Authors: Phil Rickman
THE BULKHEAD BULB CAME ON, AWAKENING SHADOWS IN THE
castle walls, as if the explosion had summoned to the surface all the violent drama locked into its eight hundred years of history. Grayle stood in the yard in the rain and the irritable wind, hugging herself to squash the shakes. Feeling the banging of her own heart, like an iron bucket against the sides of a deep, deep well.
Marcus stumbled out through the fan of light, slivers of glass shining like snow crystals in his hair, an open cut on his forehead.
‘Just don’t say it, Marcus!’ Grayle’s voice rising like an elevator out of control. ‘Just like the old days. Just like the old freaking school. Only difference is, this time it’s
you
got to explain to the insurance guys.’
And then she was sorry because Marcus, barely free of the flu, looked like shit. Looked like he’d been beaten up on.
‘Should be some … chipboard.’ He was looking around vaguely. ‘In the old pigsty, round the …’
‘Huh?’
‘To board up the window. Got to keep … keep the rain out.’
A fog behind his glasses. The sour chill in the air, the smell, the sound, the
taste
of it, and all of it right there in his own back yard, within his own castle walls. The shock of invasion.
Grayle took his arm. ‘We’ll deal with it, Marcus. Bobby and I will handle it. You come back inside. Let’s get you a big glass of something strong. Get that cut cleaned up.’
‘Cut?’ A nerve tweaking his cheek. ‘Where’s … where’s Persephone?’
‘I guess she’s still in there, with Cindy and Bobby. Leave it, huh?’
‘I have to talk to her. She’ll be distressed. She needs reassurance.’
‘No, Marcus,’ Grayle said patiently. ‘That was last time. That was twenty years ago. She grew up. She knows precisely what she did.’
Cindy came out, followed by Malcolm the dog, loosed from the study. Then Bobby.
‘Marcus? You OK? Grayle?’
‘We’re fine, Bobby. Just deciding which of the all-night glaziers in St Mary’s we should call out.’
A bubbling giggle forming. Here we go, that old hysteria, welcome home. Some glass splinters fell out of her hair.
Bobby was looking at Malcolm, who didn’t move. Grayle shook her head hard, watching more glass fall around her feet. Bobby bent and patted his thighs. Malcolm looked uncertain. Grayle thought,
What is this? Did Bobby collect something in there?
Malcolm gave a slow wave of his stumpy tail, ambled over. Bobby crouched. He and the dog bonded under the bulkhead lamp.
Cindy nodded. Whatever it was, it was OK now.
‘Where’s Persephone?’ Marcus demanded.
Bobby looked up. ‘I thought she came out with you.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘She was ahead of you. She ran out of the room. When it happened, she ran out, hands over her ears.’
‘Then she’s out here, someplace.’
‘Persephone?’ Marcus stumbled out into the yard.
‘Persephone!’
Stopping and listening and getting no reply. Only the wind against the castle walls. Marcus strode to the dairy. Hammered with a fist on the door.
‘Persephone! Are you in there?’ He turned to them, blood oozing down his forehead. ‘What if she’s in there with … with …?’
He couldn’t say it. But Grayle knew she wouldn’t have laughed at him this time if he had. She breathed in hard to cancel the memory of the feral, male smell.
‘Stand back,’ Marcus said.
‘Aw, Marcus—’
Marcus hurled himself sideways at the door. Bounced off, moaning, holding his shoulder.
‘Bloody hell, Marcus.’ Bobby putting himself between Marcus and the door. Malcolm started barking, figuring this was a fight.
‘She’s in there … don’t you see, Maiden? She’s locked herself in. She’s trying to deal with it herself. Bloody Lewis screwed it up, and she—’
‘All right.’ Bobby pulled hair out of his eyes; he was sweating, anxious. ‘Before we kick it in, you’ve got another key to this place, haven’t you?’
‘Lost it. Months ago. Persephone’s got the only key.
Persephone!’
Marcus kicked the door, under the lock.
‘Please
…’ He rattled the handle and the door sprang open. Marcus crashed through like an old bull, flung down on his hands and knees inside the dairy.
