Night After Night (15 page)

And who will include the comedian Austin ‘Ozzy’ Ahmed… and the radio presenter Rhys Sebold.

Car-crash television, or what?

Half an hour later or thereabouts, she’s hunched up on the sofa, rocking with caffeine.

Radical differences of opinion are and always will be at the very heart of unmissable TV.

Get used to it or get out.

She checks the cream envelope in case she’s missed a page listing the other residents, but there’s only another memo.

The ghost of…?

As in the late Princess of…?

Grayle starts to laugh. Oh, Leo, you really know how to set out a stall, don’t you?

In anticipation of whatever Marcus has for her, she goes back to the laptop and into the folder marked
trinity
. Already a working profile of the tragic beauty – a gangling, knock-kneed, coltish twelve-year-old when her father’s stationery firm switched to a new factory in Surrey and it all started.

Trinity’s mother, who apparently had never felt she should have to be northern, couldn’t get the hell out of Warrington fast enough. Grayle has never been to Warrington and doesn’t know too much about Surrey either, but she gets the idea: the Ansells, a sales manager married to a hairstylist, were seriously into upward-mobility. Which, at first, would’ve been a good deal easier for them than for Trinity who, according to the national paper obits, was not a wildly attractive pre-teen. Her northern accent was widely and cruelly imitated by the kids at her new school in Guildford.

An unhappy time. In a TV interview – Grayle found it on YouTube – a gorgeous early-thirties Trinity, enviably relaxed, tells Piers Morgan of her efforts to master southern vowels and how funny the other kids found it when she got them all mixed up. The rich-kid Piers nods sympathetically, though, Grayle figures, if he’d been been at that school he could easily have been one of her tormentors.

Watching the DVD of that interview – she’s seen it twice – puts her, as an American in the UK, very much in Trinity’s corner. Archetypal ugly duckling. By the time she’s eighteen and reading English History at the University of Reading, the knees no longer knock, and when she drops out of college for a modelling career which turns into a movie career, she’s become the swanniest swan in swanland.

She answers Piers’s questions in a low, breathy voice in which every word is enunciated the way the Queen does on
Christmas Day. Periodically tweaking a strand of dark hair from her long, lovely face, she talks about her yearning for England the way it used to be, her sense of being born in the wrong era. Her growing disdain for the crass modern world of soundbites and social networking. The superficiality of it all. She tells Piers she dreams of living in a world where there’s no Internet, no computer games, not even any phones ringing. Where people still listen to the silence and hear the voices from the past. She never quite explains that.

Grayle’s also found some clips from
The King’s Evening
and notes that Trinity had different coloured hair and a wider, more sensual mouth than KP.

Or even Princess Diana, whom Lisa Muir compared with Trinity. Must be a whole bunch of people who’ve claimed over the years to have seen Diana’s ghost.

If it’s Eloise again, she’ll be toast in the house.

PART THREE

Getting dark

Late September

17

Woohoo Hall

IT
’
S MID
-
MORNING
and Grayle’s in one of the porta-suites, watching, on her laptop, a recording of Ozzy Ahmed talking to the psychiatrist.

Each of the subjects has to be interviewed by a shrink – one of the old
Big Brother
rules, and you can see the point of it. Not everyone is capable of confinement. A psychiatric condition can have devastating consequences in an intense, claustrophobic situation where you’re under permanent scrutiny. So here’s the shrink trying to find out what experience Ozzy’s had of being in a limited space with others.

‘What kind of secondary school did you attend?’

‘After I was expelled from Eton?’

The psychiatrist, a young, flop-haired guy, puts his head on one side, looking too wry for his years. Ozzy looks sleepy-eyed. His dark hair is longer than the last time Grayle saw him on TV. He’s wearing a purple onesie that says JESUS LOVES YOU across the chest. Yeah, very funny.

‘You never forget those harrowing, long nights in the dorm.’
Ozzy says.
‘All the competition for a bed with a wall on one side so you only had to fight off one big boy at once.’

He’s shaking his head, long-faced, a familiar, slack-eyed expression from his TV gigs. The psychiatrist nods minimally. They’re in a grey-walled room at HGTV’s London offices in Clerkenwell. Ozzy stretches in his leather chair. He’s becoming bored.

‘Thing is, you know which school I was at, cock. It’s on Wikipedia. It was just a posh comp from the days before they called
them academies. My day, you couldn’t pretend you was any more than a thick yob.’

Grayle notices he’s put on more of a working class accent for this interview. Both she and the psychiatrist know his old man’s an ophthalmologist and he grew up in Wilmslow or some other upmarket enclave in leafy Cheshire.

She’s even met his mother-in-law, who still lives in that moorland farmhouse between Manchester and Sheffield and is a nice, pinked-cheeked woman, all too ready to talk, and not in a vindictive way, about the guy who held her up to ridicule for so long. Grayle’s transcribed the recording.

