by Phil Rickman
Never felt less happy in Knap Hall but makes herself walk deeper into the room. The main reason it’s dark in here is that the biggest window has been roughly boarded up, a thick wooden frame hammered in tight to the mullion. The only light comes from one much smaller window at a right angle to it, exposing the uninspiring bushes next to the house and the woodland further back that were visible from the first room.
Which suggests the blocked window overlooks somewhere that might identify the location. Could be Sudeley Castle. A deep-set door right at the end, the darkest part, probably leads to wherever they’ve taken up the floorboards for the overhead camera sweeping the chamber below.
It’s all a big TV studio now, or will be in two or three weeks.
A mothy air in here, like it’s whole decades since Trinity Ansell slept in that broken bed. Now her eyes have adjusted, Grayle can see that the carved posts are darkened by an accumulation of grime. Someone has work to do.
The air’s actually laden with fine dust. She coughs. The boarded window has hairline cracks of ruby light. She imagines the boards gone, Trinity standing next to her, both of them gazing towards the last home of Katherine Parr, a couple miles away, a trinket in the trees.
What are you thinking, Trinity?
Did she stand here, knowing she was pregnant? Maybe thinking of KP, pregnant by Seymour of Sudeley, though never by Henry, a fat old king with an ulcerated leg, who had one son, not destined to make it out of his teens and could’ve used another.
Is it possible Trinity’s baby was not Harry’s?
Talk to me, Trinity.
Haunt me.
No, don’t. Jesus God, ignore that, don’t.
On her desk in the portacabin, she has two biographies of Henry’s last queen, which she’s only flipped through but, in all the portraits, Katherine – small-featured, demure, quite kind-looking – is wearing a red dress. In various pictures inside, she’s wearing different dresses, all red. Grayle remembers one sumptuous number with gold braid and padded shoulders. And rubies, everywhere.
A distant rustle of voices from downstairs tells her the ten minutes must be up by now. Defford will be looking for her, impatient. Always impatient, now. He’s changed. Too many things not going right. Does this place really do stuff to people, or is that just down to the kind of people who wind up here? People and history and suggestion – a word often used by Ashley Palk, editor of The Disbeliever, some of whose lectures Grayle’s found on YouTube. Some are hallucinations, some are self-deception, but most so-called ghost experiences are down to suggestion, says Ashley, of the tilted head and mirthless smile. Oh, really, does anybody educated actually think that way any more? How marvellous. Everything is marvellous to Ashley, for whom marvels don’t exist.
There’s movement, woodwork whingeing. Grayle looks sharply back down the bedchamber, wondering if she’s trodden on a loose board. But she hasn’t moved.
‘Who’s that?’
Aware of saying it, she doesn’t hear it. The room looks longer than when she came in, ending in a purply vagueness around the pale rectangle of the doorway through which she entered. A shadow is dislodged from the corner by the door.
‘Leo? Is that—?’
The pale rectangle narrows. It’s the oak door itself, slowly closing, sliding quietly into the light-space, the wooden latch falling – thock. And then a shift into silence, and the silence is a fabric that wraps itself damply around her, and she can feel, as it touches her, its quick decay.
A tipping sensation inside her head and chest, an outpouring of cold and a connection across years to being in a cab bound for the airport after leaving her father’s apartment with its framed blow-up of Ersula in her academic gown. A weight of misery settling around her heart like sludge, a wanting for it to be over.
Life. Please. No more.
She’s aware of standing beside the barricaded window, watching, in the slats of sunset, specks of dry dust falling and gathering, motes of misery, all the misery in the room coagulating around her, a smog of sorrow, and it has a vague smell, the distant stench of last year’s dead leaves, slimed and skeletal and never coming back. A sick little airless cry is trapped far inside her, as a last vibration of panic inhabits her hands and arms like pins and needles before it becomes an acceptance of the inevitable, and she watches something assembling raggedly between the posts of the bed.