Bobby moved to help him up. Grayle pushed past them both, putting on the light. Marcus was shaking Bobby off, ramming his glasses into position.
‘Oh,’ Grayle said.
On account of there was no-one else in the dairy.
She saw the bed was half made, the duvet turned back. A lone silk blouse hung limply on a hanger on the closet door.
But there was no sign of Callard’s bags. Grayle went quickly into the other rooms. She opened the closet: empty. No personal stuff in the kitchen, in the bathroom just a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush on the shelf over the basin.
This
Mary Celeste
feel about the whole place.
‘What’s going on?’ Marcus demanded. ‘What’s happened here. Underhill?’
‘Looks like she checked out.’
‘I don’t understand …’
‘Hold on. Let’s …’
Bobby Maiden had run out into the night, Grayle trailing behind him across the yard, towards the entrance. When they got there, they found the wooden farm gate unlatched, the wind smacking it against the post.
Grayle looked back, rain in her face. She guessed the Cherokee was also gone. They hadn’t heard the motor start up. Probably on account of the wind.
From
Bang to Wrongs: A Bad Boy’s Book,
by
GARY SEWARD
Preface to the paperback edition
CLARENCE JUDGE – A TRIBUTE
As you may have read in the papers, since this book first come out, my dear old mate Clarence has been taken from us … taken from behind, in cold blood.
This has gutted me, I don’t mind admitting, like no other incident in my rich and varied life.
Doing it like that is not only the coward’s way, it’s the only way they’d have got Clarence. Right to the end – and he was nearly fifty-eight years old – this was a geezer people didn’t ever mess with if they could avoid it. You knew where you were with Clarence and if you was on the opposite side, Gawd help you.
However, he was a decent man.
Now I know a lot of moralistic gits out there will be going, What?!!! But I stand by what I just said. There’s no denying this business is full of evil double-dealers what would stab you in the back and lift your wallet in a single move. But Clarence was a man of honour, a staunch ally and a faithful friend. Even his enemies, Clarence done right by them – if you was going to be ‘visited’ by Clarence, he would look you in the eyes in the street and tell you to your face, and that was that, because Clarence believed in
being fair and upfront at all times. At least one piece of scum, possessed of this advance information, took the opportunity to top himself first, and you can’t say fairer than that.
Sadly, Clarence Judge never had much luck the whole of his life. He was too honest. If the filth accused him of a crime, he would put his hands up straight away – usually to damage a couple of them first, but that was Clarence, an angry man sometimes.
As a result, he spent more than half his adult life in prison.
‘A stupid man, too, then,’ some smirking young talkshow host in a shiny suit remarks to me late one night on BBC 2. I felt like redecorating the set with his face in memory of Clarence, and I would have too if my fellow guests Kurt Campbell and Barry Manilow had not been sat between us in nice clean suits.
Was all the war heroes, the VCs, what went over the top on their own with a rifle, was they stupid men?
Because this is what Clarence was
… a
brave foot soldier who would lay down his life for his comrades. He never mugged old ladies for their pension money, nor did he give heroin to eleven-year-old schoolkids. The people what Clarence hurt – and yes, all right, he did hurt them, he hurt them grievously, usually – was the scum: the grasses, the snouts, or the cowards what drove off in the getaway car the minute they seen the filth and left their mates to face the music. Like me, Clarence knew what could and could not be tolerated and he stuck by his principles.
But, in the end, it seems, one of the scum got at him, in the cowardly way they operate. So far the police have failed to apprehend the guilty party. I do not know how hard they have tried, but as they are unlikely to offer much of a reward for apprehending the murderer of a ‘notorious criminal’, I shall do so myself. If any reader of this book has information fingering Clarence’s killer and would like to write to me, care of my publisher, I personally will pay them the sum of between ten and twenty thousand clean ones, according to the strength of the information. Naturally, as a law-abiding citizen these days, I shall immediately hand over anything of value to the police.
CINDY ATE A SMALL BREAKFAST IN THE OTHERWISE EMPTY, WOOD
-walled bar, the place as quiet as the morning of a funeral.
