Mean Spirit (34 page)

Tears sprang into Cindy’s eyes.

Grayle said, ‘This is so crazy. The British press has no sense of responsibility.’

Papers all over the table in the editorial room.

‘Underhill,’ Marcus produced this infuriatingly knowing smile, ‘it’s practically a British tradition. Back to Tutankhamun, Macbeth. The British love a curse.’

‘Three times. Inside a
week,
Underhill.’

‘For Chrissakes, it happened just a coupla times. That’s a curse?’

‘Aw, this is bullshit. What do the others say?’

She pulled the
Independent
off the pile. There was a page one story about the fire, noting it was the third tragedy to befall a jackpot winner in a few days, but no mention of Kelvyn Kite.

Walking into the shop this morning, thinking about last night, wondering if Callard had returned, she’d come face to face with Cindy and the kite, in triplicate across the daily paper rack. His face was big on the front of the
Sun,
the
Mirror
and the
Star
but just a single-column shot on page one of the
Daily Mail,
where the big picture was the burned-out house with one surviving BMW in the drive. The
Mail
still had the line about the brother claiming Cindy had punctured the family’s joy, it just wasn’t making such a big deal about it. But then the
Mail
didn’t have the stuff the
Sun
had about Cindy’s mystical pursuits.

‘Where’s Maiden?’ Marcus asked.

‘I think he went to look up something in a book,’ Grayle said cautiously.

‘Like what?’

‘How would I know?’

‘Maiden behaved particularly strangely last night, I thought.’

‘We all did, Marcus.’

She hadn’t told him about the drawing of the face. Kind of hoping Bobby Maiden would come back wearing a bashful smile because the guy he’d been thinking of looked nothing like this, had a completely different kind of scar.
Delayed shock, Bobby. We all jump to crazy conclusions in stressful times.

‘You see, the point is’, Marcus said smugly, ‘Lewis the Lottery Man was a tabloid creation. Tinsel thin. Essentially inconsequential. And those who the tabloids create, they reserve the right to destroy. Of
course
they know all this curse stuff is complete balls – that’s why they’re not actually saying it.’

‘I know what they’re not actually saying, Marcus. I used to be a tabloid journalist.’

‘American tabloids are rather tame in comparison with ours.’

‘Jesus, most American
porn
is tame compared with your tabloids. What nobody seems to realize is this is a career they’re wrecking. Guy struggles along for years, bit-part acting, summer season, finally gets his break when he’s looking at a cold and lonely old age—’

‘That’s show business,’ Marcus said heartlessly. ‘All the same, one can’t help wondering who gave them the crucial background information. Obviously no use asking who particularly has it in for Lewis, when the entire entertainment industry’s riddled through with jealousy and back-stabbing. The answer is: every bastard who isn’t making as much money.’

‘Including you.’ Grayle dragged the phone over. ‘I’m gonna call the pub. Get him to come over here right now. Time like this, a guy needs friends. Even friends like you.’

Marcus snorted.

‘’Sides, we need to talk about last night.’

‘Nothing to talk about. Lewis blew it. It was beyond him. He hadn’t the faintest idea what he was doing. And when Persephone realized it, she just got out. A little too late, unfortunately.’

‘Marcus, that is just so simplistic.’

Marcus hit the table with the heel of his hand. ‘Well, I’m
feeling
fucking simplistic.’ He came to his feet, walked to the wall, began to pick at a piece of crumbling plaster near the door. ‘I just hope she’s all right.’

‘Jesus, Marcus …’ Grayle stood up, too. ‘What’s it gonna
take?
What is it gonna take to actually make you feel sore at Callard? The woman stays in your house, eats your food, borrows your friends, turns me into a murder suspect, then drives off without a damn word, leaving a pile of glass, and it’s still like
poor Persephone.
Jesus Chr—. Oh. Hi, Bobby.’

He wasn’t wearing a bashful smile. Or any particular expression at all. He carried a paperback. He put it on the table. There was a vaguely familiar face on the front of the book, guy with a raffish smile but cold eyes.
Not,
Grayle was supremely glad to note, the guy in the drawing that the wind blew away.

She glanced up at Bobby.

‘Page one hundred and ninety,’ he said.

