephone Callard was being pressed to preside — to preserve foolish Kurt from the wrath of the vicious Seward. Poor Kurt, who lived in such fear of this man. Awakening one morning with the horrific realization that he was in partnership with a still-active dangerous criminal.

Crap. Kurt was a liar. He was very deeply into this. He needed Persephone Callard here as much as Seward did but, because she would have knowledge of at least one murder, he would be obliged to build up Seward as the dangerously unbalanced instigator.

As he hurried through the lights, Cindy became aware of a few people staring at him, pointing. His blond wig was gone, his glasses were gone. And even New Age followers watched television.

By the time he reached The Vision stall, it was more than just a few people. He remembered the jokes with Vera about a tabloid reward.

‘It’ll all end in tears, you mark my words!’ a man yelled, and there was laughter. Images battered Cindy: the car siege in Malvern Link, the jeering, the taunts, the anger, Marcus slumped under a lamp post.

‘Please! Leave me alone!’ he yelled helplessly. Bobby, Bobby, where are you?

Flinging himself into the tent, where he stood gasping, appalled at his loss of control. But he couldn’t cope with this now. Let them all tear each other to pieces in the race to the phone, to be the first to finger the fugitive Cindy Mars-Lewis and claim their blood money.

‘Well, well,’ a woman said dryly. ‘I thought it was, all along.’

‘What are you doing here?’

It was the woman from the next tent, the etheric masseuse, Lorna something.

‘Lorna Crane.’ She was standing, hands on trim hips, under the photos of High Knoll, spotlit now. ‘And what I am doing here, Mr Cindy Mars-Lewis, is helping you out. I’ve sold a hundred and three copies of The Vision, between clients. Also seven subscriptions. And taken the addresses of two women who would like to correspond privately with Marcus Bacton. One left a photo of herself. Taken fifteen years ago, if I’m any judge. Money’s in a cashbox under my treatment couch, it’s all quite safe.’

‘Thank you,’ Cindy said, bemused. ‘It’s very good of you. We must … pay you.’

‘Nah,’ Lorna said. She shouted at the small crowd gathering outside. ‘Piss off, eh? He’ll be out later.’ She grinned. ‘Must be amazing, having fans, being adored.’

‘I fear you misunderstand. They want to tear me apart. The bogeyman, I am now. Baron Samedi. Kali the Destroyer.’

‘What are you on about?’ Lorna took from the sleeve of her multihued jumper a sizeable spliff and a book of matches. She got the spliff going, inhaled joyously, offered it to Cindy, who declined. ‘Don’t need this stuff, I suppose, when you’re a shaman. That all true, Cindy? The Celtic shaman bit?’

‘I never have denied an interest,’ Cindy said cautiously. ‘Excuse me just a moment.’ He pushed into the tiny rear compartment, where Grayle had left the small case containing her dress for the seance. Flipped open the case. The clothing was still there, neatly folded. Cindy went cold.

‘She hasn’t been back. She hasn’t been back.’

Lorna stood and eyed him blearily through the smoke.

‘That guy, the photographer, he came back.’

‘When?’

‘I dunno. Two, three hours ago. I haven’t got a watch. Maybe longer. Yeah, it was light. He come in and had a cuppa, then some guy was shouting for him and he pissed off.’

‘And you haven’t seen him since? What about the girl?’

‘Nah. Nobody else. I tell you, though, his aura looked like shit.’

‘Bobby?’

‘I told him to go and sleep it off and not talk to anybody.’

‘Lorna, have you any idea where he-?’

Cindy froze over the case. A man had entered the tent behind Lorna.

Blue-black uniform, with silver epaulettes. Cap with black, shiny peak.

He said, ‘In here, Gavin. We got her.’

Suddenly it was real eerie.

The bulb was low wattage, you could look hard at it, see its filament, how spidery and frail it was. Like in the early days of electricity, when technology was a small glow in a big fog. When spiritualism was born.

And Seward, all light and shadow in his evening suit, looked out of that era, too. She was recalling him now from the TV talkshow in the States. Dave! How are ya mate? ‘Ere … brought yer some’ing … Get these dahn yer … jellied eels. You’ll never go back to pizza again, mate.

Leaning back in his chair now, the shotgun on his knee. He couldn’t let that thing off in here; the honoured guests would hear it booming like an earth tremor under their feet.

Sure. And think it was just another sound-effect, courtesy of Mr Daniel Dunglas-Home and the first age of