Her head lifting slowly as he walks in. Then the dark eyes are widening and the breathing stops.
‘Good God.’
Cindy stands with hands on hips.
‘How
are
you, lovely?’
‘Well. I never thought of
you
for this.’
‘There’s flattering.’
She rises, smiling wanly through the straggled black hair. He takes the guitar case, helps her up.
‘Now then, Elly. Trying to work out, I am, what it is that you’re seeing and I am not.’
She scowls.
‘Do
not
tell me that’s down to ignorance.’
She’s looking at the fire which, as fires go, is not the hardest to miss.
‘Didn’t mean to yell like that. Rage as much as anything. The
bastards
. They must’ve known. They have experts. Or should do.’
She points to the cut logs assembled against the stones of the ingle. Cindy walks over. There’s no hiss from the fire; these logs are well-seasoned, two summers or more. He lifts one.
‘Oh.’
Now
he sees.
Its bark has grooves as deep as tyre tread.
‘Oh dear.’
‘Thank Christ,’ Eloise comes to her feet. ‘I thought it was just me.’
In the live gallery, the directors are looking at one another. There are four cameras covering this, and they’re getting the lot: four images, four different angles, wide shots, close-ups, face shots, fire shots, log-shots. Grayle’s getting puzzled, backward glances from both Defford and Jo Shepherd.
In a seat behind their desk, she basks in it, in no hurry to explain. First time today she’s felt halfway needed.
Jo leans over the back of her chair.
‘Fire? This is about fire? Is this to do with Eloise having a thing about fire? Because of the witch-burning?’
‘I’m more inclined to think,’ Grayle says, ‘this is about
what
they’re burning.’
‘It’s wood.’
‘Gimme a minute.’
Grayle opens her laptop. On the sound-feed, over the clunk of Cindy laying the log back on the pile, Eloise is talking, like an incantation.
‘You don’t bring it in. In the house. You
don’t
.’
‘I’ve heard that.’
‘You don’t burn it in the house. Same story. Wherever you go. Unlucky.’
‘But it also has healing qualities,’ Cindy says.
‘That’s the fruit and the flowers, isn’t it?’
‘And the leaves repel insects. And the green wood may cure warts.’
‘But
you don’t burn it
.’
Now you’re hearing genuine distress.
‘No,’ Cindy says soberly. ‘It is generally agreed, in most areas, certainly this one, that you don’t burn it.’
Defford signals Jo Shepherd to keep tabs, beckons Grayle and points at the door. Grayle gets up from her chair as Eloise’s voice is raised to the beams, and it’s not a steady voice.
‘Somebody… needs to get this out. All of it. It’s not a joke,
do you understand?
’
Grayle sits down on the steps of the reality-gallery truck, wet against her ass but she needs to operate the laptop.
‘Judas Iscariot,’ she says. ‘Remember him?’
Not expecting a reply from Defford and she doesn’t get one. He’s standing in front of her, legs either side of these heavy-duty pipes carrying power lines and fibre-optics or whatever.
‘Judas Iscariot was said to have hanged himself from an elder tree, and some sources say that’s where it started. Elder trees are bad news. Which is unfortunate really, because the bastards are everywhere.’
‘That’s what the wood on the fire is?’
Defford’s come to lean over her shoulder to see the Folklore of Trees website she’s found. Grayle points.
‘See there? See those deep grooves in the trunk? No other tree in this country has bark quite like that. The elder’s known as a fairy tree in the Isle of Man, a witches’ tree in most of Britain and Ireland. An elder tree growing too close to a house might cause consumption to claim the dwellers therein – it says here. And yet they courted bad luck by chopping it down. You can’t win with an elder.’
‘The woman’s a bloody witch, anyway.’
‘She’s a hedge witch. It’s a state of mind. I couldn’t find that she was ever part of a coven. Witch in the folklore context usually means plain evil. Elder is often called the devil’s wood.’
‘Is it really?’
‘Just tell me you didn’t know that.’
‘Fucking hell!’ Defford smashes his right fist into his left palm. ‘Talk about a happy accident.’
He looks up at the stars, a big, open-cut of a smile on his face. Grayle says, ‘
Happy
?’
‘Grayle, it—’
‘“Accident”, even?’
