She doesn’t need to ask. It’s all on file: his deselection by the Liberal Democrats after failing, by a narrow margin, to keep his Home Counties seat at the last general election. The suggestion that certain prominent figures in the party consider his very public churchgoing, his royalist views and his fascination with ghosts account for his failure, as well as being out of alignment with the party’s current leadership.
This, rather than the florists? Well, sure, although the papers loved how, when his third marriage failed, he moved in with these two women, cousins, who ran a flower shop. One florist wouldn’t even have been noticed, but two… Grayle’s researches suggest he’s never actually denied the king-size bed rumours, but so what? This is still fairly low-risk stuff compared with what some Lib-Dem MPs got up to in the last decade or so.
Still, florists, somehow that was funny and it had made the jobless Herridge into a minor TV personality for a while –
Have I Got News for You
, all those guest spots. Hadn’t lasted, obviously. Sleeping with florists was never going to be a long-term career. With all the alimony, Herridge, too, can use the money and the exposure. As the van heads north, he sips his Scotch, looking strangely happy. Grayle, thinking about Ozzy Ahmed, decides she ought to drop a light warning.
‘You realize some of the people in the house are gonna…?’
Collecting a disapproving glance from Elsie, but Herridge beams as Elsie hands him his drink.
‘Take the piss out of me? Grayle, I’ve been a politician for twenty years. Skin like a Kevlar vest.’
‘You miss politics?’
‘Never left, Grayle. Just don’t do Parliament any more. Still pursuing my own form of liberalism, as we like to say. I maintain that science and secularism have joined forces to constrict our lives. For the next week I shall fight, shamelessly, for the ghost.’
She’s read his book,
Holiest Ghosts
, about haunted churches and rectories. He’s done another about haunted stately homes.
His argument is that the ghost is an essential component of the national heritage and that a respect for the unknown is an equalizing factor, more necessary now than ever in a society inclined to sneer at the ignorance and gullibility of its ancestors.
‘I have no idea where we’re going.’ Herridge finishes his Scotch, wipes away the offer of another. ‘But if you want anyone to spend a night in the most haunted room, I’m your man. I’m not afraid of fear. If you see what I mean. I’d genuinely like to see one. I would probably count it as
the
seminal moment in my life so far.’
He flashes a smile.
‘We’ll, um, bear that in mind,’ Grayle says.
Thinking,
Jesus, Roger. Just be careful what you wish for
.
It’s kind of thrilling in the grounds of Knap Hall, where Grayle is wandering alone. She feels a little ashamed, but it is. All the lights between the trees are low and calm, the dish aerial on the satellite truck raising a cosmic dimension. You can see the glow of energy, you hear the generator’s diesel growl and you can feel a quiver: the power of television. It still exists.
This is just the grounds. Knap Hall is close but in another place, and the glow doesn’t reach its walls. Some windows are blearily lit, but most are greyly opaque, like lead. Tonight, it looks small and almost squalid.
You compare these two worlds and it’s surreal. All this technology, developed by scientists who would look at Knap Hall with incomprehension and – surely – some distaste. The idea that the people are using the technology, at enormous expense, to peer into the grimy crevices of superstition.
Even the stable block, with its clock tower, has deserted the house, defected to the other side and been honoured for that by being made the centre of operations.
The Live Gallery. Mission Control, home of the producer, the directors, the vision-mixer. All the horse stalls have been taken out, put into storage, old bales of straw transferred to the
barn beyond the knot garden. There are now new walls with acoustic panelling. Under soft lights, you see ergonomic seats, desks with sensual curves and enough monitors, it looks like, for a whole city of CCTV. From the doorway, the accumulation of screens is like an open stamp album. Row upon row of monitors, various sizes right up to maybe fifty-inch, some tilting down from the beams.
Bringing Knap Hall out of itself: whole walls alive with close-up images of oak panelling, stone stairs, a reddening log fire, dark sofas, beds, a few shadowy people moving around, robotically arranging things.
Look down to the actual Knap Hall, and it’s dead. Grayle realizes, with a breathless anxiety, as she enters the gallery proper, that it lives
here
now, that
this
is the slowly beating heart of Knap Hall, electronically extracted, fed first into the reality gallery, in a long truck outside, and then into here.
