‘Rhys reacted badly when you passed on a… a spirit message that said Chloe didn’t want him to blame himself.’
‘That’s not quite what the message was, but I did want him to speak to me. He wouldn’t, anyway. He just used me to savage spiritualism in the press.’
‘Which, I guess, was how he wound up in the
Big Other
house. No producer wants a fence-sitter.’
‘I understand he was very upset at the time, and I don’t hold that against him. What I do hold against him is what happened yesterday. If I can explain, what so startled me the first time was when the medium got her name right.’
‘Chloe?’
‘Chloe’s her second name, which she’d taken to using in her professional life because some people had difficulty pronouncing her first name. Our parents weren’t Welsh – we’re from Kent – but they spent all their holidays there and they gave their two daughters Welsh names. She and I were twelve years apart, but that was one of the things that seemed to hold us together. That and our parents’ deaths in a motorway pile-up when she was very young. Motorways don’t like us, Ms Underhill.’
‘No. I’m sorry.’
‘Rhys only knew her as Chloe when she was a researcher on his programme. Which suited her. She was uncomplicated. Just efficient and conscientious, although she got very starry-eyed when he started taking an interest in her. But they’re not easy to live with, celebrities, even third-division ones like Rhys. They take away bits of you.’
The dumped partners of soap stars often talk like this, as Grayle knows from Three Counties days. Third-division, Rhys would love that.
‘I’m sorry, did you tell me Chloe’s first name?’
‘Angharad.’
‘Not the easiest to call across a crowded office.’
‘But it begins with A…N…G.’
‘I—’
‘Same as Angela,’ Rhiannon says.
‘Holy shit.’
Grayle stiffens. Wasn’t expecting this.
‘And then someone rocked the table,’ Rhiannon says.
‘I hear what you’re saying.’
She hears its echo, still.
Angharad
.
‘Who around that table would’ve known that, Rhiannon? About her name.’
‘Rhys, certainly, although he never used it. Look, I’m not stupid, I know it’s not conclusive or anything, but he didn’t say a word, did he? I know, he doesn’t believe, why should he? But I wanted him to know
I’d
seen it. I’m not a lunatic, I’m a solicitor. And I think sometimes things do happen.’
‘And what… how might we use this information, do you think?’
‘Why don’t you do it again? Get another ouija board.’
‘Not my decision to make, but I’ll certainly… Uh… Chloe, Angharad… did she own a long white raincoat?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No.’
‘She died in one.’
Grayle’s mouth is too dry to form an easy reply.
‘The night it happened,’ Rhiannon says, ‘it was August, very warm weather but there’d been thunderstorms that day.’
‘Right. Listen. I’m gonna have to leave you now, I have… stuff to do. But I’m glad you told us this. I think it… I think it’s something I need to look into.’
‘As a crank,’ Rhiannon says steadily.
A stupid, misguided woman, according to Sebold on the phone that day, so long ago.
She sits there shaking slightly. Who can she tell about this who might listen, might even think it worthwhile pursuing? Who has the authority to pursue it?
The clock tells her
Big Other
starts in half an hour.
So nobody.
She opens up her cellphone, looks down the stored numbers, finger hovering over Ozzy Ahmed’s close friend and writing partner, Neil Gill, who hung up on her last time. This time he’ll listen. Unless Ozzy’s with him.
She puts in the number on the office phone. The line’s busy.
As she’s hanging up, the cellphone rings, the caller’s name appears. Grayle sighs.
‘Fred, there’s nothing I can tell you right now, but if you’re calling to say the
Daily Mail
’s asked you to check out Knap Hall as the
Big Other
house, I’ll come straight back to you, soon as I alert Defford.’
Fred Potter makes an amused noise.
‘No actually, Grayle, it’s not that at all. It’s
The Times
, and they do have an exclusive in tomorrow’s paper, and they want some background from us. You ready for this?’
‘I’m ready for anything, Fred,’ Grayle says wearily.
‘It’s what you might call an historic sex allegation.’
‘Please tell me it’s not Defford.’
‘No, it’s… it’s better than that. I mean, not better at all, but you know…’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘Woman called Karen Grant. I should know her, but I don’t. Lives in Cheltenham.’