‘If it was possible for this programme to get off to a better start, I’d like to know how. Did you
hear
that scream, the way it resounded off the stone?’
‘If that’s what you want.’ Grayle closes the laptop. ‘I mean, I realize you’re the producer and all, but you don’t think maybe it’s a little too soon?’
‘Aw, Grayle you really don’t think—’
‘Strikes me as a hell of a coincidence that the first two people in the house are those most likely to identify elder as the devil’s wood.’
‘You think it was deliberate?’
‘
They
do, Leo. How you gonna handle that?’
‘Fuck’s sake, Grayle, the only person this side of the cameras who knows anything about this witchy stuff is you!’
‘Far’s you know.’
‘And I take it
you
didn’t arrange with – what’s his name – the gardening guy?’
‘Jordan.’
‘To have Jordan bring in a pile of elder.’
‘Somebody did. Now whether they knew what effect it would have—’
‘Whoever they are there’s a small bonus coming their way. Did you see her
face
?’
‘And it was not a professional reaction, Leo – she wasn’t playing to the camera, even I could see that. She truly believes, like a lotta people, and maybe me too, to an extent, that old traditions didn’t just get made up. She sees nothing but elder wood on the fire and more of it stacked up on the hearth, and something tells her this whole project will not go right.’
‘Like a curse?’
‘Or even,’ Grayle says, ‘like a set-up. And isn’t that what the viewers are gonna think, too?’
Defford’s fingering his earring. She’s been following his reactions from the start of this, all the way from surprise to mystification to something close to joy.
‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘that’s a possibility. We’ll need to consider how to get that point over. Because obviously I have no reason to think that wood was deliberately chosen.’
‘You’re gonna have the wood removed, Leo? Jordan’s still here, is he, to handle that?’
‘He has a caravan. He’s on call.’
‘You mind if I go ask him if anyone here told him to bring elder wood into the house? Because I’m guessing he knows what it means. Country boy and all.’
Defford takes a step back.
‘And if nobody told him?’
‘Well, that would mean either he thought none of the residents
would be au fait with rural superstitions that even I know about… or that he did. And if
that
is the case…’
‘All right. Yeah. Sure. Talk to him.’
‘Thanks.’
‘However,’ Defford says, ‘you might just be pushing it a little, Grayle. Be aware of that.’
‘He’s always been OK with me.’
‘Didn’t mean Jordan.’
Defford’s eyes are unblinking and he isn’t smiling.
Cindy’s thinking, inevitably, he supposes, about Harry Ansell.
But that wasn’t an elder, was it? That was an oak.
He’s aware, for the first time since he entered the house, of the personal mic he’s wearing, the size of a bluebottle, glad that it doesn’t pick up his thoughts, hoping to God he doesn’t talk in his sleep.
This is not a good start, is it? Is it really possible it was deliberate?
‘When the others come in, it might be as well not to mention this,’ he murmurs, knowing full well that by this time tomorrow his murmur will have been broadcast to the nation. ‘I think they’ve got the message. I think the wood will be taken away in the night.’
‘Too late,’ Eloise says. ‘Damage is done now.’
41
Electric pig
MARCUS IS BACK
from the loft with a big old book. One of those books he knew he had somewhere. Bought second-hand a few years ago, maybe fifth-hand judging by the state of the binding.
Andy notices he’s panting a little. Aw hell, what’s that matter? All those years of being Sister Anderson, the stink, the drips, the bedpans and the old guys who drooled, and you’re worried about a wee bit of panting? Could be he’ll never have a heart attack again. Then again, he just might.
She follows him into his office where he slaps the book on his desk. Just where his own book was, the last time she was in here.
The manuscript of
In Defence of Mystery
is gone. The whole thing. Marcus always likes to see an actual paper manuscript piling up. Every time he finishes a chapter he prints it out, adds it to the pile. Satisfying as the stack thickens, but also a threat, as Marcus admits sometimes, late at night.
Finish me
, it says,
finish me or I’ll finish you
.
Not how she’d imagined it was going to be. Writing a book seemed like something she thought he could relax into. But, because it doesn’t get finished, because he goes to bed knowing he’ll have to wake up to it next morning, it’s become this source of unending anxiety. He wakes up in the night, thinks of something he’s got wrong, and he’s babbling into the wee recorder he keeps by the bed, and then he can’t get back to sleep and goes and writes. Not good.
