by Phil Rickman
‘Tobacco Close,’ Jordan says. ‘That’s the road where I live. Down Winchcombe.’
‘But, sadly, unless Knap Hall was owned by some early tobacco baron, it’s not relevant.’
Jordan considers, breathing in deeply.
‘Sir Joshua Wishatt?’
‘He was a tobacco baron?’
‘Dunno ’bout that, but he owned Knap Farm.’
‘When was this?’
Jordan shakes his head.
‘En’t good with dates. You talked to Mary Rutter?’
‘Who is she?’
‘Mary Rutter. In Winchcombe. Wrote a book. Way back. Don’t think you can buy ’em now. Didn’t go down too well with some folks. Went talking to the old ’uns and some folks reckoned she was taken for a ride. All I can tell you is she wasn’t wrong about all of it. When I was a kid, it was kind of, don’t you go playing up near Knap Farm or you’ll wind up paying Abel’s Rent. Wasn’t my dad, said that, it was my… my mother’s dad. So it goes back.’
‘And what was Abel’s Rent?’
‘I don’t know the details except there was a bloke called Abel and he worked for Wishatt and you didn’t wanner be alone with either of them if you was female, and they used to say he was still there, kind of thing.’
‘Wishatt?’
‘Abel.’
‘Who said he was still here?’
‘I dunno. I en’t never been that interested in that ole stuff. Talk to Mary Rutter, I would, but don’t say it was me—’
‘Your grandfather told you about it?’
Jordan shakes his head.
‘I said enough. Talk to Mary Rutter. Just don’t say it was me put you on to her. Always a sore point, that book. She wrote a few others, but I don’t think she ever wrote about Wishatt again.’
‘And she lives in Winchcombe?’
‘Old cloth-weavers’ cottages, opposite the church.’
‘Thank you. Um… I’ve heard some ghost stories. About the house? I guess your grandad wouldn’t be…?’
‘Been dead years. He was a bugger for the old stories, if you bought him a glass or two. Me, I’m a man of science, Miss Underhill. Horticulture’s a science, and science got an answer to everything we sees and thinks we understands. All this spirits of the dead stuff, I got no patience with that, look. It’s just an old house. Old houses – well, be funny if there hadn’t been some bad things happen there in four or five hundred years.’
‘You remember the, um, holiday home for bad kids?’
‘Weren’t the best idea.’
‘I heard about that. Nineteen sixties?’
‘Before I was born, but it’s never been forgotten. Wasn’t properly thought out. These fellers, they think the countryside’s like a desert where you can’t do no harm running wild. Boys didn’t even get locked up at night.’
‘And one of them raped a girl. A local girl?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘Never the same again.’
‘The girl? Is she… still around?’
‘Dead.’
‘What… recently?’
‘Year or so after it happened. Brutal. Nasty. Couldn’t live with it. Took her own life.’
‘Jesus.’
Another reason for local people not to be too fond of Knap Hall. Jordan’s looking past her, towards the house.
‘They shut the place down within a year of it, and after that it was derelict for a good while. Rooms turned into dormitories, and the extensions, so it wasn’t much good for anything. After that it was a youth hostel, but I don’t think that did too well. He don’t look happy.’
‘What?’ Grayle turning, thinking he means the house. ‘Oh.’
It’s Defford, hands on hips, planted like a fire hydrant at the top of the yellow steps leading up from the house. He’s staring across, maybe at Grayle, battered leather manbag over a shoulder, and, no, he doesn’t look happy.
Something’s happened.
She pretends she hasn’t noticed Defford, thanks Jordan and heads off back to her cabin, repeating ‘Mary Rutter’ under her breath. ‘Mary Rutter, Mary Rutter’, like some combination of a mantra and a tongue-twister, until she can write it down.
Along with Abel.
And still there.
In the cabin the company cellphone’s bleeping on her desk. She’s supposed to take it everywhere, forgot.
‘I’ve been calling you for twenty minutes, Grayle.’
Kate Lyons, Defford’s formidable PA. In London today, surely, even if she does sound like she’s in the same room.
