Mean Spirit (3 page)

She saw a grey concrete forecourt, decorated with a couple of wrecked cars and two old gas pumps which had clocks with hands to measure the fuel throughput. The black rubber hoses were so withered it must have been years since any fuel passed their way.

The place was deserted and looked long dead. Either the other mechanics were out to lunch or this was a one-man outfit.

The guy – his name was Justin – unhooked the tow rope and left the Mini standing on the spider-cracked forecourt. Grayle surreptitiously gave the car a reassuring pat, making it clear she planned to
return – if she was a car brought here she would figure it to be some kind of sad ante-room to the breaker’s yard.

Maybe it was the dereliction of the garage behind the beautiful façade of the village, but as they drove away in the pick-up she felt suddenly desolate.

It should be possible – like with the cottages – for age to confer beauty, for people to become golden with kindness and wisdom. How come they always ended up cold and grey and drab and flaking, like this garage?

Grayle had been in Britain over a year in total. Twenty-nine when she first arrived, now she was thirty-one, a mature woman who’d seen some death.

‘You a friend of Sir Stephen’s then?’ Justin asked. Curious, as well he might be – how many friends of Sir Stephen Callard, retired diplomat, would be driving around in a 25-year-old Austin Mini, the exhaust held in place by fence wire?

‘Uh … his daughter,’ she said.

Regretting it immediately. This was not for broadcast, Marcus had warned; the woman didn’t want it known she was down here.

‘You what?’

Justin had turned his head and was staring at her. Without the baseball cap, he didn’t look as old as she’d first figured. Maybe forty-five. His hair was still mostly black and curly, quite long. He had a gold earring, bigger than it needed to be.

‘No, uh …
I’m
not his daughter, I’m just here to see his daughter, but I would be grateful if … Jesus, look where you’re—!’

Justin glanced at the road as a big hedge came up fast in the windshield, dead ahead. The road was about as wide as a garden path. Driving with two fingers crooked around the wheel, Justin spun around the bend, then turned back on Grayle.

‘Seffi Callard, eh?’

Grayle sat up hard, pulling her flimsy black raincoat together across her thighs, dragging her purse on to her lap.

‘Relax, my sweet. I’ve travelled this ole road about a million times.’ Justin swivelled his gaze lazily back to the windshield. ‘I know every little bend, every pothole.’ He smiled, his big moustache spreading. ‘Every little hump.’

Hump? She closed her eyes briefly. Another goddamned ladies’
man. Kind of guy who’d just realized he wasn’t going to have too many more years of scoring chicks below a certain age threshold, not even puny, nervous, 31-year-old blondes. Grayle coughed, tucking flyaway hair into her coat collar.

‘So she’s staying with her old man.’ Justin was now using one crooked forefinger to control the throbbing wheel. ‘Paper said she’d gone abroad.’

‘Well, just don’t spread it around.’ Grayle was annoyed with herself for saying too much.

‘Who would
I
tell?’

‘She’ll like, uh, probably be going abroad tomorrow.’

‘Close friend of yours, then, Miz Callard?’

‘Not awful close.’

‘Quite a girl in her time.’ He glanced at Grayle again and winked. She noticed his overall had become unbuttoned to just below the waist. He smelled of engine oil.
Were those overalls next to the skin?

‘Really,’ she said.

‘That’s what they say,’ Justin said airily. Grayle supposed that if she’d been a guy, this was where they’d be starting up with all the ribald, sexist stuff, Justin outlining all the things he wouldn’t mind doing with Persephone Callard.

‘Who?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘What
who
say?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the papers. You know.’ Maybe a touch wary now, in case she really happened to be a close friend of the Callard family, fallen on hard times.

‘Right,’ Grayle said. ‘The papers.’

‘They’re saying she’s cracked up. Lost her marbles. You believe that?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t know, Justin.’

‘So she’s not a
close
friend of yours, then.’

‘No.’

‘Ah.’ Justin slowed up. ‘You’re a reporter, right?’

Grayle sighed. ‘Kind of.’

His smile was now too smirklike for comfort. She knew what he was thinking now: what kind of reporter drives a 25-year-old heap with etcetera, etcetera?

‘I work for a small, specialist magazine,’ she said quickly. ‘You wouldn’t have heard of it.’

