Night After Night (29 page)

This is complicated. She doesn’t even know what she’s going to say to him without sounding like a person in need of psychiatric counselling. She wants to tell him not to trust the house, and she doesn’t know how. She can’t explain it.
Don’t challenge them, never try to befriend them
, Marcus says. Marcus who never claims to have answers, who thinks the processes of human logic cannot be applied in these situations.

Try telling that to a TV producer.

On the inside, Defford’s personal portacabin could be a penthouse suite. Red leather seating, pictures on the walls of HGTV’s previous successes including Defford’s last one for the BBC which had hospital cooks competing against each other to provide cheap, healthy dishes. First patient to throw up, the chef was out of the game, something like that.

‘Don’t have much time, Grayle. A million things to tweak.’

Defford waves her to a small plush chair without arms, in the well below his big desk. Kate Lyons is sitting in a red leather
swivel chair, an iPad on her knees. The are two more ipads on Defford’s desk, and two TV monitors. Grayle wonders if there’s a camera somewhere focused on her now, and Defford’s watching her expressions in close-up.

Paranoia.

She has no laptop with her, no notes, only the peeling diary Mary Ann Rutter gave her, held demurely on her lap like a prayer book.

‘First off, Leo, I don’t wanna rock the boat.’

‘Grayle…’ Defford’s leaning back, tilted smile, the eyes wary and harder than the white hair and the gold earring. ‘You
can’t
rock the boat. The boat leaves in just over three hours’ time. Either you’re on it or you aren’t.’

‘If you, um… if you wanna continue with that metaphor, this is not as much about the boat as the sea.’

‘The sea.’

‘Or, like… what’s down there. In the dark water.’

‘In the house.’

‘When all this started, what we had… what I brought to you and you seemed to like… was Trinity Ansell and her perceived connections, living and dead, with Katherine Parr.’

‘Two charismatic women bridging half a millennium.’

She scans his face for irony. None is apparent.

‘Women, and ghosts,’ she says, ‘are not the same.’

‘Look. What you came up with, the tie-up with Katherine Parr, that was what persuaded me it’d been right to go for Knap Hall. I needed a little-known haunted house and I was intrigued by Ansell’s suggestion that his late wife might be one of its ghosts, even though he was clearly holding back on his reasons for thinking this. The fact that we now had Katherine Parr as well…’

‘But I think I made it clear at the time that KP could be wishful thinking on Trinity’s part. That maybe Trinity
wanted
her to be here because she played her in a movie.’

‘Although, Lisa… what’s her name…?’

‘Lisa Muir.’

‘Yeah, Lisa Muir thinks it’s rather more than that, obviously.’

‘Not as I recall.’

‘Oh.’ Defford looks vague. ‘You haven’t seen that interview?’

‘Interview?’

‘No, you wouldn’t have. Sorry. We shot it way back.’

A big cold space is opening up in Grayle’s chest.

‘You’re saying… you’re saying that Lisa Muir, who told me she could never talk about this stuff on TV without she’d burst into tears—’

‘No reflection on you, Grayle. We’re quite experienced at changing people’s minds.’

‘With money?’

Defford shrugs.

‘But you didn’t tell me. You
purposely
didn’t tell me.’

‘It’s a whole different area of production.’ He looks pained. ‘You’re research. We made the approach through a friend who knew the girl’s parents. We do what’s most expedient. In the case of Parrish, we thought she’d connect with another journalist, so we sent you. We go for what’s most likely to work. And then, once we had Lisa Muir, it was quite easy to get Pruford.’

‘
Pruf
—
?
’

Grayle’s lips have gone dry. She closes them.

Defford’s sigh is close to a yawn.

‘Yeah, we have Pruford, too. Soon as he was back in the country, we were on him. Everyone has a price. The story about the woman who photographed the two images in the doorway, he tells it well. Be very convincing overlaid with pictures of the relevant doorway. And Meg. And a little wizardry.’

Which he wasn’t going to do. He told her specifically there’d be no special effects.

