Night After Night (33 page)

Marcus slaps down a printed-out email.

‘This is his reply.’

‘Which,’ Marcus says, ‘brings me back to something Rutter said when I asked her why there wasn’t a lynching party for Fishe. Apart from him being Wishatt’s man and the superstition about the burial chamber, she said that there was something causing considerable excitement and no small amount of awe happening over at Sudeley.’

He opens up the
Annals
a few pages from the end, flattens them out. Andy sees a primitive-looking drawing of what looks like an old longcase clock lying flat. There are two flaps in the
case which have been opened to reveal, at the top, not a clock face but a human face and, lower down, a hand.

‘What is
that
?’

Andy pulls out her reading glasses to magnify the faint, tiny lettering under the drawing.

‘Why’m I no’ getting a good feeling about this, Marcus?’

Marcus sniffs.

‘I’d say a strong stomach was required. If you hadn’t been a nurse in Glasgow.’

42

Losers

‘
OPEN IT
,
SHALL I?
’ Cindy asks.

Through a speaker cunningly set into a wall hanging, the unchallenging voice of the former radio announcer Matthew Barnes has invited them into the dining room where, on the narrow oak table, under a low-hung hoop of candles, there are bottles of red and white wine, glasses, two jugs of beer and a vellum-coloured envelope.

‘You know you want to, Cindy,’ Ozzy Ahmed says.

Cindy has never met Ozzy before. He seems an affable person. Some comedians can become tiresome in minutes but the boy’s humour is dry and stays out of your face.

Ashley Palk places the envelope, addressed to no one, in Cindy’s hands.

Cindy says. ‘Should we be seated for this?’

There are seven matching chairs, wooden, rudimentary, a grey cushion on each. As they sit down around the table, the Seven, Cindy’s already slitting the envelope with a thumb, unfolding creamy notepaper.

‘Well, children, quite simple, it is. First, we are asked to state briefly how we would define ghosts.’

‘Bollocks?’ Ozzy says diffidently. ‘That brief enough, or would you like me to reduce it to a single syllable?’

‘I think that sets the pattern admirably, Austin. Eloise?’

She’s calmer now, but wary, inevitably, after the incident of the elder. She’s shed her shawl to reveal a crocheted black top, through which her black bra is visible. Her nails are black. Once a goth…

‘Spirits of the dead,’ she says unequivocally.

She’s chosen the seat at the bottom of the table, well away from Ozzy and Rhys Sebold, whose radio session with her was sent to Cindy a week ago. She hasn’t spoken to either of them directly. Biding her time, no doubt.

Cindy nods gravely, looks next at Roger Herridge – suit and tie, big hair.

‘Place memory,’ Herridge says. ‘Recording in stone. Imprint.’

‘So without personality?’

‘Only in the most obvious sense. If this was, say, the ghost of an angry person, you might get a sense of excitation… wrath, disturbance. Which might be hard to live with, even though essentially harmless in a physical sense.’

‘Invariably?’

Roger’s smile is rueful.

‘One should never say that.’

‘Thank you, boy. A good answer. Helen?’

‘God… I dunno.’

Helen Parrish looks more relaxed than any of them. And rather fetching in a sloppy jumper and black jeans, Cindy thinks. In fact, if he was normal…

‘Try.’

‘Well, you know… I do think there’s something. Levels of personal experience as yet uncharted by science, how about that? All those centuries of ghost stories, you can’t just dismiss it all out of hand.’

‘I think I just did, didn’t I?’ Ozzy Ahmed says.

‘Only because a put-down is usually funnier. You strike me as a man who must always go for what is funnier. In the interests of sustaining an income, surely.’

Ozzy blinks. Helen shrugs.

‘And, as they say, I know what I saw. And it doesn’t bother me greatly if you all think I’m deluded because I can’t prove otherwise. If this was something we could easily get a handle on, we’d all know by now.’

‘You
can
get a handle,’ Eloise insists. ‘If you want to. Perhaps you don’t, which is fine.’

‘We should perhaps…’ Cindy raises a finger, ‘…build
up
to the arguments. Mr Sebold?’

Rhys is wearing one of those crisp, striped shirts with a white collar. His body is gym-slim, his hair thick but short, razored at the sides. Good-looking boy and well aware of it. His mouth is wide, as befits his big voice, tossing Cindy a loose smile.

