Night After Night (52 page)

‘I keep a pair of leather trousers in my room.’

Dear God, all this whimsy. He must be more nervous than he imagined.

Roger Herridge says, ‘Your venture into the Outside, Ashley… has that given any indication where we might be? Soil colour or anything?’

‘All I know, Roger, is that we’re in a much bigger house than this seems, and some parts of it are more modern. And more comfortable. And no, I didn’t meet either Ozzy or Rhys.’

‘Did you observe the weather?’ Cindy asks.

‘It’s not weather you can see. Fog. And dark now. Someone said it might freeze tonight. Never expected to feel I was in a better place than out there. Have I missed anything?’

‘Nothing either you or I would have noticed,’ Roger says.

Mournful, he is, now, all his schoolboy enthusiasm evaporated. His suit is creased as if, rather than hang it in the wardrobe, he’s just let it fall on the floor of his room.

‘Ashley…’ Helen’s stepping carefully away from the hearth-stone, looking down. ‘This is probably not an entirely sensible question, but were you aware of bringing anything in with you?’

Cindy turns quickly, bends to the heap in the hearth.

The tattered rook or crow or raven on the ashy stone, sooted wings spread, has evidently been dead some time.

Lisa says she’s not sure where she heard about KP at Knap Hall. Maybe she got it wrong. Grayle reminds her of what she said about Jordan the gardener telling them ghost stories.

‘Oh God, no, it didn’t come from him. He didn’t tell you ghost stories in a good way. Not the way people like to hear them. Not like sitting round the fire with mulled wine, like we did with the guests. Guests always asked about ghosts, especially the Americans.’

‘And they were told about KP, right?’

‘I suppose.’

How myths are made.

‘When you say Jordan didn’t tell stories in a good way…?’

‘He just said we shouldn’t talk about them and we shouldn’t think about them. Don’t let any of that stuff in, he used to say. We thought he was being… uncool.’

‘And what do you think now?’

‘I wish I hadn’t started it. I don’t think Katherine Parr was good for this place. Or for Trinity. Don’t think I was either.’

‘You were young. It was exciting.’

‘Oh, yeah. Best years of my life. Best time was when I went with her to the dress designer. For the red dress. We had all these portraits of Katherine Parr?’

‘You told her how much alike they looked?’

‘I said she was even prettier.’

‘And… on the night of the banquet you told me about. When she wore the dress. When she was incandescent. Like she was more than herself? Even more than Trinity Ansell?’

‘Oh God, yeah.’

‘She tell you what happened that night?’

‘I was there.’

‘No, Lisa, afterwards. You said that next day the light had gone out. Really gone out.’

‘I’m… not sure.’

A pause. You can hear people moving sluggishly around outside in the foggy dark. Grayle decides to go for it.

‘Did Harry rape her that night, Lisa? She ever tell you that?’

Lisa’s face twists. Her elbow knocks over the coffee cup and the suddenness of it makes her cry, like little kids do, at something abrupt. It takes another ten minutes to get out of her what she was obliged to do after Trinity missed a period. At first, Grayle doesn’t understand.

‘Lisa, she could’ve… it’s not like it’s even complicated any more. She had friends in London and places who could organize it quietly.’

‘She just didn’t want to tell anyone. Why she wanted it, you know? Didn’t want anyone trying to talk her out of it or asking her why. She was in a pretty bad way.’

‘How?’

‘Scared. I mean
really
scared. What was I supposed to do? She didn’t even have a computer at Knap Hall. No access to the Net – she was like superstitious about it, letting the Internet into her world. All the bookings were made by post, if possible. So I ordered it from home. I was scared I’d get the wrong ones. Mifepristone. Horrible word.’

‘I mean, I can see why she wouldn’t want it on any of her credit cards or any gossip, but involving you to that extent… Where was Harry?’

‘Not around much. If at all. Abroad or in London on
Cotsworld
business. He hardly ever came back to Knap Hall after that night. I think he was scared, too. Like of what he’d done. Or what he might do.’

‘Talk of divorce?’

‘Not really. Certainly not amongst the staff. It was the last thing any of us wanted.’

‘How much did the staff know?’