Oh Christ, she’s really seeing this…
She’s still standing up, but something inside her is on its knees, naked and desperate, too utterly dejected to cry out. She can only see, through eyes she wants to close and can’t, not four bedposts but five, and the fifth is a man with his arms by his side, a thin shadow joining him to the blackness above like an umbilical cord from his head into the vaster shadows of the ceiling. The weight of the body slowly bringing the face around for her and the eyes are like capsules of egg white, a liquid desperation, and Grayle feels she might die of fear and this all-enshrouding misery.
24
Two camps
MARCUS HAS LOST weight which, considering his cardiac history, can’t be a bad thing. He has only two remaining chins and his cheeks are not so red. But his eyes are still burning with the same angry light under the dense grey hair.
‘Strikes me, Lewis, that if it’s reasonable to assume a double agent walks away with twice the money, this is going to make you sickeningly fucking rich.’
Quite comforting, it is, to detect the old sulphur in his voice.
‘Comparatively speaking, Marcus,’ Cindy concedes. ‘Comparatively speaking.’
Setting down his mug of Earl Grey, gazing with a genuine affection across the desk of dented beech-wood, which is far too big for this place. Here in the second bedroom, which serves as Marcus’s office, extra shelving has reduced the window to little more than a slit.
Better than a caravan, mind.
Marcus scoops up his manuscript, slams it in a drawer of the desk, Cindy raising his arms in protest, bangles jangling.
‘I’m not going to steal your ideas, Marcus, I do retain some ethics.’
‘Really? Where’re you keeping them these days?’
Cindy smiles, eases his chair away from a stack of books. Apart from the English bull terrier, Malcolm, they’re alone in the bungalow. The good Sister Anderson is working late at the clinic, which can only help preserve their relationship.
Cindy sighs.
‘Opposite poles, we are, Marcus.’
Opposite poles, however, of the same planet. Neither of them will ever join the British Humanist Society or buy a subscription to The Disbeliever. And a cause which they support equally is the welfare of little Grayle Underhill.
‘Come to meet Mr Driffield, I have. We’re having dinner.’
‘Who?’
‘The television producer?’
‘Defford?’
‘That’s the man.’
‘And you’re going like that?’
‘Brand new skirt, Marcus. Vera Wang.’ He couldn’t afford a pair of knickers by Vera Wang, but the chances of Marcus having heard of the woman… ‘Anyway, dinner’s at his house, near Stow. Can’t be seen together in public, obviously.’
Marcus sits back, polishing his glasses.
‘All right, start by explaining the double-agent business. I was too dazzled by your tawdry jewellery to take it in.’
Cindy considers what Marcus knows, what he needs to know and what it would be better to conceal. He knows, for example, about Cindy’s long-term friendship with Trinity Ansell, though not about the diary or its content. Knows how Cindy played young Jo to get himself invited into the house, also that Jo and her boss are keeping Cindy a secret from the rest of the production team, including Grayle, until the eve of transmission. He does not, however, know why.
‘They’re not idiots at HGTV, Marcus. They employ psychologists to predict how the people they’re calling residents will react to one another – who will form friendships, who will be hostile. Anticipate all that, they can, w
ith a fair degree of accuracy.’
‘They hope.’
‘However, this is a programme considering the existence of paranormal phenomena. I think that if anything entirely inexplicable were to occur the production people really would have no idea how to react. And I think they realize that.’
Marcus smiles, itself an almost preternatural occurrence.
‘We can take it, I think,’ Cindy says, ‘that Mr Defford is not a believer and is fairly confident that nothing inexplicable will take place. However…?’
‘Needs to cover all his bases, as Underhill would say.’
‘What he can’t allow to develop is an us and them situation, with the production team, including his informed researcher, as outsiders. What, for example, if the ghost supporters work together to invent an apparition and support each other’s stories?’
‘Hard to conspire in that situation, surely. They’ll all be wearing these personal microphones day and night. Everything they say overheard.’