‘OK.’
‘She was Harry Ansell’s personal secretary. She’s saying he raped her.’
‘Wh—?’
Two other women who worked in the
Cotsworld
office but who don’t want to be named have made similar allegations. Not rape, but certainly serious sexual assault. You still there, Grayle?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When I say historic sex, it’s actually not that historic. All in the period since he lost Trinity. Last one was the day before he hanged himself.’
‘Why… why’s this coming out now?’
‘Because Karen Grant, it was more a date-rape thing, she went out for a drink with him because he seemed depressed and went back with him to his flat and made him some coffee, and
then… She’d always had a lot of respect for him, and then when he hanged himself the following evening…’
‘She thought it was a one-off.’
‘What was she going to do, tell the inquest about it? She’s married. And then, as the shock of his death wore off, the other stories started to come out from women in the office about sexual advances, and she began to feel guilty in case there were others out there who’d been damaged by Ansell and were afraid to talk about it. And her father works for
The Times
, some executive position. Look, I don’t want anything from you, Grayle. I just thought you’d like to know. It’s a kind of closure, in a way, isn’t it? If Harry Ansell killed himself because he thought it was about to come out… and he’d be facing arrest, long court case, several years inside?’
‘Or…’ Grayle swallows some water, coughs. ‘Because he couldn’t face what he’d become. Or even understand it.’
‘This could open the floodgates. Other women over the years. Blokes just don’t
become
abusers. Do they?’
One answer is, not on their own, no. She keeps another to herself.
65
White sadness
THE CAMERAS MOVE
playfully around a chamber reborn. There are new old chairs, new old tables. New old light. The wrought-iron candle hoop has gone, replaced by one the size of a carriage wheel, with more than twenty glistening tongues to probe the deep reds and ochres in the new wall hangings, bringing to surreal life the fantasy bestiary with lions and monkeys and unicorns.
But failing to animate the near-black eyes of the half-shadowed woman in the alcove. In the live gallery, Grayle grips her chair arms.
‘
Oh
God, what is that?’
At first she thought it was Meg the actress, now she can see it isn’t an alcove either.
‘Ha,’ Defford says. ‘Even Grayle. Good-good.’
‘Got me earlier,’ Jo Shepherd says. ‘Leo had it painted. It’s an actual painting, on wooden panelling.’
‘And here’s me thinking Holbein retired.’
The woman is life-size in a dull wooden frame with scrolling around the top. The candles light the ruby necklace, the ruby pendant and the band of rubies in her French hood. But, no, the light doesn’t touch the eyes.
Defford strolls away along the row of monitors, satisfied.
‘Cost an unknowable amount,’ Jo says to Grayle, behind a hand. ‘Based on several of the existing portraits, but essentially…’
‘Essentially a new portrait of Katherine Parr.’
‘Done amazingly quickly. I was there when he was on the phone to the artist. He’s going, Make it like one Henry VIII
would’ve had on the wall opposite his bed to get him in the mood.’
‘For what?’
‘Yeah, I know. Wouldn’t have it in my house, but then I’m not a sixteenth-century king.’
Or a TV producer who’s decided a house should be haunted by two specific women. Grayle doesn’t like this picture – too secretive, too heavy with hindsight. Holbein actually would not have portrayed her this way. It’s too
good
. This is a woman pregnant with precognition, a Katherine Parr who knows she’ll die too young. KP shadowed by Trinity Ansell.
‘Jo,’ Grayle says, ‘I need to tell you—’
‘Sssh.’
Defford’s back, sitting down between them.
‘So you like it.’
Grayle says nothing.
‘We love it,’ Jo says.
Cindy recognizes the choral music emanating from the walls: the
Agnus Dei
, from a mass written for Henry VIII by Thomas Tallis.
It settles upon him like a slow blossom-fall, a white sadness. Trinity played this same music. Trinity was having it played in this very room on the occasion of his unfruitful second visit to Knap Hall. As if God himself wandered amongst the guests.
The music fades as they walk in from the dining hall, Roger Herridge gazing around.
‘This is all for us?’
