‘Do you know where my phone is, by the way?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You had it in the restaurant, Grayle. You were talking to the waitress and you had my phone on the table.’
He was following her,
back then
? She shuts her eyes in dismay, fingers knotting on the hand that’s in her pocket.
‘As you know, we check phones, the residents’ phones, for anything that might be important, so you don’t get disturbed, but at the same time—’
‘And
was
there? Something important?’
‘I just called someone back and told her you weren’t available right now.’
‘And do you know where it is? My phone?’
‘I—’
He holds up a leather-gloved hand.
‘It’s here.’
Her teeth set tight. So he saw her in the restaurant, maybe through the door. Followed her out under cover of fog. Waited for her to come out of Defford’s meeting and saw her putting the phone on Kate’s desk. From where he retrieved it. And it looks like he’s been following her ever since. Not good. At all.
Sebold says, ‘What did you tell her?’
‘Who?’
‘Rhiannon.’
‘I told her we couldn’t allow the residents to make or take calls that might identify the location. Which she understood.’
‘And what did
she
tell
you
?’
Problem is, he may have called Rhiannon up himself. He might know all of this. Also, he could’ve heard her talking to the fog and, earlier, to Neil Gill.
She talks carefully.
‘The initials that came out in the seance. Rhiannon told me it wasn’t Angela. Told me what the letters ANG might’ve gone on to become if some asshole hadn’t turned the table over.’
‘I see.’
She’s aware of him swinging his arms in the swirling air.
She says, ‘You, uh, talked to Ozzy, since you both came out the house?’
‘Why would I want to talk to Ozzy?’
‘You and he… seem to have had issues. As they say.’
‘Everyone has issues.’ He pauses. ‘I read about your sister.’
Grayle sighs. This is what he does.
‘Because of whom,’ she says, ‘I am just a little famous.’
‘You flatter yourself.’
‘But, see, why would you bother to check me out, anyway, Rhys? Not like I’m ever gonna be on your show.’
‘You were investigating me, I investigated you. Finding out that, while your sister was a respectable scientific scholar, you are as loopy as the rest of the losers in this dump, and Defford only hired you because you could talk their language.’ Didn’t he?’ He shouts into her face. ‘CORRECT?’
‘This is… partly true. I do like to fool myself that there may be levels of awareness to which we can aspire.’
And other levels to which we can subside, deteriorate. Grayle doesn’t move. They’re not on his show now, they’re on what’s left of hers.
‘So Rhys, when did you realise Ozzy wasn’t your friend after all?’
Silence, then he says: ‘You little bitch.’
‘I guess. But then we’re not supposed to be, are we?’
‘What?’
‘Friends. Celebrities and journalists. Not supposed to be friends.’
They have no common ground, her and Sebold. He’s not even a real journalist, he’s a
presenter
. She recalls from her research that he was a big supporter of the Hacked Off movement set up to handcuff the press after the big celebrity phone-hacking scandal. OK, hacking’s bad, but some celebs were just grabbing a chance to hide sordid secrets.
These matters should not be hidden for ever
, says Mary-Ann Rutter in Grayle’s head.
Or if the stories are passed on as gossip they’ll lose whatever truth they possessed and become legends.
She watches Sebold’s arms fanning the fog. A rural fog turned dark and urban by a fire, and he’s an urban man and he doesn’t look for the moon. She’s in control here, this is her place, and she knows everything. She feels an unexpected exhilaration.
‘So how’re you and Ahmed gonna work this out? I mean about Chloe.’
‘Chloe,’ he says, ‘is dead. GONE. OVER.’
‘Gone over?’
‘Don’t you
dare
play with my words.’
‘All I meant—’
His face bends to hers.
‘Never fuck… with a power-crazed bully, desperate to save his career.’
Oh shit
. Worst case scenario. She can only pretend she doesn’t get the reference, that it means nothing to her.
Change the subject, just talk.
‘You don’t know’ – she starts shifting quietly away towards where the distant orange fire has dulled to rust – ‘that it was Ozzy pushing the planchette. Even Ozzy can’t be sure. There’s always that thin bar of… light.’