‘Marcus, Marcus… it can happen without a word exchanged, by the power of suggestion. One person claims to have seen something, the others of a like mind convince themselves they’ve seen it, too. And then it virtually exists, and they go on feeding it and pretty soon they’ve all forgotten they’ve made it up. Which is why Defford needs an insider.’
‘Double agent. Snitch.’ Marcus blows out his lips, replaces his glasses. ‘Traitor. So you’re the house rat.’
Cindy strokes the strange, white head of Malcolm the bull terrier who’s sitting between his chair and a book tower comprised of the collected speculative works of Colin Wilson.
‘It is, as you know,’ he says cautiously, ‘a part of my tradition to have a foot in two camps. However, I would worry for my karma if I didn’t have a reason for being there which goes beyond the goldrush for viewing figures.’
‘You mean your personal guilt? Your suspicion that you might have saved the Ansell woman?’ Marcus looks pained. ‘Lewis, she didn’t even bloody die there. And she died trying to abort a baby. You have no idea at all what mental state she was in or if it even connects with the house.’
‘I think it does.’
‘Why?’
Cindy sighs, makes no reply. His fears about the death of Trinity Ansell run too deep for easy explanation, even to Marcus Bacton, whom he tried to get appointed as researcher. Never imagining that Marcus would conspire to hand over the job to little Grayle Underhill.
‘I…’ Marcus has sunk back into the shadows behind the lamp, ‘told Underhill they’d offered me a place in the house – yes, I know they wouldn’t consider someone as obscure as me – and that I’d had to turn them down for health reasons. So they offered me the researcher’s job, and… I may have given Under-hill the impression I found this either an insult or a distraction from my book.’
The book. Which will, Cindy is sure, have well-developed theories, eloquently expressed, and twenty years ago would probably have found a reputable publisher. Today, even with a punchier title than In Defence of Mystery, publishers will wear rubber gloves to carry it to the bin.
Oh, Marcus, Marcus. The researcher’s fee would have been far more than he could reasonably expect to make from his book even if a reputable publisher were to accept it.
Little Grayle, however, is the daughter he’s never had, while her own father, who’s left her in this transatlantic limbo, is the kind of man Marcus despises most.
‘The Vision was going down the toilet, Lewis. We were actually losing money on it by then. Underhill went back to the States. Anderson arrived from the Midlands, diagnosed I was heading for another heart attack and stayed. We… for reasons of poverty, we sold up and moved out here. Woman held me together. Still does.’
‘You’ll never deserve her, Marcus.’
‘Then Underhill turns up again without any warning. Relationship with her father’s broken down beyond hope of reconciliation. Cold bastard.’
‘So I gather.’
‘She’s—’ Marcus takes a hard breath. ‘Thing is, when you talk to her about it, she’ll tell you she didn’t realize how close she was to a breakdown. But she wasn’t close at all. She was having a fucking breakdown. Turned up here looking like the husk of something. I think she had some idea of relaunching The Vision on the Internet, but… its time was over, Lewis. Never go back. And the bastard Internet’s no answer to depression.’
‘Quite.’
‘What were we supposed to do? Toss her into the psychiatric system? As it happens, one of Anderson’s clients – irritable bowel – is a man called Neil Oldham. Owns the Three Counties News Service, which makes its money serving shit to the tabloids. One of his reporters had just landed a job on the Sun. Oldham’s lying helpless on her treatment couch, Anderson twists his arm.’
‘A radical solution?’
‘Lewis, Underhill’s a trained journalist. Decent writer who got waylaid by all the whimsy and windchimes bollocks. This was the other end of the business – hard graft, long hours, commitment required. And she does commit. And the last thing she wanted was space for a private life. It broke the pattern. I think she enjoyed it.’
‘So the windchimes are no longer hanging in the porch.’
‘Cut her hair short. Looks bloody awful.’
‘Drastic.’
