Night After Night (30 page)

‘So you see the problem. Assuming Cindy would have his phone back after our chapel session until he went in again, I was about to leave a message to have him call me… and then it hit me that the next time Kate Lyons went through his calls she’d spot my damn number. Then Defford would know we were talking behind his back. Which now would be even worse.’

Marcus grunts, like conclusively.

‘You’re stuffed, Underhill. No point at all in arguing with a megalomaniac. Do what he says. Then grab the money with one hand while lacing up the bastard running shoes with the other.’

‘That’s it? That’s the summit of your advice? Grab the loot, don’t look back?’

‘’What d’you want me to say? Knew from the start what you were getting into. Spent two years working with cynical hacks, had your hair symbolically butchered. No, look, essentially, Underhill, your work there is done. Why prejudice your bonus?’

Yeah, right, why? What can she do here? Who can she help?

Only the dead.

She stares out over the Hunter-Gatherer village to an empty field, the wind dragging dense grey rain across it like a tarpaulin, along with the voice of Mary Ann Rutter.

If she thought me mad, what would that matter? She’d remember what I’d said. She might have acted on it
.

Too late now, Mary Ann, Trinity’s dead. Also Harry. The small wood on the other side of the grey field is where they found him hanging, the tautened rope disappearing into a mesh of dark branches and the dusk.

It
should
be known, you see. These matters should not be hidden for ever. Or if the stories are passed on as gossip they’ll
lose whatever truth they possessed and become legends. But if it all comes out in your programme…

Which it won’t, not now. The programme will be a travesty, a fabrication. And, sure, you can see why it probably has to be. And yet…

… keeping secrets about it helps no one, except those responsible for the wickedness. And having the
responsibility
of a secret… that is not a good position to be in
.

No. It sure as hell isn’t. Grayle watches wet trees and sees Mrs Rutter flapping amongst the remnants of her research, absurdly delighted that an old responsibility has been lifted from her old shoulders by a younger woman who isn’t subject to local pressure and might run with it.

‘Only you wouldn’t do that, Marcus, would you?’

‘Do what?’

‘Take the money and run. That’s not what you’re about.’

‘All I was thinking…’

He dries up. She’s guessing that what he was thinking was, do I want to be responsible for Underhill winding up on Prozac again?

Which, let’s not forget, she took just once.
Once
, OK?

She says, ‘What if all Trinity Ansell and Katherine Parr had in common was that they were both victims of this house and something in it?’

‘In which case, whatever it is can’t be this Abel Fishe, can it? When Parr died, he was still two centuries in the future.’

She sighs.

‘That mean Fishe was a victim of it, too?’

‘Let’s not go that far. Man doesn’t sound like a victim to me.’

Grayle pulls down her woolly hat over the phone at her ear.

‘A ouija board. A freaking
ouija board
. Trinity and her little friend Lisa, and maybe the third finger on the glass is Jeff Pruford’s. Both of them saying more on camera, prepared to tell millions of viewers more than they felt able to confide to me. Maybe because I’m like
foreign
?’

Marcus is silent for a while. Rain pools around crispy leaves at Grayle’s feet.

‘However,’ Marcus says at last, ‘there’s nothing to stop someone else – someone not in the house, not on the Defford payroll making a few tentative inquiries. Is there?’

‘Oh.’

Thing about Marcus, the word
tentative
doesn’t exist in his dictionary.

‘On the basis,’ he says, ‘that this outsider can make use of anything he might find… in defence of mystery.’

‘In his book?’

‘Planning a chapter showing how people, non-believers usually, have always manipulated the paranormal for their own purposes, confident there isn’t going to be a comeback. Spirits can walk but they can’t sue. HGTV can do what they want with dead Ansell and dead Parr. Move them easier than puppets. These TV programmes, there has to be a conclusion, otherwise it’s a pointless exercise. Especially if it’s lasted a whole week.’

‘An ambience of mystery… maybe that doesn’t translate to TV.’

‘Can’t.’

