‘From whom?’
‘Drink up, Mr Maiden,’ Vic said. ‘My lady’ll have my dinner on the table.’
These days Elham got unplugged at five-thirty. Now, close to seven, it was dark and damp and already empty. In the hotel car park, the symbols of small-town wealth were awaiting removal to the outlying villages: a Series Seven BMW, a Mercedes next to a Lexus next to the space where Maiden had parked. Now a space again.
It was close to the road, not far from a streetlamp.
‘Bugger,’ Maiden said. ‘This hasn’t happened to me in quite a while.’
‘It don’t take them five minutes these days, Mr Maiden. Even the kids. You have an alarm? Mind you, nobody takes any notice of an alarm these days. Specially if it only lasts a few seconds, which is all they need.’ Vic glanced around. ‘Sod’s Law. All these Mercs and Jags and they go for your … what was it?’
‘Golf. Four years old.’
‘Not your week, Mr Maiden. Sorry I can’t give you a lift, but I’m on foot. Being a local now.’
Maiden said it was OK. Not that far for him to walk either. He might call in at the station and report it. If he could face the humour.
‘Car thieves. Joy riders. I despise those bleeders.’ Under the sterile sodium streetlight, Vic frowned briefly. ‘You take care, Mr Maiden. If you’re walking, stick to the main roads, sorter thing.’
No stars in the sky, only a chemical haze. Elham by night: like being inside a giant warehouse storing nothing much at all.
Maiden walked past the shut-down Carlton cinema. Past the bus station, where late buses and a tea-bar were social history. Past the late Tony Parker’s Biarritz Club in its cage of scaffolding — about to become possibly the only building that ever went upmarket by being turned into a McDonald’s.
He didn’t call in at the police station. He would phone.
He’d changed the lock on the flat himself. Not a brilliant job, but it would hold. If they really wanted to get in, they’d get in.
They. Someone working for someone working for someone working for Martin Riggs. He saw Riggs’s face — the broad forehead, the long, narrow chin, the almost translucent skin. Head like a light-bulb. Was it really possible that Riggs was still, in some undetectable way, employing Beattie, maybe a couple more policemen … and monitoring Maiden’s movements?
And wanting Maiden to know?
He changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, called the station and reported the theft — WPC Lisa Starling tutting sympathetically. ‘The Crown, eh? They’ve been advised to install CCTV that many times!’
Maiden was aware of his hand shaking when he put down the phone, aware of how hard and fast he was breathing.
Riggs would have been gratified to see this.
OK. Lose it. He made himself a cup of tea then went into the bedroom, closed the door and sat on the side of his bed. Put on the blue-shaded table lamp. Quiet light.
He sat for several minutes, at first conjuring the image of Riggs in the air three feet from his head. Holding it there, summoning all his negative emotions about Riggs. And then letting go of them. Watching the lightbulb head go dimmer, fade, disappear.
And then straightened his back, systematically relaxing his body, starting with the toes, working upwards, tightening muscles and then letting them go. Finally, inhaling slowly, aware of the air entering his nose and throat and expanding his lungs. Fixing his attention on a point in his throat, he held the breath for ten heartbeats, then exhaled through his nose.
The throat being the first chakra.
He let his attention shift to the second, which was in the middle of the chest: the emotional centre. Inhaled again. Ten heartbeats. On about the seventh, he became aware of a gentle warmth in his chest but didn’t allow himself to dwell on it.
Next chakra: the solar plexus. Maiden inhaled again as, on the bedside table, the phone rang.
‘Bobby.’
He rolled off the bed. ‘Andy?’
‘You all right, son? You sound a wee bit strange.’
Maiden wanted to tell her about the books he’d been reading on spiritual development but felt embarrassed.
‘I fell asleep,’ he said.
‘Well, have a biscuit and a glass of water, then get yourself over here.’
He ran all the way. By the time he reached the General Hospital, his body felt half-numbed down the left side, lingering side-effect of the brain-stem injury. He was sweating in the cold and the damp. Just outside, under the Accident and Emergency sign, stood plump, trilby-wearing George Barrett, the Division’s longest-serving Detective Constable, lighting one of his small cigars.
‘Thought you was on leave, boss.’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Another day, boss. Another day.’
‘Who’s in there with him, George?’
George fitted a rough grin around his cigar. ‘DS Beattie. And one of the traffics.’
‘Here quickly, was he? Beattie?’
‘Probably here before it fucking happened.’ George blew out a contemptuous ball of smoke. He had less than a year to serve, didn’t give a shit any more.
‘What do we know?’
‘No eye-witnesses. Bloke out dog-walking reckons he saw a car coming out of Danks Street with a bit of tyre-squealing. Didn’t get the number. Poor bugger. You always knew where you were with Vic.’
Maiden’s head was spinning. It was unreal.
He went into Casualty, wondering how he was going to manage to look into Beattie’s face without smashing it with whatever piece of heavy resuscitatory equipment was closest to hand.
XIII
Grayle sat at the end of the sofa, outside of the lamplight, watching Marcus Bacton doing this courtly minuet stuff around Persephone Callard. So annoyed at the way he was behaving — this complete reversal of the one-time teacher-pupil relationship, so that now Callard was the big guru and Marcus the humble acolyte.
Which was just so much bullshit because she was merely someone that weird things happened to. Not a spiritual person, not an exalted human being, not even an authority. Whereas Marcus’s knowledge of the unexplained, in all its aspects, was possibly unrivalled anywhere.
But maybe this was it: Marcus knew everything about paranormal phenomena except how to make them happen. He was perhaps convinced that, between them, he and this haughty broad could evolve some of the answers he’d spent most of his life groping towards. Answers he was perhaps half afraid of.
And if Grayle was less convinced, was she not just envious of Callard’s beauty and her fame and her power over the legendary curmudgeon?
Marcus was saying, ‘Persephone, you had scientists studying you at one point, didn’t you?’
He hadn’t blown his nose or wiped his eyes in a full half-hour. He was hunched at the edge of his chair, from which stuffing was leaking like the so-called ectoplasm in those phoney Victorian spiritualist photos.
‘Oh Lord.’ Callard relaxed into the full Prince Charles drawl. ‘That was frightfully tedious. They’d have one sitting in some little glass room concentrating on an object in a sealed, transparent container and trying to move it with one’s mind. Or there’d be someone in the next room concentrating on a particular image and you’d have to draw it. I mean, what’s the point? What is the point? If you succeed, someone’s always going to say it was a fix.’
‘And did you succeed?’
‘Sometimes. Sometimes I was told what the object was. And sometimes I was lied to.’
‘By the spirits?’
Callard shrugged. ‘I submitted to this nonsense for about four months, in New York and Boston, throwing various professors into paroxysms of joy and then troughs of despair.’
She was leaning against the desk, long legs stretched out in front of her, half out of a long, split skirt, bare feet in scuffed sandals. She’d changed into the skirt and a white silk blouse, for dinner — more soup and tuna sandwiches and a dusty bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon Grayle found behind the fridge.