"So, my father was a murdering Anti-Semite, directly or indirectly responsible for eight people's deaths." "You won't say it, so I will." "Based on what evidence exactly?" "That you've found so far." "Nothing that would ever stand up in court, Mrs Gessler, but you must be aware that back then the vast majority of these people who passed themselves off as spiritualists were nothing more than magicians themselves." "And the tricks and illusions they cooked up, to fool people, were so ingenious, usually..." "they got away with murder." "Maybe...in this case..." "I dunno..." "You seem to have a more open mind about it all." "Born of religious conviction?" "Faith, Jonathan, or fear, I'm not sure which." "The more I go through life, the more questions it throws up and fewer answers." "Of course, I've had plenty of time to reflect on what happened that day." "What I remember of it, but..." "One thing that's always lodged in my mind... and you wonder, I suppose, eventually, whether you just imagined it, but..." "As they were all standing there, chattering away, trying to make sense of it all," "he bent down and picked up what looked like a small pebble or stone from the floor and put it in his pocket in a...very private way, as if..." "I mean, he obviously thought no-one had noticed." "Did that make him a killer?" "You tell me." "There are certain moments, aren't there, when you just suddenly stop..." "..and look around and think," ""How the hell did I get to this point in my life?"" "Standing here, on a ransom drop, waiting for the woman I love to be bundled into a ditch - if we're lucky." "When I first met her, she was performing a trapeze act in Prague quite brilliantly." "I mean, truly astonishing, the skeletal dexterity, what she could do with her body." "I'd never met anyone like her." "And so..." "Do I see a link here with your friend?" "Well, you just wonder..." "How many more young women will suddenly go missing before we're finished?" "Wow." "You must be..." "Some kind of mind-reader." "Sorry...professional reflex, I wasn't trying to..." "Back in the car!" "Sorry, are these making your eyes water?" "Just enough to douse the fire in my heart." "But here's to re-kindling." "Cheers." "I have to go." "Give me a kiss." "Hey!" "Now, listen - just you put her down." "I'm saying goodbye to flat-mate, you have problem with that?" "You wanna watch it with him, Lenny!" "He's the magic man, he could do anything!" "Fire that gun in his face, he'll just catch the bullets in his teeth, I've seen him!" "Yes, well, let's not get..." "carried away here..." "I mean, we don't wanna waste the guy's ammunition." "I have to go." "And you, you great useless sack of shit..." "You look after her." "Because if you break her heart, I come round and I'll break your legs." "Oh, he's all talk, don't worry." "Anyway, what time's this friend of yours coming?" "I better get a move on." "I hope you're not gonna just spend tonight fretting about all this other stuff?" "She wants to run around solving murders and kidnappings to stick on her silly website..." "..just let her get on with it." "It's not your problem, is it?" "And will you not keep tidying up after me all the while?" "God, I read an article the other day, said that's a classic sign of being spiritually repressed." "So just try and chill out." "And let's enjoy ourselves tonight." "Yes, I'll try and enjoy myself with a woman who's spent her working life bent over a coffee table." "Whose idea of a deep relationship..." "PHONE RINGS" "..is a man with a 12 inch..." "Hello?" "Yes, I am, actually, kind of busy." "Where are you?" "I'm outside the theatre, watching him load up the truck." "You know, his roadie guy, Glenn, we're not at all sure about." "Props and cabinets and stuff." "Apparently, I've just found out, they're all stored away in this big warehouse, in the East End." "Away from prying eyes." "Dunno, it's just got, "secret hiding place"" "written all over it, don't you think?" "Um...no, I can't possibly, not tonight." "Cos we're just on our way out, so..." "Yes, well, fine, thanks, whatever." "Bye!" "Have fun!" "Thanks, Glenn." "Just chuck it over here, would you?" "We're going to need to get the whole flying rig boxed up and flown out by Friday, so..." "Yeah." "No problem." "Oh, hello!" "Come in." "Hi." "Nicola!" "Hi, Candy." "If you want to just dump your coat in there," "I'll go and see to the food." "Something smells delicious, what is it?" "Putenesca sauce..." "Will you bless her heart, Jonathan, she actually believes I have magic powers!" "Can you imagine the attraction that gives me in the bedroom?" "It's a passport to paradise." "Not that anyone could accuse you of short-termism." "And what happens when she finds out the whole act is one big fake, from start to finish?" "What's to find out?" "I got enough tricks and angles to keep this alive for as long..." "POP!" "Oh, God, no!" "My God!" "Will you look at that?" "It's OK!" "Don't worry, it has done this before." "It's like, when the elasticity or something, it just suddenly goes in the implant and it all just collapses." "Means I'll have to go back and see that bloody surgeon again in the morning." "Anyway, help yourself to bread