The Cold Calling

XXV

This is how it goes, Grayle thought, struggling with the zipper on her jeans. This is how it happens.

Outside the window, morning rinsed the pink stone of the village.

So you do something rash and you wind up in a strange place. You’re lonely and anxious and it all seems so futile. This is when you’re at your most vulnerable. This is how rich, empty widows wind up backing half-assed business deals and homeless kids get sucked into fruitcake religious sects.

Somebody is kind to you, is how it starts. Deep into the night, somebody wants to listen.

Just that, by daylight, the whole idea of a cross-dressing actor-ventriloquist who believed he was into a mystical tradition with a direct line to the megalith-builders seemed a whole lot less convincing than it had last night.

Plus, why should Cindy suddenly pick up on her in a bar? What was he doing here anyway and why had he not wanted to tell her last night? If he was looking up his old friend Marcus Bacton, why was he staying at the inn, and why was he alone?

Grayle felt calmer and stronger this morning. She would investigate the University of the Earth. She would do it objectively and efficiently. She would find out what it was that had so seduced Ersula, but she would resist its allure. And Cindy’s.

Get wise. Grayle moved down the dark, twisty stairs to chase up a small breakfast before seeking out Cefn-y-bedd. Put some distance.

‘What’s up with you, Maiden?’ Marcus dangerously dug a fork into the toaster to retrieve a fractured slice. ‘I mean, what the bloody hell is up? You look like you haven’t slept.’

‘That’s because I haven’t slept.’

‘Oh … shit!’ Marcus held the toaster upside down and a million dry crumbs came out on the stone worktop. At the sight of the blackened heap, Maiden erupted into dry coughs and stumbled to his feet to run himself a glass of water. Marcus brushed the debris to the floor and carried the toast to the table on the end of a fork.

‘That’s it.’ He sat down. ‘That is fucking it. ‘

Malcolm, the dog, ambled over, checked out the ancient crumbs, sniffed and turned away. Maiden drank the water slowly.

‘Had a piece for the magazine yesterday.’ Marcus unwrapped a pack of hard, chilled butter. ‘Woman in Norfolk claims actual fairies have been performing scenes from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream in her bloody greenhouse. Been a subscriber since 1962. What do I do with that?’

‘Offer her the editorship?’

Marcus stared at him. ‘You may be right. I’ll bury Mrs Willis today, full honours, be as nice as I can to the relatives, if any turn up. And then-’

‘She have any children?’

‘Niece in Hay. Another in Allensmore. One of them, I can’t remember which, thinks she might make it to the funeral.’

‘But if Mrs Willis was Annie Davies …’

‘Then there’ll be a few cousins and second cousins in the village. But did they know? And if they did, will they admit it? Old prejudices die hard, places like this. I’ll bury her, and then that’s it.’

‘What is?’

‘Get out. Piss off. Surrender The Phenomenologist to the mad biddies. Put this place on the market. Must be some appeal in a castle, even if the house is disintegrating.’

Maiden filled the kettle, set it down on the stove. ‘Maybe Falconer would buy it.’

‘Thank you, Maiden. Over my dead, fucking body. Rather flog it as an outward-bound centre for your ten-year-old car-thieves.’

Marcus was suddenly sunk into profound misery, bloodhound eyes blurring behind his glasses.

‘Went into the bloody Healing Room late last night. Core of the house for the past year. All those bottles and jars, with Mrs Willis around, they were full of mystery. Potions and elixirs. All drawing energy from her. Full of a sort of condensed life-force. And at the same time you’d feel this overwhelming peace and calm in there. Now it’s just old bottles full of dead and rotting gunge. Have to put them all in bin bags, take them to the tip.’

‘I’ll do it, if you like.’

Marcus shook his head, splattering butter on a fragment of brittle toast. ‘If there’s a message in those bottles, Maiden, it’s for me. I look at my life … I mean is that fucking it? Standing in a desert, surrounded by graves. Celia. Little Sally. Mrs Willis. Possibility of seeing them again’s about all there is to look forward to, you get to my age.’

