by Phil Rickman
He remembers someone – Marcus probably – sending him a copy of the Echo, Gloucestershire’s evening paper, with a picture of Knap Hall, grimly shot against the light under the headline HEARTBREAK HOTEL. Obvious, but the impact was undeniable, and there was an inset pic of Trinity at her most queenly, astride a handsome chestnut horse that used to live in the stables here and has now, apparently, been sold along with Harry Ansell’s hunter. Her hair was coiled under her riding hat, and she was gazing towards some invisible horizon, her lips parted as if in anticipation of a new beginning.
And now – yesterday, in fact – the second diary has arrived, like a spirit message.
The delay – all his fault. Trinity seemed to have been dissatisfied with what she’d written this time. Didn’t want to take it to her parents’ cottage, perhaps for superstitious reasons, so she parcelled it up, gave it to the trustworthy Poppy Stringer for safekeeping, to put away in her kitchen under lock and key. Weeks after Trinity’s death, Poppy finally unwrapped the diary, finding Cindy’s name on a piece of notepaper inside its cover and telephoning him. He told her he’d pick it up when he was in the area in a few weeks’ time, doing a gig at a comedy club in Gloucester.
And then the club closed down, the way they do, and – unforgivably – he forgot about the diary, phoning Poppy last week in the hope she’d kept it.
Dearest Cindy,
I’m so sorry you haven’t heard from me for some while. I’m doing my best but not finding this at all easy. There are some things it’s so hard to share, even with you. I read some of it back and think it just reads as if I’m mentally ill. Anyway, I’m going to wrap this up because I’m going away.
There’s more, but I don’t feel able to write it yet,
God help me.
With love
T
He’s driven across Wales to see Winchcombe church.
Now, satisfied it all exists as Trinity described, he turns away from the church and goes back to where he’s left the secondhand camper van he’s emptied his bank account to buy. On the way, he notes that there is indeed a Vineyard Street, just as described, dropping steeply from the town in the direction of Sudeley Castle.
He does not enter the street. The diary gives no clue to which of the macabre stone faces represents the horror that would not let dream-Trinity out of the street and put her in fear of violation.
It was his plan to go on to Knap Hall, see if he could get into the grounds and feel what might be felt there now. But there seems no point until he can make some sense of the grotesques – what they mean and in whose dark mind they were formed, all those centuries ago.
10
Hunter-Gatherer
THIS IS WRONG. Three times up and down the same hill lane, which the satnav insists is right. Three times, inching the Mini Cooper Countryman along like a ladybird on the spine of a leaf, and still she can’t find the entrance, so it has to be wrong.
Grayle likes to think she knows her way around the Cots-wolds, but today it’s like invisible walls have formed.
It’s still early – early morning and early March – and strands of white mist are snagged in the tops of distant conifers like sheep’s wool in barbed wire. The pale-green fields are swelling under a sickly-pink sky, and there are various communities of trees, some bare, some evergreen, any of which might be hiding houses.
But hotels are hard to hide. They have obvious gateposts and big signs. She didn’t ask Fred, who covered all the Trinity stories, thinking it was going to be obvious.
She gives up, pulls into the drystone wall and, feeling stupid and foreign, calls this Defford on her cellphone.
His London laugh is abrasive.
‘Someone should’ve told you, Grayle – there is a sign.’
Someone should’ve told you. Not him, obviously. And there is no freaking sign. Be there for eight, if you can, Defford said on the phone. If you can. Jesus.
He says, ‘There’s a sign to a prehistoric monument called Belas Knap?’
‘The burial chamber. Yeah, I saw that sign.’
And drove past it. For personal reasons, Grayle avoids prehistoric burial chambers in isolated spots.
‘And about a mile after that a turning to the right?’
‘I took it. I’m there.’
‘And then another turning that says farm entrance?’
‘Well, yeah, I saw that, too, in fact I can almost see it now, but it—’
‘When a large, expensive house is left empty for long periods, its location isn’t advertised.’