‘Where’s it gone? The book.’
‘Drawer. Tired of it nagging me. Look at this.’
The title of the tome Marcus has brought down from the loft is
Annals of Winchcombe and Sudeley
by Emma Dent.
‘Famous Victorian matriarch of the family which still owns Sudeley Castle. Persistent old dear. Probably not unlike Rutter, if considerably richer.’
Overhearing his phone call to the woman called Rutter, Andy was amused to register that she’d thought he was dead – Marcus, furious at this, snarling
minor… cardiac… blip
into the phone.
‘I asked Rutter,’ he says now, ‘how, if this man Fishe was so close to demonic, did he get away with what he was doing with the local women? How come a bunch of vigilantes didn’t go up there and lynch the bastard? She reminds me his employer, Wishatt, was a magistrate, wielding considerable power. Also that people were superstitious about Belas Knap and Knap Hall and believed Fishe under the protection not only of Wishatt but the devil himself.’
‘How’s the devil come into it?’
‘Belas Knap – where’s the name come from? Some people say “bel” – beautiful. More likely Baal, the storm god. In the eighteenth century, when nobody was seeing paganism as cosy, that would’ve been as good as saying Satan. Demonic, anyway.’
Marcus switches on the black Anglepoise lamp that used to stand on Andy’s desk at the hospital for so many years. So much a part of her that when she left they gave it to her. At first the hospital administrators had refused even to sell NHS property, so a couple of consultants pinched it. Marcus loves it.
‘Lot of legends and ghost stories attached to Belas Knap. As recently as 1998, a woman clearly saw a group of monk-like figures approaching the mound but disappearing before they reached it. Quite significant. Suggests God-fearing folk can’t get close. For hundreds of years, probably the only people who went up there alone would be bastards like Fishe – the ones who’d given up worrying about their immortal souls and believed it would give them what they craved. And who’s to say it didn’t?’
‘Craved?’
Marcus is looking a wee bit devilish himself. Gets like this when he’s on the trail of something, snuffling around from one place to another like an electric pig. For a while he was unsure about this Abel Fishe, thinking maybe the guy had come to embody the misdeeds of several people, possibly all of them connected with Knap Hall.
Now he’s decided Fishe was halfway demonic and this is linked somehow to his naming of the house after Belas Knap.
‘Bodies buried there. Outpourings of devotion to Baal or whatever they worshipped to improve their hunting.’
She knows it, of course. Marcus dragged her up there once, in the days when he was still taking it slowly. She recalls thinking there was something smug about it. Didn’t like it that much.
‘Whatever energy’s accumulated there,’ he says, ‘might be neutral in itself, but it’ll swell whatever reservoir of toxic energy’s inside a man like Fishe. He’ll come away from there feeling he isn’t on his own. He’s united with something. And that whatever he’s been doing, he’s
meant
to be doing it. And he’ll keep going back for more.’
‘You don’t even know he ever went there. Maybe he was scared like the rest of the folk.’
‘Then why would he name his house after it?’
‘Wasnae even his house.’
‘True. Wondered about that. How would a tenant be in a position to change the name of someone else’s farm? Put it to Rutter, who suggested that Fishe knew enough about Wishatt to be able to make certain demands. That Wishatt was sufficiently afraid of Fishe – or of what Fishe had become – to accede to his every whim.’
‘You’re still flyin’ a kite.’
‘Of course I’m flying a bastard kite. With nothing to go on but Rutter’s word-of-mouth history, what option do I have?’
Andy turns away to conceal her smile. This is not exactly living with the mystery.
‘All right.’ Marcus is rapping a pen on the Sudeley book. ‘Let’s say Fishe is controlled by urges, and one of them keeps drawing him back to the mound, like a junkie to a drug dealer…’
Andy nods for the sake of domestic peace.
‘But you’re right, Anderson. We don’t know enough about him. So thought I might as well drop an email to old Teddy Everly. Knows everything, remembers most of it. When he’s sober.’
Teddy Everly is this old drunk from Stroud, most famous for his book,
In Search of Rosie
, in which Teddy challenges the author Laurie Lee’s assertion that the obliging young heroine of his classic Cotswold memoir
Cider with Rosie
was a composite character.