SIX

LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS, LONDON. 13 JUNE 2011, 1 P.M.

Rachel peered at Kyle as he retrieved his screeching phone from the side pocket of his leather jacket. ‘Do you need to get that?’

Kyle shook his head. ‘Nah. It can wait.’ It was the third call from Max since he’d sat down with Rachel Phillips on a bench in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. One look through the window of the pub and she’d quickly eschewed her own choice of eatery. ‘Don’t worry,’ she’d said. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to be seen with you. But I don’t want anyone overhearing our conversation. I know too many people in there. I only have twenty minutes. I can eat later. You don’t mind?’

Quickly, concisely, breathlessly, as they’d walked to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, her eyes rarely left the screen of her BlackBerry and Kyle understood this interview was going to be brief. ‘Hope you’re not going to bill me for your time. I’m guessing you’re expensive.’

She’d laughed. ‘Can be.’ Crisp white blouse, a single strand of pearls, designer glasses with black frames, charcoal pinstriped suit, glossy white tights, sling-backs, perfumed maturely. She was plump, but sexy, in that handsome way middle-aged blondes with pale skin can be. When she moved her hands, her red nails glinted like the shells of large ladybirds and a thin golden chain glittered on a smooth freckled wrist.

Kyle gave her DVD copies of his last two documentaries, hoping she would get past the lurid covers and watch them; see that he was serious and not crazy or exploitative and could be trusted if she ever changed her mind about speaking to camera, or at least letting him use her dialogue. ‘Oh. My God. Coven. Whatever next?’ she said, then gave him a conciliatory look and said, ‘Thank you,’ while quickly pushing the discs inside her bag.

‘Not my choice of title. Distributor,’ he offered by way of explanation.

Kyle’s phone cheeped as Max left another message.

‘And I thought I was busy,’ she said.

‘It’s the executive producer of the film. He can wait. I know your time is precious.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, demurely, and stared out across the grass towards the cupolas and ramparts of St Mary’s University. ‘The smell came first. That was the first thing I noticed.’

‘How would you describe it?’

‘Ghastly. A faint residue of sewage in the beginning. But then I became convinced there was a dead rat under the floorboards. Like carrion. Unmistakable. I spent some time with the UN, in Bosnia, investigating war crimes. So I know what death smells like.’ She blinked her carefully shadowed eyes three times. ‘But it would come and go. At night. It was never there when the letting agency sent a tradesman around during the day. They couldn’t find anything. The plumbing was fine.’

‘Did they check the basement?’

‘Of course.’

‘Because that’s where we found a leak, I think.’

‘A leak?’

Kyle nodded. ‘Behind the boxes and the furniture. On the wall. The lights weren’t working.’

‘The lights.’ Rachel bit the side of her bottom lip; her manicured hands fidgeted for a moment around her BlackBerry.

‘Yes. When we went back at around ten to finish up a couple of segments, we found the lights were out. So we were using the camera spotlight when Dan saw the stain on the basement wall.’

‘It wasn’t a leak,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper. She looked about to make sure no one was eavesdropping.

‘No?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘Am I right in saying that you saw a discolouration in the storage room?’ she said tersely, her blue eyes narrowed in tandem with the interrogatory tone of her question.

‘Yes –’ He stopped himself from finishing with ‘your honour’.

‘And what did you see exactly on that wall?’

Kyle shrugged, still unsettled by the sudden directness of her inquiry. ‘Er, a stain, I think. Or scorch mark. On the plaster. When I played it back, I saw . . . I don’t know. Bones or something.’

Rachel smiled in secret triumph. ‘The stains on the plaster occurred in two of the rooms I rented. Three months after the property had an extensive renovation. Which included new plumbing, wiring throughout, and a complete redecoration in all three flats. I know because I made the letting agent show me the invoices. And there was no damp. There were no leaks. No rising moisture. Nothing to have caused those marks.’