rolls." "Thanks, Glenn." "That's everything." "You just head off." "I've got a few things I need to sort out." "Oh!" "Ugh." "Oh." "Enjoying it?" "Is it a grape?" "Mmm, got grapes in it, that one." "They're supposed to be in there." "That tastes a lot like pickled onion." "It's delicious." "Very nice." "There's a little deli store in the market just round the corner from here." "I've been going there years." "You just need to take it out of the fridge for a couple of hours..." "Mmmm." "Uh-huh." "Oh...d'you mind?" "I think that's me..." "No worries." "And, um...would you excuse me a second?" "Can you believe she had the nerve to pass them off like that, as the genuine article?" "!" "All that time, she just let me go on believing that that was nature's own handiwork!" "the irony, can you?" "I give up." "Oh, God..." "What the hell's she g..." "Sorry...um..." "This does actually sound serious..." "Jonathan?" "Two hours!" "Folded up in here like a penknife!" "Ow!" "He'll be miles away by now!" "Hopefully!" "Well, of course!" "But I'm telling you..." "God, oh, God, oh, God!" "Can we just get out of here?" "Please!" "So, how long will they keep him, d'you think?" "They've got bugger all evidence." "still there, all that while." "It's like he's one step ahead of us, all the time." "And that whole kidnap thing obviously was a complete fiddle." "So he set it all up himself, do we think?" "As a cover for murder?" "So it would seem." "And how wrong was I about him then, in the end?" "Mmm." "More wrong, possibly, than we might have imagined." "Have you not worked out yet, what the two of them were doing in that church?" "Of all the mistakes that I've made in my life," "I'm not sure I'll ever come to terms with this one." "That I underestimated Lance Gessler, and what he was capable of." "Cos am I right in thinking you and Elodie...?" "The two of them..." "God knows when all that began to lose its lustre, but..." "And what was weird, it took this whole thing with Mina to bring it home to us." "How serious we were about each other." "No." "No." "You're absolutely right." "It's was like, the way was clear now to make a life for ourselves." "I just can't take it any more." "This house, her, everything...." "Of course, when she told him, that was it. ..it's suffocating me." "The thing is for some time..." "She gave him three weeks' notice." "She was out of his act, out of his life." "..I mean, you'll find a way to cope, somehow, won't you?" "You always do." "And when all this kidnap stuff happened," "I mean, what else am I gonna think?" "Cos that is how clever he was." "I just thought if I said anything at that stage," "I dunno, I might have compromised her safety." "And now!" "For God's sake, what kind of shit is going on round here?" "And I thought that was your department, explaining it all." "I tell you, if I ever wake up one day and find all of this was real..." "God help us all." "Jonathan?" "You're staring at a ladder." "No, you're staring at a ladder." "I'm staring at a hypotenuse." "Which does just make you wonder..." "And did this...just..." "Sorry?" "Oh, yeah." "Third one this week." "It's like they've got a kind of death wish or something, round here." "Anyway, I suppose I'd better get on or go mad." "Look." "Radical proposal." "Cos I have had a right basinful of all this now." "It seems to me the only way we're gonna find out what's going on in that room is to tough it out for ourselves." "What do you reckon?" "Hmm?" "That's if you can bear the thought, Jonathan, of spending the night with me." "I mean, we wouldn't go the whole hog, with padlocks and everything, it's just..." "Yes...well, whatever you feel you need to do." "Um..." "What I saw last night, in that warehouse," "I know must be very hard for you to..." "What we see, and what we think we see, aren't always the same, are they?" "I just pray to God, when the dust has settled in due course, we'll find out this has all been some dreadful, ghastly mistake." "So, here we go, then." "I mean, it is all bollocks." "We know that, obviously, so..." "But then of course, that's what Mina thought." "Amazing to think he just spent his whole life here." "Is that what they said?" "In Edwardian times, this mad relative character." "It makes you think." "I dunno, what is it about being in this room, that really gives you the willi..." "What are you doing?" "What do you mean?" "That's a bit previous, isn't it?" "I thought the idea was that we were just gonna sit it out, and..." "And what?" "It's half past 11," "I've had a lot of late nights this week." "And surely the whole point is that we just do what everyone else has done." "Get undressed, go to bed, go to sleep." "And unwittingly surrender to whatever nameless horrors lie dormant here in The Nightmare Room." "What are your plans?" "Are you going to stand there like Hannibal Lecter all night or wha..?" "What?" "No, I noticed that before." "You put any pressure on this mattress... ..a sort of vent seems to open, in the canopy..." "..that seems to be full of dead flies..." "Great." "And what do we make of our friend on the wall, while we're at it?" "Man with pipe in mouth." "I dunno." "It's like, whenever she looks at it..." "And