‘I’m trying to tell myself it wasn’t gonna be like that. Could be Harry Ansell’s death changed everything. Ansell had a reason for inviting Defford to use his house, and it surely wasn’t only because he couldn’t find anybody to buy it. And now Defford’s never gonna know what that was, and that makes him feel insecure.’

‘Anyway,’ Marcus says, ‘there are things I can look into. You’ll take your money, they’ll take theirs. And I can blast the bastards out of the water from a safe distance.’

‘Worthwhile publisher might like that.’

‘Never once occurred to me, Underhill.’

‘Of course it didn’t.’

A rising wind heaves at the ash tree’s branches.

‘I do get the feeling, Underhill,’ Marcus says, ‘that there’s something you haven’t told me.’

The damp field looks like dead, grey skin.

‘I guess,’ Grayle says. ‘OK, here we go…’

37

The eighth person

SIX HOURS TO
recording, early dark outside. No more than a dozen people under low lights in Leo Defford’s executive office. Key people. The producers, directors, senior Jamies, senior Emilys sitting around a plan of the house surrounded by photographs, all pinned to display boards, replacing the pictures of competing NHS chefs.

Defford’s final briefing. Pep-talk time. Grayle’s been permitted to sit at the back with the more lowly members of the team. Defford’s on a high stool, a clipboard of handwritten notes on his knees, rectangular reading glasses on his nose.

‘OK. Now I’ve said most of this before at various times, as you know, but I’m saying it again so nobody forgets what this is about. The viewers think they’ve seen everything. They think we’ve seen every conceivable permutation of the haunted house scenario. If they still think that after the first hour they’ll switch off in their hundreds of thousands.’

Actually, he’s told Grayle he reckons they have a full two hours to hook the Saturday night viewers. What will grab them initially is the first interaction of the residents. Virtually everybody will recognize Austin Ahmed, Helen Parrish and Cindy Mars-Lewis. The others they’ll’ve heard of. And their individual introductions in the chapel will signal the discord to come.

Defford leans back on his stool, tosses away his notes, the way smart-ass political leaders do at party conferences to show how personally confident they are of the way ahead.

‘Intelligent viewers think they no longer fear the supernatural. They’re continually assured by smooth scientists and
serious newspapers that it’s all primitive myth. It’s a secular society now, and there’s no going back from that. No God, no ghosts – not if you want to work for the BBC.’

Nobody laughs.

‘Which I don’t, any more,’ Defford says. ‘Been there, done that. But I accept that some of you might, so please be sceptical. See, I don’t care how many of you claim to believe in ghosts or how many think it’s all balls. I don’t
want
to know. I don’t want to hear opinions expressed or arguments for or against until we’re out of here at the end of next week. That’s not your business. Your business is to produce hour after hour of unmissable television.’

A few of them start to applaud, but Defford stops them with a raised hand.

‘Now what do I mean by that? There’s so-called reality television that everybody knows
isn’t
. We all know these people are playing their parts in a pre-structured scenario. Some of our seven residents will also be under this impression. Some of them will think they’re only doing this to rescue their careers, show the world what great entertainers they are. I don’t intend to tell them otherwise, but I do want to see the situation gradually beating it out of them. Do you know what I’m saying? At no point do I want any of these fuckers to think they can upstage
the house
.’

Jo Shepherd raises a hand as she’s maybe been programmed to do.

‘Are you saying here that the house is… the eighth character?’

‘The house is the
primary
character. When people at home switch off at the end and go to bed, it’s the house I want to invade their dreams. The candlelight, the old glass between the mullions, the embers in the hearth.’

Defford stands up, goes over to the plan of the house. Most of it’s shaded to highlight the important bits, the oldest part of Knap Hall which consists of the main ground floor chamber
with the dining hall on the other side of the inglenook and the Gothic doorway where two women, only one of them alive, were allegedly imaged by the visitor from the American Midwest.

‘The main door out of the chamber leads to the half-spiral stone stairway… here. Continues past a locked door accessing the more modern parts of the building where we don’t need anyone to go. On the other side are toilets which we’ve divided into male and female. The passage continues to a rear door, accessing the walled garden and the chapel. This will be electrically controlled by us, as will the door of the chapel.’

