Night After Night (18 page)

Not that he’d consider himself in either category. Not by many years.

All right, perhaps not that many. Cindy scowls, shoulders his pink knapsack and stares into the blushing sky. Left it till late afternoon, he has, in the hope of being alone. All the same, he’s never been here before and would not like to find his way back in the dark, stumbling over a tree root and breaking an ankle. No way would HGTV have him wheeled into the house.

Over the stile and into a wood. A steep, muddy footpath, spikes of light through the skeletal trees, and then he’s on the edge of a wide field, sloping up, making its own horizon, all the sheep gathered in a far corner.

A sign identifies this as the Cotswold Way, though there’s no obvious path here, just a grey drystone wall to follow to the ridge. He should have come here weeks ago so that all this was familiar to him at different times of day. So that he could walk it with eyes shut.

A sense of pilgrimage as he follows the wall, the land quickly falling away behind him, until he can see the spread of Winchcombe and the burnished coil of Sudeley Castle. This must be the highest you can get in the Cotswolds, and it’s cold up here, even in his warmest woollen tights, and the sun’s like a traffic light on amber.

At the top of the hill, there’s a walkers’ gate, and he waits for a prosperous-looking middle-aged couple to come down through it.

‘Bit of a disappointment,’ the man says. ‘Just a little hump.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Well, all right if you’re interested in that kind of thing, I suppose.’

The woman zips up her puffy jacket.

‘Well I have to say I didn’t really like it. Don’t think I’d come up here on my own.’

Giving Cindy a meaningful look.

‘Oh dear,’ he says. ‘I was told it was the Stonehenge of the Cotswolds. Scout, I am, for a rambling club.’

‘Somebody having you on, madam,’ the man says. ‘Probably worth it for the views.’

‘Well, there we are.’

He watches them go before passing through the gate and down into another wood where the drystone walls are splashed with vivid moss. There is no sign to point the way. The Cotswold tourist people are doing the minimum, and he likes that. This is not really a place for tourists.

You don’t even see it until you’re almost there and its shadow-dome rises over a fence, and he hears Trinity’s soft voice: as if it’s erupted from the corner of the field or landed from somewhere.

The sky hangs heavy over the barrow. The sun has shrunk.

The first site of it, through the bare trees, thrills him in a way only such places can. Oh God, it’s conscious. It knows he’s coming.

Belas Knap is embedded at the highest point of the extensive Cleeve Hill, the Cotswold summit. Sunk into the soil and rock like a big, ground-nesting bird. You can walk all around it. You can, without much effort, walk over it.

Been restored, reconstructed or despoiled, depending on
your point of view, but, in essence, he feels, unchanged. It’s the place that is important, the situation.

Stone Age, it is, certainly, but the stones are hidden under an overcoat of earth, and only the lintels of the entrances are visible: four of them, small accessible chambers in its sides. Bodies were found here, including the bones of children. But the term ‘burial chamber’ is something of a misnomer. An estimated five thousand years ago, this was a place of complex ritual worship, sited with more calculation than most cathedrals. Inside it, you can feel yourself at the centre of the world.

And you can journey. He stands on the edge of the wood, his back to the wall, fingers in the dollops of marzipan moss.

Not yet. It’s his first visit. He’s not ready to go in.

To show this is not about fear, he stands on top of Belas Knap. The countryside up here is bare rather than beautiful, the fields greyish. In the distance he can see pylons.

He can’t, however, see Knap Hall.

Cindy shivers in the grey afternoon. Gathers his bag up under an arm, steps down from the long mound and walks round to what you would think was the main entrance at the northern end.

The end of the mound curves inwards to where two standing stones and a lintel are set into the turf. But between the stones is another and part of a wall. It was always thus, the experts think.

This is the main, ceremonial-looking, entrance. But not an entrance at all. It’s impenetrable, a doorway either walled up or never a doorway at all. A false entrance, they call it, always a closed portal, and nobody knows why.

He opens his arms to it and closes his eyes.

