by Phil Rickman
Defford grunts and quickly pulls out his finger, like someone has tried to grab it from the other side.
‘Good-good,’ he says.
Grayle sighs.
‘Leo—’
‘You’re asking what’s the programme in development? Right, then.’ Slaps his hands together. ‘We have a commission from Channel 4 for a series scheduled for late autumn, to run for a week. Seven or eight editions, ninety minutes, maybe, through midnight.’
‘OK.’
‘You might’ve seen a particular show where people who don’t know one another are locked up together. In a place full of cameras which record all their movements, all their interaction. All their arguments and embarrassment and mutual hostility.’
He waits. For Grayle, the truth starts to dawn, and the dawn is clouded with dismay.
‘The holes are for cameras?’
It’s like he hasn’t heard.
‘These people don’t have much, if anything, in common. And as the days go by they get increasingly annoyed with one another. Talk about the others behind their backs. Scabs get scratched, small disagreements escalate into bitterness, even rage. The atmosphere’s thick with paranoia and insecurity, because they know that their every reaction is being judged by millions of viewers, who—’
‘Mr Defford, are we talking about—?’
‘—who have the power to punish them. The viewers love that. Even more when the people they’re punishing have famous faces.’
Shit, shit, shit. They were all thinking Most Haunted and it’s so much worse. It’s like the walls of the big room are contracting, closing in on her like some medieval mechanism for the disposal of prisoners. Get me out of here.
12
All the reasons to be afraid
GRAYLE SHUTS HER eyes on an anguish it makes no sense to conceal. Opens them on Defford smiling, comfortably wedged in the corner by the door.
‘Go on, then, Grayle. Say it.’
‘Big Brother?’
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘It isn’t. Big Brother, as you might recall, started on Channel 4 and ran for several years, making celebrities out of ordinary people and real celebrities look ordinary – periodically, they’d run a series where all the Big Brother housemates were already famous, from the world of TV, pop music, sports, whatever.’
‘Celebrity Big Brother.’
‘Indeed. It all got dumped when it lost its cutting edge, and was picked up by the more, er, populist, Channel 5.’
‘Leo, please call me precious, but I like to think I’ve become… well, a serious journalist, you know? And what—’
‘Bear with me.’
Defford puts up his hands, tells her it’s no secret that C4 have been looking for something new which would generate that same sense of mounting excitement – the tension, the unpredictability – that you got in the early days of Big Brother. But something deeper, more intelligent. More issue-led. If Big Brother was a hothouse atmosphere, imagine a coldhouse.
‘I don’t…’ Grayle hugs herself with sweatered arms, ‘… really need to imagine that.’
‘We’ll be getting the heating reconnected, but only as background. It’s no accident that the Big Brother House is always some modern module – cheap-looking, garish. Like a nursery school?’
‘Because the housemates have effectively become children again. No control over their own lives.’
‘It’s also full of two-way mirrors and false walls hiding the cameramen. So they can walk all around the action. We’re going to have to be much cleverer and subtler here, but we’ll do it, somehow. And we won’t be calling them housemates. Maybe settle for residents.’
Grayle thinks of the few times she’s seen the Big Brother show on TV, all those fame-hungry exhibitionists. Bad enough in an environment that looks like a kindergarten.
‘In Big Brother,’ Defford says, ‘they don’t have much in common. Here, they will. They’ll just have radically different attitudes to it.’
He strolls over to the window, three panes of leaded lights separated by the stone mullions. A smear of winter foliage through old glass.
‘We started off with the idea of two extremes. Uri Geller, who bends spoons by stroking them and talks about cosmic forces. And Richard Dawkins, geneticist and aggressive atheist who I believed wanted to have signs on the sides of buses saying, There’s no God – live with it. Or words to that effect. Obviously we were unlikely to get either Dawkins or Geller but you see where I’m coming from.’
‘You’re looking for people who’re gonna totally abhor one another’s entire world view?’
‘Radical differences of opinion are and always will be at the very heart of unmissable TV.’
‘People who, like, resent and despise one another?’
‘I’m looking for healthy argument.’
‘Living together here? Seven days, seven nights? Night after night?’
‘During which one or two of them,’ Defford says, ‘might appear to have had… interesting experiences. Which some of the others will mercilessly scorn.’
‘How do you know that? About the experiences they might… appear to have had?’
Defford smiles.
‘Because we’ve picked the right people.’
‘You already know who they are?’
‘We’re down to a shortlist. I’ll give you a copy. Confidential. When you’re sworn in.’
She looks at him. He doesn’t smile.
‘More binding than the Official Secrets Act. More sinister than the Freemasons. Trust me, Grayle, this is going to be the most talked-about television of the winter.’
‘God,’ Grayle says. ‘After three, four nights, they’ll be halfway to killing one another.’
And what a stupid, naive remark that was. Defford turns to her, eyebrows edging his snowy hair, lips twitching into a foxy smile.
‘You really think it’ll be that good? No, listen, I’m kidding.’
She knows he isn’t.
‘What if they just walk away?’ Grayle says. ‘The residents.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘What if they’re like, the hell with this, I’m out of here…?’
