Mean Spirit (52 page)

Kurt stopped shaking him.

‘It may already be too late,’ Cindy said. ‘There was a shot, as you heard. From the cellars? Where are the cellars, Kurt? Don’t fool about, boy, we have to stop this abomination.’

‘There are no cellars. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And you’re pushing me too far.’

‘Oh Kurt, you’ve already gone too far, lovely. Further than you would have ever imagined before you entered dear Gary’s social circle and began letting him do all those favours for you. And then—’

Kurt slapped him hard across the face with his left hand and then punched him savagely in the left breast with his right. Cindy went down on his knees. He did not stop talking.

‘… those deaths. The poor pilot and the man who took on a blonde too big for him. Pure coincidence, of course. But what if there was a third, more appalling, more devastating? A beautiful, multiple death? Well … a piece of—’

Kurt slammed an elegant foot into Cindy’s face. Cindy collapsed.

‘… piece of cake for Gary and the boys from …’ he found his face against a cold stone flag, blood oozing from his mouth ‘… Forcefield.’ He coughed feebly, spat out a tooth. Heard footsteps, voices, people calling for him.

‘But who should it be?’ His words thickened by blood. ‘Who should it be, Kurt? Must move now … while the story’s hot … don’t delay, don’t miss the opportunity …’

‘Cindy? CINDY!’

Hands. Many hands.

Cindy back on his knees. A blur of faces. Could not focus, could not think quite where he was.

‘Who should it be?’ he murmured. ‘Who were those stupid people … with the fleet of BMWs?
They
deserve it, the crass … crass idiots.’

LIV

IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE MAIDEN BECAME AWARE THAT WHATEVER
Seffi Callard usually did, she wasn’t doing. Whatever customarily happened was not happening.

She would close her eyes, throw back her head, as though someone was pulling on the rope of her hair, draw in another slow breath. But when he looked at her again, the amber glow would be back in her eyes, wide open again, desperate.

Pleading. Saying,
Someone has to stop this.
Knowing that no-one could.

Maybe ten minutes passed. Gary Seward watched in silence from outside the handcuffed seance.

All he wanted was to see Clarence Judge again. In the end it was that simple: Gary Seward and Kurt Campbell wanted proof, for themselves, of a certain kind of life after death. Abblow’s kind. The transference of the human essence to a parallel, godless existence where Victorian values survived the grave, where a life of crime would not rebound on you, where the spirit of Clarence Judge remained unsinged by the fires of hell.

The thought of it made Maiden scared and depressed. It too much resembled the colourless, ill-formed memories of his own death experience. And he was going back there very soon; death as the end of everything would be an infinitely more appealing prospect.

His eyes met Seffi’s before she closed them again. He eased his hand over hers and their fingers enfolded, slippery with cold sweat
and despair. When he closed his own eyes and tried to pray, what came to him was an image of the salmon-coloured dawn at High Knoll, layers of cloud interwoven with the distant Malvern Hills. Which was here. From the Knoll, this was where the dawn began. And none of them were going to see the next one, were they, not from anywhere?

He didn’t know Seward was behind him until the barrel of the shotgun came down and broke three of his fingers.

The whisper was close to his left ear. ‘Now, that ain’t how we arranges our hands, is it, cock?’

Kurt Campbell must have been well away before they came – Maurice and Lorna and Harry Oakley. Well away before Cindy was able to pull together his thoughts and was struggling to say,
Find him
…
stop him. He’s the only one who can tell us where
…

But it was far too late. This was Kurt’s house. A thousand places to go, including the dreadful cellars.

Lorna Crane was trying to clean up Cindy’s face with his own lavender-scented handkerchief. ‘I’m all right,’ he was telling her through bruised lips. ‘I’m all right, lovely.’

‘You want to bloody see yourself,’ said Maurice.

‘Maurice … listen to me, boy … you have to find the entrance to the cellars.’

Lorna muttering. ‘God, I think he’s lost a couple of teeth. Oh Christ, could his jaw be broken?’

‘Do you
understand?’

Maurice said, ‘Because of that shot?’

‘Find the entrance, but do not, on
any
account, go in. Fetch me at once. It may be a flight of steps, it may be a trapdoor. The most obvious area is the kitchens, but it could be anywhere … at the side of a fireplace, beneath a carpet, in a cupboard under stairs to the first floor … Look everywhere.’