The wind had not died with the dawn. Cindy had awoken into cold light and the rocking of the inn sign, with its grim, grey, curly-horned ram.
Amy collected his dishes. She wore one of her little black dresses, very Juliette Greco. Quite sexy, he thought sadly. Too late now for him to appreciate such qualities. The course was set; whichever way he turned would leave him leaning suicidally over the abyss.
‘How can they say those things?’ Amy said. ‘They don’t know you. That brother, he’ve got no brains. Just hit out, they do, without a thought.’
Cindy was silent.
‘You mustn’t let them get away with this.’
Cindy smiled with a sorrow which, in the gloom of the bar, Amy would be unlikely to discern.
‘Not as if they’ve
sacked
you, Cindy, is it? The BBC would not be so daft! You’re a big star!’
‘A big star. Yes.’
The
Sun
lay folded by his plate. He poured himself a coffee, picked up the paper.
‘Don’t…’ Amy said anxiously. ‘Don’t torture yourself.’
‘A little late for that, my love.’
Cindy spread out the
Sun.
THE CURSE OF
KELVYN KITE
The enormous front-page headline displayed like an official public warning.
Cindy briefly closed his eyes, opening them to the sub-head:
Brother blasts Cindy as horror
blaze kills Lotto family
This angle came from Brendan Sherwin’s brother, Greg, who did not, Cindy judged with unusual bitterness from the photograph, look like a man who might qualify for Mensa.
Greg, 34, said: ‘My sister in law was very upset when Cindy made that bird come out with all those comments about the new Barrett home and the BMWs.
‘Brendan and Sharon were both demoralized. It had got that they were scared to come out of their new house because of the remarks people made.
‘One day last week, two little kids were standing at the edge of Brendan’s drive flapping their arms like birds’ wings and shouting, “It’ll all end in tears!”’
Greg added, ‘I hate that Cindy now for what he’s caused. It’s like he’s sneering at ordinary people’s good luck.
‘He tries to blame it all on Kelvyn Kite, but everybody knows it’s what he really thinks.
‘Cindy is sick. If you ask me, he should quit now.’
Oh, how cleverly it had been done. Perhaps some hungry freelance journalist had initially put the words into Greg’s mouth:
‘So how do you feel about Cindy now, Greg? I expect you hate him.’
‘Er, yeah.’
And the use of the beautifully ambivalent line,
I hate Cindy for what he’s caused.
Causing people to deride Lottery jackpot winners or, in fact, causing their deaths?
Nobody was suggesting such a nonsense, of course. Nothing so direct.
The piece continued across pages four and five. Page four referred to the plane crash and the heart attack. The National Lottery death toll. The paper had spoken to a consultant psychiatrist, whose portentous comments began,
If people are constantly warned to mistrust good fortune achieved without any effort on their part and told that such luck will inevitably bring repercussions, then …
Page five was all about Cindy.
Oh God.
He could not read it.
He should leave quietly. What use was he here, having failed Marcus and Grayle, failed Persephone Callard and – what was worse – damaged her equilibrium, driven her away in fear and despair? No, he was not the world’s most popular man this morning. Not at Castle Farm in the parish of St Mary’s. Nor, by the looks of the morning papers, anywhere in this impressionable country.
Sydney Mars-Lewis, I am arresting you for complicity in the deaths of Gerry Purviss, Colin Seymour, Brendan Sherwin, Sharon Sherwin
…
But let’s not get carried away.
Leave that to the
Sun.
Around eight-thirty in the morning, Bobby Maiden had the lights on in the editorial room, formerly a treatment room, now a mess. With no window, you needed all the lights all the time.
He and Grayle had pulled out the jagged glass from the frame, boarded up the space as best they could with chipboard panels from the stable – Marcus shouting instructions, cursing a good deal to cover up how unnerved he was, while Maiden was thinking,
She’ll come back. She just wants to drive around for a while, clear her head.
Only she hadn’t come back. She’d grabbed most of her stuff in a hurry and taken off, just as she’d apparently done from Barber’s party.
Fled from it.
