Mean Spirit (37 page)

The upshot was that Cindy had offered to pay half the fee if they could still hire a stall for
The Vision
at the Festival of the Spirit. Which started, as it happened, in two days’ time, Wednesday through to the weekend.

Like this was part of his destiny. He’d been up to the Knoll to ask for an answer, and when he got back to the farm, there they all were around a marketing circular headed,

Overcross Castle:
The Veil is Lifted

Some kind of shamanic signpost.

Jesus.

‘This Kurt Campbell,’ Grayle said, putting down the teatray in the living room, ‘he isn’t really known in the States. He’s like David Copperfield?’

‘He’s not a magician,’ Bobby said, ‘he’s just a hypnotist. Has his own consultancy. But also does TV. These shows where people come on to be made to do humiliating things. Bit like Paul McKenna?’

‘Right. So the thing he did with Cindy – or tried to do – on the Lottery Show …’

‘That was his routine act. But there’s also a serious side to the hypnotism. And this interest in the paranormal, which led to the Overcross project.’

‘So apart from that Seward’s into spiritualism, do we know of a connection between him and Campbell?’ Grayle put the pot on the tray between two mugs with Cottingley fairy faces on them. ‘I’ve been trying to read his book, but it’s all written in dialect and jargon, so presumably ghost-written from taped interviews. Jeez, I don’t even understand the title.’

‘Clumsy pun on London villain-speak. The only mention of Campbell is a passing reference to him and Seward once appearing together on a TV talkshow.’

‘So?’ Grayle shrugged. ‘Showbiz is a small world. Seward’s plugged into the same circuit. It means squat.’

She thought Bobby looked tired. Sitting there by the inglenook, all dark eyed and unreadable. Was his agenda linked to amber eyes and brown breasts and hair you could use to tie up a boat in a storm?

She poured pink tea. ‘So what’s gonna happen at this seance?’

‘That’s what bothers Marcus. What happens when she goes into trance and Clarence – if it is Clarence – takes over?’

‘But if Seward’s behind this, isn’t that what he wants?’

‘But if this Victorian seance is a highly public event … I mean really public, as distinct from an invited audience of Midlands villains.’

‘It’s a conundrum, Bobby. I guess you want to be there, too, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know. I hate going into anything blind.’ He drank some herbal tea, didn’t wince. ‘I wondered about going to see Kurt Campbell.’

‘Now?’

‘Well, tomorrow.’

‘On what pretext?’

‘I thought that I could take a temporary job with
The Vision.
Request an interview about the festival, with its founder.’

‘Sure. Except the next
Vision
doesn’t come out till next month.’

‘He doesn’t know that. I could say it’s out on Thursday, and I’ve just got time to get an article in.’

‘You don’t know too much about production schedules, do you, Bobby?’

‘Yeah, well, he probably doesn’t either.’

‘And interviewing? What do you know about interviewing?’

‘Done thousands, Grayle. In depth.’

‘Oh, yeah, sure. Like, “Where were you on the night of the fifteenth and don’t give me no shit or I’ll slap you around the cell?” What are you, crazy? He’d have you sussed in like four minutes. Listen, I’ll go. I shoulda thought of this. I’ll do the interview. Which is why you came here, right?’

‘It is
not
why I came. Besides, they very likely know your name.’

‘So you think this would, uh, expose me to some risk?’

‘Well, no, not particularly. That just happens in movies, but—’

‘Like the movies where they crush you to death with an old car? What the hell, the way I’m feeling I could use risk.’

‘Bad attitude, Underhill. Consider yourself off the case.’

‘Screw
you.
Listen, OK, here’s what’s gonna happen. We both go. I’m Alice D. Thornborough of
The Vision.
And you could be … you could be like Lenny Lens, the photographer. You can handle a
camera, aside from mugshots and pictures of DOAs in chalk outlines?’

‘I can handle a camera. We don’t do chalk outlines.’

‘Well, as it happens, I have a camera here. A Nikon,
ex-Courier.
Convincingly professional. We’ll do it. Hell, let’s go interview Seward too. Let’s stir some shit.’

‘That’s a
very
bad attitude,’ Bobby said.

‘Yeah?’

Grayle caught sight of herself in the long mirror, amid the crystals, the Tree of Life poster, the Egyptian dog of the dead. For all the tough talk, she looked small and lonely in her red frock, a lost kid in a fairy grotto. She was just four miles from where her sister was murdered.

