by Phil Rickman
Grayle wants to die. She thinks, Need to know. Need to fucking know.
They didn’t tell her because they didn’t want her messing with what they’d gotten neatly parcelled up. That’s what this is about. She struggles for composure.
‘Am I allowed to ask what they learned from the ouija board?’
Because, unless Cindy’s playing by the same HGTV rules, Trinity never told him about this.
Defford shakes his head.
‘I dunno, usual garbled rubbish. What was significant, according to Lisa, was that whenever they had a ouija session, Trinity would have dreams. Very vivid, usually involving Katherine Parr. Then Trinity would say she was seeing Katherine in the house. Like they’d opened up a way for her to come in.’
It fits. Sure it fits. Grayle clutches the diary and thinks of another one, more chaotic, less coherent, kept by Trinity Ansell at the behest of Cindy. You can’t second-guess ghosts, but people are easier, and it’s clear Trinity Ansell wanted Cindy to help her bring something of KP into Knap Hall. And Cindy wasn’t playing. Then, the next time he went back, when the UK’s most prestigious guest house was up and running, she was saying, Look, I did it. I did it by myself. To the happy sounds of Renaissance music.
Sure. It all fits. But then, as the diary reveals, something changed: I can see the hearth with no fire. The room is cold and there’s a blue light.
Something ended. Something died. Something that was represented in Trinity’s dreams, according to Cindy, by an image of the dead body of Katherine Parr.
‘So what did you want to tell me?’ Defford asks. ‘Bearing in mind how close we are to recording.’
Jeez, you can almost see the digital clock pulsing in his brain
‘I went to see a woman this morning. An historian.’
She sits on her pride and tells him as briefly as she can about Sir Joshua Wishatt and Abel Fishe. About Abel’s Rent. Tells him this man is, pre-Trinity, possibly the most significant piece of history she’s been able to uncover relating specifically to Knap Hall. Only the way she’s feeling now, it doesn’t come out with as much enthusiasm as it might’ve done earlier.
‘And when was this?’
‘Don’t have precise dates, yet, but we’re looking at the eighteenth century.’
‘The eighteenth century,’ Defford says. ‘So that would be around two centuries after Katherine Parr. And three before Trinity. She know about this guy?’
‘Fishe is believed to have brought women here. Here. To Knap Hall, as he was now calling it. And he was abusing them. Here. And whereas today abuse can be like a guy pinching someone’s ass…’
‘I realize all that. Did Trinity know about him?’
‘If you’re saying did she know his name, his personal history, I guess not. But if you’re asking was she affected by… whatever remains of him and what he did, that’s a whole different—’
‘I’m not asking that,’ Defford says.
She keeps trying.
‘See, you’re looking down to another level of… murk. You could be looking at what’s represented by all this talk among the staff of things in the house getting dirty very quickly. Heaps of soil appearing on the floor, the windows becoming hard to see through. Maybe you recorded somebody talking about that, too. I wouldn’t know, I’m just the researcher.’
He doesn’t react.
‘OK,’ Grayle says, ‘I don’t know whether any of that actually happened or whether it was just in the perceptions of the staff who thought they were having to do too much cleaning, but it’s what worries me a little, so I thought you oughta know.’
‘OK. Thank you.’ Defford glances at Kate Lyons, who remains expressionless, then he leans back again. ‘Grayle, I have two problems with this. ‘A, wrong century. B, wrong sex. In television, we don’t look to complicate things. The more straightforward the background, the fewer people involved, the less history to absorb… need I go on? We have two famous women in a house which is Tudor in origin. That is, not eighteenth century.’
‘No, but—’
‘And we start recording programme one tonight. You do realize what “tonight” means?’
He snatches up a copy of one of the cheapo TV guides, almost the whole of its front page given over to the black silhouette of some historic house which clearly is not Knap Hall and a big headline:
WHO DARES GO INTO THE BIG OTHER HOUSE?
It’s the first of these she’s seen. There’s been a few speculative pieces in the papers over the past weeks but it’s the first time she’s seen the name. Defford puts it down on his desk.
‘And there are big spreads coming up in the weekend TV supplements. I’ve done an interview for the Sunday Times. Done and dusted. I need to draw a line under this, or it’ll run away with itself. Your job now is to try and match what’s happening in the house over the next week with what we know about Trinity Ansell and Katherine Parr. And tailor your chapel questions accordingly.’
‘OK.’ She stands up. ‘That’s what you’re paying me for. But so I know where we’re headed, let me just re-check the formula. As well as debating the existence of ghosts in general, from the outset, you want the residents to start forming a picture of what might’ve happened here, right?’
‘Correct.’
‘And then, at the end of the week, you’ll reveal the truth about where we are – how close they got, if any of them do – and we see the footage of Meg the actor in the red dress, and we hear Lisa and Pruford. And then we come to the Ansells, and Harry’s death by probable sui—’
‘We’re being careful about that. I don’t propose to speculate about Ansell’s death. Leave that to the media. It’ll add a certain resonance, but I’m sticking with his wife.’
‘Right.’
