Mean Spirit

by Phil Rickman

Maiden groaned.

  ‘Mr Gabriel takes it as a sign from the Almighty. A holy vision … All right, I exaggerate, but he says to Bradbury, “I want that man bundled into the lift without delay. To the roof”.’

  ‘The roof.’

  ‘Unless the cable gets cut. I’m just flashing danger signals, Bobby. On two counts. One, Mr Gabriel is a team manager and so takes an extremely dim view of a player breaking formation. Two, Mr Gabriel’s definition of religious observance is unlikely to include sticking it into a notorious pagan goddess. So, a question. As you are out of your playground and well into mine, is there anything you want to tell me you couldn’t tell me last night?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About anything. All right, never mind, I’ll tell you something. It appears Sir Richard Barber leases his nice new apartment from Bright Horizon Developments. Bright Horizon is Gary Seward and an otherwise reputable builder called Stuart Etchison, who purchased this rundown block in Cheltenham last year, turned it into quality, no expense spared.’

  ‘You’re saying Seward is Barber’s landlord?’

  ‘Thought you’d like that. I like to be helpful when I can.’

  ‘Can you do anything with that?’

  ‘Can you? Let me know. Don’t forget. Oh, and Bobby … another passing coincidence. We have an ID on our axe victim in the ditch. Well, I say axe victim – the PM makes it more complicated. What actually killed him was a massive blow on the head not from an axe. Or possibly delivered with the blunt end of the axehead.’

  ‘Really?’ Maiden trying not to show more than professional interest.

  ‘Probably from behind. But that’s by the by. We’ll know a lot more when we find the implement. Geezer’s name was Jeffrey Crewe. Big boy. Twenty-six years old. Fit.’

  ‘So what’s the coincidence?’

  ‘Oh, yeah … Young Jeffrey had a good job. In Worcester. At the Midlands depot of an expanding security firm. Which one, Bobby? Go on, try a reasonable guess.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Forcefield Security, indeed. Making him an employee of your old guv’nor. Although seemingly off duty at the time of his demise.’

  ‘Is that the coincidence?’

  ‘Perhaps you’re the coincidence, Bobby. You showing up like this and having that very special relationship with Martin Riggs. One of whose employees gets his head decisively beaten in.’ Ron paused. ‘Only kidding, son.’ He laughed. ‘Only kidding. You have a nice day with your exotic friend, wherever you are. And, er, if there is anything else you want to tell me, make it quick, eh? It’s just not the same if I find out from other sources. Know what I mean?’

  Seffi Callard stood at the bottom of the stairs. She wore a black sweater, looked like cashmere, the gold cross hanging outside it. Her hair was bunched on one shoulder; over the other hung the strap of her black leather bag.

  She surprised him by kissing him slowly on the lips, holding his face. Her hands were very warm. But when she stepped away, he saw her smile was cool.

  ‘Worked it all out, have we? Grayle – what about her?’

  ‘Grayle?’

  ‘She could’ve told me, couldn’t she? Just as she told me all about your peculiar death experience. Or Marcus. Marcus knows all about you and Emma, surely? Perhaps it was Marcus.’

  ‘Marcus doesn’t know about the sweet trolley,’ Maiden said quietly. ‘Nor Grayle. Nobody else knows about the sweet trolley.’

  ‘What sweet trolley?’ Insouciance. ‘I don’t remember saying anything about a sweet trolley. Perhaps you said it. Perhaps you heard it in your head. Perhaps you imagined it.’

  He stared at her. ‘What on earth are you doing, Seffi?’

  ‘Giving you a get-out.’

  ‘I don’t want a get-out.’

  ‘There always is one, you know.’ The smile was warmer, the eyes were sorrowful. ‘There’s always a get-out. Who were you talking to?’

  ‘Foxworth.’

  She wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Seffi …’ He glanced at the wall, where the set of hedging tools looked complete again. ‘How many times did Grayle hit that guy with the hacker?’

  The suddenness of the question made her wince. She turned away from the wall.

  ‘You did see it, didn’t you? You saw the blade go in?’

  She nodded. Swallowed.

  ‘How many times, Seffi?’

