‘He might be more excited than nervous. For reasons I’m sure you’ll appreciate.’
‘Why would you think he’d come out here to do it?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think Ansell liked Knap Hall, even before Trinity died. How long you gonna be there, Fred?’
‘Long as it takes. Hang on, they’re just loading Ansell’s Range Rover onto a transporter. This could be quite a big story, you know, Grayle. They’ll all be sniffing around, and the Trinity death stuff will get brought up again.’
‘If I get anything that won’t impact on the programme, I’ll pass it on.’
‘Thank you.’ There’s a silence. She can hear voices in the background and maybe tyres rolling in mud. ‘One thing I’m sitting on. Got a whisper from a mate in the police. I’ll probably put it out tomorrow, so not a word right?’
‘Sure.’
‘He left a note,’ Fred says. ‘Well, not a note, just an envelope attached to the breast pocket of his jacket with a paperclip. One word written on it.’
She says nothing, thinks
Trinity
.
‘The word was Burgess.’
‘Oh.’
‘Claiming back his original identity before he died? Do you think?’
Renouncing Ansell? Exorcizing Ansell.
Exorcizing Trinity.
‘Makes you think, Grayle. Look, I can see Colin Mellor coming down the track. I’d better…’
‘Sure.’
Colin Mellor is a police superintendent at Gloucester.
‘Call you tomorrow, Grayle.’
‘Right.’
She tosses the cellphone onto the passenger seat with the Parrish contract. All that seems so long ago. It feels like her whole life is a series of hallucinations: the dark interior of the small car, the rear-view mirror as she reverses to face the main road. Ersula in her black gown. The bedposts, and a slumping thing.
The rope connecting it to the shadows.
Her hands grip the wheel so hard her knuckles crack. No wonder people don’t talk about these things any more. It doesn’t help. Maybe one day, when this is all over, she’ll tell Marcus. Meanwhile, she’ll pack it all away in a box and bury the box. Would so love to do that.
But it isn’t going anywhere, is it? And you can’t bury yourself.
PART FOUR
Night…
Ghosts are no longer souls.
Ghosts are now an emotion field.
Roger Clarke
A Natural History of Ghosts
(2012)
Late October
29
Resentment
When she stands up, the red dress is alive with candlelight.
It’s Thursday evening, three days before transmission, two before the first recording with the residents. It’s just after dark, and she walks.
She walks out of the same shadows, every time, in that facsimile red dress. No deviation, the way ghosts walk. The swish the dress makes disturbs the candles as she crosses the stone flags, past the shifting logs in the ingle with their sparse yellow flames and out through the doorway.
A unnatural quietness, then…
‘A wrap, I think,’ Jo Shepherd says softly. ‘We’re not going to improve on that.’
She’s with one of the cameramen, backed up into a corner by the window. There’s another one behind the false wall. Someone’s recording ambient sound. Outside the chamber, in a different century, the woman in the gloriously expensive red dress – her name is Meg – expels a whole lot of breath, turns to Grayle.
‘You haven’t got an aspirin or something?’
‘We can get you one in the restaurant. Do you wanna…?’
‘Nah, it’s OK. I know I haven’t eaten for a while, but I just felt muzzy-headed. That’ – Meg cuddles her arms – ‘was absolutely
the
spookiest thing I’ve ever had to do.’
She’s been contracted in the full knowledge that these pictures may never be shown. She’s a Londoner. Grayle thinks she’s seen her in commercials. Whatever, she’s been given a lot of work in reconstructions for HGTV documentaries over the
years and can be counted on to keep her mouth shut and be philosophical if she doesn’t get to be a ghost onscreen.
They go up the steps, Grayle looking directly away, avoiding the stairs. She’s been told the Ansells’ apartment has been converted into two bedrooms with the bathroom and toilets in between. She hasn’t been upstairs to look. Nor does she intend to.
Outside, in the half-lit walled garden, Meg pulls off her dark wig, looks relieved.
‘Usually when you’re on to about the fourth take, it’s autopilot stuff, but in there it just got more and more uncomfortable. As if I was walking in someone else’s footsteps and she was… walking beside me. Resentful.’
‘Really?’