Why should she care now? After more than half a year, her role in this project is nearly over. Why not just back away from it all? Like lying back in some hospital bed with your eyes closed and submitting to the…
… the disease.
Dis-ease. You walk into someplace to produce a piece of light entertainment disguised as something deeper, and you find you’re close to something old and sick that nobody wants disturbed. Least of all Defford. No excitement in his eyes. It’s not about seeing what happens, it’s about control. Always was. He should’ve realized by now that Big Brother rules just won’t work here. Virtually none of them.
He hasn’t.
Grayle looks into his deceptively amiable features under the innocent lambswool hair. She remembers the first time they met and him saying he wanted to know everything there was to know about this house, all the history, all the legends, all the reasons to be afraid.
‘So you’re… happy.’
‘I’m as satisfied as I can be at this stage. I don’t think we’ll get anything better. All this eighteenth-century abuse stuff, sure, bear it in mind, but don’t go looking for it. I really don’t want to have bring in an emergency team of actors in different costumes to shoot rape scenes against a background of whatever this dump looked like in the eighteenth century.’
‘Well, I just wanted you to be aware of it. Being as how you like to be one step ahead.’
‘OK, I’m aware of it.’ He consults his iPad. ‘Kate, get me Paul at C4, will you?’
Grayle’s aware that, for Defford, she no longer exists in the room. Kate Lyons already has the door open for her and outside it’s raining now.
36
Walk but they can’t sue
SHE RUNS OUT, through the rain, to her ash tree, the only place she feels safe to think. And to feel confused and useless. Ash trees… something about them: when they die it’s from the inside and they become hollow, something like that. Eloise would know. M.R. James wrote a famous story about an ash tree with a dead witch inside.
This one seems to have resisted whatever ash-blight is going around. Its branches heave up around her into the rain, most of its leaves have been shed. Is that liberating for a tree facing winter? Is it liberating to know when
you’re not wanted any more, when nobody wants you to think outside of the box?
What now?
Maybe call Marcus Bacton. It isn’t the ash tree that says that.
When she tells him about her day so far, his laughter’s a bark, like Malcolm the terrier came through on an extension.
‘You talked to Lewis about this?’
‘Oh, yeah, I’ve talked to him. I’ve interviewed him in the chapel. Have I really talked to him? No.’
What’s more, she doesn’t see how she’s going to. Not today, not tonight, not any day or night until this is all over.
It’s the phones. When they go into the house, the Seven, they have to leave their phones behind. Well, sure, it makes sense. They can’t have any contact with the outside world. The phones are kept in a safe in Kate Lyons’s office inside the Leo Defford cabin. Twice a day, with the residents’ agreement, Kate will take them out and check for messages.
The residents have been asked to inform their loved ones, agents, lawyers, etc. that they’ll be unreachable for a week except in dire emergency. In which case all calls should go through an HGTV number. Anything possibly urgent found on the mobiles will be monitored by Kate and crucial messages passed on.
‘So you see the problem. Assuming Cindy would have his phone back after our chapel session until he went in again, I was about to leave a message to have him call me… and then it hit me that the next time Kate Lyons went through his calls she’d spot my damn number. Then Defford would know we were talking behind his back. Which now would be even worse.’
Marcus grunts, like conclusively.
‘You’re stuffed, Underhill. No point at all in arguing with a megalomaniac. Do what he says. Then grab the money with one hand while lacing up the bastard running shoes with the other.’
‘That’s it? That’s the summit of your advice? Grab the loot, don’t look back?’
‘’What d’you want me to say? Knew from the start what you were getting into. Spent two years working with cynical hacks, had your hair symbolically butchered. No, look, essentially, Underhill, your work there is done. Why prejudice your bonus?’
Yeah, right, why? What can she do here? Who can she help?
Only the dead.
She stares out over the Hunter-Gatherer village to an empty field, the wind dragging dense grey rain across it like a tarpaulin, along with the voice of Mary Ann Rutter.
If she thought me mad, what would that matter? She’d remember what I’d said. She might have acted on it.
Too late now, Mary Ann, Trinity’s dead. Also Harry. The small wood on the other side of the grey field is where they found him hanging, the tautened rope disappearing into a mesh of dark branches and the dusk.
It should be known, you see. These matters should not be hidden for ever. Or if the stories are passed on as gossip they’ll lose whatever truth they possessed and become legends. But if it all comes out in your programme…
Which it won’t, not now. The programme will be a travesty, a fabrication. And, sure, you can see why it probably has to be. And yet…
… keeping secrets about it helps no one, except those responsible for the wickedness. And having the responsibility of a secret… that is not a good position to be in.
No. It sure as hell isn’t. Grayle watches wet trees and sees Mrs Rutter flapping amongst the remnants of her research, absurdly delighted that an old responsibility has been lifted from her old shoulders by a younger woman who isn’t subject to local pressure and might run with it.
‘Only you wouldn’t do that, Marcus, would you?’
‘Do what?’
‘Take the money and run. That’s not what you’re about.’
‘All I was thinking…’
He dries up. She’s guessing that what he was thinking was, do I want to be responsible for Underhill winding up on Prozac again?
Which, let’s not forget, she took just once. Once, OK?
