Night After Night

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Jess Taylor.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The camerawoman you were to have spoken to. If Defford hadn’t decided to do it himself.’

  ‘Oh, the one who… saw something.’

  ‘In the main chamber. From behind the false wall. Put the cans on, I don’t want anybody overhearing. Plus, I don’t want to hear it again.’

  ‘Why did Defford have to interview her?’

  ‘Because she was under contract, one of the team.’

  ‘I see.’

  She doesn’t.

  ‘You will,’ Jo says.

  The woman’s evidently uncomfortable at being on the wrong end of a camera. Or maybe just uncomfortable. Her accent is London, middle-class. Her skin is very dark, African rather than West Indian.

  ‘Thought it was the log guy at first. Or the log guy’s assistant.’

  Defford’s voice: ‘He doesn’t have an assistant.’

  ‘Thank you for that.’

  She’s in the chapel, but with no mood lighting. This is bright and hard, for clarity. She’s very thin and fit-looking, sinews in her neck like piano wire.

  Defford: ‘What was he wearing?’

  ‘Could’ve been leather. Brown and worn. Some kind of boots. He had fairish hair.’

  ‘Where were the residents?’

  ‘Supper. In the room next door. I’d been told to get some GVs of the room while it was empty. Only it wasn’t. So I waited for him to leave. Which he did after a few seconds.’

  ‘So why would you think—?’

  ‘Because, Leo, it walked’ – her voice rising like a siren in the cans – ‘through the fucking wall?’

  No reply from Defford. Grayle turns to look at Jo, detaches one can.

  ‘Quite,’ Jo says.

  Jess Taylor’s glancing from side to side in the chapel. Not really liking it or what she’s here for.

  Defford: ‘And that was it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re saying you saw it again.’

  ‘Yes. In a different part of the room. Half formed.’

  Defford waits.

  ‘I… One hand, no legs.’

  ‘Take your time.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, Leo.’

  ‘Older than she looks,’ Jo says. ‘Eight years with Al Jazeera.’

  ‘So not…’

  ‘Not exactly inexperienced.’

  ‘I’m trying to get this right for you,’ Jess Taylor says. ‘Picture me on my own in my little bunker behind the false wall, where I knew nothing could see me. Hard to believe that at first – first time for me with two-way mirrors. But by then I’d spent a couple of days shooting people who couldn’t see me, so I was adjusted. But this…’

  ‘This was different?’

  ‘Oh yes. First of all, remember I’m seeing it through the camera. You always think you’re OK behind a camera. Invulnerable. You’re obtaining the shots, that’s the important thing. It’s how cameramen get killed in wars, obtaining the shots. What you see is not what gets you. I was actually saying that to myself. What you see is not what gets you.’

  ‘What you’re seeing is usually harmless.’

  ‘Usually. Certainly this… sort of thing.’

  Defford: ‘You’ve seen one before?’

  ‘My gran. I was about thirteen. It’s not uncommon for kids. ‘This was…’ Jess lifts a hand into shot. ‘Look at that. Still shaking. Don’t remember the last time that happened. These things… it creeps up on you, then it takes over everything. All your senses. Takes you out of yourself and into its place. Not like anything else you’ll ever experience.’

  Grayle stiffens. Yes. Yes, that’s how it was. Thank you, Jess. Christ.

  ‘You’re not going to use this, are you?’ Jess manages a wispy smile. ‘Or you wouldn’t be doing the interview. It’d be the American woman.’

  ‘Maybe we should do it again, then. With Grayle.’

  Jess takes the kind of breath that conveys astonishment moving towards outrage.

  ‘I said I’d talk about this once, Leo, and then never again. Nor am I going back in that room.’

  ‘Jess—’

  ‘So if you’ve nothing else for me, outside the house, I’ll be on my way. Just glad I’m not using my own kit. That camera, by the way’ – she’s half out of the chair – ‘you should get rid of it. And don’t trade it in. I mean get rid.’

