Mean Spirit (48 page)

Maiden saw former DC Ballantyne smirking in delight at this dear old underworld character from a lost era, as if this was cabaret. He wondered if Ballantyne knew what Seward had done to his colleague, Jeffrey Crewe. He wondered what Seward had told Riggs about the incident.

‘But having said that, Grayle, it’s incredible how things what comes out in the heat of the moment do turn out to be quite prophetic. I believe in all that stuff.’ Seward swivelled, spreading his hands. ‘I mean, let’s be frank about this, a short time from now, the two of you will have died three times between you.’

The fluorescent tube in the ceiling zizzed and popped along with the famous monotone laugh.

‘I mean, you know, how else is it supposed to end? What else can I do, the position you put me in? It’s your own fault, innit?’

Grayle looked at him, frozen-faced, her skin blue-white under the
strip light, her hair tangled on her shoulders. Maiden wondered desperately how he could get her out of this. Being nice to Seward didn’t seem an option.

‘I mean this is an omen, yeah? The two of you here: a young lady what was recently told she was dead and a geezer who
was
dead.’

‘Mmm,’ Maiden said, ‘that is really uncanny.’

‘What can I tell you? You’re gonna die. You
are
gonna die. We all die. Your time has been brought forward, that’s all. How I always look at it. Bringing forward the inevitable. That’s all it is.’

‘I never thought of that before,’ Maiden said tonelessly. ‘That’s amazingly profound.’

Gary Seward tucked a fast fist into Maiden’s undefended stomach.

‘That the spot, Bobby?’

Maiden retched, folded in agony.

‘You scumball!’
Grayle screamed. ‘You knew he was hurt!’

‘But I digress,’ Maiden heard Seward say, across the pain. ‘What I was about to say is, by the time you check out I hope we’ll all know more about the actual business of death and what follows. The reality. You ever meet Clarence Judge, Bobby?’ Seward bent to him. ‘Eh?’

Maiden shook his head.

‘We can fix that.’ He turned and pushed open the oak door, stepped back. ‘Go through, would you, please?’

Ballantyne and his colleague blocked the passage in each direction. Ballantyne signalled Maiden into the room.

Where Maiden saw what he expected to see. A richly carpeted area with a red sofa and five chairs around a table. A little bit of Cheltenham.

What he didn’t expect to see, in one of the chairs, was Ron Foxworth.

LI

THE TABLE WAS OF CREAMY, POLISHED YEW, THE SEATING AROUND IT
an inelegant mixture: two straight-backed wooden dining chairs, three red brocaded Edwardian fireside chairs. In one of which sat Foxworth.

He barely glanced at Maiden. He still wore his old black anorak with the rally stripes. He looked slightly absurd in this opulently furnished cellar.

But then the island of opulence itself looked absurd. All around, it was still a cellar. The walls had been patched up with cement. A strip light buzzed and flickered near the top of a wall. A dusty unlit bulb dangled from a brown Bakelite rose in the centre of the low, grey ceiling.

It was this hanging bulb, more than anything, which made it look less like a filmset than a display hurriedly flung together in a furniture warehouse.

‘He holds this very much against you, Bobby.’ Seward tilted his head to peer at Foxworth as though he was a child in a pram. ‘Don’t you, Ronny?’

Maiden saw that Foxworth was also handcuffed but with his hands in front. He saw a tall, expensive Chinese vase on a table pushed against the furthest wall. On either side of it, two oil heaters faintly smoking below a jacket on a hanger on a hook in the wall.

‘All this talk of the Festival of the Spirit, you really whetted Ron’s
appetite, Bobby. Thinkin’ about you and me and how we all fitted into the picture. Had to come over and check it out, didn’t you, Ronny?’ Seward smiled at Foxworth and then at Maiden. ‘It’s his obsessive personality.’

Ron Foxworth didn’t speak. Ballantyne directed Grayle and Maiden into the red chairs on either side of Ron.

