Mean Spirit Part 24

'Where?'

'Cheltenham area. Well-off bloke. Nice bungalow with a long drive. I've just left there, as it happens.'

'Les Hole? You've b.l.o.o.d.y-'

'Could be.'

'Well, I'll tell you what, Bobby,' Ron said, collecting himself together. 'I've got a press conference at half-seven. Want to do that myself, make sure we get the right points over. I'll be free about... eight, eight-thirty? Where'd you wanna meet up? Somewhere quiet, yeah?'

'Wherever. I don't know this area too well.'

'We're setting up the incident room at Stroud, so ... Look, gimme your mobile number, I'll call you back. I really do have to do this presser.'

'You won't get much in the Sundays, Ron. Not at that time.'

'Bobby, I'm desperate for an ID, and there's gonna be no nice, peaceful pictures of this poor b.u.g.g.e.r to show around.'

'Oh.'

'Axe job, it looks like. Geezer found in a ditch, face split like a b.l.o.o.d.y walnut.'

'Right,' Maiden said. 'Mmm.'

XXIV.

'WELL, WE'LL BE HAVING A HOLIDAY FIRST,' ONE OF LAST WEEK'S Lottery winners says this is a syndicate of five school-dinner ladies from Basingstoke. 'Taking the kids to Disney World. And, of course, we've already bought ourselves a BMW.'

'Yaaaaaaaak,' Kelvyn Kite shrieks, stabbing a scornful talon at the monitor.

The audience whoops. The apparent need of so many Lottery winners to rush out and buy a BMW has become a running joke of Kelvyn's ever since the appalling Sherwin family, from Banbury, immediately bought five of them his, hers, teenage kids', granny's ... and granny didn't even drive.

'Stop it, now.' Cindy frowns at the bird, pointedly ignoring the autocue. 'It's none of your business. People are allowed to buy whatever cars they like when they win two million pounds.'

'Watch it, Cindy,' Jo says in the earpiece. 'I think you've taken this one far enough, don't you?'

'This has gone far enough,' Cindy tells the bird.

'Awk,' says the cynical Kelvyn Kite.

'Anyway, I like the Lada,' Cindy says.

Laughter. Kelvyn sulks, beak in the air. Cindy ignores him, turning to the autocue.

'But one of last week's big winners has gone one better than a BMW. Colin Seymour is the headmaster of a school in Shrops.h.i.+re for children with learning difficulties. He's also a newly qualified pilot ... So what was the first thing Colin did with his one point seven million ...? Why, he bought the very plane in which he'd learned to fly!'

Cue VT. Up it comes on the monitor. A little Cessna winging in to a rural airstrip. Stirring music. Cut to genial Colin Seymour stepping out, grinning. He is tall, lean and bearded and wears a Second World War flying ace's leather jacket.

'Just under two minutes for this one, Cindy,' Jo reminds him. 'And remembering what he does for a living no jokes at all.'

'Wilco, chief.' Cindy is relaxed about this. Reckless he might be, but he's not stupid. Camelot, the BBC and BMW, however, are big targets; they might not like it, but they can't appear mean-spirited enough to censure a man in late middle-age and a midnight-blue diamante evening dress.

Cindy goes for a little sit down, off set you don't want the audience laughing at the wrong time, even if they aren't being transmitted until Jo says, 'Thirty seconds, Cindy. Get ready to brandish the bird.'

Cindy slips his right arm into Kelvyn and walks out, an eye on the monitor. Colin Seymour is surrounded by happy children from his school. He's showing them his plane. Finally, in close up, Colin says, 'And what I'm planning to do this summer is to buy a slightly bigger aircraft in which I'll be able to take small groups of the kids up for short flights. Which will, you know, be a really fantastic experience for all of us.'

Jo says, 'Five seconds ... Kelvyn.'

Colin Seymour turns to an engaging gap-toothed youngster. 'What are we going to do, then, Charlie? We're going to fly like ...'

Charlie beams. 'A kite!'

And Camera One goes in tight on Kelvyn, who snaps his beak modestly.

Cindy can't resist it. He looks dubious.

'Fly like him, lovely, and you'll never find the blessed airstrip!'

Kelvyn shuts his beak and sulks; the audience roars.

