Remembering the night, not so long ago, when Bobby Maiden lay on his back, the crash team backing off, despondent — three minutes gone, three and a half. Andy refusing to call off the defib, hands on the top of his head, his hair all stiff with blood. Feeling, inside her own head, the sun rising beyond St Mary’s, through the gap in the stones of the High Knoll burial chamber, the heat travelling down to her fingers.
A healing place.
Despite the best efforts of the Health Service bureaucrats, Elham General was a healing place, too — though this was sometimes harder to credit than the legend of the Holy Virgin’s appearance at High Knoll.
Andy dropped back into the room, looked down at the watch on her breast pocket: 2.25 a.m. She’d call Marcus when she came off shift, before Bobby could get around to it.
She dunked her ciggy in the sink, went to take a look at Mr Trilling on the ward.
XVII
‘So now we know,’ Grayle said.
Laying on the cynicism like mayonnaise because she really didn’t want Marcus to think she believed any of this stuff.
The study looked tired and bleary. The fire in the stove was down to a bed of ash. Marcus put on a small log from the depleted basket and hauled his chair closer.
‘Great story, though,’ Grayle said, not allowing herself to think about it. She yawned and lay full length on the sofa, kicking off her shoes.
Around half-past midnight Callard had elected to return to the dairy, maybe realizing that Marcus and Grayle would have a lot to discuss. Standing by the bulkhead light, Marcus had watched her cross the yard under the shadows of the ruins. He’d looked tired, weak, hopeless.
‘It’s late, Marcus, and you’re sick.’ Grayle pulled a cushion under her head. ‘Go get some sleep.’
‘Not tired. Or rather, I am, but…’
‘You want some cocoa?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to know what you really think about this.’
‘Me? You’re asking the help?’
‘Don’t piss about, Underhill.’
‘Let’s talk about this tomorrow.’
‘I want to bloody talk about it now,’ Marcus thundered, snatching off his glasses, mopping his eyes and nose, thrusting the glasses back on.
‘You really don’t.’
‘You mean you don’t.’
‘OK.’ Grayle sighed. ‘Whatever.’ Swung her feet to the floor and sat up, hands clasping on her knees like in prayer. ‘Let’s lay this thing out.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Me?’
‘I want your opinion, dammit!’
Grayle shrugged. ‘OK. Well … essence of it is, after like fifteen years as this cool, fashionable, high-society psychic, Ms Persephone Callard can’t cut it any more on account of, whenever she tries to do a seance, only one spirit comes through and this is a bad spirit and it’s real close, closer than anything she ever experienced before and she’s like … soiled and full of fear, and the next day she’s debilitated, feels like shit. How’m I doing?’
‘Go on.’ Marcus opened the stove, put on a second log to produce flames.
‘What do you want me to add? All of this goes back to a particular night at the home of this former MP, Sir Barber, who’s paid out big money for no good reason.’
‘So you didn’t find it convincing.’
Grayle didn’t reply. Callard’s evocation of the scene had thrown her a full and clear picture of this Barber’s sumptuous drawing room on an extraordinary night. A movie, with sounds: voices and a music track.
And a smell. Callard describing how several people in the room had picked it up simultaneously — distaste on women’s faces. Then the drop in temperature, as though the heating had cut out, the same women reaching for jackets, cardigans, evening shawls.
Persephone had looked up and seen a man sitting there, at the back of the room, clear as Marcus was now, she said.
The man gazing impassively into her eyes.
And his eyes were cold and cloudy and almost white, and seemed to lead nowhere. And while Callard had been describing it, Grayle was seeing it and feeling it. Deeply, deeply chilled, a cold worm in the spine, but doing her damnedest not to let it show.
As she looked into the empty space suggested by the near-white eyes, she realized she was seeing into a space where the man had been. And then Callard had felt his freaking hands on her freaking face — moist, precise, surgical hands.
Her voice cool, precise and clinical as she described it, but Grayle knew that same worm was also deep into Seffi’s spine.
So. Why couldn’t she just have lost the trance-state, dropped out of it? A medium does not become possessed; the medium remains in control. The essence, the spirit, is dependent upon the medium for energy. Whereas this …
This was so close and clear and impressively defined that even Callard had been in thrall to it. Although she knew it was entirely negative, it had an incredible … a compelling physicality, and some sick, greedy part of her didn’t want to let it go.
Grayle shuddered now and tried to smother it by leaning forward and hugging Malcolm, who, now they were alone, had sidled into the room. ‘You didn’t like her, did you, honey? Freaked you out, right?’ Dogs almost invariably picked up disturbance, whether psychic or psychological.
‘OK, what spooked me’, she said to Marcus, ‘was the way she was able to describe the face. But then I’m thinking, if you were trying to dream up a really evil face it would look something like that.’
A dark face. Thin-featured. Callard shaking her head in a swirl of lamp-lustred hair. Hooked nose. Hair flat, slicked back. When he first appeared, he was looking away from me, looking to the side, and I thought he was wearing glasses, and then he turned slowly, to face me. And then he smiled … he smiled at me. And when his face crinkled, I saw that it wasn’t glasses, it was a scar. Almost encircling one eye and running all the way back to his ear.
Marcus asking, How far away was he from you?
I should think, ten, fifteen feet…
Yet he was able to … you thought he was somehow touching you with his hands.
How fast does a thought travel?
Hmm. What was he wearing?
A grey suit. Three button, all the buttons fastened. Neat.
‘I mean, a scar?’ Grayle said to Marcus. ‘A goddamn scar?’
‘Be interesting to talk to someone who was at the party,’ Marcus said. ‘Someone else who saw … saw it.’
Someone who saw what happened when Callard twisted out of her chair. Someone who heard the loud crack in the air, like a gunshot. Who witnessed the dislodging of a large Chinese vase from a niche in a corner of the room where nobody was sitting — shards of it everywhere, panic, people leaping up and running for cover, as though they imagined everything in the room was going to start exploding.
For Callard, it must, at first, have been a merciful release of energy.
… and then, being thrown, jerked, out of trance like that, I immediately experienced a wave of self-disgust. It was as though I’d been a willing participant in some ghastly sexual violence, some perverse crime. I felt like … I don’t know … Myra Hindley or somebody.
Grayle recalled how she’d lost her lustre as she talked, had been hunched up into a corner of the sofa, her arms around her knees. Hell of an actress, if she was making this up.
What did you do? What did you do then?
I got out of there, Marcus. In the middle of the chaos, I slipped away and into the lift. I caught a taxi in Cheltenham and had him take me directly home … not to the hotel, all the way back to Mysleton.