Night After Night (14 page)

Eloise, with those big, haunted eyes and straggly black hair, became famous in the wrong way about halfway through the second series, when it became clear there wasn’t going to be a third. The horror-film glamour roles had long since dried up, and she was left with a derelict cottage in the middle of a field outside a village in rural Warwickshire and no money left to repair it.

She’d bought the place with cash, no mortgage. Not that she’d’ve been given one for a fire-damaged hovel with a reputation darker than Knap Hall’s.

‘What the hell was that woman’s name?’ Marcus says. ‘The woman who died. I should know.’

‘Alison Cross. The song?’

Claiming this woman’s spirit wouldn’t rest until the truth comes out, Eloise rewrote and recorded the well-known north-country traditional folk song called ‘Alison Gross’, which goes,

Grayle has the album which closes with Eloise’s amended version.

Marcus grunts.

‘That ever proved?’

‘Not to my knowledge,’ Grayle tells him. ‘Became a cause célèbre in pagan circles for a while, but soon forgotten by the national media. Generally dismissed as a tasteless publicity stunt by the anti-bloodsport lobby.’

She keeps the cuttings: Alison Cross, aged 48, a member of the League Against Cruel Sports, a shrill voice at protest demonstrations during the period early this century when Parliament was debating whether to ban fox hunting with hounds.

Also a practising witch.

With the countryside split over the issue, Cross’s coven announce they’ve laid down a spell to protect local wildlife against the hunt – hunt supporters finding this richly funny. Fox body-parts are nailed in the night to the doors of hunt opponents, including Alison Cross.

Nasty. But what happens next fuels hatred.

What happens next is that the Master of the Hunt has a bad fall from his hunter, sustaining a fractured femur.

Some unthinking pagan kid tells the local paper that the Goddess has spoken. Provoking a nationwide reaction from country people, most of whom are too educated ever to be accused of a witch-hunt, although fury swells the letters page of the hunt-supporting
Daily Telegraph
.

The Master of the Hunt, something of a local philanthropist, never really recovers from his injury. A few years later he’s dead – prematurely, everyone says. By now, Alison Cross is widely shunned in the local community.

Before the year’s end, she’s dead of smoke inhalation when a fire breaks out at her roadside cottage in the early hours of the
morning. Believed to have been caused by an electrical fault. Squirrels – her beloved wildlife – getting in under the eaves and chewing the wires. Coroner’s verdict: Accidental Death. Community verdict: Good Riddance.

In her letter, Eloise, living in Birmingham at the time, tells
The Vision
of her personal pilgrimage, months later, to the remains of the cottage. Sending a photo of herself, dressed all in black, amongst the sooted timbers where she swears she saw the ghost of Alison Cross. In the picture, her hair is lank and there are grey circles under her eyes.

‘Anybody else see it, Eloise?’
Ozzy Ahmed asks gently.

This is how it starts. Gently.

‘Does it matter? The message… it was for me. Even if a couple of dozen people had seen her, you still wouldn’t believe it, would you?’

‘Mmmm… yeah, you could be right there.’

‘Broad daylight on a mild summer evening,’
Eloise says wistfully.
‘It was the most moving experience of my life.’

‘So you didn’t just run like hell?’

‘I admit I was cold and shaking when I came out, but not for the reasons you might think. And I couldn’t sleep that night. Next day I went back. With a friend. I just felt I had to know what she wanted from me.’

‘And did she tell you?’

‘There was nothing this time. Neither of us saw anything. But we did see the local paper, and that really said everything I needed to know. There was a big spread about people wanting the cottage knocked down because it was an eyesore and the local kids were saying it was haunted. And I thought, Right, I’m going to buy it. There was no For Sale sign or anything, but we found out who the agents were who were handling it for Alison’s family and we put in an offer and it was accepted the next day. So now it was mine, and all my money went into restoring it.’

‘You’re going to live there? Just you and the ghost?’

