‘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, with 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 she’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.
Never happened. All she wanted was to put miles and miles of roadway between her and Knap Hall…
… where maybe nothing happened. Nothing outside of stress, overwork and her own failure to harden up the house’s metaphysical history. Emotions released by being in a room displaying the ruins of a relationship.
She pulls into a motorway service area, ventures far as she can get from the interior lights, sits behind a coffee and a doughnut and thinks, rationally, about ghosts.
It’s like this: haunted houses are fun to read about, haunted house movies useful for providing a reason to hold onto someone in the cinema. And English ghosts are special – if Transylvania has vampires, England has ghosts, the way it has the Royal Family and the bowler hats nobody wears any more. Somehow, from across the Atlantic, these English ghosts… they make you feel kind of thrillingly… warm? Really?
Hell, no. This is what Marcus says after his bit about trusting terror: ghosts are not about someplace else, ghosts are about here. An aspect of here that is almost invariably negative. Ghosts are dampness in the walls, cold shadows on the stairs. Ghosts, when you see them, offer no real hope of redemption, no promise of heaven or a meaningful afterlife. Ghosts are spent energy sucking feebly at yours. Ghosts make the fire go out. And then you carry them away with you like cold ashes from the hearth, and you yourself have become a haunted house.
And still you keep glancing in the rear-view mirror in case there’s someone sitting in the back seat. Someone who you’ve picked up.
Grayle drinks a second coffee. Has to put the cup down when her hands start to shake.
Back in the Cooper, she rolls up the left leg of her jeans and examines the abrasions around the knee, sustained when she fell down the last stone stairs. Still there, still real, still hurting. She remembers trying out her limbs, from which she’d felt in some way disconnected, her body feeling stiff like unfamiliar, starched clothing.
It’s quite a small, stone, farmworker-type cottage on a down-sloping lane somewhere between Totnes and the sea which Grayle can smell when she gets out of the car. The English Riviera at night, what a waste.
Not what you’d call lonely here. The nearer you get to the coast in Devon, the more crowded it becomes, and the lights of other houses and bungalows are strung out either side of the former farmworker’s cottage that probably stood alone here once, and she can hear music from someplace.
The porch door is already open, globular wall lamps lit either side. It’s no longer raining. A woman comes out of the porch, stands at the top of some steps, peering down towards the Mini.
Grayle’s seen some recent pictures of Helen Parrish and vaguely remembers her from the BBC news. Seems to be the same woman, despite the clothing. Unless she was in a war zone someplace hot, Helen Parrish, like other TV reporters of her era, would be wearing smart suits and talking in this clipped, tough-as-a-man voice. Or this is how Grayle remembers her. Tonight, Parrish is wearing a loose cashmere cowl-neck sweater and shocking pink jeans. She looks relaxed, raises a cheery hand.
‘Grayle Underhill?’
At least she hasn’t lost the voice. To be a reporter on the Royals, even ten years ago, it helped if you sounded like one of them.
‘Thanks for seeing me.’
‘Hardly a problem. I told the woman who rang that tomorrow would be fine, but she insisted.’
‘She did?’
Figures. Grayle follows Helen Parrish into the house, into a small parlour, warm with the coloured dust-jacket spines of travel books, bright, plump cushions and a compact, glass-fronted woodstove burning red and orange.
A room for one. Grayle’s research says Helen Parrish began as a reporter with the
Western Morning News
, marrying one of her colleagues. Within a couple years, she landed a reporting job on the BBC’s West Country local news team, and the marriage didn’t survive her move to London four years later. However, latest rumours are that, thirty years on, back home in the west, she’s seeing her former husband again, though they’re still living separately.