With his habitual sigh of satisfaction at being able to drive west, beyond the hard lights of London, Cindy tossed Kelvyn's pink suitcase on to the back seat of his new saloon car. A Honda Accord, it was, he could never have a BMW now.

However, before leaving the car park, he put on the Honda's interior light and tore open the bulky envelope which had arrived for him, care of the BBC. Young Jo had handed it to him with something of a grimace.

For, at the foot of the expensive, parchment-coloured envelope was inscribed, Overcross: experience it.

Inside was a leaflet and a small, stiff-backed book. No covering letter, so perhaps he was just one person among several hundred on some marketing firm's mailing list.

The leaflet showed a photograph of towers against a red sunset. It was headed, Overcross Castle: The Veil is Lifted On page two there was a brief explanation.

Overcross Castle, in the foothills of the Malverns, was built in the 1860s (on the site of a medieval castle) by the Midlands industrialist Barnaby Crole, who made his fortune from the South Wales mining industry.

The Victorian Gothic castle was named Overcross after the nearby hamlet, but for Crole this had a deeper meaning: it was a place where, he believed, our world and the world of spirits might overlap.

With its romantic towers and turrets looming from the woods, Overcross quickly became famous for weekend gatherings, at which distinguished mediums of the day, including the revered Daniel Dunglas-Home, would conduct seances attended by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and an ardent spiritualist.

The eminent scientist and psychologist Dr Anthony Abblow, himself an experienced trance-medium, became so enamoured of Overcross Castle and its unique atmosphere that he took an apartment in the castle, where he spent many years engaged in experiments into the meaning of life and death.

Huge and increasingly difficult to heat, the castle ceased to be a private home, became a school and then a hotel and was then derelict for many years before being purchased by the celebrated consultant-mesmerist, paranormal investigator and television presenter Kurt Campbell.

Now Kurt Campbell is ready to reopen Overcross to continue the work begun by Crole and Abblow in the Victorian heyday of psychic studies.

And from Wednesday 18 March, when Overcross hosts its first Festival of the Spirit for over a century, you can join an exclusive house party, a recreation of a Victorian spiritualist gathering with Kurt Campbell himself and one of the world's most celebrated mediums as guest of honour.

Cindy's eye travelled to the very much smaller print at the foot of page three, where he learned that one might become a privileged house guest on the night of this extraordinary psychic soiree for a mere 500 for a double room.

Perhaps this reflected the deficit in Kurt's finances, resulting from his failure to become the most expensive presenter in the history of the Lottery Show.

Barnaby Crole would turn in his grave.

And indeed, perhaps Kurt was hoping for that. Or for some kind of psychic fireworks, anyway.

Cindy glanced at the booklet. It was a reprint of a small history of Overcross Castle and its founder, originally published in 1936. He pushed book and leaflet back into the envelope.

On reflection, he suspected the mailing list had been drawn up prior to Kurt's appearance on the Lottery Show. He wondered what Kurt's reaction would be if he actually turned up.

Meanwhile ... home.

Only a humble caravan, mind, but think of the location. And the bonus, this time, of a visit to little Grayle and her irascible employer that somewhat lesser known castle owner with rather an intriguing purpose. For which one would require energy and attunement.

Therefore, at first light tomorrow, taking his painted shamanic drum, he would follow the s.h.i.+ning path to the gorse-p.r.i.c.kled hill overlooking the sea on one side and, on the other, the Preselis. Perhaps even as high as the great magnetic centre Carn Ingli, which he was presumptuous enough to consider his power base.

He would stand alone in the stiff, wiry, sheep-munched gra.s.s and give thanks to the elements, to the forces of earth and air, sea and sky which, together, became something approximating to G.o.d.

And pray. In his fas.h.i.+on.

Avoiding the horrors of the M25, Cindy found his way to the M4, the motorway of the west. Before the junction, as usual, he put on the radio to catch the ten o'clock news on 'Five Live'.

And with that shamanic flair for pinpointing the moment which, in more pleasant circ.u.mstances, would be termed serendipitous, the switch clicked on this: '... and it's just been confirmed that the pilot who died when his two-seater aircraft overshot a runway and smashed into a barn in Shrops.h.i.+re has been named as Lottery jackpot winner, Colin Seymour.

