Night After Night (54 page)

Meanwhile, in the first hour of tonight’s programme, the Ozzy story is getting dealt with, with several flashbacks to the upsetting of the ouija board and the hurling of the bottle, and Ashley Palk is still the fount of common sense.

Defford, watching, is looking as happy as you could expect.

For a man who doesn’t know the half of it. Doesn’t know that the Ozzy situation could be even more complex before tonight’s programme is over. Doesn’t know about Angharad. Doesn’t know what he’ll be reading in tomorrow’s
Times
about Harry Ansell, who only wanted to watch.

Panic claws at Grayle’s gut. She really needs to say something and throws a glance at Defford, who turns and frowns as her phone starts ringing, without permission, in the live gallery. She raises her hands in apology and takes the phone outside, where the aggressive fog hugs her thin sweatshirt with this almost carnivorous glee.

‘Grayle Underhill?’ Northern English accent, like Ozzy’s. ‘Neil Gill. Ahmed’s writing buddy. Where is he?’

‘I’m sorry…?’

‘Ozzy. Where
is
the bugger? Everybody’s talking about him on the box, but we haven’t seen him onscreen, not personally since he threw his wobbly. Which we keep seeing,
gratuitously, over and over again, and that Scottish woman being smug. But no Ahmed. Then, you ring me saying you’re worried he might harm himself or something. And then he does that routine with the mirror. Which I figured you knew would happen, so that was all right, relatively speaking, but now I’m not sure.’

‘Uh, no. No, we didn’t know that was gonna happen.’

‘So what’s going on?’

‘Yeah, well, I was gonna ask you that. Ozzy stopped, uh, talking to us a while back. You saw Ashley Palk stitch him up, and you saw him failing to respond to that in the way we and presumably you would’ve expected.’

‘And then you let your biggest name walk out? Halfway through the week? That doesn’t strike me as value for money. I keep trying to call him, never an answer.’

‘We still have his phone.’

‘Well give him his phone
back
, please.’

‘We can’t do that. Listen…’ No way around this now. Grayle looks for privacy and shelter from the cold, finds none and starts walking, in the narrow alleyways between cabins. ‘He left. He left us without a forwarding address, in the night. As a person, he’s free to go; as a contracted professional, it wasn’t what we expected. He didn’t have a car here, but it’s not a long walk to the nearest town.’

‘You’re saying… Ahmed did a runner? On foot?’

‘That’s how it looks, yeah. Our boss, Leo Defford, lives in hope he’ll drive calmly in again before weekend. Personally, I’m less… let’s say I have issues.’

‘You haven’t told the police?’

‘Why would we? You really think he’d want us to do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Neil, uh, it’s clear something’s bothering you. Can I…?’

She can almost hear him thinking, tossing his options around.

‘All right, go on.’

‘You saw what happened before he smashed the mirror and demanded we take him out the house. That strike you as out of character?’

‘It does now.’

‘You’ll know about the woman he kept claiming to have seen.’

‘Will I?’

‘White coat. Injuries. And the initials ANG. Rhys Sebold thinks he was on the edge of a nervous—’

‘What the fuck does Rhys Sebold know?’

‘His best friend?’

‘I’m his best friend.’

‘Yeah, well, I guess there are things I don’t know either.’

‘Oh, there are, darlin’, bloody right there are. He’s a clever lad, Ozzy. You offend him, he doesn’t punch you in the face, he digs a hole around you that you can’t see till you fall down it, and he doesn’t care how long it takes. I need to call you back, all right? Somebody I need to talk to.’

‘Who? Listen, I’m putting my ass on the line here.’

‘I want to find out if he’s talked to his agent. We have the same agent, and if he’s pissed off he’ll have called to check his legal position. He’s funny but he’s not daft.’

‘No, listen we already…’

His agent. Defford said he’d be taking care of that. But Defford, like many reality-TV producers, doesn’t like agents. Avoid them – one of the ground rules, next to always stay one step ahead. Agents, in general, don’t like unscripted, openended reality TV; therefore it follows that Defford hasn’t spoken to Ahmed’s.

‘What did you say?’ Neil Gill’s asking.

‘Just talking to someone else. Sorry.’

‘Let me get back to you.’

‘Make it soon,’ Grayle says.

The air smells acrid and hostile. Her throat tastes like she has a cold coming on.

