Gethsemane Hall Read online

  “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 bigg
est 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.”

  Corderman’s eyes still shone, but now with a warrior’s hope.

  chapter five

  god’s good plan

  Meacham decided to hedge her bets. She felt good about the inspiration the radio had given her. One skeptic was good. Two would be better. She wasn’t just going to clean the Adams fiasco. She was going to sterilize it. She found the other name she wanted in the background files. The face was in a picture taken at Adams’s funeral.

  In Paris, Kristine Sturghill was working the saw down to the bone. She was well down into the flesh and gristle. The sounds were a chuckling gurgle of wet snaps. The woman she was working on didn’t twitch. She looked dead sexy, every pun intended. Blood flowed, poured, pooled. The floor was covered in a growing puddle that reflected the lights from its darkness. She cut through the last of the gristle, and there was the grind as the blade sank its teeth into bone.

  The audience roared.

  Sturghill was performing at La Bourgeoise Épatée. The theatre was a hole in the wall in the Rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth in the 3rd Arrondissement, spitting distance from the stolid respectability of the Arts et Métiers museum, only two blocks from the bustle of the Boulevard St. Martin, but far enough east to be removed from the sleaze factor of the peep shows and porno palaces that sprang up the closer the Grands Boulevards came to Pigalle. The building had been a theatre off and on for a hundred and fifty years, and was making its mark in its new incarnation by revelling in its own filth, while tapping into its age for class. The in-crowd was squirting with pleasure. La Bourgeoise Épatée put on shows that were unapologetically pornographic and cheerfully debased, but had an aura of hipness that meant the city guides carried the listings in the same sections as the grand dame of La Comédie Française, rather than relegating it to the sex-tour back pages with the likes of Chochotte and Sexodrome. The decor was restored neo-classical, the seats new and spacious. The lighting was excellent, and Sturghill had to admit that even the dressing rooms were not only clean (a bonus, given what she’d dealt with in the past) but comfortable. Actually comfortable.

  The hall was packed, the box office fat, and she was making nice coin. So where was the love?

  She leaned into the saw, and the sound of grating and snapping bone filled the space. Not a twitch, not a visible breath, from the woman. A huge crack, and she was through. There was an enthusiastic gout of blood. The offal stench was building. Sturghill had already severed the upper torso, and now she pulled the centre of the box out. More blood pooled. The butchered woman, motionless, sexy, dead, glowed in the spotlight. Sturghill stepped forward and grinned at the audience. She was wearing the full Dietrich: tux, fishnets, stilettos, blonde killer as sexy as her red-headed victim (have to match the blood, don’t you know), dressed in just enough masculine garb for that extra piquance of double-edged homoeroticism. She raised the saw blade and licked some blood from it. God’s thunder of applause. She doffed her top hat and bowed low. Fade to black on the scene of slaughter. That was the orgasm. Resurrection was old hat and unwanted.

  Where was the love? She wondered that again back in the dressing room. Her feet were aching from the heels, but nothing new there. That wasn’t enough to sour her on the gig. Maddy Tibbert had climbed out of the coffin and was towelling off the blood, in a hurry for her first post-show cigarette. “Went pretty well,” she said.

  “I thought so,” Sturghill agreed, her voice flat.

  “You sound chipper.”

  Where was the love? “The show’s getting to me, I guess.”

  “Girl, this was your baby.”

  “I know. I know.” The trick was so old it was cool again: the box painted with lengthwise stripes so the connecting sections between the removed middle and the head and legs looked thinner than they really were, leaving plenty of room for Tibbert to bend herself into position. The gimmick was the blood. Sturghill’s inspiration had been an old Herschell Gordon Lewis movie, The Wizard of Gore. In the film, the gory illusions had turned out to be real. Sturghill ran with the idea, and pretended to mutilate her assistant. She’d loved Lewis’s bloody tongue-in-cheek attitude, wanted shock and satire in her own act. The early shows in the goth clubs had been fun, the audience buying exactly what she was selling. She was pretty sure they were in on the joke. She hoped they were. Either way, word spread, the gigs improved, and then the call had come in from Paris. And here she and Tibbert were, gravy train at full throttle.

  So where was the love? Not in the audience. That was the problem. They weren’t buying the satire. They might claim to be. All the reviewers did. But Sturghill wasn’t buying what they were selling. She knew what was going on. Rocks were being got off, far too many of them, over the sight of one woman carving up the other. Her fault for playing up the sex. What happened to irony? she wondered. She knew the answer: it had become a first-rate alibi for guilt-free indulgence. I’m not a misogynist, the audience said. I don’t really like seeing women pretend-butchered. I’m appreciating the social commentary. Now get me hard again, you bitch.

  The love had been leaking away for a while. The breaking point, the moment where the love had died and the freeze had set in, had been Pete Adams killing himself. The poor bastard had no family and was buried in England. At least that meant Sturghill had been able to attend the funeral. The event had been too depressing. Adams had been a smart guy, too smart to wind up believing his own bullshit, but there he was, another audience with no irony. Dead in his seat. They’d met in college, had hung out a fair bit before he’d joined the Agency, a decision that Sturghill still had trouble forgiving. She didn’t want to believe that someone she liked, someone she respected, would work for that outfit. At least she was aware of the little bit of irony in her disappointment. She must have some faith after all, if someone could betray it.

  They’d stayed in touch, though. Just enough so that the network of friends spread the word when he died. A few made it over from the States. A handful more sent wreaths and cards. Most were absent and silent.

  Sturghill changed out of her fishnets. She balled them up and
threw them on the chair.

  “They do something to you?” Tibbert asked.

  Sturghill made a face. “Isn’t any of this bothering you?”

  “I never bought your whole make-a-statement idea, you know that. So it’s all good.”

  “There are guys creaming to see you bleed.”

  Tibbert shrugged. “Like this is news. At least they’re paying for it. They don’t touch us, and neither of us is naked. Things could be worse. Shit, Kristine, we’re making coin, and we’re living in Paris. I’m trying to see the problem here.”

  Sturghill didn’t answer. Look at what you’re doing, girl, she thought. You were working on a humanities degree. You were going to change things. Look at what you’re doing. Look at what you’re wearing.

  André Curval poked his head in the dressing room. He ran La Bourgoise Épatée and was a happy, happy man. “Kristine,” he said. “Phone.”

  She followed him to his office. His desk was an anal retentive’s wet dream of order, pen and papers in perfect regimentation, nothing permitted off the perpendicular. The walls were a collage of old Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergères posters, overlapping and tangling with each other, as if Curval had heard somewhere that impresarios had to be messy, and this was his one concession. Framed behind his desk was his baby: an original poster for the Grand Guignol. Curval waved her to the desk and left her to it. When the woman on the other end of the line introduced herself as one of Adams’s colleagues, she almost hung up. “Stay the hell away from me,” she said. “You people have done enough damage.”

  “You’re probably right,” Meacham answered, hooking Sturghill’s curiosity just enough to keep her listening. “I’m asking you to help undo some of it.”

  “How?”

  “Let me ask you, how devoted are you to his memory?”