She coughed. ‘This herbal tea’s making me feel sick. Let’s get some serious coffee. Old-cop strength.’

XL

‘GUY’S A SAINT, IT APPEARS.’

On the editorial room table, Grayle gathered together the cuttings on Kurt Campbell. Say what you like about Marcus, he was assiduous in compiling files on anything and anybody connected to the paranormal.

Just that these clippings were hardly firming up the image of a man who would facilitate a not-necessarily-ex criminal’s plan to contact the spirit of his psychopathic buddy.

‘Seems Campbell once flew to Belfast to give hypnotherapy free of charge to a kid of four who’d become mute after both his parents were shot in front of him by the IRA.’

‘Worked too, as I recall,’ Marcus said.

‘Apparently.’

At nine a.m., she’d called the PR firm handling the Overcross Festival and left a message requesting an interview with Kurt. In case
The Vision
sounded too smalltime, she’d given the name of the
New York Courier
– well, they
had
invited her to submit freelance pieces after she quit.

‘Also, Campbell gives his services to all kinds of youth charities, and he’s worked with terminally ill people to calm their minds, and ease pain to the extent that some of them no longer needed drugs. Gee, Cindy,’ Grayle looked up in dismay, ‘you’re a guy really knows how to choose his enemies.’

‘Indeed,’ Cindy said gloomily. ‘Even though – as all too few
will now remember – the saintly Kurt, it was, who chose me.’

He still wore yesterday’s twinset, but without the pearls and fewer bangles. No defiance today, Grayle thought, this was comfort-dressing.

None of today’s papers actually said he was finished. They didn’t have to.

The
Mirror’s
lead headline was

Lotto-phobia!

The angle was that outlets and agents all over Britain were reporting that the sale of Lottery tickets had slumped to an all-time low because so many people were now ‘afraid to win’.

‘It gets worse,’ Bobby said glumly. ‘Look at this.’

Grayle peered over his shoulder. One of the tabloids had found another bunch of ‘victims’ of the curse of Kelvyn Kite, two pages’ worth.

“’I haven’t had a day’s luck since I won two million,”’ Grayle read out. ‘“The day after we were featured on the Lottery Show, I discovered my wife was having an affair with her boss. Now we’re getting divorced and she’s demanding half my money and the new house.”’

Bobby said, ‘“My partner’s health seemed to break down all at once, and we had to cancel the cruise …’”

‘”… and the money meant we were able to fly to Houston, Texas for the fertility treatment, but it all went horribly wrong …’”

‘Stop,’ Cindy cried weakly. ‘I can take no more.’ He passed a limp hand over his forehead, half-hearted theatrics. Tried to call up his former producer again this morning. No answer, no machine switched on. Like she was avoiding having to speak to Cindy or call him back.

‘Well, I’ve seen this happen before,’ Grayle said, as brightly as she could. ‘You plant the idea of a jinx and all these jerks suddenly realize they never knew what bad luck was till they got lucky. Perverse. People are assholes. And, you know, it snowballs for a couple days and then it’s just like it never—. Oh, Jesus, will you look at this? The
Sun
just opened a Lotto Curseline. You believe that?’

‘Interestingly,’ Marcus said, ‘the broadsheets barely mention Lewis. The
Guardian
quotes a psychologist who says a major surge of disillusion with the Lottery was inevitable after a few years and people are simply using this nonsense as a vehicle for expressing it.’

Nonsense?
This sounded like Marcus actually trying to cheer Cindy up. Wow.

‘Hey, they actually use the word nonsense, Marcus? Gotta be a step toward sanity.’

‘I’m afraid, my friends,’ Cindy said in a voice full of finality, ‘that it doesn’t matter
what
they call it now.’

And Grayle knew he was right. The BBC would fire him, change the show around and everything would be just fine again inside a couple of months … except, of course, if you were Cindy, for whom the Lottery Show meant more than he was ever going to admit. He loved it when people loved him despite that he was weird. And he knew that this time he was too old to come back.

Cindy straightened his cuffs, half-smiling like some elderly maiden aunt with no stake in the present, no hope for the future. The future was Kurt Campbell – a couple years younger than Grayle, a lot of money and a reputation that was firming up again after a minor hiccup. Caused by an old guy who wasn’t coming back.

