What she saw first was the blade. It sliced clean through the moment of relief at finally gaining access to the lodge.
The blade was wide — wide like a machete — and it had a reddened edge, and there was a figure in shadow behind it that didn’t move.
Grayle came unsteadily to her feet, backing up against the wooden door — a heavy thack from the latch as she closed it with her ass.
‘Who are you?’
This harsh, low voice. Grayle blinking in the gloom of a low room with small, square, leaded windows.
A woman. With blades.
She was not holding the big blade, but she was standing next to where it hung from this like torture-chamber wall. It was on the end of a thick wooden handle bound with cord, the whole item like a butcher’s weighty, stubby chopping knife for splintering bone. Next to this knife was a rusty sickle with no handle. Above them, a razor-edged hook on a five-foot wooden pole.
Some kind of rustic armoury. Grayle saw, with faint relief, that the red on the butcher’s blade had been a reflection from a low-burning fire — little coals glowering sullenly out of a black, sunken grate.
‘Uh …’ Trying to make out the face as the woman moved out from the wall. ‘You’re Pers … Persephone?’
Not a stupid question because this did not look too much like a cool, silky fox with skin like Galaxy chocolate and calm, penetrating eyes. Maybe her older, embittered sister.
‘I said … who are you?’ Arms hanging loose, sleeves pushed up, like she was still ready to pull down a lethal weapon from the wall. ‘Your name.’
‘I … Grayle Underhill. I told you, I work for … with … Marcus Bacton.’
‘As what?’
‘As a writer.’
‘So where is he?’
‘Sick. The flu. He’s existing on whisky and paracetamol. You wouldn’t want to catch it.’
But when the woman stepped out, she looked like she already had: in the grey light from the window, she seemed fleshless, a scarecrow in a powder-blue cashmere cardigan, half-buttoned over probably nothing. Hair like a coil of oily rope. Eyes burning far back, like the coals in the black grate.
‘Who’s that in the truck?’
‘That’s, uh … the garage guy.’ Grayle was picking up a tired and sickly smell of booze. ‘My car broke down a few miles back. The guy drove me here.’
‘And naturally you’re terrified of the man who’s repairing your car.’
‘Well, not terrified exactly, I-’
‘Look at you!’
‘OK, yeah, he was … he was kind of forward. On the way here.’
Grayle fumbling out an explanation about the exhaust system. The card in the phone box. Fred West. All of that. Sounding completely half-assed, like she was just now making it all up. Often the way of it with the truth.
‘He doesn’t know I’m in here. He thinks the lodge is empty.’
‘That case, you’d better keep your voice down and stay away from the window. Sit in that chair, if you like, next to the fire. Dry off.’
Dry orf was how she said it. She looked wrecked, but she talked like out of the royal family. Grayle sat. The chair had a high back and faced away from the window. The fire was probably kept low so there’d be no glow on the room. Siege procedure. The woman was living here in darkness, like a ghost. It could only be Persephone Callard.
‘All right, be quiet, he’s coming.’
She slipped back into the shadows beyond the armoury — actually, Grayle realized, a collection of rustic, rusted hedging implements. There was an old bowsaw beneath the butcher’s-type hacking tool and then the wall ended in a wooden stairway.
‘Don’t speak until I tell you. Don’t move.’
The greasy squeak of Justin’s fingertips on the window made Grayle stop breathing. A coal fell out of the grate.
‘Stupid, huh?’ Outside, the truck’s engine was starting up. ‘He’s probably a nice man.’
‘No, you’re probably right,’ Callard said. ‘He imagined he was on to a shag. How will you get your car back?’
‘Call him in an hour or two, I guess. I don’t know. He works till seven or eight, he says. What else can I do?’
‘You had him drop you at the house.’ Pronouncing it hice, like Prince Charles. ‘So he knows you were coming here? He knows why? That man knows I’m here?’
‘I’m afraid he does,’ Grayle admitted. ‘I let it out I was coming to meet with you. That was indiscreet. I’m sorry. I have no excuse. Marcus fully apprised me of the situation.’