Defford looks unperturbed.
‘If they walk out, they don’t get paid. Or don’t get paid as much. And we’re not talking peanuts for this, Grayle. Think six figures, and for someone big enough it can reach seven.’
‘A million?’
‘Trust me, however bad it gets, nobody ever walks out.’
‘Shit.’
‘But quality shit, Grayle. Quality shit.’
‘Not what I—’ Grayle starts to cough; air’s full of ancient dust. ‘Not what I meant, Leo. It was an exclamation of… I dunno… on one level, it’s a hell of an idea.’
‘But it does need very careful advance planning. On Celebrity Big Brother, there was always a key instruction drummed into the whole team. Stay ahead of them. Always be at least one step ahead of the overpaid bastards. If we don’t always have a very strong idea of what’s going to happen next, the programme can easily slip away from us. And that must never happen. That’s why we need to know everything.’
‘Figures.’
‘We need to know… how they think… what they believe… how they’re going to react to a given situation. Not too much of a problem with the sceptics, but the others…’
‘The fruitcakes?’
‘I never said that.’
‘More than one kind of fruitcake, Leo.’
‘Grayle… as you can imagine, I had you checked out. I know that way back when you were in your twenties—’
‘Wasn’t that far back!’
‘—you worked for one of New York’s smaller newspapers, where you wrote a column which dealt with what I hope I don’t insult you by describing as pop spirituality.’
‘Right.’ Grayle nods wearily. ‘You don’t insult me.’
Defford tells her he was looking for an independent investigative jou
rnalist who was both sceptical and open-minded. Who didn’t automatically believe in alleged paranormal phenomena, but didn’t laugh at them either. She decides not to ask him if he knows Marcus Bacton. It’ll all come out at some stage. If she goes through with this.
‘By the time our residents arrive this autumn,’ Defford says, ‘this person will have learned more about them than their mothers know. More than their agents know.’
‘Agents. Right. So the people in the house – the residents – this is a celebrity thing?’
‘Some better known than others. But celebrity isn’t the only thing we’re looking for.’
All residents will be specifically chosen, he tells her, because they have a personal history of some encounter with the paranormal. Or a strongly declared belief, for or against. And if the believers claim to be experiencing something here, the programme will be looking at how their stories measure up against what’s known of the house and its history.
‘So you need to know all that,’ Grayle says.
‘Everything. Everything about this house that’s even been known or suggested or whispered about. I need the history and the legends and all the reasons to be afraid.’
‘But if you know, then surely they can also—’
‘No. They’ll know nothing. They won’t even know where in the country they are. They’ll be flown from London to Cotswold Airport. Voluntarily and comfortably blindfolded. Driven here in the back of separate vans, at night, arriving at different times. Mobile homes in the grounds where they’ll spend the night, before a briefing – individually – the following day. And then, at sunset, we’ll take them into the house, where they’ll gradually encounter one another for the first time.’
‘They’ll be completely disoriented.’
‘Absolutely. That’s essential. They won’t even have seen the house from the outside. Black plastic tunnel from the mobile home to the door. They’ll walk on their own from the twenty-first century to the sixteenth. The name Knap Hall will never be used. From the night they arrive, it’s The House. Nobody mentions Harry Ansell, it’s The Owner. The people who serve their meals and clean the place up are being brought in from London, so they won’t even hear any local accents. They’ll be confined to a set number of rooms, with all other doors locked against them. Access to the walled garden if they need air.’
‘Is that a proviso of Ansell’s? Part of the deal for letting you use the house, that it doesn’t get identified?’
‘No. We’ll reveal all at the end. But it’s why we rejected all famously haunted houses, any place that’s been in one of those spooky-Britain guides or any of the TV programmes or the Internet. It would just take one of them to recognize the location and we’ve lost it, so you’ll need to make sure none of them ever stayed here, maybe as one of Trinity’s guests or a friend. It’s also important they don’t have any clues about the nature of the haunting.’
‘When you talk about the end… what’s the end gonna be? Will the viewers at home get to vote on who gets evicted from the house and in which order? At the end only one person remains, not always the most admirable. That gonna happen here?’
Defford pinches his earring.
‘We’re still thinking about it. We want there to be a conclusion, of course we do. And essentially that conclusion should be whether the majority of people think – from what they’ve seen and heard – that ghosts exist.’
‘Big question.’
‘And the last person left should be the one who’s convinced them that there are such things as ghosts – or not. We’ll try to deter them from voting for whoever they found the most entertaining, which is not the point. And we have just over six months to work out how to do that. This is a big, long-term, high-budget operation, Grayle. This programme could be – and I’ll be honest here – the making or breaking of Hunter-Gatherer. A lot of competition now. Country’s full of insects with degrees in media studies.’
‘So what’s it called?’
‘What?’
‘The programme. Does it have a title?’
Defford grins, drops his arms.
‘I make no apology for this. We want millions of people to stay up past their bedtime.’
‘Sure.’
‘It’s called – what would you expect?’
‘I wouldn’t like to guess.’
‘It’s called Big Other.’
His laughter’s like a scattering of nails on the flagged floor.
