Night After Night (55 page)

‘We
know
?’ Defford stares at her. ‘We don’t
know
anything.’

‘Leo,’ Grayle says, ‘do you have five minutes?’

To get into the live gallery, you walk through an area that still looks like the original stable. Part of it’s been sectioned off, a cheap door installed, though the new room it accesses has never been used by HGTV, except, judging by the smell, as a smoking area.

A naked bulb throws jagged light over a bale of straw and a stack of metal hurdles. Defford rests his foot on one.

‘You’re telling me
you
saw… That’s what you’re saying?’

Defford shuts his eyes, shakes his head. He doesn’t need this. This is not even the programme getting out of control, this is the staff. He does not expect to have to be one step ahead of the goddamn
employees
. Grayle sees all this in his face, and also an uncertainty.

‘
Here?
’

‘Up in the Ansells’ old bedroom. You don’t know whether to believe me, do you, Leo?’

‘Grayle, it—’

‘Same with the camerawoman, Jess. It’s OK if the
residents
think they’ve seen something. That’s what they’re here for, and if they’re crazy, what’s that matter? But the guys
this
side of the camera, we’re professionals, we’re supposed to be above all this shit. Right?’

‘Why are you telling me this now, if it happened days, weeks ago? Why now, Grayle?’

‘Because it… seems to impact on what’s happening now.’

‘Harry Ansell?’

She’s about to tell him what he’s going to read in tomorrow’s
Times
, and then stops herself, because that will immediately cancel out everything that went before. It’s reality; this is not.

‘I don’t… I didn’t even think of Harry Ansell at the time. I saw something hanging from a rope in what was left of the
Ansells’ four-poster bed. And the air was full of this deep sadness, despair, regret… and something which I now feel was self-hatred. It was all over me. Never felt this desolate. Not even when my sister died. It was like being choked with someone else’s misery. And yeah, maybe…’ She sinks down on the bale of straw, and her head sinks into her hands. ‘Maybe I should’ve told you earlier, but I didn’t think it would actually improve my… standing.’

She looks up, and his face tells her she was dead right.

‘You’re saying this… experience… happened before you knew about Harry Ansell’s death.’

‘Several hours before. You must’ve known about Ansell before I did. I was in Devon.’

‘You’re saying it was the night that he…’

‘And, conceivably, at the time it was happening. I don’t know.’

The way he’s looking at her, she knows he’s thinking,
What the fuck use is this to me? You’re not a resident, you don’t matter.

He pulls his glasses off.

‘Ansell hanged himself in a wood. Not in his former bedroom.’

‘In a wood, yeah. He died in a place he knew that nobody who knew him personally would find him, nobody who’d be personally affected by the sight of him. But in his mind… as he tightened the rope… we don’t know where he was in his mind, do we?’

‘Nor will we ever. I’m getting a headache, Grayle.’

‘Yeah.’

Grayle stands up again, the cellphone throbbing in her pocket. This was going to be the opening to explaining what she now understands about Ansell’s state of mind the night he died, his struggle against something in the house. The stuff that will sound even less convincing tomorrow after the paper comes out and the new Ansell sex story gets picked up by radio and TV.

‘
Leo?’

Jo’s voice from the door of the live gallery.

‘In here,’ Defford shouts.

Sounding glad to be interrupted before he has to say something he might regret just to get rid of this unstable woman. Grayle’s phone stops vibrating, as Jo comes in. She’s wearing a heavyweight fleece over her fatigues, and she’s out of breath.

‘Leo, we have a problem.’

Defford leans back against the plywood wall.

‘Just the one, Jo?’

‘There’s a barn on fire.’

Defford stares at her over his glasses, down his nose, like he doesn’t get it. Jo maps it out with her hands.

‘There’s a barn full of old straw, apparently. I mean full. And… it’s on fire. And old straw burns like…’

‘And that started… how?’

‘Nobody seems to know. We just had a call from security. But even if you just put your head out the door—’

‘How far from the house?’

‘Well, that’s it. Not so far away we don’t need to worry about it.’

‘We have fire extinguishers, don’t we?’