One of the Jamies asks if this means the residents won’t be able to go out for air or a cigarette. Only in the daytime, Defford tells him. He doesn’t want anybody attempting to scale the wall at night to try and find out where the house is. If they want to stick their heads out of their bedroom windows for a smoke that’s entirely up to them. If they’re lucky enough to get a window.

‘All right, upstairs. Seven single bedrooms, two created out of the former owners’ own apartment, five more off the passage across the landing, the door at the end of which is double locked, sealing off the rest of the house. All windows with views extending beyond the grounds have been boarded.’

‘So what we have is – essentially – a time capsule,’ Jo says. ‘The oldest part of the house, Tudor or even late medieval. The place of ghosts. Which some of the residents might well feel they’re aware of. They’ll be asked to share any impressions.’

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Defford says, ‘I don’t want people
seeing
things all the time. Don’t want any of this cable-TV shit where everybody jumps at an airlock in the pipes and then, “Oh look, it’s a fucking
orb
.”’

Laughter.

‘What I’m saying… when – if – somebody sees or hears or feels something, I want it to be an
occasion
. I want everybody either frozen to their chairs, or astonished or furious at the stupidity of the others. The expression I don’t want to see on anyone’s face is beatific calm.’

Grayle’s been told that the live sections aren’t aired in real time. There’s a short delay in case anyone says or does something unsuitable even for Channel 4 after midnight. And there are specific
Big Other
no-nos. Defford tells them how close they can go to the old
BB
format and what they should avoid.

‘I
don’t
want burps and farts on the track and shots of guys scratching their balls. Though a glimpse of flesh is OK if it appears to be in response to something. We don’t expect to see any ghosts, but we don’t rule out anything. What we
know
we’re going to get are the responses of people who think they
have
experienced something, and the reactions of people who think this is insanity.’

This audience – even Grayle, now – is techno-savvy, so he doesn’t need to explain about pictures being fed simultaneously into as many as twenty channels as the Seven start to socialize and small alliances form. Everyone wears a personal mic. All conversations get recorded. Different directors will be assigned to follow emerging storylines or developing relationships, with editors constantly at work on the rushes, selecting the best moments for the following night’s programme. Jo and then Defford will make final decisions on what’s used. Everything, however, will be saved in case something that appears innocuous at the time proves to be significant in light of what happens later.

One of the Emilys raises a hand.

‘Leo, what are we actually telling them about the house?’

‘To begin with, as little as possible. They’ll learn it’s an old house – at least as old as it looks – with a history of unhappy events and psychic phenomena. On the history, the viewers will be one step ahead – they’ll see some of our pre-recorded images, suggestive of period, but never identity. At the end of each night – in the live part of the programme – the residents will be asked to review their impressions. Anyone who seems to be close to the truth will be called into the chapel for in-depth questioning by Grayle.’

‘What if nobody gets close?’ Emily asks.

‘Someone will always get close to something, even if it’s only guesswork. The fact that they’ve been called in will indicate they’re on the right track. However, yes, it’s possible we might lose momentum. I’m not going to worry too much about that at this stage. These people are doing it because they want to be noticed. Things
will
happen. But we’ll meet here every day to hear your views on how it’s going and discuss any ideas on how we might expand the picture and tighten the screws. We want them to be challenged in all kinds of ways.’

It’s becoming clear to Grayle that Defford has contingency plans she hasn’t been told about. He obviously isn’t going to mention the possible use of Cindy as an engine of change. The unethical side.

‘What about the evictions?’ a bearded Jamie asks. ‘How often?’

‘One every night. Possibly two,’ Defford tells him.

The technical part of this, the counting of phoned-in votes, is being handled from London. When a resident gets dumped, he or she is straight back up the tunnel and into the pop-up. They won’t be prisoners, they can walk around the grounds, but they can’t go the other side of the gates. Perhaps short interviews will be recorded with each of them as they emerge, and then longer ones the following day with a view to finding out if and how their opinions have changed.