‘Ms Callard.’
Cindy met her at last just after seven, when she emerged from Marcus’s study into the ill-lit, stone-walled passageway. He took her hand, bowed formally over it.
He wore his tweed jacket and slacks with crisp creases. His hair was conservatively brushed and carried only a hint of its usual mauve. Bobby Maiden thought he looked like the manager of a slightly faded hotel, approaching retirement. Not really a celebrity, the clothes said. Not quite a loony. But they were just as much of a costume as those spangly frocks.
‘Mr Lewis,’ Seffi Callard said.
The two hands parting civilly.
Seffi, joined now by Marcus, was calm and seemed distant — as though something had been agreed, Maiden thought, but it would be no more than going through the motions.
Seffi didn’t look at Maiden. He watched, with Grayle, from the doorway of the kitchen across the passage. He thought of Em, but she was far away now.
He looked at Grayle in her jeans and a lime and lemon baseball sweater too big for her — a defiant statement; none of this solemn Victorian formality for her. She looked very pretty, her blonde hair bunched like bananas. But also forlorn, Maiden thought. He didn’t think he’d ever met anyone with less to hide, less to feel bad about.
But his gaze, inevitably, was drawn back to Seffi Callard, evoking a longing as strange and raw as the one he sometimes felt for lonely-places — long beaches, estuaries, ante-rooms to infinity.
‘I’m getting the feeling you’d rather keep this formal.’ Cindy’s accent, like his hair, was smoothed down. He and Seffi looking at one another almost like opponents. Not fighters, but maybe international chess champions: same game, different language, different names for the pieces.
‘It’s your show, Mr Lewis,’ Seffi said.
Cindy shook his head gently. ‘No, lovely, your show it is, tonight. You are walking the tightrope. Think of me as a safety net. Or, rather, don’t think of me at all.’ He smiled and ushered her into what had been Mrs Willis’s healing room.
They might have been going in for dinner.
The first time Maiden had been in here, Mrs Willis was recently dead and although he’d never met her there’d been a poignancy about her stripped-down daybed and the rickety shelves still loaded with jars and old Marmite pots full of herbs and potions. Now the shelves were sagging under stacks of back copies of The Vision.
The size of the place, its height, surprised him. Perhaps a partition wall had been taken down since he was last here. It was clear now that the room had once been a small barn or a cowshed attached to the farmhouse. Rafters were exposed where a short hayloft had been; there was a long window which had probably been a doorway, and you could see the ruins out there and hear the wind whining like a trapped banshee in the derelict castle’s sawn-off tower.
A computer, unplugged, had been pushed against a wall on its table. In the centre of the room was a circle of six wooden chairs, some brought in from the study and the kitchen. On a small, round table in the middle of the circle, an earthenware bowl held a stubby candle.
Maiden said, ‘Six chairs, Cindy?’
‘Are there really?’
‘There are five of us.’
‘Hmm,’ Cindy said. ‘A little corny, do you think?’
One time, while she was with the Courier, Grayle had been given special permission to cover a seance given by the exclusive New York medium, Morgan Schuster.
She was real ghostlike: small, white-haired, wore white woollen dresses. She had an apartment in the Dakota Building, the turreted and gargoyled Central Park chateau where Polanski shot Rosemary’s Baby and Mark Chapman shot John Lennon. It was, she said, perhaps the most resonant location in the city, a major spiritual node, a focus of psychic energy, a great amplifier for the inner voice.
Morgan used to operate out of her front parlour in Queens until not too long after Grayle’s column broke the story about her psychic contact with the spirit Beatle. Which — whatever the likes of Lyndon McAffrey said — had seemed genuine enough to Grayle at the time. And, even if it wasn’t, where was the harm? Morgan was a wise, good-natured person who helped people find their true selves. Just that she used to help poor people and now she helped mostly rich people, and had a way of making Grayle feel good about what she did.
See, Grayle, to people all across the nation — distressed, grief-laden people and those who’re just looking for some kind of celestial light in a gloomy world — you’ve become very essential. You are a crucial conduit in a data flow which begins in the unseen world, passes to people like me and reaches the material world through your column. What you’re doing transcends mere journalism.
Grayle nodding weakly, figuring Lyndon McAffrey might see it from a different perspective, regarding her column as a useful conduit through which large amounts of money were siphoned into the bank accounts of people like Morgan Schuster.
And then … So Lucas, the art dealer, is no longer close to the centre of your world, Morgan had said.
I tell you that?
