Mean Spirit Part 5

'Marcus Bacton', she said, 'was the only person in my entire f.u.c.king life who ever pitied me.'

She dug a bare hand into a bucket and came up with a clutch of small lumps of coal, scattering them over the fire, wiping her hand on her jeans.

'People are suspicious of me. Or afraid. Or they want a piece of me. But I mean, pity ... that was something new, even at the time. I was profoundly offended at first.'

'Best of all,' Grayle said, 'Marcus likes to offend.'

'When I think about him ... I picture him striding up and down the corridors, with his wide shoulders and his little pot belly. Glaring through his gla.s.ses and roaring at pupils. Teachers too, sometimes.'

'Uh huh.' Grayle finished her whisky, gratefully put down the gla.s.s in the hearth. She noticed that Callard's tumbler remained half-full. She'd drunk hardly any.

'One night this is on record ... in the books a big window just exploded in the dormitory. Gla.s.s everywhere. I was at the other end of the room, but they knew ... the staff knew things happened around me. They actually put me into a room no bigger than a cupboard. Locked the door, as you would with a dangerous mental patient. This was the headmaster and the matron. Didn't know how else to handle it. Mr Bacton was furious. Came out in his dressing gown, and when they wouldn't give him the key he kicked the door in and brought me out and we went for a long walk in the grounds. Talking. For hours, it seemed like. He resigned soon after that, and I was taken away from the school. I haven't seen him since.'

'What did you talk about?'

Callard didn't reply. Whatever they'd discussed, that must have been the night Marcus connected, showed her he understood what it was like having psychic ability although he had none himself. The bond between them had been formed that night, and Grayle was no kind of subst.i.tute.

Callard poked at the fire again. 'Flu, you said.'

'Marcus has this theory that men get it worse than women. He's real low. But he was flattered, I guess, when you wrote to the magazine, trying to reach him. He's been feeling a touch insecure.'

'Marcus Bacton insecure?'

'In his way,' Grayle said. 'Feels he wasted too much of his life not doing what he wanted to do ... investigating the Big Mysteries, showing people that the world was so much wilder than the scientists and the politicians wanted them to think. And now he's past sixty, running this small-time magazine that the right people don't read, and he doesn't think he's ever gonna get where he wants to be.'

Callard rose unsteadily. It didn't show in her voice, but she must already have drunk plenty today. Reaching that stage where it no longer made you happier, just kept the fires of h.e.l.l tamped down. But now she'd stopped drinking and the alcohol in the gla.s.s didn't seem to be tempting her.

'And what do you do exactly, Grayle?'

'Oh, I ... came over from the States for ... personal reasons, and I met Marcus and I started helping him with the magazine. Which was seriously rundown. And like now we've changed the name and it's starting to make this very small profit, which I thought would make him happy. But perhaps he feels it's being taken out of his hands. Or losing its peculiar integrity. I don't know. He's a complex individual.'

'And where is this?' Callard moved to the window, pulled thick, dark curtains across. 'Apart from on the Welsh border?'

'He has this farmhouse inside the ruins of a medieval castle. Which sounds grander than it is. But it's Marcus's fortress against the cold, rational world.'

'Nothing's changed then.'

'I guess.'

'He was a hero to me at the time.' Callard sat down again. 'When they threw me out of the school and my father was advised to hire a private tutor, I wanted it to be Mr Bacton. I've never been entirely sure whether he turned down the job or my father lied about offering it to him. My father was ... diffident ... about the psychic world. He'd worked in the Diplomatic Service in too many strange places to dismiss it entirely, but he didn't want anything to do with it.'

'Your father was still working abroad?'

'No, Foreign Office. When he married my mother he came back, bought Mysleton.'

'Your mother died, right?'

'My mother died when I was four. I don't think she could stand the cold and the drabness and stiffness. A black woman in the Cotswolds, even then ...' A match flared. Callard applied it to a candle on the mantelpiece. 'They said she died of cancer, but I think she withered.'

'Withered?'

'Like an exotic flower,' Callard said heavily.

'You remember her?'

'I remember her essence.'

'Right.'

Callard slumped back into the sofa, said snappishly, 'When people keep saying "right", it usually means they haven't understood anything and don't propose to.'

