Monday
It was, Audrey knew, technically a violation of her contract with the BBC and a vindication of every single negative thought Jennifer had expressed about her, her integrity, and her profession, but she couldn’t help herself.
All thoughts of simnel cake were forgotten and all thoughts of the show’s frustratingly charismatic producer were not forgotten but were, for a while, rigorously suppressed.
She’d typed up her notes on Doris’s story as soon as she got home, her brain borderline fizzing with the possibilities.
Some of those possibilities—and this really was going to confirm Jennifer’s worst suspicions—were commercial.
War nostalgia sold. Stuff with TV tie-ins sold.
This could be a real scoop for the Echo.
Then again the Echo’s last big scoop had been about a series of vicious goose attacks in High Ercall.
But salability aside, even if you cut out the extremely lucrative connection to a very popular television show, the story itself wasn’t letting Audrey go.
Which was foolish in a lot of ways, because all she really knew was that Doris had come to Patchley House more than seventy years ago and had met another girl who, honestly, had been kind of shitty to her.
What this said about Audrey’s own issues she didn’t want to interrogate too closely.
Nevertheless, she’d arranged a pitch meeting with Gavin as soon as she got into work.
And while the more relaxed atmosphere at the Echo sometimes gave Audrey a nebulous sense that she was doing it wrong (You’re not doing it wrong, said Natalie, because you’re not doing it.
This isn’t journalism.) it did mean that a pitch meeting was more likely to be a pleasant cup of tea after lunch than a three-minute conversation in a lift with a guy who’d try to put his hand up her skirt.
“Biscuit?” said Gavin, pushing a plate of hobnobs and pink wafers across the desk as he perused Audrey’s printed proposal.
“Not right now.” She was slightly too nervous for a biscuit. Although, given how incredibly low the stakes were, she wasn’t sure why.
Gavin read. He wasn’t a slow reader, but he was a meticulous one.
It was, in abstract, a good quality for an editor.
Just not when you were sitting in front of him, trying not to dwell on how much you were about to piss off a woman whose default state of being already involved a certain level of pissed-offness.
“You’ve got to admit,” she said, as Gavin was starting his third reread, “it’s a strong human-interest piece.”
“Yes”—he pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose—“but…”
“But you’re worried what the BBC will say?”
Gavin gave the most sheepish of nods. “The producer lady has quite the reputation.”
“Her name’s Jennifer, and she’s not that bad.” Audrey knew for a fact that she was exactly that bad, but this was very much the wrong time to point that out. “I really think if we reach out to her she’ll go for this.”
“Do you?” It was only two words, but the look in Gavin’s eyes provided the rest.
“Yes?” Audrey tried to restrict her voice to rising one octave rather than several. “I think she can actually be pretty reasonable?”
“Do you?” Gavin repeated.
“Look at it this way.” Who was she trying to convince here? “The absolute worst possible outcome is she says no.”
“Is it?”
Audrey considered this. “Okay, the worst possible outcome is that she says no, kicks me off the show, and vindictively sues the Echo every time we so much as mention baking from now until the BBC goes bankrupt from underfunding.”
Gavin drummed an anxious pattern with a single fingertip. “That does sound like quite a bad outcome. Possibly an extremely bad outcome.”
“Not if the BBC goes bankrupt from underfunding really quickly. Which seems increasingly likely.”
“Even then I think they’ll probably outlast local newspapers,” Gavin observed, still drumming.
“Yeah, fair point. But”—Audrey smiled; she had sometimes been told she had a nice smile and she knew how to employ it, if not disarmingly then at least in a way that signalled commitment to a series of ongoing talks about nonproliferation—“given what readership’s been like, might it not be worth taking the tiniest little swing for the fences? ”
Looking down at the printout, Gavin further adjusted his glasses. You could tell how concerned Gavin was about something from how frequently he repositioned his eyewear. “I suppose journalism is about taking risks.”
“It is,” Audrey agreed.
“And it’d show the bloody Star.”
“It would.”
“See how they like being Shropshire’s second biggest regional newspaper.”
This was going well. “Right.”