'42-year-old Mr Seymour was headmaster of a special school for children with learning difficulties, and earlier tonight millions of viewers of the BBC's National Lottery Live saw him showing pupils the plane he'd bought with his one point seven million pound win ...'

Cindy drove numbly into the mesh of lights at the M4 junction.

He was tasting the bitter tang from the sea.

XXV.

RON WAS WAITING FOR THEM IN A LAYBY ABOVE STROUD, AS arranged. Seffi flashed the headlights and Ron lumbered across from his Rover, a bulky bloke in an old anorak. Maiden got into the back of the Jeep so he could stretch his legs in the pa.s.senger seat and appraise Seffi by the interior lights.

'They were right about you having exotic friends these days, Bobby. I'm sorry, love, you don't mind exotic, do you? Ron Foxworth, my name.'

'h.e.l.lo.' Seffi a touch guarded.

'You're the one I been reading about. The one who's disappeared.'

'Psychic Seffi,' she said with distaste.

'Better watch what I'm thinking then, hadn't I?' Ron said.

'It doesn't work like that, Mr Foxworth.'

'Oh, really? A little limited, my knowledge of these things. Nuts and bolts rationalist, me, I'm afraid. Where we going then, Bobby? I don't think I feel like a drink, and I'm sure our famous friend here doesn't want to be seen in a pub with a battered old b.u.g.g.e.r like me. Can we just drive around? Cotswolds by night?'

Maiden had almost forgotten what a tricky b.a.s.t.a.r.d Ron could be. He started frisking for holes the story he and Seffi Callard had concocted in the harsh light of the discovery of a second body, with a hacked face and few doubts this time about the origin of the wounds.

'So you and Miss Callard, Bobby ...'

'Friends,' Maiden said.

'Quite close friends.' Seffi pulled out of the layby.

'I see. Well ...'

'We met when Bobby was gathering background information in connection with the Green Man murders. I was able to explain a little about the psychology of people who believe they're being influenced by elemental forces. Working together on something essentially frightening can be curiously ... intimate, as I'm sure ...'

Seffi let the sentence hang. Maiden sensed her smile.

How fluently she lies.

'So when I was feeling rather threatened recently, I asked Bobby for advice.'

Telling Ron how, in this line of work, one received endless crank mail. Mostly from fundamentalist Christians warning that the fires of h.e.l.l were already being stoked in readiness for one's arrival. A very few implied that physical retribution might be exacted on the earthly plane.

Seffi sounding loony enough for Ron to take it all less than seriously, but looking alluring enough for him to see why Maiden had stuck around.

Below them, the lights of Stroud formed a glowing bowl.

She told the story of the party, but only as far as the Kieran Hole incident. When they were into the countryside again, Ron said, 'Yeah, I can see how that would offend Les Hole. This was a message you had ... on the, er ...?'

'A spirit message.'

'Ri-ight.' Ron nodding sceptically. 'From the boy, Kieran, you say?'

'He did hang himself, then,' Maiden said.

'Oh indeed, Bobby. No note, no clothes on. We had it down as a w.a.n.king job.'

'I'm sorry?' Seffi said.

's.e.xual hanging. Auto-erotic strangulation. "Come Dancing" on the end of a rope. Commonplace enough, but occasionally a bit difficult to prove medically, so coroners often tend to be merciful and put it down as suicide. It affected Coral very deeply, as you obviously realize. And Les, of course. So you're saying Les blamed the, er, messenger.'

'There was a letter', Maiden said, 'from the wife. Trying to set up another meeting with Seffi. But it was the phone calls ...' Lying now. 'Late at night, n.o.body there. And this sense of being ...'

'Stalked,' Seffi said. 'Although I never got a good look at him.'

Ron leaned back against the side-window, getting a good look at her. 'So all these stories about you packing it in ...?'

'This was just a part of it. I've been feeling generally vulnerable. No-one likes to be on the receiving end of scorn and hostility.'

'It seemed to me we ought to go and see Mrs Hole,' Maiden said. 'She wasn't there, but he was. He didn't know I was a copper. He was aggressive. He seemed to think someone might have set him up and he wasn't looking at Barber. He mentioned the name Gary.'

'Oh, did he?' Ron's voice thickening with satisfaction.

'That means something to you, Ron?'

'You don't know?'

'Should I? I got the feeling he was a little scared of Gary.'