‘That was the original intention. I just underestimated how much it would cost to repair it. The damage was more extensive than I’d thought. The family – I don’t know what happened to the insurance money, but they weren’t interested. They didn’t exactly go along with Alison’s religious beliefs. Until I came along, they were supporting the people who were campaigning to have it demolished.’

‘So this was why Eloise did that radio show,’ Grayle tells Marcus. ‘She had no money and no prospect of any. Her TV show was over, her days as a spooky lady in the movies were over. And you don’t make that kind of money playing village halls and folk clubs. She decided the only way she was going to get that cottage restored was to set up some kind of charitable trust.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘Museum of witchcraft, maybe. I don’t think she ever really worked it out. Another idea was have it as some kind of retreat centre, where stressed out pagans could spend, like, restorative holidays. She was trying to get a trust off the ground, but even the legal fees were proving too much. She was looking to reach sympathizers, nationwide.’

‘Don’t suppose it was entirely successful, was it?’ Marcus says.

‘And all this because you convinced yourself you’d seen the ghost of a woman who died in an ACCIDENTAL FIRE?’

‘Look. Obviously you don’t believe that, Rhys. But I know what I—’

‘You know what you think you saw.’

‘So I’m having a commemorative sign made saying it’s the home of Alison Cross, who—’

‘Bet that’ll go down well with the locals.’

‘I don’t care. They deserve it. They killed her, after all. That should never be forgotten.’

Silence.

‘Eloise, have you even thought about what you’re saying?’

‘Thought about little else for months, Rhys, and it’s not been the easiest time, frankly.’

‘You believe that some individual was responsible for the death of Alison Cross.’

‘Yes. One or maybe two. Maybe a whole bunch of them.’

‘This,’
Ozzy says,
‘is gonna cause a lot of righteous anger in the squirrel community.’

Eloise ignores it.

‘I’m not kidding myself that the murderer’s ever going to be identified. Too clever, too well-connected. And fire destroys DNA, so there’s never going to be—’

‘Really? That’s what you think?’
Rhys’s voice lifting in amazement.
‘What do you think they actually did? Come on, let’s spell this out, Eloise. Did they bribe the police and the fire brigade to destroy any evidence? Is that what you’re saying? Did somebody have a coroner or two in the pocket of his hunting coat?’

‘No, I’m not saying— Well, I don’t know, anything’s possible. Hunting controlled that village – big hunt kennels, local people employed. And a vibration starts.’

‘Oh, sorry, you meant a PSYCHIC thing. Should’ve realized.’

‘However you want to describe it. Hatred directed at Alison Cross, rumours spread about her seducing local married men, that kind of malicious gossip sets up a vibe. And some kid thinks Alison’s evil and therefore fair game, so anything you do to her is OK. And that’s how the vibe spreads, and that’s how a fire can start… like in the mind? But when you—’

‘That’s pure—’

‘—when you analyse it, they’re still just a powerful minority. Most ordinary local people didn’t support the hunt at all. Their cats were getting killed by hounds that weren’t controlled properly… there was damage to farmers’ fences, sheep aborting lambs because they were being terrorized by the hounds and the horses and the hunting horns. All that did much more damage than foxes.’

‘Eloise, listen… listen, right? Do you have any idea how utterly ridiculous some of this makes you sound to a lot of people? I can
tell you it’s not even country folk and townies any more. I live in London, right? And we’re getting OVERRUN with urban foxes and some of us have grown to hate them.’

‘We come from different worlds.’

‘No, no, no… YOU come from a different world, which some people might think is called Cloud Cuckoo Land. Listen, a colleague of mine was saying he’d like to have people licensed to shoot urban foxes.’

‘Oh, you’d probably—’

‘And I don’t think that makes him a barbarian, because they’re vermin. A health risk.’

‘—probably shoot people like me, too, wouldn’t he? Look… if we have certain principles, sometimes we’re called on to stand by them, no matter what that does to our lives, our careers, our personal safety.’

Her voice has gained a quavery, preacher’s strength. Sebold lets her talk, as if he knows she’s digging a deep, deep grave for herself and her ill-conceived pagan-oriented charitable project.