Grayle picked up the book. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ Flicked over
the pages. Around the middle of the book was a stack of photo-pages all together. Pictures of newspaper headlines, reproductions of news pictures – guy in handcuffs being led to a police van, bunch of guys in bow ties getting showered with champagne around a dinner table.

‘Over the page,’ Bobby said.

Grayle turned the page to find a police mugshot.

Underneath, the caption said,

Believe it or not, this is the only photo I could get of Clarence. He always hated having his picture taken.

‘Holy shit,’ Grayle said.

XXXVII

‘
WELL, WELL,’ MARCUS SAID SOURLY. ‘IF IT ISN’T THE ANGEL OF
fucking Death.’

And Cindy, while hurt, could understand the dismay. Marcus’s heart would have done a small leap when he saw a flash of blue skirt.
She came back.
Flinging wide the door to welcome back the prodigal daughter. Only to find, instead, his favourite deviant in twinset and pearls, hair fluffed out, with a fresh mauve rinse.

Cindy and Marcus looked at one another for two silent seconds before Cindy smiled his gentle, ironic smile, an old clown painting out his sorrow.

‘If I am going to be hanged, it seemed beholden on me to present a more tasteful figure upon the scaffold.’

Wearing men’s clothing last night had been a mistake. He had wanted to present to Miss Callard an image she could not deride, which would give her confidence. How foolish to allow his psychic responses to be inhibited by image and taste and diplomacy. The result was an overload of masculinity in the room, an imbalance. Cindy’s nose twitched in memory of the stench of the urinal sharpened with soiled lust, an unmistakable odour of male evil.

But the clothing had been only one of his errors. All of them the result of giving into material neuroses, worldly apprehensions, fear of public hatred, fear of penury.

Marcus, for once, was right to be suspicious. He scowled.

‘Suppose you’d better come in.’

*       *       *

At once he detected an electricity in the room. A dreadful excitement. At first falsely attributing it to the stack of morning papers on the table, the evidence for the prosecution.

Little Grayle, at least, seemed glad he’d returned. She rose, hugged him.

‘Jesus, why are they doing this to you?’

Cindy was stoical. ‘When things happen to us which we clearly cannot alter, little Grayle, we must ask ourselves what is to be learned from them. What they may be telling us abut ourselves that we were unwilling to recognize.’

‘Oh sure. Like you’ve been chosen as God’s tool to break the hold of the National Lottery on the public’s consciousness? Did the BBC respond yet?’

‘My career with the BBC is, you might say, in a state of cryogenic preservation. Someone may perhaps consider thawing me out in five years’ time.’

‘Cindy, can they just do this?’

‘I fear they have done it, lovely. Some years ago, the mandarins might have stood by me. Those days are gone.’

Bobby Maiden looked up from the
Mirror.
‘This didn’t just happen, did it?’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘Somebody had to start it, didn’t they?’

‘I also tend to be sceptical about spontaneous combustion, Bobby, but I rather suspect we have something more important to discuss than the descent of Kelvyn Kite.’

He had seen the exchange of glances. Oh yes, something else had occurred in the aftermath of the explosive exit of Miss Persephone Callard.

Grayle said, ‘You better tell him, Bobby.’

This was the standard mugshot issued to the papers when Gary Seward’s long-time enforcer, Clarence Judge, escaped from police custody in 1976. Used many times since because Clarence always hated having his picture taken.

‘You could argue’, Maiden pointed out, ‘that I came across it
browsing through Seward’s book, and it just stuck in my head. A famous picture of a minor gangland celebrity.’

‘Which was subconsciously stored’, Marcus said, ‘and surfaced in a moment of heightened consciousness during a meditative state induced by sitting around in the dark with a group of people who—’

‘Hey, whose side are you on?’ Grayle demanded.

‘Just giving the psychological explanation, Underhill.’

Maiden smiled to see Grayle setting up in opposition to Marcus, the way she often did, without realizing this was what Marcus intended.

Cindy examined the photo in Seward’s book. ‘It’s a face which seems to convey a brutal distrust of the entire human race.’

‘A criminal stereotype, in fact,’ said Marcus.

‘And another stereotype’, Grayle said, ‘is bad guys always having scars. I don’t see a scar in this photo. Otherwise, yeah, it’s very like the face you drew. Got the scar when he died, maybe?’

