Will Kingdom: Mean Spirit

‘Twenty years!’ Underhill yelled. ‘You haven’t seen her for twenty years! Like, did she come for your advice when they were touring her all over Europe and the States? When Diana was calling her up in the middle of the night, did she ask you how to handle it?’

‘She’s in trouble. I know this girl.’

‘Well, precisely. You knew a girl. This is a grown woman now and by all accounts she’s manipulative and paranoid in equal measure.’

‘You don’t know her.’

‘I know a lot of people like her.’

‘Believe me, you don’t.’

Underhill had looked stubborn.

‘She’s in trouble,’ Marcus insisted. ‘We can’t let this hang fire. I need you to go and talk to her.’

‘Like, she’s gonna talk to me ? She’s in hiding from the media, she won’t take phone calls, and you think-?’

‘What else can we do?’ Marcus had started coughing, and the coughing had gone on for a long time and Underhill had sighed and given in.

Marcus pulled off his glasses, clutched the Kleenex to his streaming eyes. Never seemed to get colds or flu when Mrs Willis was alive and keeping house for him — first sniffle and the dear old soul had always been there with some mysterious, brown, stoppered bottle. Now he’d been forced back on the inhalers, expectorants and headache pills produced by fiendish pharmaceutical multinationals which, he was convinced, directed a meaningful element of their astronomical profits into the development of new and virulent strains of influenza.

Bastards.

He sagged back into his old chair, and the castle disappeared from the window, displaced by the last weak sun seeping into the Black Mountains. The study door edged open and Malcolm, the bull terrier, ambled in.

‘What are you grinning at?’ Marcus dragged the phone from the desk. A recorded message told him it was not at present possible to reach the mobile phone he was calling and he should try again later.

Waste of bastard time, mobile phones.

What she’d hoped for was that the community of Mysleton would be another pleasant, cheerful, big village with yellow-stone cottages and a pretty pub with tables outside and a scattering of early tourists trailing kids and dogs.

Oh, sure.

Clouds like industrial smoke banked over clay-coloured ploughed fields. The rain came in tough spatters, like abuse.

‘This … this is the place?’

Justin didn’t reply. Justin had become real silent; his lips had vanished into his moustache. He looked bigger, somehow.

Mysleton was not any kind of village. It was just like … a name. On a map, presumably; there wasn’t even a sign. You could see a few farms, well back from the road, but no two dwellings appeared to be within about three hundred yards of one another.

They came to this gap in the roadside hedge and, about ten yards in, two broken-down gateposts, no gate.

‘Mysleton House,’ Justin said.

But like suppose this wasn’t Mysleton House at all? Suppose that at the end of the track there was just some place which Justin knew was derelict, where no-one could hear you scream?

In what already seemed like standard Mysleton policy, there was no sign on the gateposts. Justin drove between them, into an avenue of bare poplar trees. Though it was only about four-thirty, the day was darkening rapidly on account of the rain, and the rain was coming harder — one of the truck’s wipers squeaking to this awful, chugging rhythm, like it was trying for an orgasm.

Grayle clenching her fists. Come on … even if he’d worked out that the call had not been from Persephone Callard, nothing was going to happen. This was Gloucestershire, England.

Jesus, what is that supposed to mean? Frederick West, the leering, sex-driven builder and repeat killer of women and girls, operated out of freaking Gloucester …

Always the same: when you saw olde-English-quaint, you saw harmless. A mistake.

And what you did not do, when your car broke down, was call up the number on the scuffed card that was always stuck up in the lonesome callbox. Because the guy on the other end of the phone knew that callbox, and if it was a woman’s voice he could guess she was alone. Maybe Frederick West had his card in lonely callboxes: F. West, general builder; cellar conversions a specialty.

‘OK, stop!’

They’d reached a low, smallish house, enclosed by trees and bushes and well covered with ivy creeper. Dirty stone in between the creeper, no Cotswold glow. Didn’t look so very old by English standards, maybe Victorian. Could this be it? The lodge?

Justin braked, but didn’t switch off his engine.

‘This ain’t the house. This is only the lodge, Grayle. You can tell it’s empty. Look — no lights. Tiny little windows like that, this time of day there’d be lights.’

Marcus had said, There’ll be no lights, no sign of life, no car visible. She doesn’t want the press to think there’s anyone at home because, if anyone sees her, the word’ll spread like wildfire and there’ll be a dozen bloody photographers peering through the windows.

Justin was waiting, revving the engine in short, kind of masturbatory bursts.

Grayle plucked at the passenger-door handle.

‘Maybe I’ll walk from here.’

‘In this? Don’t be daft, girl.’ Justin accelerated through the trees, past the lodge, along a level black-top track. ‘House is round this bend, ’bout a hundred yards.’

‘Thanks, but there was no …’

Aw, leave it; she’d just have to get out at the house, thank him graciously and smile. Walk right back to the lodge, just as soon as he’d driven away.

Mysleton House sat firmly at the end of the track, open fields behind it. It was no stately home, but no chalet either: one of those substantial stone-built rural dwellings that didn’t answer to any particular style and tended to escape the attentions of those English Heritage guys Marcus Bacton hated worse than tax inspectors.

And, of course, no smoke issued from its tall chimneys and there were no cars parked outside. Justin stopped the truck in front of a five-barred gate dividing the track from a garden with trees and stuff.

He was looking so damned smug.

‘Ain’t nobody here, my sweet.’

‘They’ll be around back,’ Grayle said confidently. ‘Look, I’ll call you about the car. What time do you close?’

‘Seven … eight. Sometimes later. Countryside hours. I’m a hardworking man.’ Justin didn’t smile.

‘I’m sure you are. Look, I really would be grateful if you could get it fixed tonight. Could I give you a … a deposit?’

‘I got the car, Grayle. And I trust you.’

‘Right. Well, thank you for, uh, for all you did.’

She backed out of the truck, shouldering her bag. Walked through the rain to the five-barred gate, which — thank Christ — did not have a padlock, only a latch. She glanced back at Justin as she lifted the latch. He was just sitting there, watching through the snapping wipers. Seeing her safely to a front door which he knew was not going to be opened.

The door had a bellpull. Grayle looked up at it and turned away. Raised a hand back at Justin — no problem, everything’s just fine — and walked right past the door, following a concrete path around the side of the lightless house.

Flattening herself against a wall below a bright yellow burglar alarm, sheltered from the rain by the eaves, she pulled out her phone.

There was a signal. Just.

Call the cops?

Well, no officer, he didn’t exactly do anything; he was just conveying an unmistakable menace. The way he talked … the kind of questions he asked. And — oh yeah — he grabbed my leg. My thigh … Well, sure, we were going around a tight bend at the time; it’s possible his hand kind of slipped, but I sure don’t think so. Press charges? Uh …