‘And resentful. You said that when we talked.’
‘That was the only strong impression I got.’
‘And Trinity’s mood?’
‘Funny one, that. I’m not great with words. Tremulous? All quivery?’
‘As if she knew the other woman was there?’
‘Wouldn’t like to say.’
‘Did you notice Harry Ansell that night?’
‘Harry, eh?’ Pruford stops next to the reality van, its door shut against the fog. ‘That was a bugger, wasn’t it? Him topping himself. Don’t know if it surprises me or not. If he was ever depressed, he wouldn’t even admit it to himself.’
‘What was he like that night?’
‘He was like some of the other blokes there. Or maybe more so. The red dress, you know?’
‘Go on.’
Jeff Pruford looks both wry and reticent.
‘He was keeping in the background, the way he did. But – I might be wrong, and if I am, I’m sorry – looking to me like he wanted to tear it off her there and then.’
No, he wouldn’t be wrong. Not this guy. He’d know.
‘Uh… they say Trinity was never really happy again. After that night. That banquet.’
‘I never said
he
looked
happy
about it,’ Pruford says. ‘It was just rare to see him betraying any sort of emotion.’
‘Like he wasn’t… quite himself?’
‘What was “himself?”’ Pruford says.
When she gets back to her cabin, a document’s come through to the laptop from Kate Lyons. One hundred and twenty-seven people who recognized Ozzy’s lady. Who think she’s a dead daughter or a dead mother. Grayle opens a few – all the Angelas coming in now.
They won’t all be basket-cases, some just people looking for something to shore up their crumbling beliefs, in these dismal days. They’ll follow
Big Other
to the end of the week and turn off their TVs feeling worse than if it had never been screened.
Defford’s assuming – and he’s probably right – that the majority of his viewers will not be like this and think they very much got their money’s worth in terms of human conflict.
But it’s just possible there’ll be someone else like Paul Swinton, from Ozzy’s Ahmed’s past. Glancing down the names on the list, Grayle spots one that’s a little familiar, not sure
where she’d heard it before. She thinks it’s Welsh and underlines it as the phone rings.
‘Ashley Palk,’ Kate Lyons says crisply.
Ashley’s cuts are superficial, which means they didn’t require stitching, but there are other wounds; Grayle can tell that soon as the door closes on them.
The camera’s still in the sitting room where she talked to Sebold, but this time there’s nobody to operate it. Ashley has asked to talk first, unrecorded. She has minor dressings on her cheek, jaw and under an eye. Wearing a grey bathrobe, no make-up, she’s hunched into a corner of the deep sofa patterned with heraldic beasts.
‘I don’t know how far he would’ve taken it,’ she says. ‘I knew he was clever. I know he learned all that Wiccan terminology to send up his mother-in-law. I’m guessing he read up on those famous cases where a group creates a’ – she double-fingers quote marks in the air – ‘“ghost” and then people outside the group start claiming they’ve seen it. Maybe he was hoping viewers would ring in saying they’d seen the woman in the white mac.’
‘They may have. I’m checking. Uh… the perfume, that’s pretty conclusive. And the way he consistently followed the pattern of letting people drag information out of him. The ouija board… how’d you do that?’
‘That’s one of the things I didn’t want you to ask me about on camera. Sometimes you just have to wing it.’
‘So you didn’t know he was pushing the planchette.’
‘I do now.’
‘But you couldn’t really be sure with five fingers on there.’
‘No.’
‘OK – and this is what I don’t understand, Ashley – you let him start to spell out the woman’s name – ANG, like it’s gonna be Angela or Angie. And then you decide it’s time to wind up the charade and you upset the table.’
‘No.’ She sits up quite sharply. ‘No, that wasn’t me.’
‘Ahmed?’
‘Him or his mate, Sebold, who was already annoyed at Helen forcing him to sit down with the idiots. I’m not sure of anything except it definitely wasn’t me. I wanted to know who Angela was.’
Grayle nods.
‘Me too. I thought for a moment it might’ve been Roger Herridge. Angela’s the name of one of his flower-shop girlfriends. But then why would Ahmed give the spirit the name of someone who was far from dead? Unless he knew he was about to be exposed – which neither of us thinks he did.’
‘That was coincidence, I think. It was Roger who first suggested the name Angela, perhaps because it was so familiar to him.’
