Gethsemane Hall (3 page)

“That doesn’t mean we’re wrong. Spirits don’t
have
to disrupt the field.”

“No, but consistency across the readings is always more impressive.”

“To whom? To people who wouldn’t believe even if you captured a spirit and put it in a bottle?”

Pertwee didn’t answer. He was right, but she couldn’t bring herself to let go of her fantasy of converting the skeptics. She wanted back into the community of science. She deserved it. She was rigorous in her work. She didn’t make sensational claims. She was even careful to a fault with her image. No unicorns, Birkenstocks, and unkempt hair to keep her locked in the flake compound. She followed fashion trends like a hawk, navigated the trade winds to maintain a look that married professional with flair. She had good skin, good hair. She did a good media face when she had to. But the backs remained turned to her.

Corderman didn’t push things. He was ready to move on. “What next?” he asked.

“Next you go home, and we both sleep.”
We’ve earned the rest. We’ve done good work
.

“But is there anything else lined up?”

“Nothing definite.” A couple of calls had come in that she wanted to follow up on, but nothing too exciting.

“Because I was wondering ...” Corderman pointed at the
Sun
, dropped on the floor beside the outside door.

Pertwee’s mood took a dive. She stood, walked over to the paper, and picked it up, handling it like toxic waste. She read the article again, thoroughly this time. Her lips were pressed into a stone line.

“Is that steam coming out of your ears?” Corderman asked.

Not funny. She kept reading. Despair fought with anger. This was the sort of giggle-piece that helped confine her research to the outer darkness, that prevented her work from ever being taken seriously. But that wasn’t the worst thing about the article. The worst was the slander of Gethsemane Hall. “Liars,” she muttered.

Corderman looked uneasy. “I don’t know, Anna. Do they really make up deaths?”

“I don’t mean about that. I mean about why it happened.” She understood why the reporter had run with the story the way he had. Ghost hunter visits haunted house, plunges from tower. Writes itself. Scary, killer ghosts were much sexier than the sometimes sad, sometimes happy, often melancholy souls she encountered. There had always been talk among ghost-hunters about angry or dangerous spirits. Pertwee had her doubts. She had never found any evidence of malevolence, and she put those beliefs down to the fears and perceptions of the observers. Ghost could be frightening, yes. That wasn’t their fault.

But Gethsemane Hall. Of all the places to tar with a house-of-horrors brush. In the community, the house was legendary, and it was saintly, which was as it should be, given its original owner. The stories that had filtered out over the generations had turned the house into the Lourdes of ghost-hunting, and yet it had never been properly investigated. Pertwee was surprised that this Peter Adams had been given the go-ahead. In the past, the owners had always shot down any request. She had tried several times, then given up, especially since she had begun to acquire a media profile. It wasn’t huge, and it wasn’t lurid, or so she hoped, but it was there. It was a regular thing, now, for one of the tabs to call her up whenever they wanted a scientific-sounding gloss on a ghost piece they were doing. They were using her, and she knew it. She used them right back, the heightened visibility opening doors and bringing people and opportunities for investigation to her that she might never have had otherwise (though no doors to the science community, oh no, never there).

Just over three months ago, the payoff had been huge: a high-profile haunting underscored by her authentication of the event. She was officially a Quoted Expert. She couldn’t deny she was pleased. The problem was if the owners of a house weren’t big on the media. In the past, the Grays had been private to a fault. The dowager Lady Gloria had died five years ago, though. Perhaps the heir was more open. She should have checked, rather than assumed the new regime would have the same policy. And now some amateur had beaten the professionals to the punch and had gone and either tripped over his own clumsy feet or committed suicide on the premises. The Hall’s name was public now and would be stained forever.

Unless you do something about it. Unless you dig up the spectacular, tabloid-worthy proof that there is nothing wrong and everything right with this place. Unless you risk everything, and go public for a cause that’s bigger than you or your precious reputation. And is there really any of that to lose?

“We’re going,” she told Corderman.

“Where?”

“Devon.”

“To the Hall?”