Lets her cellphone flashlight tilt a little, so she can see his face: narrow and strong-boned, wide-mouthed under side-razored hair, heavy on top. Aggressively inquisitive. It’s how he sees himself. And the coke: you can almost hear the rapids in his brain. She lets the light shine directly into his eyes, and his head jerks away – another sign.
He’s a big man, gym-fit and, as his head avoids the light, his shoulder and arm are bending away like they’re powered by hydraulics. When they swing back, his leather-gloved hand is open and it’s like a car-crash in her face.
‘
Thin
—’
‘Oh, G—’
Her head spins round so fast it feels like he’s broken her neck, and she doesn’t even see his other hand come round like the boom of a yacht in a gale, his voice hissing through it.
‘
Bar of—
’
Her feet leaving the ground, and she’s barely aware of the first hand swinging back and—
‘—
light?’
A distorting crack, agony exploding in an ear, and she’s hurled away, feet sliding from under her, through thick air into a solid wall. The ash tree. She bounces off its bole, winded, and then she’s curled up and retching. Her lips won’t form words, not even a scream. Her necks twists, mouth dribbling too-thick saliva into the grass.
‘You hit me.’
The words, so clear in her head, come out thick and muddy, with a salty slick.
Creak, creak
. Flexing of fingers in leather gloves, and he snorts.
‘Never laid a finger on you. Where are you? You must’ve walked into a low branch in the fog. Where are you?’
She throws up her hands, the phone still in one. Cowering against the tree, hurting so much. The pain is white, the fog around Rhys Sebold is blue, not the blue of a summer sky or the
midnight blue of a fine night but the dirty blue of mouldy bread, and then the night… it’s like the night yawns and, with her ears popping, she glimpses another figure, wire-thin, moving fitfully out of a hollow in the fog, bringing its own sour light. Half-seen, sporadic: here, gone, here, gone.
Through the slits of her wounded eyes she can still make out Sebold standing there, some distance away, the faint, woolly lights of the TV village behind him. His arms are swinging again, coke energy, and he’s shouting something she can’t hear. He’s in a different place.
A trickle of cold is parting Grayle’s coat. She chokes on the smell of earth and shit and leather, perceiving something sliding like a lizard inside a dull and oily glow, and then cold, old fingers are exploring her stiffening body, squeezing and pinching and probing, fast and feverish.
Aware of Sebold watching. The presenter. The presenter presenting. Breathing in someone else’s warm, raw-meat breath, pulsing with revulsion, Grayle tries to squirm away.
Can’t.
Sebold comes forward, and she can feel his excitement as he bends to her, and she can’t move, as the presenter presents.
Greetings, greetings.
PART SEVEN
What you remember from the night
If your answer is that you are more than a biological accident whose ultimately meaningless life is bounded by the cradle and the grave, then I have to say I agree with you.
David Fontana
Is There An Afterlife?
(2005)
69
Victims reunited
THE FOG HAS
gone, like soiled sheets crumpled and thrown in the wash, leaving the sky pale and shocked, as they enter the walled garden at first light.
The stone is still in place. A loose stone that Cindy dragged from the wall to wedge open the electrically controlled door of the chapel.
‘You did this last night?’ Helen says. ‘You came back? On your own?’
‘No problem, with everyone watching the fire, cameras switched off.’
He holds open the door for her and follows her into the chapel where a liquid cherry light envelops them.
Helen says, ‘What’ve you done?’
Cindy collects some of the broken wooden panels, puts them in a neat pile. Thinner than they looked while in place across the window, boxing in the stained glass. Easy enough, even in darkness, to splinter the wood, careful not to damage the two cameras.
Not that they’ll be needed any more.
Big Other
is already history.
Helen stares up, above the scraped wall where the altar was.
‘This… was always here? Directly behind us as we talked. Is it the Virgin Mary?’
‘No, no.’
‘It’s a triptych,’ Helen says. ‘The same woman.’
‘She used to live here.’
‘Defford covered her up?’
‘On the off chance she might be recognised. Doesn’t matter now. Now that
Big Other
is history.’
