Night After Night

by Phil Rickman

  ‘What’s he gonna think when he hears you saying this about him?’

  They’ve agreed not to mention that Ozzy quit the project. That way this can, if necessary, go out tonight and no one’s the wiser.

  ‘You know what?’ Rhys says. ‘I don’t care. I’m willing to put up with being hated for a while if it saves him from himself. I’m only sorry Ashley wasn’t aware of his condition – which you’d think she would be, as a psychologist. Perhaps she just chose to humiliate him. For personal reasons.’

  ‘So I can take it you don’t’ – she has to ask – ‘think it was anything to do with the house?’

  He doesn’t even answer. He’s expressed no curiosity about the house or who might’ve lived there. Some journalist.

  When Grayle leaves – quickly, to avoid any noddies – she goes out by the front door. The door seen in that vintage edition of Cotsworld, all softly golden as the guests arrive, Trinity Ansell inclined generously towards them, like she’s about to offer a hand to be kissed.

  In the fog, Knap Hall’s stone looks raw and jaundiced. Jordan the gardener, pulling a bier-load of logs towards to the house, looks like he wishes he were someplace else. Grayle waits for him.

  ‘Thankless task, huh?’

  Jordan lets go of the bier’s wooden handles, wipes his hands on his tartan overshirt.

  ‘Bloody thing.’

  ‘Even I can tell it was never meant for logs. But, see, that’s your role, Jordan. Sinister bastard.’

  It’s likely he didn’t intend to smile. Encouraged, Grayle pulls a block of orange-coloured wood from the pile.

  ‘This safe to burn?’

  Jordan leans back against the bier, looks up into air the colour of cream of mushroom soup.

  ‘I don’t wind up that easy, Miss Underhill. You must know that by now.’

  ‘Else you wouldn’t still be here, right? See, I figured you might walk out that first night after Ahmed and Sebold called you a yokel.’

  ‘En’t such a bad thing to be.’

  ‘Least a yokel knows about elder?’

  He doesn’t reply.

  ‘What I figured,’ Grayle says, ‘two options: either somebody slipped a couple elder logs onto the bier, or you were told to do it.’

  Jordan nods.

  ‘One of them options, aye.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’s no big deal. You can find that stuff in most books on folklore, or from the Internet. Wouldn’t take much psychology to choose Eloise as a suitable target.’

  ‘And, of course, you – as a man of science – wouldn’t have a problem with that.’

  No response. When you see Jordan in the mist, this stocky, brick-shithouse kind of guy, you don’t see a man of science so much as a genius loci. The spirit of a place, the protector. Which is equally inappropriate; what would Jordan want to protect here?

  ‘You talked to Poppy Stringer recently?’ Grayle asks.

  He shrugs. ‘See her now and then.’

  ‘She, uh, felt some kind of obligation to the Ansells, as regards Knap Hall. Which clearly doesn’t extend to HGTV.’

  ‘You thought it might?’

  She shakes her head. What she was really asking was why is he still here? Really doesn’t strike her as the kind of guy who could justify becoming a joke on TV purely for the money. The knot garden? Doing it to watch over the knot garden he made for Trinity? Which she could see from above – as knot gardens are meant to be seen – from her apartment. Not quite enough, is it?

  She’s wondering what questions she might ask him if he was in the chapel, camera on, sound on, and right now can only think of one.

  ‘Jordan, do you really like being here?’

  The fog swallows it.

  61

  Pure, bright water

  PULLING ON HER woolly hat, belting her old blue coat, she walks back up the drive towards the TV village, looking more like a military base on a day like this. Suddenly, it’s the dead-end of autumn. The bones of the landscape are poking through the fog, the trees are skeletons in grave-clothes. She doesn’t remember ever feeling depressed before in quite the same way. The sense of loss is all-enshrouding, the sense of something that could have been thrown away for the sake of personal vanity. And it is vanity. Showbiz people, public people, it’s always vanity.

  ‘Doesn’t look any more hospitable, Grayle.’

  ‘Oh.’

  It’s Jeff Pruford, Trinity’s old manager… steward… coming across the tarmac drive with no visible limp, glancing down at the dull stones of Knap Hall.