‘I believe that hunting is about violence and blood-lust. A communal blood-lust focused on one small animal. I also believe that if this same weight of violence and hatred is focused on one small woman, alone in an isolated cottage—’

‘Just…’
Ozzy Ahmed can’t hold back.
‘Just a minute, Elly. She was a witch. If she thought she was getting bad vibes directed at her, she could’ve raised what my ex-mother-in-law liked to call a Cone of Power. Eko, eko, azarak. She—’

‘Oh fuck off! I’m not going to just sit here and listen to you crass, metropolitan idiots demeaning everything I stand for. And don’t give me that disapproving look, Rhys, you’ll hear worse fucking language than that before I’ve fin—’

‘That’s—’
Momentary silence, plug pulled somewhere, Rhys taking over.
‘That’s it. I think you have finished. I think we all know exactly where you’re coming from. Eloise, THANK YOU SO MUCH.’

16

Toast

On one of the websites, there’s a close-up picture of the offending sign outside the cottage, which says,

H
OME OF
A
LISON
C
ROSS
,
LAST WOMAN IN
E
NGLAND
TO BE BURNED FOR WITCHCRAFT

There’s a blurry picture of white-haired, angry Alison, her face half obscured by a placard that says, FOR FOX SAKE, BAN HUNTING.

Also a recent picture of Eloise, showing how the dark-eyed beauty has given way to someone starker, more gaunt-looking, although she can’t be much over thirty.

‘I’m figuring that finished her,’ Grayle says sadly. ‘She already caught most of the backlash against the dumb witch who saw the hunt master’s fall as retribution. I’m guessing she’s broke these days. And desperate.’

Marcus grunts.

‘Certainly desperate enough to take the Defford shilling.’

‘Probably two, three hundred grand. Enough to restore this cottage.’

‘If she still owns it.’

‘I Googled it. It’s on some pagan websites. It’s all boarded up now, fenced off, but she’s refusing to sell the cottage or any of the land. There’s vandalism periodically, especially to the sign.’

‘Well, good luck to her,’ Marcus says. ‘It’s a chance to get her campaign before a much wider public.’

‘Night after night.’

‘And late at night on Channel 4, nobody’s going to care how often she says fuck.’

‘Yeah. Um…’ Grayle unfolds the HGTV notes, finds the postscript to the radio CD, reads it again to make sure she hasn’t got any of this wrong. ‘Listen, about that…’

And then, abruptly, she decides not to tell Marcus what it says. This is not his problem. He has a heart condition and a book to finish. And he’s right: what could they have done to make people take Louise Starke any more seriously?

‘What’s wrong, Underhill?’

‘Um… well, you know, I now have to check her out. Find out where she’s at now before they put her in front of a psychiatrist who needs to make sure she isn’t gonna self-harm or something.’

‘Your job to find out anything you can about her that might be used to make good television. No need to apologize for that, Underhill. Better it’s you than someone who… who…’

‘Who thinks she’s already out of her mind? Someone who has less in common with her?’

Well, sure. She isn’t about to deny that. She remembers calling Louise Starke to explain why they couldn’t run the story in
The Vision
, and they had a long, amicable discussion on the phone, agreed to talk again. She was little crazy, but then so was Grayle, back then.

They never did talk again. Life intervened.

‘When you think about it,’ Marcus says, ‘you’re in a position of some power here. You get to decide what background information to put before Defford’s people. And perhaps what to conceal.’

‘Yeah, sure. And when they hear a nice damaging story someplace else, they just fire my ass.’

‘Subtlety required, Underhill.’

‘Great. Thanks.’

When she comes off the phone, part of her wants to call up Louise Starke right now, tell her the worst of it.

The worst being that she’ll be sharing an allegedly haunted house for a whole week, night after night, with some people guaranteed to be well out of sympathy with everything she holds dear. Who’ll be there specifically to remind millions of viewers how misguided she is, how loopy.