Obviously likes to go out with a bang,
Grayle had said laconically before she went home around midnight, leaving Maiden to bed down on the sofa. Marcus had offered him the dairy, but he couldn’t bring himself to sleep there. He’d lain awake for a long time,
Malcolm sleeping on his feet. Maiden listening for the sound of an engine in the wind.
All right, she was unpredictable,
famously
unpredictable, and she owed him nothing, perhaps not even an explanation. But this wasn’t right. He had to find her. How could he not try to find her?
Marcus came in, still in his dressing gown.
‘She hasn’t…?’
‘No.’ Maiden picked up a shard of glass they’d missed last night.
‘No phone call?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s not like her, Maiden. People don’t change that much, whatever Underhill might say. She wouldn’t leave the way she did, leaving us in the bloody wreckage, if she hadn’t got a good reason.’
‘Other than wondering what else she might do to the place if she stuck around?’
‘Did you feel anything, Maiden? Did you feel a build up of energy?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t know what a build up of energy felt like. Not the kind of energy you mean.’
‘Last night,’ Marcus said, ‘before we let the damnable Lewis take over, she and I had – I mean, you couldn’t call it a heart to heart exactly, but she did go on about the trouble she was claiming she’d caused. All this about coming between Underhill and me. Which was nonsense. She said she’d made a mistake coming here.’
‘She said that to me. She also said she couldn’t stay because she had an appointment to keep.’
‘You ask her what it was?’
‘Should have, but I didn’t.’
‘Don’t suppose she’d have told you. Went on to me about going to a bloody ashram, something of that nature. Bullshit, probably. This has been a total disaster. She was in a state of torment and we probably made it worse. She couldn’t stand it any more. Buggered off.’
‘She was going anyway. She was already packed.’
Marcus waved a dismissive hand, went off to get dressed.
Maiden prowled the room, picking up more glass. He wondered if maybe they hadn’t
all
made the window explode – all sitting there nursing their private fears and longings.
Under the computer table, which he and Grayle had pulled back into the centre of the room, he found a writing pad. He froze.
* * *
Cindy searched for his phone for a while before remembering that he’d hurled it, in his agony, over the castle wall.
At nine, from the payphone in the hallway of the Tup, he rang Jo’s direct line at the BBC. No answer. No point in calling her at home; she’d be on her way to the office. Cindy returned to the bar and his table, bare now. Except for the
Sun.
No excuse any more. He looked at page five. Saw a picture of himself wearing a cunning smile and a pointed hat.
Underneath the picture, the caption read:
Cindy the sorcerer:
‘communes with spirits’.
The smile on the face was real, but the hat was a clever and convincing computer graphic. Perhaps a legitimate liberty, under the circumstances.
The feature story had it all. Twisted and sensationalized, of course, but, in essence, true. The
Sun
had even sent someone to confront one of the Fychans, young Sion, at his farm in Snowdonia. Not that this had proved entirely helpful. Sion had invited the reporter in for tea and generously answered all his questions. In Welsh, of course. Only in Welsh. Cindy allowed himself his first and probably final smile of the day.
The sources of the information which did not require translation were given as ‘close friends’ and anonymous people said to have ‘worked with’ Cindy.
Only one person was actually named in the piece.
TV hypnotist Kurt Campbell, who recently discovered the hard way that Cindy was no easy subject, said last night, ‘I didn’t know any of this, but to be honest, it doesn’t surprise me.
‘You can tell that behind all that camp stuff the guy has iron will-power.
‘Sure I could believe he’s studied magical techniques. It could explain a lot.’
‘Thank you, boy,’ Cindy murmured grimly. He returned to the payphone in the hallway, redialled Jo’s number.
This time the phone was answered almost immediately. The voice was male and young and cool and assured.
‘I’m sorry, Jo Shepherd isn’t coming in today.’
‘Unwell, is she?’
Jo was always at work on Monday, planning Wednesday night’s show.
‘Far as I know, she’s absolutely fine. Who’s this?’
‘That’s all right,’ Cindy said. ‘Call her at home, I will.’
‘Ah.’ Pause. ‘That’s Mr Mars-Lewis, isn’t it?’
