‘Coffee?’ Parrish says. ‘Tea? Or… I mean, have you eaten?’
Grayle thinks of a doughnut bleeding into a plate.
‘I’m fine. But tea would be… yeah, please. Um… weak.’
‘Grab a seat.’ Parrish waves a hand at the comfortably unmatched chairs around the stove. ‘Still summer in the daytime, but I’m sure the nights are getting colder.’
‘I guess.’
‘You look cold.’
Grayle nods. She’s felt cold most of the way down here, refusing to turn on the heater in case it had no effect. In case it wasn’t that kind of cold. She sits down in an old wing chair with a chintzy cushion. Thinks about how she needs to play this, and it’s really quite simple.
The message, the course of action the honest person in her should convey to Parrish, amounts to reaching out and grabbing the ITV holiday-programme-for-the-older-viewer with both hands. It amounts to wearing those summer clothes, staying in the good hotels, sampling the ethnic food for the camera (mmm… good!) admiring the scenery and forgetting you ever heard of Hunter-Gatherer Television.
The envelope is under Grayle’s arm. Here’s the contract, she should say. Take it out, don’t look at the revised figure. Just take it out and tear it up. This might not be a programme you should be doing, in a house that could mess with your dreams for the rest of your life.
But that’s not how it works with Helen Parrish. Helen is used to taking control. When she returns and they’re sitting either side of the stove’s glow with their mismatched mugs of tea and a plate of buttered fruitcake, Parrish stretches her lean body, fluffs up her blue-grey hair, says,
‘How are things now, then, Grayle?’
Like they’re old friends who haven’t met in a while. Grayle looks up.
‘Things are… a mite complicated, Helen.’
‘Can imagine.’ Parrish switches on a reading lamp with an amber shade. ‘Not something you can easily walk away from, is it?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I meant your sister.’
Grayle stares at her, the room going into a slow spin.
‘You knew my sister?’
‘No, no,’ Parrish says. ‘Not at all. All I know is she was murdered.’
26
Big word
THE MAN CINDY
now knows as Leo interrupts their meal to take a call.
The meal, in essence, is a pizza. An upmarket pizza, to be sure, and doubtless expensive, but a pizza nonetheless. Well, Leo’s on his own, his woman partner in London, and he was hardly going to employ caterers.
‘You’re kidding me,’ he says into the phone.
He listens. Cindy looks around the lavish farmhouse kitchen, evidently fitted by one of those firms that puts everything behind richly oiled wood so that you need a map to find the refrigerator.
‘No, listen, do they want to talk to me? I mean was it actually inside the hedge… fence? If it’s just some bloody vagrant or… No, no, don’t say anything to anyone, Kate… All right. I’d better come over.’
He hangs up. Some consternation on his face as he strolls back to the banquet-size table where the pizza and trimmings are spread out, a bottle of red wine uncorked.
‘Cindy, mate, we have a problem. Not something that happens every day, I’m glad to say. Only, someone appears to have been found dead at Knap Hall. I just need to be sure it’s nothing we need worry about.’
Cindy elects to go with him in the white Discovery, leaving his camper in the courtyard at the Victorian stone villa on the edge of Stow. Shouldn’t take long, Leo tells him, and they can talk on the way. They take the rest of the pizza and a flask of coffee.
How civilized.
‘Sod’s Law, eh?’ Leo says as they leave the lights behind.
‘Or the hand of fate?’
‘Don’t go sinister on me, Cindy. You ever meet her? Trinity?’
Cindy leaves it a moment.
‘Once released my big money balls.’
‘What? Oh, the Lottery. I see.’
‘A woman on the cusp, even then. I liked her. Why did you decide to use her house?’
Leo goes silent. Must be wondering how much he can disclose to a creature he knows only by reputation. Cindy laughs lightly.
‘Only making conversation, Leo. Question of need to know, I realize that. And I’m sure I don’t.’
Leo rounds a bend, accelerates.
‘Her husband told me,’ he says quickly, ‘that it was haunted.’
‘A big word, that is. Often misrepresented.’
‘In what way?’