‘I see.’ Justin the ladies’ man leaned back, relaxed again, as the rain came down harder on the ochre ploughed fields to either side. She could guess
his
idea of a small, specialist magazine. ‘So, er … does she
know
you’re coming to interview her?’

‘Well, of course she does. You don’t drive all this way if you don’t expect someone to talk to you. Least,
I
don’t.’

‘So she’s expecting you.’

‘Sure. She’s expecting me in like … like a couple hours ago.’

‘She is, is she?’

‘Most certainly.’ This shameless probing was making her decidedly uneasy. ‘We talked on the phone just this morning. She’s probably calling around by now to find out why I didn’t show up.’

Complete lie about the phone; according to Marcus, Persephone Callard was not taking any calls right now.

‘What’s your name, my sweet?’

‘I—’

‘To put on the bill?’

‘Oh. Right. Underhill. Grayle Underhill.’

‘Grayle.’ Rolling it around his mouth like candy.

‘As in holy.’

‘And are you?’ His hand moved up and down the gearstick suggestively.

‘Devout,’ Grayle snapped. Jesus, however creepy Persephone Callard turned out to be, she was unlikely to be in the same league as this guy with his big moustache and his overalls open to the groin.

‘You believe in that stuff? Her stuff?’

‘Uh … some.’

‘You ask me,’ Justin said, ‘she’s a total bloody fraud, your Miz Callard. All that mumbo-jumbo and communicating with the departed spirits. Load of ole bloody twaddle.’

‘That’s what they say around here, is it?’

‘It’s what I say, Grayle. Way I see it, look, the stuff she does, if she was some old lady with a crystal ball she’d be lucky to get fifty pence for it in a bloody tent at the village fête.’

‘Well,’ Grayle said carefully, ‘that’s, uh … that’s one argument.’

‘’Stead of which, Grayle, she’s mugging the aristocracy for five K
a time, and they all thinks she’s somethin’ special on account of her ole man’s loaded and got a title and a big bloody house. You wanner see her strutting round Stroud in her fancy clothes, nose in the bloody air. Nothin’ snottier on this earth than a coloured girl that reckons she’s a cut above. You know what her mother was, don’t you?’

‘A nurse,’ Grayle said tightly, ‘as I understand it.’

‘Oh, that’s what they calls ’em now, is it? You’re a reporter, why’n’t you expose her for a cheat and a phoney?’

‘Well, I, uh … my job is … Are you sure this is the right road to Mysleton?’

‘It’s the picturesque route.’ Justin laughed, like his display of self-righteous, racist rage had blown down a barrier between them. He looked more relaxed. Not a good development, in Grayle’s view.

‘Um, Justin, in light of the time I already lost, I think I would prefer to take a chance on the shabby route … like through the factory estates and stuff?’

‘There aren’t any fac—’ He turned to her. ‘You’re bloody having me on, Grayle!’

And what he did next … she could not
believe
this … he reached over and rubbed her goddamned thigh, pushing up the hem of her skirt, like they were long-time lovers sharing an intimate joke.

‘
Jes
—’

By the time she unfroze enough to grab his hand, he’d already pulled it casually back. The truck speeded up, going insanely fast for a road this narrow and twisting.

‘This is my famous Cotswold Tour, Grayle. You want the commentary?’

‘Look—’

If anything came around the bend now they’d be dogmeat.

‘Relax, my sweet. Listen, if we don’t get that ole exhaust sorted, you’ll be looking for a hotel, right? I can probably help you there.’

‘But it’s gonna be …’ Grayle bounced off of the door as the truck took a tight bend on two wheels ‘… fixed, isn’t it?’

‘Friend of mine does accommodation.’

‘Huh?’

The bastard actually thought he was going to fix her up with a room in some sleazy flophouse? She had to get out of here. She
pushed herself up against the door, as more hedgerow reared up in the windshield.

Her mobile bleeped in the purse on the seat, between her and Justin.

‘Excuse me …’ Diving into the purse, scrabbling for the phone, fumbling for the green button. ‘Hello?’

‘… erhill?’ Marcus? His voice was breaking up badly. ‘Underhill, I’ve …’

‘It’s my …’

My boss, she was about to say. She bit that off and jammed the phone hard to her left ear so that Justin couldn’t hear the voice the other end. He’d slowed down and was watching her intently.

‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘Ms Callard! Yeah, I’m just on my way. I had a problem. My
car
broke down. No … really … nothing too serious, and I got lucky – I’ve been given a ride by a very … a very kind gentleman called … called Justin. Runs a small garage? In a village about three miles out of Stroud? Justin. Yeah. You know him? Gave me a ride in his … his … white … Toyota … truck.’

Justin slowed to a crawl, and she thought for a moment he was going to snatch the phone.

‘…
UCKING SCOTCH
!’ Marcus roared.

‘So I should see you in about … Oh, I should guess ten minutes? That would be terrific. Bye … bye, Ms Callard.’

Marcus had broken up into unintelligible crackle. Grayle pressed the
end
button. Trying hard to keep her breathing steady as she dropped the phone in her purse.

Justin’s eyes were back on the road.

‘Ten minutes, would that be about right, Justin?’

‘’Bout that,’ Justin said sullenly.

‘Good,’ Grayle said, breathless. ‘Terrific.’

Justin’s face looked dark with suppressed rage.

II

Psychic Seffi
Gives up the
Ghosts

by Stuart Burn

Super-psychic Persephone Callard has turned her back on the Other Side.

The £5000-a-session medium is being treated for clinical depression, it was revealed last night.

And Seffi, 35, whose clients have included TV soapstars and the late Princess Diana, has told friends her career has reached a dead end.

Seffi’s manager, Nancy Rich, said, ‘She’s been overworking – that’s all.

‘She’s not had a holiday in about three years and she’s desperately tired.’

But a friend said the high-society psychic had been having trouble sleeping and had lost two stones in weight.

‘She went to see her doctor and was referred to a consultant psychiatrist. She just wants to be left alone and won’t be taking on any more clients for a while – if ever.’

Last night, Seffi’s whereabouts were a
mystery. It was believed she could be on her way to the villa in Tuscany owned by her father, ex-diplomat Sir Stephen Callard.

Seffi Callard has been a controversial figure since she was a teenager.

Twenty years ago she was expelled from a top public school after the havoc caused by a sudden wave of poltergeist phenomena.

Witch doctor,
they’d said behind their hands, the night the dormitory window blew out.
JUJU WOMAN GO HOME,
Marcus Bacton had found the next day, daubed in lipstick on the girl’s locker. Even the other staff were wary. Eventually the head had brought in a psychologist.

Bastards.
Marcus had read the bloody tabloid cutting too many times. He balled it, tossed it into the opened stove, piling twigs on top to rekindle the fire, and then an oak log. Slammed the stove door, pulled off his glasses, snatched a handful of Kleenex to mop his sore, pouring eyes.

The race factor had figured strongly, if obliquely, in the psychologist’s report. The bottom line had been that the subject – ‘rather immature for her age, lonely and alienated from her peers’ – had attempted to create a mystique around herself by fabricating a fantasy history of her late mother’s West Indian family, involving ethnic magic and occult practices. Producing what the psychologist had called ‘evidence of her own assumed powers’. The fantasy enveloped her to the extent that ‘a certain self-deception was evident’.

Blinkered wanker.
Marcus recalled storming into the headmaster’s office. Bloody hell, was the head
mad?
Didn’t he understand the overwhelming significance of this? Didn’t he realize that this overpriced, underachieving internment camp was about to go down in parapsychological history?

Bacton,
the head had said aridly,
‘did it ever occur to you that what you choose to call parapsychological history is merely a tawdry chronicle of fraud, lies and mental illness?

Marcus wiped sweat from his glasses.

It had been one of those archaic boarding schools which, after
about four centuries, had been induced to admit girls. There were probably a whole bunch of black girls there now, but Persephone – Afro-Caribbean/Home Counties English – had been the first.

‘And took shit from kids of both sexes, I guess,’ Grayle Underhill had said, when he’d given her the history, working on her to meet Persephone on his behalf.

‘Especially when things started disappearing,’ he’d recalled.

Small things at first, like pens, then there was a watch – from classrooms and dormitories where Persephone had been, and then fingers had been pointed. Made no difference when some of the items had turned up again, sometimes in the same place, sometimes not. Kleptomania, they sneered.
Always go for glittery things and coloured beads, don’t they?