Worthless Remains (12 page)

Emms tried to guide her cameraman backwards to safety while he kept filming but herself stumbled over a defeated Briton trying to crawl off the battlefield. Both ended up on the ground. A flagon of cider was thrown and bounced off a Roman helmet. Cy was vainly shouting at everyone to stop, just
stop
.

Stoneking was on his feet. ‘It's turned into Asterix in Britain!'

‘They definitely stopped acting,' Guy said. ‘What's the old lady up to?'

‘She'll tell you in a moment,' said Carla, ‘I've no doubt.'

Another two minutes and it was all over. The Romans withdrew from the battlefield, carrying one of their number but leaving much gear of war behind. The Britons appeared victorious, though none of them looked exactly unscathed. Several were limping and one of them was crawling on all fours. Morgan called to him: ‘Can't you walk, Terry?'

The crawler didn't look up. ‘I've lost a bloody contact lens!'

At the excavation trenches all pretence of work had stopped the moment the fight started and now cricket applause drifted across the lawns. Cy stared furiously at the old lady who had walked straight through his scene. For a moment he looked as though he thought of confronting her, then chose a simpler target. He stomped after the Britons who had obviously started the brawl. Paul was examining his camera for damage and Emms sat on the grass crying with laughter.

The old lady reached the terrace without further incident. I got up from my deckchair and so did Guy, out of politeness as much as in recognition that the woman was furious and knew how to use a stick to make her point. Stoneking, who had been standing, sat down. ‘Can't you see you ruined the take, woman? Did you have to totter straight through there? What do you want?'

Olive Cunningham was a tall woman but I doubted she had ever been beautiful. Noticeable, impressive, perhaps she had been called ‘attractive' in her day. When exactly that day had been was hard to tell. I guessed she was at least eighty but her voice was as firm as her stick-swinging arm. ‘I am perfectly in my right to walk where I want,
Mr
Stoneking. But I am not at all sure you have the right to turn Tarmford Hall into an amusement park. I appeal – I was going to say to your better nature but you do not appear to have one – I appeal to you to send these people home and stop this, this . . .' Her no doubt well-prepared speech faltered under the pressure of real emotion. ‘They are desecrating the place. Those dearest to me are
buried
in these grounds and the dead deserve respect. And peace. And what do they get? People digging holes everywhere, a campsite, drunken brawls. If Sam was here it would break his heart. He may be a villain but he understands the Hall. Tarmford Hall is more than just a pile of stones, Mr Stoneking. It is a living thing and you have been torturing it from the moment you took possession of it.'

Stoneking made an impatient gesture. ‘Look, we have had this talk, Mrs Cunningham, and there is no point going over it again. It'll all be over in a week and peace, as you choose to call it, will return to the place, all right? In the meantime go away, turn on the radio and do some knitting. Come out again next Sunday – you won't even know they've been here.'

Carla's hand reached towards Stoneking's shoulder but she withdrew it when he stopped talking. There was a heartbeat's pause before the old lady said: ‘Oh, I'll know they've been here. We'll all know it. And we won't forget it.' She straightened up and walked off towards the house.

‘I'd best get back to the kitchen and organize tonight's VIP dinner,' said Carla. She quickly followed the old lady inside.

Stoneking impatiently crossed his legs and brushed imaginary fluff from his jeans. ‘Stupid old bat.'

‘Not too keen on us then, the old lady,' Guy said.

‘You can say that again. She's been on at me about it ever since I made the mistake of mentioning this thing to her. She even threatened me with lawyers. All piffle of course. Living in the granny flat doesn't give her any rights. She has the right to totter about the grounds and through the house if she has to, but that's about it. She can be a real nuisance. She always pops up where you least expect her. If you want to keep her out of a place you'll have to padlock it.'

‘She must be quite old, though,' Guy mused.

‘She should be seventy-nine or eighty now.'

‘You don't exchange birthday cards then?' I asked.

‘No, and I'm beginning to suspect she lied to me about her age. I mean who can tell with old people? She could be seventy-five. And live till she's ninety-five. Hell, twenty years with her ghosting about! I don't think I have twenty years left in me. In fact I'm sure I haven't. My God, she could outlive me, what a thought!'