It’s like all these ritual sites. Sometimes they’re bad places. You go one day, it’s lurking, sinister. Another time almost welcoming, a fairy hill.

In the second diary Trinity says she came here again. Could not have been more than a month before her death. Came here
with her mind in a turmoil for reasons which she doesn’t really explain. Perhaps because she didn’t understand herself.

And then it comes.

It comes quickly. As though he’s been punched in the chest by a funnelled wind. He reels away and almost falls.

Oh yes. Oh, dear God, yes.

Cindy steps back to a place of safety, up against the wall. Sinks his fingers into the marzipan moss, closes his eyes, steps away from his thoughts and the cold images come to him immediately.

There is, of course, a guardian. Maybe, considering the importance of this site, at the very summit of the Cotswolds, more than one. When he was younger, they scared the hell out of him, but now he knows that’s all they’re for.

All they’re for. So they don’t. Not any more. Old spirit, dead spirit, the deathless dead, often embittered and full of malevolence.

Cindy, barely breathing, lets it out.

When he opens his eyes, they’re gazing into the false entrance, and they widen, his eyes, and he’s momentarily shocked, looking between grassy thighs into the lips of an enormous stone vagina.

Well, this is not so extraordinary; a chamber like this is all about birth and rebirth.

But these are closed lips.

He shakes his head, not a little awed, tremulous with the sense of something taking shape.

21

Flawed people

MARY RUTTER IS
a Google long-haul.

Or Mary Ann Rutter as it says on the book, when Grayle finally chases it up on a local history website.

Guessing Mary Ann is not exactly what you could call an academic historian. Her book,
Rogues and Roués of the Northern Cotswolds
, was published over thirty years ago and sounds like it ought to have been a steady seller in this area. But it was issued by a small regional press which seems to be long extinct and only ever seems to have made one edition. The cover is this crude watercolour of a Cotswold-looking street with shadowy guys in three-cornered hats in the moonlight.

What’s odd is that Grayle’s failed to track down a single copy, new or second-hand. Nothing on Amazon, nothing on AbeBooks, at any price. A book dealer in Cheltenham says she’ll put out feelers.

Googling Abel’s Rent, Grayle gets no closer than Abel’s Car Hire in Brisbane, Australia. She finds a few Rutters in the local phone book, but only one that seems to fit Jordan’s directions. She writes down the number.

All this to delay having to call Rhys Sebold.

‘Grayle, hi. Greetings.’

‘Mr Sebold—’

‘Good of you to call me at last. Can I take it you’ve come to the end of your private list of my friends?’

He’s told her he’s in his car. On his mobile, bluetooth, hands-free.

‘I know,’ he says, over a throaty motor, ‘it’s your job. You need to make sure I’m not going to fall apart on live television. I expect you to go behind my back. But do you know what gets to me? You ONLY went behind my back. You didn’t even bother to talk to me first. Do you think that’s courteous, Grayle?’

She tries to explain to him that he’s in line, like all of them, for an interview with Max the shrink. That it was her job to feed Max information on which he can base his questions.

‘So you want to be sure I’m not psychiatrically challenged. Well, let me ask you… would it – should it – matter if I am? Is yours the kind of programme that still considers mental health something that should be hidden away?’

She doesn’t reply. Feels like she’s on his radio show. Feels also that Defford would be not at all unhappy if Sebold behaved like someone halfway out of his tree. The fact is, she hardly needed to talk to his friends. She got most of it from the papers and the Net. Endless stuff about the party at his apartment that was raided by the cops, the not-inconsiderable quantity of cocaine that was taken away. His court appearance, the fine, the community service, how he lost his radio show. All established fact, and he was hardly the first BBC person to find himself in the middle of this kind of minor scandal.

No, the difficult part relates to Rhys’s girlfriend, Chloe. The truly awful news brought to him while he was in police custody. How damaged he’d been by this. How he might react if someone brought it up on the programme.

And the aftermath that links directly into
Big Other
: the fraught issue of the sister and the medium.