‘Can we go forward to the incident in front of the mirror, when Ozzy Ahmed finally blew? Can you take me through that?’
‘I’ll try.’
Ashley arranges herself on the sofa. She’s holding a brocaded cushion in front of her, like a teddy bear.
‘What did you think,’ Grayle asks, ‘when Ozzy was demanding to be let out of there?’
‘A wee moment of triumph, I suppose. Nearest I’d get to a confession. And then I thought, well, that’s just a personal triumph. Look how clever I am, you know? Wait till Wiseman and Chris French see this, and all the other shafters of charlatans. But where’s it really taken us? How happy is Defford going to be with me for taking out his star performer? And do we know what’s behind it? I wasn’t sure we did.’
‘So you decided to try and talk him down from the ledge, as it were?’
‘They made me watch it this morning. Pathetic, wasn’t it?’
Grayle’s playing the scene in her head, recalling for the first time how it kept replaying itself spontaneously through half dreams. The mental tape jamming on one specific instant that
she still isn’t sure actually happened as she thinks she remembers it.
‘How did you feel when he brought back his arm with the wine bottle in it? What did you think would happen?’
‘I thought he wouldn’t do it. Too laid-back. Not a violent man at all. Everything about him’s rather gentle, apart from his tongue.’
‘What did you feel like when the bottle left his hand?’
Ashley’s cushion creases as her arms tighten.
‘Very cold, actually.
Very
cold and surprisingly… shocked?’
‘That a strong enough word, do you think, “shocked”?’
‘OK, frightened. I was very frightened.’
‘Frightened of Ozzy?’
‘Frightened of what he’d become, yes.’
‘In that instant.’
‘Yes.’
In Grayle’s head there’s an image from the monitors of the expression on Ozzy’s face as his arm passes over his head. How it rapidly changes – only one monitor showing this – as if the lowering arm has wiped away the familiar half-smile and underneath it is…
‘Ashley, you were standing just slightly behind Ozzy as he threw the bottle. Were you also looking in the mirror?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You didn’t see his face in the mirror?’
‘I…’
‘You only saw the back of his head?’
‘I suppose. It all happened incredibly quickly.’
And yet in slow motion, too.
‘See, if I was in that situation, Ashley, I’d want to know what I was dealing with. Like what was in his eyes. And his eyes were surely in plain view in that mirror.’
‘The room was dark. Just candles.’
‘But you’d the spent the whole night in candlelight, your vision would’ve adjusted. And the light collects in the mirrors,
too, and reflects back into the room, which doubles the amount of light. Or is my science not up to this? My sister Ersula could’ve given it to you in whatever the light equivalent of decibels is. C’mon, Ashley, what was his expression as the bottle left his hand?’
‘You’re good at this, Grayle. Closing in on things.’
‘My old man never thought so. Go on…’
‘All right, there was a sort of greeny hue on the face. From the candlelight picked up in the green glass of the wine bottle, as it… That probably was what intensified it.’
‘Intensified it how? I mean, what did it intensify?’
‘The determination, I suppose.’
‘Determination.’
‘And the… the single-minded, the focused… malevolence?’
A door opens. In the light, posh Scottish accent, the word sounded quite beautiful, Grayle thinks, like a slow cascade of pure, bright water over smooth stones.
‘Not a word you’d normally associate with Ozzy,’ she says gently.
‘No.’ Ashley’s gazing into nowhere, with no realization of what she’s actually saying. ‘That’s why m’ first thought was that it wasn’t his face at all. You know?’
62
The runes don’t work
CINDY HAS HELEN
alone again, in front of the fire with a pot of tea. Old friends, they are now.
Ashley has not yet returned. Roger, bored and disillusioned, has gone to his room for a nap before the night’s recording begins, perhaps hoping something seductively spooky will invade his dreams. Poor Roger. Cindy would like to help him, perhaps show him some exercises to open up certain alcoves of his being, but he’s not sure that this, in the end, would be helpful. Roger has his own concept of the beyond, which this house might spoil for ever.
‘I’ve been day dreaming a lot,’ Helen confesses, sugaring her tea. ‘Not something I tend to do, much. Thinking about Diana and Althorp, how people connect to places. Hard to imagine anybody connecting to this place.’ She takes the tea to her cushion on the ingle’s rim, stretching out her legs, balancing the saucer on her knees. ‘There’s no love here. I mean you could feel almost sorry for it.’