She nodded. “Tomorrow morning. We’re taking all the gear. All of it. If you forget something vital, I’ll break your neck.” But she was smiling
. I’m coming to you
, she thought, picturing the Hall.
I’m coming to save you.

the cleaner

Gerald Fretwell looked amused. Meacham couldn’t blame him. He glanced out his office window before leading her out and paused, gazing down at the cluster of reporters camped out in front of the Millbank entrance to the British Security Service’s headquarters. Fretwell’s already cheerful face broke into a wide grin. He was a small man. His grey hair had receded to a token statement on the top of his head and was buzz cut. His eyes bulged, giving an air of permanent, jaded surprise at the silliness of the world. “Are these yours?” he asked, pointing.

“Probably.”

“Seen many?”

“At the airport. Outside my hotel. Here.”

Fretwell laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. His smile was kind and old with experience. “Welcome to the world of leaks.”

Meacham sighed. “No surprise. Korda wants us to be seen behaving well.”

“You have my sympathy, dear heart.” With that, he led the way from his office.

The MI-5 building had been refurbished and updated, but it was still old, still on historical registers, and its massive stolidity put the lie to the modern equipment. Meacham kept expecting to see manual typewriters and carbon paper instead of laptops and laser printers. Fretwell led her down to a large evidence room. The space was sterile, fluorescent-cold. Pete Adams’s possessions were laid out on three large tables. “Thanks for doing this,” Meacham said. “I’ll try not to leave too big a footprint on local turf.”

Fretwell waved her caution away. “Don’t be silly. To be honest, we’re happy to follow your lead.”

Meacham raised an eyebrow. “What’s the catch?” Since when did one agency defer to another so happily?

“Oh, don’t misunderstand. Our Peter was indeed the subject of jurisdictional conflict. But ... what’s the opposite of a tug of war? MI-6 said we could have the case. His dying here made this an internal matter, they said. Could well fall into counterterrorism or counterespionage, they said. Bastards. We said that as he was a member of a fellow foreign intelligence agency, they should take charge and liaise with your people.” Fretwell shrugged. “We lost the coin toss.”

“I see.” Meacham did, her heart sinking still further. She sensed the chance of a reborn career shrink to nothing. She thought she could hear Korda laughing somewhere. Still, if she completed the mission, maybe she could at least hang on to her pension. She mentally rolled up her sleeves. Time to work. “Anything worth pointing out now?” she asked.

“That depends on your taste for the absurd,” Fretwell said. “As you can see, there’s plenty of electronic equipment.” He gestured to the first two tables. “Some of it has potential espionage applications. Recording devices, low-light and zero-light cameras, that sort of thing. Nothing for transmitting, though, so douse your hopes for a good, clean double-agent story right now. Everything here is geared toward reception. And then there are these.” He handed Meacham a stack of spiral-bound notebooks. She flipped through first one. Page after page of draftsman-crisp printing of recorded temperatures, times, weather conditions, types of experiments, and the results, which, at first glance, were negative across the board. She checked the dates. The oldest notebooks were from years ago. Adams had been riding his hobby horse for a long time and in far more places than Gethsemane Hall. “Completely obsessive and completely ridiculous,” Fretwell observed. “If this is a cover, it’s bloody brilliant.”

“I wish.” She picked up a MiniDV cassette and looked a question at Fretwell.

“Ah,” he said, uncomfortable now. “Yes. That. You’ll be wanting to take a look at that.” He took her over to a workstation that had a monitor and every form of media player.

“You’ve seen it,” she said as she slipped the cassette into a camcorder at least a decade old.

“I have.”

“And ...?”

“It’s one of the reasons we’re happy to step aside. The tape is cued up to the relevant sequence.”

The scene was grainy and green, a staircase shot in infrared. The camera was at the stop of the stairs, looking down. The image was too murky for detail, but the steps looked steep and old. The picture flickered steadily. “Time lapse?” Meacham asked.

“Yes. One second shots, every ten seconds. He could fit an entire night onto one tape.”

Meacham watched. The flicker began to work on her head. She hadn’t slept on the plane and was still on her feet after arriving at Heathrow at five in the morning. She struggled to keep her vision clear and hoped her pulse wouldn’t pick up the rhythm of the picture and start throbbing. “I don’t see anything,” she said.

