Night After Night (11 page)

Grayle knows this from when she was living in a little old cottage, but she feels obliged to raise her eyebrows as they enter Knap Hall through a small side door.

‘This is an early twentieth-century extension, as you can tell by the comparative neatness of the stonework. I’m told we can’t touch it, how crazy is that?’

‘Right.’

They’re in a windowless stone passage lit by a slanting skylight bar of blue light, cold as a gun barrel. Not what she was expecting from all the lush interiors pictured in
Cotsworld
. Grayle shivers. In her haste to follow Leo Defford, she’s left her coat in the car. She rubs her hands together. Left her mittens, too.

‘So if someone, back before there were these regulations, had built some kind of flat-roofed, concrete extension that was like a real eyesore from outside…?’

‘Then they might be forced to keep it.’ Defford tilts a smile. ‘Not a problem, I’d imagine, where you come from.’

Hell no, we’d just pick out the really old bits, pack them in bubble-wrap and fly them out for reassembly on the edge of the Nevada Desert.

Grayle says nothing. Why ruin your nation’s reputation for irony-deficiency?

‘Only the servants actually came in this way,’ Defford says, ‘so it didn’t matter a lot.’

With the camera under an arm, he pushes open what is clearly, despite the metal studs, a fairly modern door, and they step down into a small, square hallway with one small Gothic window. Defford stops before another door, closed. This is clearly old, oak as hard as cast iron. There’s an age-blurred crest on the wall above it, and the ochre stones in the wall here are no longer uniform.

‘This is where it all changes, and we enter the house proper,’ Defford says. ‘You get the readies?’

‘What?’

‘If the money’s in your account, means you’re on the payroll and we can talk more freely.’

‘Oh. Yes. Uh, thank you.’

Defford puts a hand across her to the door, drops his stubby fingers to the wooden latch.

‘Good-good.’ He raises the latch and steps back. ‘After you.’

His woolly white hair is luminous in the dim, grey hallway. He looks impatient now, like a ram in a pen.

Grayle’s expecting the dumb cliché of an eerie creak as the old door swings inwards, but it’s quite noiseless. Beyond the door, there are two stone steps, down, and a musty, waxy smell. She thinks of candles and death.

Hesitantly, she descends, and it’s like…

… like when you enter a church sometimes, from a busy street, and the very silence, the depth of it, is somehow active.

‘Mr Defford, are you looking for an actual ghost here?’

‘One way of putting it.’

‘Can you say any more? What I mean is… is it, you know… is it her? Trinity Ansell? Is she what you want?’

Defford stiffens, then relaxes, shrugs.

11

The significance of holes

IT
’
S A BIG
room, too big for a farmhouse, and parts of it are still sunk into shadow like the night’s reluctant to let go. The ceiling has saggy oak beams, wrinkled and paling in places. Oak pillars show where walls have been taken out, making maybe three rooms into one. More ancient oak is ribbing the stone walls – stone made flesh by the pink light strained through mullioned windows.

Defford is weighing the air in his hands.

‘Quite a dense atmosphere, yeah?’

‘You could carry it out on a shovel.’

Maybe because there’s no furniture in here, Grayle has the feeling of being inside the ribcage of some half-fossilized carcass. Which, for a vegetarian, is not a great sensation.

But Defford’s smiling, nodding his head appreciatively. This is clearly everything he’s looking for in a room, gloriously gloomy. Grayle gazes around, aware of her own heartbeat.

‘So this was…?’

‘A parlour. This is where the Ansells’ hotel guests came to relax after dinner. Take in the lovely old vibes. Isn’t there a picture in the magazine we sent you?’

Cotsworld?
Grayle rocks back. This is that room…?

In the magazine picture, hazy candlelight is reflected in milky old window panes. Shivers up the velvet drapes and the wall hangings. Touches the chairs you want to sink into and the chairs just for looking at. The wall-wide tapestries, all deep reds, lions and fauns and unicorns. The portraits of Tudor ladies looking stoical and innocent, maybe with a view to keeping their heads.

In the photo, there’s a mature fire in the ingle, reddened logs like open thighs. And, in front of it, half-smiling, demurely on a velvet cushion, with the flames around her out of focus like an aura… Trinity Ansell, her hair loose around her shoulders, her full lips parted.