all that creepy talk, about history and the value we put on human life..." "You just get a feeling of some dark and sinister part it's played, at some point in her li..." "Hello?" "Yeah, just a quick one, treasure!" "If I say Big Apple and gridlock, you'll know where I'm coming from!" "Can you believe I'm running eight meetings behind?" "!" "I don't think I'll get much change here out of another week!" "Love to natter, but..." "I'll give you a bell maybe on Tuesday!" "Yeah, OK, Alec." "Look after yourself." "I mean, bottom line, what's your reckoning?" "D'you think he... ..really exists, or..." "As scary as it sounds," "I'm afraid I do." "There's too much frightening evidence we can't ignore." "There's no question, he exists all right." "You serious?" "You really think there's a ghost?" "Hmm?" "Oh...sorry, I thought we were talking about Max Headroom there, on the phone." "You ever actually seen him in the flesh, that bloke, or..." "Ghost-wise," "I don't think there's any question, our friend Mr Futrelle laid a trap in this room," "designed to fuel and perpetuate the superstition that kept him in business all his life." "This afternoon," "I did get a slight glimmer of...something..." "So I suppose all we can do now is just sit tight, and try and keep our wits about us." "Jonathan?" "Jonathan!" "What happened?" "Oh, God!" "You OK?" "Yes." "Just...panic attack..." "like I..." "I couldn't breathe there for a minute, I was just.." "Oh, my God!" "What?" "No, I..." "I was just remembering what she said to us tonight." ""What we see, and what we think we see."" "Obviously, you see someone cutting into someone's neck, but," "I mean, what if, with all that gasping, she was actually choking, and he comes along, and the only way he can try and free her up to save her..." "The old emergency tracheotomy." "Cos by that time, it'd all be too late, but..." "And of course the reason he doesn't say anything..." "Whoever did it could be someone he wants to protect." "What's that they say?" ""A watched pot never boils."" "I know, but I will certainly be glad to get out of..." "Aah!" "Oh, God!" "This bloody bed!" "That has done my back in for good now." "What the hell did you make me lie down for!" "On this lumpy, moth-eaten old pile of..." "Can you get down the stairs?" "Stairs?" "I can barely walk." "Drugs is what I need, maximum strength." "OK." "Oh, my God!" "So what's been happening?" "You're not telling me the two of you just..." "Oh, yeah." "We gave it our best shot, I'm afraid, but obviously somewhere along the line, something was different." "What the hell was it?" "That dead bird, in the wheelbarrow..." "Sorry?" "No, it's just...when that other one hit the window, the first day we were up there, a few minutes later I saw it, or I thought I did, sticking out the roof." "Exactly where you'd expect to find it, just below the attic." "Which pretty much killed off a little hypothesis I had before I had a chance to get going." "That the room we'd been standing in was not the same one as we're looking at now, on top of the house." "But then, what you said yesterday, obviously opened the whole thing up again." "That bird could've been up there for days, it didn't prove anything." "Which meant that maybe it wasn't such a mad idea after all." "Bearing in mind the size of the place, and the fact you're going up a spiral staircase, by the time you get to the top you could be almost anywhere." "We just take it as read that it's an attic because of the small pitched ceiling but..." "..that room could easily be on another level with a small angled ceiling or a "hypotenuse"" "deliberately built in, to suggest a roof." "I mean, no-one'd be any the wiser." "Either way, it's still the same room, where it all happened." "How does that solve anything?" "It doesn't, that's the problem." "All it does mean is we can no longer be sure what's underneath." "Certainly not that bedroom she slept in I looked round the other day." "Oh, that's what I came down here for... industrial-strength pain killers for her back." "Oh, right." "Yeah, I'm sure I can dig something up." "Otherwise she'll never get down from there." "Unless she's decided..." "..when I get back tonight, that usually sorts it out..." "Oh..." "Oh, if that's it!" "Cos that small stone he picked up could've easily been not a stone at all..." "Cos that's what they all did, not in the night, but in the morning." "They all took a bath." "Oh, shit!" "In the name of God." "Where is she, can you see her?" "Joey!" "Joey!" "It's closing." "Coming up again." "Wedge it." "Wedge it." "Do something!" "Joey!" "Just grab her arm!" "I've got you." "I've got you!" "OK." "OK." "SHE SOBS It's all right." "It's all right." "I think we all knew the house contained some pretty dark secrets." "Maybe not as dark as that." "Basically a fairly massive, concealed water tank, underneath an attic that's not where we thought it was." "Stairs to the real one, God knows." "Blocked up probably, a long time ago." "And beneath the bath, a very efficient rig of pulleys and counter-weights - pressure-sensitive, we can assume, that respond to the weight of a body by tipping it out, and then closing up again." "You feel the Hoover Dam