Mean Spirit Part 37

'It's still a b.l.o.o.d.y gamble, Maiden.'

'So? Seward's a gambler. He loves risk. Also, he put himself very close to Seffi earlier on, when he posed as Barber's chauffeur so he could pick her up at the hotel. So he could get close to her. Would he see that as establis.h.i.+ng a link with someone who wouldn't normally handle pond life like Gary Seward?'

Grayle stood up. 'There's clearly a whole lot we don't know, but we have a working theory. So let's follow it through. Callard gives out real indications that she's in contact with Clarence. But then it all goes wrong because Callard's this loose-cannon kind of medium. The breaking of the vase, all this chaos ... and then she runs out on them.'

'Taking Mr ... Judge with her?' Cindy said delicately.

'Right! And then', Grayle grabbed his hand with a jangling of bangles, 'she goes off into the night ... with this dead guy ... attached to her. And she can't get rid of it.'

'Why, though?' Marcus said. 'Why can't she get rid of it? She's an extremely experienced medium, she's done all this before.'

'Yeah, well, I can't explain that. Except maybe there's something different here. Something she hasn't done before. Or, of course ... she may know more than she told us.'

'The point about all this', Bobby Maiden said, 'is that most of it remains valid even if you don't believe in ghosts. All you need to accept is that Seward himself is a complete believer. Also a gambler, chancer, ruthless b.a.s.t.a.r.d ...'

'Because of what comes next, right?' Grayle said.

x.x.xVIII.

WHAT CAME NEXT WAS THE MYSLETON LODGE INCIDENT.

And the dead guy, Crewe. And Justin.

Bobby hypothesized that Seward wasn't about to give up on Callard, even though she'd put herself out of the picture.

Grayle took up from here.

'Seward's getting real antsy. He's thinking: s.h.i.+t, does this woman now know what I oughta know? After all, he's paid this broad twenty grand, he's ent.i.tled to that information. What's he do next, Bobby, how's he go about this?'

'He puts out feelers. Among his own people, to begin with, and maybe some of his s...o...b..z friends. His network. On the fringes of which, maybe, are Justin Sharpe's "hard friends" in Cheltenham. So when Justin happens to find out that Seffi's at the lodge at Mysleton ...'

'It gets back to Seward in like no time at all, and Seward, he's through with elaborate scams, arranging smart parties. It's down to basics. He sends these guys out to fetch her. Bring her in.'

'That could be it. We know that one of them was an employee of a security firm doing a bit of moonlighting, like they often do.'

Marcus looked appalled. 'The man was having Persephone kidnapped, to make her attempt to re-engage with ... Is that even possible, Lewis? That she could be forced to do it? Go into trance, under duress?'

Cindy considered. 'Perhaps we should be asking ourselves not what is possible, but what such a man as this might consider possible.'

'And when it all goes pear-shaped and one man winds up dead,' Bobby said, 'Justin's hard friends go back to make sure he doesn't implicate them. Maybe one of them is even the other Mysleton guy. The one who felt obliged to put Crewe out of his misery.'

Grayle thought of something. Wished that maybe she hadn't. Felt queasy.

'If they made Justin talk, there's, uh, one thing he could've told them. Which is my name.'

'Oh,' Bobby said.

'I told him my name. I didn't write it down or anything, I didn't spell it out, but...'

'This is madness!' Marcus howled. 'It's got completely out of hand.'

'Yes,' Cindy said, 'perhaps it has.'

'What if the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds turn up here?'

'Just a name?' Bobby said. 'No address?'

'No. No address.'

'She'd be hard to track down from just a name, Marcus, even if Justin remembered it correctly. All the same ...'

Marcus pushed his chair back. 'We should take it to the police.' He glanced at Bobby, coughed. 'I mean ...'

'You mean the real police,' Bobby said.

Grayle thought about having to make that full statement, tell the cops about the hacker at the bottom of the River Wye, take them to the spot where they tossed it in, stand by while the divers went down. Oh G.o.d.

'They gonna believe us, Bobby?'

'Do we believe us?'

Marcus came to his feet, paced the flagged floor. 'We've been here before, I think. What the holy f.u.c.k are we going to do, Maiden?'

'If this is Seward,' Bobby said, 'it would be naive to a.s.sume that he's going to stop now. He's still going to want Seffi.'

'We need to find her first, right?' Grayle now had that jumpy sensation around her middle.

'Well, at least I know a senior copper who's prepared to believe anything of Gary Seward. If we can spend an hour or two trying to harden all of this up a bit, I could take it across to Gloucester and dump it in his lap. That would be the sensible solution.'

'I guess.' Any residual excitement seeped out of Grayle, leaving only the queasy feeling. If they were right, at bottom this was just a sordid tale of underworld obsession, revenge, cover up. Which, as Marcus said, had gotten way out of hand.

And yet was still glowing darkly under the halo of Big Mystery: the imploded window, the drawing where did you get by taking stuff like this to the cops? You got disbelieved. Derided. Suspected. Accused. Referred for psychiatric reports, like all those creeps who said, I heard a voice telling me to do it.

'All right.' Marcus cleared his throat. 'I think we all probably agree that before doing anything hasty we should spend some time attempting to locate Persephone ourselves. She needs to know about this possible Judge connection.'

'a.s.suming she doesn't already,' Grayle said. 'And that's one of the reasons she hightailed it into the night without so much as an offer to pay for the gla.s.s.'

