‘I’m sorry…?’
‘She’s buried in the chapel, in the castle grounds. In a tomb. And they – they had the funeral all over again?’
‘What?’
‘It was five hundred years since she was born. So they had a public recreation of the funeral to commemorate it. I know that
doesn’t make total sense, but that’s what they did. I expect it was because she was born somewhere else but died there, and perhaps the original funeral was, like, underplayed? Not this time. Everyone was in costume. It was beautiful.’
‘And
you
were there?’
‘Mr Ansell was in New York or somewhere – I think they were opening a
Cotsworld
office there. So Trinity asked me to go with her. It was all… beautiful. You don’t think a funeral could be beautiful. They made a video of it for the tourists.’
‘How long was this before Trinity died?’
‘Few months. I suppose you want me to say I felt a deep sense of foreboding or something. But I didn’t. I was just… we were both quite excited. It felt like a historical moment.’
‘Why? Why a deep sense of foreboding?’
‘Because she… KP was thirty-six.’
Grayle’s holding on to the lab’s ears.
‘Same age as Trinity, right?’
‘Mmm.’
‘How did she die? Katherine Parr.’
Lisa looks momentarily wary then sits up.
‘A fever. Puer— Puer-something. When childbirth goes wrong.’
Puerperal fever. An infection, often fatal in those days. Grayle starts to tingle. It’s a familiar feeling when you know you’re getting close to the story, the essence, the energy source. And when no one else has it. Is it possible no-one else has this? She’s certainly not read it anywhere.
‘What about the baby? Did the baby…?’
‘The baby was born. It was a girl. Katherine died soon after-wards. Look, if it’s going to be that kind of programme—’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘People saying at least Katherine went through with it?’
‘Oh. Yeah, I see.’ Grayle nodding vaguely, like this has only just occurred to her. ‘No, I hope it won’t be that kind of programme.’
‘I hate that sort of gossip,’ Lisa says.
‘Did anybody at Knap Hall suspect Trinity might be pregnant?’
‘No. Not at all. We thought she was just… run down. She’d put in so much work that year. We thought she was just going away to rest, spend some time alone in a… quieter place. If you see what I mean.’
‘I guess.’
Not that it makes complete sense. Nobody would’ve expected someone with Trinity’s money to hide herself away at her parents’ holiday cottage in Dorset for the purposes of quietly effecting a chemical abortion with a pill.
She needs to look up the inquest reports again, and the newspaper medical features that followed. While it’s uncommon for a termination drug to cause a heart attack, it
has
happened before.
What it came back to was
why?
What it looked like was that Trinity wanted to get rid of the baby before her husband could find out she was pregnant. Maybe because it wasn’t his. That was the gossip on the Internet.
Tragedy tinged with scandal. Harry Ansell’s never talked about it, never given an interview. In fact, Harry Ansell may never have given an interview in his life. That was what Trinity was for.
‘The dress,’ Grayle says. ‘That was a Katherine Parr dress, right? I don’t know much about her, but in the portraits I’ve seen…’
‘Always in a red dress, yeah. And wore rubies. She never wore it again. Not—’
Grayle waits. Lisa looks a little sick.
‘I hate all that,’ she says eventually. ‘Hate people who speculate on the Net.’
‘I can understand.’
Grayle leans over and switches off the recorder.
Time to go. If she knew why she was being asked these questions, Grayle thinks Lisa would hate her, too.
4
A soul on eBay
AROUND MIDDAY THE
wind comes in from the sea and has the ageing caravan rattling like the rusting tin can it has now become.
Not a good place to have a caravan any more. One day, he’s thinking – one of these days of extreme climate change – it will simply collapse in on itself, like a flatpack, and the fire brigade will be required to recover his remains.
The mobile barks, and he looks up from his book and smiles, as he always does. A phone that barks like a dog – of all the manifold manifestations of new technology, this may be the one that pleases him most. Certainly in comparison with a series of electronic bleeps arranged into a speeded-up rendering of the opening bars of the Welsh national anthem, which is what his neighbour, Ifan, the hill-farmer, has on
his
phone. This might be ironic, but probably not.
