Night After Night (58 page)

Or who knows Leo Defford, sole owner of those wonderful high-definition shots of Ozzy Ahmed’s fire-crisped corpse still smoking in a burned-out barn. Of Rhys Sebold before the cops came.

And of the man who killed him.

‘When were you first aware of the other man?’ Max asks.

‘Which other man?’

Shit. Mistake. Wrong to relax with Max.

He looks at her with curiosity, but if there was more than one other man, he doesn’t need to know. He wouldn’t understand any more than the cops would have. The second
other man
, if such he was or had ever been, is outside the parameters of his discipline, always will be.

‘Jordan? He was just there. I didn’t see where he came from. Didn’t recognize him at first. He was just… like someone else pasted on the fog behind Sebold. But the spade…’

She recalls her cellphone lying in the grass in the flashlight mode. Its tiny LED bubble, uptilted, is reflected from a rectangular blade of stainless steel, worn thin. A bright star in the spade.

‘Did he speak?’

‘He shouted something out. I don’t recall what it… I was pretty much out of it, in ways…’

In ways she won’t be telling him about.

‘Did you see what he did next?’

‘Some of it. He saw what was happening. I’m assuming he’d also seen Ahmed’s body in the barn. He knows the barn. And he saw the blood on my face. See, he couldn’t have had much time to think. And Sebold’s a bigger man than him. And visibility was not good. So when Sebold turned and went for him, he struck out blindly. That was how it looked to me. He didn’t know if Sebold had a weapon. He just reacted.’

‘You saw what happened. I’m sorry, Grayle, this must be awful for you. Very raw, still.’

‘I heard it.’ She swallows, her shoulders tightening. Pain. ‘The spade made a kind of whine in the air. Or maybe it didn’t. That’s just how I hear it now. Or a keening. The blade is travelling very fast, like it’s slicing through the fog. And then I heard something fall. Like when a coconut falls out of a tree? I never actually saw that happen, only on TV, where they kind of boost the sound of it landing.
Thunk
.’ Her swollen lips shape what she guesses is a truly ghastly smile. ‘You don’t invariably get the truth on TV.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Max says gravely. ‘So Jordan…’

‘He may have saved my life. That’s what I told the police.’

‘And what else?’

‘Nothing else,’ Grayle says, resolute.

This is what frightens her so very much.

She needs advice, though not from Max.

Is she right to keep quiet?

Has Abel’s Rent been paid?

71

In the old and proper sense

‘
WHAT DO YOU
remember after that?’

This is Cindy Mars-Lewis the next night.

Twinset and pearls, matching beret, under the ex-hospital Anglepoise in the bastard bungalow in Broadway. Marcus is behind his desk, making notes. A small sofa has been installed which Grayle shares with Malcolm, the white English bull-terrier with psychotic eyes.

‘Just give me a couple minutes,’ Grayle says. ‘Let me go over it again in my head.’

Like she hasn’t already done this, before she took the sleeping pill, after the sleeping pill wore off. And God knows how many times in between.

Before she left Knap Hall at dusk, she had a fortifying coffee in the restaurant with Roger Herridge.

‘It’s all right.’ Herridge looking into her multi-coloured eyes. ‘I’m not going to ask. I know how long you’ve spent with the police.’

He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with holes in the elbows. His hair was in slabs.

‘It’s been a travesty,’ he said.

‘Kind of.’

‘Nothing happened for us, did it?’

‘You think?’

‘Oh,
a lot
happened. Two of us… two of us
died
.’

‘But in the original
Big Other
context…’

‘Quite.’

Grayle recalls feeling strangely relaxed.

‘You know, it’s weird, Roger. And yet it’s not. There’s this friend of mine who always tells you that it –
it
– is never gonna play to your rules. I look back over the last few days, and think who amongst the seven had an inexplicable experience. Cindy? Uh huh. Not what he expected. Maybe not what he was even used to. Ozzy – well who knows? He’d be in denial, anyway. Helen? Maybe. Maybe Helen – though she wouldn’t admit it even to herself – came here to find out.’