  ‘Once.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Once … seemed to be quite enough.’

  He breathed out. ‘She didn’t kill him.’

  ‘Grayle?’

  ‘He had another head wound. Somebody else killed him.’

  ‘When?’ Seffi let her shoulder bag fall to the carpet.

  ‘I don’t know. Didn’t like to ask about the time of death, or seem too interested in any of it. But somebody hit this lad very hard on the head, probably from behind.’

  ‘He was driven away. By the other man.’

  ‘Which kind of narrows it down.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Pretend you’re the other man for a moment. What would you do if you were with someone who’d just been badly injured and was bleeding all over your car?’

  ‘Take him to hospital. Or call for an ambulance.’

  ‘Of course you would. That’s how you were brought up. Only, suppose this bloke had got the injuries as a result of something seriously criminal you and he were into, what would you tell them at the hospital? Midnight gardening accident? Give them his name and your name? Wait around while they call the police?’

  He stopped talking, letting her work it out.

  Oh no, Bobby.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You’re suggesting the other man killed him. To save … explanations … embarrassment.’

  ‘And a prison sentence. It also suggests they weren’t close, of course.’

  ‘Why couldn’t he simply have taken him to a hospital, left him outside or something?’

  ‘And risk being seen? And risk being fingered by the damaged bloke when the police got at him? The guy’s already incapacitated, he’s in a lot of pain, he doesn’t really know what’s happening. And you know you’ve got a hammer or something in the boot …’

  ‘That’s utterly barbaric.’

  ‘Well it … it might have been a panic thing. I mean, I hope it was panic. Otherwise, yeah, the kind of person we’re looking at …’

  ‘This is a nightmare, Bobby. This is a continuing bloody nightmare.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You’ll have to tell him, I suppose. Foxworth.’

  ‘Or you and Grayle will.’

  ‘I don’t want to do that.’

  ‘It might be for the best.’

  He was thinking: Crewe and his partner came here because they wanted Seffi Callard, and when it all went pear-shaped Crewe was chopped without a second thought. And then Justin was killed. Perhaps to get information, but perhaps also because Justin would know enough to finger someone when Jeffrey Crewe’s body was found.

  So what was he going to do next, whoever he was? Was he going to walk away at this stage?

  Maiden realized how unwise he and Seffi Callard had been, spending last night in this place. He realized he hadn’t been taking any of this quite seriously enough.

  ‘We’d better go,’ he said. ‘We need to talk to Grayle. Give her the good news.’

  And the bad news.

  XXX

  ‘WHAT’S HAPPENING?’ SHE WAS SCREAMING. ‘WHAT’S GOING ON? Cindy, why are they doing this to us?’

  Near hysteria. The poor child.

  Within a mile of Castle Farm, he was, when the phone, against all rural odds, had managed this tiny gasping bleep, a faint whimper. Cindy pulling over into the hedge – if it had turned out to be his friends from the Mirror, he would have had to hang up without a word.

  ‘Doing it to us, Jo?’

  ‘I’ve just had a call from the BBC Press Office. You wouldn’t believe the questions they’ve had f
ired at them.’

  ‘I rather think I would,’ Cindy said sadly.

  ‘The Press Office’ve drawn up a statement saying it’s complete nonsense. But they want to clear it with you before it goes out. Yes?’

  ‘And to what does this statement react?’

  ‘The Mail, the Express, the Mirror, the Telegraph, the—’

  ‘Yes, yes, but what are they saying?’

  ‘In the statement? Well, obviously, the BBC is rejecting any suggestion of you being involved with witchcraft.’

  ‘Well, good. That’s … er … that is quite true. In essence, but what I meant—’

  ‘Or the occult in any respect.’

  ‘And, indeed,’ Cindy said carefully, ‘depending upon the interpretation of the word “occult”, this also could be considered broadly accurate.’

  ‘Cindy …?’ A sudden remote quality to young Jo’s voice. He imagined her in the lovely Notting Hill flat she shared with her boyfriend, a writer of TV screenplays. Another lazy, idyllic little Sunday over the arts pages. Until this silliness. ‘Cindy, I don’t like the way you said that.’

