They were standing with Malcolm the dog in front of the tent, watching the build-up of cars and vans. Grayle was looking for a Jeep Grand Cherokee with a woman at the wheel. She’d already checked the cordoned off exclusive parking lot up by the castle. Was Callard coming here at all, or had Marcus got it all wrong?
‘She won’t give you away.’ Cindy lit a cigarette. ‘She wants an end to this. It’s been going on too long. Longer than she knows.’
‘What’s that mean? What are you saying?’ Puzzled by this new animation around Cindy. Everything he said seemed pointed and penetrating, like a needle teasing a splinter out of the skin.
‘I think’, he said, ‘that Bobby may be able to complete the picture when he returns. But ponder this, Grayle: the only purpose-built haunted house? What does that mean?’
‘Means they were ambitious. They were aiming to call down spirits at will. Scientifically.’
‘But how many ghosts is it reputed to have? You’d think a hundred, wouldn’t you? And yet … John Hodge, the gamekeeper. The sole apparition. Just poor John. Accidentally shot, here in the grounds, with his own gun. I wonder where, precisely.’
‘They probably put the damn toilets over the spot.’ Grayle glanced briefly over at the Portaloos. ‘You’re saying you think there’s a connection between the death of John Hodge and what’s happening now? Or is that shamanic intuition?’
‘If we think of Anthony Abblow as the Kurt Campbell of his day … a man whose interest in the paranormal had little of the mystical about it. A man who-. Something wrong, is it, Grayle?’
‘Sorry, I just saw …’ Grayle was staring at a big vehicle heading up the main drive towards the castle. ‘Cindy, you see that van? Wait till it comes out the other side of that clump of bushes … OK, you see the symbol on the side panel?’
‘A blue rose?’
‘Right. Well, this is probably nothing, but I would swear that is the same firm we saw taking stuff out of the flat we thought was Barber’s. In Cheltenham.’
‘You’re sure about this?’
‘I’m almost sure it’s the same company. It may not be the same van. I mean I wouldn’t recognize the licence plate or anything. Maybe this is the outfit everybody uses in these parts. Coincidence.’
‘You are saying this could be the van which departed carrying furniture and effects from the room in which Persephone Callard conducted a seance for Sir Richard Barber?’ Cindy’s eyes flared. ‘Grayle, in such a situation as this, there can be no such thing as coincidence.’ He clipped on Malcolm’s lead. ‘Come on.’
‘What about the stall?’
‘Would all these spiritually developed people help themselves to free copies of The Vision?’
‘Only if they haven’t read one before.’
Grayle followed Cindy and the dog up towards the castle. It looked bloated against the light.
‘My mother died earlier this year, Bobby,’ said Harry Oakley. ‘She always used to say to me, “The truth won’t come out in my time, there’s still too much prejudice. But perhaps before the end of your life it might.” So I promised her, you see, that one way or another I’d make sure it did come out. Not quite on her deathbed, but it was a promise.’
‘What did she mean by too much prejudice?’
‘Prejudice in his favour. Nobody in the locality would hear a word against Barnaby Crole. You see, not only was he the local benefactor, he was the only one there’d ever been around here. He built almshouses for the old people. Built the school. Turned a blind eye, the locals, out of pure self-interest, Bobby.’
‘So … how do you think your great-grandfather died?’
‘How much do you know?’
‘I’ve read that little book. It says he had an accident with his shotgun.’
‘Aye, and no-one’s ever going to prove otherwise now. I’d be happy, and I think my mother and her mother would rest in peace, if it was just accepted locally that they probably murdered him. That’s all we want.’
‘Crole and Abblow?’
‘They were doing experiments’, Harry said, ‘into what happened at the moment of death. I remember my grandmother talking to my aunt — in that hushed way they talked when there were children about — about Mr Crole and Mr Abblow coming to see their neighbour when he was dying. They wanted to be with him when he died, you see. Crole even offered to pay for the funeral, with an expensive memorial in the churchyard — oh, he was made of money was Crole. But they still wouldn’t let him go into the bedroom that last night because they knew he just wanted to watch what happened when the old man passed over. Watch the light go out of him.’
‘It was said they took animals.’
‘I believe it. Though that wouldn’t satisfy them for long.’
‘You think they experimented on John Hodge? Or did he see too much and they killed him to stop him talking?’
‘Oh, he’d already talked,’ Harry said. ‘Or his dreams had. These terrible nightmares he couldn’t properly remember. But he knew he was going to die, my mother said they were all convinced of that. By day he was very quiet and withdrawn. At night he’d scream. My grandmother remembered those screams and they disturbed her own nights all her life. That’s how bad it was.’
‘What were the actual circumstances of his death?’
‘They heard a shot and then Abblow was said to have found him in the woods with half his face blown away. They claimed he was unfit to move, so they made him as comfortable as they could on the grass, Crole laying down his fine jacket and Abblow tending him — Abblow was a doctor, you see.’
‘What year was this?’
‘Eighteen eighty-seven. This month. This day.’
‘This actual date?’
For an instant Maiden was aware of himself being vibrantly aware of the moment — as though he was standing behind himself and Harry Douglas Oakley seated at a round, mahogany table in the small, dark-panelled bar.
‘Those evil beggars,’ Harry said. ‘Myself, I don’t think they were tending him so much as prolonging his agony. Dragging out his death so they could study him and make him tell them what was happening. Perhaps they’d got gadgets attached to him.’
‘Gadgets?’
‘I don’t know. Like Frankenstein. They always had gadgets in those days. Kept them in the dungeons, most likely.’
‘The castle has dungeons?’
‘Well, cellars with thick walls. Nobody been down there in years. All the years it was derelict, it was well fenced off and barb-wired, and no-one ever went there because it was always private land. Except for my poor old great-grandfather. Who never went away.’
‘You mean his ghost.’
‘Aye.’
‘That was seen quite often?’
‘At one time. So it’s said.’ Harry looked down into his beer, as though the face of John Hodge might materialize there. ‘Poachers and so on. But even the poachers got nervous. The last time … well, that would be a young couple, staying at the Crown for a night. Ramblers, with backpacks. Walked into the pub at sunset, all ashy-faced. Strangers wouldn’t know, you see. Ninety-seven, this would’ve been.’
‘What did they say they’d seen?’
‘They’d found one of the paths through the grounds and they were getting as close as they could to the castle and up strolls a man in a cap, with a shotgun under his arm — so clear and sharp they thought he was a real, living person. And they stopped and wished him good evening and hoped they weren’t trespassing … and he walks within a few feet of them and never took them on and just disappeared into the air. Been a few like that.’
Maiden took a slow sip from his glass of cider. He was hearing Seffi Callard.
… certainly, in my experience as a medium, I’ve never seen anything quite so clear as this before. So fully defined. Such a physical presence.