by Phil Rickman
A unnatural quietness, then…
‘A wrap, I think,’ Jo Shepherd says softly. ‘We’re not going to improve on that.’
She’s with one of the cameramen, backed up into a corner by the window. There’s another one behind the false wall. Someone’s recording ambient sound. Outside the chamber, in a different century, the woman in the gloriously expensive red dress – her name is Meg – expels a whole lot of breath, turns to Grayle.
‘You haven’t got an aspirin or something?’
‘We can get you one in the restaurant. Do you wanna…?’
‘Nah, it’s OK. I know I haven’t eaten for a while, but I just felt muzzy-headed. That’ – Meg cuddles her arms – ‘was absolutely the spookiest thing I’ve ever had to do.’
She’s been contracted in the full knowledge that these pictures may never be shown. She’s a Londoner. Grayle thinks she’s seen her in commercials. Whatever, she’s been given a lot of work in reconstructions for HGTV documentaries over the years and can be counted on to keep her mouth shut and be philosophical if she doesn’t get to be a ghost onscreen.
They go up the steps, Grayle looking directly away, avoiding the stairs. She’s been told the Ansells’ apartment has been converted into two bedrooms with the bathroom and toilets in between. She hasn’t been upstairs to look. Nor does she intend to.
Outside, in the half-lit walled garden, Meg pulls off her dark wig, looks relieved.
‘Usually when you’re on to about the fourth take, it’s autopilot stuff, but in there it just got more and more uncomfortable. As if I was walking in someone else’s footsteps and she was… walking beside me. Resentful.’
‘Really?’
‘I know, I’m too impressionable for this job. I expect it’s just…’ taps her forehead, ‘up there. While I was waiting in the pop-up, I read another feature in the Sunday Times or somewhere about Harry Ansell and Trinity… I mean you can’t take it on board, can you? Both dead now, and none of it’s… you know, normal?’
As Jo Shepherd comes out, Grayle says casually to Meg, ‘Who do you think it was? Walking beside you.’
Frilly white cuffs slide back as Meg’s hands shoot up abruptly into warding-off mode.
‘What’re you guys trying to do to me?’
Meg laughs unconvincingly. She’s about to become another footnote in Grayle’s haunted house file.
There are three pop-up hotels, one more luxurious than the others, for the residents and senior execs, though from the outside they all look like big crates. Outside, while Meg’s getting changed in a ground-floor suite, Grayle accepts a cigarette from Jo Shepherd. Hasn’t smoked, bar the odd joint, since her teens, but with two days to go…
‘I’m feeling a bit bloody haunted, too.’ Jo’s kind of tomboyish, short curly hair and an amethyst in her nose. ‘Next time we record in there, it’s likely to be for real.’
This week, they’ve had two days of dress rehearsal, with the residents played by various Emilys and Jamies, hamming it up, and Grayle in her booth in the reality gallery interviewing people sitting in the chapel. She had a monitor in there, showing their faces staring into camera, but they couldn’t see her. The first time her voice faltered and she started coughing. Afterwards, there was a big forum discussion in Defford’s classroom-sized portacabin office, producers and directors encouraged to say what they thought didn’t work.
Tonight the first residents are coming off the plane at the Cotswold airport, blindfolded, assisted into windowless vans. Tomorrow night they go into the house, one by one, and recording starts as they meet one another. Then the rushes get edited and all the best stuff goes out from ten p.m. on Saturday, finally going live at midnight.
Grayle says, ‘Leo’s looking excited, but not in a good way.’
‘That’s normal. Between now and tomorrow night, he’ll be biting heads off. As soon as we’re rolling, an icy calm comes over him. That’s not in a good way either, but we get used to it.’
Grayle guesses Harry Ansell’s death has hit Defford harder than he’s showing. Maybe relying on Ansell – in the gallery, watching – making some disclosure that might alter the direction of the programme towards the end when the last person is alone in the house and the location is finally revealed. But the connection’s severed, no revelation. He’s on his own and there are things he doesn’t understand. That none of them understands.