‘Oh. Well…’ Grayle nods to herself like a stupid person. ‘Right. I’ll be with you soon, then, Mr Defford.’
‘Leo. This is television. We don’t even remember last names.’
‘Right.’
Television. A medium well into a second century and so much of it cheap crap now, and they still think you should be excited by it.
She can see the farm sign from here. It’s quite small, on a post planted next to a metal gate in the drystone wall, where an avenue of trees steers what she took to be a rough track into bristly woodland. So the satnav was right. But it still feels wrong. A wrong thing to be doing. Something keeps saying this to her.
Yesterday, she spent ten minutes on the phone to Defford, finding out precisely nothing about the nature of his programme but a whole lot about what he’d be expecting from her.
She thought there’d be some procedure connected with switching from being employed by Three Counties to working freelance for HGTV but it just happens. Calling at a cash point this morning, to draw a couple of hundred, she found three thousand pounds had arrived in her account.
It’s like Defford thinks everybody in the whole world is working for him unless they specifically opt out.
And yet, from the first, she kind of likes him. If only because she’s so relieved she hasn’t run him down.
The uphill drive has been tarmacked, but clearly not for some time, its surface greased with last year’s leaves and over-hung with the branches of spreading trees, thickening now with catkins and stuff. And then, just around the final bend, there’s a wall of morning mist and this broad back, hunched in a canvas jacket, crowned by curly white hair.
Grayle, wide-eyed, lurches into the brakes, the car stalling maybe five feet from Leo Defford, who doesn’t move at all. An earring twinkles. When he eventually turns it’s in an entirely unhurried way, and she can see he’s lowering a medium-sized video camera to his chest.
He grins, and Grayle sees Knap Hall, revealed for the first time, sprouting out of his wide shoulders like massive, misty, golden angel wings.
She gets out of the car, shaking, as Defford spreads his hands.
‘No worries. Americans always drive slowly over here. Shit themselves on our roads. All these mad Brit bastards going like the clappers on the wrong side. Terrifying.’
‘Um…’ She holds on to the wing mirror. ‘I’ve been living here going on eight years now, Mr Defford.’
‘Blimey.’ Defford’s pale eyes wobble. ‘I had a lucky escape, then.’
Grayle nods dumbly.
‘Would’ve been less than auspicious, a broken hip.’ Defford offers her his stubby right hand. It’s warm but doesn’t linger. ‘So. What d’you reckon then, Grayle?’
He steps aside to uncover all of the frontage of Knap Hall in its shallow bowl, its mossy hollow below the pine-topped hill. The house, with its two distinct wings, is like heavy jewellery, made more interesting by verdigris. Its age is indeterminate, it’s just old. Its windows are sunken and its stonework is the dirty blonde of Grayle’s hair.
Defford looks lit up with pride.
‘All ours.’
Well, lucky us. Grayle shivers in the mist. Defford’s looking down into the camera, replaying some shots, nodding, evidently satisfied. She waits for him to look up.
‘Um, forgive me, Mr Defford… Leo… You’re saying you actually purchased Knap Hall?’
‘Leased it. For ten months. Place’s be
en on sale since last August. No interest. Not even a derisory offer. Amazing how quickly a house goes downhill when it’s been abandoned.’
Certainly true of this one. You wouldn’t immediately identify it as the house pictured in that copy of Cotsworld, where it’s floodlit at night, romantic and sparkling. It looks dull and unhappy, as if it’s pulling the mist around itself like a widow’s veil. Some of the trees don’t help. Too many larches. Nothing looks deader in winter than a deciduous conifer.
Defford says, ‘Even Ansell can’t afford to have a derelict pile on his hands until either the property market looks up or enough people forget about its… sorrowful history.’
He lifts the camera.
‘Been collecting some moody shots while I was waiting. There could be lots of ground mist when we’re all here in the autumn, but maybe not. Grab it while it’s there, I always say.’
‘Couldn’t you… you know… simulate mist?’
‘Wash your mouth out, Miss Underhill. Nothing about this production is gonna be simulated. No filters, no computer effects, no creepy music. That appeal to you?’
