Night After Night (25 page)

A wave of deeply reluctant affection washes over Grayle as his eerie rosy lips form an unsettling smile.

She holds her face still.

No more lies, no more evasion, no more bullshit.

His full name is Sydney Mars-Lewis and he is, of course, a national treasure. At least, he
was
, until he overreached himself on live TV and faded quietly back into the land of his fathers.

She has no idea how old he is, only that, for two decades, he made a precarious living as a ventriloquist. Cindy Mars with Kelvyn Kite – a red kite, rare at the time, even in Wales. A sinister-looking bird with a smart beak and pink-tipped fingers up its ass, whose derisive comments about the greed and foolish extravagance of Lottery winners came back to peck him when tragedy befell a jackpot-winning family.

Who could forget the
Mirror
headline:
THE CURSE OF KELVYN KITE?
Not easy to come back from that kind of publicity. Which explains everything. On the surface.

Grayle stares into his mild, friendly, inoffensive,
duplicitous
fucking eyes.

‘This is all down to you, right?’

‘All?’

He tilts his head and still the goddamn beret stays on. Grayle tilts hers to hold his gaze.

‘Marcus… me… you. The way it all mysteriously came together.’

Cindy looks stern, like some old-school headmistress in a black and white English movie.

‘Are you honestly telling me, little Grayle, that it never once entered your head to wonder why I was not amongst The Seven?’

Jesus, ‘The Seven’. Who else could take a shallow commercial enterprise and endow it with apocalyptic resonance?

‘Yeah, I know,’ Grayle says, ‘I should’ve figured. Nobody ticks the boxes better. Wounded, washed-up, in urgent need of money. One-time big name on Skid Row.’

‘Skid Beach, it is, to be more accurate,’ Cindy says.

*

Over the next half-hour, under those industrial lights, some big holes in her knowledge get cemented in. How, before
Big Other
was even conceived, before she or Marcus or even Defford knew anything about Knap Hall, Cindy Mars-Lewis was there.

The only one of them who ever met Trinity Ansell. Who walked around the house before it became the core of
Cotsworld
.

His eyeliner’s smudged. All the time he’s talking she keeps noticing that. Men, however abnormal, are rarely good with make-up.

‘Does Marcus know all this?’

‘Little Grayle, the thing always to remember about Marcus—’

‘He knows. OK. And the reason he kept me out of that particular loop is he… Oh, Jesus, I’m getting Marcus’s money?’

She’s pulling back from the table, chair legs screeching. The mobile starts ringing in her bag.

‘Not
quite
that simple,’ Cindy says gently. ‘I didn’t know, back then, what was involved. And Marcus… well, would he have lasted two weeks with these people?’

She ignores the phone, drags her bag to the floor.

‘And the house?’

Suppose it had been Marcus, not her, in the Ansell bedchamber… Marcus with the heart condition… Marcus who says ‘trust terror’. Trust it to do what? Take you out?

Cindy’s sitting motionless as an antique mannequin in an old-fashioned ladies’ outfitters. Watching her, watching it all sink in. Then he leans across the table, pushing aside his unfinished pink gin, bringing down his voice.

‘It’s an unreliable house, isn’t it?’

She nods.

‘I’m only a human being,’ he says. ‘Walked around, did some dowsing. Listened to my senses and the little voice whispering, ‘Tell her to get out, sell up, cut their losses, escape to a tax haven.’ Would she be alive now, do you think? Do we believe this nonsense?’

‘She died trying to get rid of a baby without her husband knowing. Died someplace else.’

‘Don’t interfere. That’s what Marcus says. Only human beings, we are, we don’t really have
wisdom
. Bigger influences than us at work. Might as well say, would she be alive if she hadn’t said yes to the part of Katherine Parr in a film? We could go on, couldn’t we? At the end of the day, a determination to transcend the everyday has its risks, but when you’re very beautiful, very rich, very famous and you’ve pushed your talents as far as they will go, what’s left? Good works? Religion? Perhaps what she was doing
might
have turned the house around. Not impossible to alter the atmosphere by force of will. I don’t know. I feel inadequate, little Grayle.’

‘Are they both there… on some level?’

Her voice seems very small.

