Mean Spirit Read Free Page A

you’re a big rig in a tiny country. You should make allowances. Asshole.
    In England even rural roads were now so crowded that driving had become small-scale and intricate, like macramé. OK, no comparison with New York, but in New York Grayle took cabs.
    Places like Oxford were on the signs now. But what about Stroud? Was this OK for Stroud? There were hills ahead, at least. Not big hills, but in England the further east you went, the more they lowered the minimum height for hill status.
    From behind, another horn was blasting her out. In her driver’s mirror she saw a guy in a dark blue van gesturing, moving his hand up and down like a conductor telling an orchestra to soften it up.
OK, what did I do now?
    It was three miles further on – Gloucester safely behind her, the blue van gone – when Grayle found out. This was when the clanking began, like she’d just gotten married and someone had attached a string of tin cans to the fender.
    All too soon after this delightful image came to her the noise became more ominous, this awful grinding and then the car was sounding like a very ancient mowing machine.
    Grayle pulled over, climbed out.
    There was a dead metal python in the road with an extended lump in the middle, like it just dined on a dachsund. She realized what the van driver’s up-and-down hand movements had been about.
    This was wonderful. This was just terrific.
    She looked around. Suddenly the British countryside seemed an awful lot bigger.
    The garage guy stood over the mangled exhaust system, doing all those garage-guy things – the head-shaking, the grimaces. Showing her how the pipe had apparently been attached to the underside of the car at one end by a length of fence wire.
Fence wire?
    Grayle said, ‘Couldn’t you just like patch it up and kind of … shove it back on?’
    The garage guy found this richly amusing. Wasn’t that odd: the world over, garage guys having the same sense of humour?
    It began to rain. Because her mobile was out of signal, she’d walked over a mile to a callbox, where she’d found the number of the local car repairer on a card taped to the backboard. Then walked all the way back to the Mini and waited another half-hour for this guy to arrive like some kind of knight in greasy armour.
    ‘Problem is …’ he kicked the pipe ‘… it’s not gonner be too easy finding one like this.’
    ‘You’re kidding, right?’
    She stared at him. Was this not the most famous British car there ever was? A
classic
car? This was what the second-hand dealer had told her when she bought it – quiet-voiced middle-aged guy in a dark suit, not slick, not pushy. Marcus had been furious when he heard how much she had paid, but the car had run fine, until now.
    ‘As you say –
was.
Not any more, my sweet.’ The garage guy took off his baseball cap, scratched his head, replaced the cap, all the time grinning through his moustache at the dumb American broad. ‘How long you been over here?’
    ‘Oh … quite a while.’
    ‘This car of yours …’ The guy gesturing with a contemptuous foot. ‘Got to be well over twenty years old. Maybe twenty-five.’
    He went silent, looked her all over, with that fixed grin. Over his shoulder she could see a copse of leafless trees and some serious clouds: the English countryside in March.
    ‘OK,’ she sighed. ‘What do you have in mind?’
    Anything. She was at his mercy. She should have been there by now. No matter how you felt about the practice of mediumship, you did not turn up hours late for an interview with somebody as notoriously prickly as Persephone Callard.
    The garage guy leaned on his white truck, pursed his mouth, sniffed meditatively. ‘Tow it in. I reckon. I could ring round a few of my mates in the trade. See what I can come up with.’
    ‘Right.’ She nodded. ‘OK.’ He had her. He was going to take several hours and then come up with something which, due to being a rare antique component, was going to cost—
    ‘Where you