The candle sat crookedly in a pewter tray. It looked warmer than the fire.

'I don't think you want to tell me what this is about, do you?' Grayle said.

'I don't know you. I don't trust journalists. I might be reading about it in the New York Courier next week.'

'You might be reading about it in The Vision.'

Callard smiled. 'That I could cope with.'

Grayle thought, Me too. I could just about cope with this if it was gonna make a feature for The Vision. She'd never even dared suggest that to Marcus, but yeah, it had been at the back of her mind.

'Listen,' she said, 'I didn't want to come here. You contact a guy after twenty years, no way are you gonna want to talk to the help. I came because Marcus was too sick to come, and Marcus felt you were in some kind of trouble, and he didn't want it to be ... too late. Or something.'

'Do I look like I'm in trouble?'

'You don't look too good, if I can say that. You look like the papers had it right.'

'The papers are suggesting I'm mentally ill.'

'Not necessarily that.'

'Of course, that. No journalist who wants to stay on the national press can be seen to accept the spiritual.'

'I did.'

'Quite,' Callard said. She laughed.

Grayle stood up. 'Maybe I'll call Justin, find out if he tracked down an exhaust for my car.'

In the candlelight, she saw Callard shrug. She reached for her bag and dug out Justin's card.

'That was rude of me,' Callard said wearily. 'Don't go.'

Grayle didn't look at her. Held the phone up to the candle, punched out the number, which she now realized was a mobile. Clearly, the rundown garage was no longer on the phone.

Callard said, 'Why don't you stay the night?'

'That's not possible.' She heard the phone ringing at the other end.

'Look,' Callard said, 'as soon as the oaf picks up your scent again, he'll start reviewing his options. First, he'll lie about your car ...'

'Mayfield Garage,' Justin said.

'Uh ... it's Grayle Underhill.'

'h.e.l.lo, Grayle!' Real jovial. 'You find Miss Seffi Callard then, did you?'

'Yes. Listen, I wondered if you managed to hunt down any kind of exhaust.'

A pause. A chuckle. 'Ah dear,' Justin said. 'I rang round six mates between here and Swindon. No can do tonight, but one of them reckons he might put his hands on something tomorrow.'

'Oh.' Not on me he won't.

'You'll have to spend a night in the glorious Cotswolds, my sweet. Look, there's a good country-house hotel not far from where you are. I could pick you up, take you there ...'

'That's kind of you,' Grayle said quickly, 'but I already made a provisional reservation. In ... in Stroud, I ... Ms Call ... Seffi's gonna take me there.'

'Fair enough,' Justin said neutrally. 'Fair enough.'

'So I'll call you from there tomorrow.'

'Whatever you like.'

'Well, uh ... do your best with the exhaust.' Grayle pressed end. 'He can't fix it tonight. I need to find a hotel.'

'I told you,' Callard said. 'There's a spare room here. Terribly twee and rustic.'

Grayle shook her head. 'I'll call a cab. You have a phone book. Yellow Pages?'

Persephone Callard didn't move. Except to close her eyes.

'Forget it.' Grayle took the phone to the candle. 'I'll call Inquiries.'

No reaction from Callard. She was kind of breathing heavily. Jesus, she fell asleep? She fell asleep from all the booze?

Callard's gla.s.s, still untouched, stood on the mantelpiece. Grayle punched out 192. 'Directory Inquiries,' a woman's voice said brightly. 'What name, please?'

Persephone Callard sat up on the couch and her breath came out in a long, hollow whooooosh. Grayle jumped. Somehow, it was like a corpse rising.

'Directory Inquiries.'

The candle went out. Just went out. On its own.

Grayle said, too loudly, 'Uh, could you give me the number of a hotel in Stroud, please? A big hotel.'

'Tell me, Grayle,' Persephone Callard said softly, 'what was the awful thing that happened to a young woman very close to you?'

V.

THE ROOM WHICH HAD BEEN, UNTIL HER DEATH, THE BEDSIT OCCUPIED by Mrs Willis, Marcus's housekeeper and resident healer, was now the editorial suite of The Vision. Marcus stumbled in with a gla.s.s and his dying bottle of Glenmorangie, brus.h.i.+ng a hand down the light switches, gazing around in bleary despair.