“I mean, obviously they’d like it quite a lot. Nothing wrong with being Shropshire’s second biggest regional newspaper. I think we do rather well here at the Echo all things considered.”
Okay, maybe that had been optimistic. “We do, but wouldn’t it be nice to be Shropshire’s biggest regional newspaper just for a bit?”
Gavin was fiddling with his glasses again. “It’d be a lot of pressure.”
“Gavin”—Audrey gave him her most supportive and sincere look—“I really believe we’re up to the challenge.”
Gavin fell into a mulling-things-over silence and Audrey decided to let him mull. Because sometimes the right thing to say was nothing.
Once appropriate mulling time had passed, Gavin settled his glasses into their most decisive position. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll reach out to Inveterate Productions.”
Not entirely convinced that Jennifer Hallet was a bus she wanted to throw Gavin under, Audrey had hoped he’d leave it to her. “I can do it for you if you’d—”
“No, no. This is my decision and I should take responsibility for it.”
Now Audrey thought about it, maybe it would be best if the initial approach came from someone who hadn’t personally argued with Jennifer multiple times in a single weekend. “If you’re sure.”
Gavin just nodded. “I’m sure. But listen, Audrey. Even though this is an exciting opportunity, you can’t let it distract you from the core work we do here at the Shropshire Echo.”
“Of course not,” said Audrey.
“Seventy-nine thousand four hundred and six people are relying on us to keep them informed about the things that really matter to the real lives of the real people of Shropshire.”
“Absolutely,” said Audrey.
“So what I really need from you right now is for you to leave this with me.” Gavin slid his glasses up his nose and, fleetingly, he looked like the journalist he’d probably been in his younger days.
“I’m serious, Audrey, we need to do this properly or it could cause the Echo a lot of trouble.
Put your energy into the ghost barge story. ”
In her heart of hearts, Audrey did not want to focus all or indeed any of her energy on the ghost barge story.
Nor, if she was being one hundred percent honest, was she convinced that the ghost barge story counted as something that really mattered to the real lives of the real people of Shropshire.
But now was not the time to bring that up.
Especially since she’d just asked Gavin to go out on a limb for her.
A limb that ran under a sewage outflow pipe.
She mustered her most team-playerey voice. Which, honestly, wasn’t that different from her normal voice because Audrey was kind of a team player. Or, as Natalie had put it during an argument once, had a subservient mindset. “You got it.”
Grabbing her things, she hurried out of Gavin’s office and down to the car park where Eddie, the Echo’s best and only photographer, was waiting for her. He had an enormous grin on his face, camera around his neck, suspiciously new-looking black bag over his shoulder.
Audrey always tried very hard not to pretend that she didn’t want to know things she blatantly wanted to know. With Eddie, that policy was occasionally a liability. “What’s that?” she asked.
Still grinning, Eddie opened a Velcro pouch on the suspiciously new-looking black bag and pulled out—Audrey wasn’t really sure what he’d pulled out—some kind of plastic box with red lights all over it and an ergonomic grip. “I’m glad you asked, because—”
“No.”
“You haven’t—”
“It’s a ghost-hunting kit, isn’t it?”
Eddie nodded. “I thought since we were investigating a haunting, it would be best to be prepared.”
“We’re not investigating a haunting,” Audrey reminded him. “We’re interviewing an amateur historian from Ironbridge about a local legend.”
“A local legend about a”—Eddie’s voice fell into that deep, trembly tone that’s the universal code for supernatural—“ghoooooost baaaaaarge.”
“And you think we’re going to see this ghost barge at two thirty on a Monday in June?”
Not willing to let go of a good thing, Eddie waggled his ghost detector. “Ghooooost baaaaarge.”
Sometimes you just had to let people have things. And, when you got right down to it, who was Audrey Lane to take a ghost barge away from a perfectly nice man who she was beginning to suspect was really a fourteen-year-old boy in elaborate cosplay.
Accepting her ghostly fate, she unlocked the car door and got into the driver’s seat, leaving Eddie to pile in beside her with his overpriced collection of EMF meters and EVP recorders, each of which he insisted on explaining to Audrey during the eleven-minute drive to Ironbridge.
