Night After Night (39 page)

Grayle wonders how recently Ozzy’s kin were practising
Muslims. To her knowledge, he hasn’t made any jokes about his family.

‘So during the night I put off going to the lav as long as I could, but we’d drunk a lot of Coke, and in the early hours I was in agony. All the others were asleep and I couldn’t hold out any longer. Got up, tried not to look at Reg. Go shuffling off down the corridor. On my way back, I encounter Cyril doing his rounds. Asks me if I’m all right. Says I’m looking a bit scared and I’m going, no I’m all right, sir, thank you, though I really didn’t want to go back in the biology lab. So when Cyril asked me if I’d like a mug of hot chocolate in the staff room…’

‘Oh dear.’

This is Herridge, ex-Eton or someplace like that. Ozzy gives him a look.

‘Yeah right. And we go down to the staffroom, and we sit down on the big plush sofa with our mugs of chocolate, and then the fucker’s all over me.’ Ozzy looking up, full into camera, brown eyes full of pain. ‘All over me.’

Squeezes his eyes closed.

‘Dynamite, or what?’ Jo whispers.

The monitor on Jo’s left has Ozzy’s audience, the camera finding Ashley Palk as she lifts a hand for attention.

‘Ozzy, I’m not being prurient, but when you say— I mean, what did this man actually do to you? You
can
say. In fact you should.’

Ozzy hesitates then shrugs.

‘Made me toss him off, Ashley.’

‘And you went along with that?’

‘Listen, I was scared
shitless
. I mean, already. Ghostly old Reg, you know? I was twelve! Twelve-year-olds were different back then, we didn’t even take drugs. Cyril… he wasn’t the gym teacher, but he played rugby with the sixth form, bought them pints down the pub. Big bloke, everybody’s mate, you know the sort. And in the staffroom we were far enough away from the science labs for nobody to hear me scream.’

‘You didn’t report him, afterwards?’

‘Easy to say that now, but you didn’t back then, did you? Popular teacher, Cyril. Everybody liked him. It was like bloody Jimmy Savile groping his way round the country, and lots of people knew and not a word cos he was such a lovely bloke, so-called.’

Ozzy stands up into silence.

‘And that’s why I don’t like ghost stories.’

In the gallery, Jo breathes in slowly.

‘Media are going to be down on this like a strike force.’

The quality of light in the chamber has altered, or so it seems to Grayle. It’s brighter, yet bleaker.

Rhys Sebold breaks the silence, going over to shake Ozzy’s hand.

‘Well done. I think your experience illustrates an important point about the way predatory paedophiles use a child’s fear of the supernatural.’

‘It was the other hand, actually, Rhys,’ Ozzy says.

Getting some nervous laughter, but Rhys has a point to make.

‘They use ghost stories, the way cults use religion.’

‘Let’s not go overboard,’ Roger Herridge says. ‘Your rather weak attempt to equate the supernatural with sexual predation says, I think, rather more about you. This man evidently was just an opportunist.’

‘Given me a few nightmares, though, Roger, over the years,’ Ozzy says. ‘Reg and Cyril have become like an item. In my subconscious, if you like. And now Cyril’s dead, just as dead as Reg… OK, I
don’t
believe in the supernatural. But it still scares me. That make sense?’ He sits up. ‘No not scares, it
disgusts
me. Makes me go cold. Like a phobia.’

‘It’s a trigger,’ Rhys says. ‘One’s become a trigger for the other. Perverted sex, perverted beliefs.’

‘In which case…’ Behind him, Eloise is looking entirely
unsympathetic. ‘I mean, what the hell are you doing
here
? Because it’s trigger after trigger, here, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe that’s
why
he’s here,’ Rhys says. ‘To exorcize it. I’m using that word in its most rational sense.’

Looks at Ozzy who finds a wry smile.

‘If you think this guy knows me better than I know myself, you’re probably right.’

‘OK.’ Helen Parrish raises herself up. ‘So you feel better now, Ozzy? Now that it’s out in the open?’

‘Not sure about anything, Helen. All I think I’m saying is that you don’t have to believe in something to be scared of it. Buggered if I’m going into therapy, mind.’

‘Yes, sure, I get all that. But it doesn’t tell us anything about the woman, does it?’

‘Woman?’

