by Phil Rickman
She stretches out her legs, easing off her shoes.
‘Thought you’d want his job?’ Cindy says.
‘Worse than that – I think he thought his managing director would want me in his job.’
‘He was probably right. Household name, you are. An asset.’
‘What nobody gets,’ Parrish says, ‘is you can still be a household name when the income’s completely dried up. People’re still pointing at you when you’re sitting on the scrapheap, and you find yourself smiling back at them, with a rusty car bumper up your bum.’
Cindy laughs.
‘You could do after-dinner speeches.’
‘Please, God, no. Not that, not ever.’
Grayle finds them kind of touching. Two middle-aged ladies, except one isn’t. Nothing is as it seems. Helen contemplates her tweedy companion through her smoke.
‘You actually gay then, Cindy?’
‘What?’
‘I’ve often wondered. I mean, there you are in your senior-secretary’s outfit. I remember you on the Lottery show in all your glitter. Are you? Or is it a double-bluff?’
One monitor shows Cindy up close, gazing thoughtfully into the bed of spangled ashes. Catches the twitch of his glossed lips.
‘Never really warmed to that word, to be honest,’ he says.
‘Gay?’
‘I appreciate the irony in it, of course, and “homosexuality” … well, that still sounds like a criminal offence. But “gay”, I think, has had its time. Always sounded too much like a squeal of petulant defiance. Look at us, we’re all so happy! You straights will never be as happy as we are! Reaching the stage, I think, where all that needs to be left behind. Too shrill for the times.’
Grayle’s nailed to the screen. Of all the questions she’s never liked to ask… Marcus, too, though she’s sure Marcus really doesn’t want to know one way or the other. Now, here’s Helen Parrish and Cindy, both well aware of the personal mics and the potential size of the eavesdropping audience, opening their hearts into the embers, like only the ghosts can hear.
‘Do you know that song, Helen, by John Grant? “Glacier”? Marvellously eloquent, profoundly melodic gay whinge. Its chorus extolling the pain of his situation. A glorious agony.’
‘You still didn’t answer the question.’ Helen says.
‘Well, you know, lovely, thinking about it, I’ve always preferred “queer”. Oh yes, queer, I am and no mistake. On every level.’
Helen Parrish laughs.
And Grayle laughs, too, delighted as Cindy and Helen sit in companionable silence, watching a log collapse, splinters like fireflies.
‘You gonna use that, Jo?’
‘Depends what it’s competing with. That’s the stock answer. I’d love us to use it, wonderful cameo, but it might just wind up getting saved for the out-takes programme when it’s all over.’ Jo spins her chair to face the full bank of screens. ‘Tomorrow’s opener goes like this: first half atmos and introduction of residents, and the core of the second half has to be the elder-wood sequence. Some of the shots of Eloise’s face before Cindy comes in – that really was magic. The kind of fear nobody can fake.’
‘I figured maybe you’d want me to get Eloise telling the story of the witch’s house. I was gonna—’
‘No need. We’ve shot a sequence of her at the cottage – didn’t you know that?’
‘No I didn’t. Like the rest of the background, I just wrote it up and handed it in. I know I’m only the researcher, but I’m starting to feel kind of resentful about all the stuff I haven’t been told about. Like half of this was going on behind my back.’
‘Only half? Hell, Grayle, we all feel that. It’s a totally paranoid industry. Don’t let it get to you, OK?’
‘Sure.’
‘Anyway, we bought some local news clips of firemen poking around in the smoky ruins of the witch’s cottage after the blaze. And Eloise with her commemorative sign, raging about the hunting set, looking like she’s completely lost it. Performing her Alison Cross song in a field. So quite a nice package on the backstory.’
She tells Grayle a senior director called Mike is already at work on the Eloise thread. They’re loving how it all comes back to fire. Mike will be following this angle all week.
‘Ozzy give you a nice out, with the line about getting carried out on the bier?’ Grayle says.
‘Yeah, I really like that. Ozzy knows what he’s doing. Could’ve been scripted.’