‘And then all that goes to pieces, and she’s about to become unemployed again. Without much of chance, this time, the way things are, of becoming re-employed. So when Oldham arrives for his next treatment…’
‘It’s all right, Marcus, I know the rest. You made a sacrifice of Christ-like proportions and tried to cover up your part in her rescue. The problem is, this role is not the sinecure you might have thought it would be. Don’t get me wrong – I have no doubt little Grayle is doing a fine job, and the money’s good. But the house may be more challenging than Defford imagines. And, however you dress it up, reality celebrity television is for losers, some of them deranged.’
‘You speak as one of them.’
‘Indeed,’ Cindy says. ‘And the problem with us losers is that we’re so much more dangerous than winners, isn’t it? And the house… the house is the biggest loser of them all. Always has been, see.’
‘Lewis—’
‘Do you? See?’
‘You’re saying this house takes people down with it?’
Time to drive over to Stow to meet Mr Defford. Cindy, who worries about varicose veins, stands up, takes what paces he can around the constricted study, massaging his legs. He can hear the first sullen spatters of night rain on the window.
‘Goes beyond that, Marcus. Do you know Belas Knap, at all?’
25
Spent energy
Even in the daytime, most motorways rob you of the countryside, sunk between their banks and obscured by high-sided trucks and trailers. At night they’re about speed, lights and not much else.
She looks in the rear-view mirror.
Sees lights through the rain. Just lights.
She’s prodding the CD changer on the stereo, trying for something loud and sense-consuming, but all Mumford and Son’s songs seem to be about body parts. She switches off. The satnav woman tells her to do nothing much for nineteen miles.
She looks into the rear-view mirror.
It’s becoming obsessive.
Her left hand grips the gearstick for support. Gearsticks are just so reassuringly English.
Like ghosts.
Stop it.
She doesn’t remember too much about getting out through the enshadowed door at the bottom of the bedroom, only the crawl over the hole between beams, through a tangle of electric wiring, into the empty belly of the hotel. Through twisted, oak-banded passages, sunset-flushed and narrow like bowels, until the house emptied her into a stairway she’d never used before and she fell down the last three wooden stairs, one knee hitting the floor and opening her up to crazily sublime agony. Real-world pain.
She tries the CD player again, at random. It’s Foals, an album s
he’s forgotten she had, a song about a guy never feeling better than on his way out of the woods. Never being afraid again.
She turns up the sound, grips the wheel, stays in the slow lane until she’s calm enough to consider how someone like Ashley Palk would explain it. Palk with that special smile for making people feel stupid. Talking about suggestion. Out of which comes hallucination.
God, it’s so easy, isn’t it?
She looks into the rear-view mirror.
Sees the edge of her own face and, behind it, lights, just lights swollen by rain.
‘Excuse me, but is there someone up there?’
She said this to the first guy she met on the ground floor, who was Patrick the carpenter, working on a temporary chipboard wall to seal off the main staircase which will have no part to play in Big Other.
‘Shouldn’t be anybody wandering around up there,’ Patrick said. ‘It’s not safe. Floorboards pulled up, exposed wiring everywhere.’
‘Only I think I heard someone.’
‘You sure?’
‘I could’ve been mistaken. But I’d hate to think… like… if someone’s hurt.’
‘I’d better go and check.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Might be a good idea.’
With some relief which fragmented when he came down after about five minutes and said nobody was up there. Looking a tad irritated. He’d gone into over twenty rooms. Nobody. Nothing. Grayle mumbling something about sound carrying in strange ways in these old houses and stumbling off towards the sound of real voices.
And you know what? Nobody noticed. Nobody saw anything different about her. Nobody said she was looking pale, nobody offered her a glass of water. Not Kate Lyons, not Peter the sparks, and especially not Leo Defford, taking the A4 cardboard envelope from Kate, handing it to Grayle.
‘Don’t make a big deal about this. Just make sure she sees the revised figure while you’re chatting to her, journalist to journalist.’
She remembers now how there was going to be some straight talking between her and Leo Defford about the need for this journey, like she was going to be set up to take the blame if Parrish pulled out.
