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.