  ‘Too Welsh?’

  ‘Cindy, for Christ’s sake! You’re only half denying involvement in the occult. This is not funny.’

  ‘No. No indeed.’ He was watching a buzzard alight upon a telegraph pole. ‘Not funny at all.’

  Refusing to dwell on how important the programme had become in his life. Not only financially – he had no pension, no savings to speak of – but the way the buzz of live television twice a week had heightened his everyday consciousness, his being in the present moment, to an unexpected degree. He’d been flying, as never before.

  ‘Cindy, listen to me, you know there’ve always been people who want you out.’

  ‘Jo—’

  ‘Nobody wants the show to be dangerous, that’s the issue. Or anything other than genial, superficial crap, and all the winners buying their BMWs and flying off to the West Indies for a couple of months, and all living happily ever after. They never liked the idea of you satirizing the myth and they were all attuned for the first indication that what we were doing wasn’t working any more. Right?’

  ‘Jo, it… it’s little more than a hobby.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  There was, inevitably, a devastated silence.

  Cindy sighed deeply and told it as it was.

  ‘Many years ago, while working in North Wales, I stayed with a family, the Fychans. Two of whom, father and son, were … well, dyn hysbys is the Welsh term, meaning “wise man”. In other parts of the Celtic world they’ve tended to be women; in Wales, for some reason, more often men. Anyway, the family had followed this particular path through many generations – making little of it, I have to say; it was entirely normal to them. But I was a young man and fascinated. And although I did not have the Welsh language, they were kind enough to say I had a peculiar aptitude for … this art.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand,’ Jo said, evidently with some residual hope that it would all have been herbal cures and the odd love potion.

  ‘Shamanism is the technical term I tend to prefer. The Welsh descriptions, when translated, tend to invoke images of, er, wizardry.’

  ‘It’s not just like Mystic Meg then, is it?’ Jo said aridly. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ. Why have you never told me all this?’

  ‘I never hid it, lovely, but I always detected that you were a trifle impatient with those people usually termed New Agers and, indeed, Kurt Campbell and his research into the paranormal.’

  ‘What about the bird? One of the papers said … oh, God, this—’

  ‘The truth of that’, Cindy said patiently, ‘is that a shaman often adopts what is sometimes called a totem beast – well, the beast, it is, usually, which adopts the shaman. In his … let’s call it his reverie … he will perhaps find himself accosted by a particular species of creature – it might be an owl or a fox or a hare – with which he will develop a relationship. In my case, it was the red kite which, at the time, was confined to an area of the Cambrian Mountains. Kelvyn was a humorous diversion. A shamanic in-joke, if you like.’

  ‘Cindy, I…’ He could hear the air being expelled in a thin stream between Jo’s little teeth. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this. Cross-dressing is fine … being gay is fairly cool … having a rubber fetish is just about acceptable. But a ventriloquist having an unnatural relationship with his doll …’

  ‘Communications between shaman and totem creature occasionally are founded upon hostility rather than sympathy.’

  ‘This is a dream, isn’t it?’ Jo said. ‘This has got to be a bloody dream.’

  ‘It sounds to me’, Cindy said soberly, ‘as if the feeding of this background information to the press has been quite cleverly orchestrated.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘Not sure. Look, we both knew it was never going to last for ever, Jo.’

  Jo gave a kind of yelp. ‘What are you saying? Listen … Listen, listen, listen! Just you stay out of the way. All right? Wherever you are, stay there! Don’t talk to anybody. I’m going to tell the Press Office I couldn’t get hold of you. Meanwhile, I don’t care how you do this – lie, cheat … deny, deny, deny … but you have to think of a way out of this. You’re smart, Cindy, you can talk your way out of anything. Look at the Campbell incident.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Cindy said. ‘The Campbell incident.’

  He’s obviously just extremely vindictive, Jo had said.

  ‘Just think about how you’re going to get us out of this, Cindy.’

  The line went dead.

  In a big roadside pub, its bar like a deserted factory floor, they took a distant table, ordered coffees. Maiden laid on the table the brown paper bag from the bookshop in Gloucester. They’d stopped in Gloucester because Seffi needed a chemist’s. On his way back from the bookshop Maiden had seen her standing against a concrete wall, talking into her mobile.