  Silence. Then,

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘When I saw it again, it was suddenly fully formed. And unclothed. Walking through the candlelight, as if the candle was part of it. And it was this… this side of the mirror. My side. With me. In other words, there was no mirror. No wall. And the camera… the camera was utterly freezing. So cold it felt hot, you know what I mean? Like in the dead of winter when you’re trying to prise something out of the ice, and it freezes your fingers. And they go numb. That cold. The camera was that cold.’

  ‘You were frightened.’

  ‘Now what do you think, Leo?’

  The sound distorting as she gets up and it’s over.

  ‘Sometimes, Leo just doesn’t think,’ Jo says.

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Gone. I mean really gone. Gone back to London.’

  ‘He let her go?’

  ‘She’s a freelance. She gave him a full account of what happened—’

  ‘Very professionally. Fulfilling her contract.’

  ‘And then she quit. Grayle, I could not possibly be more convinced.’

  ‘No wall,’ Grayle says. ‘You notice that? There was no false wall there even last week. Let alone centuries ago.’

  ‘So… whatever it was lives in that room as it used to be. God, I never in my life thought I’d be having a conversation like this.’

  ‘And she’s right. He needs to get rid of that camera. And not switch it on again.’

  ‘We checked the rushes. Nothing. I asked Leo what we were going to do with Jess. He said we’re going to sit on it.’

  ‘He’s that stupid?’

  ‘I think he means we save it, for possible use at the end of the week. If it seems appropriate. We don’t have pictures of anything – he kept saying that – at the end of the day, we just have somebody talking about seeing something. Somebody nobody’s heard of.’

  Grayle stands up, slams down the lid of the laptop.

  ‘This because it doesn’t fit into the story so far? Because it’s a man?’

  ‘Because we don’t know who he is or how he fits in. An innocuous fair-haired man in leathers.’

  ‘You think he was innocuous? You wanna watch her again?’

  ‘God, no.’

  ‘What if I know who he is? Was. Is. Time we stopped backing away from this. End of the day, the worst that can happen to the credulous is embarrassment.’

  ‘We go and talk to Leo?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Grayle shakes her head. ‘Let him come looking for us. What I think is you need to fix up another meeting with Cindy. Any way you can let him see this?’

  She’s nodding at the laptop.

  ‘Might be possible, but it’d be a risk. The chapel’s going to be in demand tonight. We go live for the first eviction, and the timing of that’s still floating.’

  ‘Can we get him out the back? Outside the walled garden?’

  ‘If Defford finds out we’re going behind his back, it’ll be the worst of all worlds. I mean, OK, my world view’s turning upside down, but apart from that what’s going to happen? What can Knap Hall and a man with… yellow hair… really do? Apart from not giving us the kind of television we had in mind.’

  ‘Well, Jo,’ Grayle says. ‘Why don’t you ask Harry Ansell? Why don’t you ask Trinity?’

  That night, from the very top of the programme, they screen Ozzy story’s, beginning with those ‘previously on Big Other’ moments when he’s behaving oddly in his bedroom, finding him knocking over candles at the end of Helen’s Diana story. Joining the audience next day for his memories of Reg, the
caretaker’s skull, and Cyril the paedophile. Ending with that intimate public confessional with Parrish. I’m a mess, Helen.

  Defford thinks it’s the finest programme he’s ever produced.

  He has several bottles of champagne brought up from the restaurant to his office, to which everyone will be invited.

  Just as soon as the first eviction’s out of the way.

  54

  Fruitcake thing

  FIRST THING TUESDAY morning, Grayle is called into Defford’s office, where Kate Lyons sits, hair bunned and skewered, behind Defford’s big desk, a printout in front of her.

  ‘We have a problem, Grayle. I’ve handed it over to the lawyers, but Leo thinks you should be in the picture.’

  ‘Eloise?’

  ‘No, Eloise is still taking it rather well. She didn’t make any friends and she says she’s getting better vegetarian food out here. No, it’s this. Have a seat.’

  At first, she thinks it must one of the viewers’ emails, backing up a choice of evictee, but, no, it’s someone using the same Big Other email address to alert them to what he says is a gross libel.

  ‘Obviously, it isn’t a libel,’ Kate says, ‘as the alleged victim is no longer alive. Even so, if it’s true it’s unsavoury and poses certain questions that we’ll need to answer sooner or later.’