With a forefinger, he slides the answer-bar on his mobile. Embedded in a vicious gust, the caravan rocks like a tumble-drier.
‘Cindy?’
The voice is coming out of his hand, the phone on speaker, to save what few brain cells remain. He draws a slow breath, made more tortured by the simultaneous creaking of the caravan’s failing frame.
‘Who is this?’
Well, he knows, of course. But his response conveys a faint irritability at being disturbed by so many calls. In fact it’s his first in a week.
‘The voice from the past,’ she says.
‘Be more excited, I would, if it was a voice from the future.’ He takes the phone to the window, looks down the hillside at St Bride’s Bay, dark and blotched. ‘How are you, young Jo?’
‘I’m good. Cindy, the reason I’m calling… things’ve changed,’ she says. ‘Things’ve moved on. Very exciting.’
‘The idea of change, Jo, is an illusion.’
‘And we now have a different proposition for you.’
‘One moment.’ He braces himself between the wall and the bed-settee, not wanting her to hear the sounds of fabrication fatigue and realize he’s in the same old caravan. ‘When you say
different…
’
‘It certainly involves more money.’
‘Now that, Jo…’ Cindy straightens up, brightening his voice. ‘…is my very favourite kind of different.’
He remembers, with an acute sadness, his second visit to Knap Hall. The occasion on which he encountered Poppy Stringer, who worked there as housekeeper, and remembered him from the television. When Harry Ansell came home early from work, it was Poppy who smuggled Cindy into the vast kitchen and served him afternoon tea while they shared their anxieties about Trinity. How vague and hazy she was becoming. Not long after-wards, he received her first strange, short diary.
He didn’t see much of Trinity that day. There was no third visit.
It was Poppy who phoned him two months later, her voice brittle as last winter’s dead leaves. Leaving him shattered… bereft and heartsick at his own inadequacy, his failure to realize how vulnerable Trinity had been. His unforgiveable failure to save her from… what? Her death was neither at the house nor had anything to do with it. He can’t remember what the inquest verdict was: Accidental Death or Natural Causes.
Nothing in that house could be entirely natural. He remembers a grey depression settling around him with the low cloud
as, after the call from Poppy Stringer, he walked out into the rain, staring at the heartless sea, feeling that his useful life might well be over.
But apparently it was not.
Poppy again, the following November. Ringing to tell him about a television company sniffing around Knap Hall, phoning her one night, tapping her for information about Trinity’s last days, asking to meet her. Did Cindy know of this HGTV? Poppy sounding unhappy. Still hadn’t found another job, but should she take their money for her memories? What did he think?
Hunter-Gatherer Television sounded like one of those private production companies run by children, which might survive for as long as a year before they were reduced to shooting porn for the early hours. He hated the idea of such insects swarming over Trinity’s past before her ashes were cold. Advised Poppy to say nothing at this stage. He would find out.
Digging out his tattered book of contacts, he made some calls, picking up fragments of intelligence here and there. On the Internet, his intermittent broadband told him that one of their employees was his former producer on the
National Lottery Live
show.
Cindy likes to think he played a significant part in the demise of this celebration of naked greed, only disappointed that the Lottery itself did not disappear into the same sink-hole.
Young Jo Shepherd, however, he got along with her as well as you can with a producer. In her thirties now. And a mum, for heaven’s sake. Little, chaotic, curly-haired Jo – with a baby buggy and a crate of Calpol where the wine bottles used to live?
Hadn’t spoken to her for a few years now, feeling that it would be quite a while before she wanted to work with him again. But now he rang her on a pretext – asking her for help in tracing the family of a studio manager on the Lottery who he’d heard had died. Thus reminding her of his continued existence and leaving her his mobile number.
She was back within a week.
Cindy, darling, how do you feel about reviving your television career?
Never called him darling before.
‘So you’re still busy,’ Jo says now.
He answers with elliptical ease.
‘Not at all, young Jo. Feet up, cocktails at sunset. Industrial dowsing as practised by Uri Geller and myself can be most remunerative.’