‘So where do
you
stand, Mr Lewis?

Of course. Rhys is an interviewer.
He
asks the questions. Cindy feigns embarrassment.

‘Me? Oh, heavens, all of the above. And more. Ghosts are various and complicated. But also, I suppose, relatively simple. They inhabit areas of our senses which have become moribund through disuse. They live in our derelict houses.’

‘You’re saying we make them up.’

‘Far from it. What I—’

‘Because we
do
make them up. For whatever purpose suits us at the time. That’s my answer. We invent them.’

Rhys stand up and walks away from the table, as if his work here is done. Cindy calls after him.

‘Or do they invent us?’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Haven’t the faintest idea. Now…’ Cindy peers around the table. ‘Who’s left?’

‘Just me, I’m afraid.’

‘
Ashley
. My apologies.’

She’s looking fresh and relaxed in a magnolia dress, swingy blond hair, no jewellery. A schoolteacher on holiday. She sips white wine.

‘As a psychologist, I could bore you all at length, but I shall restrict m’self to words like “projection” and “auto-suggestion”.’

‘As distinct from “hallucination” and “self-delusion”?’

‘That would be offensive.’

How nice we are being to one another, Cindy thinks. And how nice the room feels, quietly Elizabethan, not oppressive. He wonders: was the elder a device? And whose? If so, it could hardly have worked better: a sudden darkness followed by some companionable light relief – which no viewer will trust. He consults the creamy notepaper under the circular candle-holder which haloes them like the biblical light in a Rembrandt.

‘Next question. Again, quite simple. Apart from the money, why are we all here?’

Sitting beside Jo Shepherd in the live gallery, Grayle watches on another monitor as Jordan arrives in the chamber with his bier and its cargo of fresh logs. The thick door between the two adjacent rooms is shut. Jordan’s alone.

Well, not entirely. Let’s not forget the cameramen behind the false wall with its inset two-way mirrors.
They
are the ghosts in here.

To make this kind of traffic possible, boards have been cut to use as ramps to get the bier up and down the few steps. What this suggests to Grayle is that Defford knows full well that this is no ordinary wood cart and is hoping one of the residents knows enough about historical death-procedures to get spooked and spread it around.

Jordan unloads some wood that Grayle doesn’t recognize. Pale, flaking bark, silver birch? The camera’s behind him, so that his face is not seen. He looks timeless in a leather apron and a kind of old-fashioned watch cap – not the type of headgear Grayle’s seen him in before – so you don’t even get to check out his haircut.

A camera between the ceiling beams observes his hands piling the elder on the bier for removal, which itself must be an infringement of some folkloric no-no. The fire’s burning low, the main elder log already collapsed into pink and orange ash. Jordan uses one of the new blocks of wood to push it back. Then he nests the block in the hot ash, arranging a funnel of smaller ones either side.

‘In case you were wondering, Leo actually hadn’t planned that,’ Jo whispers to Grayle. ‘The elder incident. He loves how it happened, but he’s disturbed that it did.’

‘How much
does
he have planned?’

Jo comes on all wide-eyed.

‘Did I say he had anything arranged, Grayle? I don’t think I did. That would be against the whole ethos of the programme.’

‘Sure,’ Grayle says between her teeth.

Damn right it would.

‘Let’s not dress this up,’ Helen Parrish says under the kindly candlelight. ‘We’re all losers. We’re trying to recover something of our professional lives before we’re unfit to be seen on the box after four p.m.’

‘Except for him.’ Eloise nodding at Ozzy Ahmed. ‘He’s doing rather well, it pains me to say.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Cindy running with it. ‘Austin’s behaving terribly badly, he is, simply by turning up here and robbing a decent loser of an opportunity to get back on his feet. Thought-less, see. Selfish.’

Ozzy looks wry, says nothing. Fundamental rule: if you can’t think of anything funny to say, look wry and say nothing. But he’ll be looking for a way to establish that Cindy is not the house’s number one comedian. Eloise, who’s drunk a little wine, waves her empty glass.

‘I know why he’s doing it.’

The reflections of at least five candles glimmer from that glass. There’s a scraping noise from the inglenook.