‘Oh, I don’t know… we speak of a haunted air to convey that a place has a strong atmosphere that no amount of redecoration can alter. Somewhere you might go in and think, Oh, I feel different here.’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s only when two or three people, arriving independently, experience the same reaction that it becomes officially haunted, and even then…’
‘We’re not going into the house,’ Leo says. ‘I don’t want you seen in the vicinity. You can wait in the car, if that’s all right.’
‘Of course. Must be quite worrying for you. How long have you been working on this now – best part of a year?’
‘Could be nothing. Bodies’re always being found. I’m just hoping it’s no more than someone having a heart attack in the woods. Because obviously if it is one of our people, and the papers finds out, they’ll be down on us in force and it won’t be easy to mislead them about what we’re doing.’
‘My solution, in such situations, has always been to give them a juicier story. Rarely fails to divert.’
But it’s as if Leo hasn’t heard.
‘Can’t totally trust anybody not to leak it. Some techie who doesn’t think he’s getting enough money. We’ll have in excess of a hundred people on site for this one, all with problems money can solve. Or just problems. You can’t monitor everybody all the time.’ Leo flicks him a glance. ‘Anything I should know about you?’
‘Heavens, lovely,’ Cindy says. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
They both laugh. The Discovery glides through the dark and the intermittent rain. Not much traffic on the roads. Glimpses of a milky sickle moon between the trees. They talk, for a while, about people in the business they’ve both worked with before Leo approaches the reason for this meeting.
‘Point is, Cindy, I like to think there’s never been a programme quite like this.’
‘You could be right.’
‘It’s a gamble.’
‘But if it works,’ Cindy says, ‘it could make history, could it not?’
‘And how likely is that, do you think, on a scale of one to ten?’
‘In this house… four? But it can work both ways, see. The problem is that these phenomena have a tendency not to dance to our tunes. And why should they?’
‘Perhaps because it’s us who conjure them – on some psychological level – into existence.’
‘But the only way you’ll get that onscreen is through the expressions on the faces of the housemates.’
‘Residents.’
‘I’m sorry. Residents, yes. Unlikely you’ll record anyone walking through a wall, though, see. The best you can hope for is momentarily to shock a sceptic. Have to catch the moment quickly, mind – scepticism soon springs back.’
‘So even if the house has a history of psychic phenomena, you don’t think it’ll play? Even for the believers.’
‘All I’m saying is that my experience tells me they don’t need us… as much as some of us need them.’
‘You mean as evidence that we continue after death?’
‘Or even,’ Cindy says, ‘for us to achieve recognition as the creative force behind a truly epoch-making televisual event.’
Leo’s laughter is explosive.
‘You bugger! I still can’t make out whether you believe in this or not.’
‘Oh, I believe in everything, Leo. But, as you must know, it’s a gamble.’
‘Leo Defford is not a gambler.’
‘No, indeed. No successful producer can afford to be much of a gambler nowadays. Leo, pardon me, but I think we go right here.’
‘Yeah, you’re right.’ Leo downshifts as the road inclines. ‘You know how to work a ouija board, Cindy?’
‘Never done it, to be quite honest,’ Cindy lies. ‘Though I doubt it’s terribly taxing, technically. Upturned glass, bits of paper. Basic knowledge of the alphabet.’
‘That’ll do.’
Cindy smiles, as the windscreen becomes pimpled by the scattered lights of what might be Winchcombe.
‘Am I to understand from your question that if, over the seven nights, we run into what, in television terms, might be described as a dull patch, it might have to be enlivened by someone giving the spirit world a small nudge?’
‘It’s a remote possibility. A fallback. Or perhaps there are more original ways of appearing to do this. You’d know better than me.’
‘The poor old ouija board. All a bit too
Most Haunted
, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Cindy says, ‘I do understand, broadly, where you’re coming from, and I shall, as the Bard phrases it, think on’t.’
‘I’d be grateful. We could be a good— Oh fuck, look at this…’
The road ahead has erupted into spasms of blue. There’s a skew of vehicles on the grass verges, and two are police cars. A female officer comes over as Leo pulls up and lowers his window.
‘Leo Defford. I’m leasing Knap Hall.’
‘You have any ID, sir?’
‘Loads.’ He pulls something leather from an inside pocket of his hard man’s canvas jacket. ‘Can you give me any idea what’s happened?’
