Night After Night (13 page)

The fact that Ansell has never talked publicly about the circumstances of his wife’s slightly sordid death.

Stay ahead of them. Always be one step ahead of the overpaid bastards
.

Easier if they only exist in the monitors and you’re the guy who’s overpaying them. Tricky if the obsession is sitting with you in the gallery, and the obsessive is your landlord, and you don’t know where the hell he’s coming from or how he might react to whatever’s happening in the house.

So… Defford wants her to find out, and he clearly doesn’t care how she does it. What it amounts to, what is unsaid, is that he wants marital secrets. This could be worse than the lowest kind of tabloid journalism. If she could hack into Ansell’s phone without him finding out, she guesses Defford would have her do it.

But, no worries, there’s plenty of time, he’s assured her, locking the ghosts in the house and hurrying to his vehicle – had to get to London for a meeting. Would call her tomorrow. Well, she can always resign.

She pulls into the forecourt – the apartment block’s most expensive asset. Of course, she can’t resign. It wouldn’t be honourable or professional. Not now.

The apartment’s still flushed with sunlight when she lets herself in, the opening door just clearing the nose of Anubis,
the Egyptian god of the dead who sits in the boxy hallway with a gold lamé poodle collar around his neck. Her sole remaining New Age artefact, still around for sentimental reasons. She drapes her coat around Anubis and carries her shoulder bag through to the living room. Among the usual stuff, the bag contains a creamy HGTV envelope, sealed, and a CD. Given to her only after she’d nodded acceptance of the terms and she and Defford had formally shaken hands. Which in the UK is like puncturing your wrists and mingling the blood.

Grayle goes to make herself a mug of black coffee. She’ll eat later. Considers calling Marcus, who got her into this. At least she can be sure that anything she tells him will stay within the yellow walls of the bastard bungalow.

Maybe she’ll call him tonight. She unpacks her bag, dumps the CD and the envelope on the Shaker-style coffee table. Would Shakers drink coffee? Would the caffeine make them shake more?

She giggles insanely, stares at the envelope, picks it up with, for the first time, a small itch of curiosity. Thought about playing the CD in the car, but Defford told her the envelope contained notes on what she’d be hearing. She tears it open: photocopies.

Copy of an email? No, it’s not, it just looks like one. People like Leo Defford have forgotten how to write an old-fashioned letter. Email, however, is not to be trusted with advance programme information. According to Defford, the original – like all communications connected with
Big Other
– was dispatched to the network by motorcycle courier, delivered hand to hand.

When she unfolds the list, for the first time, it feel like unrolling a Dead Sea scroll.

An incomplete scroll: there are only three names.

Along the bottom, Defford’s scrawled,

All in good time, Grayle. Play the CD.

The next page, typed, reads:

She slips the CD into the player. Sebold? Never heard this guy on the radio, although she’s fairly sure she’s heard of him, in some other context. The voice from the bookshelf speakers has almost the same accent as Defford: Bloke. But it sounds younger and sometimes there’s a lazy drawl – more DJ than news presenter – and sometimes he shouts.

‘OK. Kids are in bed now, full of sweets and chocolate and various other ill-gotten gains of all that trick-or-treating. Of course, the commercial side of Hallowe’en didn’t really exist in the UK till America told us what we were missing. Well, THANK YOU, AMERICA!’

[
Sound of mild studio merriment.
]

‘So let’s talk about what Hallowe’en means to adults. Give us a call, tell us what you think – is the night of ghosts and witches the most fatuous of festivals, something we could well do without, or does it have something to tell us about the way society’s moving? With me now, through midnight, looking not terribly scared, is the comedian Ozzy Ahmed. Ozzy… GREETINGS!’

Grayle’s seen Ahmed on one of those stand-up comedy TV shows. He’s dry, droll and satirical rather than laugh-out-loud funny, and his ancestry means he can get away with careful jokes about Islam. The HGTV note reads:

‘… didn’t make any of this up, that’s the thing, Rhys. She was a Genuine Alexandrian Wiccan High Priestess – no, I don’t know what it means either, but they lived in an old farmhouse on the moors – this is my mother-in-law and her Magical Partner, this old guy with a pointy beard – and there was this… pentagram on the front door, and a broomstick on the wall – all witches are very modest and discreet, as you—’

‘Ozzy, did you KNOW she was a Wiccan High Priestess when you started going out with her daughter?’

‘Restrain yourself, Rhys, I was just gonna explain about that. My first encounter with the occult was when I was twenty years old. I had this old van. And a new girlfriend, Sophie, now my ex-wife. And I pick her up one night. We’re going to a pub, up in the southern Pennines – karaoke night at this country pub, about
seven miles away from my girlfriend’s house. And then – sod’s law – the van breaks down, about a mile from the farmhouse, six miles from the pub. Course I wasn’t in the AA, couldn’t afford it back then. And it’s a terrible night, throwing it down. So we have to walk back, through the rain, and she’s saying, in this funny little voice, “Oh, I don’t think this is a good thing to do, Oz. Not tonight.” I’m like What?’

‘You didn’t have a mattress in the van?’

‘Not since the roof started to leak. So, anyway, when we get back to the house, there’s all these cars in the yard, like there’s a party on. But we have to go quietly in the back way, creep into the kitchen, and you could hear it right away. Eko, eko, azarak – I never forget that. Eko, eko azarak.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

And was this in the house, Ozzy?’