He learned this a couple of hours ago from Defford himself, over a pot of coffee in the restaurant, after the bodies had been taken away and the more senior police had left. HGTV is now pulling together two long documentary programmes. Rescue programmes. Better than rescue, he’ll sell them all over the world. They’ll be
true crime
programmes. Neither of them will involve the paranormal. You could feel Defford’s relief.
Cindy felt none. Cindy was in agony.
Too late. Too late again. He looks up into the exposed window, at the wide lips half smiling, the demurely lowered eyelids, the wine-dark cloak, the rubies. Close to weeping, he turns away to face another woman, more rubies glinting in the florid light projected through the stained glass to the back wall of the chapel.
Helen, following his eyes, flinches.
‘Oh my God.’
Cindy sighs.
‘Easier than I expected. The poor queen wasn’t secured to the wall of the chamber. They probably didn’t have time. And she wasn’t all that heavy. And grateful to be out of there, aren’t you, lovely?’
‘She looks different. I mean less…’
‘Heavy? Of course she does.’
‘Bloody hell, Cindy…’
‘Of course, it was too late.’
‘You really think that if you’d got it out earlier… or if it had never been done in the first place…?’
‘Helen, I don’t know. How can any of us know?’
‘The two women in the picture… that the guy told us about?’
‘Both victims.’
‘Reunited.’
‘Not really. Just sharing a sanctuary.’
‘I wonder if that picture ever existed.’
‘Doesn’t matter, does it?’
‘I suppose not. Nothing gets believed in the end. All these bits of evidence for the unexplained.’
‘Meaningless,’ Cindy says. ‘Just like Mr Defford’s programme. It’s an interior thing, it is. As you probably realize now.’
‘God yeah.’ Helen turns back to the stained glass. ‘I don’t think I’m the same person any more. I don’t think I’ll be the same person again.’
In the rosy light, she looks rather young. He watches her and tries not to think of the two bodies he saw before they were taken away. Helen looks up at the woman she hasn’t yet recognized.
‘Thank you, Mr Defford,’ she says.
She doesn’t know about Grayle.
70
Parameters
‘
WHAT DO YOU
remember after that?’
This is Max.
‘I remember him, you know, pulling at my clothes?’
‘You just remember him doing that, not how he
came
to be doing it. How the – I’m sorry to ask stuff like this – how the sexual impetus took over from the plain violence.’
‘Maybe I lost consciousness, I don’t know.’
Max, the shrink, in the outsiders’ interview lounge. Daylight, fogless. A digital recorder on his chair arm. She’s on the sofa with the medieval bestiary, folding herself into gryphons and unicorns. Whichever way she’s sitting, she gets some pain.
‘This is…’ Max leans towards her, hands together like he’s praying. ‘…this is what you told the police, right?’
‘That’s what I said, yeah.’
The police took pictures of her face. Both eyes, swellings of red and purple and black. Later embossed with drying blood. She never wants to see those pictures, souvenirs of the rape suite, where no signs of rape were evident.
‘How do you feel about it now, about what might have happened?’
‘You mean do I need counselling?’ She laughs, actually manages to laugh. ‘Who you gonna find who could counsel me, Max?
Who
?’
Max doesn’t reply. She leans back. Pain.
‘I feel… fortunate. Like I came through something I was not supposed to come through. And I think of others who didn’t.’
‘You were afraid. Well, I mean, obviously…’
‘I was more afraid than I’ve ever been in my life, and I’m afraid now just thinking about it. Afraid in ways I did not understand. And now I’ve told you more than I told the cops.’
Whole lot more. But still not the half of it.
‘When you say others who didn’t come through…’
‘I don’t just mean others who offended Rhys Sebold. When I say others, I might be going into areas where a guy like you would not, uh, want his professional colleagues to know he’d ever ventured.’
He nods.
‘But Grayle… you do realize you’re the only one who can tell us any of what happened. The only independent witness. Now that Sebold’s dead.’
Max is responsible for overseeing the mental health of all of them, including staff, even though
Big Other
has been suspended for reasons apparent to anyone who reads papers or the Internet, or tunes into radio or TV news.