Cindy considered hanging up.
‘Glad you called. My name’s John Harvey. I’ll be taking over as producer for the next few weeks.’
Cindy’s grip on the phone grew tight. ‘I may be wrong, but I don’t recall Jo mentioning that.’
‘Oh, Jo didn’t know until this morning.’
And could not reach Cindy because his phone was lying in some soaking nettlebed at Castle Farm.
‘Swift decision from On High,’ John Harvey said. Smoothly. Triumphantly. ‘They wanted someone more experienced to take over for a while. I don’t think I need to explain the reasons, do I?’
‘Perhaps not,’ Cindy said, then regretted it; these people never thought they needed to explain, they just dictated memos.
John Harvey, sounding all of twenty-six, said, ‘Look, Cindy, I’m going to have to call you back, I’m due—’
‘In a meeting?’ The hand gripping the telephone now shaking.
‘You’ve been in the business a long time, matey. I think you know how these things work.’
‘Not really, boy. Perhaps you can enlighten me when we meet at rehearsal tomorrow.’
John Harvey laughed nervously. Cindy remained silent.
He was going to make the boy say it: that his presence at tomorrow’s rehearsal would be very far from essential.
Grayle had come in with a whole pile of papers, all this crazy stuff about Cindy, portrayed as some kind of jinx figure bringing down darkness and retribution on innocent people for the crime of winning the National Lottery.
What the
hell?
Insanity all around her. Hadn’t gotten any sleep until must’ve been four a.m. Lying there, hearing Callard whispering,
He’s touching my face.
And then the window disintegrating, the exclamations, the scraping of chairs, the stumbling, the feet skidding on glass.
And now here was Bobby Maiden staring in disbelief at the office pad they used for telephone notes.
A drawing on it, another relic of a wild and crazy night.
She hadn’t seen Bobby like that since Emma, his girlfriend, was savagely killed, when he was groping for the light of understanding under the deadening pressure of a lingering head injury.
‘OK … let’s … let’s be calm.’ Easing the pad out of his fingers. ‘Let’s look at it by daylight. Let’s consider the rational options before we get carried away.’
She bore the pad quickly to the back door and out into the farmyard, Bobby following in silence.
The main options were that he was lying, that he’d done this as a scam to give Callard some credibility. Or that Cindy had done it after they left him alone in there last night. She didn’t know too much about Cindy’s level of artistic ability, but the design work on his shamanic drum had some style.
It was good that Marcus had not reappeared. Better not to complicate this by introducing the Big Mystery option.
The wind was blowing, the sky was heavy but there was no rain. Grayle leaned the pad against the stump of an old gatepost. She didn’t like to hold it. She was glad to get it out the house. Well, Jesus, a face like
that …
The drawing was rough, done with the kind of broad, scrubbing strokes that Lucas, her old art-dealer friend, might appreciate. She could almost hear Lucas now:
Yeah, yeah, bold, confident … what it lacks in finesse it makes up for in raw energy.
The pencil shading had been smudged, like Bobby had licked a finger and rubbed at it.
Damn it, this face had life.
Bobby and she stood together examining the picture, like they were figuring whether to buy it.
‘You never said you saw him,’ Grayle said.
‘I didn’t … see him. Grayle, I don’t remember doing this.’ Rubbing hard at his eyes. ‘What the
fuck
…?’
‘Calm down. Jesus, were you like this when you found Justin’s
body? Believe me, this is … this is just… I’ve seen this stuff before, Bobby. It’s just an anomaly.’
‘It
was
me who did this?’
‘Sure it was. I was vaguely aware of you drawing. I didn’t even think much about it at the time. I must’ve thought, yeah that’s what he does when he’s all strung up. He draws.’
She remembered something else then, something that had gotten wiped from her memory in all the chaos of Marcus trying to break into the dairy.
‘What were you doing in there with Cindy? Afterwards.’
‘Well, he was just … it was a cleansing thing. Didn’t he do it to you?’
‘No. A cleansing thing?’
‘A banishing. He made me stand against a wall and he drew shapes in the air in front of me.’