Jo comes out of her chair, offering Grayle a cigarette to take outside. Grayle declines. Jo tells her Leo wants to have Helen Parrish telling her Diana story tonight for the Sunday programme.
‘Maybe we could use the fireside sequence with Cindy there. At the end, just before we go live. Unless we have an embarrassment of riches. The angle with Parrish is whether she dares to believe. Whether she trusts her own senses. Is she going to come down on one side or sit on the…?’
‘Rusty fender?’
‘Ha! Get some sleep, Grayle.’
‘What time you want me in the morning?’
‘Twelve will do. We don’t plan to do much by daylight.’
Under a sparse but spiky rain, Grayle goes back to her room in one of the less-luxurious pop-ups, all lined up like outsize bathing huts. Strips and washes and puts on her ten-year-old, long T-shirt with the cabalistic Tree of Life down the front – relic of a previous life.
Walks to the window. Gazing out over the TV city that never sleeps, she sees, in the middle distance, what can only be Jordan Aspenwall pulling his bier up from the house. He would’ve had to wait until everyone was in bed before building up the fire, installing the fireguards, making sure all was well. As well as it could be.
Long hours for Jordan. She has questions to ask him and wouldn’t mind getting dressed again, but this doesn’t seem like a good time.
She wonders how it affects him, being called a yokel and a troll, knowing this will be on TV tomorrow night. Waits for him to come past but he doesn’t. Flattening her face to the window, she finally locates him sitting on the tail of the bier, parked on the edge of an area lit by security lamps which, she guesses, must be overlooking his beloved knot garden.
44
KP
MARCUS GRIPS THE metal shade of Anderson’s old black Anglepoise for warmth. The heating went off hours ago. In the heat of discovery, he didn’t notice, but now pertinent facts are emerging more infrequently and, at two a.m., he’s cold.
Not often he’s still around at this time. The old night nurse, Anderson, often prowls the early hours, claiming she can get more done when he’s out of the way. Now she’s in the kitchen making more bastard cocoa, or possibly tea to tempt him out of here.
But he doesn’t want to go, leaving the friends of Farmer Lucas still in hiding.
Bastards.
His desk is cleared of all but the book, Annals of Winchcombe and Sudeley, and his computer. Not much you can’t discover now in cyberland, if you have the patience, but these are not important people.
Like hell they’re not.
Malcolm’s sitting by his chair, bony head on his left thigh. Malcolm’s unsettled by all this.
‘Ten minutes,’ Marcus tells him. ‘Then we’ll go, and you can piss at your leisure all over the streets of Broadway.’
Lucas, Lucas, Lucas…
Too common a name. What were this man’s motives in the first instance? He think there might be money in a dead queen?
All Marcus has found out so far is that, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, this Lucas appeared to have farmed land at Sudeley Castle, probably living at the castle lodge, all of it owned at the time by Lord Rivers, whoever he was. The castle, on which Parr had spent much of her bequest from Henry VIII, had been wrecked during the English Civil War, left derelict, continuing to decay during Rivers’s time. Likewise the chapel in the grounds where Parr now lies in her showpiece tomb, fashioned as recently as Victorian days.
Whether the original tomb was trashed by Rou
ndheads or was just not built to last doesn’t seem to have been reliably recorded.
However…
In the summer of the year 1782, the earth in which Qu. K. P. lay inter’d. was removed and at the depth of about two feet (or very little more) her leaden coffin or chest was found quite whole, and on the lid of it, when well cleaned, there appeared a very bad though legible inscription of which the under written is a close copy
VIth and last wife of King Henry the VIIIth 1548.
This is from a 1783 account attributed to a man called Brooks, apparently an eyewitness to what happened at Sudeley the previous year, someone official. Marcus looks at the drawing of what Anderson thought looked like a longcase clock with small door that opened to a face that was a human face.
Mr Jno. Lucas (who occupied the land of Lord Rivers whereon the ruins of the chapel stand) had the curiosity to rip up the top of the coffin, expecting to discover within it only the bones of the dec’ed, but to his great surprise found the whole body wrapp’d in 6 or 7 seer cloths of linen, entire and uncorrupted, although it had lain there upwards of 230 years. His unwarrantable curiosity led him also to make an incision through the seer cloths which covered one of the arms of the corps, the flesh of which at that time was white and moist. I was very much displeased at the forwardness of Lucas who of his own head opened the coffin.