  ‘The places we’ll come back to for money, eh?’ Pruford’s wearing a bomber jacket and tight jeans, carrying an overnight-type bag over a shoulder. ‘Going in tonight, to talk to your residents. Tell my story about the ghost in the phone. But with no names, no hints of location.’

  ‘He’ll get around to that.’

  ‘Mr Defford?’

  ‘He’s, uh, changing the direction of the programme. It’s what he’s good at.’

  ‘You don’t look too happy about it, Grayle.’ He falls into step with her. ‘Why don’t we go into Winchcombe for some lunch? When I’ve checked in.’

  ‘I would like that, Jeff, but I think they have things for me to do.’

  ‘Some other time, maybe.’

  She glances up at him. He has a thing about tired, scrawny women with slashed hair? He still has that soldier-cool. Does Defford think he won’t be recognized by people who knew this place when Trinity was queen?

  Entering the TV village, he looks around at all the trucks and cabins, the dish aerial.

  ‘Bloody hell. How many people you got here?’

  ‘Over a hundred. I’ll show you who to tell you’re here. But first, could I…?’

  ‘Anything for you, Grayle.’

  ‘The picture. In the phone. What did they really look like, those women?’

  ‘It was more like a painting, really,’ he says. ‘Trinity Ansell looked gorgeous. The other woman… didn’t look like a real woman. Least, that’s what I feel now. No vitality about her. Not like you.’

  His eyesight was damaged, in the bomb-blast?

  ‘Was she recognizable in that picture, Jeff? I mean, we’re talking about Katherine Parr, right? That’s the inference.’

  ‘Who I mustn’t mention by name tonight. Look, I’d be exaggerating if I said I recognized her, any more than you can recognize anybody from, say, an effigy on a tomb.’

  ‘She was like that? An effigy?’

  ‘If you mean pale and cold-looking, yeah.’

  ‘And resentful. You said that when we talked.’

  ‘That was the only strong impression I got.’

  ‘And Trinity’s mood?’

  ‘Funny one, that. I’m not great with words. Tremulous? All quivery?’

  ‘As if she knew the other woman was there?’

  ‘Wouldn’t like to say.’

  ‘Did you notice Harry Ansell that night?’

  ‘Harry, eh?’ Pruford stops next to the reality van, its door shut against the fog. ‘That was a bugger, wasn’t it? Him topping himself. Don’t know if it surprises me or not. If he was ever depressed, he wouldn’t even admit it to himself.’

  ‘What was he like that night?’

  ‘He was like some of the other blokes there. Or maybe more so. The red dress, you know?’

  ‘Go on.’

  Jeff Pruford looks both wry and reticent.

  ‘He was keeping in the background, the way he did. But – I might be wrong, and if I am, I’m sorry – looking to me like he wanted to tear it off her there and then.’

  No, he wouldn’t be wrong. Not this guy. He’d know.

  ‘Uh… they say Trinity was never really happy again. After that night. That banquet.’

  ‘I never said he looked happy about it,’ Pruford says. ‘It was just rare to see him betraying any sort of emotion.’

  ‘Like he wasn’t… quite himself?’

  ‘What was “himself?”’ Prufor
d says.

  When she gets back to her cabin, a document’s come through to the laptop from Kate Lyons. One hundred and twenty-seven people who recognized Ozzy’s lady. Who think she’s a dead daughter or a dead mother. Grayle opens a few – all the Angelas coming in now.

  They won’t all be basket-cases, some just people looking for something to shore up their crumbling beliefs, in these dismal days. They’ll follow Big Other to the end of the week and turn off their TVs feeling worse than if it had never been screened.

  Defford’s assuming – and he’s probably right – that the majority of his viewers will not be like this and think they very much got their money’s worth in terms of human conflict.

  But it’s just possible there’ll be someone else like Paul Swinton, from Ozzy’s Ahmed’s past. Glancing down the names on the list, Grayle spots one that’s a little familiar, not sure where she’d heard it before. She thinks it’s Welsh and underlines it as the phone rings.

  ‘Ashley Palk,’ Kate Lyons says crisply.