  He tipped out the book. On its cover was a smiling face. A cheery face under a slab of pavement-grey hair. One tooth off-centre, giving the smile that dangerous edge, that Jack-the-lad, lock-up-your-daughters, cross-me-at-your-peril kind of gleam.

  The force of the smile gathered in all your attention so that you didn’t really notice the eyes, not at first. You didn’t notice how cold and fixed they were, like the eyes of a big fish packed in ice; all you saw was the cheery smile and the cheery title.

  Maiden turned the book round, pushed it in front of Seffi.

  BANG TO WRONGS

  A BAD BOY’S BOOK

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘You recognize him? From the party?’

  ‘Yes. Yes and no. All I remember from the party is hearing the laugh. Not the face. I’m not aware of seeing him at the party, so he must’ve been keeping well away from me. Maybe another room, I don’t know. But, yes, it was nagging at me last night, where I’d heard that laugh apart from the party.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘This was Barber’s driver,’ Seffi said. ‘He picked me up at the hotel.’

  ‘The chauffeur? The chauffeur was Seward himself?’

  ‘Peaked cap, the whole bit. Very friendly, very jovial, big smile. This smile. And, yes, the laugh, for heaven’s sake … that was what I was half remembering. The chauffeur had the laugh.’

  ‘What did you talk about with the chauffeur?’

  ‘He told me how seriously interested his employer was in the spirit world. Suspicious in retrospect because Barber obviously couldn’t care less.’

  ‘Is it possible Seward knew that something … extraordinary … was likely to happen to you that night, at that party? Did you get that feeling when he was driving you there?’

  ‘I wasn’t particularly …’ Her phone went off in her bag, like a small police warbler. ‘Yah.’ Brusquely.

  The female voice in the phone was animated, insistent.

  Seffi said, ‘Nancy, look, I’m going to have to call you back … No. No, I don’t. Yes, I will. But when I’m
ready … I’ll call you back.’

  She tossed the phone back into her bag, biting her lip then forcing a smile.

  ‘My agent. In a state of some anxiety. Wondering if she’s ever going to make any money out of me again.’

  ‘She know about the … trouble you’ve been having? The nature of it?’

  ‘She seems to know too much,’ Seffi said, ‘but that’s not your problem.’

  Before they left the pub, she went to the lavatory. She was gone more than fifteen minutes and didn’t explain. Maiden guessed she’d been on the phone in there. Very evidently, now, there was something she didn’t want him to know about. He was feeling uneasy as they took the road towards Ross-on-Wye and the border.

  After a while, she said, ‘I won’t stay. At the farm. I’ll just pick up my stuff. Perhaps you could explain to Marcus.’

  ‘Oh.’ He watched her biting her upper lip as she drove, hugging the wheel.

  ‘It was a mistake, anyway, Bobby. I’ve brought him nothing but hassle.’

  ‘Marcus likes hassle.’

  ‘When he’s well. But he’s not well. I’d never have written to him if I’d known that. I just wanted someone to tell it all to, who wouldn’t be judgemental.’

  The Jeep rolled into a sandstone village with a Norman church. He saw how she’d tightened up, pulled back into herself. Like last night was something which had happened in a different time-frame.

  Which bothered him. He’d felt so close to her. She was right: what had passed between them was as intimate as sex. Not casual sex, either.

  ‘What’s changed, Seffi?’

  ‘Nothing’s changed.’

  ‘You sure? You go to Marcus for advice after twenty years, because he’s the only person you feel you can trust. And then you just walk out. You know, it’s going to make him feel like a useless old bugger.’

  She slowed as the road narrowed. She cleared her throat. ‘I’ve got to be somewhere, OK? Tomorrow, probably.’

  ‘You could stay tonight, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Only there are things we need to discuss. All of us. Like the fact that there’s someone out there who wants you.’

  A truck loaded with gravel came grinding and clanking past, making even the Jeep shiver.

  ‘That’s no-one’s problem but mine,’ Seffi said.