Persephone Callard pulled the hair out of her face. Her amber eyes glittered. ‘Let me try and analyse what you’re saying, Grayle. Why you brought me here.’
‘Well, I’ve come to realize what part you played in all this, is all.’ Grayle turned away, watching a buzzard wheel and mew. ‘You were his first big breakthrough. Incontrovertible evidence of the world being a bigger place. Marcus’s Philosopher’s Stone. If Annie Davies was the legend and the inspiration, you were the proof. And maybe, all the time he was scraping together the money, he was holding you in front of him, just as much as Annie.’
‘Whereas you know I’m just spoiled and neurotic.’
‘Aw, look, I never …’ Grayle tugged her hair into bunches. ‘I’m not a sceptical person. I’m a gullible person. Holy Grayle, remember? Mind so wide open you could store a Freightliner in there. Underneath, I wanna believe what you’re saying, what you represent, just as much as he does.’
‘Oh, sure.’ Callard walked around the burial chamber until she was facing Grayle across the capstone. ‘But you also want to protect him. Because suppose Callard’s lying. Or fooling herself. Or become a psychiatric case? Or always was? Suppose she’s not a Big Mystery at all, just a medical anomaly? What’s that going to do to poor old Marcus — finding out that everything he cares about is founded on angel dust?’
Grayle bent and rested her cheek on the cold stone. She felt suddenly near to tears. It sometimes happened at High Knoll.
Callard said, more softly, ‘There’s something else about this place, isn’t there? It means something to you.’
‘It …’ Grayle sighed. ‘This was also the place Ersula — my sister — came. When she was a research archaeologist at Cefn-y-bedd. The University of the Earth?’
She straightened up, folded her arms on top of the stone.
‘They had a research programme into the effects of ancient monuments on human consciousness, which involved sleeping out at places like this and recording your dreams. It was how she got killed.’
Callard stepped back from the stones. ‘Here?’
‘I don’t think she was killed here. They found her body in a shallow grave, a co-worker at the centre and a police detective, Bobby Maiden … But that’s all over, the killer dealt with and all. You read about it. Everybody read about it.’
‘But this is why you came back here, to work? To be near …?’
‘Or in spite of being near. I’d got to know Marcus, I liked what he believed in …’
‘Until now?’
‘I don’t know.’
Callard said, ‘You want me to leave.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know that he can help you. He has a lot of books and a lot of contacts. He’ll find out if any other mediums ever got stuck with a … presence … they couldn’t lose. He’ll find out how they handled it. But in the end, I-. Look, you don’t need to involve Marcus. He’s sick. Why can’t I help you?’
Callard blinked. ‘How?’
‘Practical stuff. Seems to me if there’s an immediate problem it relates to you and me and what happened the other night. Like, personally, I’m not gonna be able to rest until I find out what that was all about and what I did to that guy … who he was, all of that.’
‘Don’t go thinking that’s your problem. It isn’t.’
‘It is now,’ Grayle insisted. ‘Also, on the most basic level, I need to get my car back. So … what I figured … maybe you could take me over there this morning, while Marcus is poring over his files and phoning his mediums. And then when we get the car or … or we deal with that in some way … we could go over to Cheltenham, see this Barber …’
‘He’s in France.’
‘Oh.’
‘And I wouldn’t want to go back there.’
‘Isn’t that just the place you oughta go? He has to know stuff that could help you. Like suppose his apartment was like haunted — infested with this … this presence? How do you know he didn’t plan to unload the shit on you? Seffi, however you look at it, that bastard was holding out.’
‘And what do I do? Offer to give it back to him? No. It was a bad place. I couldn’t go back.’
‘Bad place? What’s that mean?’
‘Oppressive. I don’t know.’ Across the big, flat stone, Callard looked vague. ‘I’m just a receiver, a monitor. I’m not the whole computer.’
She turned her back on the stones, walked away to the new stile and the pathway down the hill.
Grayle followed, pausing to pat the capstone. ‘Wait there, OK?’
It was Marcus’s long-term plan, if The Vision ever made real money, to try and buy this scrubby field and this monument and then erect a pedestal with a glass case on top to relate the story of Annie Davies and the day the sun rolled across the hill.
The former dairy had four small rooms, including a kitchen with a hotplate and grill and a refrigerator. The living area was basic, with a pine-framed sofa like a child’s cot with the side down, a chair and a low table. Apparently, Marcus’s friend Andy Anderson, the nurse, had fixed this place up for him as a source of extra income. It was done out in her favourite colour: hospital white, bright and sterile, halogen wall lights reflecting the dazzling whitewashed stones back at each other.
The door to the bedroom was ajar. From the chair, Grayle could see Callard’s suitcase open on the floor; she hadn’t even properly unpacked.
‘I do expect a bill for the use of this place’, Callard said from the kitchen, ‘before I leave. You have sugar in your tea?’
‘Two. I don’t put on weight, I use nervous energy.’
She was, as yet, unsure about how successful the expedition to High Knoll had been. On the one hand, she was on the way to getting this basket case off Marcus’s back. On the other — disturbingly — she was less sure that Callard was a basket case.
Grayle said, ‘Uh, this may be simplistic, but did you ever think maybe a priest-’
‘God, no!’ Callard flung back from the kitchen. ‘Not having anybody gleefully wheeling out the bloody bell, book and candle trolley for me.’
‘But you wear the cross.’
‘It’s different,’ she said quickly.
‘I guess so.’ Marcus would understand that: the radiant symbol transcending all the dogma and the liturgy and the politics. ‘But there are other kinds of priests is what I was thinking. Guy we know … he has abilities in this general area. He’s helped people. I guess.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Hard to know how to describe it. But he’s had results.’
‘This is someone Marcus trusts?’
‘Uh …’ bloody prancing pervert, deranged deviant ‘… trust may not be the appropriate word in this instance. I’ll need to think about this. Look, should I tell Marcus we’re driving over to Stroud, or what?’
Callard came in with two mugs of tea. ‘I’m not entirely happy about it, but I can’t see an alternative. We’d have to go carefully.’
‘Naturally.’
‘I …’ Callard hesitated. ‘I’ve been thinking about Barber. And that party. There is another possibility. I’d forgotten about this, but we had a letter from the woman whose son committed suicide. Coral … Coral Hole. Asking if she could see me again. A private consultation.’
‘You didn’t follow up on it?’
‘Nancy sent the usual reply — I’m committed for the foreseeable future, but if she’d care to write again in six months’ time. They never do.’
‘So,’ Grayle drank some sugary tea, ‘if you were to get her address from your agent, maybe we could get some information out of this woman. How this party came to be organized, what was behind it, who was invited and why.’