‘Enough to be unhappy. The atmosphere was awful. And then the place seemed to be getting well out of hand very quickly. The electricity kept going off. You’d turn on taps but no water came out. Came up between the stone flags instead. And I couldn’t tell anybody what I’d done…’

‘You didn’t— Lisa, she died of heart complications. It’s not exactly commonplace for that to happen in a home-abortion situation, but she wasn’t the first.’

‘But when Harry Ansell hanged himself—’

‘Don’t go there, either.’

Grayle’s thinking, inevitably, of Harry Ansell wanting to watch. Poppy Stringer’s take on it.
To see what it might do to other people. People who didn’t matter.

‘But there is just one more thing I’d like to ask you about. This is likely to go back to the time when she was on her own. When she was depressed… paranoid… and having bad dreams. One of which may’ve been recurrent. Relates to the grotesques
on Winchcombe church. You remember a night when she was in such a state you both went down to the kitchen and drank coffee with whisky?’

Lisa nods, like her head’s gone very heavy.

‘She tell you about that dream?’

‘I tried to forget it.’

‘Yeah, me, too. I saw her diary entry. She said the… this thing came down from the church and followed her through the town. Dancing like a puppet. Male… naked. What did she think it meant?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did she see that and not Harry when she…?’

Oh God, there just is no way of asking this.

That’s enough for now. This isn’t going to end anyplace sane, and it’s time for Defford’s nightly briefing. Grayle picks up the cup, uses a napkin to mop up the coffee.

Lisa nods, starts to push back her chair and then stops.

‘We… did one other thing, before she left for Dorset. The red dress. It was torn and not very… clean. We burned it. She’d put it in a drawer in one of the empty bedrooms, and when Harry was away, we locked ourselves in the… you know the main chamber, where the residents are? And we burned it on the fire.’ Lisa stands up, unsteady. ‘Never forget the way the fire went for it. The flames going… going blue.’

‘Something in the fabric,’ Grayle says. ‘That’s all. OK, one more thing. The bit you forgot to tell me about, but which you conveniently remembered for the camera. When you and Trinity tried to contact KP through a ouija board…?’

‘Oh, look, it was just bits of paper and a glass! I only remember one bit that made any sense. All the rest was just jumbles of letters, so we stopped.’

‘What was the bit that made sense?’

‘Willing. I think that word kept coming up.’ Lisa’s edging away. ‘Look, I have to get… Able and willing. Something like that.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Grayle nodding, keeping it casual. ‘Able and willing. Normal spelling?’

‘I suppose.’

‘So like how was the word “able” spelt?’

‘I don’t remember.’

64

Bits of you

DEFFORD
’
S MADE AN
executive decision. He tells the inner circle that for tonight’s first hour, they won’t go live; they’ll have people talking and theorizing about Ahmed, and they’ll run Grayle’s interviews with Ashley and Rhys. It’s about drawing a strategic line under the Ahmed incident, Defford says. They won’t say Ozzy’s walked away until they have to. They’ll just unload him, move on.

And no one will be evicted tonight. They’re already ahead on evictions, one by default, Defford says.

He’s bullish. His white hair’s been gelled into aggressive spikes which under the office lights look, to Grayle, worryingly like the effects of an unseasonal sweat. It’s about moving the goalposts, he tells them. Seizing an initiative, stealing a march. Moving
on.

It’s this that worries her most. While the four remaining residents are dining, the mood of the big chamber will be altered, subtly and swiftly. Around eleven p.m., they’ll emerge –
live
– into what is, Defford insists, the real world of Knap Hall, although nobody inside the house will know that and viewers will learn only gradually about the world of Trinity Ansell.

He’s doing this, she guesses, because he’s expecting imminent exposure by the national media. Twitter and Facebook are fizzing with speculation about which old house
Big Other
is using. The first accurate rumour to hit the Internet, and the invasion will be on.

But Trinity’s world was never the real world of Knap Hall, and something didn’t take to it, in a way that Harry Ansell came, too late, to understand.

Before the meeting, Jo Shepherd showed her the latest rushes, and that scared her. That scared everybody. Sure, birds and bats and other things are occasionally found in hearths, especially the hearths of old houses with wide, straight chimneys. It was dead, it may have been there a long time, caught in some crevice, disturbed by the resumption of firelighting.

