by Phil Rickman
‘When you say getting back into history…?’
‘During the Elizabethan weekends, we all had to wear period costume. I had this… jerkin thing that never felt right. But when she was in a Tudor dress, it was like she was relaxing into it. I can’t explain it better than that, Grayle.’
‘Like she felt she was living in the wrong age?’
‘Not any more. At Knap Hall she was in the right age. When there was nobody staying there, you’d still see her wandering in the woods in costume, kind of. Long dress in summer, heavy cloak in winter. Wouldn’t notice you. Like she was out of it. Out of your world. As if she’d taken something.’
‘Had she?’
‘I doubt it. She didn’t drink much either, and she’d given up smoking. I noticed that. When they first came here she was a smoker, but after a month or two she’d just packed in, no fuss at all. Like it didn’t exist for her any more. And the music. She used to like modern folk music – Laura Marling, Seth Lakeman. And then you didn’t hear that any more, only this Tudor choral music. Thomas Challis?’
‘Tallis, I think.’
‘Whatever. It was piped around the house, quite low. Followed you around. I could’ve done without it.’
‘How did Harry Ansell feel about this?’
‘Not sure. He didn’t unload his private thoughts on the staff. Or anybody, I’d guess. Businessman, and he kept his business to himself. And she was his business. In all senses of the word. Whatever made Trinity happy. Putting her on a pedestal, that’s an understatement. If you ever go to Knap Hall, have a glance at the chapel. I’m saying nothing, just have a look.’
‘Do I get the feeling you didn’t like Ansell?’
‘I didn’t say that. Don’t you suggest I said that, Grayle, all right? I just got worried about her. The way she was becoming more and more withdrawn. Like she was fading into a tapestry. I don’t think she was eating properly. I think he should’ve done something, that’s all. To save her from herself.’
‘Was she sick?’
I never thought that till afterwards. I thought it was the house. Listen, I’ll tell you what I think you’re looking for, Grayle, but I won’t speculate about it. I think the Ansells dressed up that house to be what it wasn’t. Even when it was first built, it wasn’t posh. And when it got bigger it was only to accommodate… well, it was for bad lads, wasn’t it?’
‘I keep hearing about that.’
‘It was a charitable trust, I think. Providing outward-bound holidays for young offenders. Long walks and all that. Tire them out. Not enough, apparently. One of them raped a local girl. In the grounds.’
‘At Knap Hall?’
‘Brought her back and kept her there all night. Quite nasty, she spent some time in hospital. Look for a happy story about Knap Hall, you’ll be hard-pressed to find one.’
‘So when you said it was hard, meaning the house…?’
‘Who told you that? Never mind. Aye, I would’ve said that. Historic, but basic. But they made it into a small palace and it wasn’t meant to be, and that was… it was like when you see a dead person – a corpse – all dressed up in its Sunday best with the face all made up. Sorry.’
When she offers him another drink he shakes his head. He’s deciding whether or not to say something, looks down into his empty mug, begins to muse, and she notices his northern accent is more pronounced.
‘Soldiers… we’re funny buggers, like I say. Day I got my foot blown off, it was actually Friday the thirteenth. Didn’t realize till afterwards. I remember laughing like a clown when they carried me into the hospital and there’s this bloody calendar. This programme you’re making… won’t be taking the piss out of all that, will it? It’s not that funny.’
‘In all honesty, I’m not in a position to say. If it was my decision, no, it wouldn’t.’
‘All I can say… I’m quite susceptible to atmospheres, and I didn’t take to Knap Hall. But you don’t let a few misgivings about the feel of a place put you off when you’re offered a brilliant job by Harry Ansell and his famous lady, do you?’
‘You felt it was… unlucky?’
‘I felt it was angry. Didn’t like what had been done to it.’
‘So, um… when she died…’
He takes a mouthful of air, breathes it out, eyelids lowered.