‘Must have been attempts over the years,’ Cindy says, ‘to love it. To bring it alive.’
Wishing they weren’t wearing personal microphones and he could tell her about his friend, Trinity.
‘What I feel, Cindy, is that you could pour in love by the bucketful, and it would all be absorbed very quickly and all you’d have left would be some… damp gunge.’
‘Ah, Helen…’ Cindy purrs at her perception. ‘Marry you, I would, if I was normal.’
‘Blimey.’
‘No, you’re right. Is that the house itself, do you think? Or something in it? Or someone?’
‘I don’t think it likes women,’ Helen says.
‘Or perhaps likes them too much. But does not love them.’
Cindy feels a shifting in his spine; the house’s concurrence. Glances meaningfully at the false wall, where a mirror has been replaced, lifts a friendly hand.
‘Listen well, televisual folk. Wisdom, see.’
They hate that, the TV boys. After four days in here, you’re supposed to have forgotten they ever existed. But he doesn’t forget and neither does Knap Hall, the name of which must never be breathed aloud this week. The house is irritated, injured even, by the television people, with their ubiquitous hidden wiring and their universal eyes. An intrusion, disrespect, a slight against its sovereignty. When Mr Ahmed put the bottle through the mirror, he was hurling it for the house.
Or for what lives here. A spiritual life-form, low enough now to relish what Helen calls the ‘gunge’. He will not distinguish it with a human name, although he suspects it’s had several. Of all the levels in the house, this is the lowest, but its vapours rise, and we breathe them in and see what we would not want to see.
Helen leans her head back against the stone.
‘When Ozzy Ahmed was talking about an abused woman, I felt… that women have been abused here. I keep thinking about that, Cindy.’
‘Abused women… or Ozzy.’
‘Ozzy. The performance of his life? I don’t think so. When he was talking to me, that wasn’t a performance. Yes, he was being
careful
– when you’ve done as many news interviews as me, you know when people are watching their words – but it wasn’t entirely made-up. Something was… burning inside him. I didn’t expect that.’
‘Mr Sebold thought he was approaching a breakdown.’
‘Such concern.’ Helen smiles. ‘Usually commensurate with the level of fame. TV and radio presenters, while pretending to
be above all that, love to collect celebs. They’re just part of the celebrity support mechanism, but they like to think they’re far more important than that. I wonder what they’re saying to one another now. Are you allowed to socialize when you’re evicted?’
‘I think we all have to come back at the end of the week to share our feelings, so perhaps not. Can’t see how they could stop it, mind. Any more than they could stop us gossiping about executives of Hunter-Gatherer Television. Just rely on us, they do, to be decent human beings.’
Helen turns to face him. So clear-eyed, she is.
‘
Is
this a haunted house?’
‘All houses are haunted. I’m sorry…’ He wiggles his hands. ‘I know what you’re asking. I think, despite some rather baffling developments over the past day or two, most viewers would think not. Human fireworks, but little else.’
‘It feels haunted now,’ Helen says. ‘If you weren’t here I’m not sure I could stand it.’
‘Well, that’s been the problem, see. Too many of us, filling the place with our baggage and our back-stories. Our electric emotions. When Eloise came in alone, she reacted alarmingly quickly to something she, personally, perceived as horrifically wrong – the elder wood on the fire.’
‘And the viewers at home, most of whom wouldn’t recognize an elder branch from a cactus, thought she was bonkers and threw her out. But was she?’
‘No. The elder was a personal conduit to something deeper.’
‘So the intention,’ Helen says, ‘is that, at the end of the week, one person – the viewers’ chosen one – will be left alone here for one night. Should it be Roger, do you think?’
‘Roger would want it to be Roger. Personally, I would not.’
‘All right.’ Helen takes his left hand. ‘What do you think?’
‘What?’
‘What is it? What do you think it is?’
Cindy looks down at his silly skirt. What an old phoney he must seem. And yet isn’t that the point of all this… that the
hard line sceptics like Richard Dawkins and Ashley Palk should regard him with ridicule rather than hatred, thus allowing him to walk amongst them?
He looks down at the jagged red seam of fire under patient old oak logs which rarely flare. Remembers that momentary glimpse he had yesterday, as the planchette trembled between worlds, of the dead hearth, the pale-brown walls, the rude and empty chair and the rotting hangings. Visions from the vapour.