‘I’m no expert, but I talked to one of the security men. He says, and I quote, using a fire extinguisher on a barn blaze is about as much use as pissing in a furnace. He was about to call the fire brigade, I said no, wait… it needed to come from you.’

‘Fire engines? Sirens?’ Defford lurches from the wall. ‘Look, if it’s only a barn, no animals or anything in there, and it’s insured… it’ll burn itself out eventually, won’t it?’

‘If it doesn’t spread. Leo, we may have to evacuate the house?’

Defford is still for a moment. His eyes say they’ll evacuate Knap Hall over his dead body.

‘Go back in, Jo. I’ll join you when I’ve sorted this. And get me a crew out there.’

He wants pictures of the fire? Well, of course he does. He leaves without looking at Grayle, who follows Jo back into the live gallery, where it’s like nothing’s happened, the residents in their candlelit time capsule, patched all over the walls, oblivious. She picks up her coat and her woolly hat and goes out into the fog, where the air’s thickening and her phone’s vibrating again.

It’s Neil Gill.

‘Is he back?’

‘Ozzy? No, not that I know of.’

‘You should call the police.’

‘My boss—’

‘Bugger your boss, you should call the police.’

Above the dull lights of the TV village, Grayle can see a billowing glow that turns the fog orange.

‘Neil, I think you better tell me why.’

‘I’ve been advised not to tell you anything, for legal reasons.’

‘So you’re saying I should call the cops and tell them a grown man apparently decided he wasn’t gonna be availing himself of our accommodation any more and could they please organize a nationwide search?’

‘You’re a TV company.’

She pulls her woolly hat down over one ear and the phone and walks away from the stable and the noise of the diesel generator, towards the orange glow.

‘Listen… I’m the researcher, on a short-term contract. One up the food chain from the caterers. I’m also probably the only person here who will make any kind of sense out of whatever you can tell me, and I’m not about to pass it on to anybody else. Even if I could guarantee they’d listen.’

‘I don’t know,’ Neil Gill says. ‘I’m his mate.’

‘Neil—’

‘We write together. We share our ideas. I tell him things, he tells me things. Things you know won’t go any further because you’re partners.’

‘Angharad,’ Grayle says. ‘He tell you anything about a woman called Angharad?’

She keeps walking, as he talks, into something worse than fog.

67

Pig roast

WHILE THE SOLDIER
is taking his leave, waiting for his escort out of the house, Cindy motions Helen Parrish into his corner, where the lighting isn’t brilliant. Sits her in his chair, kneels beside it. He’s prepared, if it comes to it, to disable her personal mic and take full responsibility, if it means she’ll talk about this. Bigger than television, it is, but Helen isn’t concerned.

She looks defeated.

‘Cindy, I’m sure tonight’s rushes are going to finish my career for good, but… I… genuinely do not remember what the bloody hell I said.’ She leans her head against his shoulder. ‘If I could give them back their contract in return for this never going out, and me being a hundred miles from wherever this is by tomorrow…’

He points to her mic, motions removing it. She shakes her head.

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘How long have you known?’

‘I
didn’t
know. Christ, odd things happen, they’re just… odd things. Odd and useless. Maybe Diana, if I’d been on my own, without a crew and a budget to worry about… I don’t know, I’m just a jobbing hack.’

He strokes her hair, says nothing.

‘I’m buggered now, aren’t I?’

He laughs.

She probably is.

*

The shaped bushes of the evergreen knot garden are black against the blaze, like a graveyard in front of a burning church.

That
barn. The only barn it could be, and flames are already gobbling up the roof, alight almost end to end now, rafters burned through, blackened air sizzling with hot dust and chips of wood trailing fire like small comets.

Grayle watches roof tiles falling into the body of the barn. Her eyes are smarting. She’s seen Eloise and Lisa Muir among groups of people watching and coughing, and Jordan on his own. Half the village must be out here. She can’t see Defford.

‘You in a bloody chest hospital?’ Neil Gill says in her ear.

‘We have a fire.’

‘At the house? Are you serious?’

‘In an outbuilding.’