‘I took the call – did they tell you that? From Harry Ansell’s secretary in Cheltenham. I had to tell everybody. Worse, in a way, than when one of your mates is being sent home in a coffin. And the implications. I think Ansell went back there three times, four at the most, and never for very long, and never to sleep. Without Trinity… nothing. Almost a shrine when she was alive, but then… get rid. Some folks are like that.’
He talks about how quickly the house was stripped. He was kept on to oversee all that – the valuable stuff taken out quickly, furniture sold to antique dealers. And then the place was just abandoned, except for a caretaker and a gardener. Regular police patrols for a while. He looks up, smiling ruefully.
‘But you want to hear about the red dress, don’t you?’
She gives him a small smile.
‘Aye. She loved that dress. They say she was buried in it. Or cremated, I’m not sure which – we weren’t invited, though I did attend the memorial service at Gloucester Cathedral. Anyroad, night she wore the frock, there was a group of American Cotsworld readers staying there and, although she didn’t like it, you could tell a few were taking pictures of her surreptitiously, with their phones.’
‘I’m surprised she even allowed phones into the, um, sixteenth century.’
‘Aye, well, that’s why the woman didn’t show it to her.’
‘A picture?’
‘On her phone. She showed it to me. An elderly lady from the Midwest or somewhere. This was the following day after breakfast. Stops me on the stairs. “Master Pruford…” – I was Master Pruford on the weekends – “Master Pruford, ah cain’t keep this to ma sey-ulf any longer. Couldn’t get a wi-unk of sleep last night.”’
She smiles at his western accent and Jeff Pruford smiles at the memory, but it’s fleeting. Earlier he asked Grayle if she’d be staying overnight in Cirencester and she gave him a wry no and handed over the cheque from HGTV. Although he’s asked for a raincheck on whether he wants to repeat the story for a TV recording, she can’t see he has any reason to string her along.
‘This lady… a very seen-it-all, matronly kind of woman, but she was one hell of a state. Didn’t want anybody else to see it, so we went down to my office and she brings out the phone, puts it in front of me…’
He places his own phone on the pub table, reverses it so the symbols are facing Grayle.
‘… and she’s like this, flipping over the pictures with one finger, half looking away and then she comes to this particular one and snatches her finger back and she’s looking over my head, anywhere but at the phone. So I’m looking down and at first I think it’s one end of a group photo. There was Mrs Ansell standing at the door of the dining room – after a meal, she always left before the others, which was a kind of queenly thing to do. And she’s standing in the doorway in that red dress, all right? Graceful, poised, a little wistful smile. I bloody wish I had it now. I asked this lady to send it to my phone, but she just said a very shuddery sort of no. I should’ve offered to buy the phone off her or something. What’s a phone to these people?’
He puts away his own phone. The pub is old, has uneven timbers in the walls, and they’re on their own in the shadows at the end furthest from the bar.
‘Here’s the thing,’ he says. ‘It was the only time while I was at Knap Hall that a real shiver went up me. Took another look, and I’m thinking double exposure? But, wait, this is digital, that doesn’t happen, does it? And anyway, the other woman’s…’
Pruford gives her a look that says he still isn’t sure he actually saw this and can’t believe he’s telling her.
‘I’m sorry, Jeff, which other woman we talking about?’
&n
bsp; ‘Another woman in another red dress. Might’ve been the same, but you couldn’t make out the detail. It was just like a sheen of red in the photo. Like an Impressionist painting. And her face… very pale. So pale it’s like parts of it have been eaten away.’
He stops, as though he’s thought of something for the first time.
‘Eaten away by the background,’ he says. ‘By the house.’ Smiles. ‘Take no notice of me, Grayle, I’m daft.’
‘You’re saying there are two women in the picture?’
‘The door’s open, right? Into the next room. It’s two linked rooms that were possibly the same room at one time, I’m not an expert on Tudor architecture. Doesn’t matter because all you can see through that doorway is darkness – that could be the camera in the phone, only picking up the nearest lights, no depth. But I remember there were a hundred candles lit in that other room that night – literally ablaze with light. Anyway, the second woman – she’s a little way behind Trinity – is in that darkness.’