She walks back between the furry lights. All this is nothing to her. She could just go back in the live gallery and sit and watch and let Defford do what he wants – like she can stop him anyway. And maybe nothing will happen, no one living will be hurt. So why, she’s wondering, am I working for the dead?

66

Landmark

THEY ARE BEING
introduced to their alleged unseen companions by a perfectly presentable, honest-looking fellow – ex-soldier, he says – sitting in a tall-backed chair in front of the portrait of Katherine Parr. The soldier is the first outsider to enter their chamber. He tells them about a woman living here, a modern woman, well-known, and another, even more famous woman who lived nearby half a millennium ago. About the same age when they died.

Are they supposed to guess at identities? Cindy wonders.

‘How old?’ Roger asks.

‘Thirty-six, going on thirty-seven.’

‘Like Diana,’ Helen says, looking startled now in the wobbly light. ‘God almighty, why does all this seem so portentous?’

Ashley pushes her light blond hair behind her ears.

‘You’re saying this is not a good place to be thirty-six?’

Cindy thinks,
Oh dear.

‘Only, I actually turned thirty-six last week,’ Ashley says, ‘Didn’t realise it was such a… psychic landmark.’

The absent Ahmed, no doubt, would have felt obliged, at this point, to make some slick remark, but no one else does. Ashley laughs lightly, as Ashley must.
You’ve changed, though, lovely
, Cindy thinks.
Won’t admit it, even to yourself, but you have
.

The soldier talks, guardedly, as some soldiers do, about what he knows of the history of the unnamed house, about a banquet so posh that photos of the hostess have to be secretly snatched, and Cindy edges his chair inside the cloak of shadows in the corner between the Gothic door and the screen of old-ship’s
oak. It smells musty and oily and old as if the wood’s seafaring years have seeped into its woody sinews. Cindy sits with his hands, palms down, on his knees, listens to his breathing, and sets up the steady pulse of an inner drum.

Normally, a real drum would be used, see, usually the Celtic hand-drum, the bodhrán. There would be preparation, perhaps fasting. Alas, no time. He pulls the shadows around him.

After a while there comes a quivering and a fluttering and here’s his totem bird, Kelvyn Kite, taking flight. Freed from his stage-suit of fluffy wings and absurdly glaring pool-ball eyes, his inner raptor is released to seek out Belas Knap, the most ancient and aloof sacred centre, at the highest parts of the Cotswolds. Where all this, surely, begins.

Call me a coward
, Trinity wrote,
but I stayed behind the wall. I felt sick… couldn’t go any closer. I thought it would help me to touch it or something, but suddenly I knew it didn’t want to help me, not at all.

No, lovely, it wouldn’t. You had no relevance to it. Its rules are old and stiff and primitive. It knows nothing of love.

The red kite circles, waiting for him. Eager. They haven’t done this for a while. Patience, Kelvyn. Out of practice, see. Doesn’t know any more if he’s a man of psychic substance or a mere charlatan. But then, as Emrys Fychan always said, the uncertainty of it remains central to the experience. You must walk the horizon’s rim in that indefinite place –
y plas amhenodol
– where past and present meet and the future might just, in some small way, respond to you.

In his cloak of shadows he’s above the fog, above the hill. He can see the half moon, like a segment of apple. Down below, the remains of the hill fog trail a grey aura around the burial mound, the shape of a plump, ground-nesting bird, a pheasant perhaps, between trees and sheep-cropped fields. He starts his chant following the drum.

Old spirit, dead spirit,

Old spirit, dead spirit,

Arise, the deathless dead

He’s standing now on the barrow, on Belas Knap, at the end above the false entrance, the enormous vagina, with the bulk of the mound behind him. He’s waiting for the guardian. There’s always a guardian, someone sacrificed in prehistory, willingly perhaps, in order to protect this place.

Old spirit, dead spirit,

Old spirit, dead spirit,

Arise, the deathless dead

Down in the valley, near the edge of the town, the faces on Winchcombe church gaze up. Some of them surely are memories of twisty, wind-formed faces seen at Belas Knap in the days when people were more aware of the spirits of place. The guardian’s different faces later joined on the tower by stone caricatures of local despots and ne’er-do-wells, appointed sentries on the Church of St Peter, the town’s gatekeeper. All this making perfect, lucid sense to Cindy on his shamanic journey.