Grayle’s shocked. It’s the same fireplace, dead. The same fat oak lintel, its underside smoke-blackened, greasy-looking. On the hearth below, a layer of cold wood-ash is congealed like old volcanic lava. She recalls Lisa on the frustrations of Mrs Stringer, the housekeeper:
things would get messed about
…
Things would get dirty, very quickly
.

Leo Defford walks across to the wall opposite the windows, which is all dark wood, thick slanting timbers like a huge wooden radiator, bleached in places to the colours of old bone. This is not panelling, too rough and must be a couple inches thick.

‘Originally ships’ timbers. Sixteenth century. Farmhouses were cobbled together in those days from what you could salvage. Wood from old ships, stones from abandoned castles and abbeys, that kind of thing. Now…’ Defford’s peering into the shadows. ‘Look at this.’

An elbow comes back and he suddenly stabs a forefinger at the wall of iron-hard oak, hard enough to splinter bones. Grayle gasps as the finger vanishes, up to the third knuckle.

An unexpected sliver of sun from one of the windows finds Defford’s earring and the momentary relief on his face before he hides it with a laugh. He’s wiggling his finger around in the hole. This looks to Grayle to be absurdly sexual, and maybe Defford realizes this; he grins.

‘Not a knothole, more like where a peg used to be. They’re all over the place. Holes in the walls, gaps and old splits in the beams. Which is terrific. Drilling our own might well bring us into conflict with the Listed Buildings guys, and we don’t need that kind of attention. Besides…’ He taps the oak. ‘Not easy drilling through this.’

‘No.’

In Grayle’s former cottage, you needed a jackhammer to hang a picture. But she’s still trying to work this out. The significance of holes.

Defford grunts and quickly pulls out his finger, like someone has tried to grab it from the other side.

‘Good-good,’ he says.

Grayle sighs.

‘Leo—’

‘You’re asking what’s the programme in development? Right, then.’ Slaps his hands together. ‘We have a commission from Channel 4 for a series scheduled for late autumn, to run for a week. Seven or eight editions, ninety minutes, maybe, through midnight.’

‘OK.’

‘You might’ve seen a particular show where people who don’t know one another are locked up together. In a place full of cameras which record all their movements, all their interaction. All their arguments and embarrassment and mutual hostility.’

He waits. For Grayle, the truth starts to dawn, and the dawn is clouded with dismay.

‘The holes are for cameras?’

It’s like he hasn’t heard.

‘These people don’t have much, if anything, in common. And as the days go by they get increasingly annoyed with one another. Talk about the others behind their backs. Scabs get scratched, small disagreements escalate into bitterness, even rage. The atmosphere’s thick with paranoia and insecurity, because they know that their every reaction is being judged by millions of viewers, who—’

‘Mr Defford, are we talking about—?’

‘—who have the power to punish them. The viewers love that. Even more when the people they’re punishing have famous faces.’

Shit, shit, shit. They were all thinking
Most Haunted
and it’s so much worse. It’s like the walls of the big room are contracting, closing in on her like some medieval mechanism for the disposal of prisoners. Get me out of here.

12

All the reasons to be afraid

GRAYLE SHUTS HER
eyes on an anguish it makes no sense to conceal. Opens them on Defford smiling, comfortably wedged in the corner by the door.

‘Go on, then, Grayle. Say it.’

‘
Big Brother?
’

‘No.’

‘What?’

‘It isn’t.
Big Brother
, as you might recall, started on Channel 4 and ran for several years, making celebrities out of ordinary people and real celebrities look ordinary – periodically, they’d run a series where all the
Big Brother
housemates were already famous, from the world of TV, pop music, sports, whatever.’

‘
Celebrity Big Brother
.’

‘Indeed. It all got dumped when it lost its cutting edge, and was picked up by the more, er, populist, Channel 5.’

‘Leo, please call me precious, but I like to think I’ve become… well, a serious journalist, you know? And what—’

‘Bear with me.’