‘What I can tell you is I don’t think it’s happened on the property you’re leasing. It’s just been easier for some of our vehicles to reach the spot from your land.’
‘One of my people phoned me and said someone had been found dead. Man or woman? Can you—?’
‘Sorry, I can’t really tell you anything about that, except we might’ve thought it was on your land at first.’ The officer is shining her torch on Leo’s driving licence. ‘Thank you, Mr Defford. If you want to drive up through the main entrance, I’ll call ahead, see if there’s anyone who can talk to you.’
‘Thanks.’ Leo waves a hand at the other vehicles, a few shadow figures visible now. ‘Who are…?’
‘That’s the media, sir.’
Cindy sees Leo flinch.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘They seem to know about these things faster than we do these days.’
27
Responsibility
IT’S NOT SOMETHING
that goes away for long. It’s part of who you are. You could win a Pulitzer Prize, get a medal from the Queen, but you’re still the person whose sister got murdered.
And this is a small country. Murders get remembered, especially if yours is part of a chain and the killer has a popular handle like The Boston Strangler or The Yorkshire Ripper.
Here’s how it probably went: Kate Lyons tells Parrish they’re sending Grayle Underhill to talk to her, Parrish thinks maybe she’s heard the name before and goes onto the Internet, where there’s hardly anything about Grayle, but still quite a bit about Ersula, and whole megabytes about the Green Man, who drew attention to the erosion of British traditions by killing people at ancient sites.
‘Where is he now?’ Helen Parrish asks.
‘Broadmoor. Under constant watch, I guess. He was down here in Dartmoor for a while but he killed a prison chaplain.’
‘Oh God, I remember. Kitchen knife. They trusted him.’
‘Not a mistake they’ll make again.’
Grayle leans back. Being with another journalist makes her realize she is one, has always been one, even during the New Age years on the
Courier
. Journalists, whatever part of the job they grew up in, to whatever level they progressed, share a mind-set, a kind of objectivity. They always see the story. Even when the story is painfully and horribly close.
And, not untypically, Helen Parrish, as the more experienced journalist, has gotten her talking about herself before HGTV has even been mentioned.
‘Your sister was an anthropologist?’
‘Among other things. She was younger than me. The clever one. The one who progressed. Like when we were kids we both got into mystical stuff but even then she was ahead of me. I read about witchcraft, she became a witch. Till they discovered she was just studying them and threw her out the coven. Or maybe she just quit in disgust.’
Parrish laughs.
‘And then,’ Grayle says, ‘she was the serious academic who went to Africa and Haiti, studying shamanism, in which she didn’t believe. And wound up over here as a guest professor at something called the University of the Earth, which was looking to bridge the gulf between serious archaeology and anthropology and… cranks. Cranks like me. And so spent time testing theories about the siting of Stoneage monuments, often in places so lonely that you can… get killed there.’
‘I’m sure you’ve talked enough about it,’ Parrish says. ‘I just thought we should get it over with.’
Grayle stares into the fire. Nobody at HGTV has ever asked her about Ersula, though they must all know.
‘I’m OK with it now. As far as anyone ever could be. I flew over here when Ersula had been out of contact for a while, and I was there when they caught this… creep.’
‘And you’re still here.’
‘Made a handful of good friends. And got no closer to my father who’s never actually said he thinks the wrong daughter was murdered, but if Ersula hadn’t crossed the threshold from real science back to the place where I hung out, with the crazies, she might be alive today.’
‘He blames you?’
‘And in spite of it all, I still love all that – the idea of being in a country full of these ancient ritual sites and old stones and all that stuff. I just… tend not to visit them. Not alone, anyhow.’
She’s thinking how close Knap Hall is to the famous burial mound, Belas Knap, after which it presumably is named. Just
over the hill. Seen it marked on the map. Never been to look. Too much like Black Knoll, where Ersula died. And where she herself saw or hallucinated the image of the girl in the rain. What a messed up person she is.
‘So your mission here,’ Parrish says, ‘is to reassure me – as a fellow fruitcake – that if I agree to go into your house I’ll be amongst friends.’
‘It’s that obvious?’
Parrish pours more tea for them both from a very English brown pot. She’s pretty; her face, though, quite lined, doesn’t do severity, always relaxes into semi-amusement. She’s been around and it doesn’t matter who knows.