He waits on the barrow’s bristly coat of cold grass. Nothing comes. Maybe there’s not much left of the guardian now, beyond a miasma of menace and misery. He moves away from the false entrance and stands on the lintel stone of one of the side chambers, looking down.

Ah…

In its entrance, old bones are laid out like toys from a toybox. Human bones – arms and legs, ribs and a pelvis. A child is squatting there, a child clothed in night-mist, thin arms outstretched like thorny twigs and, in each hand, a small skull. The skulls are grinning and the child is grinning, and a woman’s voice comes to Cindy, faint and filmy as a chiffon scarf.

… dancing like an old-fashioned puppet, and it had a full body, a male body, and I saw that it was naked and…

‘You saw the picture yourself?’ Roger Herridge says.

‘And I examined the phone, best I could,’ the soldier says. ‘No doubt it could have been fabricated, but not here.’

‘We tend to react with surprise, even outrage,’ Roger says, ‘to the idea of a ghost manifesting through the most modern technology. In fact computers, tablets and mobile phones, digital signals, wi-fi… lend themselves far more readily to such manifestations than do…’

… I knew exactly what it wanted to do to me.

The breath, his own breath, is loud in Cindy’s ears, shushing out Roger’s voice as Belas Knap shrivels away beneath him, candlelight replacing moonwash, Kelvyn Kite finding his own way home.

‘… energy, you see,’ Roger says. ‘It’s all about energy. You want to ask any questions, Ashley?’

‘I have no questions at all,’ Ashley says. ‘Ghostly pictures are, I’m afraid, ten a penny. I wish we had it to look at, but unfortunately it seems to be unavailable. I’m not saying our friend here made it up, but he certainly can’t prove he didn’t.’

‘Cindy?’ Roger Herridge asks. ‘You must have some thoughts on this.’

‘Yes, I… I have a question. The women in the picture. Did they seem content to be here?’

‘I think I said that one of them, the…’ the soldier glances almost furtively over his shoulder at the portrait, ‘… the ghost, if you like, was not content.’

The portrait indeed is sombre. Only the rubies around the French hood are aglow.
Little lights
, Trinity said that January afternoon.
There was a pattern of tiny red lights, like a constellation.

Warning lights, Cindy thinks.

The soldier says, ‘It seemed to me, pained, mortally offended… I don’t know. She was very pale, like parts of her face had been eroded. Eaten.’

‘Did she – either of them – seem perturbed? Afraid even?’

‘Well, I—’ The soldier looks fleetingly disconcerted. ‘Aye… there were a sense of… let me put it this way, the woman, my boss, you’d expect her to have been very happy that night, but there was a sense of anxiety… trepidation. Agitation. Unrest.’

‘And was there a male?’ Cindy asks. ‘A man or a boy?’

‘Several men. It was a party.’

On his guard now, he is. And the very fact that he
is
…

‘Thank you,’ Cindy says.

‘It’s been very interesting,’ Roger Herridge says. ‘Thank you for telling us this. We’re all— Oh. Helen. Sorry. Do you have any questions, any thoughts?’

Helen is apart from the others, on her usual cushion, though a little further away from the hearth tonight because of the ferocity of the fire. She’s looking a little confused, plucks at the cowl neck of her smoky-blue jumper.

‘Dead?’ she says. ‘Is he dead?’

Defford comes across to Grayle in the gallery, where directors are exchanging glances.

‘What’s she on about?’

‘Leo, how would I know?’

Cindy comes into shot, sitting next to Helen Parrish on the stone. He looks concerned. He looks, momentarily, like a man in drag.

‘Is who dead, Helen?’

‘God,’ Grayle says, ‘Look at that.’

Helen’s eyes are glistening with tears.

‘Too clever for his own good,’ she says. ‘But he didn’t deserve this.’ She looks up. ‘Sorry. Daydreaming again. No… I have no questions.’

‘Daydreaming,’ Defford says. ‘She said that earlier. I mean, she fall asleep just then, or what?’

‘I’m sure Helen would reject this,’ Grayle says, ‘but her eyes were… OK, I’m gonna say this, I’m thinking trance.’

‘What?’

‘I think we’re inclined to take our eyes off the ball, Leo. In fact, we get so carried away with the dramatic stuff that we don’t even see the ball. The ball’s like very small and pale. Most of the time. We should be looking out for Helen. We
know what this place is like, we should be looking out for all of them.’