A rumble of thunder reverberated through the grounds, reflected back at us by the bulk of the house. The hall loomed behind us now against a sky the colour of wet slate. A certainty of heavy rain was in the air and everyone hurried in preparation for it. The archaeologists covered the enlarged trench with a movable khaki tent they had prepared for this moment, and everyone not involved in that made their way towards the house or the campsite in the woods, depending on their status. Delia shuttered the catering van. The Romans had already withdrawn into their camp but the Britons were still struggling to pitch their simple tents at the edge of the lawns, as far from the Romans as possible. The TV crew packed up and Cy came over, carrying laptop, scripts and a fistful of cables. ‘That was a total disaster; I doubt we can use any of it. We'll have to re-shoot the thing. That bunch of pissheads were completely out of order.'

‘You hired them,' Guy said quietly.

Cy ignored him and turned to Stoneking. ‘And that old woman ruined what was left of the shots. Who is she? Sorry, she's not your mother, is she?'

‘The madwoman in the attic,' Guy offered.

Stoneking launched into an impatient explanation as the first drops fell. We got out of our armchairs a little too nonchalantly because a few seconds later the heavens opened with a crack of thunder and by the time we had sprinted across the verandah and through the French windows our clothes were soaked. Raindrops hammered on to the terrace and bounced up again eight inches into the air. The storm was getting nearer, lightning and thunder following each other ever more closely.

‘Reminds me of the monsoon in Sri Lanka,' Stoneking said.

Emms was the last of the privileged few to make it to the house. ‘I'm soaked to the skin,' she said. ‘I'll have to go and change.' She splished across the carpets, her red hair clinging close around her head.

‘I hope those Roman tents are waterproof,' Cy said.

‘I hope they'll get a mudslide,' was Guy's contribution.

I stood by the window and watched the rain. I liked watching heavy rain. I liked listening to it thrumming the ground and washing the windows, as long as I was dry and cosy inside. But not everyone, I saw, minded being out in the rain. At the furthest edge of the lawn, barely visible through the curtain of raindrops, a hooded figure walked quickly in the direction of the hedge that screened the greenhouse, then disappeared from view among the trees.

‘I
've no idea what half of them are. I'm not a great reader, I'd be the first to admit.' Mark Stoneking gestured at the floor-to-ceiling shelves full of books of all sizes. Many of them were leather bound and the whole collection looked as though it had been amassed over the last 150 years. There were gaps on several shelves, some of them quite large.

Guy ran a dust-testing finger through one of the gaps. ‘Have you been flogging off the valuable ones?'

Stoneking frowned. ‘Things aren't quite that desperate yet, Guy. The books belonged to the Cunninghams and came with the house, just like most of the furniture, the gloomy paintings and all the junk. If you see something weird, or utterly useless, then it came with the house. In fact, if it's older than 1960, then it came with the house. But Olive took all the books she wanted first, as we had agreed. Actually I think she still comes in here and takes books – not that I care; I've not seen a single one I'd want to read.'

Tea was being served to us VIPs in the library while the rain drummed against the windows and the thunder rumbled on. I had the decency to spare a thought for the poor of the parish who were sheltering under canvas, though not a long one. Such is the anaesthetizing effect of luxury on the conscience. It was dark enough for the lights to be turned on in the large but gloomy room. The library was comfortably furnished, with several armchairs and side tables. The place looked like it had been kitted out by the props department of a 1950s B-movie company, with a selection of Indian religious statuary, faded photographs of the Raj and glass cases full of dried scorpions, skewered butterflies, giant bugs and birds' eggs. There was a stuffed baby alligator on the mantelpiece, a muzzle-loading rifle on the wall above it and beside the fireplace several swords in an elephant's foot. The books on the walls were mainly nineteenth-century tomes on obscure subjects with titles like
The History of Magic
,
Islands of the Occult
and
On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers
.

‘A place like this house should really have a ghost,' Andrea said, examining the specimen on show with a fascinated disgust.

