The Cold Calling

XIX

Cindy Mars-Lewis made it three, possibly four, dead, plus one near-miss.

The near-miss was the boy motorcyclist in mid-Wales. The possible was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl found strangled, but not sexually assaulted, last January, in a bus shelter not far from Harold’s Stones at Trellech in Monmouthshire. This was still only a possible because the bus shelter, as Cindy had confirmed on a site visit, was on a very dubious alignment.

But, then — Cindy watched a boat far out in St Bride’s Bay — there was no evidence this murderer was a perfectionist.

Take the killing of the Midlands businessman on a bird-watching weekend in Wiltshire. The man had been savagely and inexplicably battered to death at the foot of a small hill, in the middle of field a couple of miles from Avebury.

He could almost sense them now, but it would be necessary to visit the actual murder site to be certain, and he was rather unwilling to do this so soon after the event, with police all over the place. Cindy had discovered he was not terribly popular with the police.

In particular, that mild-mannered family man, DCI Hatch, in Bournemouth. Cindy had telephoned Mrs Carlotta Capaldi from Liverpool where he was playing Third Witch in a rather downmarket touring production of the Scottish play, to discover that Hatch would appreciate a word with him.

‘I’ve had an inquiry about you, Mr Lewis. From the West Mercia Regional Crime Squad.’

Suspecting something of the kind, Cindy had waited until he was home before telephoning Bournemouth CID on his mobile.

‘What the holy hell are you playing at?’ Hatch demanded. ‘You just won’t take piss off for an answer, will you? You know there’s absolutely nothing to connect these killings — nothing admissible, anyway — and as for ringing bloody Crimewatch …’

A mistake, Cindy would agree. But the TV programme had run such a detailed reconstruction of the killing of the poor homeless boy in a shop doorway, showing precisely the location of the shop, close to the ancient market cross, and …

‘An impulse, I’m afraid, Chief Inspector. They did appeal for anyone with information.’

‘You didn’t have information. You wasted police time with a crackpot, semi-mystical theory which even I can’t entirely grasp, about so-called ley lines — which I understand the experts say do not even exist — linking a bunch of crimes which simply have nothing in common.’

‘With all respect, Peter,’ said Cindy, ‘that’s what they said about the Yorkshire Ripper.’

‘Not my area,’ Hatch snapped.

‘Oh, no, you don’t want to talk about that, do you? Why Sutcliffe kept walking in and out of the police net because he didn’t fit the profile? And because they were conned by a hoax tape into looking for the wrong type of man entirely.’

‘I don’t see where this-’

‘Still several unsolved murders out there, that might be down to him. And why were they rejected by the Ripper squad? Because they weren’t prostitutes, and the profile said the Yorkshire Ripper Only Kills Prostitutes.’

‘Mr Lewis, we are not looking for a serial killer.’

‘Psychos make their own patterns, see. Sometimes, the police are just so simplistic.’

‘That,’ Hatch said icily, ‘is because, at the end of the day, we have to make it stand up in court. Now look, Mr Lewis, I was very patient. I accepted your desire to do all you could for Mrs Capaldi and I answered your curious questions on three separate occasions. But public relations has its limits, and telling West Mercia you were a friend of mine has, quite frankly, done my career no good at all.’

‘Is the file on Maria still open?’

There was a pause.

‘You know it is,’ Hatch said bitterly.

‘There you are, then, lovely. Your ideas were no better than mine.’

‘We’ll get him, Mr Lewis, I promise you. Meanwhile, if I could give you a word of advice, some senior policemen get rather suspicious of people who hang around murder investigations. It isn’t healthy, if you know what I mean.’

‘No,’ said Cindy, nettled. ‘I do not.’

‘Think about it. I know you’re harmless, relatively speaking, and that your only crime is an attempt to generate some self-publicity to revive a flagging career, but less tolerant officers …’

‘How dare you!’

‘Sorry,’ said Hatch. ‘That was probably uncalled for. But you would do well to remember that, while we welcome all the information we can get from the public, we do tend to prefer it if you leave the interpretation to us, because we’ve been there before.’

But had they? Had they been here before? Would Hatch have been able to say that when, for instance, his Hampshire colleagues had discovered, not so very long ago, that a particularly brutal stabbing was down to a twelve-year-old girl who received sexual gratification from killing? The youngest potential serial murderer in history, dealt with at Winchester Crown Court in March.

The change of millennium was continually pushing back the parameters of human experience.

The British police had simply never encountered a killer who walked the ancient tracks, in the footsteps of his prehistoric ancestors, and committed ritual murders — he would perhaps regard them as sacrifices — which were identifiable as such only by the nature of their locations. No connection at all, except to someone educated in the arcane mysteries of the landcape.

‘There are more crimes in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, my friend.’

Cindy watched the clouds formation-dancing over the bay.

‘Bananas, you are, Cindy.’

The eyes of Kelvyn Kite bulged from the shadows in his corner beside the sink.