Grayle smokes hesitantly, gazing out at the myriad lights of something halfway between a fairground and a small city. Or like a condensed and comparatively soundless rock festival site, and Knap Hall is the stage. Some stage: silent, unlit and cloaked, she feels, in resentment. Resentment has become tonight’s dominant emotion.
‘Gotta say I never imagined all this… the expense. How lavish it all is.’
Jo wrinkles her nose.
‘It’s all relative. We’re looking at twenty-four hours of quality television. Think what Hollywood spends on less than two.’
‘I guess.’ The wind’s getting up again. Grayle tightens the belt on her woollen coat, shields her cigarette. ‘This weather good or bad?’
‘Weather’s not a particular problem. We’ll be OK for heavy rain, snow, thunder and lightning – I mean that would be brilliant. The only problem would be, say, hurricane-force winds so that all this gets flattened, with only Knap Hall left standing.’
‘That would be, um…’
‘Don’t even think about it, Grayle.’ Jo swallows smoke, starts to cough. ‘I’ll go only so far with this stuff.’
After Ansell’s death, there had been nearly a week of heavy meetings, Grayle getting occasionally admitted to the core team, though Defford keeps looking at her like he’s not sure she should be there.
So how will this big suicide affect the programme, specially in the final stages? On one level, it will eventually make the whole thing more newsworthy, but there are questions of taste to be dealt with. Also the fact that the programme will be going out before the full inquest on Ansell is held. Defford’s spent some hours with the coroner’s people, forced to explain some of what HGTV were doing at Knap Hall. Taking Grayle along as his chief researcher and therefore an expert on the Ansells. As if.
Defford’s being immensely helpful to the cops in return for nothing about the project coming out through the police press office.
He hopes.
Now that Harry Ansell is too dead to sue, the tabloids have been indulging in some lavish speculation about relations between the lone-wolf publisher and his beautiful trophy wife. Why did she feel she needed to conceal her pregnancy from him? Did he know why, and was that what drove him down to the woods with a rope? There was a small panic when a Sunday broadsheet ran a feature with a big dark picture of Harry Ansell walking the grounds of Knap Hall with the house in the background and the headline: HAUNTED LIFE, LONELY DEATH. But it was all metaphorical.
The lonely death made a mess of Grayle’s schedule, too. Twice she’s had to postpone a meeting with Mary Ann Rutter, the writer, though she’s spoken to her on the phone – she sounds old but bright – and learned why there are no copies of Rogues and Roués of the Northern Cotswolds to be found.
Seems some far-flung member of the Wishatt family – in the US, Mrs Rutter thinks – got sent a copy. And she must know what some of her fellow Americans are like about their English ancestry. Oh boy, does she? Probably dining out on being descendants of a titled landowner with connections to Sudeley Castle. As distinct from a serial sex-criminal. So these descendants tracked down every copy of Rogues and Roués, which is so much easier to do now, with outfits like AbeBooks. And they bought them all. Every one left on the market.
And probably destroyed them. Mrs Rutter sounds amused, but she must be furious. Grayle decides to go see her tonight or tomorrow – that’s assuming Jo Shepherd doesn’t demand more rehearsal for her unwanted role as voice-link with the chapel. All the hours she’s spent getting abused by junior producers pretending to be Ozzy and Eloise – Let them talk, don’t interrup
t, Jo insists. Keep yourself in the background.
If only. Never totally going to trust Jo, after her revelation of just one day ago, about the last resident – Gifford’s replacement.
Oh yeah, the unnamed one now has a name – a name Grayle knows all too well. Could be that Jo Shepherd has been been sitting on this for months.
And yes, it’s all too plausible and explains precisely what Defford meant by his Orwellian reference to some residents being more equal than others. Just this one, to be exact. Whenever she thinks about it, Grayle feels like one side of her mind has shut down while the other, with sadistic glee, is putting two and two together to come up with some impossible prime number.
At seven p.m. precisely, she calls Mary Ann Rutter from her cabin to see if she’s free tonight, but it’s on answerphone. She leaves a message, and then, barely a second later, her phone rings.