‘Oh, but it has,' said Carla, who was serving tea and coffee. ‘And it's right over there in that glass case.' She nodded at a mahogany display case between the windows.

‘What ever can you mean?' said Emms, pulling a sceptical face, but both women rose to inspect the case, and so did I.

‘I don't see any ghost,' Andrea said.

Carla joined us at the case. ‘It was before the First World War. A ghost started appearing in people's bedrooms at night and haunting the corridors. Usually accompanied by an eerie green glow. It was the ghost of a young woman. Eventually the Cunningham family brought in a priest to exorcize the spirit. The exorcist captured the ghost and imprisoned it in that little glass phial there.'

‘Tosh and nonsense,' Emms said.

‘Quite hard on the poor ghost,' I added.

‘That depends,' said Andrea. ‘What's the liquid in the bottle?'

‘It's holy water,' Carla said.

‘Let me see that.' Guy pushed between the women and stared down at the little glass phial which was stoppered and heavily sealed with red sealing wax. It was resting on a prayer book in the centre of the collection of other curios like ivory-handled knives, pocket watches, dried beetles and small animal skulls.

‘Don't tell me, Guy,' said Andrea. ‘You're scared of ghosts as well.'

Guy's nose twitched. He turned to Carla. ‘It's just a bit of nonsense, right?'

Carla shrugged. ‘One person's nonsense is another person's family legend,' she said, throwing a look across the room where Stoneking was sitting unmoved. Then she went back to serving afternoon tea.

Guy's face looked ashen in the grey light that struggled through the windows as he returned to his chair. Cy, Paul the cameraman and the bald-headed soundman, whose name I still didn't know, were talking shop again with serious faces while Andrea the head archaeologist and Emms the director started playing ‘thunderstorms I have seen'. I was sitting near the fireplace with Stoneking while Guy sat apart from all of us in a narrow armchair by the window, looking peeved. All of us, whether peeved, talking shop or swapping Tuscan thunderstorm stories, found time to stuff ourselves with strawberry tart or sticky chocolate cake or, as in my case, both.

Despite the talking and cake munching I detected an odd tension in the room, as though we were all half listening out to something other than our conversations. The sky darkened even further and then all at once we stopped talking, as though by a pre-arranged signal. Everyone looked up. It went very quiet in the room, the only sound the swishing of the rain. The hairs on my arm were rising up as though pulled by a magnet and beside me Mark raised a hairy hand to show me the same phenomenon. The lights winked out, thunder crashed, the windows rattled and the ground seemed to shake. Guy let out a short scream and knocked over his coffee cup. A few seconds later we could hear another, more earthly crash outside.

Stoneking had jumped up. ‘That was a lightning strike. It must have struck the house. I'll go and check if there's any damage.'

‘Sounded like there was,' I said and made to follow him, but Guy was by my side and grabbed my arm to hold me back. With the lights gone, the shadows of dusk had risen in the room even though it was not yet five in the afternoon. But there was enough light to see he was frightened. ‘Come with us,' I told him.

He did. Armed with umbrellas from a stand in the hall we left by the front door. We followed Stoneking, who marched around the building, stopping from time to time to peer up into the rain and thunder, looking for damage in the roof. On the north side, just beyond the swimming pool extension, we found it in the original roof. On the ground lay some crumbled sandstone masonry and a raft of ceramic roof tiles, all broken. Stoneking cursed fluently and inventively as he kicked at the debris. He pointed up into the gloom. ‘It hit one of the lightning conductors near those chimneys and knocked a few thousand quid's worth of tiles off the roof.'

‘But at least we're not on fire,' I offered.

He gave me a disgusted look. ‘Glass half bloody full, is it?'

The lights came back on, both inside the house and in the loft of the coach house where the incident room was. ‘Lights are back,' Guy said with relief. ‘I'm going back inside; I'm getting soaked even under my brollie.'

‘Don't blame you,' said Stoneking. Wind gusted around us, making all of us fight with our umbrellas. Stoneking closed his and swore some more. ‘Bloody useless things.'