‘Do me a favour, Grayle,’ Defford says. ‘Don’t go there. Don’t go anywhere
near
there. Not today.’
‘Leo, it’s what the damn programme’s
about
!
’
‘You really haven’t learned much since you’ve been here, have you, Grayle?’
Grayle shuts up. Least it wasn’t anything
she
did that drove Ahmed out of the house, off the entire site. No one saw him leave but that’s no surprise. The firm handling security is more concerned with anyone getting in.
Defford has people discreetly checking out cab firms, train stations. He’s awaiting a call from Ozzy’s agent. Only Defford could know what to say to Ozzy’s agent in a situation like this. Sebold’s also been asked if he can think of any friends Ozzy might go to. London-based staff are keeping an eye on Ozzy’s north London home.
‘If it’s not a breakdown,’ Jo Shepherd says, ‘it has to be concealing something heavy to make him throw it all away.’
‘He
didn’t
throw it away,’ Defford says. ‘Ashley blew it all apart. And then here she is, being all nice and sympathetic and “don’t go, Ozzy”. Smug bitch. Even I’d smash the bleeding mirror.’
Grayle jerks.
Bleeding mirror
. Something about that climactic moment still disturbs her in a way she can’t work out. Maybe she’ll get Jo to play it back. Sometime.
‘I’m not panicking at this stage,’ Defford says. ‘We have three days to get him back. Somehow we’ll do it. Meantime, we just script over it, and we rebuild tension in the house by letting some of the background in.’
Grayle looks up at him.
‘Trinity?’
‘Been out of the picture for too long.’
Grayle lets her eyes close on him.
Never really was in it, Leo. It’s the wrong picture.
‘So much unplanned drama here now, it won’t be long before the media find us. I don’t want them blowing our cover. I want
us
to be seen to do that, at our own pace. So we start feeding it in, slowly. Katherine Parr, then Trinity. All right? Jo, let’s start working on that.’
Grayle opens one eye.
‘Would help, surely, if somebody had picked up on any of it.’
‘I doubt any us thought that was going to happen. It was a device. A conceit. We’re never going to prove there are ghosts here. Or that there ever were.’
‘I see.’
‘Nonetheless, it demonstrates how you can give a concept a whole new lease of life by introducing a blanket theme.’
‘So, uh, what is Big Other?’
‘Well, that’s it. Big Other is the
theme.
’
‘Oh, right.’ Grayle turns to Kate Lyons. ‘Kate, do you – or anyone – have a list of the viewers who rang or emailed to say they could identify the woman Ahmed may or may not have been seeing?’
Kate looks down at her iPad.
‘We should have. If we do, I can email them to you within the hour.’
‘Good. Yes,’ Defford says. ‘Let’s get Max to talk about that.
Nice example of how viewers can be conditioned. All right, most of these people are basket cases, still…’
‘We should understand each other then,’ Grayle says.
Wonders how much of her pay they’ll dock if she quits tonight.
Outside, she sees it’s not just ground mist, this is fog. This is what happens sometimes in the fall when there’s no wind and no rain. She checks her phone, hoping for Marcus, but finding a number from the past, calling it back from under the ash tree.
‘Who told you, Fred?’
He laughs. HGTV are supposed to have a hush-agreement with the cops, who don’t want the lanes clogged with sightseers either. But Fred Potter’s police contacts seldom get their names on press releases.
‘Nobody got arrested,’ she tells him, ‘and Ashley’s injuries aren’t life threatening. So no story.’
‘Glad to hear that.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Anyway, this is just a reminder that we still exist and have all the background beautifully written up. First sign of anything leaking, we have to press
send
.’
‘Always made sense to me, Fred. Press it now, if you want.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘I’ll explain one day.’
She’s being signalled. Kate Lyons’s head around Defford’s door.
‘What’s Mr Ahmed’s mood this morning?’ Fred says. ‘Just to keep me up to speed.’
‘Uh…’ Grayle stares into the greyness. ‘I guess he seems a little out of it today. You know?’
‘Sebold,’ Kate shouts. ‘Five minutes.’
This is the small sitting room Jo talked about, in the part of the house that still looks like it used to be a hotel, the furniture in
here too comfortable to be Tudor, the wall panels too regular to be handsawn from a tree.
