Night After Night (44 page)

And in the
Mirror
,

PSYCHIC? DON’T
MAKE ME LAUGH!

All of them pointing out that the comedian still refuses to explain the figure of an abused woman messing up his nights in the
Big Other
house. All the papers carry a quote from the
programme – the singer Eloise accusing Ahmed of being in denial, Rhys Sebold suggesting he’s simply stressed out. A formal statement by producer Leo Defford emphasizing that a psychiatrist is standing by. Compared with all the world’s problems, it’s trivial stuff, but it’ll still have commuters snatching copies from rail-station racks. Days like this, Grayle wishes she was back out there, trying to write shit like this.

‘This guy Swinton,’ she says. ‘Don’t wanna get in the way of the lawyers, but would anybody mind if I tried to talk to him? Don’t imagine he’s exactly a friend of Ozzy’s any more, but maybe that’s what I need.’

‘You didn’t tell me,’ Kate says.

Within an hour, Defford calls a key-people conference to tell them they’re going live for most of tonight’s programme. Raising both fists joined at the wrists.

‘We have a huge audience in handcuffs now. I think it’s time to live dangerously, don’t you?’

Getting the applause he expects. Grayle starts to join in but her hands won’t connect. If Defford detected any hint of danger, no way would he consider going live.

In her cabin, she Googles Ozzy’s old comprehensive school near Leeds, asks for Paul Swinton, but he’s teaching. He sends a message through the school secretary that he doesn’t want to talk from work but passes on his home number.

In the restaurant, Grayle has a vegetarian breakfast with the newly evicted Eloise, looking surprisingly fresh-faced and relieved, seaweed hair tied back.

‘I guess you know where we are and everything?’

‘Funny.’ Eloise spreads hummus on a rice cake. ‘I met her once. Trinity Ansell. I hoped she’d ask me to come and play at one of her weekends. No chance. Too left-field, me.’

‘Probably just as well, when you think about it. If you
had
played here and HGTV found out – and they would – you’d’ve been dumped long before contract stage.’

‘Actually I’ve been close enough. In my druid days, a bunch of us once went up to Belas Knap. The burial chamber? Genuinely weird place. You go on the wrong day, it won’t like you. I mean
really
won’t like you. Go inside you’ll get wrung out. A guardian goes for you, my mate said. Maybe more than one. It’s an important site.’

Grayle smiles. Knows all too well about guardians. Some horrific spectre, perhaps installed by human sacrifice when the chamber was first raised, however many thousand years ago, to protect the site. Dig up the wrong stone you’d see it in your dreams for ever.

‘They’re not a joke,’ Eloise says. ‘Trust me.’

Problem is nobody does. After Eloise got voted out last night, they screened Max’s analysis. He was in a room Grayle had never seen before. A small room, which looked old, but in a Victorian way and could well be in a more modern part of Knap Hall. There were bookshelves all around Max, stacked with medical-looking tomes without dust covers and a few jacketed titles on psychic subjects.

Max said some people, predictably enough in these cynical times, found Eloise a little flaky in a New Age, neo-hippy way. Others saw pro-pagan politics at work. Several contrasted her aggressive attitude with that of Ashley Palk, who was always polite and appeared to listen to other people’s points of view even if she thought they were insane.

If Eloise was secretly delighted to get the hell out, she hid it well, biting her lower lip and leaving the chamber, raising a flaccid hand only to Cindy before picking up her guitar case.

‘There appears to be a consensus,’ Max said brutally, ‘that the
Big Other
project will probably proceed in a more balanced and considered way… without Eloise.’

‘Tossers,’ she said in the chapel. ‘I don’t hold out much hope for Britain any more.’

But now she’s slept on it and confirmed that her crazy fee won’t be affected by an early rejection.

‘I was never in it to try and revive my career. Nobody wants esoteric TV programmes any more, and next to nobody buys CDs. I’ll have enough money to restore Alison’s cottage and buy some land. Plant fruit trees. Find a new relationship. You can really start again, can’t you, with a few hundred grand in the bank? I mean for two days’ work?’

‘Ozzy Ahmed,’ Grayle says. ‘What’s your verdict?’

‘He got me out, I think. I accused him of not facing up to what he knows.’

‘What do you think he knows?’