‘Why do you bother, you old fool?’

The bird had a point. Why did he bother?

Hatch’s barb about self-publicity had stung only briefly. The stage was his career, but not his life. And he didn’t need the money. His lifestyle was humble. He followed the work around Britain and returned periodically to this very pretty fairground caravan on a tiny plot, which he owned, in a sheltered spot on the most beautiful part of the Pembrokeshire coast. His earthly life was neatly boxed, the corners of the box pleasantly scuffed and rounded.

As for his inner life … Well, sometimes it seemed to be getting richer, more complex. One day, he would have to retire and embark upon the final stage of the great quest, in preparation for his transition. But that was probably years ahead. He couldn’t help feeling there should be an interim stage. The idea that one should live one’s spiritual life solely in preparation for what was to follow did seem unnecessarily self-indulgent. There ought to be a way of using the incidental abilities one inevitably acquired along the way for the greater good of the community at large.

To fight earthly evils?

Perhaps.

Cindy gathered all the press cuttings into a pile. On top was the one from the Shropshire Star he’d picked up last week, during the two nights the Transit Theatre Company’s Macbeth had been playing the Ludlow Assembly Rooms. It was the kind of news story which, for Hatch, would be a complete joke but, to Cindy, was confirmation. MURDER SHOP ‘HAUNTED’ CLAIM.

The story was written in a way that indicated nobody on the paper believed it either. It referred to the butchering of the homeless boy in the shop doorway, the case which had brought Cindy to the notice of the West Mercia CID. Now a local youth leader was claiming attendance at his club was falling off because youngsters didn’t like to go past this particular shop at night.‘Two of the girls told me they had felt a sudden drop in the temperature as they passed the doorway, and one is convinced she saw a trail of blood dripping from the step to the gutter.‘These are decent girls, not, in my view, the kind to be prone to fantasies,’ said Mr Ruscoe, who is calling for the area to be exorcised.However, the owner of thehardware shop, Chamber of Trade chairman Mr James Mills, has condemned the scare. ‘This was a terrible incident, which most people in this town just want to try to forget,’ he said.‘Fairy stories like this are not good for trade or local morale, and Ted Ruscoe should have more sense than to encourage them.’

‘Fairy stories,’ said Cindy scornfully. ‘Fairy stories!’

The man would, of course, have to be the chairman of the Chamber of Trade. Cindy was continually amazed at the arrogance of small-time local officials, who considered their particular field of commercial endeavour to be of supreme importance in the great scheme of things.

The police, in most cases, were exactly the same. If you couldn’t explain it to the Crown Prosecution Service they wouldn’t even consider it.

Cindy swept the pile of press cuttings into a box file and went back to work on the magazines. Wherever he went, he sought out the local dealers in publications devoted to paganism and earth-magic, some of them, like Fortean Times, Kindred Spirit and Chalice, high-quality glossies; some, like The Ley Hunter, quite specialized, and others little more than photocopied pages stapled together. At least one of these, surely, was read — and possibly contributed to — by the killer. Cindy saw this individual as someone with very definite and fixed ideas — ideas which he would want to disseminate. Also, like most killers, he would want his acts to be noticed.

The letters pages were a very likely source of clues. Cindy flicked open an issue of Pagan Quest.

Dear Sir, I have been a worshipper of Thor for over nine years and have recently moved to Basingstoke, where I am anxious to contact fellow pagans…

Most of them, unfortunately, were on this level. Cindy wondered if there were any submitted letters that the editors of these magazines considered too extreme for publication. He’d had no reply from Marcus Bacton at The Phenomenologist. But perhaps that had not been such a great idea. The journal only came out at three- monthly intervals, so even if its staid and ageing readers had any ideas, it might be Christmas before they appeared.

‘Kelvyn, who was that boy we met in Gloucester who wanted to interview me? Long, red hair.’

‘Jasper somebody, wasn’t it?’

‘His mag was called … No, it wasn’t Jasper, you stupid bird, it was Gareth, Gareth Milburn, and the mag was called Cauldron … Crucible!’

Cindy leafed through a copy of a pagan magazine in which other, smaller pagan magazines tended to place small ads.

‘Here we are, Kelvyn … Crucible! Oh, and a phone number, there’s unusual.’

Cindy prodded out the number on his mobile.

‘Blessed be! You’re through to Crucible. Leave a message and we’ll get back to you … one way or another, ha, ha, ha.’

‘Gareth, it’s Cindy Mars-Lewis, the humble thespian you were so determined to out as a pagan earlier this year …’

Cindy hung up, unsatisfied, restless. There must be something else he could do.

‘What’s your hurry, old fool?’

‘I don’t know. I feel …’

Cindy picked up his pendulum, slipped a middle finger through the loop.

‘… I feel it’s getting closer.’

When held over the maps at each of the murder spots, the pendulum reacted in exactly the same way: a furious anti-clockwise spin. What would Hatch say to that?