“You won’t. Listen for it.”

When it came, she jumped. She glared at Fretwell, but he wasn’t laughing. He was still uncomfortable and a little green around the edges. The sound was a one-second slice from the centre of a scream. It was deafening, piercing, a siren that was redolent of rage and agony. When Meacham’s heart steadied, she noticed that her throat was sore, as if in sympathy with the howl of vocal chords scraped by broken glass. The effect of the scream was made worse by its truncation. There was no origin, and no conclusion, only an
in media res
stab to the senses. Meacham waited until she felt composed again. She cleared her throat. “Okay,” she said. “Is there more?”

“No.” Fretwell sounded relieved.

“Okay,” she said again. She stopped the playback anyway, eliminating any chance of another surprise. “Excuse me, but what the fuck was that?”

“We don’t know. Neither, according to this,” Fretwell held up a hardbound diary, “did Adams, though you can imagine what he speculated.”

Meacham turned to look back at the table and the raft of recording units. “Does this sound turn up anywhere else?”

“We’re still checking. He made hundreds of hours of audio. But we don’t think so. His journal entries for this date express frustration at not having a recorder at the same location as the camcorder.”

“Was there anyone else in the house?”

Fretwell shook his head. “The police gave the place a going over, and so did we. No one was there but Adams.”

Meacham leaned against the work station. “Your take?”

“Without having seen his psych profile ...” Fretwell paused, giving Meacham the opening to offer the information. When she said nothing, he shrugged. “Our best guess is depression.” His smile was wry. “One might say his interests were a bit on the morbid side.”

Not morbid enough, though. There was nothing in his file to suggest instability. Adams was an odd duck, but seemed a pretty happy ducky. “And what about that scream?”

Fretwell’s unease returned. “We’re still working on that. How does an audio glitch sound? Some kind of electronic gremlin? These are the thoughts that are calming things down around the office.”

“Good enough for government work.”

“Precisely.”

She flirted with the temptation. “
Ghost Hunting Spy Was Suicidal”
for the tabloids. A more bureaucratically worded version of the same in a report for Korda. No reason why this wouldn’t work. The tabs didn’t have the scream recording, after all. Ta-da, job done, home again by the end of the week. Oh, for life to be that simple. She sighed and resisted. The story might look neat and tidy. That didn’t mean it actually was. The loose end of the scream was still dangling. There was always the possibility of a leak re-igniting media interest. The worst case scenario was a failure to follow Korda’s injunction:
I want to know what kind of missile is heading our way before it hits
. Going with the tidy story might turn out to be as good a defence as closing eyes and plugging ears against the missile. She had to know definitively, one way or another. “I’m going to have to check into a few things,” she said.

Fretwell grunted in sympathy. “Better you than me, dear, that’s all I can say.”

Meacham walked over to the equipment again. She riffled the pages of a notebook. “How much longer will you be going through this stuff?”

Fretwell gave her his sad smile. “You must have mortally angered the gods. Let me guess. If you need this unholy tech mess, you’ll be wanting it down at Gethsemane Hall.”

“I must look depressed.”

“You do.” Fretwell thought for a moment. “Will the end of the week be soon enough?”

“I’ll call you from there, let you know. If I can muster the right troops, I won’t need any of this.”

“You should be so lucky. In the meantime ...” He pointed to the notebooks. “Feel free to abscond with those. We have all the copies we’ll need.”

“Thanks.”

“No, thank you. You’ve just added to the downward slope. Now the shit can roll down past me.” He smiled, one of the happiest people Meacham had seen all year.

That night, she sat in her hotel just off Charing Cross Road and ploughed through the notebooks. There was much she couldn’t decipher. She was going to have to consult an expert, she realized, and shuddered at the implications. Her season in Hell was going to be long and hot. Exclamation and question marks were scattered like seasoning over the pages, becoming more and more frequent as the dates crept closer to Adams’s leap. They were suggestive but told her squat. The diary was more detailed and interesting. She started with the date of the scream, and saw that Fretwell was right: Adams was amphetamine-excited about his recording. He was also crack-mad about not having caught more. No surprises there. What had her frowning was how surprised Adams was. Not that he’d recorded anything at all, but that the sound was a scream.
Isn’t that what ghosts are supposed to do?
Meacham wondered. Not the ones at Gethsemane Hall, apparently.