  Ashley’s cuts are superficial, which means they didn’t require stitching, but there are other wounds; Grayle can tell that soon as the door closes on them.

  The camera’s still in the sitting room where she talked to Sebold, but this time there’s nobody to operate it. Ashley has asked to talk first, unrecorded. She has minor dressings on her cheek, jaw and under an eye. Wearing a grey bathrobe, no make-up, she’s hunched into a corner of the deep sofa patterned with heraldic beasts.

  ‘I don’t know how far he would’ve taken it,’ she says. ‘I knew he was clever. I know he learned all that Wiccan terminology to send up his mother-in-law. I’m guessing he read up on those famous cases where a group creates a’ – she double-fingers quote marks in the air – ‘“ghost” and then people outside the group start claiming they’ve seen it. Maybe he was hoping viewers would ring in saying they’d seen the woman in the white mac.’

  ‘They may have. I’m checking. Uh… the perfume, that’s pretty conclusive. And the way he consistently followed the pattern of letting people drag information out of him. The ouija board… how’d you do that?’

  ‘That’s one of the things I didn’t want you to ask me about on camera. Sometimes you just have to wing it.’

  ‘So you didn’t know he was pushing the planchette.’

  ‘I do now.’

  ‘But you couldn’t really be sure with five fingers on there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK – and this is what I don’t understand, Ashley – you let him start to spell out the woman’s name – ANG, like it’s gonna be Angela or Angie. And then you decide it’s time to wind up the charade and you upset the table.’

  ‘No.’ She sits up quite sharply. ‘No, that wasn’t me.’

  ‘Ahmed?’

  ‘Him or his mate, Sebold, who was already annoyed at Helen forcing him to sit down with the idiots. I’m not sure of anything except it definitely wasn’t me. I wanted to know who Angela was.’

  Grayle nods.

  ‘Me too. I thought for a moment it might’ve been Roger Herridge. Angela’s the name of one of his flower-shop girlfriends. But then why would Ahmed give the spirit the name of someone who was far from dead? Unless he knew he was about to be exposed – which neither of us thinks he did.’

  ‘That was coincidence, I think. It was Roger who first suggested the name Angela, perhaps because it was so familiar to him.’

  ‘Can we go forward to the incident in front of the mirror, when Ozzy Ahmed finally blew? Can you take me through that?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  Ashley arranges herself on the sofa. She’s holding a brocaded cushion in front of her, like a teddy bear.

  ‘What did you think,’ Grayle asks, ‘when Ozzy was demanding to be let out of there?’

  ‘A wee moment of triumph, I suppose. Nearest I’d get to a confession. And then I thought, well, that’s just a personal triumph. Look how clever I am, you know? Wait till Wiseman and Chris French see this, and all the other shafters of charlatans. But where’s it really taken us? How happy is Defford going to be with me for taking out his star performer? And do we know what’s behind it? I wasn’t sure we did.’

  ‘So you decided to try and talk him down from the ledge, as it were?’

  ‘They made me watch it this morning. Pathetic, wasn’t it?’

  Grayle’s playing the scene in her head, recalling for the first time how it kept replaying itself spontaneously through half dreams. The mental tape jamming on one specific instant that she still isn’t sure actually happened as she thinks she remembers it.

  ‘How did you feel when he brought back his arm with the wine bottle in it? What did you think would happen?’

  ‘I thought he wouldn’t do it. Too laid-back. Not a violent man at all. Everything about him’s rather gentle, apart from his tongue.’

  ‘What did you feel like when the bottle left his hand?’

  Ashley’s cushion creases as her arms tighten.

  ‘Very cold, actually. Very cold and surprisingly… shocked?’

  ‘That a strong enough word, do you think, “shocked”?’

  ‘OK, frightened. I was very frightened.’

  ‘Frightened of Ozzy?’

  ‘Frightened of what he’d become, yes.’

  ‘In that instant.’

  ‘Yes.’

  In Grayle’s head there’s an image from the monitors of the expression on Ozzy’s face as his arm passes over his head. How it rapidly changes – only one monitor showing this – as if the lowering arm has wiped away the familiar half-smile and underneath it is…

  ‘Ashley, you were standing just slightly behind Ozzy as he threw the bottle. Were you also looking in the mirror?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You didn’t see his face in the mirror?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘You only saw the back of his head?’