‘We’ve had the cameras running for most of two nights,’ one of the Jamies tells her. ‘On the off chance.’
‘Of what?’
‘I dunno. Orbs or something? I’m not sure.’
Yeah, right. It also gives them hours of wallpaper shots of empty rooms in different lights. She sees on a few monitors where more of the upstairs windows have been boarded up, but it’s no longer rough, it’s proper panelling now, matching the walls, as if the windows were open wounds which have healed over. What did all this
cost
?
‘Grayle, what’ve you done with Herridge?’
Jo Shepherd’s come in behind her. She’s wearing camouflage cargo pants bulging with stuff. Grayle opens up her hands.
‘In the restaurant, having coffee?’
The restaurant, which has no windows, is attached by a canvas tunnel to the pop-up hotel where the residents will sleep until they go into the house. The restaurant is a long marquee divided into two eateries, one for the crews, one for the execs and the residents.
Jo looks worried.
‘You
left
him?’
‘With a minder. Someone Elsie found. I guess she’s beginning to feel the strain. Roger can be… a touch wearing. He’s like someone from another era. An adventurer. Comic-book hero. Kind of naive.’
‘An act. They all come in with an act. MPs are a lot of things, but naive is never one of them. The friendly stuff won’t last, never does. As soon as the others come in, he’ll find somebody to hate.’
Jo seems, essentially, like a kind person, but she accepts in-house hatred as desirable and necessary.
Grayle nods, the way you have to.
‘So who else do we have in so far?’
‘Just Helen Parrish. She’s OK, she’s a pro. She’s asleep in her room. Two more who don’t live that far away get picked up by van before first light tomorrow. Cindy we meet in Cheltenham at the garage where he’s leaving his car. Usual dark glasses job. Can’t have him seen driving in here.’
‘Who knows about Cindy being… more equal than others?’
‘Officially, Leo and me. Unofficially, Leo, me and you. Leo will announce to the team that Cindy’s a last-minute replacement for Colm Driscoll. At which point you can legitimately say, “Good God, I know this man.” I’m trusting you with my entire future here, Grayle.’
‘OK.’
You can’t dislike Jo Shepherd. Anybody who’s survived working with Cindy on the
National Lottery
and then chooses to work with him again, also live, has to be a strong and capable woman. Or in desperate need of that bonus.
‘I forgot to mention,’ Jo says. ‘Another person you know who’ll be working here from tomorrow is Lisa Muir. Reprising her role as… scullery maid? She’ll be serving the residents their meals. We’re trying to keep it all in the family. For security reasons at first, and then—’
‘Shit, Jo, she told me she didn’t even like to
drive
past here.’
‘Lure of television, Grayle. Put it this way, we didn’t need to ask her twice. Leo decided it would be good to reassemble some of the people who were here when the owners were, you know…’
‘Alive? Leo told me months ago that all the house staff would be shipping up from London for security reasons.’
‘Yeah, well, that was then. The staff won’t be seen on camera, so nobody’s going to get identified and give the location away. And they’re used to keeping shtum. So Darryl, our location manager, discreetly contacted the former staff one by one and only Lisa agreed. Jordan the gardener’s already here, so he’s getting extra to do the odd-job-man bit. Keep the fires fed. He’s been, you know… coppicing? From our woods?’
‘And chainsawing, and gathering and chopping logs and barn-drying all summer. I noticed.’
‘And the wood gets brought into the house loaded on… that, probably.’ Jo points to an ancient-looking low flatbed handcart with wooden wheels, standing to the side of the main doors. ‘Suitably rustic. Pretty battered.’
Grayle blinks.
‘Like… you do know what that is, don’t you? At least, I think it is.’
‘Just looks like a wood cart to me. Somebody found it in here when it was a stable, and we were going to put it into storage, and then Leo thought it was kind of in keeping. Knap Hall’s cart.’
‘Jo, that’s a bier.’
‘A what?’
‘For like wheeling coffins out of houses and into church?’
‘Oh God, really?’ Jo looks a little unsteady. ‘What the hell was it doing still here?’