Adams kept referencing the house’s history and reputation, but never went into detail on either. Meacham gathered that the Hall was supposed to be a good place but couldn’t piece together more than that. What was clear was how, from the moment of the scream onward, Adams had started unravelling. Meacham flipped back to the beginning for comparison purposes. His entries from his arrival at the Hall were enthusiastic and profuse, the work of a man happy with the time on his hands. By the end, his writing was terse, perfunctory, and cryptically paranoid.

The last entry was dated two days before he died. Meacham checked the notebooks again. These had notations as recently as his last morning. He had worked right to the end, it seemed, but he wasn’t enjoying his work.

The final entry in the diary:
I wish I could leave
.

And this was why cleaning jobs were so dirty. She was going to have to bring in another party, someone sane but informed about craziness. Someone she might actually think was okay. Someone who didn’t deserve to be pulled into the shit, in other words. But hey, that’s why you get paid the big bucks.

Sometimes, life smiled. She was owed that, given how many frowns she’d been landing. Life smiled while she was eating a room-service breakfast. She had the radio on and was listening with half an ear as she flipped absently through the morning papers. Her antennae twitched, and, with a
click
, she was all ears. She heard the man she needed speak. She had a moment of sympathy for him. He didn’t know what was heading his way. Then she put herself on the collision course.

They were almost packed and ready for Roseminster. Pertwee was acting in a spirit of relentless optimism. She and Corderman were going to descend on the town like Operation Overlord, and their sheer momentum would force Gray to let them investigate. There was still the little matter of tracking him down. There was no answer at Gethsemane Hall, which meant he was probably in London, and that would make it easier for him to say no. Pertwee wanted Corderman in place and ready to roll before she confronted Lord Gray. The closer they could come to presenting him with a
fait accompli
, the better.

Corderman had popped down the road for the morning papers. Pertwee wanted to be off, but Corderman needed his football scores. So he said.
He needs his Page 3 girl
, Pertwee thought. But when he stepped into the flat, he looked ashen. “What’s wrong?” she asked, heart skipping. Gethsemane Hall in the news again? Corderman was turning into the bearer of bad news whenever he picked up his fix of Fleet Street yellow.

“It’s Bromwell,” Corderman said. His voice trembled on the verge of tears.

Bromwell. Pertwee’s biggest triumph, the one that had made her the Quoted Expert, the one she wasn’t sure whether it would help or hurt her with Gray. “What?” she asked again.

“Crawford’s been there,” Corderman whispered.

“Rubbish,” she said in pointless denial. She reached for the paper.

“It’s not in there,” Corderman said, though he didn’t resist when she snatched the
Sun
. She heard him but turned the pages frantically anyway, as if energy of action would summon help. “I heard him on the radio,” Corderman went on. “He was being interviewed.”

“When did he go?”

“Just after us.”

Of course. The bastard was probably drawn by the publicity. She’d presented him with a huge, inviting target. He wouldn’t rest until he brought down everyone’s joy. She’d never met him, but she felt the prick of personal animosity in his choice of investigation site. “What did he say?” she asked.

“Guess.”

She didn’t have to. “He did another one of his surveys, didn’t he?” When Corderman nodded, she asked, “How many participants?”

“I can’t remember exactly. Over six hundred.”

Crawford had all the resources of a university behind him. Kent believed in his work. It was respectable, but just sexy enough to be media-worthy. If she had that kind of backing, she’d be producing results that would show him where to go. “He talked about magnetic fields, didn’t he?”

“He found some strong variances.”

“He debunked Bromwell.”

Corderman’s eyes were shining
. Don’t cry,
Pertwee thought.
Don’t you dare cry. This isn’t over. We’re just getting going.

Pertwee said, “Load up.”

“But what are we going to —”

“We carry on. The new project is even more important now.” She gave Corderman a punch on the arm.
Buck up, soldier
. “Crawford had better watch out. Gethsemane Hall is going to debunk
him
.”