The shelves which had held the herbal potions were dense with box files Underhill having bought them as a job lot from a local farming accountant who was switching to computers.

The boxes contained for the first time alphabetically sorted and categorized the many years of handwritten case histories sent in by an ageing army of correspondents the length and breadth of Britain.

Loonies to a man, Marcus thought morosely. Although, in truth, most of them seemed to be women. Many of whom had, over the years, made vague proposals of marriage to the editor, whom they'd never even seen. And who were now expressing dismay at the large number of young women who appeared to be working with him.

Meryl Taylor-Whitney, Alice D. Thornborough and the rest.

All the pseudonyms of Grayle Underhill, who was changing everything.

For most of its life the flimsy pages of The Phenomenologist, as it was then known, had been grey with dense and smudgy type, its headlines not much larger. A typical one might read, Report of Presumed Fairy Ring Received from Central Cornwall 'And what the h.e.l.l's so wrong with that?' Marcus had demanded of Underhill during their first, tempestuous editorial conference last year. 'It's straightforward, accurate and a direct statement of fact. The magazine has received, from an old biddy in Truro, a garbled letter relating to what is probably a mildly anomalous circle of mushrooms on her front lawn, but which she, in her precarious mental state, presumes to be a nocturnal meeting place for tiny men with bells in their little b.l.o.o.d.y hats.'

Underhill had let her unkempt, blonde head fall forward into her hands and had groaned. He'd stared at her, baffled and resentful.

'Marcus,' he'd heard from under the hair, 'it just isn't ... it isn't s.e.xy, is it? And what are we doing with a magazine t.i.tle that most people connect with a bunch of crazy German philosophers pre-World War Two?'

And so, just over six months ago, to surprisingly few complaints from the residual readers.h.i.+p, The Phenomenologist had been relaunched as The Vision.

Marcus poured himself a quarter-inch of Scotch, held the whisky in his mouth as long as he could taste it. Sitting in the high-backed chair behind the b.a.s.t.a.r.d computer he refused to use, he leaned his head thick grey hair lank with sweat into its soulless foam-rubber padding.

Underhill had energy, enthusiasm and though he was never going to admit this to her face a certain dexterity with the written word. A touch flip, a trifle coa.r.s.e but what could one expect from a New York tabloid hack?

Hey, you know, this is fun, Marcus. We're gonna make it happen, I can feel it. Like, if we start by bringing it out like bi-monthly ... like six times a year? Then we go to monthly ... Oh, sure you have the material ... You just got to stop cramming it all together ... have bigger type, photographs. And bigger headlines which are more, uh ... evocative. Plus, you need to attract advertising. And also, of course, you have to start trying to sell it to people other than the correspondents themselves. Hold on to the subscribers, sure, but get it into the newsagents. You appreciate what I'm saying?

Well, of course he did. Known all this for years. If it had happened with Fortean Times, it could, presumably, happen to The Vision. As she told him, there was a market for 'this sort of thing'.

But should it?

Look here, he'd told her. You know I can't possibly pay you a decent wage.

She'd shrugged. Then she'd have to make it so that he could start to pay her. It's gonna happen, Marcus. It was meant to happen.

Because Underhill, in her ingenuous American way, believed in destiny: coming to Britain, initially, in search of her sister, an archaeologist, who had gone missing; who, it later emerged, had been an early victim of an obscene ritual murderer residing perilously close to Castle Farm itself; Underhill accompanying the decayed remains of her sister home to the United States, where their father was a prominent academic ... and then making an unexpected return within three months, arriving on Marcus's doorstep with two large suitcases and a pale, shy, unsure smile.

Destiny.

And now The Vision was bi-monthly and designed on a computer, and each issue carried several stories investigated and written by Meryl Taylor-Whitney and Alice D. Thornborough. Underhill was volatile and frantic, and there were times when Marcus suspected she was no more balanced than the crazed biddies who wrote to him about their haunted coalsheds and their stigmata.

Yet the journal's circulation had already increased by forty per cent and, even after the expense of the computer and sundry publis.h.i.+ng software, there was a small but appreciable profit.

But was the magazine's destiny compatible with Underhill's? Was The Vision, any more than its editor, ever meant to be commercially successful?

The phone rang. Marcus fumbled it wearily to his ear.

'Bacton.'