The Cold Calling

XVI

Three-fifteen a.m., Andy driving as if she could read Bobby Maiden’s mind. Grim-faced under the fluffed-up red hair, clogging the pedal as though they were breaking bail — all mobiles alert for a ten-year-old powder-blue Golf with a Greenpeace sticker.

Slowing only whenever she spotted a police car. But it wasn’t police, as such, that Maiden was worried about. He was seeing a dark vehicle blocking a country road. Two men in balaclavas. Tooled up. Silencers. No small talk, no prelims. Maiden, then Andy. The Golf driven into a wood with the bodies.

But, then, Maiden was as paranoid as you can get.

They were a good ten miles out of Elham before Andy spoke.

‘Who’s Emma, then?’

‘Mmm. Well …’ He told her about the hit-and-run car which had first brought him to her attention.

‘Aw, you’re no serious …’

‘Plus — in case you missed the references back there — her old man’s Tony Parker.’

Andy shook her head, laughing her comfortable, smoker’s laugh. ‘Jesus God, Bobby. And I thought I was mixing with lowlife the day they called me into a meeting of the hospital trust.’

‘She’s OK. Didn’t you think?’

Andy thought about it. ‘Aye. Genes aren’t everything. And the last person she’ll ever harm is you. But you’ll know that. Are you no awfully knackered, Bobby?’

‘Long past knackered. Knackered was yesterday.’

She’d tilted the passenger seat for him, but he’d pulled it back up, even further, so it was almost a right angle. He concentrated hard on the lights through the windscreen, but with half his vision blocked by the makeshift patch it was hard to keep his good eye open.

‘But you’re no gonny let yourself sleep, right?’

‘No.’

‘Bobby, you need-’

‘Sleep, sleep and sleep.’

‘You’re no gonny die, Bobby. Not again. I mean like not yet. Not imminently.’

They were at a brightly lit motorway intersection, big blue signs. When they hit the motorway itself, it felt safer: a no man’s land.

‘I was wondering. Got anything in your bag to kind of ward off sleep?’

‘Speed? In your condition? Christ, you would be bloody dead. There’s chocolate biscuits in the glove compartment, and that’s your lot.’

‘Should have asked Clutton.’

‘I don’t like the way you’re talking.’ Andy leaned back in her seat, hands loosening around the wheel. ‘Look, I’m no shrink … But maybe what we’re looking at here is your subconscious manufacturing a smokescreen, setting up a block to shield you from some trauma. Images of bleakness, this cold, soulless place. Cold neutralizes pain. Like when we put the frozen peas on your eye.’

‘Yes … but … Well, OK … Suppose you wake up dead?’

‘Is that no a wee bit contradictory?’

‘With all your bodily juices drying up. Your muscles dead weight. Veins clogged.’

‘Oh.’

‘And being aware of decaying. Tasting the soil.’

‘Shit,’ Andy said.

‘Twice that’s happened. How normal is that?’

‘Aw, hell …’ She hesitated. ‘You know what this says to me? I mean, this is just off the top of my head, I havenae thought it out, but it’s as if when … after we brought you round … some part of you stayed dead. It’s as though something down there in your mind doesnae know we got your body to come back.’

He saw her hands tighten on the wheel.

‘It’s like you’re carrying around your own corpse, Bobby.’

‘Well, thanks,’ Maiden said. ‘That’s very encouraging.’

They kept on talking after that. There was a flask of black coffee Em had made, and chocolate biscuits. They were through Spaghetti Junction, so little traffic this time in the morning that the great concrete snakepit looked like a major overspend.

She was telling him about this guy called Marcus Bacton, a schoolteacher for over thirty years, though he claimed to hate kids worse than the flu. Took early retirement after his wife’s death, and bought himself this rundown farmhouse on the Welsh border, to start a new career as a magazine editor.

‘Kind of Learned Gentleman’s Journal of the Unexplained. Printed on the kind of paper you wouldnae wipe your arse on in case your fingers went through. So … he’s stuck out in the sticks, losing money hand over fist on this awful rag, and having to pay a housekeeper on account of he cannae tie his own shoes. Lucky to land one who didnae ask for much other than a roof over her. Mrs Willis. The healer.’

Andy pulled off the motorway, giving two fingers to the driver of an Escort who’d zipped in from the fast lane and cut in front.

‘Dickhead. Listen, I never went for this baloney. Laying on of hands. Sending healing vibes. I’m a professional. Like, if it works, what we doin’ spending billions on hospitals and clinics? And yet …’

Healing vibes. He was remembering Jonathan telling him about Andy’s hands either side of his head as he lay dead, Andy’s eyes closed. It was as if she was somewhere else. She was concentrating so hard on bringing you back, it was as though nothing else in the world mattered or ever would again if she failed. When you started to breathe, she just sagged. And we thought …

Maiden jerked in his seat. He’d almost slipped away. It was like waking up on the edge of a sheer cliff. He swallowed a lot of air and laid his cheek against the window, for the coolness of it.