‘Who?’

‘The Ansells. Trinity. And now Harry.’

He doesn’t answer.

‘When I came back the second time,’ he says eventually, ‘it was during one of the Weekends. All frivolity and wealthy guests, a film star, a rock star and a band with lutes and virginals. As if she wanted to show me my ill-expressed misgivings were well off the mark. That she’d pulled it off. And there I am, smiling approvingly, with the sense of a funfair erected on a peatbog full of decaying matter.’

On the other side of the long room, two guys have begun a game of pool:
snick, snock
. Cindy tells her about the diary he asked Trinity to keep. How she’d make a couple of entries, put the diary in the post to him and then start another. He brings out his phone, thumbs through some photographed images of handwritten pages, turns the phone to face her.

She reads it a second time.

‘What
is
this?’

‘I think she’s describing a dream. About Katherine Parr? Probably. She came to believe, on no historical evidence, that Katherine died there.’

‘At Knap Hall?’ Which wasn’t even called Knap Hall back then – was called Dean Farm, or Quarry Farm, something like that. ‘Where’d she get that idea from?’

‘Seemed to make her happy. The idea of its being Katherine’s final refuge.’

‘Was she losing her mind? Was the house… doing something to her? Or her marriage?’

‘Dreams… may show us what, if experienced in our waking hours, would test our sanity. But, equally, dreams can strip away the buffers our waking selves use to absorb primitive fears.’

‘How long before she died did she write this stuff?’

‘Not long. Weeks. I wondered if perhaps she’d begun another in those days when she was alone at her parents’ holiday cottage. I even got her parents’ number from Poppy Stringer – the housekeeper?’

‘Wouldn’t even talk to me.’

‘Cast a peculiar enchantment, I do, over women of a certain age. Except for Trinity’s mother. I rang her parents to see if she’d left another diary. Tried to explain, but her mother was angry. Knew who I was and
what
I was – or what people
said
I was. Told me never to ring them again. Finally, I steeled myself to ring Ansell’s office, left my number.’

‘Not a man for calling back.’

The mobile starts up again in the bag. She grimaces, drags it out to find a terse, reproachful text from Kate Lyons.

‘Cindy, I’m gonna have to go. Gotta… sweet-talk one of the
residents. Go down with a driver to pick him up at the Cotswold airport. In a van with no windows.’

‘How exciting.’

‘Yeah. We’re bringing them all in over two nights.’

‘Well, then, I shall leave you my mobile number, little Grayle. We need, I think, to stay in touch when I’m in the house and you are not.’

She stands up, nodding, shoulders the bag.

Cindy says, ‘Have you seen the Winchcombe Grotesques?’

‘The what?’

‘The stone monsters on the church tower.’

‘Oh. Well, yeah… briefly, I guess, shopping in town. Haven’t had much time for sightseeing lately. A lot of English churches have weird stuff like that.’

‘Not on this scale. Forty of them, or more, and at least half of them blatantly demonic. That tower’s in a class of its own.’

He talks about one of the grotesques acquiring a naked body and stalking Trinity’s dreams.

Seems to Grayle that woman had a few too many dreams.

‘The relevant diary was delayed,’ Cindy says, ‘so I knew nothing of this until long after her death.’

‘You’re saying it links to the house?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Like, if she was getting increasingly screwed up… for reasons we don’t know – or do we?’

He says nothing.

‘Everything she sees is, like, crowding in on her, including the horrific faces on the tower?’

‘Starting to think like a TV person, you are. For whom everything must fit into the box.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’ve always tended to take the overview. Look at the landscape and its features. Find the layers. And, no, I don’t think Trinity was mad.’

Grayle closes her eyes, rubs them wearily, shakes her head.

‘We need to talk about this. I’d like to know everything she said to you. Everything she knew about Knap Hall and what might… what might’ve been seen there.’

‘You probably know more than me, lovely. She told me she’d never seen Katherine, though perhaps smelled her scent. May once – though she seemed far from sure – have caught a glimpse of a handsome young man with fair hair who wanders in and out. Trinity thought it might have been Thomas Seymour.’

‘See, this is a new one on me—’

‘Layers. Apparitions exist on different layers, in different time frames, independent of one another.’