Grayle snaps,
‘Underhill.’
A pause, then a light, lyrical laugh that goes through her like raw alcohol.
‘Now there’s authoritative. How are you, little Grayle?’
As the wind pushes at the pop-up hotel, a tremor ripples down Grayle’s phone-hand. Holy shit, he never changes.
‘I’m… handling things,’ she says.
And he laughs again.
‘A meeting,’ he says, ‘is necessary, I think.’
‘A meeting.’
‘Call it a date, I would, if I was normal.’
If I was normal. He always says that. It’s one of his signature phrases. He relishes it – not being normal. Like the house.
30
Skid beach
A ROADSIDE PUB out near Gloucester. New-looking, cheap meals, pool table. Lamps like upturned chromium barstools glued to the ceiling.
Not the kind of pub where even the lowest-paid TV person would ever dine, and nobody in here looks at all like one. Grayle’s finishing a small glass of orange juice at a corner table when the double doors open for this individual – and individual is the word – in a tweed jacket and skirt, pearls, gold and silver hair supporting a pink beret.
When they embrace, it doesn’t feel right, but when did it ever? He fetches her another orange juice from the bar and a pink gin for himself. She looks at him, refusing to be disarmed.
‘Just so I know, Cindy, you got my cell number from Jo Shepherd, right?’
He frowns.
‘Heavens, no. No one knows we’re meeting tonight. Not even young Jo. Make her anxious, it would. No, I did what anyone would do. Rang the London offices of the eccentrically named Hunter-Gatherer Television, put on my best New England accent and said I was your father. Your aunt is dead, by the way.’
‘Which aunt?’
‘Aunt Mia. All very sudden. They wouldn’t tell me yesterday where you were to be found, but eventually gave me the number of the mobile phone they bought for you. Still, fair play, she had a good innings, at ninety-eight.’
A wave of deeply reluctant affection washes over Grayle as his eerie rosy lips form an unsettling smile.
She holds her face still.
No more lies, no more evasion, no more bullshit.
His full name is Sydney Mars-Lewis and he is, of course, a national treasure. At least, he was, until he overreached himself on live TV and faded quietly back into the land of his fathers.
She has no idea how old he is, only that, for two decades, he made a precarious living as a ventriloquist. Cindy Mars with Kelvyn Kite – a red kite, rare at the time, even in Wales. A sinister-looking bird with a smart beak and pink-tipped fingers up its ass, whose derisive comments about the greed and foolish extravagance of Lottery winners came back to peck him when tragedy befell a jackpot-winning family.
Who could forget the Mirror headline: THE CURSE OF KELVYN KITE? Not easy to come back from that kind of publicity. Which explains everything. On the surface.
Grayle stares into his mild, friendly, inoffensive, duplicitous fucking eyes.
‘This is all down to you, right?’
‘All?’
He tilts his head and still the goddamn beret stays on. Grayle tilts hers to hold his gaze.
‘Marcus… me… you. The way it all mysteriously came together.’
Cindy looks stern, like some old-school headmistress in a black and white English movie.
‘Are you honestly telling me, little Grayle, that it never once entered your head to wonder why I was not amongst The Seven?’
Jesus, ‘The Seven’. Who else could take a shallow commercial enterprise and endow it with apocalyptic resonance?
‘Yeah, I know,’ Grayle says, ‘I should’ve figured. Nobody ticks the boxes better. Wounded, washed-up, in urgent need of money. One-time big name on Skid Row.’
‘Skid Beach, it is, to be more accurate,’ Cindy says.
*
Over the next half-hour, under those industrial lights, some big holes in her knowledge get cemented in. How, before Big Other was even conceived, before she or Marcus or even Defford knew anything about Knap Hall, Cindy Mars-Lewis was there.
The only one of them who ever met Trinity Ansell. Who walked around the house before it became the core of Cotsworld.
His eyeliner’s smudged. All the time he’s talking she keeps noticing that. Men, however abnormal, are rarely good with make-up.
‘Does Marcus know all this?’