You’re making it do that, he’d say scornfully. Even if you’re not doing it consciously, something inside you wants it to happen.

Of all the extra-sensory disciplines, dowsing was the most widely accepted. It began with the practical skill of water-divining, but no-one knew where it ended, how deep it would go in its search for hidden truths. Sometimes, it seemed to be simply a way of communicating to your conscious mind something that you already subconsciously knew. Other times, as the great T. C. Lethbridge had first demonstrated, it could be your link with different levels of existence and, perhaps, with some great cosmic database from which information could be gathered.

Sometimes, as Cindy had found, the pendulum would spin like a propeller, a preliminary to shamanic flight … as when he’d held it over the spot in the Elan Valley in mid-Wales where the barbed-wire trap had been laid.

On a whim, Cindy spread out the pagan and earthmagic magazines in a circular fan formation and held the pendulum over the table.

He closed his eyes. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘tell me. Which one of these, if any, will guide me towards the person who killed Maria Capaldi?’

Emptying his mind, letting conscious thoughts blow away like leaves.

Knowing, before he opened his eyes, that the pendulum was spinning furiously.

But over The Phenomenologist?

Cindy was sceptical. He was fond of the archaic publication, although under the editorship of this man Bacton it had become a little political, even angry sometimes. Still, there was always some message to be gleaned from the action of the pendulum. Perhaps it was time to telephone Bacton.

But what about the big question? He collected up all the magazines, put them in a pile on the floor and opened up his map of Britain on the tabletop. He sat upright, a hand on each knee, the pendulum under his right hand. He rotated his head a few times to relax the neck muscles, did some brief tensing and relaxation on the arms and legs, stomach and back, and followed this with some chakra-breathing, three times round the seven points, until he felt light and separated and glowing.

Then he began to visualize the islands from afar. The sound of the sea and the gulls through the open window lifting him. Feeling the air currents under his wings.

Flying.

Over the New Forest to the glade where a girl lay impaled …

… across the scrubbed mid-Wales hills to the flooded valleys, following the line of the oakwood, faster and faster, into the sudden whiplash snap and twang of barbed wire …

… spinning back across the English border, the tension of Offa’s Dyke … the flash of rivers, the bulging of hills, the bright, hot grille of the ley lines …

… towards Clee Hill and the timber-framed market town … above a cobbled street to a doorway, bloodied cardboard in the pink dawn … and up again and down the border until he felt …

… three twitches from Harold’s Stones and the choking terror of a girl, thumbs in her larynx …

… Across the Marlborough Downs, over old crop circles, feeling the magnetic, goose-pimpling pull of the still-pulsing Avebury henge, hovering over a field he did not know where a faceless man lay under a mask of blood …

… and then … and then …

Cindy felt his hand rising from his knee and the weight of the pendulum as it began to swing over the map. He closed his eyes.

Now.

Where will it happen next?

Later, unnerved, Cindy telephoned Marcus Bacton, editor of The Phenomenologist.

‘Marsh-what?’

‘Mars-Lewis. We’ve never spoken before, but I pen the occasional piece for you under the name Cindy the Shaman.’

‘Oh my God. Look here, Mrs, er, Lewis, we’re a trifle old-fashioned at The Phenomenologist. Correspondents who wish to communicate with us tend to put it in writing.’

‘Just wondering, I was, Mr Bacton, if you had perused my letter regarding the murders.’

‘Oh, hell, Look, er, Lewis. One doesn’t want to bring down the heavy editorial hand, but — much as we value your contributions on Celtic shaman practices — this is not bloody True Crime Monthly.’

‘No, indeed, I understand. But I have personal reasons for continuing my investigations and it has occurred to me that you may be able to help me.’

‘Very much doubt that. Look, I’m rather up to the bloody eyes-’

‘I suspect the person I’m looking for, see — the murderer — may well, at some point, have been in communication with your periodical.’

‘Oh, right. You’re saying one of our chaps is a bloody psycho. I see. Well, what about Miss Pinder, the ectoplasm lady from Chiswick? I can just imagine her striding across the Welsh moors with a fifty-foot roll of barbed wire …’

‘Always this receptive, are you, Mr Bacton?’

‘What?’

‘No wonder your circulation is sinking so rapidly.’

‘Bloody hell! Look, Lewis. I can do without this. Things are bloody fraught enough just at the moment. For a start, we’ve had a rather difficult death …’

The phone seemed to freeze in Cindy’s hand.

‘Death?’

It took nearly twenty minutes and several attempts by Bacton to get him off the line, but when Cindy finally put down the phone he had learned how and where the housekeeper, Mrs Willis, had died. And that she had been a very good woman, a herbalist and a spiritual healer.

Cindy retired to bed with several back numbers of The Phenomenologist and Franklin and Job’s Guide to Prehistoric Remains on the Welsh Borders.

He already had his suitcase packed.