was an engineering breeze next to that one, but, as you know well enough, that's the very reason these things work." "There's a level of artifice that common sense just won't tolerate." "Something so enduring and elaborate, suddenly demonic possession sounds a lot more plausible." "That gooey "ectoplasm", it's fairly safe to say, was pre-set, to drip all over Mencken as he lay in the bed that night." "Just to make doubly sure he'll want to freshen up in the morning." "The fact that it's now harbouring dead insects may well have had a similar effect on your friend." "I don't know how she felt about spiders at all." "And it was a piece of soap he didn't want us to see." "Flew across the floor, you think?" "When he went under." "Of course, history doesn't record the fate of all the people who spent the night there and didn't take a bath." "Mythology works best when it's selective." "Yes, well, we see the light now, at least, on so many things this morning." "That strange affair in the warehouse, which I'm sure was an honest mistake at the time." "Sorry, what d'you mean, mistake?" "I told you..." "No, forgive me." "We know now, it was a mistake." "The police rang me earlier, to confirm." "Lance couldn't possibly have murdered Elodie, as you claim, because they've just received a video that quite clearly shows her alive and well, at eight o'clock this morning." "Mr and Mrs Whey Cheng were filming this little moment in the park, at 8.13 this morning." "Time and date there, as you can see." "Also, just here, our local daily newspaper, published only this morning." "Our two young tourists apparently recognised her from all the news coverage and rang up the police straight away." "This is not possible." "I'm afraid it's not only possible, it's irrefutable." "Wherever she is and whatever she's up to... ..and whatever it was you saw that night, my son is innocent." "OK!" "I am not too proud to admit, I am now so out of my depth." "I mean, you were there!" "That was not a trick!" "That woman could not have been more dead!" "Verified by a qualified nurse for God's sake!" "And now, a couple of days later, here she is walking round a park, after we all saw her with her throat cut open?" "There's ways you can stop a pulse in your hand...thing Adam does, by squeezing a tennis ball under his arm, but this?" "Certainly puts Lazarus in the shade." "Hang on, you still got that newspaper?" "Now that is curious." "And taken together with this, that's almost conclusive." "Wouldn't you say?" "Would I?" "You would if you knew your David Hockney." "Because therein lies the perfect, cryptic clue, which if you cast your mind back, through everything we've seen and heard, these last few weeks, points us in a very clear direction." "Towards the one person here capable of pulling something like this off." "As daring a piece of magical misdirection as you'll ever see." "Utterly amazing." "Right." "Is this something you want to share with me, at all, or..." "Absolutely, but it might make sense to get down the local nick ASAP." "Assuming our Mr Gessler will shortly be released without charge, and who knows, we might be able to put this whole thing to bed." "No, no!" "You can cheat death on stage every night, or appear to, but what happened in that warehouse was as real and sadistic and unequivocally final as it gets." "Lance Gessler murdered Elodie that night, as he'd always planned to, after God knows what taunting and suffering had gone on, since he staged that phoney kidnap." "As tempting as our little thought was, about the emergency tracheotomy, not sure it ever really had legs." "Somewhere, you imagine, behind that facade of charm, was a gene that drove him, like his grandfather, to crush all opposition, with ruthless ingenuity, and with a callous disregard for anyone else he brought in to help." "Someone who might come along and pick up that money, in the road." "And someone who, somehow, managed to rig up a video, that appeared to contradict the evidence of three independent witnesses." "Of course, he never expected to be caught in the act like that." "That footage was always a part of a carefully planned insurance policy." "A kidnap victim's caught on camera, taking a quiet stroll in the park?" "Even if she never turns up again, it'd be hard to put a murder case together." "Maybe we'd all warm to the idea that she'd faked it with Glenn, so the two of them could do a runner together." "But how was it done?" "Grabbing a shot one morning before she goes missing, if you know where she's gonna be, is easily arranged." "But how do we explain that newspaper that was conveniently being read in the background?" "A daily paper, with up to the minute news, that couldn't even have existed until first thing this morning." "Or could it?" "Suppose you know exactly what's going to be on the front page of that paper more than a week beforehand, because you're the person who's gonna design it." "Only question then is, how could you possibly know what the big story's gonna be that day?" "Answer - because you're gonna create it yourself." "A council meeting being interrupted by a swarm of bees wasn't too tricky to engineer..." "..and not too tricky, once you think