Persephone Callard found a small smile. Then a clutch of bottles on a table. ‘Vodka, gin, Scotch?’
‘Well, maybe a Scotch … Plenty of water? Thank you. You don’t have a car here?’
‘It’s in one of the garages up at the house.’
Grayle peered out at the walled wilderness. ‘How long you been here?’
‘Just over a week. I don’t want to open up the house.’
‘Too big, I guess.’
‘Too obvious. This is more discreet. Have to be out of here in a couple of weeks, however. From Easter, we let it out as holiday accommodation. Have to be out even sooner now, if your friend Justin shoots his mouth off.’
‘I’m sorry. You’re here all alone?’
‘As I’m sure Marcus Bacton’s told you …’ Persephone Callard’s voice put on a weight of irony ‘… people like me are never entirely alone.’
One time, Grayle had done a piece for the Courier on how many mediums were practising in New York City. She’d established two hundred and thirty-five, which was just over twice as many as there’d apparently been in 1850, when the first boom had been on.
Even in those early days, most of the mediums had been exposed as fakes … inventors of table-rapping devices, experts at pulling strings of muslin ‘ectoplasm’ out their nostrils.
Sure, Justin had been largely right. It was exploitation of the bereaved. About taking the sting out of death, like your loved ones were just a phone call away. Always a ready audience for that.
Some of the working mediums Grayle had talked to were kind of genuine — even though a lot of the information they relayed was inaccurate, they seemed to have contact with something. Just that they usually came over just as gullible as their sad clients, needing to believe they were bonding with the departed. Plus they did tend to be so pious and all knowing, putting on the air of church ministers.
And sure, in those years as a New Age columnist, Grayle had never encountered anyone she could honestly believe was in contact with the dead.
Callard had come to sit on a Victorian sofa on the other side of the fireplace from Grayle’s chair, facing the window. She had a tumbler half-filled with some kind of immoderate Martini mixture.
‘You know why I drink too much?’
Grayle said nothing. It was so dark in here, now, that you didn’t like to move in case you knocked something over. She began to feel cold, edged her chair closer to the underfed fire.
‘Because when I’m pissed I don’t receive.’
‘Right,’ Grayle said uncertainly.
‘Nothing significant gets through alcohol.’
‘That’s interesting.’
‘Don’t feel …’ Callard leaned back, with her head against the wall, maybe observing Grayle for the first time ‘… that you have to fucking patronize me. What did you say your name was?’
‘Grayle Underhill.’
‘Grayle?’
‘Underhill.’ She sipped weak whisky from a glass that felt greasy.
‘Oh my God.’ Callard did this short snort of a laugh. ‘Not that dreadful … You don’t have a column in one of those ghastly American tabloids. Under the name …’
Grayle sighed. ‘Holy Grayle. But not any more.’
‘Holy Grayle.’ Callard threw an arm behind her head and peered at Grayle across the murk. ‘Oh my God. I was in New York doing some television and my agent brought me some copies. You really wrote that drivel?’
‘Don’t feel you have to patronize me,’ Grayle said.
Callard snorted, took a graceless slurp from her glass. She sat up, grabbed a poker, stabbed at the coals until a feeble white flame spurted.
Outside it was getting too close to dark. Time, Grayle figured, to cut to the chase.
‘Ms Callard, why did you write to Marcus?’
‘Did I?’
‘Marcus Bacton.’
In the wan firelight, you could see her navel between the bottom of the cardigan and the top of her dark jeans, then a fold of skin creased over it. She was anorectically thin.
‘Marcus Bacton’, she said, ‘was the only person in my entire fucking 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 glasses and roaring at pupils. Teachers too, sometimes.’
‘Uh huh.’ Grayle finished her whisky, gratefully put down the glass 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. Glass 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 substitute.
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 hell tamped down. But now she’d stopped drinking and the alcohol in the glass 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.’
‘Hello, 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 glass, 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?’