But there’s not much more than the knot garden between the barn and the oldest part of the house, where the main chamber is and all the bedrooms. They need the fire brigade, and fast. Defford must see that.

‘Let me get away from here,’ she croaks into the phone. ‘I just needed to see how bad it was. Jeez—’

An interior explosion like a huge dragon-gasp has sent people backing off from the barn, hands and scarves clamped over their mouths. A cameraman drops to one knee, alongside a soundman with a fleeced-up boom mic, his hooded lens panning slowly across the ridge of fire which tonight is the horizon.

Neil Gill says, ‘You want to call me back?’

‘No, hell, Neil, I want you to keep right on talking. Go back to the word “Machiavellian”.’

‘Sounds daft when you say it, but that’s the way he is. Too smart by half. When he’s messed up emotionally, it’s how he works his way through. Puts his broken heart into something. Didn’t even start work on his mother-in-law till he found out Sophie was playing away.’

‘His wife was…?’

Amidst the roaring and the crackling, Grayle’s mentally replaying her tape of Ozzy’s friendly Wiccan mother-in-law.

That lazy image – very misleading, luv. Austin has a steely determination, and he’ll never give up on an idea… I could see him studying me… devising a persona for me that would sound realistic as well as being very funny… a very clever lad.

This was revenge? Recovery?

‘Neil, did Ozzy actually tell you what he had in mind for
Big Other
?’

‘Not directly. More a what if…? situation. He’d read this book about these people creating a ghost. The ghost of somebody imaginary, and he’s going, What if you created the ghost of somebody who’d been alive and was now dead and shouldn’t be? In a situation where it’d be believed without too many questions.’

‘Rhys Sebold’s dead girlfriend? His
friend
?’

She flounders through the murk of HGTV’s amusement park, looking for a quiet place now. Passing the clock-towered stable, far enough away from the barn to keep on transmitting, as long as no cables are affected. Neil spells it out.

‘Sebold has an ego the size of Greater London. He thinks everybody famous wants to be his mate and every woman wants to shag him, and a lot of the time he’s not wrong. Women… he doesn’t do equal. You listen to him on the radio, he’s this big feminist. Away from the mic, what he likes, what he gets off on, is to be adored. Unconditionally.’

Under the sudden squawking of a fire truck in the lane, she can hear Rhiannon:
she got very starry-eyed when he started taking an interest in her.

‘Chloe… Angharad…’

‘Little researcher. Did all the things for him that women are not supposed to at the ultra-feminist BBC. Rhys puts her in his pocket, takes her home. Life goes on as usual, drinking with his famous mates, one-nighters with women who adore him. You must’ve noticed him this week, turning it on with
that Eloise before she got the elbow. And
she
thinks she hates him.’

‘Angharad put up with all that.’

‘Except for the drugs. It started to irritate him, her little England attitude to recreational narcotics. It was like, Oh, if you really loved me you’d at least give it a try. It’s not addictive. Here’s a list of Very Famous People who do it.’

‘Sebold told him this?’

‘Of course he didn’t. Never said a word to anybody until after she was dead, and he was making a big deal about coming clean, getting his defence in first.’

The first fire engine comes howling past and she recalls Sebold on the phone.

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.

‘She walked out,’ Grayle says, ‘when she saw the cops, and Sebold and his pals ignored her. She walked out and she got into her car, in her white raincoat, and…’

‘He wanted her to do it long before that.’

‘Who did?’

‘Ozzy. Leave him, Ozzy says. Leave the bastard…’

‘Sebold was… listen, was there actual physical abuse?’

‘Smacked her a few times, aye. Ozzy’s like, Leave the bastard and…’

‘What?’

‘Come with me.’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘He met her when he was on Sebold’s show. He liked her… as a person… a lot. Just friends for quite a while. Ozzy thought they were more than that, but I was never sure, to be honest. She liked the lad, he made her laugh, she confided in him. But she kept going back to Sebold. The way they do.’

‘Sebold told me that Ozzy… that he’d’ve been at that party…’

… if he hadn’t been touring Australia at the time – if I believed in something as ridiculous as astrology, I might say he’d been born under fortunate stars.