‘I have no idea. Surprisingly, with all the extra work that got dumped on me, there’s still a bunch of stuff I don’t know about. Which reminds me, there’s a woman I’m gonna try to see
tomorrow before it all starts up, if you can spare me for a couple hours?’
‘Well, try and be back by lunchtime, we might need you to go down to the airport again.’ Jo tightens her lips, shakes her curls. ‘A bier. Jesus. We haven’t even started yet, and this place is already doing my head in.’
‘No kidding.’
‘No, really, I mean I’ve always got along fairly well by operating on the basis that if you don’t have particular feelings about something – if you just see it as subject-matter, you won’t be touched by it. Then, hey… I had
a baby
.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘Nearly four now, and I like to think, like all parents do, that she’s super-intelligent, really advanced. And I’m reading her traditional fairy tales because I like the idea of all that. And it’s just weird how things that feel silly to me make her, you know, really very scared. And I want to stop reading, but she won’t let me, for God’s sake! She wants more. She can’t wait till bedtime. And I’m wondering at what age things like that stop touching you.’
‘Some people, it doesn’t stop,’ Grayle says.
Thinking of Louise Starke – Eloise. And maybe her adult self not too long ago.
‘And now I’m surrounded by… all this. We’re all supposed to be getting focused on… uncanny possibilities. And I think that, to do my job properly, I really ought to be affected the way my daughter’s affected by fairy tales, though I’m not because, to me, they’re just… fucking fairy tales.’
‘They say,’ Grayle says carefully, ‘that as kids we’re receptive to what we later automatically start to block out. If we could return to the child-state we’d become blown away, and all our thinking mechanisms would alter.’
‘And we’d probably all be in analysis. Ignore me, Grayle, I’m overtired.’
Grayle nods at the bier.
‘You think Leo knows what that is?’
Jo looked annoyed.
‘Well now you mention it I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Anything to unsettle them. The residents. That’s what we’re paying them for, after all.’
‘Uh… you feel like a coffee?’
For the first time, Grayle’s not going back to Cheltenham tonight. She has a tiny bedsit in the second pop-up hotel, won’t be leaving Knap Hall until it’s all over, ten days or so from now.
‘No thanks. Might keep me awake. Been hard enough to get to sleep lately. Keep thinking about… not ghosts or fairies… I keep thinking about the man we have to call the owner’s husband. Or the real owner. What he did.’ Jo looks around the gallery. ‘Now that is
real
. That makes me worry about the weight of human stress.’
‘Yes.’
‘
You
OK, Grayle?’
‘Fine.’
She realizes she must’ve been scanning the monitors for a picture of the Ansell bedroom. Which she won’t recognize, anyway, with a different bed and panelling over the window. Or will she? She feels an urgent need to bring it all out: the smell of slimed leaves, the dangling dead weight, the blurry egg-white eyes, but it…
…what good would it do, for either of them? Just another fairy tale.
Jo’s not looking at her, which might be just as well. She’s watching the screens.
She says, ‘Did Leo tell you…?’
‘That… the owner… wanted to come in here? To watch.’
‘You want spooky, that
is
spooky.’ Jo’s face flickers in the myriad monitor lights. ‘I don’t believe in this stuff, Grayle, I really don’t. But I’ll tell you one thing. When we’re rolling, I’m always going to make sure I’m
never
sitting next to a bloody empty chair.’
Friday
32
Fouler seed
THE WEATHER
’
S ALTERED
. It’s like the fall happened overnight, the air dry but dense with breeze-blown autumnal dust. Some years, the leaves stay on the trees until well into November; this morning, you can see them floating like moths outside the windows of Mary Ann Rutter’s terraced cottage.
‘Now, if you’ve read my book,’ Mrs Rutter says, ‘you’ll know what a devilish man Sir Joshua Wishatt must have been.’
Grayle nods. This Wishatt is a key player in
Rogues and Roués
. He was a squire of sorts. Or liked to think he was. Married to a woman from a good family, whose ancestor had been a lady-in-waiting to Katherine Parr at Sudeley Castle, Wishatt lived here in the eighteenth century. His son and heir left Winchcombe after a fire destroyed the family home on the outskirts of town. After that the Wishatts simply disappeared from the area.
‘Or rather the
name
did,’ Mrs Rutter says. ‘Do you see?’