‘Here? In here? Over there? The woman you thought you saw? Who you thought was bleeding? Help me out here, Ozzy, I’ve lost the plot.’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

Grayle and Jo look at one another. A flurry of movement in the monitor, Eloise on her feet.

‘Oh, you so bloody do, Ahmed! You’re in total denial. I’d be
very
surprised if all you’d had over the years were dreams.’

‘Oh, Elly, you’re such a—’

‘No!’ She’s standing directly in front of him. ‘You can’t just blank it out. You can’t go on fooling yourself for ever. We’re all psychic to an extent, and if you just go on hanging out with negative people like Sebold, you’ll wind up an alcoholic or getting sectioned, trust me.’

‘Yeah, go on,’ Rhys says to Eloise, ‘go for him while his defences are down. There’s no such thing as psychic. There’s only fraud.’

‘Oh, you are such a fucking idiot, Sebold.’ She spins at him. ‘Big mouth, opinionated, politicized… but going nowhere. Occasionally useful for winding people up on tabloid radio, but
blind to what’s right in front of you. And he…
he
can go on denying it until they take him away.’

This is personal, Grayle a little scared at how fast the situation’s escalating. They haven’t been together two full days yet. Even on the celebrity
Big Brothers
she’s seen, it usually takes over a week to reach this level of antipathy.

She watches Rhys Sebold trying to control his rage, small tightenings in his narrow face. Eloise’s little fists bunched, a line of perspiration above her upper lip, like she’s been made-up for some hothouse drama. Is that a moment of love–hate electric sexuality, a pulse of blue light between her and Rhys? As if everyone else in the room has felt the charge, they’re all separating, a wide shot showing the diaspora. An experienced director called Lee is supervising, giving rapid instructions. A muted excitement in the gallery.

‘Hang on.’ Jo’s pointing. ‘Listen to this.’

One camera’s never left Ozzy. Now Helen Parrish has pulled her chair close to his, is talking quietly to him. Ozzy’s staring at the false wall, its mirrors reflecting candlelight as a blaze.

‘Two way mirrors,’ he’s saying. ‘That’s what they always do on
Big Brother
, isn’t it? There’s a narrow walkway behind, where cameramen creep like perverts. I hate that side of it.’

‘No worse than CCTV in a shopping centre,’ Helen says. ‘We’re all under surveillance now, soon as we leave home.’

Ozzy’s screwing up his eyes.

‘Maybe, if you’re at the right angle, you can see through a two-way mirror. See who’s on the other side. Would that explain it?’

‘Wouldn’t know. I’ve never worked with secret filming.’

‘Or maybe,’ Ozzy says, ‘I just fell asleep looking into the mirror. Didn’t get much sleep last night. Maybe I drifted off. I don’t know. And then drifted back. In and out of it. Sleep and wakefulness intersecting. You know what I mean? Gets confusing.’

Grayle and Jo exchanging glances. What’s he saying? Helen’s interested, too.

‘How false memories are made. Ozzy, what
did
you see in those seconds? Out of interest, what did you actually see? I’m not trying to trap you or anything. Not trying to prove you saw a ghost or that you’re actually psychic, which would be pointless, but…’

Ozzy smiles at her.

‘Don’t like it when you lose the plot, do you, Helen?’

‘Hate it. Takes me back to when I was a young reporter on a big story and all the national papers would be there, and they all knew each other, and you felt they all knew what the story was and you didn’t. Don’t expect you to understand that. It’s just nerves playing tricks.’

Ozzy turns his chair to her.

‘I thought I saw a woman. In the mirror.’

‘The same woman you saw last night, in your room?’

‘Dunno. Maybe. But that wasn’t much more than a scent.’

‘Yes, I know, but…’

‘This was a woman in white. Looked at first like a robe, but I think it was a coat. A long, white mac… trench coat kind of thing.’

‘What kind of woman? How old?’

‘Couldn’t make out her face. But young, I think. I thought she was real at first, maybe one of the technicians. Definitely looked more real than that bloody troll with the logs last night.’

‘So, as you don’t believe in the paranormal…’

‘I don’t believe in Jesus.’ Ozzy looks down the front of his hoodie. ‘I don’t believe anyone gets saved. Yeah, I went for a closer look.’

‘You ran at her.’

‘Before she could get away. I’m like, What’s up? What do you want? She didn’t say anything but she slowly opened her coat, and she… she was naked underneath? Yeah, I know, I
know
… Thing is… it didn’t matter, her being naked. What mattered was that she was covered with what looked like bruises, and she was bleeding, and it was like
that
was what she wanted me to see, what she wanted me to know. That she’d been hurt.’