‘I went out without the phone, Kate, I’m sorry.’
‘I think you need to call Mr Sebold. He rang here an hour ago, very unhappy. Thinks he’s being spied on. People talking to his friends and former colleagues about him. You, in other words.’
‘Well… yeah. But that was weeks… months ago.’
‘He seems to think it’s still going on.’
‘Well it isn’t.’
In relation to her inquiries about both Sebold and Parrish, Defford gave her numbers for the more reliably talkative of his former colleagues at the BBC. It’s the part of the job she hates. Makes her feel her like a seedy private eye.
‘You could have been more discreet, Grayle.’
What? Like how?
Grayle says nothing.
‘Anyway, someone gave him your name. We think you should be the one to talk to him, put his mind at rest. This afternoon, not now, don’t want him to think he’s in control. Tell him this is something that happens to everybody going into the house. Be nice to him. He’ll be reassured to hear your voice.’
Her inane, harmless babble, in other words.
‘He’s not going to cry off,’ Kate says. ‘Not in his position. But he has had a difficult time in the past year.’
‘He’s given a few other people a bad time.’
‘Might be better not to point that out,’ Kate says.
19
Little sister
‘NO, NO, YOU’RE absolutely right, I’m not a believer in ANY GOD,’ Rhys Sebold is saying. ‘That’s my choice.’
Grayle’s listening, through cans, to his radio interview with Colm Driscoll, the junkie rapper whose life turned around after he became a born-again Christian. On the advice, apparently, of his dead great-grandfather, a Baptist minister in Dublin.
Dead, geddit? A feature of his rehab-dreams, this ancestor, and in one manifestation was accompanied by a man with a halo.
It explains why he’s on the list, but he isn’t going to have a great time in the house. Rhys – this was on a different BBC radio show from his controversial session with Ozzy and Eloise – is clearly getting exasperated.
‘Why do you think I should be? I think you’ll find that nobody is actually expected to have a religion any more, Colm. We know a good deal more science now, and the Spanish Inquisition’s long over. I’m simply expressing my amazement at your surprise that some people – not to say the majority of people – don’t believe that what you were experiencing was any more than a surreal, recurrent dream.’
Grayle’s learned that Rhys was unusual amongst radio presenters on a news station in that many of his questions appeared to be conditioned by his personal opinions. Isn’t BBC News supposed to at least appear neutral on everything? Rhys was into making it clear to guests where he stood on some contentious issue and then generously allowing them to argue with him for a short while before he cut in and slapped them down. Then, seconds later, he’d be like they were old buddies again.
She’s noticed he was often audibly hyper, talking too fast, and you’d have to wonder if he’d snorted a line of coke in the staff bathroom before going on air. Not unlikely in view of what happened later. However many noses Rhys has gotten up, you do have to feel sorry for him now.
A wide shadow falls across Grayle and she turns to see Leo Defford in the doorway. The strap of his leather manbag is diagonally across his chest, shoulder to waist, like a bandolier full
of bullets. The nearer it gets to transmission, the more aggressive Defford looks.
‘Well…’ Grayle pulls off her headphones, ejects the CD. ‘No love lost there, Leo.’
‘What?’
‘Sebold and Colm Driscoll. Do we have an established procedure for when two guys come to blows in the house? At what stage do we call the cops?’
Defford, face set like cement, jabs a thumb at the CD case.
‘Bin it.’
‘Huh?’
‘Always one, Grayle. You get to this stage, and there’s always one fucker who lets you down.’
Oh no…
She’s on her feet, staring at him, panic setting in. Sebold already pulled out because of her invasion of his privacy? Before she can even call him? This is not going to be a good day.
Defford unslings his manbag.
‘Bloke who’s promised the money to a charity, you don’t expect him to walk, do you?’
‘Driscoll?’
Relief throws her back into her seat.
Though actually she’s legitimately annoyed, having endured hours of the guy’s rhythmic rants on YouTube, talked to music journalists about his angry youth. Even dipped into some of the lurid gothic literature which coloured his material before Christianity.