Marcus has read it four times. Seems bizarre that Parr was originally given such a cursory burial and then ignored by later owners of the castle.
As for the condition of the body after over two hundred and thirty years encased in lead, with just the earth below it, this is the level of preservation normally only associated with the remains of saints.
In the Annals, first published in 1877, he finds a poem attributed to a Mrs Clara Payne.
In Sudeley’s ruin’d chapel, lo! ’twas there!
Royal Katherine’s neglected tomb they found,
More than two centuries had pass’d while here,
Reposed her corpse within the hallow’d ground.
Yet time had not her lineaments effaced,
She seem’d as slumb’ring in Death’s tranquil sleep—
For perfect might her features then be traced,
So well in death, their form of life they keep.
Even more remarkable considering a report made to the Society of Antiquaries in 1787 recording that the spot where Parr lay in her shallow grave had been used for the keeping of rabbits which ‘made holes and scratched very indecently about the Royal Tomb’.
There’s also a tradition of an ivy berry falling into the opened coffin and a subsequent inspection revealing an ivy wreath around the head of the Queen.
However, Brooks seems to have returned to Sudeley for another look at the corpse, by which time the poor woman seems to have been, not unexpectedly, in a state of considerable putrefaction. The smell makes Brookes’s son, who was with him this time, ‘quite sick’.
Hardly surprising when you read about the lead coffin being opened several times by then.
‘Bloody tourist attraction,’ Marcus tells Anderson.
She’s given up waiting for him to come out, lowers a tray with a teapot, mugs, biscuits to his desk, nudging the Annals to one side.
‘Still be here in the morning, Marcus.’
‘It is the morning, and I don’t care.’ He stares down at the book as if its pages might start to putrefy before his eyes. ‘Don’t want to accuse anybody of something they didn’t do.’
‘Oh no. You widnae do that. Against your very nature.’
‘But, bloody hell, Anderson…’
Reversing the book, pushing it at her.
Again in 1792, the tomb was violated; the tenant then occupying the Castle, in the most incredible manner allowing a party of inebriated men to dig a fresh grave for the coffin. The details of their work are too dreadful to give or dwell upon; but the tradition lingers in Winchcombe that each one of the Bacchanalian band met with an untimely and horrible end.
‘Probably bullshit, the last bit,’ Marcus says. ‘All the same…’
‘If you’re thinking what I’m thinking you’re thinking…’
‘As there’d be very little left on the bones by then, no, I’m not. I’ve found another version on the Net suggesting all they did was turn her upside down. Having a laugh. I’m thinking back to the early days after that very first opening of the lead coffin. When she was, ah, fresh and moist.’
‘No.’ Anderson wiping the air. ‘I don’t wannae hear this.’
‘Abel Fishe is Lucas’s neighbour. Within walking distance. Both tenant farmers. Land might even’ve been adjacent. Lucas was obviously fascinated by his discovery. Who does he tell first? Probably not his wife.’
‘He tells his friend the notorious sex addict?’
‘They didn’t even have to be friends. A lot of people owed Fishe – Abel’s Rent? Equally, a lot of people were shit-scared of him.’
‘Marcus you are never gonnae prove—’
‘I’m not a historian.’ Marcus slams the flat of a hand on the desk, making the tray rattle. ‘I don’t have to prove it.’
45
Dirty linen
GRAYLE AWAKENS TO the sound of techies tramping through the mud, a dawn chorus of techie jargon. In the window, Saturday morning is seeping in through a sky like an old brown plastered wall.
She’s had maybe five hours’ sleep. The image in her head, detritus of a dream, is of a blackened log in a cold hearth. She feels isolation, a sense of betrayal. As she rolls out of bed, heads for the bathroom, something is coming together, the way these things do in the cold light.