'Yes, all right, Underhill. So how do we go about finding her?'

'We could call in a medium,' Grayle said.

'Or we could simply call her agent,' Maiden said. 'She was talking to her yesterday from this pub we called at on the way over here. Whatever it was about, she didn't want me to know. She took the phone into the loo. Afterwards she started saying there'd be no point in coming to St Mary's, and that she had to be somewhere tomorrow that's today.'

'She didn't want us to know where she was going,' Grayle said. 'Why?'

'Do we have the number of the agency?'

Grayle smiled. 'I guess Marcus does.'

Marcus called from his study. He was quivering with the kind of adrenalin charge he'd thought he'd never experience again. 'Want to speak to Nancy Rich,' he told some lofty b.i.t.c.h.

'Ms Rich is in a meeting. Perhaps you could call back later.'

'Just get her,' Marcus rasped.

'I don't know whether you heard what I-'

'Well get her out of the b.l.o.o.d.y meeting!' Marcus roared. 'This is crucially important.'

'And you are?'

'Marcus Bacton, my name. Tell her-'

'Does she know you?'

'Tell her it's about Persephone Callard.'

'Are you a journalist?'

'What I am', said Marcus, 'is a man with very little time to fart about, so you can tell Rich that if she doesn't want to lose her princ.i.p.al meal ticket, she'd better get off her complacent a.r.s.e and drag herself to the f.u.c.king phone. Am I making myself clear?'

'Explicitly,' the woman said coldly. 'Hold the line, please.'

Marcus waited. The agency's phone played Mozart to suggest you were connected to people of taste and intelligence. Marcus drummed his fingers on the desk. Outside, the wind was still battering the castle walls.

Nancy Rich came on the line.

'You have one minute, Mr Baxter.'

'Bacton. Look, I'm calling because I believe you're still in fairly regular contact with Persephone Callard.'

'I'm her agent.'

'It's imperative I speak to her. Without delay.'

'Mr Bacton, have you any idea how many callers say precisely that?'

'And half of them are dead, no doubt. Madam, I don't care how many b.l.o.o.d.y crank calls you get, this is not one of them.'

'Had to play the Winterstone card, in the end,' he told them. 'That's the school. Which, inexplicably, is still in existence. Says she'll call me back. Wants to check me out, I suppose. I think she's still afraid I'm a b.l.o.o.d.y journalist.'

'You are a b.l.o.o.d.y journalist,' Grayle said.

'Hmm. Yes. One forgets.'

Grayle smiled. The only good thing about this weird, uncomfortable situation was that Marcus had been galvanized.

The rest of the morning they drank coffee, nibbled toast, tossed around wild theories. Cindy tried, in vain, to call his producer. Grayle stashed all the dailies out of sight because of the way he kept going back to stare in distress at those big headlines. In the end Cindy said he'd walk up to the Knoll, give himself a retune.

Around two, a call came through.

Bobby's mobile.

Foxworth. Maiden took the phone outside.

'Information for you, Bobby. Show you what a helpful fellow I am.'

'I always knew that, Ron,' Maiden said warily.

'Sir Richard Barber, Bobby. Still interested?'

'Sure.'

'Barber and Seward. It's a yes. Barber retired at the last election, yeah? Afterwards, gets divorced from his missus. Papers are thinking, h.e.l.lo, what's been going on there? But it's too late now, he's n.o.body special any more, so they never tried too hard to find out what he'd been up to in his nice new flat. Which, as it turns out, he'd been renting from Seward for quite a while before he bought it. Only for girls, mind, nothing sordid Gary hates perverts. Just nice, clean, grown-up girlies.'

'So, Gary's flat and Gary's girls? Where'd you get this, Ron?'

'I'm a member of the Conservative Club. For the cheap beer. Always a comfort after the kind of day I've had.'

'No developments, then.'

'Oh yeah. Just the kind of development you need with my budget. Another one. Even nastier.'

'No!' Maiden wedged himself into the doorway, out of the wind.

'Woman gets round to reporting her boyfriend missing after the other side of the bed's been cold the best part of a week. Local bobby makes a routine visit to his place of work he has a garage finds somebody's dropped a b.l.o.o.d.y car on the poor sod.'

'Like from a crane?'

Ron explained.

'What are the Cotswolds coming to?' Maiden said neutrally. 'No leads?'

'How many d'you want? For starters we've got about half a dozen blokes whose wives this lad reckoned he was stuffing, so the regular girlfriend's also worth a glance. Oh, yeah, lots of angles and about two spare bodies in CID for the legwork. I was trying to link it into this other one seeing it wasn't far away, but they won't quite gel.'

Maiden said, 'You talk to the late Mr Crewe's employer yet?'

A chuckle.

'I was waiting for that. Yes, I have indeed. In person. Lovely office in Worcester. Charming view of the Severn. Mr Martin Riggs on the door, gold lettering. And what a nice chap. Out comes the twelve-year-old malt. "What a tonic to see you, Ron, talk to an old-fas.h.i.+oned copper again."'

'He offer you a job when you retire?'

'Blimey, son, that's positively uncanny. Must be with poking the psychic.'

'What else he have to say?'

'Crewe? According to Mr Riggs, Forcefield is such a big organization nowadays that it's appallingly difficult to keep tabs on all the staff. However, he's done some checks and this does seem to be a regular lad, absolutely no reason to suspect, etcetera, etcetera.'