‘Little Grayle, the thing always to remember about Marcus—’
‘He knows. OK. And the reason he kept me out of that particular loop is he… Oh, Jesus, I’m getting Marcus’s money?’
She’s pulling back from the table, chair legs screeching. The mobile starts ringing in her bag.
‘Not quite that simple,’ Cindy says gently. ‘I didn’t know, back then, what was involved. And Marcus… well, would he have lasted two weeks with these people?’
She ignores the phone, drags her bag to the floor.
‘And the house?’
Suppose it had been Marcus, not her, in the Ansell bedchamber… Marcus with the heart condition… Marcus who says ‘trust terror’. Trust it to do what? Take you out?
Cindy’s sitting motionless as an antique mannequin in an old-fashioned ladies’ outfitters. Watching her, watching it all sink in. Then he leans across the table, pushing aside his unfinished pink gin, bringing down his voice.
‘It’s an unreliable house, isn’t it?’
She nods.
‘I’m only a human being,’ he says. ‘Walked around, did some dowsing. Listened to my senses and the little voice whispering, ‘Tell her to get out, sell up, cut their losses, escape to a tax haven.’ Would she be alive now, do you think? Do we believe this nonsense?’
‘She died trying to get rid of a baby without her husband knowing. Died someplace else.’
‘Don’t interfere. That’s what Marcus says. Only human beings, we are, we don’t really have wisdom. Bigger influences than us at work. Might as well say, would she be alive if she hadn’t said yes to the part of Katherine Parr in a film? We could go on, couldn’t we? At the end of the day, a determination to transcend the everyday has its risks, but when you’re very beautiful, very rich, very famous and you’ve pushed your talents as far as they will go, what’s left? Good works? Religion? Perhaps what she was doing might have turned the house around. Not impossible to alter the atmosphere by force of will. I don’t know. I feel inadequate, little Grayle.’
‘Are they both there… on some level?’
Her voice seems very small.
‘Who?’
‘The Ansells. Trinity. And now Harry.’
He doesn’t answer.
‘When I came back the second time,’ he says eventually, ‘it was during one of the Weekends. All frivolity and wealthy guests, a film star, a rock star and a band with lutes and virginals. As if she wanted to show me my ill-expressed misgivings were well off the mark. That she’d pulled it off. And there I am, smiling approvingly, with the sense of a funfair erected on a peatbog full of decaying matter.’
/> On the other side of the long room, two guys have begun a game of pool: snick, snock. Cindy tells her about the diary he asked Trinity to keep. How she’d make a couple of entries, put the diary in the post to him and then start another. He brings out his phone, thumbs through some photographed images of handwritten pages, turns the phone to face her.
I can see the hearth with no fire. The room is cold and there’s a blue light, a shaft of blue light bathing a low wooden bed. A truckle did they call it? Her eyes are closed, though her mouth is slightly open. And I know she’s dead.
She reads it a second time.
‘What is this?’
‘I think she’s describing a dream. About Katherine Parr? Probably. She came to believe, on no historical evidence, that Katherine died there.’
‘At Knap Hall?’ Which wasn’t even called Knap Hall back then – was called Dean Farm, or Quarry Farm, something like that. ‘Where’d she get that idea from?’
‘Seemed to make her happy. The idea of its being Katherine’s final refuge.’
‘Was she losing her mind? Was the house… doing something to her? Or her marriage?’
‘Dreams… may show us what, if experienced in our waking hours, would test our sanity. But, equally, dreams can strip away the buffers our waking selves use to absorb primitive fears.’
‘How long before she died did she write this stuff?’
‘Not long. Weeks. I wondered if perhaps she’d begun another in those days when she was alone at her parents’ holiday cottage. I even got her parents’ number from Poppy Stringer – the housekeeper?’
‘Wouldn’t even talk to me.’
‘Cast a peculiar enchantment, I do, over women of a certain age. Except for Trinity’s mother. I rang her parents to see if she’d left another diary. Tried to explain, but her mother was angry. Knew who I was and what I was – or what people said I was. Told me never to ring them again. Finally, I steeled myself to ring Ansell’s office, left my number.’