‘All of us?’

‘Everyone. Go in groups. Fours and fives. Don’t let anyone put you off.’

‘The dungeons,’ Mr Oakley said. ‘Crole and Abblow’s dungeons.’

‘Do you know where they might be?’ Cindy demanded, his whole face ablaze with pain.

Mr Oakley shook his head. ‘Only that it was where they murdered my great-grandad. They’ve killed someone else now, haven’t they?’

‘Just find the entrance. Tell me. I shall be in the great hall.’

‘I’ll stay with you,’ Lorna said.

‘Thank you. And … pray, all of you. Pray to your several gods that we are not too late.’

But he thought they were.

‘This is good,’ Seward confided to Maiden. ‘This is excellent, how that happened. I once saw Clarence do a geezer’s hands. Some nonce. Not wiv a sawn-off, mind. Wiv a piece of pipe, but still …’

Seffi was staring down at the table. Their hands were separated. Maiden’s fingers were turning black. The pain was dull and distant.

Across the table, Grayle was unnaturally still. Shock. Behind her, Clarence’s grey suit hung limply from its hanger. Maiden thought he could see smoke from the oil heaters funnelled from its collar. He thought he could see part of Ron Foxworth’s white jaw, with teeth, on the table bearing the sepia photograph of Clarence Judge. The face became, for a moment, very clear, and it seemed to Maiden that the bulb had become much brighter.

Seward straightened up.

‘Is he here? Is that him?’

At that moment Foxworth’s body slid a few inches down in the armchair and the cuffs dragged painfully on Maiden’s left hand, and the bulb was dark again, under its skin of dried blood.

Seffi Callard didn’t react. Her eyes were closed again. The cellar smelled sweetly foul.

Seward hissed, ‘You see him?’

Seffi gulped air through her mouth. There were tears on her face.

Grayle said, ‘
I
see him.’

Seward swung round, the sawn-off at his hip.

Grayle stayed motionless, opposite Maiden, her back straight, both hands on the table, one pulled slightly askew by the slippage of the corpse but she seemed no longer affected by its proximity.

‘Hi, Clarence.’ Grayle giggled.

Oh, no,
Maiden thought. He watched the expressions – scepticism, suspicion, hope, yearning, hunger – chasing across Seward’s face like
a speeded-up film of storm clouds. This was the real, unpublic face: charmless, cheerless, flabby, the mouth turned down, the dyed hair sweated to the forehead. The bow tie was off, the shirt undone.

Seward said, ‘You?’

Grayle was staring past him with a lopsided smile. ‘You don’t scare me, Clarence.’

Seward moved back against the wall, the shotgun pointed upwards. ‘What’s he look like? You tell me exactly what he looks like!’

‘You do not freaking
scare
me!’ Grayle screamed.

‘What’s he
look
like, bitch?’

‘He, uh … he’s just like … I … I don’t know … He’s not here, not like you and I are … Oh Jesus … He
is
here. Now he
is.
Now he’s like … he’s
really freaking here.
He’s just … standing here. He’s wearing a suit. And a white shirt. And like a thin, black tie. Like a funeral tie. Maybe …’ Grayle let out a wild peal of laughter. ‘Maybe he just went to his own funeral …’

Seward’s breath was coming faster. ‘You better not be fucking wiv me, lady. Go on. What else? His shoes. Describe his shoes.’

‘I can’t see his shoes. He like … he isn’t too defined down there. It’s like he goes into mist, and his … he’s off the ground is what I’m saying. It’s like he’s maybe six inches off the ground. Jesus, he’s … you know, he’s awful. This is a dead man.’

‘Ask him if he can see us.’

‘Yeah …’

‘
Ask him
!’

‘I’m asking him! In my head. You can’t just …’

‘What’s he say?’

‘He isn’t saying anything. He’s just there, is all. All he is is
there.’

‘Then why can’t
I
see him?’

“Cause you’re an insensitive asshole, how the fuck should I know?’

‘All right.’ Seward was feverishly breaking and snapping shut his shotgun. ‘You said you can see him now, yeah? Clear?’

‘I can see him very well.’

‘So you tell me what he looks like. His face.’