‘… burial chamber,’ Andy was saying. ‘Part of it had collapsed, and there was a sign telling you not to go inside. But me — all six and a half stone of me — I fitted under the capstone, no trouble. I was that weak, you know? When you said that about being dried out like a corpse, that was how it was for me, with the colitis. You’re just crapping all the moisture out of your system. You’re a husk. Tired the whole time, and weary as hell, and you’ll try anything. And so I’m lying there, in this burial chamber, until the dawn comes. You like the dawn, Bobby?’

‘When the world’s all quiet and fresh and sparkly.’

‘This was a dawn like I never knew — and I’ve seen a few thousand, end of a shift. It’s like … very dark in this wee chamber. I must’ve fallen asleep straight away. Just lying there on the hard earth. These huge stones all around me. A really dense sleep. And then, the next thing, I become aware of my hand … I must’ve been lying with my arms under my head and my hands are out in front, and this hand … it’s like it’s on fire.’

The car slowed, her hands on the wheel lit by red light from traffic signals.

‘But it’s … it’s like the fire’s inside. The hand glowing in the darkness. Just this hand. Not the stone, not the earth. Just the hand, like there’s fire inside. So I reach out with the other hand to touch it, and that lights up too.’

The lights changed to green and Andy pulled away. Maiden saw she was smiling.

‘What it was, it was the midsummer sun coming in through the slit, in this really focused beam. They were warm, too, the hands.’

They were coming into Worcester city centre and by its lights Maiden could see the girl in Andy’s rugged face.

‘Found I was breathing very, very slowly, aware of each breath as it came in. And it was like each breath was going further into my body. And while this happened, it was getting progressively lighter and warmer inside the chamber. The sunlight coming between these big stones like … molten gold from a what-you-call-it? Crucible. I can feel it now.’

Maiden smiled at hard-bitten Andy, all poetic. But he was impressed.

‘Afterwards, walking back to the cottage, it was like, you know, walking on the golden clouds. It was Midsummer’s Day. They told me how this wee girl, years back, she had this vision of the Virgin Mary in this very same place, on Midsummer’s Morning. Jesus, it’s enough tae give you religion.’

He noticed how her accent would ebb — the result of thirty years in England — and then roll back in a wave with the powerful memories.

‘They wouldnae take any more money for the cottage, though Mrs W fed me for days. Fresh fruit, homemade veggie soup. And weird stuff from bottles with stoppers. Miracles. Magic. When I left, I was about a stone heavier but … light. Inside, you know? And before I go, she says, You can do this now. If you want to. So when I get back to work, I’m signing on for every healing course advertised on the back wall of Elham Healthfoods. Acupuncture, homoeopathy, cranial osteopathy, Reiki.’

Maiden said cautiously, ‘You’re saying you used this on me?’

Andy shook her head. ‘I wouldnae claim credit. I’m a convert to alternative medicine, but … powerful enough to kick-start the dead? I don’t dare think. The Holy Mother? Bobby, I was raised a Presbyterian. All I’m saying, there’s something remarkable about that place, and I cannae explain it in any scientific terms. Whether it’s some kind of magnetic thing, some property of the place, like Lourdes and such, I wouldnae have any idea about that. All I know is, when you were lying stone dead on that table in A and E, I was holding the image in ma head of the rising sun at High Knoll and willing it to come into ma hands and to come into you.’

… we thought, for a second, that she was going to drop dead, Jonathan had said.

‘Maybe I blacked out for a split second. And the next thing, the whole team’s jumpin’ up and down and whooping and everybody’s hugging me and stuff. I … couldnae … I couldnae go home. I was too high. Couldnae sleep that night.’

They were through the city now, back in the dark country.

‘So why didn’t you feel like that, Bobby? Breaks ma heart.’

The other side of Hereford, small signs were saying Michaelchurch, Craswall, Longtown. Tiny, scattered lights from windows in the sky. Hill country.

‘I feel I’ve been ungrateful,’ Maiden said. ‘You wasted your … light.’

‘Get lost. There’s always a reason for things. Did I ask you what you believed, Bobby? If you ever believed there was stuff out there?’

‘Yeah, well …’ Through the windscreen, Maiden saw a church steeple greyly smoke-ringed with low night cloud. ‘I used to believe all kinds of stuff. Once.’

‘When you were gonny be a painter?’

‘Yeah. Not many coppers believe. Like doctors. Like how can any kind of a just God allow this shit …?’

‘I’m a cynic, Bobby. And a sceptic. I take a lot of convincing. Years of seeing good human beings die prematurely and bad human beings keep on recovering. I have no answers. And yet …’

‘Truth is I’d love to believe all that,’ Maiden said. ‘Be nice to be that kind of person. New Age cop. But my experience of being dead ties in only too well with the kind of deaths I’ve been seeing for years. Cold, ugly … to be avoided.’ He sighed. ‘To be avoided.’

At the end of the village street, a muddied sign said: Capel-y-ffin. Mountain road, unsuitable for heavy vehicles.

‘Nearly there, son,’ Andy said. She was thinking of how, when she talked to Marcus yesterday, he said Mrs Willis told him she had seen a black light. Over the Knoll.

That would make sense to Bobby, all right. With his experience. Black light.

In the headlights, the whitened bone-branches of two half-dead trees locked horns over the road.