Bobby Maiden began to weep.
Part Four
From Bang to Wrongs: A Bad Boy’s Book,
by GARY SEWARD
It amuses me when people say, ‘There ain’t no justice.’ In my world there is, every time. One thing we have always believed in is that people should get what is coming to them, by whatever means may be appropriate at the time.
Let me tell you the story of Billy Spindler.
Billy was the scum of the earth. A rapist. By which I don’t mean the kind of poor sod what goes down for seven years on account of getting a bit pissed and not hearing her say no. I mean a real pervert what gets off on degrading ladies. (As you may have gathered, I hate perverts of all persuasions, but that is by the by in this instance.) Another reason Billy was scum was on account of being a grass, and when he was nicked for sexually assaulting a schoolteacher, while wearing a black balaclava, on a building site at Chiswick, he was quick to take the Coward’s Way Out by striking a bargain with the police, as a result of which three of his neighbours were arrested in connection with a very clean raid on a branch of the Bradford and Bingley Building Society, as it was then known. Naturally, the whole community was up in arms about this, but the scum was hard to get at, without an element of personal risk, due to police protection, which was an outrage in itself.
Now, justice works in peculiar ways and you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. What happened was in some respects regrettable, but the law of karma does not require permission from the Crown Prosecution Service to take effect.
What happened was that, two months later, to the day and the hour, the same schoolteacher was raped by a man wearing a black balaclava.
Well, most of the police had been well choked by that deal with Billy Spindler and, alibi or not, there was no way Billy was walking away from this one. He was convicted in record time and done eleven years, and not very pleasant years by all accounts, mostly in Parkhurst, where he ended up in solitary for his own safety and even then discovered he was not totally safe after a screw was bribed to look the other way.
Billy Spindler learned the hard way that certain behaviour cannot be tolerated, especially if perpetrated by a pervert.
And in case you were thinking this was hard on the poor schoolteacher, soon after she received an envelope containing ten thousand pounds in clean money from ‘a wellwisher’. So, there you are, everybody was happy, apart from Billy Spindler, which is how it should be.
XXVIII
Awakening into half-light from the cell-like window, Cindy put on the bedside lamp and his eyes met the eyes of Kelvyn Kite, sullenly shambling in the chair by the wall at the bottom of the bed.
You cowardly old tart.
‘Yes, yes, I know.’ Cindy’s voice was morning hoarse. ‘You don’t have to rub it in.’
What the hell are you doing here?
‘I ran. I ran away, all right? Ran away, I did, from the bitter tang of the cold sea.’
You never learn, boy. Never realize when you’re on top. Always looking down, you are, into the darkness.
‘Leave me alone,’ Cindy said. ‘Too early for the inquisition.’
He never wore a watch. He guessed it was not yet seven. Too early, also, to get up and disturb Amy. He reached for something to read and discovered the small, stiff-backed book sent to him in Kurt Campbell’s promotion package: The Mysteries of Overcross Castle by G.L. Mirebrook.
A ring of Enid Blyton, that title. The facsimile edition from 1935 had fewer than fifty pages. Cindy flicked it open near the middle.
for Abblow, it appears, was both jealous and suspicious of Daniel Dunglas-Home who was, by this time, acquiring an international reputation arising from the extraordinary phenomena which were said to gather around him like moths to a lamp. Home was able to produce not only spectacular visual effects but also sounds, evoking in one instance the tumult of waves and the creaking of a ship’s timbers; he also was able to levitate and had been seen to float around the room; he could even, it was attested, assume the physical size and shape of a particular spirit, appearing, furthermore, to increase his own height by several inches.Crole had met Home at Malvern Spa, where the spiritualist was receiving the hydropathic cure for an illness of the nerves brought on by difficulties and upset in his personal life. In the two years up to 1871, Home was a regular visitor to Overcross, where he said he found the atmosphere most conducive to the physical manifestation of spirits.This, it should be remembered, was a period when spiritualism was considered by many to be a legitimate extension of science, and when science was advancing in so many other daring directions that many people believed it was only a question of time before mankind was able not only to prove the existence of life after death but to engage in regular meaningful intercourse with the departed. Such a development was felt to be imminent, and Anthony Abblow, who had practised for some years as a medical doctor, was determined that it should be he, a scientist and scholar as well as a medium, and not the likes of Dunglas-Home with his ‘carnival tricks’, who proved the validity of survival on a spiritual plane.When Daniel Dunglas-Home ceased to be invited to Overcross, it was widely believed that Barnaby Crole had been ‘poisoned’ against him by Abblow, who had become intimate with Crole to the extent of being invited to set up his own apartment within the castle. It was here that the two men began to experiment in earnest — and in secret. Many were the rumours that circulated in Overcross and the neighbouring villages and even in Great Malvern itself, it being alleged that Crole and Abblow had experimented on animals. However, this was dismissed as nonsense by Crole, who invited the vicar and senior parishioners to dinner with Abblow and himself to explain that their activities were in no way irreligious and would be seen, when ultimately published, to have made a substantial contribution to the sum of human knowledge. However, nothing was ever published and the experiments seemed to have ceased shortly after the death of a gamekeeper, John Hodge, as a result of the misfiring of his shotgun, and the rumour that his ghost was haunting the castle grounds. These rumours persisted even after the departure of Abblow and the eventual death of Crole, who became a recluse but continued to make large donations towards the upkeep and development of the community.
Cindy smiled. How many people would be prepared to pay dearly to watch whichever medium Kurt Campbell had hired go strolling through the midnight woods attempting to have ‘meaningful intercourse’ with the restless spirit of Old Jack, the gamekeeper?
Hadn’t told little Grayle this, mind, but even as a shaman he’d always been a touch contemptuous of spiritualism. The shamanic way was to achieve intercourse with the elements and the spirits of the ancestors — in a more abstract sense — in order to attain continuity and oneness with the earth. The nurturing of a sticky relationship with a dead individual was unnatural and usually led to psychological problems. Indeed, something must have caused Daniel Dunglas-Home to have his nervous breakdown …
In fact, Cindy’s own research had indicated Dunglas-Home to be, for the most part, quite genuine — the Uri Geller, or the Matthew Manning of his day.
Or even, perhaps, the Persephone Callard?
Miss Callard. Yes. Cindy rose. Remembering also that he needed to buy some newspapers, he felt a plummeting of the soul.
Kelvyn Kite glared spitefully from his chair.
Grayle collected the Sunday papers and by nine was driving between the castle walls to find …
… still no Cherokee in the yard! Shit.