Night After Night (34 page)

‘It’s OK,’ Roger Herridge says. ‘He’s gone.’

They come back into the dining room, Rhys Sebold closing the oak door, letting the wooden latch fall like a little guillotine. He looks annoyed. Cindy hears Eloise’s indrawn breath, gives her a warning look: say nothing.

Ozzy rubs his hands.

‘I really like the idea of the funeral buggy.’

Roger Herridge turns to him with understandable suspicion.

‘No, I do,’ Ozzy says. ‘You reckon when we get evicted, we all go out on that? Laid out? One by one?’

Strangely, nobody laughs. Ozzy doesn’t give up.

‘Roger with a little bunch of flowers on his chest?’

‘Let it go, mate,’ Rhys says.

43

The rusty fender

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT
, Eloise is summoned to the chapel to talk to Grayle.

How they do this, a bell bongs and the voice of Matthew Barnes – he sounds like a monk – comes through the speaker in the tapestry. ‘
Eloise to the chapel, please
.’ It’s a recording. Barnes has done a summons for each of the residents, so he doesn’t have to be there the entire time. In fact, Grayle’s never seen him – or maybe she has and just doesn’t recognize him; he’s a radio face.

The green light comes on. Grayle pulls in a breath.

‘Good evening, Eloise.’

‘Is it?’

‘Not been a great one for you, huh?’

Eloise has pulled back her hair, applied a rubber band. Been into the bathroom, washed her face clean of make-up, though her eyes are still dark. She looks like a corrupted schoolgirl, still vulnerable in spite of everything she’s said yes to.

‘Look,’ she says, ‘I’m not mad, you know.’

‘We do know that.’

‘Old beliefs, they weren’t just invented. They came out of a time when people were sensitive to the moods and the vagaries of nature. When you had to fit in with the natural world, when people didn’t think they could trample over everything, and fracking and all this abuse.’

As suggested by Jo, Grayle gets Eloise to explain the folklore surrounding the elder tree, Judas Iscariot, all that stuff. It can be edited and fitted subtly around what happened at the inglenook.

‘We don’t yet know how that happened,’ Grayle tells her. ‘But we apologize for any offence. Eloise, what do you think of the other residents?’

‘They’re OK. I mean, they’re OK so far.’

‘Are there any of them you seem to connect with?’

‘Well, I knew Cindy before. He doesn’t change. He knows his stuff. Roger Herridge seems fairly well-meaning. Not as much of a conman as I’d expected. I’ve never met a politician who was honest. Maybe he’s realized what’s important. Helen Parrish… I don’t know. She seems OK, but I don’t really know where she’s coming from. I’m going to wait and hear what she has to say.’

‘Ashley?’

Eloise wrinkles her nose.

‘She’s just the token sceptic. Just comes out with psychological crap. I’ve heard it all before. Doesn’t impress me. Just hides a completely flat mind.’

‘Which leaves…’

‘Yeah, I know who it leaves. I’d forgotten about them. They’re just nonentities, those guys. You can tell why they’re mates, both just out for everything they can get. Atheism’s cool right now, OK, let’s have some of that.’

‘They’ve offended you in the past?’

‘I did Sebold’s radio show and Ahmed was on it, and they took the piss out of me, non-stop. I didn’t expect intelligent. Sad bastards on late-night trash radio. They’ll go through the next week determined to see nothing and sneer at any of us who do. Well, fuck
them
.’

‘Do you have any feelings about the house itself, Eloise?’

‘It’s not a warm place in any sense. I don’t feel it welcomes us, or what you’re doing here. But then I’m not sure any house would. Which sounds a bit hypocritical after agreeing to take part. I can probably give you a better opinion after spending the night here.’

*

The night.

This isn’t like
Big Brother
, where they sleep in dormitories, all together. This isn’t about turning them back into kids. Each has a separate room, with an en suite bathroom and a bell to awaken them for breakfast. Cameras will watch over them as they sleep, but there are none in the bathrooms. This is not about voyeurism.

At least not in
that
sense.

Most of them go up before one a.m. to rooms with boarded windows, a wardrobe each, a mirror and a bedside table with a lamp. The single beds are plain, with headboards of antique pine; nobody gets a four-poster.