‘He knows what he wants. When you see a glint in his eyes, it’s hard and metallic. He’s here for a reason and it’s not money. In a way I like him. I even fancy him a bit. But I’d never trust him. Any more than I’d trust that house. Somebody said a cameraman quit?’

Grayle says nothing. Eloise starts to unscrew a jar of honey. It resists her.

‘I mean this is not
Big Brother
, is it? Nobody’s going to want to be the last in there. Any more than you’d want to be alone in Belas Knap.’ She puts down the jar, looks up. ‘When I came out last night, they let me look at the house from the outside, and I just… I just started quaking. I don’t mean shivering, much stronger than that. And I’m thinking, hang on, I didn’t feel that way when I was actually inside. Not even when I found the elder. What’s that mean? Two days, and I come out and it’s like walking into the sunshine, even though it’s night and pissing down. What’s that mean?’

‘You tell me.’ Grayle picks up the honey jar, gives the lid a twist. ‘A lot of people lived and worked here when Trinity Ansell was here. You might say it got her in the end. You might even say it got Harry Ansell.’

‘They were probably good people in their way. They were certainly throwing good energy at it. Brought jobs, too. Maybe they were supported by their employees.’

Grayle thinks of Lisa Muir.

We wanted them to go on loving the place. We wanted them to stay. Like I say, it was a brilliant job. We thought Mrs Ansell was turning the place round. Just by being there.

All that positive energy, and the dirt still gathering. Dead rats and birds and soil. She gets a sudden image, nothing mystical, nothing psychic, just dreadful, of a fair-haired man pulling a cart with big wooden wheels up the hill from the ruins of Sudeley Castle.

‘Forget it,’ Eloise says. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying.’

‘No.’ Grayle twists hard at the jar’s metal lid, feels sweat below her shorn hair. ‘Keep talking. You don’t love this place, do you? None of you. Most of you are just here for the money.’

‘Takes more than that,’ Eloise says. ‘Greed’s not good, but it’s not necessarily evil. And for some of us it’s just despair. I’m a fruitcake, sure, but when we were doing
House Wizard
I picked up evil in a few places. And again at Alison’s cottage. She was murdered, I know that. I’d walk through that village and I’d know the people who torched her house – the killers – were there. Just like when I looked back at the house last night, I knew, for the first time I knew what it meant when they say your flesh creeps.’

‘But you didn’t feel that when you first went in? When the worst thing in there was elder wood.’

‘No. You’re right. I didn’t.’

‘Which suggests there’s something in there – something negative, let’s just call it
negative
– that wasn’t there when you first went in. Alone.’

‘That’s a cranky thing to say, Grayle.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘You still connected with Marcus Bacton?’

‘You remember him?’

‘I course I remember him. And how you couldn’t use my story because his magazine was closing down. I never forget a crank.’ She looks suddenly forlorn. ‘And, yeah, I know when I go back to that cottage, with my ill-gotten gains from Hunter-Gatherer,
it’ll probably mean bugger all. All that planting fruit trees, finding a nice guy to help pick the apples, that won’t happen. I might go back and they’ll break down my resolve, those bastards in the hunt. Or kill me. Like Alison.’

She laughs, a little shrilly.

‘So don’t go back,’ Grayle says. ‘Learn a lesson from Knap Hall.’ She waves the honey jar. ‘Let’s see if they have one of these we can actually get into.’

She finds Jo Shepherd in the live gallery, watching Ashley Palk talking to Cindy.

Ashley going, ‘Let me say that I didn’t start out as a sceptic. As a wee girl, I was fascinated by the supernatural. And UFOs. Didn’t draw much distinction between them. I used to think it was an adult conspiracy. That adults knew the truth about the things that frightened us and when we grew up all would be clear.’

Something of Ersula in Ashley, Grayle thinks.

‘Unfortunately,’ Cindy says, ‘the older we get, the more uncertain everything becomes. There is always a period, during childhood, when everything seems quite clear.’

‘Children don’t believe in the same way, Cindy. A ghost is a special effect. They know that a special effects department can do anything now. So a ghost – in the way that ghosts are allegedly experienced – is a rather inferior special effect.’

‘But surely, part of the ghost experience is the sensation evoked by the encounter. Something special effects cannot yet replicate. Big Other, if you like.’