‘So you put that together,’ he says, ‘with Lisa Muir’s story about her and Trinity talking to Katherine Parr through a ouija board… Grayle, don’t
look
at me like that. It was early days
when you talked to her. She didn’t really know who you were. She didn’t think her parents would like it. Lots of problems like that. Once they were all sorted, she opened up. It’s what we do, we sort things.’

Grayle wants to die. She thinks,
Need to know
.
Need to fucking
know.

They didn’t tell her because they didn’t want her messing with what they’d gotten neatly parcelled up. That’s what this is about. She struggles for composure.

‘Am I allowed to ask what they learned from the ouija board?’

Because, unless Cindy’s playing by the same HGTV rules, Trinity never told him about this.

Defford shakes his head.

‘I dunno, usual garbled rubbish. What was significant, according to Lisa, was that whenever they had a ouija session, Trinity would have dreams. Very vivid, usually involving Katherine Parr. Then Trinity would say she was seeing Katherine in the house. Like they’d opened up a way for her to come in.’

It fits. Sure it fits. Grayle clutches the diary and thinks of another one, more chaotic, less coherent, kept by Trinity Ansell at the behest of Cindy. You can’t second-guess ghosts, but people are easier, and it’s clear Trinity Ansell wanted Cindy to help her bring something of KP into Knap Hall. And Cindy wasn’t playing. Then, the next time he went back, when the UK’s most prestigious guest house was up and running, she was saying, Look, I did it. I did it by myself. To the happy sounds of Renaissance music.

Sure. It all fits. But then, as the diary reveals, something changed:
I can see the hearth with no fire. The room is cold and there’s a blue light
.

Something ended. Something died. Something that was represented in Trinity’s dreams, according to Cindy, by an image of the dead body of Katherine Parr.

‘So what did you want to tell me?’ Defford asks. ‘Bearing in mind how close we are to recording.’

Jeez, you can almost see the digital clock pulsing in his brain

‘I went to see a woman this morning. An historian.’

She sits on her pride and tells him as briefly as she can about Sir Joshua Wishatt and Abel Fishe. About Abel’s Rent. Tells him this man is, pre-Trinity, possibly the most significant piece of history she’s been able to uncover relating specifically to Knap Hall. Only the way she’s feeling now, it doesn’t come out with as much enthusiasm as it might’ve done earlier.

‘And when was this?’

‘Don’t have precise dates, yet, but we’re looking at the eighteenth century.’

‘The eighteenth century,’ Defford says. ‘So that would be around two centuries after Katherine Parr. And three before Trinity. She know about this guy?’

‘Fishe is believed to have brought women here. Here. To Knap Hall, as he was now calling it. And he was abusing them. Here. And whereas today abuse can be like a guy pinching someone’s ass…’

‘I realize all that. Did Trinity know about him?’

‘If you’re saying did she know his name, his personal history, I guess not. But if you’re asking was she affected by… whatever remains of him and what he did, that’s a whole different—’

‘I’m not asking that,’ Defford says.

She keeps trying.

‘See, you’re looking down to another level of… murk. You could be looking at what’s represented by all this talk among the staff of things in the house getting dirty very quickly. Heaps of soil appearing on the floor, the windows becoming hard to see through. Maybe you recorded somebody talking about that, too. I wouldn’t know, I’m just the researcher.’

He doesn’t react.

‘OK,’ Grayle says, ‘I don’t know whether any of that actually happened or whether it was just in the perceptions of the staff
who thought they were having to do too much cleaning, but it’s what worries me a little, so I thought you oughta know.’

‘OK. Thank you.’ Defford glances at Kate Lyons, who remains expressionless, then he leans back again. ‘Grayle, I have two problems with this. ‘A, wrong century. B, wrong sex. In television, we don’t look to complicate things. The more straightforward the background, the fewer people involved, the less history to absorb… need I go on? We have two famous women in a house which is Tudor in origin. That is,
not
eighteenth century.’

‘No, but—’

‘And we start recording programme one tonight. You do realize what “tonight” means?’

He snatches up a copy of one of the cheapo TV guides, almost the whole of its front page given over to the black silhouette of some historic house which clearly is not Knap Hall and a big headline:

WHO DARES GO INTO THE
BIG OTHER
HOUSE?