The residents emerge from their bathrooms mostly in robes or dressing gowns. On one monitor Eloise is switching out the lamp before sliding into bed. On another Ozzy Ahmed is not scribbling in a notebook.

When the lights go out, there’s no infrared to make people look like they’re in another dimension. At least Defford stuck to that.

He’s quit the live gallery now, leaving a couple of all-night producers and Jo and Grayle amongst the screens. Grayle watches the house tightening into the dark. Ashley Palk comes out of the bathroom into quite a large bedroom, the single bed looking isolated in one corner. She’s wearing a long, dark nightdress, low cut. As she crosses the room, Grayle realizes which room this is, looks away. Perhaps Ashley’s the best person to have it.

Only two people remain in the chamber, chairs pulled close to the ingle, the fire bronzing their faces. Late-night chat, like after the kids have gone to bed. Helen Parrish has a cigarette going.

‘I suppose I came out of normal journalism too soon, all those years ago. Once you’ve been a TV-face, you’re over for everything else.’

Cindy nodding, his beret on his lap.

‘Couple of years ago,’ Parrish says, ‘I applied for a subeditor’s job on an evening paper. Turned me down. The editor said he couldn’t believe I’d be satisfied with the subs desk.’

She stretches out her legs, easing off her shoes.

‘Thought you’d want
his
job?’ Cindy says.

‘Worse than that – I think he thought his managing director would want me in his job.’

‘He was probably right. Household name, you are. An asset.’

‘What nobody gets,’ Parrish says, ‘is you can still be a household name when the income’s completely dried up. People’re still pointing at you when you’re sitting on the scrapheap, and you find yourself smiling back at them, with a rusty car bumper up your bum.’

Cindy laughs.

‘You could do after-dinner speeches.’

‘Please, God, no. Not that, not ever.’

Grayle finds them kind of touching. Two middle-aged ladies, except one isn’t. Nothing is as it seems. Helen contemplates her tweedy companion through her smoke.

‘You actually gay then, Cindy?’

‘What?’

‘I’ve often wondered. I mean, there you are in your senior-secretary’s outfit. I remember you on the Lottery show in all your glitter.
Are
you? Or is it a double-bluff?’

One monitor shows Cindy up close, gazing thoughtfully into the bed of spangled ashes. Catches the twitch of his glossed lips.

‘Never really warmed to that word, to be honest,’ he says.

‘Gay?’

‘I appreciate the irony in it, of course, and “homosexuality”
…
well, that still sounds like a criminal offence. But “gay”, I think, has had its time. Always sounded too much like a squeal of petulant defiance. Look at us, we’re all so happy! You straights will never be as happy as we are! Reaching the stage, I think, where all that needs to be left behind. Too shrill for the times.’

Grayle’s nailed to the screen. Of all the questions she’s never liked to ask… Marcus, too, though she’s sure Marcus really doesn’t want to know one way or the other. Now, here’s Helen Parrish and Cindy, both well aware of the personal mics and the
potential size of the eavesdropping audience, opening their hearts into the embers, like only the ghosts can hear.

‘Do you know that song, Helen, by John Grant? “Glacier”? Marvellously eloquent, profoundly melodic gay whinge. Its chorus extolling the pain of his situation. A glorious agony.’

‘You still didn’t answer the question.’ Helen says.

‘Well, you know, lovely, thinking about it, I’ve always preferred “queer”. Oh yes, queer, I am and no mistake. On every level.’

Helen Parrish laughs.

And Grayle laughs, too, delighted as Cindy and Helen sit in companionable silence, watching a log collapse, splinters like fireflies.

‘You gonna use that, Jo?’

‘Depends what it’s competing with. That’s the stock answer. I’d love us to use it, wonderful cameo, but it might just wind up getting saved for the out-takes programme when it’s all over.’ Jo spins her chair to face the full bank of screens. ‘Tomorrow’s opener goes like this: first half atmos and introduction of residents, and the core of the second half has to be the elder-wood sequence. Some of the shots of Eloise’s face before Cindy comes in – that really was magic. The kind of fear nobody can fake.’

‘I figured maybe you’d want me to get Eloise telling the story of the witch’s house. I was gonna—’

‘No need. We’ve shot a sequence of her at the cottage – didn’t you know that?’