‘I know, I’m too impressionable for this job. I expect it’s just…’ taps her forehead, ‘up there. While I was waiting in the pop-up, I read another feature in the
Sunday Times
or somewhere about Harry Ansell and Trinity… I mean you can’t take it on board, can you? Both dead now, and none of it’s… you know, normal?’
As Jo Shepherd comes out, Grayle says casually to Meg, ‘Who do you think it was? Walking beside you.’
Frilly white cuffs slide back as Meg’s hands shoot up abruptly into warding-off mode.
‘What’re you guys trying to
do
to me?’
Meg laughs unconvincingly. She’s about to become another footnote in Grayle’s haunted house file.
There are three pop-up hotels, one more luxurious than the others, for the residents and senior execs, though from the outside they all look like big crates. Outside, while Meg’s getting changed in a ground-floor suite, Grayle accepts a cigarette from Jo Shepherd. Hasn’t smoked, bar the odd joint, since her teens, but with two days to go…
‘I’m feeling a bit bloody haunted, too.’ Jo’s kind of tomboyish,
short curly hair and an amethyst in her nose. ‘Next time we record in there, it’s likely to be for real.’
This week, they’ve had two days of dress rehearsal, with the residents played by various Emilys and Jamies, hamming it up, and Grayle in her booth in the reality gallery interviewing people sitting in the chapel. She had a monitor in there, showing their faces staring into camera, but they couldn’t see her. The first time her voice faltered and she started coughing. Afterwards, there was a big forum discussion in Defford’s classroom-sized portacabin office, producers and directors encouraged to say what they thought didn’t work.
Tonight the first residents are coming off the plane at the Cotswold airport, blindfolded, assisted into windowless vans. Tomorrow night they go into the house, one by one, and recording starts as they meet one another. Then the rushes get edited and all the best stuff goes out from ten p.m. on Saturday, finally going live at midnight.
Grayle says, ‘Leo’s looking excited, but not in a good way.’
‘That’s normal. Between now and tomorrow night, he’ll be biting heads off. As soon as we’re rolling, an icy calm comes over him. That’s not in a good way either, but we get used to it.’
Grayle guesses Harry Ansell’s death has hit Defford harder than he’s showing. Maybe relying on Ansell – in the gallery,
watching
– making some disclosure that might alter the direction of the programme towards the end when the last person is alone in the house and the location is finally revealed. But the connection’s severed, no revelation. He’s on his own and there are things he doesn’t understand. That none of them understands.
Grayle smokes hesitantly, gazing out at the myriad lights of something halfway between a fairground and a small city. Or like a condensed and comparatively soundless rock festival site, and Knap Hall is the stage. Some stage: silent, unlit and cloaked, she feels, in resentment. Resentment has become tonight’s dominant emotion.
‘Gotta say I never imagined all this… the expense. How lavish it all is.’
Jo wrinkles her nose.
‘It’s all relative. We’re looking at twenty-four hours of quality television. Think what Hollywood spends on less than two.’
‘I guess.’ The wind’s getting up again. Grayle tightens the belt on her woollen coat, shields her cigarette. ‘This weather good or bad?’
‘Weather’s not a particular problem. We’ll be OK for heavy rain, snow, thunder and lightning – I mean
that
would be brilliant. The only problem would be, say, hurricane-force winds so that all this gets flattened, with only Knap Hall left standing.’
‘That would be, um…’
‘Don’t even think about it, Grayle.’ Jo swallows smoke, starts to cough. ‘I’ll go only so far with this stuff.’
After Ansell’s death, there had been nearly a week of heavy meetings, Grayle getting occasionally admitted to the core team, though Defford keeps looking at her like he’s not sure she should be there.
So how
will
this big suicide affect the programme, specially in the final stages? On one level, it will eventually make the whole thing more newsworthy, but there are questions of taste to be dealt with. Also the fact that the programme will be going out before the full inquest on Ansell is held. Defford’s spent some hours with the coroner’s people, forced to explain some of what HGTV were doing at Knap Hall. Taking Grayle along as his chief researcher and therefore an expert on the Ansells. As if.
Defford’s being immensely helpful to the cops in return for nothing about the project coming out through the police press office.
He hopes.