‘Um – I should ask – nobody in the party was wearing a similar dress than night?’
‘You kidding? This was very much Trinity’s show. Nobody would dare. Would you have?’
‘I don’t do dresses these days.’ Grayle’s feeling unexpectedly tense. This guy, this ex-soldier with one foot, he would’ve gotten more impact out of this if he hadn’t admitted to being superstitious. ‘So…’
‘No mirrors. No double image. And you know how I know this? Because the expression’s different. Couldn’t be more different. The other face is very pale and not smiling. The lips seem to be parted, and the eyes are also very pale. Almost white. And they’re staring from out of the darkness.’
‘Staring at you? Staring at Trinity?’
‘Both. That probably doesn’t make any sense, but it would if you could see it. The eyes are… they’re taking offence. Big time. Somebody’s not welcome. That’s how I saw it. Call it hindsight if you want.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No. Stays with you, an image like that. I know it’s unlikely, a faint wisp of a woman putting out all that negative emotion. But I’m just— I think I will have another drink, Grayle. They do proper coffee here, do you think? No, no…’ Pruford’s out of his chair faster than you’d imagine for a guy with one foot. ‘No, I’ll get them.’
‘Just— Jeff, were you the only person to see this, apart from the woman who took the picture?’
He’s shaking his head.
‘It’s worse than that, Grayle. Couldn’t get that white face out of my head, and yet I was feeling very pissed off at my own… cowardice is not the word, but getting creeped out by a tiny image on a phone? I was going to have another go at that woman when she was safely away from Knap Hall, so about a fortnight later, when Trinity was not looking good, I looked up her details and called the number in the States and… she was dead.’
Grayle stares at him.
‘Arrived back in the States with pneumonia. Gone within a week. And if that sounds like I’ve made it up to support not having any evidence for you… well, whatever you want to think.’
‘So nobody else saw it.’
‘Nobody I know of saw that picture, no.’
‘What about what… what was in the picture? None of the staff ever see anything?’
‘Dunno. Frankly, I’d be surprised if nobody did. But, you see, we all valued our jobs too much to want to scare Mrs Ansell. I often had my suspicions about Poppy Stringer, the housekeeper, but you wouldn’t get anything out of her. Not even now. She used to work for the Marquis of Bath at Longleat – must have a stack of stories about him, but never a word.’
‘Um… Lisa – the scullery maid? She indicated that after the night of the red dress, something changed. For Trinity. That night she was… the word was “incandescent”. And then… maybe something soured?’
He shakes his head.
‘I wasn’t that close to her. Lisa was closer. She’d know.’
Grayle says nothing. Jeff Pruford’s leaning on the backrest of his vacated chair.
‘I wonder what she sees. If she still walks that place, what does she see? I mean, does she exist in the world she created, where Knap Hall’s all aglow?’
‘Different place now, I guess. Full of regrets.’
‘More than that, Grayle,’ Pruford says. ‘If she’s stuck there, God help her.’
February
6
Something touched me
FOR THE SHORTEST month, drab February can last for ever. The twenty-seventh is a silvery kind of day, and Fred Potter’s taken Grayle out to lunch at the new health-food restaurant in the Rotunda, a healthy four-minute walk from the office.
Significant warning sign. Fred doesn’t do health-food restaurants. Fred does burger joints and pubs, like the good old-fashioned journalist he is, despite being barely thirty.
‘What would you recommend, Grayle?’
He has the menu. She ignores it, looks him full in the eyes.
‘I’d recommend you get this over real quick and go grab yourself a bag of fries. Chips.’ She slaps her own wrist. ‘All these years and I still never get that right.’
She’s kidding, of course; it was one of the things she got right from the very first week she was over here, on account of chips sounds so much more healthy and innocent than fries. But Fred Potter and Neil Oldham, who owns the agency, seem to like it when the Americanisms leak out.