‘No I didn’t. Like the rest of the background, I just wrote it up and handed it in. I know I’m only the researcher, but I’m starting to feel kind of resentful about all the stuff I haven’t been told about. Like half of this was going on behind my back.’

‘Only half? Hell, Grayle, we all feel that. It’s a totally paranoid industry. Don’t let it get to you, OK?’

‘Sure.’

‘Anyway, we bought some local news clips of firemen poking around in the smoky ruins of the witch’s cottage after the blaze.
And Eloise with her commemorative sign, raging about the hunting set, looking like she’s completely lost it. Performing her Alison Cross song in a field. So quite a nice package on the backstory.’

She tells Grayle a senior director called Mike is already at work on the Eloise thread. They’re loving how it all comes back to fire. Mike will be following this angle all week.

‘Ozzy give you a nice out, with the line about getting carried out on the bier?’ Grayle says.

‘Yeah, I really like that. Ozzy knows what he’s doing. Could’ve been scripted.’

Jo comes out of her chair, offering Grayle a cigarette to take outside. Grayle declines. Jo tells her Leo wants to have Helen Parrish telling her Diana story tonight for the Sunday programme.

‘Maybe we could use the fireside sequence with Cindy there. At the end, just before we go live. Unless we have an embarrassment of riches. The angle with Parrish is whether she dares to believe. Whether she trusts her own senses. Is she going to come down on one side or sit on the…?’

‘Rusty fender?’

‘Ha! Get some sleep, Grayle.’

‘What time you want me in the morning?’

‘Twelve will do. We don’t plan to do much by daylight.’

Under a sparse but spiky rain, Grayle goes back to her room in one of the less-luxurious pop-ups, all lined up like outsize bathing huts. Strips and washes and puts on her ten-year-old, long T-shirt with the cabalistic Tree of Life down the front – relic of a previous life.

Walks to the window. Gazing out over the TV city that never sleeps, she sees, in the middle distance, what can only be Jordan Aspenwall pulling his bier up from the house. He would’ve had to wait until everyone was in bed before building up the fire, installing the fireguards, making sure all was well. As well as it could be.

Long hours for Jordan. She has questions to ask him and wouldn’t mind getting dressed again, but this doesn’t seem like a good time.

She wonders how it affects him, being called a yokel and a troll, knowing this will be on TV tomorrow night. Waits for him to come past but he doesn’t. Flattening her face to the window, she finally locates him sitting on the tail of the bier, parked on the edge of an area lit by security lamps which, she guesses, must be overlooking his beloved knot garden.

44

KP

MARCUS GRIPS THE
metal shade of Anderson’s old black Anglepoise for warmth. The heating went off hours ago. In the heat of discovery, he didn’t notice, but now pertinent facts are emerging more infrequently and, at two a.m., he’s cold.

Not often he’s still around at this time. The old night nurse, Anderson, often prowls the early hours, claiming she can get more done when he’s out of the way. Now she’s in the kitchen making more bastard cocoa, or possibly tea to tempt him out of here.

But he doesn’t want to go, leaving the friends of Farmer Lucas still in hiding.

Bastards
.

His desk is cleared of all but the book,
Annals of Winchcombe and Sudeley
, and his computer. Not much you can’t discover now in cyberland, if you have the patience, but these are not important people.

Like hell they’re not.

Malcolm’s sitting by his chair, bony head on his left thigh. Malcolm’s unsettled by all this.

‘Ten minutes,’ Marcus tells him. ‘Then we’ll go, and you can piss at your leisure all over the streets of Broadway.’

Lucas, Lucas, Lucas…

Too common a name. What were this man’s motives in the first instance? He think there might be money in a dead queen?

All Marcus has found out so far is that, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, this Lucas appeared to have farmed land at Sudeley Castle, probably living at the castle lodge, all of
it owned at the time by Lord Rivers, whoever he was. The castle, on which Parr had spent much of her bequest from Henry VIII, had been wrecked during the English Civil War, left derelict, continuing to decay during Rivers’s time. Likewise the chapel in the grounds where Parr now lies in her showpiece tomb, fashioned as recently as Victorian days.

Whether the original tomb was trashed by Roundheads or was just not built to last doesn’t seem to have been reliably recorded.

However…