‘You’re sixty,’ Maiden protested.

‘Unless, of course, your own version of the Other Side is the truth of it,’ Marcus said. ‘In which case we’re all stuffed, aren’t we?’

There was the sound of tyres on the forecourt. Marcus dropped his burnt toast.

Maiden saw someone getting out of a very old but beautifully polished black Morris Minor. ‘Woman. Late middle-age, mauvy hair? Tweed skirt, kind of mohair sweater with white woolly lambs on the front. Gold earrings, necklaces, bangles.’

‘Sounds hellish,’ Marcus said. ‘If we keep quiet maybe it’ll go away.’

‘Might be one of Mrs Willis’s nieces.’

It certainly wasn’t a policeman, so Maiden made for the front door and dragged it open before the woman had time to knock. It was a strange moment. She just stood there looking at him for several seconds. She was as tall as he was. She had the small, glittering eyes of a bird of prey.

‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘You’re not Marcus Bacton, are you, lovely?’

A long, flat-topped hill. Like a bed, with a pillow of trees at one end. Grayle headed toward the trees, as directed by Amy Jenkins, the landlady. Remembering what Ersula had written about the curious magic of this place.

She came to a plain farm gate and it was open. Walked through, and suddenly — like … wow — there was, below her, this unbelievably beautiful, rambling, mellow stone house spread out like a sleeping lion. The kind of country house they tried to clone in Beverly Hills and failed because the result was just too movie-set perfect. High walls suggested gardens with fishpools and stuff.

Typically — because the house was irrelevant to what went on there — Ersula had never referred to it, except as ‘the center’. It looked more of a home than an educational establishment, which explained why Ersula and the others had had apartments over the stables, and why folks on the courses needed accommodation in the village. Couldn’t be more than five or six bedrooms in the house itself.

And just one car parked in front, a rebuilt VW beetle, pink. A squirrel scampered past, otherwise no sign of life.

Clouds were gathering, and it looked like more than a gesture. She should’ve come in the car, but walking a couple of miles gave you a handle on a place. Fall was setting in, the first dead leaves curling together on the brown gravel as she tried — because there were no other options — the huge, solid, iron-studded door.

Tugging a bell pull on a black chain, she stepped back in alarm when it responded with this deep, churchy tolling, way back into the house. And Grayle thought, in a kind of terror, Suppose the door opens and it’s Ersula. Ersula in a bathrobe, hair mussed and smelling of recent sex?

But there was no Ersula. No answer at all. And no use in ringing again, there was no way anyone in the house would have failed to hear.

Grayle was curious. Emboldened by the likelihood of there being no-one here at all, she wandered around the side of the house to peer over the stone wall. It was too high, around nine feet. But it had a door in it. A smaller replica of the front door, going to a Gothic point. There was a ring handle; she turned it.

Waited, holding her breath. Nobody came out with a shotgun or two snarling mastiffs on a chain. She pushed her head through the opening. ‘Hullo?’

Expecting a stately Elizabethan knot-garden or something of that order, but it was just a gravelled yard with two white Portakabins. This noise coming out of one. A slow, cavernous noise, like a giant flute deep underground.

She stood and listened a while. There was an artificial quality to it. She padded across the yard. The Portakabin windows had Venetian blinds. One was open; you could just about see inside. She saw two tall speakers, computer monitors, a tape deck with a green pilot light. Whole setup looked like a recording studio, maybe for making those ambient, New Age tapes — whales talking to one another kind of stuff.

‘Yes?’ From close behind her.

‘OhmyGod. ‘ Grayle spun.

Found herself facing one of those people you just knew weren’t going to be helpful. She was about Grayle’s own age, good-looking and so sure of it she could wear an old wax jacket and baggy cords, harness her abundant hair in a rubber band.

‘What are you doing here?’ Authoritative voice, very English, well bred; kind of voice that spurned Hugh Grant until the last reel.