Or, as she said to Jo, it may have been planted, just inside the chimney, when logs were brought in. Jo says Defford absolutely denies any knowledge of this. Defford loves that dead bird. In the absence of anything better, it will close tonight’s programme. Grayle thinks she really needs to talk seriously to Jordan Aspenwall.

Meanwhile recognizing the pointlessness of raising a hand now and saying, Leo, you need to realize you could be refuelling something which led, however indirectly, to the death of both Ansells.

Because it’s not unlikely that he
does
realize it. He’s a TV producer, for Chrissakes, he needs serious momentum for the final days. He’s going to back away from that in the face of madwoman whimsy? No. He needs more dead birds.

Grayle’s first out of the executive office, speaking to nobody, pausing only to leave Sebold’s cellphone on Kate’s desk. During that uninterruptable session with Lisa, Rhiannon Littlewood came back, leaving a short message. She’ll be in all night and will await a call.

Coming now…

Running through the village, all its lights furred by fog, and into her cabin, slamming the flimsy door behind her, locking it.

The TV’s on, with no sound, and all she can hear as she slides down behind the desk is the night jackhammering, first in her head and then inside her chest, getting louder and louder and, oh God, what is this?

The silent screen has one of those flashing images they have to broadcast warnings about, for the sake of the epileptics out
there. Flashing images and scenes some viewers may find disturbing. BIG OTHER in dazzling white on funeral black, the image serrating into stone flags by candlelight, a broken ouija board, the disturbed brown eyes of Ozzy Ahmed, an exploding mirror.

Grayle sags in her chair as the
Big Other
trail ends, replaced by serene summer pastures and a barn conversion, an invitation to create for yourself a new home in the country. All Grayle sees in her head is Leo Defford’s wide smile opening up like a metal gate. She reaches for a bottle of Cotswold spring water. What is she
doing?
Why is this even important, for God’s sake? It’s a goddamn
job
. Just a well-paid job in an industry known for its lavish fees and occasional, short-lived creative satisfaction. Whatever they tell you, it is never, never NEVER life and death.

Believe that.

Unconvinced, she picks up the cellphone, itself an angry little planet.

‘Mrs Littlewood? Rhiannon?’

‘Who’s that?’

‘My name’s Grayle Underhill. From HGTV?’

‘Oh. Yes. Hello.’

‘You may recall we’ve spoken before, when I was researching the programme.’

‘About Rhys, yes.’

‘You mailed us last night. And you tried to call Rhys.’

‘Did he tell you that?’

Grayle just hurries on.

‘I guess you know the format of the programme means the residents are… under house arrest, if you like, and we can’t allow them to communicate with people outside. So they leave their phones with us on the understanding that if it’s a seriously important personal call, we can make an exception.’

‘It was.’

‘Yeah, but unfortunately it also overlaps with material used in the programme. So we actually would rather you didn’t get to talk to him until it’s all over on Sunday.’

‘It’ll be too late, then.’

Her voice is calmer than Grayle was expecting from her text. She’s older than her sister, Chloe, whose picture Grayle has seen online – dark and pretty in a tidy way, demure-looking. The first time they spoke, Rhiannon was describing herself as a second mother to Chloe, their parents both having died young.

‘What I’m wondering,’ Grayle says carefully, ‘as we can’t let you talk to Rhys, is if there’s some way
I
might help.’

‘So… are you the woman who asks the questions? In the chapel?’

‘They’re in the chapel, I’m not. But yeah.’

‘I see.’ Rhiannon pauses. ‘I think… that I’d rather talk to you than Rhys. You come over on TV as if you know what you’re talking about. And also quite sympathetic to… what some people think.’

‘Well, it’s not a script. For a time, I was a journalist specializing in, uh, mind- and spirit-related issues. I may’ve mentioned that the first time we—’

‘Look, I’m not a crank.’

‘I am,’ Grayle says. ‘Used to have windchimes in my car.’

Surprised laughter in the phone.

‘And that isn’t the worst of it,’ Grayle says. ‘However—’

‘I’m not a practising spiritualist, Ms Underhill. I always thought a lot of it was rubbish. I just went along with a friend who thought it might help me. When your little sister’s just died in a horrible way, life can seem very dark and pointless and you’re open to anything.’