Jo says, ‘I worked with him every week on the
National Lottery
, and I still don’t know to what extent he’s for real. I still don’t know if he’s just a transvestite or a proper transsexual. I don’t know what bits he has under his skirt. And I don’t really know what a shaman is.’

‘Someone who mediates between the tribe and its ancestors on a spiritual level.’

‘Like a medium?’

‘Only less cosy. You’re usually not thinking of ancestors in the sense of like your great-uncle, your grandma. Maybe localized energies to which we can turn in times of crisis. It’s not so crazy. Some people choose to see it more in terms of psychology than religion.’

‘Always a get-out, Grayle.’

‘But the point is that a shaman’s essentially a loner. Someone on the periphery. Often an outcast. Shunned because he’s neither one thing nor the other. Both feared and despised. Unless he works in light entertainment.’

‘Anyway, we’ll see a lot of him tonight. He gets to tell his ghost story.’

‘Live?’

‘Leo thinks he’s what we need right now.’

‘What’s that mean?’

Grayle looks down at the seated Jo. The worst of what she just said is that Cindy
live
is not someone accessible. She won’t be able to consult Cindy at all tonight. Won’t be able to tell him about Poppy Stringer or Jess Taylor.

Jo doesn’t look up.

‘I think it means that before the night’s out,’ she says heavily, ‘Cindy gets to talk to the dead.’

55

Old and twisty lane

‘
AN IMPORTANT PART
of their working lives, you see,’ he says softly, ‘was the management of death.’

He pauses, looking from face to face, and a camera follows him around the semicircle. They’ve all been asked, in a Matthew Barnes recorded message, to wear dark clothes tonight. And have generally complied. This means you can see only their faces in the firelight, which makes you really look at these faces. Normally, when you first meet people, you observe their taste in clothes, hairstyles, adornments. In this light, it’s the real people, all faces naked, now that the woman with the sapphire in her nose has been removed.

None of them as compelling as the face of the man talking. A man in… late middle-age? Grayle realizes she doesn’t know. He could be fifty, he could be approaching seventy. He’s outside of normal time. Or something.

‘I use the word “undertaker”,’ he says, ‘as distinct from the term “funeral director”. Always do more for you, they would, the old undertakers, than today’s funeral directors with their coffin-catalogues and their plush reception rooms with the pot plants and the pastel walls. And “undertaker” is so full of an unintended profundity.’

His accent is Welsh at its cosiest, the Welsh of the old mining valleys in the south. But the Wales he’s talking about is the wilder Wales, further north and further west where, it seems, he ended up spending a significant part of his childhood.

‘So think of the Fychan brothers as farmers and undertakers. In the old way. They made coffins from local timber, and they
carved headstones from local stone. They had their workshops in the outbuildings at the family farm. A hill farm, this was, on a ridge beyond Machynlleth. Most impressive against a blood-red dawn, when it would look like an extension of the rocks themselves.’

Grayle sees a sardonic grin on Rhys Sebold’s thin, firelit face. A craggy face tonight; he still hasn’t shaved. Now his head is sunk into the blackness of his chest and it’s being slowly and sceptically shaken as the monk-faced man talks of the Fychan brothers and a relationship with death that went back generations.

When Cindy smiles… that smile seems almost calculated to induce unease. He can be very funny, but his smile is rarely part of that.

‘My parents, see… they did not find it comfortable to spend too much time in the company of the Fychans. We kept our holiday caravan in the farthest corner of their field and my mother would not go alone past their buildings. Not even in full daylight. Which would have troubled the Fychans, had they known, for they were kindly people.’

Ozzy Ahmed leans forward to put another log on the fire. It’s an oak log, heavier than he expected, Grayle figures, and he drops it. Raises an apologetic hand and leaves the log rocking on the hearth.

The fallen monk smiles, in his accommodating way.

‘I suppose that what did it for my mother was hearing a story in the local pub. Or it might have been the post office. These were the days, you understand, when every village had a post office and a pub, and there was always time to chat. And my mother was told the story of how the Fychans were given notice of an impending client.’

Usually Emrys, it was. Grayle’s heard this before. Emrys Fychan, who had been the sickly one in the family. Attacks of asthma – well, not good for a farmer, with the hay, or a carpenter, with the dust, so Emrys would do the books, the accounts, and the cooking. He never married, nor formed an
attachment, so nobody was ever there when he awoke in the night. Usually to the sound of sawing.