‘One of these born-again churches,’ Defford says. ‘Fundamentalist. Restrictive. His so-called minister learns about us, tells him that all spirits of the dead are from Satan. And because he’s a recovering addict, Satan will see him as a target. Will delight in breaking him down in front of millions of viewers.’
‘That’s the kind of guy Satan is.’
‘So if Driscoll doesn’t want to wind up back on the smack, he needs to forget he ever heard of us. Primitive or what?’
‘What you gonna do?’
‘Already done it. Patted the little bastard on the back. There, there… course I understand, mate. Then bunged him ten grand for his junkies’ charity.’
‘You paid him ten thousand? For nothing?’
‘For his silence. We don’t want to be reading about this on Twitter, and we don’t want any lunatic-fringe churches trying to shaft us. At least, not before we’re rolling, when that kind of thing’s useful for publicity. We’ll get over it. Just that it leaves us seriously unbalanced, with all the weight on the sceptical side.’
Grayle wrinkles her nose.
‘Seems to me, Leo, it was always that way. You don’t have anybody in this line-up who’s gonna outsmart guys like Ozzy Ahmed in an argument. Except maybe Helen Parrish, if she hasn’t changed.’
‘Parrish.’ Defford leans over, grabs the Sebold/Driscoll CD and bins it himself. ‘We do need Parrish in handcuffs, don’t we?’
‘I’m a mite worried, Leo. I’ve compiled an extensive biog, from her time on a local newspaper, through her period in Northern Ireland, end of the Troubles, to the Royal years, but nothing in her background hints at any interest in the supernatural. Now while that’s no bad thing if her Princess Di story hangs together…’
‘No, you’re right, that would be a good thing. No axe to grind.’
Defford’s talked personally to one of his former colleagues at Newsnight, learning nothing about Parrish’s alleged experience other than it happened while she was shooting a documentary about the posthumous cult of Diana. As for what she actually said… well, it doesn’t seem to come to much at all, and there’s even a rumour she tried to backtrack, claiming all she’d said was that working on the documentary had made her feel so close to Diana it was like her ghost was walking alongside.
‘We need to move on this, don’t we?’ Defford says soberly. ‘Could be she doesn’t want to tell us in case we don’t think it’s strong enough, and if we only learn when it’s too late to get anything better…’
‘That occurred to me, too.’
‘I’ll make a call this afternoon. To a mutual friend. Meanwhile, on the positive side, I’ve just been told the chapel’s finished. You want to check it out?’ He tries for a grin. ‘Maybe we’re in need of spiritual sustenance.’
‘Sure.’
‘Shame about Driscoll,’ Defford says as they leave the cabin. ‘All that lovely mutual hatred gone to waste.’
The chapel of Holy Trinity.
Not any more. God…
Harry Ansell’s stained-glass window is gone. They’ve used ornately carved panelling to box in that whole wall, including the space where the outline of an altar was visible the last time Grayle was here. The panels have ornate foliate patterns like you find on church rood screens.
And significant holes. Always the holes.
Defford strides around, flipping switches and the now-colourless nave is lit by invisible bulbs that send sinister shadows shooting up the stonework. Shadows a lighting guy can alter at will, with more switches, according to the mood they’re looking to evoke.
A dark-wood chair sits before the foliate screen. Grayle observes it from the doorway. She doesn’t like this chapel any more, worries about the extreme secularization of a once-sacred space. Worries especially about what’s going to be happening here in just a few weeks’ time.
And her own possible role in that.
She checks out the chair. It’s not the glitzy throne from Big Brother, more like a judge’s chair from some stark, puritan courthouse.
‘Welcome to the confessional,’ Defford says.
He’s explained this, fully. How the residents will be summoned by the tolling of the bell in its turret on the chapel roof. Come to Big Brother.