‘As did I.’

‘Yeah, but you
wanted
it.’

‘The time it’ll actually happen is when I
don’t
want it?’

‘Count on that.’

Roger started stirring his big cup of coffee like it was a cauldron.

‘I’d rather it happened to one of our party leaders, wipe away the inane smugness… or perhaps that prune-faced woman in the shadow cabinet who…’ he began to laugh. ‘I just wanted to know that the world was more than these people. The idiots whose company I once craved.’

‘Ashley,’ Grayle says. ‘You thought about Ashley?’

‘Really?’

‘Worth keeping an eye on what Ashley’s writing from now on, listening to what she’s saying.’

Before she left the village, Grayle looked around for Ashley, but she seemed to have left.

A lot to think about.

Cindy, though serious tonight, seems happier, less absurd. She’s watched him with Helen Parrish. He’s spoken of a
spiritual dalliance.

‘Something else was there?’

‘Oh yeah. I know there was.’

Cindy says, ‘So the hands…’

‘If hands they were… they weren’t Sebold’s. Least, not after he hit me.’

Hands that don’t recognize clothing.
Trust terror, little else is safe
. She stares at Marcus, with his heavy glasses and his iron-grey hair. He and Cindy, these are guys – the only guys – she
could
tell, but not yet. She came here mainly so Andy Anderson could do some healing, work on the pain. Andy’s good with pain on so many levels. She knows what Marcus wants to ask but nobody is ever going to be able to confirm to him if Abel Fishe wore leather or had fair hair. Or what he smelled of. Nobody.

Marcus says. ‘I’m sorry, Underhill.’

Cindy says, ‘Tell me this is hindsight, if you like, but when I saw the state of the knot garden after the fire I thought, this will not end well.’

Hearing the soft bump, seeing that the silhouette is shorter – these are the impressions the subconscious will store for nightmare material. And the thick rain. The thick rain on your face. And the spade, time-honed, earth-honed, wielded by a very strong man. A haunted man, a walking secret.

‘Maybe I should’ve talked to Jordan more. Wasn’t that he was unapproachable or unfriendly, just the kind of guy who if he doesn’t want you to know something waterboarding wouldn’t get it out of him.’

‘He’s still in custody?’

‘No, Marcus, he’s home. For now, anyway. I talked to Fred Potter. Fred has good cop contacts. They’re guessing the CPS won’t like Jordan for murder or manslaughter. Even though the edge of the spade hit Sebold’s throat so hard that his head just…’ Grayle laughs, too shrilly. ‘Maybe there’s a charge of like being in possession of an offensive horticultural implement.’

‘Seems little doubt,’ Marcus says, ‘that Ahmed was murdered by Sebold.’

‘Fred Potter figures that’s down to forensics and the autopsy. Maybe a head injury before the straw got pulled over him. And lit.’

Maybe he wasn’t dead then. Maybe they’ll find that out, maybe not. No witnesses. Nobody saw them together. What Grayle keeps recalling is Sebold’s radio interview with Eloise where she says the killers of Alison Cross got away with it on account of fire destroys DNA. And Sebold trying to tell her Eloise had to be in the frame for firing the barn.

She’s concealed from the police none of what she’s learned about Sebold and Ahmed and Angharad. All of it uncovered while she was doing her job, legitimate inquiries in the context of the programme. So far today, Kate Lyons has turned away over fifty journalists who want to talk to her about the best celebrity deaths for several years.

She won’t be talking to anyone. At some stage, she and Marcus will tell this story. Marcus in his book,
In Defence of Mystery
, or whatever it gets to be called. And maybe she’ll write about it, too, for whatever outlet is prepared to publish it in full. And she’ll talk to Helen Parrish and the camerawoman, Jess Taylor. Even Ashley Palk. It all needs to come out, even if it’s only to keep faith with Mary Ann Rutter.

With whom she talked on the phone today. This time about Jordan Aspenwall. Brought up by his grandparents in Winchcombe. His grandmother mainly, the old man was a wastrel. His grandmother took care of Jordan.