‘Um… yeah. I guess.’
‘The house itself, the exterior, we won’t see that – except maybe in silhouette, a few lit windows at night – till the closing moments of the final show. Can’t have it recognized. Last thing we need is crowds of teenage goths and bleedin’ pentecostal Christians with placards.’
She doesn’t understand, peers at him. The white hair is confusing, he could be anywhere between forty-five and sixty. His accent is the one she’s come to recognize as Bloke – upper middle-class English given a faux-Cockney edge by a man who wants to get along with everybody.
‘Um, is the plan that I just carry out research for you without ever finding out the nature of the project? Because if—’
‘Let’s go in the house.’
He turns and walks briskly back, shouldering into the mist which makes it look like he’s giving off a steaming energy.
She’s Googled him, of course. He used to work for the BBC in current affairs, a producer on Newsnight. Quitting to become the editor of a proposed Channel 5 nightly magazine programme which never actually happened. Defford emerged as a private producer, with a Channel 4 documentary deal. Wikipedia says he made a pile of money with a series of indiscreet films about the Royal Family for US cable TV, which financed his production company, HGTV.
Hunter-Gatherer. It’s a term for the nomadic, foraging society in which sustenance comes from wild plants and animals, as distinct from agriculture. It suggests a chancer’s life, but evidently it’s paid off. According to Fred Potter, Defford and his partner have a very classy weekend cottage in several acres down towards Stow-on-the-Wold and attend the cool parties – at one of which he seems to have heard the first whispers about Knap Hall.
With the windows down, Grayle starts the motor, crawls the Mini after him, feeling ridiculous. The track forks away to the left of the house. She parks and follows Defford round the side. Close up, you can see where the original Cotswold stone, the colours of an old teddy bear, meets the much more recent roughcast. Defford’s pointing out details as he walks.
‘Ansell wanted to demolish this wing, replace it with something more Elizabethan. Listed Buildings guys refused outright. Seems blending the authentic with the fake is verboten. Different stages of building must be apparent. How that’s interpreted is up to the individual, but some of these bastards are power-drunk.’
Grayle knows this from when she was living in a little old cottage, but she feels obliged to raise her eyebrows as they enter Knap Hall through a small side door.
‘This is an early twentieth-century extension, as you can tell by the comparative neatness of the stonework. I’m told we can’t touch it, how crazy is that?’
‘Right.’
They’re in a windowless stone passage lit by a slanting skylight bar of blue light, cold as a gun barrel. Not what she was expecting from all the lush interiors pictured in Cotsworld. Grayle shivers. In her haste to follow Leo Defford, she’s left her coat in the car. She rubs her hands together. Left her mittens, too.
‘So if someone, back before there were these regulations, had built some kind of flat-roofed, concrete extension that was like a real eyesore from outside…?’
‘Then they might be forced to keep it.’ Defford tilts a smile. ‘Not a problem, I’d imagine, where you come from.’
Hell no, we’d just pick out the really old bits, pack them in bubble-wrap and fly them out for reassembly on the edge of the Nevada Desert.
Grayle says nothing. Why ruin your nation’s reputation for irony-deficiency?
‘Only the servants actually came in this way,’ Defford says, ‘so it didn’t matter a lot.’
With the camera under an arm, he pushes open what is clearly, despite the metal studs, a fairly modern door, and they step down into a small, square hallway with one small Gothic window. Defford stops before another door, closed. This is clearly old, oak as hard as cast iron. There’s an age-blurred crest on the wall above it, and the ochre stones in the wall here are no longer uniform.
‘This is where it all changes, and we enter the house proper,’ Defford says. ‘You get the readies?’
‘What?’
‘If the money’s in your account, means you’re on the payroll and we can talk more freely.’
‘Oh. Yes. Uh, thank you.’
Defford puts a hand across her to the door, drops his stubby fingers to the wooden latch.
‘Good-good.’ He raises the latch and steps back. ‘After you.’