Although, in BB, it’s not so sinister, usually just a small, plain room, to which the housemates can be summoned, individually. They sit in the glitzy chair, in front of the camera, to be debriefed by some unseen voice representing their controller. Nothing like a police interview room. Big Brother, a sympathetic sibling, asks how they’re coping with the confinement, what they feel about their companions – which ones they get along with, which they hate. The housemates tend to use these sessions to unload their anxieties and put the knife into their co-habitees. While Big Brother might use them discreetly to prime some traps.
This will be the same but different. They’ll sit down, alone amidst the jumping shadows, to be questioned by… not Big Brother but Little goddamn Sister.
Shit. Defford only mentioned this in passing, and the short-list for the role of interrogator included Max the shrink, and a few TV personalities known to have an interest in the unexplained. They need someone with an extensive knowledge of paranormal phenomena, faked or imagined or even arguably real. But someone sensible. Someone who knows the right questions to ask when one of the residents claims to have seen a bobbing light or felt a shock of cold air. They also need a calm, distinctive voice, unlike anyone else’s.
Seems an American accent would work well enough in this context and for only a fraction of what a celeb might’ve walked away with. Calm is another matter. Grayle spent ten days in London, receiving expert tuition from retired BBC and ITV presenters. Means she can now more effectively grill people like Rhys Sebold and Helen Parrish, who know all the tricks.
Defford folds his arms.
‘You’re not going to wimp out on me, are you, Grayle? You’ll have a working script for each interview. Just a question of being able to respond to the unexpected, and you’re probably the only one here with the knowledge to do that. We’ll do some rehearsals with one of the residents, who we’ll get to be as awkward as possible for you,’ Defford says.
‘Uh-huh.’ And then she stares at him. ‘Leo, how will that be possible? You’ll bring one of them in blindfold, in advance? And won’t that give whoever it is an unfair advantage, knowing how it’s done?’
‘Normally, it would. In this case, that might not matter. We’re still working on a few details.’
He means his core team, a handful of younger producers and Kate Lyons. Occasionally, Grayle’s been admitted to meetings of the core team, but mostly not. Like she’s not yet accepted as a television person.
‘Pu
t it this way,’ Defford says. ‘To expand on the Big Brother Orwellian theme, all residents will be equal… but some may have to be more equal than others.’
The set of his face tells her she’s not meant to ask him what that means.
‘I guess Kate told you about Sebold,’ she says as they leave the chapel.
‘Be sensitive to his issues, Grayle, but don’t let him bully you.’
‘Sensitive to his issues. Right. Um…’ She waits while he locks ups, glad to be out in the warmth. ‘One more thing, Leo: what’s the score now with Harry Ansell?’
Ansell still isn’t talking to her. She’s tried the formal request, calling his office, playing it straight. She’s Mr Defford’s researcher and she’d like to ask Mr Ansell some questions, any of which he can refuse to answer.
He refuses to answer any of them. He doesn’t even want to hear them.
Well, OK, he doesn’t exactly say that. He just doesn’t say anything. His secretary keeps telling Grayle he’s away on business and she’ll pass the message on when he returns. The evening after she received this reply for the third time, Grayle was treating herself to a vegetarian dinner in the health food restaurant at the Rotunda and there was Harry Ansell strolling past the window, a copy of Cotsworld under an arm of his expensive fitted overcoat. If she’d been any kind of journalist she’d’ve been out there, placing herself on the sidewalk directly in front of him.
Only, his face was like the steel door on a bank vault, and her ass refused to come off the chair.
‘He doesn’t seem to think this is anything do with him,’ Defford says.
‘But it is, isn’t it? He still wants to watch, right? Still wants to see what happens when we go live.’
‘He’s said nothing to the contrary.’
‘Leo, he’s said nothing at all!’
‘He’s a very private person, but I think it’s more than that. He’s not seen at events… receptions.’
‘Still in mourning?’
‘Maybe for more than his wife,’ Defford says. ‘Unsurprisingly, the Cotsworld circulation isn’t what it was. You bought a copy of the magazine, you were buying into Trinity. The magic’s gone.’
‘Yeah, well, and maybe that also applies to the house. See, the thing is, Leo, without Ansell… you know what I’m saying?’