That lazy image – very misleading, luv. Austin has a steely determination, and he’ll never give up on an idea. Sophie and him – never suited. An astrological disaster, and I always hoped neither of them would get hurt when it fell apart. Never imagined I’d be the casualty. [laughter]

‘As soon as it was obvious the marriage was failing, I could see it in his mind – what could he take away from it? Answer was me. I could see him studying me. And then he was reading books about Wicca and the like, devising a persona for me that would sound realistic as well as being very funny. I’m not that funny, really, though I can laugh at it as much as anybody, now. He’s a very clever lad, our Austin.

The shrink – his name is Max – finally asks Ozzy some straight questions, like has he ever experienced anything he can’t explain? Ozzy, predictably, says he thought he’d told Max he’d rather not talk about his mother-in-law.

Max asks Ozzy why he’s agreed to do the show. It’s clear he doesn’t need the work.

Ozzy says he likes to meet new people.

‘Do you generally get on with new people?’

‘
I get on with everybody, cock. Look at us now – it’s like we’ve been big mates since we were kids
.’ He leans forward, peering at the shrink through his contact lenses – Grayle knows all these minor personal details. ‘
You gonna be there the whole time, Max?
’

‘Probably. Does that bother you?’

‘If it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me.’

Max blinks. Ozzy points a finger, smiles.

‘You’ll be all right, cock. Just make sure your name’s far enough up the credits.’

‘Thank you. Ozzy, can I go back to the question you avoided? Mothers-in-law apart, has anything ever happened to you that made you wonder if there were, shall we say, more things in heaven and earth…?’

Ahmed leans back in his chair, ponders.

‘Once spent a night in a room everybody thought was haunted. Possibly because of the human remains in there.’

Silence, Max lowering his chin to his chest.

‘Human remains. I see. Please continue, Mr Ahmed.’

Ozzy shakes his head.

‘Can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because…’
Ozzy sits up.
‘I’ve been asked – as, I’m assuming, we all have – to tell a story, round the fire on the first night. A personal ghost story. Or a story which will illustrate why I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘And which is yours going to be?’

‘Not saying. Wouldn’t be any suspense then, would there?’

And clams up. It wouldn’t surprise Grayle to learn he’s been talking to some
Big Brother
producer, learning about the always-stay-one-step-ahead rule. Determined to make
Big Other
work for him and his career.

Grayle switches off. She’s watched four of these interviews with the shrink. The former Liberal Democrat MP, Roger Herridge, is the most defensive, even though there was no mention of florists (it’s a long story). The psychologist, Ashley Palk, is dismissive, quite spiky about it really, as if she, as a professional, should not be subjected to this kind of indignity. Palk is the most obvious sceptic, edits a magazine for sceptics. Eloise is quiet but not in the least guarded, wearing her spirit on her sleeve.

Next to face Max – maybe this afternoon – will be Colm Driscoll, the hip-hop artist from Dublin who came off heroin into born-again Christianity. Driscoll now works with a charity helping young addicts in Liverpool and has agreed to go into the House in return for a substantial donation to his cause.

Which leaves only Sebold and…

She thought for a long time that the Diana thing was going to be Eloise and is glad that it isn’t. As Grayle understands it, Parrish
originally agreed to do
Big Other
after an approach from an old friend who was working for Hunter-Gatherer Television as a director. Back in April, the old friend left HGTV for an unmissable offer from the States. Defford’s people have stayed in intermittent contact with Parrish, who keeps assuring them that she’s still up for this, but the fact remains that she’s not yet signed a contract. No problem, she keeps saying, she’ll get back to them.

Defford thinks she’s just after more money. Word is she’s effectively washed up and, as this might be her last big fee, she’s pushing it to the wire. There’s always money in reserve, but Defford’s holding his nerve for a little longer.

Grayle goes out into the soft September morning. Personally, she’d feel happier if Parrish was all tied up. No one knows the details of the Diana story, but if it’s remotely convincing, it would be a significant exclusive for
Big Other
. This is not some flimsy New Ager, this is an experienced reporter who covered wars before landing royalty. Potentially, a very solid brick in the wall against scepticism.

Outside, the fourth and biggest portacabin is being unloaded. Behind it, Knap Hall glowers from its hollow.

It’s that time, just before the trees start to change colour, when the English countryside seems at its heaviest under warm, leaden skies. The trees are vividly green after a freakishly hot, dreamlike summer that started late and isn’t going anywhere fast.

Metal gates have been installed a few yards inside the entrance, the posts hidden behind dark clumpy yews, centuries old. The long drive to the house is a major plus – the fact that it can’t be seen from any roads. All the same, a security firm has been on site for weeks, installing new gates and fencing. Patrolling at night, originally with guard dogs, but not now.

Apparently, the dogs got restless and made too much noise. Sometimes they howled. Do trained guard dogs habitually howl? Grayle thinks not. Well they just don’t, do they?

Nobody’s commented on it. The HGTV people seem… well, bizarrely, they seem not interested. It’s as if whatever is supposed to happen here should not be happening – is not contracted to happen – until the cameras are switched on at the end of next month. Hallowe’en, that is, the night it ends – TV is nothing if not predictable.