‘Can’t wait for it all to be over, actually,’ Sebold says. ‘It’s not at all what I thought it was going to be.’
She knows he wants her to ask him what he thought it was going to be, so she doesn’t.
They’re both wearing personal mics and there’s a cameraman – just the one – behind her, focused on Rhys on the sofa. Which means, dear God, that for editing purposes they’re going to ask her to do questions and noddies.
Hell
, no. Forget it. No way is she appearing on TV looking like she’s here to clean the toilets.
‘What did you feel when Ashley revealed Ozzy’s scam?’
He’s in a Western-looking cord shirt and khaki pants. He looks relaxed but alert, tipping his head to one side.
‘How do you
know
it was a scam?’
Rhys in his familiar I-ask-the-questions mode. Trained journalist – what he does, what he is. Except he isn’t, Grayle thinks, feeling qualified at last to have an opinion. A trained journalist must never appear to hold a point of view. Hard to avoid Sebold’s.
‘You think it
wasn’t
a scam?’
‘I
never
thought it was a scam. It wasn’t funny enough. When Ozzy says something that isn’t funny, you start to wonder if he isn’t feeling well.’
‘So when he said he wanted out…’
‘He’d reached breaking point. I keep telling people this.’
‘Why do think he agreed to come on this programme?’
‘You want the truth, look at his background. His father was an immigrant. Immigrants come here to work and they work harder than anyone. They don’t stop.’
‘But Ozzy’s dad’s a doctor… an eye-surgeon.’
‘And they don’t work hard? Are you kidding? He told me his old man was appalled when he said he thought he could make a living as a comedian instead of having a normal career, a respectable career. Which explains why Ozzy, from the start,
would take every offer on the table. Even when he was earning more than his father, he couldn’t stop. He’s…’ Rhys sitting up, tapping a palm with two fingers ‘…the most successful of anyone here. Progressed from comedy clubs to major theatres in the major cities of the world. Regular on all those TV shows in which a panel of celebs swap allegedly unscripted jibes. He works all the time. He
couldn’t stop
. I’m going, Ozzy,
take a fucking holiday
. He couldn’t. It was like an illness.’
‘That bad? Really?’
‘After two days he’d be performing for the guests in his hotel to convince himself he hadn’t lost the ability to entertain. I think he saw this as a break. The only kind of holiday he could handle – one where he was getting paid serious money to sit around making smart remarks. But that would never be enough.’
‘Rhys, that doesn’t explain why he was creating ghosts.’
‘You’re not… you’re not
listening
. “Performing for the guests in the hotel”. I think it was just instinct. He wakes up, he thinks
am I working
?
Am I earning
? Before he knows it, he’s invented something he thinks is expected of him, and then he has to keep it going. It’s an illness.’
‘What’s he gonna think when he hears you saying this about him?’
They’ve agreed not to mention that Ozzy quit the project. That way this can, if necessary, go out tonight and no one’s the wiser.
‘You know what?’ Rhys says. ‘I don’t care. I’m willing to put up with being hated for a while if it saves him from himself. I’m only sorry Ashley wasn’t aware of his condition – which you’d think she would be, as a psychologist. Perhaps she just chose to humiliate him. For personal reasons.’
‘So I can take it you don’t’ – she has to ask – ‘think it was anything to do with the house?’
He doesn’t even answer. He’s expressed no curiosity about the house or who might’ve lived there. Some journalist.
When Grayle leaves – quickly, to avoid any noddies – she goes out by the front door. The door seen in that vintage edition of
Cotsworld
, all softly golden as the guests arrive, Trinity Ansell inclined generously towards them, like she’s about to offer a hand to be kissed.
In the fog, Knap Hall’s stone looks raw and jaundiced. Jordan the gardener, pulling a bier-load of logs towards to the house, looks like he wishes he were someplace else. Grayle waits for him.
‘Thankless task, huh?’
Jordan lets go of the bier’s wooden handles, wipes his hands on his tartan overshirt.
‘Bloody thing.’
‘Even I can tell it was never meant for logs. But, see, that’s your role, Jordan. Sinister bastard.’
It’s likely he didn’t intend to smile. Encouraged, Grayle pulls a block of orange-coloured wood from the pile.
‘This safe to burn?’