The phone rang.

Kurt Campbell’s PR firm, for Grayle.

‘It’s gonna be tight,’ she told Bobby, hanging up. ‘Kurt’s doing an interview at BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham late morning, then he’s over to Radio Gloucester this afternoon. Bottom line is he can give us twenty minutes at his hotel, early evening.’

‘Which is where?’

‘Cheltenham, ironically. Twenty minutes isn’t much, but I told them we’d be there.’

It was ten-thirty, just gone. Marcus had his tweed hat in one hand, Malcolm’s lead in the other. ‘Thought we could go in your car, Lewis. Leave Maiden the truck.’

Grayle shook her head at him. ‘I don’t see this. I don’t see why you had to hire the damn stall. Why not just go in as a visitor, tomorrow, when it starts? Mingle with the Tarot readers and the palmists and the Kirlian photographers.’

‘Because, Underhill, visitors asking too many questions attract attention, whereas someone who’s invested in the thing has a right to want to know what the fuck’s going on. Anyway, we’ve arranged to go and look this morning, and if we like the pitch we’ll take it. Also thought we might open ourselves to the ambience of the world’s only purpose-built haunted house. See if we can uncover what this bastard was up to.’

He placed in front of Grayle and Bobby a weighty volume from his reference section,
The Encyclopedia of the Unseen.

Abblow, Anthony (1846-1928)

Controversial spiritualist whose aggressive atheism led to frequent quarrels with his contemporaries. Abblow, a former medical practitioner, insisted that religion was a barrier in the path of worthwhile research into the existence of life after death, in which he remained a firm believer. He was reviled by the Church after publishing a paper in which he argued that the spirit world was a parallel plane in which individual status was principally determined by the force of personality and strength of character developed in this world, rather than humility and purity of heart.

In the 1870s Abblow came under the patronage of a wealthy industrialist, Barnaby Crole, who funded his research, accommodating him at his palatial home, Overcross Castle, in Worcestershire. The nature of their experiments remains a mystery as the results were never published. Abblow died in Italy, to where he retired after leaving Overcross.

‘Man of his time, then,’ Bobby said.

‘Jeez.’ Grayle raised disbelieving eyes to the beams. ‘Sounds like he just about stopped short of telling the rich they could take it with them. Surprising he didn’t get rediscovered in the 1980s.’

‘Be interesting …’ Marcus clapped his hands to summon Malcolm, ‘… to see how many of the New Agers at this fiasco realize the kind of man whose memory the event appears to be commemorating. ‘

‘Marcus …’ Cindy looked down, self-consciously removing
some fuzz from his jumper. ‘Marcus, I don’t think I can go.’

Marcus looked up so quickly his glasses wobbled. ‘What did you say?’

‘I … don’t want to go. Not today, anyway.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘I suddenly feel quite uneasy. I’m sorry, this is most unlike me. Never before felt the weight of fate and circumstance so heavily against me. I’m not ready to go out there. I need more time. Why don’t we go tomorrow? There’ll still be time to set up the stall. What I thought … I thought I would walk up to the Knoll again. Dwell for a while. Consider. Uneasy, I feel. I’m so sorry.’

‘Uneasy?’ Marcus changed colour. ‘It’s me who should be feeling bloody uneasy! Do you think I
want
to be seen around with a blindingly obvious transvestite?’

‘I’m sorry … perhaps a breath of air.’ Cindy brushed at his skirt. He truly was agitated, Grayle thought. This wasn’t acting.

Marcus expelled breath. ‘Just go and get in the bloody car, Lewis. You’ve got to face the damned public sometime.’

Cindy bit his lip, pulled down his jumper. Made his way down the passage. ‘S’truth,’ Marcus said through his teeth.

‘He’s got big problems, Marcus,’ Grayle admonished. ‘His career just took the final dive.’

‘I know he’s got problems.’

‘He’s also receptive to things.’

‘Don’t start
that,’
Marcus snapped.

They walked out to the yard. The wind had changed and the sky over the ruins was heavy with clouds veined and yellowed like mature Stilton. Something had clearly altered since yesterday. Or maybe it was just wrong to use Cindy as a weather-vane.

‘Why do I feel that if Kelvyn Kite was out of his case,’ Grayle said to Bobby, ‘he’d say this was all gonna end in tears?’