‘I see.’

‘You don’t.’

‘Erm… I hate myself for asking this, but…’

‘Not Diana, Helen. I know we’d all been listening to you, and you told it very vividly, but no, not Diana.’

‘You cried.’

‘Did I? Shit. Maybe because I’d realized she wasn’t there. That she was just in my mind. Felt the hurt coming off a woman who didn’t exist and it just broke me up. That’s what tiredness does. And brain chemicals. I’m a mess, Helen.’

The wide shot shows several people in that chamber pretending disinterest whilst clearly straining to hear what’s coming crisply through to the gallery from those personal mics.

Jo says, ‘This is almost too much for one night, don’t you think?’

Grayle leans back.

‘Helen did my job for me. No wonder he didn’t want to go into the chapel. I guess you want me to find out if Trinity Ansell ever wore a white trench coat.’

‘Leo will.’

‘I’ll do what I can.’

‘You check your phone?’

Jo glances at Grayle’s bag where the mobile sleeps.

‘Right. I got the message.’

Neither of them has mentioned the text. Everything’s accelerating before their eyes, and it may not be making the kind of sense that Defford wants. Or any at all.

The clock says there’s less than eight minutes to the first transmission.

50

Surfeit of detail

THE ESTABLISHING SHOT
. Is that what it’s called? Looks like a still until you notice the off-white light in a window is not static. A shivery light. The gables are flat silhouettes against a cold night sky. Even an architectural historian would not recognize the house from this.

‘This is a
haunted
house.’ Matthew Barnes’s soft voice spelling it out for the millions. ‘And whatever that means, we want to know. Really
know
.’

The front door swinging open to yellowy, smeary light. No music, nothing naff. Grayle feels a small seismic shudder: God, it’s happening, programme one going out to the millions, and although it’s not live, it
is
live, the house entering the ether.

A woman in the passage: Eloise, her back to the camera. Another camera picking her up from the stone hallway on the other side, top of the steps. She has the right face for this, expressing an acceptance that anything could happen tonight.

And it will. When the viewer watches her discovery in the fire in the ingle, it won’t disappoint. You see the anomaly through her eyes. It will set that tone of very real instability.

Reality TV is deceptive. Only editing allows that passage to access this hallway. But, hell, it looks good.

Cut to clouds scudding across the moon. Normally the sky might be speeded up, but the elements were playing ball when this was shot, just last night, the clouds really shifting.

In the house, more lights come on, room after room but only in that one corner of the building. The dirty lantern.

Grayle slips away.

*

In the chapel, one bulb burns in a small safety lamp set into a recess like an aumbry – where the communion chalice normally lives.

Grayle’s never been here at night before. It feels, more than ever, like a sanctuary. More of one than anywhere in the actual house.

He’s waiting in the corner of a pew, hands primly on his skirted knees.

‘Gone to the toilet, I have, little Grayle. Never easy to get away. Someone always notices if you’re gone. The toilet’s all we have. Pull down the wooden lid, we do, and sit there and relish the silence. Come to this, it has.’

Above him, facing the screened window with the camera behind, is the inquisition chair, empty as a dead king’s throne. Grayle sags gratefully into the pew opposite Cindy.

‘Is it as bad in there as it looks?’

‘It looks bad?’

‘Getting weird, Cindy. These are not airheads.’

‘Two days to become institutionalized. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. Something like that. Listen… What did Ozzy see?’

‘Now that,’ Cindy says, ‘is interesting. He does indeed give every indication of fighting against himself.’

‘So you think Eloise could be right. He’s in denial?’

‘Not cool to be psychic, is it? Not what a cynical stand-up comedian needs in his life.’

‘So does that’ – Grayle leaning forward – ‘does that explain his anti-religion gags, his witchy mother-in-law routines? I
talked
to his mother-in-law. Seemed, in spite of all he said about her, to have a respect for him. Said he was clever. But what happened in there… that didn’t look at all clever to me. Looked like something was taking him apart.’

‘Indeed. What’s Mr Defford’s view of it?’

‘When I was in there, he hadn’t seen it. He’s watching his first show go out. But it’s obvious who he’ll think the woman was. Or who he’ll think the woman needs to be for our purposes.’