‘Just for you, Roger,’ Ashley Palk says. ‘They must’ve noted how badly your appreciation of the Tudor aesthetic was offended by the place as it was. Who is this, do we know?’
She stands before the portrait which is just a little taller than she is. Roger joins her.
‘Anne Boleyn, possibly. Though not one I’ve seen before.’
‘Now
she
haunts widely, doesn’t she, Anne Boleyn? Hmmm…
don’t suppose it’s possible we’re in some lesser-known wing of Hampton Court, or somewhere like that?’
‘Almost certainly not. No, we could be anywhere. Henry and Anne travelled around quite a bit when they were first married. But, yes, someone does seem to be giving us a pointer here. A clue, perhaps, to the identity of Big Other. Cindy? Any thoughts?’
Oh dear. Is he permitted to recognize this woman? Perhaps not yet.
‘Well now, fond as I am of Anne Boleyn, poor dab, I don’t somehow think it’s her.’
Helen Parrish looks at him, uncertain… but about what? Finding that bird in the hearth… it’s affected her. Something has been dislodged. Confidence shaken, defences down. After they were locked in the dining room, Helen drank no wine at dinner, only water, listening to the movements from next door, like a poltergeist at work. The housekeepers doing more than taking away a dead bird.
The fire on the hearth, Cindy sees, has been enlivened by blazing birch and sycamore, inside the thighs of oak.
But, for all this and the extra candles, it seems, to him, no brighter. Not at all.
He knows what this is about. They’re remaking Trinity’s room, though not in a way obviously recognizable from the pictures in
Cotsworld
. Different hangings, different pictures. The false wall, of course, full of eyes.
And the new portrait, explicitly Katherine Parr.
A mistake. But what can he do?
Soon as tonight’s programme starts consuming Defford and Jo, Grayle slips away, corners one of the Jamies and gets him to find her all the rushes from the ouija session. In a small viewing unit behind the reality gallery truck, she sits alone with the technology, scrolling through shots from three or four cameras.
This is new stuff, all these angles on it. She only saw the chosen pictures on TV, while dealing with Marcus on the
phone, that queasy conversation about Abel Fishe and what he might have done to the dead KP. Now, she’s getting a sequence on it, from when Helen says,
Someone’s doing this.
What did she mean by that? Much of this got forgotten because of what happened afterwards, but it looks like Helen was the first to suspect the planchette was being deliberately pushed. And she didn’t want to be a part of that?
Rhys Sebold’s right in there with a put-down.
But it’s a spirit, surely. Perhaps even
Diana
? Anything’s possible in a haunted house, Helen
, you
know that
.
Which is what makes Helen so mad she insists Sebold take her place at the table, and this is where it escalates. Grayle finds three different views of the spelling out of the letters A… N… G. Sebold, Ahmed, Herridge, Ashley and Cindy each with a finger on the moving triangle. It’s impossible to judge from any of the shots if anyone in particular is pushing. You had to be there. You had to have a finger out there, and even then…
Herridge saying, ‘A N G? Angela?’
OK, what’s happening to the planchette now, in the split second before the table rocks? Where’s it headed? Back to the centre, and then…
One shot was probably not used, because it doesn’t cut easily to the best shot of the table rocking, the planchette launched into the air.
But it
is
the best one: a lovely angle, at ouija-level, from the bank of letters, so you can watch the planchette, five fingers still on board, as it makes its final journey, cruising along the surface of the board like it’s returning to the G. But not quite… a touch to the left.
And left of the G from this angle, is H.
For ANGH…
Oh God, Oh God
, this is far from conclusive, but…
For the fifth time, the table tips, and the board falls from under the planchette and even Ashley does a little scream.
*
From the temple of the live gallery, the house looks warm and opulent, just like in the old
Cotsworld
picture-spreads, as the residents listen, without comment, to a mystery man. A man unseen by viewers, a chaired silhouette, his back to the camera but speaking with Jeff Pruford’s voice and telling the story of two women in a picture on another woman’s phone.
Dead now, Grayle realizes. All three of these women. None named, all dead. No picture to see, except the one on the wall which seems to represent both Katherine Parr and Trinity Ansell and is, in Grayle’s view, not a good idea, but what does she know?