Gethsemane Hall Read online

  She had spent her childhood with the reality of spirits as entrenched as that of Father Christmas. Both illusions had collapsed in adolescence. She had revolted against her mother’s ethereal dreamworld and her father’s fakery machine. Her cynicism propelled her through the sciences in school and university. She had run a mile from anything that smacked of spirituality. Then her parents had died, too soon, a year apart. Her father’s death had had her searching for comfort. Her mother’s had given it to her. Sitting by her bedside in the hospital, clutching her hands as they relaxed from the pain finally ended, Pertwee had seen, seen, a glow hover for three full seconds over Victoria’s head. All the old loves and beliefs had come flooding back. Father Christmas was real again, and Pertwee was going to prove it.

  She’d been at it for eight years. She had photographic evidence, visible and infrared. She had Electronic Voice Phenomena recorded on tape and stored on her hard drive. She had records of ectoplasm, cold spots, and automatic writing. She had everything she needed to be convinced that her mother’s hopes were real, and that the comfort was real. But she had nothing that would make a skeptic listen to her. It was as if her five years of university had been wiped from history. Most of her friends from that period wouldn’t return her calls. The ones who still saw her would glaze over when she tried to talk ghosts, their smiles becoming equal parts polite and pained. She knew she should give up on them, but she didn’t. She had felt the touch. She had the evangelical calling. The science she used would be a tool of validation, not debunking.

  “How long have you been sensitive?” she asked Winnifred.

  “All my life, dear.”

  “And have you been aware of spirits everywhere you’ve lived?”

  “Oh, my heavens no. Only this house and my grandmother’s.”

  That was promising. Pertwee felt her confidence grow as she headed out to the van for the rest of the equipment. Thermal scanner. Digital and 35mm cameras. Tape and digital recorders. Motion detectors. She hauled them all inside, and while she set the tools up around the room, she opened herself to the space. She sought its rhythms and those of its inhabitants. I’m friendly, she told them. Feel free to speak with me. She took her time, triple-checking every calibration, but also breathing in the atmosphere. When she was set up, she continued to walk around the room, learning its corners, reaching out and touching the shelves and knick-knacks, making the space her home, making herself a known quantity and not a stranger. After a half-hour, she was ready. This was when she was used to loading the cameras. If only she had film.

  “Is that your assistant?” Winnifred had left her chair to be out of the way during the set-up, and now she was standing at the living room window.

  Pertwee followed her gaze. Corderman was back. He had one leg out of the car, but he wasn’t making any further progress. He seemed engrossed by something on the passenger seat. Pertwee sighed. “I’m afraid it is,” she said, and went outside. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked as she approached.

  Corderman looked up. “Sorry. Just reading this.” He passed her the newspaper. It was the Sun, and the article, halfway through the tabloid, was headlined “Ghosts Murder Spy in Devon.” She scanned the piece, and when she read the words “Gethsemane Hall,” she said, “Oh, no.”

  “That’s what I said.” Corderman nodded. “That’s just not right. They shouldn’t be writing things like that about that place.”

  “No,” Pertwee agreed. “No, they shouldn’t.” She was growing angry, undoing all the good, calm work she’d done inside the house. She folded the paper and tossed it onto the back seat of the car. “We’ll think about that later,” she said. “Now is not the time. We have a job to do here. Focus, Edgar. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. Yes.” He was emphatic, indignation forgotten. She could say this for Corderman: he switched gears quickly.

  In the house, Winnifred was back in her chair. Pertwee made Corderman sit on his eagerness and walk around the room for a quarter of an hour. Then they loaded the cameras. Pertwee tied her hair back to keep it from straying into a lens. She opened her log book, noted time, temperature, and conditions. “Are you ready?” she asked Winnifred.

  “I always am, dear. When the spirits call, I answer.”