‘It was coming from inside the flamin’ sitting room! Oh, spirits of the west, come down. Eko, eko, azarak!’

Grayle smiles. You can hear Rhys Sebold laughing in the background.

‘And here we are in the kitchen, Rhys, trying to keep a straight face – well, me, anyway. I’m going, I have got to see this. And Sophie’s like, Shut up. Don’t even move till it’s over – they’re serious about it. But, hey, come on, I’ve just got to. You know what it’s like. My mates’d kill me.’

‘You were planning to tell your mates?’

‘Rhys, I was gonna tell the entire pub!’

Between little snorty giggles, Ozzy Ahmed describes how he went outside and found a step ladder in a shed and erected it outside a small round window high up in the sitting room wall. The one they couldn’t curtain. Slowly he climbed up through the heavy rain.

Ahmed pauses. He’s a comedian. It’s all about timing.

‘Rhys… you ever see something and immediately wish you hadn’t?
’

He does the build-up in a spooky voice. It’s as if there’s been a power cut. Candles all round the room. The chairs pushed back against the walls with black cloths over them. And…

‘Rhys, I swear this has lived with me ever since. They’re all… totally starkers… all these old people!’

Pause. Grayle swallows some coffee as Rhys Sebold comes back.

‘Is there any particular reason, Ozzy, why old people shouldn’t be naked?’

Never forget your political correctness at the BBC.

‘Aw, Rhys! Not in a public place, man! All right, this wasn’t a public place, but it was public enough for me, and maybe they weren’t all old, but it—’

‘All right, look, Ozzy, let’s be serious for a moment. Wiccans, witches, whatever… what was all this about, what were they trying to do? Was it about healing – what? Did you ever talk seriously about any of this with the woman who became your mother-in-law?’

‘No! Course I didn’t. Do I look crazy? She’d’ve thought I wanted to join. I’d be getting me own presentation athame set for Christmas.’

‘Your what?’

‘It’s a ceremonial dagger. Rhys, you’re not well up on this esoteric stuff at all, are you?’

‘No. And that’s something I want to pursue. It could be argued that for over two thousand years a sizeable proportion of the population has been in thrall to what learned scientists like Professor Richard Dawkins are telling us is pointless superstition. But now church congregations are on the slide, Christmas is ninety per cent secular. And yet Hallowe’en, this spooky, supernatural festival, is kept going by commercial interests and people like your ex-mother-in-law who believe in spells and spirits. Yes?’

‘Well, yeah, you’re right. What can I say?’

‘OK. Latest surveys say that, whatever they think of God, over thirty per cent of people still believe in ghosts. Why’s that?’

Grayle’s like, What? What the hell are you asking this guy for, he’s a goddamn comedian?

‘Because they’re fun, Rhys. To some people. OK, it’s all imagination – there are no ghosts, and witches are just people who – quite legitimately, before you accuse me of anything – like getting their kit off in the woods or, if it’s raining, somebody’s front room. But that’s all it is. They’re not healing anybody, they’re not summoning spirits, because there aren’t any spirits. It’s all bollocks and it’s always been bollocks – sorry, am I allowed to say bollocks after the watershed?’

‘No, but carry on…’

‘My ex-mother-in-law hates me now. Everybody knows that. I was lucky to get away without an athame sticking out of my chest. You probably remember when the tabloids went knocking on her door and asked her if she was gonna put a curse on me, and she never denied it. But, hey, I’m still here. I think.’

‘You are indeed, and don’t go away, because—’

‘Unless having to do your show is part of the curse.’

‘Don’t go away, Ozzy Ahmed, because I want to bring in someone who’s convinced she’s actually seen a ghost – that is THE SPIRIT OF A DEAD PERSON. And not just any old dead person. This is – allegedly – the ghost of an actual witch. Let’s talk to the singer, actress and sometimes TV presenter… Eloise. Eloise… greetings…’

Hell… Eloise? Grayle knows this woman. Not well, but well-enough to guess how the radio discussion is going to develop.
She’s recalling how, a week before they finally folded
The Vision
, she opened a long letter from a woman signing herself Louise Starke. Ironically, it told the kind of story for which the magazine had come into existence.

Over the coming weeks, this story would make national papers and TV, and this woman was offering it to them first because, she said,
I trust you
. Which was kind of touching. Grayle had wanted Marcus to produce a swansong edition just to use the story, but it was too late. The printers had been paid off,
The Vision
was dead.

Hunched on the rim of the sofa as the sunset fades into evening, she listens to the sorry climax of the Hallowe’en late-night special. When it’s over, she plays it all again, reading the final notes. After pouring a risky second mug of black coffee, she brings out her laptop, does some Googling on Rhys Sebold, confirming her fears.

What are Defford’s people doing? This is tossing live chickens into the wolf enclosure. The coffee’s making her senses feel frayed and raw as she drags the phone over and calls Marcus.

15

Burned

‘
OF COURSE I
remember,’ he says. ‘But what could we do? And what difference would we have made anyway? A failed crank-journal with a circulation on the floor. By then, we were as big a joke as she was about to become.’

He’s probably right, but it doesn’t make Grayle feel any better. She still has a DVD collection of the first series of
The House Wizard
. It involved a lot of feng-shui and candle-burning to cleanse disturbed rooms, but it was well-intentioned and no more crazy than Holy Grayle on a bad week.