Jordan leans back against the bier, looks up into air the colour of cream of mushroom soup.
‘I don’t wind up that easy, Miss Underhill. You must know that by now.’
‘Else you wouldn’t still be here, right? See, I figured you might walk out that first night after Ahmed and Sebold called you a yokel.’
‘En’t such a bad thing to be.’
‘Least a yokel knows about elder?’
He doesn’t reply.
‘What I figured,’ Grayle says, ‘two options: either somebody slipped a couple elder logs onto the bier, or you were told to do it.’
Jordan nods.
‘One of them options, aye.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It’s no big deal. You can find that stuff in most books on folklore, or from the Internet. Wouldn’t take much psychology to choose Eloise as a suitable target.’
‘And, of course, you – as a man of science – wouldn’t have a problem with that.’
No response. When you see Jordan in the mist, this stocky, brick-shithouse kind of guy, you don’t see a man of science so much as a
genius loci
. The spirit of a place, the protector. Which is equally inappropriate; what would Jordan want to protect here?
‘You talked to Poppy Stringer recently?’ Grayle asks.
He shrugs. ‘See her now and then.’
‘She, uh, felt some kind of obligation to the Ansells, as regards Knap Hall. Which clearly doesn’t extend to HGTV.’
‘You thought it might?’
She shakes her head. What she was really asking was why is
he
still here? Really doesn’t strike her as the kind of guy who could justify becoming a joke on TV purely for the money. The knot garden? Doing it to watch over the knot garden he made for Trinity? Which she could see from above – as knot gardens are meant to be seen – from her apartment. Not quite enough, is it?
She’s wondering what questions she might ask him if he was in the chapel, camera on, sound on, and right now can only think of one.
‘Jordan, do you really like being here?’
The fog swallows it.
61
Pure, bright water
PULLING ON HER
woolly hat, belting her old blue coat, she walks back up the drive towards the TV village, looking more like a military base on a day like this. Suddenly, it’s the dead-end of autumn. The bones of the landscape are poking through the fog, the trees are skeletons in grave-clothes. She doesn’t remember ever feeling depressed before in quite the same way. The sense of loss is all-enshrouding, the sense of something that could have been thrown away for the sake of personal vanity. And it
is
vanity. Showbiz people, public people, it’s always vanity.
‘Doesn’t look any more hospitable, Grayle.’
‘Oh.’
It’s Jeff Pruford, Trinity’s old manager… steward… coming across the tarmac drive with no visible limp, glancing down at the dull stones of Knap Hall.
‘The places we’ll come back to for money, eh?’ Pruford’s wearing a bomber jacket and tight jeans, carrying an overnight-type bag over a shoulder. ‘Going in tonight, to talk to your residents. Tell my story about the ghost in the phone. But with no names, no hints of location.’
‘He’ll get around to that.’
‘Mr Defford?’
‘He’s, uh, changing the direction of the programme. It’s what he’s good at.’
‘You don’t look too happy about it, Grayle.’ He falls into step with her. ‘Why don’t we go into Winchcombe for some lunch? When I’ve checked in.’
‘I would like that, Jeff, but I think they have things for me to do.’
‘Some other time, maybe.’
She glances up at him. He has a thing about tired, scrawny women with slashed hair? He still has that soldier-cool. Does Defford think he won’t be recognized by people who knew this place when Trinity was queen?
Entering the TV village, he looks around at all the trucks and cabins, the dish aerial.
‘Bloody hell. How many people you got here?’
‘Over a hundred. I’ll show you who to tell you’re here. But first, could I…?’
‘Anything for you, Grayle.’
‘The picture. In the phone. What did they really look like, those women?’
‘It was more like a painting, really,’ he says. ‘Trinity Ansell looked gorgeous. The other woman… didn’t look like a real woman. Least, that’s what I feel now. No vitality about her. Not like you.’
His eyesight was damaged, in the bomb-blast?
‘Was she recognizable in that picture, Jeff? I mean, we’re talking about Katherine Parr, right? That’s the inference.’
‘Who I mustn’t mention by name tonight. Look, I’d be exaggerating if I said I recognized her, any more than you can recognize anybody from, say, an effigy on a tomb.’
‘She was like that? An effigy?’
‘If you mean pale and cold-looking, yeah.’