She stares at the sepia pictures on the restaurant walls, of ladies taking the waters at Old Cheltenham Spa.
‘We had another call from HGTV,’ Fred says.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘This time, Leo Defford in person,’ Fred says. ‘As distinct from an assistant producer just out of assistant-producer-school.’
‘You tape the call for posterity?’
Fred’s scanning the menu a second time, evidently looking for the least offensive item. He’s now chief reporter at the Three Counties News Service and may one day take over from Neil Oldham as proprietor. If it survives that long.
‘Defford was very encouraged by the stuff you gave them. He liked your style.’ Fred lowers the menu. ‘Grayle, this Quorn… does it actually taste anything like meat?’
‘Maybe with the right sauce and a little imagination. But then I don’t even remember meat. Where’s this going, Fred?’
‘He liked your objectivity. That you clearly weren’t trying to give him what he wanted to hear. Although you did. Very much so.’
That could be because nobody thought it worth telling her what Defford wanted to hear. One of the reasons she didn’t particularly enjoy this job. The other was that obtaining background material for a TV production company lacks what she likes to think of as the purity of journalism. Especially if you don’t know how it’s going to be used and really can’t imagine it being anything edifying.
‘And he has a proposition,’ Fred says.
Grayle doesn’t react beyond a wrinkle of the nose. Fred pours spring water into two glasses.
‘When he was paying us to get behind the Knap Hall wall of silence… that was just a fishing trip. See if the place was what they were looking for. Now they’re actually going ahead. With the programme. And the house.’
‘Good for them,’ Grayle says dourly. ‘Whatever it’s about.’
‘So Defford would like you to dig deeper.’
‘I’m already digging deeper. Trying to persuade the freaking gardener to talk.’
‘As part of the team.’
‘Team?’
‘He wants you on the team. In a research capacity. Which would mean a ten-month contract. And the possibility of more work if it goes well.’
Ah. Grayle can hear the swish of curtains closing on a career, like the screening of the casket in a crematorium as the furnace gets fired up.
Fred nods at the menu.
‘Whatever you’re having,’ she says absently. ‘Nothing on there died for us.’
‘Except when it was wrenched out
of the soil.’ Fred beckons a waitress in a vintage Laura Ashley apron, orders two Quorn risottos, sits back. ‘Have you ever heard a radish scream? As for a dying quorn…’
Reluctantly, Grayle smiles. Fred is Gloucestershire-born, from farming stock. He can admire an Old Spot pig without wanting to keep it as a pet. But she’s not going to make this easy for him.
‘TV experience,’ he says, ‘always looks good on a CV.’
‘Ten months of hack work under the direction of some emotionally retarded egomaniac looks good?’
Fred looks hurt.
‘All right.’ She sips some water. ‘Bottom line: would they be paying Three Counties or me?’
‘You.’
‘I see.’
It’s all she needs to know.
‘What can I say, Grayle? I’m so sorry.’
‘Well, it’s, uh… a refreshingly different way of having your ass detached from the premises without having to hear the word “fired”.’
Fred fishes for a smile, gives up, shakes his head. Tells her it’s no reflection at all on her abilities. Simply last-in, first-out. She knows how it is. And how much better it’s not going to get.
See, it’s not that there isn’t enough news around. News never winds down, human madness will always be a growth industry. Just that fewer people expect to pay to learn about it. Regional papers are closing down, radio stations getting their budgets minced. Blame the Internet, blame new technology. Nowadays, a journalist is any semi-literate asshole who can frame a blog, and a press photographer is someone in the right place with a smartphone.
‘Neil thought it would be better coming from me,’ Fred says. ‘He thinks you don’t trust him.’
‘Heavens.’
The one incontestable truth about journalism is that it makes you cynical. And the most cynical of journalists are those working for news agencies like Three Counties, picking up regional stories to sell to newspapers and broadcast media so they can be rewritten or voiced-up by the guys who get the bylines. Or, worst of all, fed into trash TV.