‘All right, he … he’s got a thin face and this hooked kind of Roman nose. His hair is slicked back. It’s that style that was
fashionable for guys over here not all that long ago. Like shaven hard up both sides and real thick on top. Only you can tell this isn’t one of those fashion cuts, this is how it’s always been. His eyes are … pale, I guess. Like watery. And no colour … no colour that I can make out. His whole face has no colour. He’s a dead man. Uh, he has this scar.’

As Grayle talked, Maiden was picturing his drawing. She was describing it. And because there’d been no published photograph of Clarence Judge since he was scarred in prison by the fish-slice bloke, this was where Grayle started walking the tightrope. Suppose the scar was nothing like the drawing?

‘OK, the scar … Clarence, will you stop freaking looking at me like you wanna …?’

‘The
scar
,’ Seward hissed.

‘It … it’s cutting across the side of his head from the left eye … the left eye as you look at him. It runs almost but not quite horizontally from the eye to the ear, like half of a pair of glasses.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, that’s it, it’s a scar. Oh. Except, about three-quarters along, it kind of disappears under a fold of skin. Like, it’s not a pretty scar, but this part is … it’s like you would say it was stitched up by two different guys working from different ends and they didn’t quite meet up. Plus, it looks kind of livid.’

‘Christ,’ Seward said.

‘Maybe … I don’t see that part too well, he never turns his head … maybe that’s not part of the scar at all.’

‘It’s another scar,’ Seward said, almost breathlessly, to Maiden. There was either a shadow or a big patch of sweat across his shirt. ‘About two months before he died, he was moaning about the scar irritating him, pulling down his eye. Reckoned it was affecting his sight. He got mad with it. One night, he takes a kitchen knife, slices into it. Sews it up hisself, different. He could do fings like that and hardly feel it. How would
she
know about that, Bobby? She never knew Clarence. You bleedin’ swear to me she never knew him?’

‘She’s American, Gary.’

‘You think she’s seeing him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do
you
see?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Tell him
I
wanna see him!’ Seward roared. ‘Tell him I need to fucking see his ugly face!’

‘You don’t get through to him, OK?’ Grayle said testily. ‘He does not respond. It’s just like he’s a dummy. A dead dummy. This is … He doesn’t hear me. Jesus, did Campbell hypnotize him to just … be like something out the basement at Madame Tussaud’s?’

Seward moved nearer the circle. He stopped.

‘What did you say?’

‘I … said … I … the basement at Madam …’

‘Before that.’

Maiden said quickly, ‘Ask him if he knows who killed him. Ask him if he knows who shot him from behind.’

Seward spun, crouching, with the shotgun outstretched. Maiden staring down the two black holes.
He’s going to kill me anyway. It’s got nothing to do with any of this. He’s doing it for Riggs. Payback for Crewe. An arrangement.

He said, ‘Grayle, ask Clarence if he remembers who shot him and where it …?’

‘Hold it!’ Grayle cried out. ‘He …’ She looked at Seward, her voice dropping to conversation level. ‘You killed him, right, Gary? You did it in the apartment near the Rotunda in Cheltenham.’

Persephone Callard’s eyes came open. She looked stunned.

‘I’m seeing this quite clearly,’ Grayle said firmly. ‘Here’s what happens. First, Kurt hypnotizes him and he plants this … a posthypnotic suggestion that like … when Clarence hears the words, “The lines are open”, he’ll come back from wherever he is. Like,
wherever
he is. And then, while he’s still in trance, Gary just like … blows him away. From behind.’

‘What
…?’ Maiden said.

Sounding, he hoped, as though this was a big shock … that it was taking some getting his mind around. Like the same theory hadn’t been forming in his head most of the night. Forming out of Grayle’s idea that Kurt had hypnotized Seffi. Hardening up at the first sight of the Cheltenham furniture, here in the cellar where Crole and Abblow …

He said, ‘This is what they did to John Hodge, isn’t it? They killed him after ordering him under hypnosis to come back. To return to
the place he loved most in all the world. So attached to it his family used to joke about him haunting it when he was dead.’

Seffi Callard said, ‘The first experiment in hypnosis beyond death. The obvious conjunction of spiritualism and mesmerism.’ She gave out a cracked laugh. ‘Only a Victorian English gentleman would see instructing the dead as the best way in.’

Maiden went on looking down those cold black metal corridors.

‘You want to talk about this, Gary?’

The entrance hall, with its vaulted ceiling, its coats of arms and crossed pikes, its stags’ heads on shields, its wrought-iron chandelier with the candles.