‘Course Ron sticks out a bit. Not very New Age. Not like you, Bobby, by all accounts. Now, you tell me – what was I supposed to do? It’s one of those moments, one of those signs. Detective Superintendent Ronald Foxworth visits the Festival of the Spirit. Life’s too short to ignore it. You know you got to react quick or you miss it. So … soon as we established he was on his tod, we had him. Lifted him clean, banged him up.’

Ron cleared his throat, didn’t look up. Maiden thought he’d never seen a man look so destroyed.

‘Surprised?’ Gary Seward slid into a wooden chair, crossed his legs, did his one-tone laugh. ‘Very surprised indeed, wasn’t you, Ronald? I mean, it don’t happen, do it? A senior officer, a distinguished detective? Should have heard the bluster, Bobby.
You really done it this time, Seward.
Big, powerful detective, this. Spent half his life trying to pull Gary Seward. Now I’ve pulled him. Exquisite. But it goes deeper, don’t it, Ron?’

Foxworth looked up. His eyes were pale and bloodshot. He didn’t look at anybody, his focus point seemed to be in a haze about eighteen inches from his face. But, at some stage since he was lifted, Ron had learned about the consequences of failing to answer direct questions.

‘Gary thinks I was once uncivil to Clarence Judge.’

‘Masterly understatement, Ron. What happened was … there was a siege situation yeah? Late Seventies, Ron? Seventy-nine, eighty, around then. Clarence, I think he done a post office for pocket money or alimony, some minor cash-flow thing. Course, Ron looks at Clarence, sees Gary Seward, know wha’ mean? Obsessive. Goes in mob-handed, SAS-style. Absolute overreaction, utterly uncalled for. Poor Clarence thinks he’s for the jump, killed trying to escape, some’ing like that. Thinks he’s fighting for his life. Well you would, wouldn’t you?’

Ron rallied. ‘He had a copper’s ear between his teeth. DS Earnshaw. Took four men to tear his bloody face away. Had half the
ear in his mouth and if they hadn’t made him cough it up he’d have eaten it.’

Seward ignored him. ‘So, back at the station, what does Ron do but invite three of DS Earnshaw’s colleagues to pay their respects to Clarence in his cell.’

‘He was smashing up his cell,’ Ron said to his chest. ‘He was also in danger of injuring himself. Judge had no pain threshold.’

Seward half-turned, pointed the finger. ‘You, Ron, are a lying toerag. What are you?’

Maiden closed his eyes.
Don’t make him say it.

‘Nah,’ Seward said. ‘He knows what he is. He humiliated Clarence that day. He stood and watched while those pigs hurt my poor friend in all the places what didn’t show. But, worst of all, they hurt his pride, and that’s the severest thing you can do to a man like Clarence, and it cannot be tolerated long term. I says, leave it, Clarence, don’t do
nothing.
‘Cause he never had no finesse, see, the poor love. You leave it, I says. But one day I will see to Ron for you, I promise. And Gary Seward keeps his promises, and this is that day and Clarence is going to be here to see it. Matthew …?’

Ballantyne closed the oak door.

Oh God, Maiden thought.

‘Let’s make ourselves comfortable.’ Seward bent down the side of his chair, came up nursing black metal. ‘We’re gonna get cosy. There will be no resistance, otherwise the inevitable gets brought forward, know wha’ mean?’

Shotgun. Sawn-off. Maiden estimated that if Seward let that thing off in here he could kill one of them, maim the others with a single shot.

‘Stand up, Miss Underwood.’

Seward ambled over, placed the twin barrels against Grayle’s temple.
‘Oh
God.’ Her voice was like a startled bird taking flight from a branch. Maiden began to breathe hard.

‘You too, Ron, Bobby. Up. Now, what we do, we close our eyes and we keep the fuckers closed.’

‘I can’t,’ Grayle said.

‘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.
’