‘He was shot in the back of the head,’ Maiden said.

‘Oh.’

‘I believe he got the scar in prison.’

‘So he
did
have a scar.’

‘If not several. According to Seward, another inmate with a longstanding grudge surprised Clarence in the prison library. With a fish slice he’d nicked from the kitchens. And sharpened.’

Grayle winced. She was probably thinking about hedging tools and a dead man in a ditch. Maiden hesitated.

Grayle took a breath. ‘Just finish the story, Bobby.’

‘It’s really about what Clarence did next. He’s half-blinded by the blood, according to Seward, but still manages to push the guy’s head through the back of a free-standing bookshelf. OK? Leaving his face sticking out among the books, like in a pillory?’

‘Uh-oh,’ Grayle said.

‘And he can’t get free, and he’s hanging there. And then Clarence goes around the other side and props up these leather-bound encyclopedias against the guy’s ears on either side for further support. And then he starts hitting him. For … well, for a long time. It was said the blood spread so far that the library had to throw away more than a hundred books.’

‘This was in the pen? Where were the … wardens … the guards?’

‘Oh, well they were attending to a small disturbance elsewhere. It probably didn’t even involve a bribe – none of the screws would’ve lost sleep over something unpleasant happening to Clarence. They hate people prison life doesn’t seem to bother, and nothing ever got to Clarence. If you spat in his food, Seward says, he’d eat it all up in front of you and ask for seconds. And then he’d bide his time, but eventually he’d come and “visit” you, as he liked to put it.’

‘Jesus. And this is what… visits Callard? I take everything back. No wonder she’s so fucked up. Jeez, I only have to look at that drawing and I’m …’ Grayle shuddered.

Marcus said, ‘You ever come across this man personally, Maiden?’

‘No, I didn’t know him at all. Clarence would’ve been doing his bird when I was at the Met. I’ve just been having a quick look at Seward’s book. Looked up Judge in the index. Lots of references. Clarence has rare qualities, Seward says. Possibly the only person he truly admires, apart from Lady Thatcher.’

‘Hold on,’ Grayle said. ‘Let’s get back to the scar. Were there
no
pictures of him with this scar from the fish-slice attack?’

Maiden thought about it. ‘I don’t know. None that I’m aware of. With a scar like that you can understand him keeping a low profile.’

‘So you can categorically state that you never saw a picture of it?’

‘Not categorically. But I’m pretty sure. It could be artistic licence, though, couldn’t it? We’re never going to know for certain unless we dig him up and call in a facial reconstruction expert.’

‘So, Bobby – let’s just get this right – you only know what the scar looked like from Callard’s description, that it was like half of a pair of glasses. In fact it may not be quite like you’ve drawn it here, but we’ll never know. OK, let’s deal with the other rational explanation. What if Callard deliberately fed us this image of the face, with the glasses’ scar? Maybe planted the whole idea of this Clarence. And even Seward, with his peculiar laugh.’

‘Except that it was Les Hole who first mentioned Seward,’ Maiden said.

Marcus looked pained. ‘Underhill, why would she anyway?’

‘I have no idea. I’m exhausting rational possibilities, is all. It still
makes no sense to me why she suddenly skipped out last night, and it doesn’t to you, Marcus, if you’d only admit it.’

Marcus was silent.

‘So let’s look at the crank stuff,’ Grayle said. ‘Spirit drawings. It’s a common enough thing for an artist to be present at a seance, right?’

Cindy, who’d been absorbing all this stuff in silence, said, ‘And the artist does not necessarily have to be a medium. Sometimes he or she works the same way as I believe police artists do, creating the face according to the instructions of the medium. And on occasion,’ Cindy coughed lightly, ‘this is done without them even speaking.’

‘The image gets transferred mentally,’ Grayle said. ‘It sounds crazy, but I’ve seen this happen.’

‘Usually, I think,’ Cindy said softly, ‘when there is, er, a close personal link between the medium and the, er, artist.’

Marcus stiffened, directed a hard look at Bobby. Grayle made no comment.

Cindy said, ‘What were your feelings, Bobby, when you were doing this drawing? What sensations were you experiencing?’

‘I can’t remember. I can’t remember doing the drawing. All I have a clear memory of is Seffi saying, “He’s touching me”, and me diving at her. And then the window bursting.’