  The name on the email is pafswinton4@btinternet.com.

  He doesn’t waste words.

  I was sickened watching your programme to hear the name of a good man blackened in the worst possible way. I am a former schoolfriend of Austin Ahmed and was one of the four boys who spent a night in the ‘haunted’ biology lab. As the youngest and most impressionable of the group, I doubt if I slept at all that night. It’s still very vivid in my memory, and I actually remember Ahmed going to the toilet in the early hours. He was scared, too, and was away no longer than about three minutes. I even remember looking at the clock.

  So hardly enough time to enjoy a hot chocolate in the staffroom and then administer a hand job to ‘Cyril’, whose real name was Dave Turner. Dave, who died three years ago, was still teaching at the school when I started work there myself as a maths teacher and we became good friends.

  I can tell you for a fact – and would say the same to his face – that Ahmed is LYING. If neither he nor you is prepared to put this right, I shall be obliged to refer this matter to the national press.

  Paul Swinton

  ‘What’s Leo say?’

  ‘He tends to leave these things to lawyers. He isn’t too worried. It’s Ahmed’s word against this chap, and Mr Turner’s dead. His friends would be expected to stand up for him. Even if he does go to the press it may not come to much.’

  ‘I dunno, Kate. When you look at this morning’s spreads…’

  Every national paper except the Independent and Morning Star carries the story from the very careful press release OK’d yesterday by Defford. Again there’s been no time to follow up the story. The tabs love it, the Express asking,

  WHO IS MYSTERY WOMAN

  ‘HAUNTING OZZY’?

  And in the Mirror,

  PSYCHIC? DON’T

  MAKE ME LAUGH!

  All of them pointing out that the comedian still refuses to explain the figure of an abused woman messing up his nights in the Big Other house. All the papers carry a quote from the programme – the singer Eloise accusing Ahmed of being in denial, Rhys Sebold suggesting he’s simply stressed out. A formal statement by producer Leo Defford emphasizing that a psychiatrist is standing by. Compared with all the world’s problems, it’s trivial stuff, but it’ll still have commuters snatching copies from rail-station racks. Days like this, Grayle wishes she was back out there, trying to write shit like this.

  ‘This guy Swinton,’ she says. ‘Don’t wanna get in the way of the lawyers, but would anybody mind if I tried to talk to him? Don’t imagine he’s exactly a friend of Ozzy’s any more, but maybe that’s what I need.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me,’ Kate says.

  Within an hour, Defford calls a key-people conference to tell them they’re going live for most of tonight’s programme. Raising both fists joined at the wrists.

  ‘We have a huge audience in handcuffs now. I think it’s time to live dangerously, don’t you?’

  Getting the applause he expects. Grayle starts to join in but her hands won’t connect. If Defford detected any hint of danger, no way would he consider going live.

  In her cabin, she Googles Ozzy’s old comprehensive school near Leeds, asks for Paul Swinton, but he’s teaching. He sends a message through the school secretary that he doesn’t want to talk from work but passes on his home number.

  In the restaurant, Grayle has a vegetarian breakfast with the newly evicted Eloise, looking surprisingly fresh-faced and relieved, seaweed hair tied back.

  ‘I guess you know where we are and everything?’

  ‘Funny.’ Eloise spreads hummus on a rice cake. ‘I met her once. Trinity Ansell. I hoped she’d ask me to come and play at one of her weekends. No chance. Too left-field, me.’

  ‘Probably just as well, when you think about it. If you had played here and HGTV found out – and they would – you’d’ve been dumped long before contract stage.’

  ‘Actually I’ve been close enough. In my druid days, a bunch of us once went up to Belas Knap. The burial chamber? Genuinely weird place. You go on the wrong day, it won’t like you. I mean really won’t like you. Go inside you’ll get wrung out. A guardian goes for you, my mate said. Maybe more than one. It’s an important site.’

  Grayle smiles. Knows all too well about guardians. Some horrific spectre, perhaps installed by human sacrifice when the chamber was first raised, however many thousand years ago, to protect the site. Dig up the wrong stone you’d see it in your dreams for ever.