His woolly white hair is luminous in the dim, grey hallway. He looks impatient now, like a ram in a pen.
Grayle’s expecting the dumb cliché of an eerie creak as the old door swings inwards, but it’s quite noiseless. Beyond the door, there are two stone steps, down, and a musty, waxy smell. She thinks of candles and death.
Hesitantly, she descends, and it’s like…
… like when you enter a church sometimes, from a busy street, and the very silence, the depth of it, is somehow active.
‘Mr Defford, are you looking for an actual ghost here?’
‘One way of putting it.’
‘Can you say any more? What I mean is… is it, you know… is it her? Trinity Ansell? Is she what you want?’
Defford stiffens, then relaxes, shrugs.
11
The significance of holes
IT’S A BIG room, too big for a farmhouse, and parts of it are still sunk into shadow like the night’s reluctant to let go. The ceiling has saggy oak beams, wrinkled and paling in places. Oak pillars show where walls have been taken out, making maybe three rooms into one. More ancient oak is ribbing the stone walls – stone made flesh by the pink light strained through mullioned windows.
Defford is weighing the air in his hands.
‘Quite a dense atmosphere, yeah?’
‘You could carry it out on a shovel.’
Maybe because there’s no furniture in here, Grayle has the feeling of being inside the ribcage of some half-fossilized carcass. Which, for a vegetarian, is not a great sensation.
But Defford’s smiling, nodding his head appreciatively. This is clearly everything he’s looking for in a room, gloriously gloomy. Grayle gazes around, aware of her own heartbeat.
‘So this was…?’
‘A parlour. This is where the Ansells’ hotel guests came to relax after dinner. Take in the lovely old vibes. Isn’t there a picture in the magazine we sent you?’
Cotsworld? Grayle rocks back. This is that room…?
In the magazine picture, hazy candlelight is reflected in milky old window panes. Shivers up the velvet drapes and the wall hangings. Touches the chairs you want to sink into and the chairs just for looking at. The wall-wide tapestries, all deep reds, lions and fauns and unicorns. The portraits of Tudor ladies looking stoical and innocent, maybe with a view to keeping their heads.
In the photo, there’s a mature fire in the ing
le, reddened logs like open thighs. And, in front of it, half-smiling, demurely on a velvet cushion, with the flames around her out of focus like an aura… Trinity Ansell, her hair loose around her shoulders, her full lips parted.
Grayle’s shocked. It’s the same fireplace, dead. The same fat oak lintel, its underside smoke-blackened, greasy-looking. On the hearth below, a layer of cold wood-ash is congealed like old volcanic lava. She recalls Lisa on the frustrations of Mrs Stringer, the housekeeper: things would get messed about… Things would get dirty, very quickly.
Leo Defford walks across to the wall opposite the windows, which is all dark wood, thick slanting timbers like a huge wooden radiator, bleached in places to the colours of old bone. This is not panelling, too rough and must be a couple inches thick.
‘Originally ships’ timbers. Sixteenth century. Farmhouses were cobbled together in those days from what you could salvage. Wood from old ships, stones from abandoned castles and abbeys, that kind of thing. Now…’ Defford’s peering into the shadows. ‘Look at this.’
An elbow comes back and he suddenly stabs a forefinger at the wall of iron-hard oak, hard enough to splinter bones. Grayle gasps as the finger vanishes, up to the third knuckle.
An unexpected sliver of sun from one of the windows finds Defford’s earring and the momentary relief on his face before he hides it with a laugh. He’s wiggling his finger around in the hole. This looks to Grayle to be absurdly sexual, and maybe Defford realizes this; he grins.
‘Not a knothole, more like where a peg used to be. They’re all over the place. Holes in the walls, gaps and old splits in the beams. Which is terrific. Drilling our own might well bring us into conflict with the Listed Buildings guys, and we don’t need that kind of attention. Besides…’ He taps the oak. ‘Not easy drilling through this.’
‘No.’
In Grayle’s former cottage, you needed a jackhammer to hang a picture. But she’s still trying to work this out. The significance of holes.