You didn’t have to. Morgan looking up, through half-closed eyes.
There you go. Just when you start putting them down as phoney, up pops a winning number.
‘Grayle.’
‘Huh?’
‘Are you with us, lovely?’ Cindy said.
‘Sorry, just … a little nervous. Trying to ground myself.’
‘Grayle, I would like you and Marcus to sit on either side of Persephone. But, remember, don’t touch her!’
Like she was gonna be live with electricity or something? Grayle looked at the dark, sombre Callard and compared her with the flitting, Caspar the friendly ghost figure of Morgan Schuster. She thought, I set this whole thing up. What am I, crazy? Am I sick?
‘OK,’ she said.
‘And try not to move, whatever happens.’
‘Sure.’
Cindy lit the wick of a tin oil lamp with a match, lowered the glass and placed the lamp on the low window ledge behind Bobby. Next he lit the candle in the bowl on the table. When he put out the lights, shadows leapt and the room shed centuries.
Grayle heard the normally stoical Malcolm whimpering from the study.
An explosion of glass in Marcus’s head. Young girls’ trilling screams in the dormitory, then the baying of the headmaster, scared even more witless than usual. What the hell are you doing, Bacton? How dare you let her out? The long, dull-panelled corridor, meagrely lit by economy night lamps. Marcus proceeding slowly along it, as though edging down a railway carriage, to where the child was crouching like a small, wild animal … Don’t move … It wasn’t your fault … Do you understand? … Don’t move … Half expecting her to leap up at him with claws out, like a half-grown, feral kitten.
‘Ah, Marcus, my sweet…’
Lewis’s limp paw on Marcus’s shoulder. He jerked back, as though stung, his fists tightening. The whole situation slipping away from him and into the hands of a madman.
‘Try to relax, Marcus,’ Lewis soothed. Like the smarmy, phoney hospital consultant the night his little daughter, Sally, lay dying. ‘Was I not sent here by cunning circumstance?’
Marcus gripped the seat of his chair. ‘Don’t fuck this up, that’s all.’
And then, somewhere on the creature’s person, an electronic ululation began. The fool had brought his mobile phone in here.
Cindy walked quickly out of the room, snatching the phone from his pocket. Forgotten about the thing, he had. Taken it up to High Knoll with him in case there should be a further need to reassure young Jo.
He moved to the end of the stone passage.
‘Lewis here!’
‘Cindy, Christ …’
‘Jo, I must call you back.’
‘Cindy, listen to me … this is like a sick joke … this is the sickest joke you ever heard.’
‘Give me two hours, lovely — two hours.’
‘No, you listen!’ Jo shrilled like a raging child pulling at its father’s knees. ‘Listen, listen, listen … the Sherwins of Banbury. You remember the Sherwins? Started the whole BMW thing when they bought one each, even the old granny? The Sherwins, Cindy — all the news programmes are asking for the tapes of the Sherwins with their BMWs and their top-of-the-range Barrett home. Oh, God almighty, I can’t believe any of this.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Happened around lunchtime today. The Sherwins had been out to dinner last night with loads of guests and freeloaders and hangers on, as usual, and they didn’t get back until late and so they all slept in, in a big way, and it’s thought one of them got up, still half-pissed, wandered into the kitchen for a snack, left something on the posh built-in cooker hob, or the built-in bloody spit …’
‘And?’
‘And they’re all dead, the stupid irresponsible bastards! The Barrett home’s a smoking ruin, the BMWs are reduced to blackened shells in the quadruple garage. You do remember the Sherwins, Cindy? You remember Kelvyn Kite cackling on your arm. It’ll all end in tears, mark my words, it’ll all end in tears!’
Cindy walked out into the treacherous night, through the uncaring wind, the spiteful rain. Crying to the elements.
What was happening?
He pushed his forehead into the cold, wet castle wall, sensing the blood and the flames of its history, the screams and roars of some small medieval massacre mingling with the screams of the burning Sherwins, the roar of the fire. Had they been screaming, trapped, or were they quietly suffocated in their beds, mother and father and daughter and son? And granny, owner of a silver-grey Series Seven BMW that she would never drive.
Above the screams and the blood and the shrivelling, crackling flesh rose the shrieking of the Kite.
End in tears, end in tears.
End in the cardiac unit …
Cindy pulled the mobile phone from his pocket and hurled it high over the smashed castle wall.
Fly … fly like a kite …
He thought could hear the tinny techno-treble of its call as it fell among the ancient ramparts.