  ‘I suppose. It all happened incredibly quickly.’

  And yet in slow motion, too.

  ‘See, if I was in that situation, Ashley, I’d want to know what I was dealing with. Like what was in his eyes. And his eyes were surely in plain view in that mirror.’

  ‘The room was dark. Just candles.’

  ‘But you’d the spent the whole night in candlelight, your vision would’ve adjusted. And the light collects in the mirrors, too, and reflects back into the room, which doubles the amount of light. Or is my science not up to this? My sister Ersula could’ve given it to you in whatever the light equivalent of decibels is. C’mon, Ashley, what was his expression as the bottle left his hand?’

  ‘You’re good at this, Grayle. Closing in on things.’

  ‘My old man never thought so. Go on…’

  ‘All right, there was a sort of greeny hue on the face. From the candlelight picked up in the green glass of the wine bottle, as it… That probably was what intensified it.’

  ‘Intensified it how? I mean, what did it intensify?’

  ‘The determination, I suppose.’

  ‘Determination.’

  ‘And the… the single-minded, the focused… malevolence?’

  A door opens. In the light, posh Scottish accent, the word sounded quite beautiful, Grayle thinks, like a slow cascade of pure, bright water over smooth stones.

  ‘Not a word you’d normally associate with Ozzy,’ she says gently.

  ‘No.’ Ashley’s gazing into nowhere, with no realization of what she’s actually saying. ‘That’s why m’ first thought was that it wasn’t his face at all. You know?’

  62

  The runes don’t work

  CINDY HAS HELEN alone again, in front of the fire with a pot of tea. Old friends, they are now.

  Ashley has not yet returned. Roger, bored and disillusioned, has gone to his room for a nap before the night’s recording begins, perhaps hoping something seductively spooky will invade his dreams. Poor Roger. Cindy would like to help him, perhaps show him some exercises to open up certain alcoves o
f his being, but he’s not sure that this, in the end, would be helpful. Roger has his own concept of the beyond, which this house might spoil for ever.

  ‘I’ve been day dreaming a lot,’ Helen confesses, sugaring her tea. ‘Not something I tend to do, much. Thinking about Diana and Althorp, how people connect to places. Hard to imagine anybody connecting to this place.’ She takes the tea to her cushion on the ingle’s rim, stretching out her legs, balancing the saucer on her knees. ‘There’s no love here. I mean you could feel almost sorry for it.’

  ‘Must have been attempts over the years,’ Cindy says, ‘to love it. To bring it alive.’

  Wishing they weren’t wearing personal microphones and he could tell her about his friend, Trinity.

  ‘What I feel, Cindy, is that you could pour in love by the bucketful, and it would all be absorbed very quickly and all you’d have left would be some… damp gunge.’

  ‘Ah, Helen…’ Cindy purrs at her perception. ‘Marry you, I would, if I was normal.’

  ‘Blimey.’

  ‘No, you’re right. Is that the house itself, do you think? Or something in it? Or someone?’

  ‘I don’t think it likes women,’ Helen says.

  ‘Or perhaps likes them too much. But does not love them.’

  Cindy feels a shifting in his spine; the house’s concurrence. Glances meaningfully at the false wall, where a mirror has been replaced, lifts a friendly hand.

  ‘Listen well, televisual folk. Wisdom, see.’

  They hate that, the TV boys. After four days in here, you’re supposed to have forgotten they ever existed. But he doesn’t forget and neither does Knap Hall, the name of which must never be breathed aloud this week. The house is irritated, injured even, by the television people, with their ubiquitous hidden wiring and their universal eyes. An intrusion, disrespect, a slight against its sovereignty. When Mr Ahmed put the bottle through the mirror, he was hurling it for the house.

  Or for what lives here. A spiritual life-form, low enough now to relish what Helen calls the ‘gunge’. He will not distinguish it with a human name, although he suspects it’s had several. Of all the levels in the house, this is the lowest, but its vapours rise, and we breathe them in and see what we would not want to see.