‘Well it’s just been done again. That place is show-home perfect inside.’

‘Doesn’t surprise me. But what should surprise you is that parts of the property were also renovated twice when I lived there, in just over twelve months. Were the other two flats still empty?’

‘Yes, they were.’

Rachel smiled again. ‘The other tenants moved out before I did. For the same reasons.’

‘The odours, stains?’

‘That was only part of it. But on the subject of the lights, two electricians assured me there was nothing wrong with the wiring, even though the lights going out throughout the entire building was not uncommon. I became quite adept at flicking the switch for the lights in the fuse box. That’s all it usually took to start with, and about a hundred spare bulbs. What was tripping the circuit, no one could tell me. But then the wiring under the fuse box was found damaged.’

‘Damaged?’

‘Rachel nodded. ‘Vandalized. But by whom? And the lights going out always preceded an appearance of the odd smells and the stains. You see, Kyle, I will wager that if you go back to the property today, the mark on the wall of the storage room will already be well on its way to disappearing. And it won’t be near a pipe, so it’s no leak. Any tradesmen will confirm there is no damp. And an impression will be left behind. You can see things in them. But that still isn’t the worst thing. It was . . . It was always the sense that we had an intruder that unsettled me. I was there on my own most of the time, so it was the last thing a woman alone wants to feel. Unsafe. But I did.’

‘We heard something weird.’ Kyle tensed when Rachel turned to him abruptly.

‘There was a fund manager and his wife on the top floor. And the owner of an airline on the first floor, who used the apartment when he was in town. We all heard things.’

‘Can you describe it, the sounds?’

‘I can try. But they were very hard to define. I thought, well, it’s ridiculous, but I sometimes thought I heard children. Crying. In distress. And wind. Children in a wind. The man upstairs used to complain of dogs. “The dogs were crying again,” he would tell me in the morning. He was Iranian. But his English was good. There were animal sounds. Or at least I hoped they were. But I’m not sure what kind of animals were making them. And always outside the flat, on the communal stairs. But the couple at the top were sure they were broken into. They had the police round three times in the middle of the night. Always sounded to me like someone was in the hall, though, or on the stairs. Footsteps. Like they were drunk, or something.’

Kyle stared at his feet. ‘Music?’

‘Music? No. But something like whistling, I used to think.’

‘So it wasn’t my imagination. We had quite a fright in there. Respect to you for sticking it out for so long. But we ran like a couple of kids. There was like this wind—’

‘That blew down the middle of the stairwell?’

Kyle nodded.

‘So what do you think it is? You’re the expert.’

‘I wouldn’t say expert. It’s not like anything I’ve heard of. Kind of like a poltergeist haunting, maybe . . .’ Kyle swallowed. ‘You never saw anything?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘God, no. But I can dine out on the story for the rest of my life as it is.’ She looked at him sharply. ‘Amongst friends. So I don’t want to find that you’ve used my name in your film. Because I will be looking.’

‘No, no. Don’t worry. Wouldn’t dream of it. The neighbour kind of corroborated some of what you said anyway. Dan spoke to him on Sunday, when we went back for the gear, and he said people were coming and going all the time. No one lived there for very long. Never had done. Place was always being gutted and fixed up again. Drove him nuts. He kept going on about the rubbish skips, the hammering and scaffolding, shit like that. I’d just like to use a little of the detail about what the residents experienced at the property, but I won’t ever mention your name.’

‘Good. So tell me, the history. You said there was a history. Of course, the letting agent never mentioned it, but I’ve a hunch I’m not going to like what you are going to tell me. Was it . . . haunted?’

‘We were there to begin shooting a documentary about The Temple of the Last Days.’

Rachel Phillips looked as if she was about to suffer a stroke. ‘The cult? In America?’

Kyle nodded. ‘They started life in that house, Rachel. When they were called The Last Gathering. They were there in 1968 and 1969.’

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