‘That title’s our best idea so far. Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ll give you some interesting stuff to take home. But first – you were asking about Trinity Ansell. I want to show you one more thing.’
13
Holy Trinity
SHE GRABS HER coat from the car and they walk around to the back of the house, passing some outbuildings, most of them picturesquely old. Others are clearly quite modern, red-brick even, but these are mostly well screened by trees and bushes presumably planted by Jordan Aspenwall, the gardener who tried to frighten Lisa Muir.
Defford raises both palms against the brightening sky to describe the banks of monitors that will feed images and sounds from the house.
‘What we’re looking for now is a nice barn to put them in.’
‘So your guys won’t be in the house itself?’
‘Only the residents will be in the house.’
There’s a walled garden out back, which Defford says will be the residents’ exercise yard, and where they go when they need to breathe. It’s not very big and it doesn’t have much of a view, just directly to the top of the hill, where the Scots pines frown.
Up against the wall in the left-hand corner is a distinctive outbuilding. The stones in the ivy-stubbled walls are regular and, along with the lack of a timber-frame, suggest eighteenth century, even later. An exposed bell turns on an iron bar in its little turret, below which is a small round window and, below that, the door, which is Gothic-shaped, ivy-fringed. Grayle quite likes the look of it. As much as she likes the look of anything here.
‘Chapel?’
Defford nods. They’re standing on a small forecourt of stone flags. He has a bunch of keys, the size of jailhouse keys or castle keys. He’s tried three in the Gothic door before the one that turns and opens it into a dark cherry glow.
‘After you, Grayle.’
She hesitates, suddenly recalling Jeff Pruford: Putting her on a pedestal, that’s an understatement. If you ever go to Knap Hall, have a glance at the chapel.
‘Does Harry Ansell know what kind of programme this is going to be?’
‘He knows everything. Go on…’
Inside, she’s transfixed by the rosy stillness. There’s a narrow aisle with five pews either side, each long enough to seat maybe four people. At one time they must’ve faced an altar, but the altar’s gone, leaving only a flaky rectangular outline on the stones. Above it, a stained glass window in three panels.
‘Who built this, Leo? It’s not Tudor.’
‘No, it’s not. Somebody at some stage must’ve thought Knap Hall needed religion. For one reason or another.’
The light’s seeping like juice from the triple-paned window. From the centre pane, a robed figure of leaded glass faces you, offering a vessel in cupped hands. Supported by two other figures in the supporting panes, turned side-on. They stand in silence. Defford hisses impatiently and throws the bunch of keys in the air.
‘Obviously –’ he needs both hands to catch the keys ‘– there’s a shitload of stuff Ansell hasn’t seen fit to tell me. However, we have a lease till Christmas, which is all that matters.’
‘Is it?’
‘Fuck, no.’ Defford breathes out slowly, looking down at his trainers. ‘I’m ready to admit this is looking more complicated than I’d figured. I have a weekend cottage half an hour or so from here. We go to parties, the missus and me. We hear the goss. Tuned into the whispers, the nervous laughter. I did used to be a journalist, too, you know.’
‘Whispers?’
&n
bsp; ‘In your report you talked about Trinity’s obsession with Katherine Parr who died at Sudeley, aged thirty-six. Same age as Trinity. And the childbirth angle. We hadn’t noticed that. Inference is that something happened here to disturb her state of mind.’
‘Leo, I have no evidence that Trinity was obsessed with Katherine Parr. Only that she played her in a movie that didn’t do big box office, and that she liked to visit Sudeley Castle – maybe to get decor ideas.’
‘All right,’ Defford says. ‘Harry Ansell employed a young couple – mature students – to live here, for security reasons. While the house was being cleared after the hotel closed down. Even though they were being well paid, they lasted less than a week before giving notice.’
‘You’ve talked to them?’
‘I’ve talked to Ansell. He didn’t want to name them. But perhaps you could find out who they are.’
‘Me.’
‘There’s plenty of time. You at all psychic, Grayle?’
‘What, like I’m supposed to get my spirit guide to tell me who they are? I don’t think about it. Being psychic means a whole bunch of things, and it means nothing if you accept, as I do, that we’re all psychic to a degree.’
‘Just asking.’
‘This couple… you’re saying they say they… saw Trinity?’
He considers, fingering his earring.
‘I don’t honestly know what they claim to have seen. I think… that there could be good reason for viewers, late at night, to wonder if there’s just a possibility that something of the late Trinity Ansell remains in this house. Apart, of course, from… that.’
He’s pointing at the window. The stained glass has turned his skin psychedelic. Grayle looks up, rocks back against a pew-end.
Seeing what she was missing.
‘Oh my God, I was… I was thinking it was… like Mary Magdalene or somebody.’
But hell, no woman in the Bible has lips like that.
In all three glowing representations of Trinity Ansell, her eyelids are modestly lowered and she wears a semi-smile. Most of the cerise light comes from her dress. The cloak around her shoulders is a dark red wine colour. She wears a gold necklace with a ruby in it. Smaller Trinitys, side-on, are looking up at the big Trinity. The gold cup between her hands is like the holy grail.