‘I realize that.’

‘Of course you do. Now go and meet your guest. We’ll keep in touch.’

‘We don’t disclose we know each other, right?’

‘On no account.’ He writes his mobile number on a beermat, stands up, brightening. ‘They’re paying me to behave in that house like the lunatic the public thinks I am. Light relief. Always so important to me.’

‘Yeah. I, uh… I feel better you’re here. But what— Thanks.’ She accepts the beermat. ‘I mean what’s really gonna happen in there? And, like, should we be trying to stop it?’

‘You really think we could? Us paid lackeys?’

‘Whatever he says, Defford likes to know what he’s dealing with. Sure, he’d love to have a ghost on camera, but he realizes that’s unlikely to happen – as do I, for Christ’s sake. Like… a ghost is not for everybody, is it? Or do we, like,
want
something to happen to wipe the smug looks off their faces?’

‘The way something seems to have wiped the lovely smile from yours?’

He regards her solemnly.

‘I have to go,’ Grayle says.

31

It lives here

THE COTSWOLD AIRPORT
is in the south of the county, not far from Tetbury, the nearest town to the Prince of Wales’s estate at Highgrove. Grayle waits as Roger Herridge is led out to the van on the arm of Elsie, from HGTV. Although it’s fully dark, he’s wearing large sunglasses, like he’s blind. And he is; they’re glasses with side shields that even a sighted person can’t see through.

Herridge is tall and angular, like a tower crane, with swept-back blond-white hair, a jutting jaw. He’s wearing a loud check suit, like bookies are supposed to wear at the races. One of those guys who, even though you can’t immediately hang a name on him, you look twice at because it’s clear he’s
somebody
.

He’s smiling vacantly, suitcase at his feet, blindly sniffing the night air.

‘It’s not Luton, is it?’

‘Damn, we never thought of that. We shoulda used a carbon-monoxide spray.’ Grayle reaches for his hand, shakes it. ‘Mr Herridge, my name’s Grayle. I apologize for this delay. We’re not usually this stupid and I accept full blame.’

He clutches her hand eagerly. Apparently, he’s been here a couple hours. Had to leave London earlier than planned, as the normally efficient Kate Lyons failed to realize that this former RAF base isn’t licensed for air-traffic at night. All got messy. Seems, at one stage, Elsie had to find a man to take Herridge to the bathroom.

Not a great start.

When the double doors are shut, bars of muted light come on in the tiny lounge that is the back of the van.

‘Can I take these bloody glasses off?’

‘Please.’

Bench seats either side, a fixed table between them, cupboards and a tiny refrigerator on the walls. Herridge takes off the glasses, shakes out his impressive hair. Grayle sits opposite him.

‘You OK, Mr Herridge?’

‘Call me Roger. All women do.’

His smile reveals irony and a narrow gold tooth. You don’t see many of them any more.

‘Would you like something to drink, Roger?’ Elsie says. ‘We have tea, coffee, wine, et cetera.’

Elsie, who sounded sixteen on the phone, is actually about twenty-five and smart-looking, even a little spiky. Herridge inspects her.

‘Awfully strange to see someone for the first time when you’ve been talking to them for hours. Strange to see
at all
. Yes, please, Elsie. Whisky? Have to be my last for a week. Even if there’s booze available in this house I doubt I’ll be having any.’

‘No, that’s cool,’ Elsie says. ‘It’s just there’s usually alcohol readily available in this sort of social situation, for the purpose of, you know, promoting general relaxation?’

And tongue-loosening, Grayle thinks.

‘Going to need a clear head in there,’ Herridge says. ‘I’m taking this seriously, anything wrong with that?’ He looks across the table at Grayle. ‘I
want
to experience something and, if I do, like to be sure it’s not my mind playing tricks.’

Elsie’s smile is a little worn, like she’s been hearing this, at length, on the plane. She opens what proves to be the drinks cupboard, displaying four bottles of good Scotch and Irish, as the van moves away.

‘Ice, Roger?’

‘Wash your mouth out, my dear.’

Grayle says, ‘So you’ve, um, never seen… anything?’

‘Not… to my knowledge. But I do feel they rather owe me one. The ghosts.’