The thing is never to let them think you are in dire need of money, or they’ll try to get you for a pittance.
Not
that money is very important here, but credibility is.
During their first meeting all he learned was that the programme would involve a debate on the paranormal taking place in a house said to be haunted. She wouldn’t tell him the location because secrecy was fundamental, only that various ‘experts’ would gather there to discuss aspects of the unseen, and some would be sceptics.
Not exactly light entertainment, then, Jo.
It’s serious television.
Then why are you talking to me? No one takes me seriously any more.
Oh, I think they do, Cindy. And those who don’t will, I think, be quite surprised.
And then she was talking about money. Enough money to get a person out of his leaking caravan and into a pink-walled terraced cottage with a glimpse of Tenby harbour from an attic window.
But that’s a side issue.
He knows how these programmes work. How the fees differ according to the fame level of the participants. Hears himself glibly telling Jo that unfortunately he’ll be otherwise engaged for the next few weeks – another tiresome dowsing job for the minerals industry – and may not be entirely free until the autumn.
But Jo persists. When they next meet she’ll have a contract with her, for his perusal. It will be for a
very
healthy six-figure sum. It’s clear she’s not flying solo here. Talks have taken place within HGTV, at executive level. They want him.
‘Don’t get me wrong, Cindy, I also know how bloody dangerous you can be. Especially working live.’
He laughs.
‘Someone offends you,’ Jo says, ‘all normal human restraint goes out of the window.’
‘Ah, Jo… the lottery show… those were exceptional circumstances.’
And so it goes on, this delicate courtship dance. The fact that she wants to show the contract to him, rather than his agent, is significant. When assembling a cast of notables for celebrity reality-TV, producers tend to go undercover. Agents are avoided – agents tend to dislike reality shows which may not display their clients in the best of lights and can destroy a career as easily as revive one. Producers will rely on their black books, those secret pages of unlisted phone numbers and private email addresses.
And a relatively junior producer, by signing someone interesting, might earn a significant bonus.
Cindy probes delicately, making careful suggestions. Wanting this job very badly, and not because of the money, so, obviously, he needs to make them think he’s holding out for more of it.
‘Tell me about this man Driffield,’ he says.
‘Defford. Vastly experienced. Been around for ever.’
‘With much success?’
‘Yeah, of course. Considerable success. Done well in America. Had a flat in London, nice bolthole in the Cotswolds. Key people at the networks still listen to him.’
‘And yet… he sees other independent producers, half his age, without a quarter of his talent, pulling in ten times the income?’
‘Cindy—’
‘Getting older, I think,’ Cindy says, ‘our Mr Driffield.’
‘
Defford
. You’ve been checking him out, haven’t you?’
‘Not much time left for the big one. Cult of youth, all that.’
‘That’s not what this is about. Look, what do you want me to say, Cindy? He pays my wages. Yours too, if you’re up for this.’
‘Jo, did you, by any chance, act on my suggestion for another person to act as researcher and consultant? Someone whose expertise in this area was… probably unparalleled?’
‘Marcus Bacton? Yes, I checked him out. Certainly an expert, but… I’m sorry, Cindy. I did call him, to see what he sounded like. He sounded… a bit acerbic.’
‘A
bit
. You must’ve caught him on a good day.’
‘Leo is not used to direct confrontation. I went through the motions, saying we’d be talking to some other people. He called back within a couple of hours to ask me to remove his name from the list.’
‘There’s a shame.’
There’s a pause before Jo comes back, tentatively.
‘But he did recommend someone he thought was better qualified to handle our background research by virtue of also being an experienced journalist. Someone we could hire initially through an agency, to see if she suited us. Seemed like a good idea, so we’re trying her out.’
‘What?’
‘Shush,’ Jo says. ‘I didn’t tell Leo she came from a contact of yours. He’s very nervous about cross-fertilization and too much getting out in advance. The ground rules stipulate that the participants know nothing about each other, which makes sense both in television terms and, I suppose, the cause of psychic research.’