‘It’s not even me I’m bothered about,’ he’s saying. ‘I get shat on all the time. I’m more concerned about Chloe’s memory – I don’t want that misrepresented for the titillation of insomniac viewers.’

‘Mr Sebold, I don’t think—’

‘So, OK, let’s deal with it now. Yes, I blame myself totally for what happened to Chloe. And no, I will never forgive myself.

I’ve talked about it on air, on other people’s shows. I make no excuses.’

‘Look, I’m sorry—’

‘For my loss?’

‘That’s not… I was going to say, I’m sorry if you’ve been given the impression that the programme’s in any way—’

‘Don’t PATRONIZE me, Grayle, I know exactly what kind of programme I’m getting into and that it’s very unlikely we’ll get to the end of the week without somebody mouthing off at length about the irresponsibility of recreational drug use. You want flawed people in that house, and I accept that I’m a particularly flawed person.’

His voice is louder. He’s evidently pulled in someplace, killed the motor. ‘But so this is not misrepresented, I want you to hear the truth. The way you would have done if you’d approached me directly instead of scraping up bits of scurilous gossip.’

Grayle closes her eyes.

‘We’re all of us flawed,’ she says.

Last summer. A hot night. Rhys and Chloe had recently moved into a bigger flat in north London, but it wasn’t a flat-warming as such, just a gathering of a dozen or so friends.

Grayle makes notes as he tells her he wasn’t a big user, but he had something to celebrate: they were trying him out for the morning show during the summer, when its regular presenter took an extended break to tie in with her kids’ school holidays.

He still doesn’t know who called the cops, but suspects a couple of neighbours who weren’t invited because they were incredibly boring people.

Chloe was a researcher on Five Live, and a good one. Never gave you a wrong name for the person you were interviewing, unlike some of them, for whom being a researcher was just the first rung on a ladder pointing skywards. Chloe had no ambitions beyond getting it right. This was what a couple of Sebold’s former colleagues told Grayle, confirming that it was the cautious Chloe,
neurotic about any kind of drug use, who was looking out the window when the police cars came around the corner.

Rhys Sebold in no way contradicts this.

‘I remember her turning round, shouting, “
It’s a raid, it’s a raid!
” And we laughed. We laughed because some of the guys had been teasing her about being paranoid. We laughed, Grayle. We fucking laughed at her. We laughed because we thought she was winding us up.’

‘Right.’

‘In the end, I think she was so exasperated with us she just ran out, got in the lift and left the building before the police came in.’

She passed them on the steps, Grayle remembers reading. They didn’t try to stop her; how would they know who she was? And got into her car and drove away – this was all in the inquest report. Found her way to the M25 and slammed into the back of a truck driven by a guy who’d been on the road too long. But at least he wasn’t coked up.

‘I apologize for not approaching you first,’ Grayle says.

‘Thank you.’

‘I also…’ seems as good a time as any to go the whole way, ‘… also talked to… Chloe’s older sister. Rhiannon.’

‘I know you did.’

‘It seemed relevant to our theme.’

‘She’s a stupid, misguided woman. Please quote me.’

‘I guess she was driven to what she did, like so many people, by the force of grief?’

‘And was despicably exploited by these inadequate people.’

Now he’s in radio-mode, like he’s flipped up the overdrive switch. Grayle says nothing.

‘You going to have one of them in the house, Grayle?’

‘I don’t think so. Leo Defford doesn’t want to go down the
Most Haunted
road.’

‘Pity. Because I’d just love to have a go at one of those phoney bastards on live TV.’

‘Can you… tell me about that?’

‘About what?’

‘About the medium stuff?’

‘What did Rhiannon say?’

‘She told me how close they were, her and Chloe, how she was always like a second mother to Chloe and how when she died it was like a big part of her life was gone… irretrievable. She explained about the friend who persuaded her to go with her to a spiritualist church, where she was convinced she was having messages from Chloe relayed to her. And one of the messages said to… tell Chloe’s partner not to blame himself. A message which she tried to pass on and… came round to see you. And she said you, like, went ballistic.’