Or at least he insisted on explaining them as well as he was able, which wasn’t very, possibly because their function was intentionally vague to stop people demanding refunds.
The most significant landmark in Ironbridge was—and every time Audrey mentioned this to somebody who wasn’t from Shropshire, they thought it was a joke—the Iron Bridge.
It was, she would then explain to them, an iron bridge of genuine historical significance, the first of its kind in the world.
Except today she would instead be explaining to them that it was also, allegedly, the best spot from which to see the terrible Ghost Barge of the Severn Valley.
They’d arranged to meet their contact at the north end of the bridge, which was where they often arranged to meet people when they came to Ironbridge.
It was, however, somewhere Audrey was beginning to think they should stop meeting people, because the north end of the bridge was also home to a shop that specialised in hand-raised pork pies, and Eddie tended to find that distracting.
So Audrey waited on a bench overlooking the gorge while Eddie grabbed himself a selection of pies, pasties, sausage rolls, and pork scratchings. To her relief, this time at least he managed to get back before the interviewee arrived.
Her name was Melissa Pope and she was a sensible, tweedy woman in her mid-forties who turned out to be a folklorist rather than a ghost hunter. Which to Audrey was a blessed relief, and to Eddie a crushing disappointment.
“So you’ve never actually seen a ghost?” he asked while inelegantly cutting himself a slice of pork pie.
“No.”
“Or a ghoul?”
“No.”
“Goblin? Spectre? Poltergeist?”
Melissa Pope was, in Audrey’s estimation, handling this rather well. “No. And I think poltergeists are meant to be invisible.”
“Banshee? Barghest? Bandersnatch.”
“No, no, and that’s from ‘Jabberwocky.’ Now, shall we talk about the barge?”
It was, in the end, a better interview than Audrey had been fearing, despite the supernatural theme and the pie crumbs.
They got some interesting quotes about the ghost barge itself, about its journey up the Severn ending in Jackfield, where there was some evidence of plague bodies having been buried at the end of the seventeenth century.
“I think for me,” Melissa Pope concluded, “that’s what makes ghost stories so fascinating.
It’s not the ghost, it’s—well, it’s the story.
The plague hit Shropshire extremely hard and that must have been this huge traumatic event for people back then, and today we still get…
I suppose we get echoes and memories of it.
That’s what legends like this are, when you get right down to it. ”
Eddie was looking at his EVP recorder, bitterly disappointed. “So there isn’t really a ghost barge?”
“There might be.” From her tone, Melissa probably had this conversation a lot and was used to being diplomatic.
“I’m not saying people are wrong for believing in mysterious things if they want to.
Just that…to me it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not.
It doesn’t even matter if there really were plague barges running up the Severn in those days, although I think there probably were.
What matters is the connection. Come up onto the bridge at night, look down into the gorge, and you’ll see ghosts.
Even if you don’t believe in an afterlife. ”
“Wait.” Eddie looked briefly thrilled. “So there are ghosts?” Then abruptly unthrilled. “Oh. You mean metaphorically, don’t you?”
Melissa Pope gave an enigmatic smile.
But Eddie was continuing to dethrill. “This is like when I was little and my dad said my mum was coming home from hospital with a present for me and it turned out to be my brother.” He rummaged disconsolately in his bag of pork scratchings.
“Like, he’s an okay guy. But I really wanted a PlayStation. ”
They wrapped the interview there, and after making Audrey swear to look after what was left of his pies, Eddie went out onto the bridge to take some shots of the gorge that they could use to illustrate where the nonexistent-but-possibly-metaphorically-resonant-ghost-barge might be seen if you showed up at the right time of night.
Mostly it was just an opportunity to get some pretty pictures of the view that would give locals a warm glow of recognition and, if they were lucky, inspire outsiders to drop by and visit the village.
While she was waiting, Audrey let the parts of her brain that did this sort of thing automatically unpick the story and look for its heart.
Given how little she’d wanted to be involved with it, she’d found it surprisingly moving in the end.
Ghosts she had no time for, but there were some kinds of magic she definitely did believe in.
The magic of places and people. The way they worked upon each other and time worked upon them.
How you weren’t just what you were now. You were everything you’d ever been.