Now that Harry Ansell is too dead to sue, the tabloids have been indulging in some lavish speculation about relations between the lone-wolf publisher and his beautiful trophy wife.
Why did she feel she needed to conceal her pregnancy from him? Did
he
know why, and was that what drove him down to the woods with a rope? There was a small panic when a Sunday broadsheet ran a feature with a big dark picture of Harry Ansell walking the grounds of Knap Hall with the house in the background and the headline:
HAUNTED LIFE, LONELY DEATH
. But it was all metaphorical.
The lonely death made a mess of Grayle’s schedule, too. Twice she’s had to postpone a meeting with Mary Ann Rutter, the writer, though she’s spoken to her on the phone – she sounds old but bright – and learned why there are no copies of
Rogues and Roués of the Northern Cotswolds
to be found.
Seems some far-flung member of the Wishatt family – in the US, Mrs Rutter thinks – got sent a copy. And she must know what some of her fellow Americans are like about their English ancestry. Oh boy,
does
she? Probably dining out on being descendants of a titled landowner with connections to Sudeley Castle. As distinct from a serial sex-criminal. So these descendants tracked down every copy of
Rogues and Roués
, which is so much easier to do now, with outfits like AbeBooks. And they bought them all. Every one left on the market.
And probably destroyed them. Mrs Rutter sounds amused, but she must be furious. Grayle decides to go see her tonight or tomorrow – that’s assuming Jo Shepherd doesn’t demand more rehearsal for her unwanted role as voice-link with the chapel. All the hours she’s spent getting abused by junior producers pretending to be Ozzy and Eloise –
Let them talk, don’t interrupt
, Jo insists.
Keep yourself in the background.
If only. Never totally going to trust Jo, after her revelation of just one day ago, about the last resident – Gifford’s replacement.
Oh yeah, the unnamed one now has a name – a name Grayle knows all too well. Could be that Jo Shepherd has been been sitting on this for months.
And yes, it’s all too plausible and explains precisely what Defford meant by his Orwellian reference to some residents
being more equal than others. Just this one, to be exact. Whenever she thinks about it, Grayle feels like one side of her mind has shut down while the other, with sadistic glee, is putting two and two together to come up with some impossible prime number.
At seven p.m. precisely, she calls Mary Ann Rutter from her cabin to see if she’s free tonight, but it’s on answerphone. She leaves a message, and then, barely a second later, her phone rings.
Grayle snaps,
‘Underhill.’
A pause, then a light, lyrical laugh that goes through her like raw alcohol.
‘Now
there’s
authoritative. How
are
you, little Grayle?’
As the wind pushes at the pop-up hotel, a tremor ripples down Grayle’s phone-hand. Holy shit, he never changes.
‘I’m… handling things,’ she says.
And he laughs again.
‘A meeting,’ he says, ‘is necessary, I think.’
‘A meeting.’
‘Call it a date, I would, if I was normal.’
If I was normal
. He always says that. It’s one of his signature phrases. He relishes it – not being normal. Like the house.
30
Skid beach
A ROADSIDE PUB
out near Gloucester. New-looking, cheap meals, pool table. Lamps like upturned chromium barstools glued to the ceiling.
Not the kind of pub where even the lowest-paid TV person would ever dine, and nobody in here looks at all like one. Grayle’s finishing a small glass of orange juice at a corner table when the double doors open for this individual – and
individual
is the word – in a tweed jacket and skirt, pearls, gold and silver hair supporting a pink beret.
When they embrace, it doesn’t feel right, but when did it ever? He fetches her another orange juice from the bar and a pink gin for himself. She looks at him, refusing to be disarmed.
‘Just so I know, Cindy, you got my cell number from Jo Shepherd, right?’
He frowns.
‘
Heavens
, no. No one knows we’re meeting tonight. Not even young Jo. Make her anxious, it would. No, I did what anyone would do. Rang the London offices of the eccentrically named Hunter-Gatherer Television, put on my best New England accent and said I was your father. Your aunt is dead, by the way.’
‘Which aunt?’
‘Aunt Mia. All very sudden. They wouldn’t tell me yesterday where you were to be found, but eventually gave me the number of the mobile phone they bought for you. Still, fair play, she had a good innings, at ninety-eight.’