It’s the first of these she’s seen. There’s been a few speculative pieces in the papers over the past weeks but it’s the first time she’s seen the name. Defford puts it down on his desk.

‘And there are big spreads coming up in the weekend TV supplements. I’ve done an interview for the
Sunday Times
. Done and dusted. I need to draw a line under this, or it’ll run away with itself. Your job now is to try and match what’s happening in the house over the next week with what we know about Trinity Ansell and Katherine Parr. And tailor your chapel questions accordingly.’

‘OK.’ She stands up. ‘That’s what you’re paying me for. But so I know where we’re headed, let me just re-check the formula. As well as debating the existence of ghosts in general, from the outset, you want the residents to start forming a picture of what might’ve happened here, right?’

‘Correct.’

‘And then, at the end of the week, you’ll reveal the truth about where we are – how close they got, if any of them do – and we see the footage of Meg the actor in the red dress, and we hear Lisa and Pruford. And then we come to the Ansells, and Harry’s death by probable sui—’

‘We’re being careful about that. I don’t propose to speculate about Ansell’s death. Leave that to the media. It’ll add a certain resonance, but I’m sticking with his wife.’

‘Right.’

Why should she care now? After more than half a year, her role in this project is nearly over. Why not just back away from it all? Like lying back in some hospital bed with your eyes closed and submitting to the…

… the disease.

Dis-ease. You walk into someplace to produce a piece of light entertainment disguised as something deeper, and you find you’re close to something old and sick that nobody wants disturbed. Least of all Defford. No excitement in his eyes. It’s not about seeing what happens, it’s about control. Always was. He should’ve realized by now that
Big Brother
rules just won’t work here. Virtually none of them.

He hasn’t.

Grayle looks into his deceptively amiable features under the innocent lambswool hair. She remembers the first time they met and him saying he wanted to know everything there was to know about this house, all the history, all the legends, all the reasons to be afraid.

‘So you’re… happy.’

‘I’m as satisfied as I can be at this stage. I don’t think we’ll get anything better. All this eighteenth-century abuse stuff, sure, bear it in mind, but don’t go looking for it. I really don’t want to have bring in an emergency team of actors in different costumes to shoot rape scenes against a background of whatever this dump looked like in the eighteenth century.’

‘Well, I just wanted you to be aware of it. Being as how you like to be one step ahead.’

‘OK, I’m aware of it.’ He consults his iPad. ‘Kate, get me Paul at C4, will you?’

Grayle’s aware that, for Defford, she no longer exists in the room. Kate Lyons already has the door open for her and outside it’s raining now.

36

Walk but they can’t sue

SHE RUNS OUT
, through the rain, to her ash tree, the only place she feels safe to think. And to feel confused and useless. Ash trees… something about them: when they die it’s from the inside and they become hollow, something like that. Eloise would know. M.R. James wrote a famous story about an ash tree with a dead witch inside.

This one seems to have resisted whatever ash-blight is going around. Its branches heave up around her into the rain, most of its leaves have been shed. Is that liberating for a tree facing winter? Is it liberating to know when you’re not wanted any more, when nobody wants you to think outside of the box?

What now?

Maybe call Marcus Bacton. It isn’t the ash tree that says that.

When she tells him about her day so far, his laughter’s a bark, like Malcolm the terrier came through on an extension.

‘You talked to Lewis about this?’

‘Oh, yeah, I’ve
talked
to him. I’ve interviewed him in the chapel. Have I
really
talked to him? No.’

What’s more, she doesn’t see how she’s going to. Not today, not tonight, not any day or night until this is all over.

It’s the phones. When they go into the house,
the Seven
, they have to leave their phones behind. Well, sure, it makes sense. They can’t have any contact with the outside world. The phones are kept in a safe in Kate Lyons’s office inside the Leo Defford cabin. Twice a day, with the residents’ agreement, Kate will take them out and check for messages.

The residents have been asked to inform their loved ones, agents, lawyers, etc. that they’ll be unreachable for a week except in dire emergency. In which case all calls should go through an HGTV number. Anything possibly urgent found on the mobiles will be monitored by Kate and crucial messages passed on.