back, to trace the culprit." "That's Lady Olga Cooper, chairperson of the Round Table." "Delia Gunning, our local newspaper editor..." "Delia, this wouldn't be more of your scrummy homemade honey?" "Back page, of course, less of a problem." "Local side's a dead cert to get knocked out of a cup tie, but you'd shoot an alternative, probably, as a cutaway, just in case." "Thing, I suppose, that sealed it, was that headline on page three." "Major new motorway that's gonna devastate the local community?" "Surely a more obvious choice for a front page lead, than the one that was already locked in place?" "Or in David Hockney's words..." "A Bigger Splash?" "I'm imagining your cast of bit players, Japanese or otherwise, would've been slipped a few quid probably, to play ball?" ""Bit players"..." "Weren't we all?" "He told me...he..." "Loved you?" "One of his finest illusions." "But she would have destroyed him." "They always do, women like that." "You think what she knew " "Everything that was sacred and vital to his career, his life." "The way she'd betrayed him already, the contempt she'd shown." "How could he have risked that kind of exposure?" "But then maybe if she wasn't to be trusted, neither were you." "Collaborator in an abduction, accessory to murder." "How much did you know?" "Enough to warrant an unfortunate "accident on the stairs"" "when you got home." "What are you doing?" "Get off me!" "Oh, oh, oh!" "Oh dear God, forgive me." "I suppose you've heard." "How did SHE take it?" "The one thing we can never escape is our destiny." "However much I prayed this day would never dawn, once the seeds have been sown..." "The seeds?" "Oh, look into my eyes." "You can't see?" "The light of innocence died there long ago." "This is all to do with that painting." "You said something once about rescuing it, from a fire." "It was 1965." "I was staying at a relative's house, in Osnabruck." "They said it was a stray coal or something, from the grate." "And still we continue, don't we?" "To make that choice... ..between the present and posterity." "I always knew, of course, that God would punish me... ..but never like this." "I made him want it, you see, so much." "Devoted my life to that dream, that one day that he would be the greatest showman on Earth." "Day by day," "I turned ambition into obsession." "And never even noticed..." "..his own mother... ..I'd given birth to a monster." "So, a certain surreal symmetry, you'd have to say, prevailed there in the end." "Man with pipe in mouth?" "Cos by then, I guess, he had nowhere to hide." "Magicians." "Don't even go there." "Yes, just waiting for our friends to arrive, there'll be six of us in all." "If you'd like to take a seat over there, please, thank you." "I've booked their exclusive private banqueting suite for the evening." "For all-round intimacy and sophistication it has no equal in London." "And so, what's next, you run this little puzzle on the web, so the whole world gets the inside story?" "And incidentally if you're up for a bit of sponsorship," "I could do you a good deal on some advertising space." "Very funky demographic, could bring you a whole new audience." "Well, you know, ordinarily..." "If it weren't for the fact this other little venture's completely cleaned him out." "Investing in the 3D porn industry." "The wisdom of which clearly escapes you Jonathan, so try this one for size." "A binding contract from Mr Snuffy White himself that in return for my not immodest contribution yesterday, guarantees me 20% profit participation on every title in their catalogue." "Which I tell you guys, is serious peanuts." "Except, you realise there's no signature on this document." "Don't mess with me!" "But I was there, I watched him sign it in front of me!" "Right..." "Given the fact that she's already fooled you once Adam, you don't think it's possible that Miss Candy Mountains might actually have been selling you one great big dummy all along just to get you on board?" "It wouldn't take a lot of research, would it, into your recent output to have tumbled to the magic properties of vanishing ink?" "She's not gonna turn up tonight, is she?" "Actually, I think I'll wait till Alec gets here." "He really knows his wine, so..." "Oh...don't tell me!" "You can't be in Miami still?" "You promised you'd be back by this morning!" "." "Yeah!" "Um, this is really tricky babe, actually, cos...it's just, something's happened in the last 24 hours, which..." "And if you're there, Jonathan, don't be shocked, OK?" "Cos, I mean, I wasn't looking for it, I swear but..." "According to this month's Vogue, you just have to act on impulse sometimes." "Just make that phone call, hop on a plane, whatever it takes, and just seize the moment, or it's gone forever." "It's just, the more I kept thinking about him after that day in the theatre, I don't know what it was." "I mean, what can I say guys, we're both so sorry..." "Gutted, aren't we, but..." "Anyway, you have a great night there!" "And just try and take" "And when we get back, we'll all have a really good laugh, won't we?" "so...catch you later." "Bye." "Now then, it was?" "Just...three for The Nightmare Room." "transcript:chocolate sync:innuit"