Mean Spirit Read online

  ‘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?

  Underhill had looked sceptical. ‘So you’re saying this was … what’s the word?’

  ‘Teleportation. I was convinced of it. Many of the disappearing items were things no-one would ever want to steal. And they would vanish so swiftly and completely that unless she’d been a master of sleight-of-hand …’

  He saw her grimace, heard the whispered Beam me up, Scotty.

  Yes, all right. Where Persephone was concerned, all Marcus’s own cynicism went out of the window.

  ‘By now, some of the girls had switched from patronizing her to basically shunning her. While from some of the boys she had what today would be described as plain sexual harassment.’

  All of which had made her withdrawn. But she wasn’t inarticulate and maladjusted like the psychokinetic kids in all those overblown films. Persephone was highly intelligent and aware of the unearthly beauty of it all.

  ‘Confused, obviously. A little scared – who wouldn’t be? But there was also this tremulous excitement. She resented being treated like some sort of pariah, but equally she was glad not to be … normal.’

  ‘So what was this, Marcus? Just straight up poltergeist activity, or what?’

  ‘Energies channelled through her, I suppose. It happens. I wondered if, like many people with this kind of ability, she’d had some sort of electric shock as a young child. But if she had, she didn’t remember it.’

  ‘Or chose not to. I guess Ms Callard would hate to think all this was down to some unfortunate accident during infancy.’

  ‘But she never once ran away from it, Underhill. What she resented was the randomness of it – didn’t like to be out of control, like a psychic puppet. Hated being used. Wanted to know how to use it. And after a while she did. It was how she first came to my attention, actually. All those essays in a variety of handwriting styles.’

  ‘Oh, right … She was getting the spirits to do her …’

  ‘Her prep. Something like that. I never actually taught her in class, you understand. I was the A-level Eng. Lit. man, and she was only fourteen then. But one day her English mistress brought me a piece of apparent verse Persephone had handed in. I couldn’t make head or bloody tail of it at first, and then I realized … it was Chaucerian English. And more than that…’

  Marcus staring into the stove, the embers reflected in his glasses. Reliving the sheer excitement of it.

  ‘It was Sir Topaz,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘There’s this spoof bit in The Canterbury Tales. Where Chaucer himself is invited by the Host at the inn to tell a tale. He begins to relate the story of Sir Topaz – doesn’t matter who he is. Point is that after a few minutes, the Host interrupts Chaucer and informs him, in no uncertain fashion, that his tale is bollocks.’

  ‘Which is a j
oke, right?’ Underhill said. ‘We all know Chaucer’s written all the rest of the stuff, so he must be pretty smart, therefore—’

  ‘Exactly. Persephone’s verse seemed to be continuing the tale of Sir Topaz, where Chaucer left off.’

  ‘Good stuff?’

  ‘The whole point’, Marcus said irritably, ‘is that the Host is critical of Chaucer’s literary skills. The notable line being, as I recall, “your dreary rhyming isn’t worth a turd”.’

  ‘So like if Seffi’s poetry was not of sufficient literary merit to be recognizable as vintage Chaucer coming through Callard, it could still be genuine, because this is Chaucer deliberately writing bad poetry. That’s smart.’

  ‘Too bloody smart for a fourteen-year-old girl who’d never been exposed to Chaucer.’

  * * *

  Soon after the night of the exploding window, Marcus had resigned, cleared off to the other side of the country and back into state education, in which he’d remained until the opportunity had arisen to purchase The Vision, or The Phenomenologist, as the magazine had been known then – memories of the Callard affair fuelling his resolve to take the gamble.

  Because he knew the girl was absolutely bloody genuine! Adolescents, particularly at boarding school, relied on friends, peer support. No fourteen-year-old girl would choose to condemn herself to life as a social outcast.

  And he’d seen the incomprehension in her eyes.

  His head full of fever, Marcus glared out of the window at the farmyard and the castle ruins. Feeling like a bloody prisoner. Dripping a little single malt into his glass. Which left just under an inch in the bottom of the bottle. How the hell was he supposed to survive flu on an inch of whisky?

  ‘BOTTLE OF SCOTCH!’ he’d bawled at the static surrounding Underhill’s bastard mobile phone. ‘BRING BACK A BOTTLE OF FUCKING SCOTCH!’

  All right: if he was honest, the whisky had also been an excuse. He’d assumed Underhill had reached Persephone Callard by now. Had hoped she’d be able to pass the phone over to Persephone, so that he might explain why he was not there in person. And make sure that Persephone understood that, contrary to her appearance and general attitude, Underhill was, in fact, relatively trustworthy.

  Another week – another three days, even – and he might have been fit enough to drive over there. Right now, he was too fucking ill to walk to the pub in St Mary’s for a bottle of Scotch. He couldn’t think straight and Persephone’s letter was burning up his brain.

  … know we haven’t spoken since my departure many years ago from A Certain School. Perhaps you feel disappointed or offended by my subsequent commercial exploitation of my God-given Abilities.

  … surrounded by leeches, parasites, false lovers. You remain the only person who has ever been there when I needed understanding, tolerance and common sense…

  The letter pleaded for Marcus to come and see her at the lodge at her father’s house. Not to write or phone – she was afraid her calls were being monitored.

  ‘Crazy,’ Underhill had said. ‘She’s blown it, you only need to read the papers. You don’t need this shit. Call her up when you’re on your feet, but play it cool. Don’t get involved.’

  … I still recall our talks with the deepest gratitude. If you only knew how often I’ve wished that there was someone like you with whom I could discuss my grimmest fears …

  ‘Oh Marcus, you were like a father to me.’ Underhill raising her eyes to the oak beams. ‘Like the father I never had on account of he was always across the sea in some God-forsaken consulate …’

  ‘She’s never—’

  ‘Subtext, Marcus.’