She wonders how close he actually came to talking about it, that day on the lawn in front of Knap Hall.

‘You remember the holiday home for bad kids?’

‘Weren’t the best idea. Boys didn’t even get locked up at night.’

‘The girl? Is she… still around?’

‘Dead.’

‘What… recently?’

‘Year or so after it happened. Brutal. Nasty. Couldn’t live with it. Took her own life.’

This was the day Jordan, horticulturalist, man of science, advised her to talk to Mrs Rutter about Abel’s Rent. Pretending he didn’t know too much about it. ‘
All this spirits
of the dead stuff, I got no patience with that, look. It’s just an old house.’

Everybody lies, especially at Knap Hall.

‘The incident at the home for bad boys,’
Mrs Rutter said today.
‘Well, I learned all about that from Billy, my husband. Billy was the first policeman on the scene. Had the barn cordoned off. The boy had kept her in the barn all night, you see. He was fourteen and unbelievably brutal. When he was first questioned by Billy he said he thought he’d killed her. He said he thought she was dead, so it didn’t really matter what he did to her. Diabolical was Billy’s word. In the old and proper sense.’

Grayle asked Mrs Rutter the name of the girl. It was Martha Worth. She was fifteen. Married quite soon afterwards, soon as she turned sixteen. The child was not her husband’s.

A couple hours ago, Grayle forced herself to go up to the Ansells’ apartment, the stabbing pains in her bones and sinews that made every stair an ordeal dulling any residual fear, twisting it into anger.

Someone had taken down the boards from the window so you could look down on the remains of the knot garden, view it the way it was meant to be viewed. Despite the damage, you could can still make out the shape of the two intersecting letters at its heart.

‘You told me about the shrine,’ Marcus says. ‘In the barn.’

‘Yeah.’ Grayle nodding. ‘Just a few religious items. I shouldn’t think they’re there all the time. Maybe a small, private – like
very
private – ceremony was enacted, to mark an anniversary.’

‘I doubt,’ Cindy says, ‘that Trinity told him where to put the knot garden. She was always happy to take advice from an expert. Another memorial, perhaps?’ He looks at Grayle, raising a neatly-plucked eyebrow. ‘What
did
you hear Jordan say – that neither you nor he told the police?’

Here we go.

‘He just…’ Grayle gazes through the window at dim lights. ‘He tossed the spade on Sebold’s body and he said…
For my mother.’

NOTES AND CREDITS

As usual, very little needed making up.

The second official funeral of Katherine Parr actually happened at Sudeley in 2012. Her body
was
found in the ruins of the chapel after the Civil War, in remarkable condition inside its lead packaging. And yes, it was interfered with. Much of this can be found in Emma Dent’s
Annals of Winchcombe and Sudeley
(British Library General Historical Collections). In the 1830s, Lord Rivers sold the castle to members of the Dent family, who, through the generations, made it into the jewel it is today.

Mark Turner’s
Mysterious Gloucestershire
(The History Press) reveals some of the nasty stuff.

Belas Knap is a steep walk, not easily found but well worth it, if you can’t resist that kind of place. Paul Devereux’s
Haunted Land
(Piatkus) looks at its reputation for strange phenomena, with a first-hand account of approaching monks. Julian Cope’s
The Modern Antiquarian
(Thorsons) draws attention to one particular feature. Catherine Owers described an experience at Belas Knap scary enough to send her running from the mound.

Winchcombe Church features some of the most celebrated stone grotesques in the country and, while a few might be satirical, some are seriously scary and not sculpted at a time when there was much of a taste for spoof-horror.

Richard Wiseman’s
Paranormality
(Pan) was well-thumbed by Ashley Palk, just as Diana Norman’s
The Stately Ghosts of England
(Dorset Press) must surely have been consulted by Roger Herridge. Diana, who also wrote as Ariana Franklin, was
a great, underacclaimed historical novelist who was spontaneously generous to me.