Will Kingdom: Mean Spirit

She dumped the phone back in her bag then took it out again, brought up 999 on the little screen, did not press send. Shoved the phone, primed for fast action, into a pocket of her raincoat and moved on around the house.

It might be the biggest dwelling in Mysleton, but it wasn’t so big, maybe six bedrooms. It was clear there was nobody living here right now, but if she stayed this side for a while, out of sight, Justin surely would have to accept she’d gotten in.

She came to a glass-walled conservatory. Cane chairs and a sofa inside. Also plants — so somebody must come in to water them.

‘ Grayle ?’

Shit. She clamped a hand around the phone in her pocket and ran away from the conservatory, across a lawn and into some trees, as Justin appeared around the side of the house, his overalls flapping.

‘You all right, Grayle?’

He couldn’t see her, she was sure, but she moved further into the dripping trees, which were soon assembling themselves into a small wood, dark and boggy, Grayle sinking up to an ankle in brown water.

Nightmare, or what? All she could hear now was her own panting breath and the grey noise of the rain which muffled other noises like, say, footsteps coming up behind you and the furtive glide of a zipper.

Gulping back a sob, dragging the sodden foot out of the hole, she stumbled on through all kinds of dank shit, until she came out on to an overgrown footpath running roughly parallel to the black-top track.

There was a wall ahead. She almost ran flat into it — a stone wall with a wrought-iron gate in it. The path stopped here. There was no place to go but through the iron gate and into what looked like a long-untended walled garden, a messy nest of brown bushes. A short gravel path led up to a wooden porch open to a solid back door painted dark green, with no obvious bell, no knocker.

The lodge, right?

Sure. But this was still all wrong. There was going to be nobody here. Like Persephone Callard — superior, graceful, elegant, supermodel-slim — was going to be holed up in a dump like this?

In fact, the whole set-up … this rich and famous woman issuing a cry for help to an old guy she’d last encountered when he was a world-weary teacher and she was a very weird schoolgirl … what kind of sense did that make? Pushing into the porch, Grayle had a flash picture of Marcus Bacton, hunched over his woodstove, nursing his flu and his fantasies. Asshole.

She stood in the porch, furious and scared, hair hanging like seaweed. She banged and banged on the door, with both fists, until it hurt and then some. No answering footsteps in the hallway, kitchen, whatever; no lights coming on.

But lights were appearing behind her. Headlights. Good old Justin easing his pick-up back down the track, lighting up the trees, scanning the ground for his prey like a poacher lamping a hare. Grayle tried to push open a narrow letterbox, but it was rusted tight.

‘Ms Callard …’ Hissing it, scared to shout.

A rattle and a creak of brakes, a shaft of white at the end of the garden: the pick-up stopping outside the lodge. Justin was bold. Justin had done this stuff before and gotten away with it. Grayle’s knuckles felt frayed and sore. She went down on her knees in the porch, her mouth to the only opening, an enlarged keyhole.

‘Ms Callard, listen, Marcus Bacton sent me. You get that? Marcus Bacton. If you’re there, just… please just let me in.’

Justin would go first to the front door, but he’d soon come around back. Grayle got ready to escape down the garden, out the iron gate. Saw herself running through acres of filthy fields to some stark farmhouse, the door answered by this grinning, naked guy who would turn out to be Justin’s insane brother.

She collapsed onto her hands when the back door of the lodge opened unexpectedly into darkness.

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.’