‘His marriage is over,’ Eloise says, impish glee behind seaweed hair. ‘No mother-in-law to torment any more. He needs a whole new act. He needs
us
– all of us, except possibly his mate, Rhys. We’re new material. Soon as he gets to his room he’ll be making notes, scribble, scribble, scribble.’

‘Unfair,’ Ozzy says at last, more of his native Manchester coming through. ‘I actually
like
mixing with people like you.
Used to enjoy visiting me mum-in-law, meeting the coven.’

‘He’s a hypocrite,’ Eloise says, succinctly.

Ozzy grins, waves a hand casually, as if he’s swatting her.

‘Never said they were sane, but I enjoyed their company.’ Shaking his head, smiling nostalgically. ‘Muppets.’

Cindy notes that he hasn’t given them a better reason for his presence. Neither has he denied his friendship with Rhys Sebold or his intention to use this gathering of eccentrics in future comedy routines.

Aware of movement in the fireplace, he turns his head, but is disinclined to mention it. Ashley Palk also glances at the fire. Could be production people, whose presence they’re expected to ignore, just as nobody commented on the rumbling from next door a couple of minutes ago. This is television.

Helen Parrish says, ‘They going to tell us what happened here? A murder? How old’s the house, anyway?’

Eloise and Herridge answer simultaneously. She says late medieval, he says Elizabethan. He bows to her.

‘Let’s compromise on Tudor. But you could be right, could be older. Stone-colour suggests… hard to say, could be Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset. And if you want to know why
I’m
here, it’s very simple and nothing to do with money or being political driftwood. I want to see a ghost.’

Eloise turns to him, interested.

‘You never have?’

‘Absolutely fascinated by them since childhood. Written three books about them. Made a practice, whilst travelling the country, of sleeping in the most haunted room of every haunted inn I could find.’

‘And a haunted flower shop,’ Ozzy murmurs, ‘where you wake up and smell roses from the pillow on the left and gardenias from the pillow on the right. Spooky.’

Roger Herridge laughs, and it’s not forced either, Cindy notes.

‘I suppose this begs the question, Roger – why do you still believe?’

‘I haven’t seen God, either, Cindy, but I still go to church.’

‘That,’ Rhys Sebold says from over by the door, ‘is ridiculous.’

‘You may think so.’

‘Not that, Roger – well, that
is
ridiculous, but I meant what’s happening through there. Come and have a look.’

He’s opened the door. From the chamber on the other side comes an uneven, weighty rolling: wobbly wheels on stone flags.

Ozzy Ahmed gets up, followed by Roger Herridge. The women don’t move, being above all this. Cindy turns his chair to observe.

‘There’s a kind of yokel here,’ Rhys says, looking into the main chamber. ‘Quiet, now, we don’t want to scare him away. What you doing, mate?’

No reply. Rhys doesn’t give up; he’s an interviewer.

‘Chop this wood yourself?’

Ozzy opens the door wider, amusement squeaking in his throat.

‘What
has
he got on? It’s like a fucking troll uniform.’

‘Let’s not torment the poor chap,’ Roger Herridge says. ‘He’s obviously been told not to speak to us. He’s just bringing in more logs.’

‘No he’s not, he’s taking them out. What’s that about? Nice cart, though, cock.’

Roger bends into the room.

‘That’s interesting.’

‘What is?’ Rhys says.

‘It’s a bier. Funeral bier.’

‘What, you mean for carrying…?’

Rhys takes a step back. Cindy hears the cart rolling away down the passage.

‘Corpses,’ Roger says.

‘You’re kidding.’ Ozzy peering in. ‘This a joke or what? Is there also a secret panel in the wall and when some bugger opens it a fucking skeleton falls out? No, geddoff his back, Rhys, they probably don’t want him to speak to us, avoid paying him Equity rates.’

The women are quiet, Eloise’s eyes dark and smoky, watchful behind the candles’ aura.

Cindy ponders. Evidently, a man has been sent to replace the elder logs with something less offensive. But on a bier? He hears the rolling, grinding sound in his head, those wooden wheels. Were they, the Seven, meant to be aware of this going on, and in a fairly sinister way? If Defford hasn’t mentioned any of it to him, well, why should he? Defford is a seasoned professional. He’ll have constructed his sets with care. It’s in his interests to create a general air of uncertainty and apprehension. And, amongst the residents, a fermenting mistrust of one another – essential, that.