  ‘They’re not a joke,’ Eloise says. ‘Trust me.’

  Problem is nobody does. After Eloise got voted out last night, they screened Max’s analysis. He was in a room Grayle had never seen before. A small room, which looked old, but in a Victorian way and could well be in a more modern part of Knap Hall. There were bookshelves all around Max, stacked with medical-looking tomes without dust covers and a few jacketed titles on psychic subjects.

  Max said some people, predictably enough in these cynical times, found Eloise a little flaky in a New Age, neo-hippy way. Others saw pro-pagan politics at work. Several contrasted her aggressive attitude with that of Ashley Palk, who was always polite and appeared to listen to other people’s points of view even if she thought they were insane.

  If Eloise was secretly delighted to get the hell out, she hid it well, biting her lower lip and leaving the chamber, raising a flaccid hand only to Cindy before picking up her guitar case.

  ‘There appears to be a consensus,’ Max said brutally, ‘that the Big Other project will probably proceed in a more balanced and considered way… without Eloise.’

  ‘Tossers,’ she said in the chapel. ‘I don’t hold out much hope for Britain any more.’

  But now she’s slept on it and confirmed that her crazy fee won’t be affected by an early rejection.

  ‘I was never in it to try and revive my career. Nobody wants esoteric TV programmes any more, and next to nobody buys CDs. I’ll have enough money to restore Alison’s cottage and buy some land. Plant fruit trees. Find a new relationship. You can really start again, can’t you, with a few hundred grand in the bank? I mean for two days’ work?’

  ‘Ozzy Ahmed,’ Grayle says. ‘What’s your verdict?’

  ‘He got me out, I think. I accused him of not facing up to what he knows.’

  ‘What do you think he knows?’

  ‘He knows what he wants. When you see a glint in his eyes, it’s hard and metallic. He’s here for a reason and it’s not money. In a way I like him. I even fancy him a bit. But I’d never trust him. Any more than I’d trust that house. Somebody said a cameraman quit?’

  Grayle says nothing. Eloise starts to unscrew a jar of honey. It re
sists her.

  ‘I mean this is not Big Brother, is it? Nobody’s going to want to be the last in there. Any more than you’d want to be alone in Belas Knap.’ She puts down the jar, looks up. ‘When I came out last night, they let me look at the house from the outside, and I just… I just started quaking. I don’t mean shivering, much stronger than that. And I’m thinking, hang on, I didn’t feel that way when I was actually inside. Not even when I found the elder. What’s that mean? Two days, and I come out and it’s like walking into the sunshine, even though it’s night and pissing down. What’s that mean?’

  ‘You tell me.’ Grayle picks up the honey jar, gives the lid a twist. ‘A lot of people lived and worked here when Trinity Ansell was here. You might say it got her in the end. You might even say it got Harry Ansell.’

  ‘They were probably good people in their way. They were certainly throwing good energy at it. Brought jobs, too. Maybe they were supported by their employees.’

  Grayle thinks of Lisa Muir.

  We wanted them to go on loving the place. We wanted them to stay. Like I say, it was a brilliant job. We thought Mrs Ansell was turning the place round. Just by being there.

  All that positive energy, and the dirt still gathering. Dead rats and birds and soil. She gets a sudden image, nothing mystical, nothing psychic, just dreadful, of a fair-haired man pulling a cart with big wooden wheels up the hill from the ruins of Sudeley Castle.

  ‘Forget it,’ Eloise says. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying.’

  ‘No.’ Grayle twists hard at the jar’s metal lid, feels sweat below her shorn hair. ‘Keep talking. You don’t love this place, do you? None of you. Most of you are just here for the money.’

  ‘Takes more than that,’ Eloise says. ‘Greed’s not good, but it’s not necessarily evil. And for some of us it’s just despair. I’m a fruitcake, sure, but when we were doing House Wizard I picked up evil in a few places. And again at Alison’s cottage. She was murdered, I know that. I’d walk through that village and I’d know the people who torched her house – the killers – were there. Just like when I looked back at the house last night, I knew, for the first time I knew what it meant when they say your flesh creeps.’