Relating to the elder. A word she’s growing to hate. The viewers will watch that stuff tonight, thinking it’s a trivial issue. And it would’ve been trivial to virtually anybody walking into the house last night, had they even noticed what was on the fire. Trivial to everybody, except for Eloise.
OK. Grayle stands barefoot on the vinyl floor. If you assume it’s no accident that Eloise was the first person sent in, it suggests strongly that the wood incident was a set-up.
And if you assume it’s no accident that the second person in was Cindy, well that’s where it starts to smell. The whole thing is too subtle. Nobody ever asked her, as researcher, to find out the relevance of different types of wood when applied to fires.
In fact, you can’t imagine anybody on the HGTV team coming up with that idea. Too esoteric, too far out of the box.
Only Cindy would know about it.
Cindy who went in second.
Cindy the double agent.
Grayle spins the faucet in frustration, throws cold water on her face.
In the restaurant, she sees a couple of directors and an editor who’ve been working all night, cutting the rushes to show to Defford before they can go catch up on some sleep. She also sees Lisa Muir coming out of the plastic tunnel after delivering breakfast to the residents.
‘Oh,’ Lisa says, like she’s trying to remember where she’s seen Grayle before. ‘Er, hi.’
‘Lisa…’ Grayle’s making no effort to hide her no-shit mood. ‘I think we need to talk.’
‘Oh. Do we?’ Lisa’s baby teeth form a vacuous smile. ‘Sorry, I thought all that was over. Thought I was just being paid to serve meals and things, now. Am I wrong?’
Grayle spots someone beckoning her from the doorway. Jo Shepherd, wearing what looks like army kit. She sighs.
‘I’ll catch you later, Lisa. Don’t leave town.’
Lisa smiles at her like she’s some faded old person whose significance is waning fast, then walks away with a toss of the hair – something Grayle can’t do any more. Why is Lisa behaving younger than she is?
‘You’d better come and look at this,’ Jo says.
They’re alone in the live gallery amongst paper cups and illicit cigarette butts. Jo brings up a hard-disk menu.
‘Just in. This morning’s rushes. We were interested to see the individual residents’ reaction, waking up i
n the house. Mostly, nothing significant. Except… OK, look at this, tell me what you think.’
Ozzy Ahmed’s room. Room two, turn right at the top of the back stairs. Plain walls, but lumpy stone underneath, deep-set window with the view-concealing boards.
A bell dinging, the bedside light coming on, an arm emerging from the duvet with an extended, mocking finger. Jo flicks forward to Ozzy standing by the side of the bed, wearing red shorts, a small paunch hanging over the waist. No personal mic. He walks over to the door, stares at it then tries the handle, but the door remains closed. There’s a key in the lock. Ozzy bends over, seems to be turning the key. Opens the door. Closes it, pulls on the handle. Scratches his head, his face serious. Stands still for quite some time, before turning back into the room. Seems to remember the camera, looks up into the wrong corner and smiles.
Then he goes into the bathroom.
Grayle shrugs.
‘What was that about?’
‘Don’t know. It was as if he thought someone was trying to get into his room in the night. Out of interest, I got one of the guys to flip through the dark hours in Ozzy’s room. No sound from him, no sound of anybody messing with the door.’
‘He’s not laughing, is he?’ Grayle says. ‘But then, deadpan’s his thing.’
‘It’s not deadpan either.’ Jo plays it back. ‘Watch his face. Not fear, but it’s certainly consternation. Like he’s thinking, Is somebody winding me up.’ She stops the recording. ‘OK, we’ll leave that. Here’s Ashley, not too long ago.’
They watch Ashley Palk as she bends over her bed, in her silky nightdress, picking up the edge of one of the pillows between finger and thumb. Disdain on her face as she pulls the pillow over the edge of the bed, lets it fall to the bedside rug, shudders, scowls.
Grayle turns to Jo.
‘What’s that on it?’
‘Stain. You can’t see it clearly. When Palk was up and about, we sent Lisa up to bring it down. Carefully. I’ve seen it. It’s faded now – not as dark as it looks here, but it was definitely there.’