‘I …’

‘No, don’t tell me,’ the woman said with a flick of a wrist. ‘You’re a bloody journalist, aren’t you?’

‘Well, uh, as it happens, yeah, but-’

‘God almighty. Don’t you people ever get the message? All visits by journalists, interviews, etcetera, etcetera, are absolutely strictly by appointment only. So I suggest you go back to your office and attempt to make one. I mean, would that be so terribly difficult for you?’

‘Listen, I don’t even know what authority you have to say that.’ No way was she going to identity herself, pour it all out to some superior being from the planet Arrogant. ‘I’d prefer to hear it from Professor Falconer.’

‘I speak for him.’

‘And you are?’

‘Magda. I run this place. Now look, I don’t have time for this. We have a course next week, a dozen people, we’re mega-busy, so please get back in your car-’

‘I never heard of you. I believe my editor spoke to someone called Ersula Underhill.’

Magda blinked. ‘That makes no sense. Ersula’s ancient history.’

The words pushed a cold skewer into Grayle, who was just imagining Ersula, in a white lab-coat, messing with tapes and stuff and taking no shit whatsoever from this woman.

‘Anyway,’ Magda said, ‘Ersula Underhill wasn’t authorized to arrange for journalists or anybody else to come here.’

‘You say she’s gone? Like, where?’ Grayle noticed that, in the Portakabin behind her, the giant flute had ceased. She watched Magda’s eyes.

‘Look.’ Magda had her hands aggressively on her hips. ‘What is this?’

‘Could I please speak with Professor Falconer?’

‘No. Go away.’

‘Well, actually …’ a man’s voice said, and Grayle, half expecting this, turned towards the door of the Portakabin.

He was lean and he wore leather cowboy boots, his greying hair pulled back into a ponytail. He had an easy smile. He carried two small cassette tapes. She remembered his face from the front of the videotape package Duncan Murphy had given her in Oxford.

Magda shrugged, expressionless, and walked away towards the house without giving Grayle another glance.

‘And which publication do you write for?’ Roger Falconer said lightly.

Grayle suddenly started feeling nervous as hell.

The atmosphere had settled around Cindy the second he was inside. Dark little hall, smell of damp. An acute tang of despair in the chaos its occupant called a study.

It enclosed Marcus Bacton like a fog. His hair was lank, the purplish bags under his eyes blown up by his glasses. He looked like a man in need of help, but it was never wise to suggest this to anyone. Always better to turn it the other way round.

‘Come for your help, I have, Mr Bacton.’

Marcus Bacton grunted. ‘Better sit down then.’ He tossed two telephone directories from the sofa and about a dozen pieces of paper flew out. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, but he seemed too weary to pick them up.

The dark-haired young man came into the study. He must be over twenty years younger than Bacton. Somehow, he looked even less healthy. His face was pale and blotched, his eyes clouded. This made no sense to Cindy; Phenomenologist editorials had been full of references to the wonderful healing ambience.

‘I have to say, Lewis,’ Marcus Bacton said, ‘I’m totally nonplussed. Are you actually telling me you’ve come all this way to talk about this bloody serial-killer nonsense?’

Cindy saw the younger man stiffen, his eyes still.

‘Er, this is my, er, nephew. Maid-’

‘Wilson,’ the young man said. ‘Bobby Wilson.’

‘How are you, Bobby? Yes, I’m afraid I have come to talk about this serial killer nonsense.’

Bobby leaned against a wall, his arms folded. ‘You see?’ Marcus Bacton said to him. Bobby didn’t look at him.

‘What does he mean?’ Cindy said.

Bobby sighed. ‘He had a letter from one of his readers who suffers from fairies in the greenhouse. That’s not you, is it?’

Cindy was furious but contained it. ‘No, lovely,’ he said. ‘That’s not me.’

He paused. Marcus scowled at Bobby.

‘I’m the one who wants to know who killed his housekeeper,’ Cindy said.