She sat on the edge of the four-poster bed with her glass of champagne. So far, only her raincoat had come off. Not the jeans, not the baseball sweater.
‘Kurt, can we talk?’
‘I don’t …’ He gave this kind of exasperated sigh. ‘I don’t want to talk. I didn’t come up all those stairs for a fucking light conversation. Alice, I thought you were up for this.’
Grayle looked at the stiff shadow and laughed. ‘You big stars, you’re so goddamn presumptuous.’
Kurt laughed too, softly. ‘Hey,’ he whispered, ‘Alice, I wanted you from the moment you came into my hotel suite last night. You’re not the consolation prize, you’re my very special present and I would very much like to … unwrap you …’ His hands were on her shoulders now, lips close to her ear. ‘Snip the string, peel off the giftwrap, slip my fingers through the tissue-paper …’
‘Uh-huh.’ She stood up, at the same time picking up the champagne bottle.
‘Christ, Alice, come on … what’s the matter with you?’
‘I have another question.’
‘What?’ Angry.
OK, here we go …
‘Down in the banqueting hall just now, when you were talking about Anthony Abblow and Dunglas-Home, you said how people could be hypnotized to see or not see a ghost, right?’
‘You want to discuss fucking ghosts?’
‘Did you ever do that?’
Grayle moved slowly round the bed. Up from the festival site, way below, floated the windy rhythms of an Andean-type band. Through the window you could see lights coming on, on the fringe of the site.
Kurt said, ‘Alice, what are you talking about?’
Her foot touched Kurt’s pants, on the floor where he’d tossed them. She bent down slowly, keeping the champagne bottle from clinking on the boards.
‘Did you ever hypnotize somebody to see a ghost?’
Feeling for the pocket where he’d put the key. A key that size, it should be …
‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Alice.’
‘Well, like …’ she was being real quiet, in case a bunch of coins or something spilled out ‘… like you could say to someone — under hypnosis — you could plant some kind of auto-suggestion thing, so that every time they came into certain circumstances, like they entered a particular room or something, it would be there, this ghost. And it’d keep happening to them. Scaring the shit out of them. Until you hypnotized them again and took it away.’
‘It wouldn’t work,’ Kurt said. ‘You can’t make someone do something that would be repugnant to them or see something terrifying they wouldn’t normally believe in.’
‘But suppose they were the kind of person who …’ scrabbling at the pants. Got to be in a pocket. Got to ‘… who would not be that scared. Who would not think it was so weird …’
‘Like a medium,’ Kurt said.
‘I guess.’
‘You guess.’
The light blinded her. She dropped the pants.
Kurt Campbell was sitting up on the bed. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t erect. When she was through blinking she saw that the long key lay on the coverlet between his legs.
‘Uh … right.’ She breathed quickly in and out. ‘OK, Kurt, here’s what’s gonna happen. You … are gonna toss me that key. You’re gonna stay right there on that bed. And I’m gonna unlock the door.’
‘Really.’
‘Uh huh. In return for this consideration and in light of me perhaps failing to make it sufficiently clear that you were not gonna get laid, I will formally undertake not to write about any of this in the New York Courier or any other publication. Or indeed my diary. Hell, Kurt, I will forget about it.’
‘You really don’t need me, do you?’
‘Kurt, in other circumstances, who can say-’
‘Because you’ve just fucked yourself very nicely, haven’t you, Grayle?’
Silence. The Andean band had stopped. There was no audible applause, just the wind whipping the window.
‘What … what did you call me?’
Kurt said, ‘Gary recognized you at once.’
‘What … whaddaya mean?’ She backed up against the door. ‘Who’s Gary? I don’t know any Gary.’
‘He and a friend were visiting Seffi at Mysleton Lodge one night. You apparently became quite hysterical. Overreacted.’
Oh no. She saw the eyes through the holes in the hood, heard the cold voice, You … are dead. A numbness began to eat in. Oh, please God, no.
‘Naturally, he made a point of finding out who you were. But as he didn’t get any further than your name and the fact that you were American, it was quite a stroke of luck you turning up here.’
‘Oh …’ Felt like she was going to vomit. ‘Oh, dear God.’
‘Gary was going to have a chat with you earlier on, but I said, “Gary, the woman’s been driving me potty. I’ve just … I’ve really got to shag her, you know?” Gary was fine about that. He says, “OK, you’ve got two hours.”’
She closed her eyes. She couldn’t think.
‘You could’ve been so much less tense by now, you silly bitch. Afterwards, I’d have relaxed you. It could all have been so much easier for you.’
Grayle found that she was still holding the champagne bottle. She lifted it, hefted it like an axe.
‘OK. Either you give me that key …’ her hand was trembling; the bottle was almost full, champagne glugging out, splashing on the floor. ‘Or I hurl this through the window.’
‘So?’
‘Everybody’s gonna hear it. Everybody down there.’
‘No, they aren’t.’
‘Or I’ll smash it against the wall and I’ll … I’ll cut you up.’
‘No, you won’t.’
‘Yeah, I will.’ Don’t look at his eyes. ‘I damn well will. You … you better believe that, you asshole.’
‘OK,’ Kurt said lightly. He picked up the key and tossed it to her. It fell at her feet. ‘There you go.’
‘All right.’ She bent down, still clutching the bottle. Maybe he was thinking about what she’d done that night with the hedge hacker, what she could do to his pretty TV face with a broken bottle. She snatched up the key, poked around for the lock, glancing back at him on the bed, but not at his eyes.
He didn’t move. He just looked disappointed, cheated.
She found the keyhole. The key turned at once.
‘And don’t you come after me, you hear?’
‘Christ,’ Kurt said, ‘what do you think I am?’
And she turned the door handle, and she was out of there on to the little landing, panting with a mixture of fear and elation.
OK … so what she’d do, she’d go right down the stairs, but at the bottom of the tower she’d turn the other direction, away from the banqueting hall and the entrance hall; what she had to do was find the kitchen where that nice woman Vera was and maybe Cindy, also; or she’d get out the back way and if she couldn’t find Cindy or Bobby, she’d avoid the truck and get over a wall, run to a cottage or a farmhouse, and she’d call the cops, no messing around this time. So terribly small and sordid. Cindy was right. And Kurt, he was mixing out of his league; Kurt was no killer, but he’d downshifted, gotten involved, maybe out of greed, with people for whom killing was a small thing, a tidying up.
Grayle hurried on to the spiral staircase and went down three steps, and then stopped, in sick dismay, the stomach bile really rising into her throat this time.
Two of them.
Just like at Mysleton Lodge, only this time they were in uniform.
And not cops.
Part Seven
From Bang to Wrongs: A Bad Boy’s Book,
by GARY SEWARD
I done all right.
That’s what I always say. I mean, nobody, no matter how they spent their life, is going to say I done all wrong, are they? I’ve robbed people and I’ve hurt people, but most of the people I’ve robbed, well, they had it to spare, didn’t they? And most of the people I hurt, they done things what could not be tolerated in a civilized society, in terms of being too cocky and grassing up straight villains and whatnot. All you need to understand is that our world is a rigid and conservative world and we never got around to banning corporal punishment nor, indeed, the Final Deterrent.