  “All right, then.” Pertwee fixed her eyes on a spot in the air halfway up to the ceiling. “To the spirits who are listening, I ask your permission to record your presence.” She waited ten seconds. She didn’t expect a positive response, but she wanted to leave room for a negative one. There was nothing. “Thank you,” she said. She turned back to Winnifred. “Shall we begin?”

  The older woman smiled. She relaxed in her chair, and her eyes lost focus. Pertwee watched. The camcorder was running. She had one of the 35mm cameras in hand. Corderman had a digital. Those were more idiot-proof. Pertwee waited.

  And there. The temperature dropped. She felt it. She felt it.

  Before they left, Pertwee thanked the spirits. It was the least she could do.

  She had a darkroom set up in her row house in Coulsdon South. It was a former bedroom. The house was small, but she lived alone, so there was plenty of room for the equipment. She and Corderman poured over the prints. They had snapped off three hundred shots over the course of the day. The digital pictures were disappointing, every one of them stuck in the mundane. Three of the 35mm shots, though, were looking promising. All three had been from late in the session. The first, which Pertwee had shot around sunset, showed a vaguely oval red discolouration around Winnifred. The other two, taken after nightfall, had small, bright lights pinpointing the air above Winnifred’s head.

  “What do you think?” Corderman asked. “Ectoplasm?”

  “These look more like spirit lights,” Pertwee said, pointing to the night shots. “This one,” tapping the red nimbus, “I’m not sure. An aura, maybe.” Maybe, and yet she knew the comments to expect if she showed the photographs to a skeptical audience. Dust on the lens. Light on the film. Glare. Not to mention that whatever authority pictures might once have had lay in ruins, thanks to Photoshop. “Let’s check the recordings,” she said.

  They listened late into the night, each with headphones. Corderman handled the tapes, Pertwee the digital material. Pertwee heard hours of nothing, cranked high and turned into static, punctuated by the sounds of clicking equipment, shifting seats, a cough here and a sneeze there. Hoping for a miracle, she checked the times of the promising pictures. “Fast forward,” she told Corderman and read off the times. The search was easier on the computer. She scanned ahead, watching the display for spikes. Nothing clear stood out, but she turned the volume up still higher. She tried to shut down every sense but hearing.

  There. In the midst of the white noise blizzard, she thought she heard a voice. “No,” it said. She rewound, listened again. There it was. “No.” She wasn’t making it up. She was sure the word was real. She opened her eyes and turned to Corderman. “Anything?” she asked.

  He was frowning. “I’m not sure.” It was the sentence he used when he desperately wished he had something but didn’t.

  “Come listen to this,” she said. He crossed the room, and they traded headphones. Pertwee played with the tape until she found the spot. Her digital recorder was more compact than it was hi-fi, and there was a lot less noise on the tape. The static was thinner. The voice should have been clearer. It wasn’t. But she heard it at the right moment, a faint but articulate denial, breaking surface just before going down and drowning. No. “So?” she said.

  Corderman shook his head. “My hearing must be worse than yours.”

  “Here.” She unplugged the headphones, played the computer’s recording back through the speakers. “You can hear someone say ‘no.’ Listen.” Static wind, aural clouds forming and dissolving, hypnotic. “There,” she said when the sound came. She stabbed a finger at the wave pattern. There was the smallest hiccup.

  “Let me hear it again,”
Corderman said. He was excited now. He stared at the wave display during the playback, and this time his face lit up. “I heard it,” he said in happy awe. “I heard it.”

  Pertwee isolated the clip and saved it to their archive of EVP. She was feeling pretty good, too. Audio and visual phenomena coming at the same time. Explain that as lens glare. She went over the temperature readings. No dip. That was disappointing, but not conclusive. Cold spots didn’t always register except on the psychic level. She leaned back and judged the night well spent.

  Corderman was dancing in his seat. “We have something. We really have something.”

  “Maybe,” Pertwee qualified, even though she agreed.

  “What maybe? This is definitive.”

  “There were no fluctuations on the EMF Detector.”

  “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.

  chapter four

  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 complet
ed 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.