She says, ‘What if all Trinity Ansell and Katherine Parr had in common was that they were both victims of this house and something in it?’
‘In which case, whatever it is can’t be this Abel Fishe, can it? When Parr died, he was still two centuries in the future.’
She sighs.
‘That mean Fishe was a victim of it, too?’
‘Let’s not go that far. Man doesn’t sound like a victim to me.’
Grayle pulls down her woolly hat over the phone at her ear.
‘A ouija board. A freaking ouija board. Trinity and her little friend Lisa, and maybe the third finger on the glass is Jeff Pruford’s. Both of them saying more on camera, prepared to tell millions of viewers more than they felt able to confide to me. Maybe because I’m like foreign?’
Marcus is silent for a while. Rain pools around crispy leaves at Grayle’s feet.
‘However,’ Marcus says at last, ‘there’s nothing to stop someone else – someone not in the house, not on the Defford payroll making a few tentative inquiries. Is there?’
‘Oh.’
Thing about Marcus, the word tentative doesn’t exist in his dictionary.
‘On the basis,’ he says, ‘that this outsider can make use of anything he might find… in defence of mystery.’
‘In his book?’
‘Planning a chapter showing how people, non-believers usually, have always manipulated the paranormal for their own purposes, confident there isn’t going to be a comeback. Spirits can walk but they can’t sue. HGTV can do what they want with dead Ansell and dead Parr. Move them easier than puppets. These TV programmes, there has to be a conclusion, otherwise it’s a pointless exercise. Especially if it’s lasted a whole week.’
‘An ambience of mystery… maybe that doesn’t translate to TV.’
‘Can’t.’
‘I’m trying to tell myself it wasn’t gonna be like that. Could be Harry Ansell’s death changed everything. Ansell had a reason for inviting Defford to use his house, and it surely wasn’t only because he couldn’t find anybody to buy it. And now Defford’s never gonna know what that was, and that makes him feel insecure.’
‘Anyway,’ Marcus says, ‘there are things I can look into. You’ll take your money, they’ll take theirs. And I can blast the bastards out of the water from a safe distance.’
‘Worthwhile publisher might like that.’
‘Never once occurred to me, Underhill.’
‘Of course it didn’t.’
A rising wind heaves at the ash tree’s branches.
‘I do get the feeling, Underhill,’ Marcus says, ‘that there’s something you haven’t told me.’
The damp field looks like dead, grey skin.
‘I guess,’ Grayle says. ‘OK, here we go…’
37
The eighth person
SIX HOURS TO recording, early dark outside. No more than a dozen people under low lights in Leo Defford’s executive office. Key people. The producers, directors, senior Jamies, senior Emilys sitting around a plan of the house surrounded by photographs, all pinned to display boards, replacing the pictures of competing NHS chefs.
Defford’s final briefing. Pep-talk time. Grayle’s been permitted to sit at the back with the more lowly members of the team. Defford’s on a high stool, a clipboard of handwritten notes on his knees, rectangular reading glasses on his nose.
‘OK. Now I’ve said most of this before at various times, as you know, but I’m saying it again so nobody forgets what this is about. The viewers think they’ve seen everything. They think we’ve seen every conceivable permutation of the haunted house scenario. If they still think that after the first hour they’ll switch off in their hundreds of thousands.’
Actually, he’s told Grayle he reckons they have a full two hours to hook the Saturday night viewers. What will grab them initially is the first interaction of the residents. Virtually everybody will recognize Austin Ahmed, Helen Parrish and Cindy Mars-Lewis. The others they’ll’ve heard of. And their individual introductions in the chapel will signal the discord to
come.
Defford leans back on his stool, tosses away his notes, the way smart-ass political leaders do at party conferences to show how personally confident they are of the way ahead.
‘Intelligent viewers think they no longer fear the supernatural. They’re continually assured by smooth scientists and serious newspapers that it’s all primitive myth. It’s a secular society now, and there’s no going back from that. No God, no ghosts – not if you want to work for the BBC.’
Nobody laughs.
‘Which I don’t, any more,’ Defford says. ‘Been there, done that. But I accept that some of you might, so please be sceptical. See, I don’t care how many of you claim to believe in ghosts or how many think it’s all balls. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear opinions expressed or arguments for or against until we’re out of here at the end of next week. That’s not your business. Your business is to produce hour after hour of unmissable television.’
A few of them start to applaud, but Defford stops them with a raised hand.
‘Now what do I mean by that? There’s so-called reality television that everybody knows isn’t. We all know these people are playing their parts in a pre-structured scenario. Some of our seven residents will also be under this impression. Some of them will think they’re only doing this to rescue their careers, show the world what great entertainers they are. I don’t intend to tell them otherwise, but I do want to see the situation gradually beating it out of them. Do you know what I’m saying? At no point do I want any of these fuckers to think they can upstage the house.’
Jo Shepherd raises a hand as she’s maybe been programmed to do.
‘Are you saying here that the house is… the eighth character?’
‘The house is the primary character. When people at home switch off at the end and go to bed, it’s the house I want to invade their dreams. The candlelight, the old glass between the mullions, the embers in the hearth.’