  ‘Underhill, I was simply a teacher at her boarding school. A teacher who listened. She thought she was going mad, with all the things that were happening to her, and I was the only teacher who was prepared to consider the alternatives.’

  ‘Twenty years!’ Underhill yelled. ‘You haven’t seen her for twenty years! Like, did she come for your advice when they were touring her all over Europe and the States? When Diana was calling her up in the middle of the night, did she ask you how to handle it?’

  ‘She’s in trouble. I know this girl.’

  ‘Well, precisely. You knew a girl. This is a grown woman now and by all accounts she’s manipulative and paranoid in equal measure.’

  ‘You don’t know her.’

  ‘I know a lot of people like her.’

  ‘Believe me, you don’t.’

  Underhill had looked stubborn.

  ‘She’s in trouble,’ Marcus insisted. ‘We can’t let this hang fire. I need you to go and talk to her.’

  ‘Like, she’s gonna talk to me? She’s in hiding from the media, she won’t take phone calls, and you think—?’

  ‘What else can we do?’ Marcus had started coughing, and the coughing had gone on for a long time and Underhill had sighed and given in.

  Marcus pulled off his glasses, clutched the Kleenex to his streaming eyes. Never seemed to get colds or flu when Mrs Willis was alive and keeping house for him – first sniffle and the dear old soul had always been there with some mysterious, brown, stoppered bottle. Now he’d been forced back on the inhalers, expectorants and headache pills produced by fiendish pharmaceutical multinationals which, he was convinced, directed a meaningful element of their astronomical profits into the development of new and virulent strains of influenza.

  Bastards.

  He sagged back into his old chair, and the castle disappeared from the window, displaced by the last weak sun seeping into the Black Mountains. The study door edged open and Malcolm, the bull terrier, ambled in.

  ‘What are you grinning at?’ Marcus dragged the phone from the desk. A recorded message told him it was not at present possible to reach the mobile phone he was calling and he should try again later.

  Waste of bastard time, mobile phones.

  III

  WHAT SHE’D HOPED FOR WAS THAT THE COMMUNITY OF MYSLETON would be another pleasant, cheerful, big village with yellow-stone cottages and a pretty pub with tables outside and a scattering of early tourists trailing kids and dogs.

  Oh, sure.

  Clouds like industrial smoke banked over clay-coloured ploughed fields. The rain came in tough spatters, like abuse.

  ‘This … this is the place?’

  Justin didn’t reply. Justin had become real silent; his lips had vanished into his moustache. He looked bigger, somehow.

  Mysleton was not any kind of village. It was just like … a name. On a map, presumably; there wasn’t even a sign. You could see a few farms, well back from the road, but no two dwellings appeared to be within about three hundred yards of one another.

  They came to this gap in the roadside hedge and, about ten yards in, two broken-down gateposts, no gate.

  ‘Mysleton House,’ Justin said.

  But like suppose this wasn’t Mysleton House at all? Suppose that at the end of the track there was just some place which Justin knew was derelict, where no-one could hear you scream?

  In what already seemed like standard Mysleton policy, there was no sign on the gateposts. Justin drove between them, into an avenue of bare poplar trees. Though it was only about four-thirty, the day was darkening rapidly on account of the rain, and the rain was coming harder – one of the truck’s wipers squeaking to this awful, chugging rhythm, like it was trying for an orgasm.

  Grayle clenching her fists. Come on … even if he’d worked out that the call had not been from Persephone Callard, nothing was going to happen. This was Gloucestershire, England.

  Jesus, what is that supposed to mean? Frederick West, the leering, sex-driven builder and repeat killer of women and girls, operated out of freaking Gloucester …

  Always the same: when you saw olde-English-quaint, you saw harmless. A mistake.

  And what you did not do, when your car broke down, was call up the number on the scuffed card that was always stuck up in the lonesome callbox. Because the guy on the other end of the phone knew that callbox, and if it wa
s a woman’s voice he could guess she was alone. Maybe Frederick West had his card in lonely callboxes: F. West, general builder; cellar conversions a specialty.

  ‘OK, stop!’

  They’d reached a low, smallish house, enclosed by trees and bushes and well covered with ivy creeper. Dirty stone in between the creeper, no Cotswold glow. Didn’t look so very old by English standards, maybe Victorian. Could this be it? The lodge?

  Justin braked, but didn’t switch off his engine.

  ‘This ain’t the house. This is only the lodge, Grayle. You can tell it’s empty. Look – no lights. Tiny little windows like that, this time of day there’d be lights.’

  Marcus had said, There’ll be no lights, no sign of life, no car visible. She doesn’t want the press to think there’s anyone at home because, if anyone sees her, the word’ll spread like wildfire and there’ll be a dozen bloody photographers peering through the windows.

  Justin was waiting, revving the engine in short, kind of masturbatory bursts.

  Grayle plucked at the passenger-door handle.

  ‘Maybe I’ll walk from here.’

  ‘In this? Don’t be daft, girl.’ Justin accelerated through the trees, past the lodge, along a level black-top track. ‘House is round this bend, ’bout a hundred yards.’

  ‘Thanks, but there was no …’

  Aw, leave it; she’d just have to get out at the house, thank him graciously and smile. Walk right back to the lodge, just as soon as he’d driven away.

  Mysleton House sat firmly at the end of the track, open fields behind it. It was no stately home, but no chalet either: one of those substantial stone-built rural dwellings that didn’t answer to any particular style and tended to escape the attentions of those English Heritage guys Marcus Bacton hated worse than tax inspectors.

  And, of course, no smoke issued from its tall chimneys and there were no cars parked outside. Justin stopped the truck in front of a five-barred gate dividing the track from a garden with trees and stuff.