Defford puts up his hands, tells her it’s no secret that C4 have been looking for something new which would generate that same sense of mounting excitement – the tension, the unpredictability – that you got in the early days of
Big Brother
. But something deeper, more intelligent. More issue-led. If
Big Brother
was a hothouse atmosphere, imagine a coldhouse.

‘I don’t…’ Grayle hugs herself with sweatered arms, ‘… really need to imagine that.’

‘We’ll be getting the heating reconnected, but only as background. It’s no accident that the Big Brother House is always some modern module – cheap-looking, garish. Like a nursery school?’

‘Because the housemates have effectively become children again. No control over their own lives.’

‘It’s also full of two-way mirrors and false walls hiding the cameramen. So they can walk all around the action. We’re going to have to be much cleverer and subtler here, but we’ll do it, somehow. And we won’t be calling them housemates. Maybe settle for residents.’

Grayle thinks of the few times she’s seen the
Big Brother
show on TV, all those fame-hungry exhibitionists. Bad enough in an environment that looks like a kindergarten.

‘In
Big Brother
,’ Defford says, ‘they don’t have much in common. Here, they will. They’ll just have radically different attitudes to it.’

He strolls over to the window, three panes of leaded lights separated by the stone mullions. A smear of winter foliage through old glass.

‘We started off with the idea of two extremes. Uri Geller, who bends spoons by stroking them and talks about cosmic forces. And Richard Dawkins, geneticist and aggressive atheist who I believed wanted to have signs on the sides of buses saying, There’s no God – live with it. Or words to that effect. Obviously we were unlikely to get either Dawkins or Geller but you see where I’m coming from.’

‘You’re looking for people who’re gonna totally abhor one another’s entire world view?’

‘Radical differences of opinion are and always will be at the very heart of unmissable TV.’

‘People who, like, resent and despise one another?’

‘I’m looking for healthy argument.’

‘Living together here? Seven days, seven nights? Night after night?’

‘During which one or two of them,’ Defford says, ‘might appear to have had… interesting experiences. Which some of the others will mercilessly scorn.’

‘How do you know that? About the experiences they might… appear to have had?’

Defford smiles.

‘Because we’ve picked the right people.’

‘You already know who they are?’

‘We’re down to a shortlist. I’ll give you a copy. Confidential. When you’re sworn in.’

She looks at him. He doesn’t smile.

‘More binding than the Official Secrets Act. More sinister than the Freemasons. Trust me, Grayle, this is going to be the most talked-about television of the winter.’

‘God,’ Grayle says. ‘After three, four nights, they’ll be halfway to killing one another.’

And what a stupid, naive remark that was. Defford turns to her, eyebrows edging his snowy hair, lips twitching into a foxy smile.

‘You really think it’ll be that good? No, listen, I’m kidding.’

She knows he isn’t.

‘What if they just walk away?’ Grayle says. ‘The residents.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘What if they’re like, the hell with this, I’m out of here…?’

Defford looks unperturbed.

‘If they walk out, they don’t get paid. Or don’t get paid as much. And we’re not talking peanuts for this, Grayle. Think six figures, and for someone big enough it can reach seven.’

‘A million?’

‘Trust me, however bad it gets, nobody ever walks out.’

‘Shit.’

‘But quality shit, Grayle. Quality shit.’

‘Not what I—’ Grayle starts to cough; air’s full of ancient dust. ‘Not what I meant, Leo. It was an exclamation of… I dunno… on one level, it’s a hell of an idea.’

‘But it does need very careful advance planning. On
Celebrity Big Brother
, there was always a key instruction drummed into the whole team. Stay ahead of them. Always be at least one step ahead of the overpaid bastards. If we don’t always have a very strong idea of what’s going to happen next, the programme can easily slip away from us. And that must never happen. That’s why we need to know everything.’

‘Figures.’

‘We need to know… how they think… what they believe… how they’re going to react to a given situation. Not too much of a problem with the sceptics, but the others…’

‘The fruitcakes?’

‘I never said that.’

‘More than one kind of fruitcake, Leo.’

‘Grayle… as you can imagine, I had you checked out. I know that way back when you were in your twenties—’

‘Wasn’t that far back!’

‘—you worked for one of New York’s smaller newspapers, where you wrote a column which dealt with what I hope I don’t insult you by describing as pop spirituality.’