‘A few like that? Were they always so clear?’
‘There’s ghosts and ghosts, aren’t there, Bobby? Some you hear of, it’s just a wandering light, no shape, no features. People who’ve seen this one, they could identify my great-grandad from old photographs. And did!’
‘You’ve never seen it?’
‘And never wanted to, Bobby. Never wanted to. Besides, it’s better coming from others, isn’t it? Old John Hodge, he’s doing no more than I am today — drawing attention to a murder.’
‘Why did the place become derelict?’
‘Well, it didn’t happen overnight. Abblow left — went abroad, it was said. Crole never came out much after that, although you’d apparently see his wife sometimes, on her own. When he died she sold the castle, and then it went through the usual things — a school, a hotel. Before this syndicate put in an offer, it was owned by Arthur Slater, the farmer. His dad, he bought it with a hundred and fifty acres in the Seventies. They ploughed round the castle.’
‘Why do you say syndicate?’
‘Well, I don’t know if it was or not. This young man, Campbell, he always makes out it’s his castle, but I do know Arthur slightly, and he reckons it was a Gloucestershire firm made the initial approach. Bright’s? Would that be it?’
‘How about Bright Horizon Developments?’
‘That’s it,’ said Harry without much interest. ‘Bright Horizon Developments.’ He finished his beer. ‘You got what you wanted, Bobby? Only I wouldn’t mind getting back. They reckon there’s Midlands television coming to film the festival taking shape and I wouldn’t mind getting my sign in front of the camera. P’raps they’ll want to interview me. Do you think?’
‘It’s always possible.’
‘I’m not a nutter, you know,’ Harry said. ‘It’s funny — my grandmother used to say it was a big joke in the family that one day her father was going to be the ghost of Overcross. Because he loved that place so much you couldn’t get him away. Dawn till dusk and then half the night, building up that estate from nothing. Part of it, you see.’
Vera, the cleaner from the kitchens, was a large woman with white hair tied up in a bun and kind of knowing eyes. You could tell, somehow, that nothing would get past her.
Grayle and Cindy sure didn’t. They went in through the kitchen door, round back of the castle. It didn’t look much like a castle this side, the door and the woodwork modern and utility.
‘You’re back again, Miss Bacton.’
‘It’s bloody cold out there, Vera.’
Wasn’t too warm in here. The kitchen was the size of a hospital ward and all white tiles. Vera said, ‘You’d like some tea, I s’pose.’
‘That would be splendid,’ said Cindy. ‘This is my assistant, Thornborough. And this is my poor bloody brother’s dog, Malcolm, who would appreciate a bowl of water and a chocolate digestive.’
Had to hand it to Cindy; he was good, could switch personalities in the blink of an eye. Right now, no way would Grayle make the mistake of addressing him as Cindy.
‘We got about ten minutes’, Vera said, taking this huge kettle to one of four sinks, ‘before the caterers arrive to criticize everything.’
‘Big dinner?’
‘The Victorians stuffed themselves silly.’
‘Great,’ Grayle said miserably.
‘Vera,’ Cindy said, ‘those removal men …’
‘Removal men?’
‘Bloody big van. Must be around somewhere.’
‘I never seen no van this end.’
‘Just that I could really bloody use a van that size, if it’s coming back. Got a load of stuff for the bastard stall, held up at Cheltenham station. Thought they might have a spare corner, and if Campbell was already paying them …’
‘They’ve probably gone round the front. Or using one of the side doors.’
‘Possibly. Would you mind if …?’
‘You have a look around, if you want,’ Vera said.
‘Excellent. Stay with Vera, Malcolm.’ Cindy crossed to a central door, pushed through, beckoning Grayle.
They were in a low passage with some narrow, cramped stairs. Servants’ stairs. A row of small bells on a bracket, for Barnaby Crole to summon the butler.
‘Quietly.’ Cindy mounted the wooden stairs. ‘We just want to know what they’re bringing and where they’re taking it and then we’re out of here.’
‘What do you think it’s gonna be?’
‘The furniture, of course. If I’m right, they want to recreate the room where Persephone Callard was introduced to the essence of Clarence Judge. They want her to do it again, see, under the same conditions. And this time she doesn’t walk out on them.’
‘They’d go to that kind of trouble? Transport the whole room? But that’s so crazy!’
Cindy paused at the top of the stairs, looked over his shoulder. ‘Is it?’
‘Look …’ Grayle hung back. ‘I don’t understand this, Cindy.’
Cindy stood above her in his tweed suit and his straw-blond wig now under a black beret.
‘That’s because, little Grayle, you are not a fanatic. This is about fanaticism. It’s also about ego. Egos big enough to want to survive death. The fanaticism and the egotism of Barnaby Crole and Anthony Abblow and Kurt Campbell and Gary Seward. Huge and cosmic, it is, and yet also so terribly small and sordid.’
And he turned and continued to the top of the stairs.
‘What kind of freaking explanation is that?’ Grayle yelled.
‘Oh,’ Cindy said.
He looked back down at Grayle. His eyes flashed: caution.
Grayle went up slowly and joined him where the stairs came out in a square hallway with rough panelling, blotched with old mould.
Kurt Campbell stood in a doorway watching her emerge.
And Persephone Callard, sleek in black.
XLV
Maiden watched Harry Douglas Oakley tramp off, with his contentious placard, to join his evangelical guardians on the edge of the festival car park.
It was mid-afternoon. He hadn’t eaten since leaving Castle Farm. It had started to snow again, flakes fine as flour dusting the windscreen. A few days ago, when he’d driven into Gloucestershire with Seffi Callard, it had felt like early summer.
He sat for a while in the cold truck, trying to form a steady picture from the confusion. It was like one of those magic-eye pictures, that short-lived fad some years back: find the Rembrandt inside the Jackson Pollock.
In no time at all, thanks to Harry Oakley, he’d established the connection. Fact: the purchase of Overcross Castle was the fruit of a collaboration between Kurt Campbell and Gary Seward, whose interest in spiritualism had become an obsession. Seward’s other obsession was his need to find the killer of Clarence Judge — because Clarence was part of Gary’s history, his yardstick of hardness. And because it was not safe for whoever killed Clarence to be out there.
Seward’s fervent, if irrational, belief that this knowledge could be attained through the employment of a good medium — the best medium — had led him to Persephone Callard, ex-girlfriend of Kurt Campbell. To conceal from her the involvement of either of them, they’d set up the Cheltenham seance, using Sir Richard Barber as a front.
Question: if Campbell had been so close to Seffi, why hadn’t he just asked her to do the seance, the way he’d asked her to do the Festival of the Spirit? As a favour, presumably.
What was the real relationship between those two?
(i.e. has she betrayed us? Has she betrayed me?)
Unanswerable. He tried not to think about Emma.
So … OK … the Cheltenham seance had ended in disarray but what it produced was convincing enough for Seward to target Seffi Callard, to do anything to get her back. Resulting in two killings.
And then there was the Riggs connection.
Maiden pushed his face through his cold hands. It was like a mad, holistic dream, unbreakable strands of his experience twisted into a pulsing, fibrous knot. Perfectly logical to the likes of Cindy, who always looked for great and abstract patterns, the Pollock beyond the Rembrandt.