The Cold Calling

XXIX

Below them, St Mary’s was a smudge on the bronze evening sky. How could he possibly have forgotten about this?

‘I can’t believe you’re living in a place like this,’ the blonde said.

Not having rushed out to embrace him or anything like that. Or left the car at all. Hardly looked at him, in fact, as the red BMW spurted dirt getting them out of the farmyard.

‘Well, I like places like this,’ Bobby Maiden said. ‘Quiet, lonely places.’

‘Very weird.’ She relaxed, checked her speed. ‘Wouldn’t want to get stopped by your little Welsh colleagues.’

‘We’re still in England.’

‘Not for long. Always safer to go abroad, I tend to think.’ She pulled up at the junction outside the pub. ‘I’m confused now. How do I get back on the main road?’

‘Just carry on through the village, turn left, keep going. This is possibly a naive question, but what’s with the blond wig?’

‘You don’t like it? A bit Marilyn, maybe? Nah. Maybe not. Truth of it is, I’ve been tailed, Bobby.’

‘You sure?’

‘Of course I’m bloody sure.’

‘Who?’

‘Well, it didn’t have a blue light, but …’

‘Bastards.’

‘Pa would’ve gone berserk. Straight to Riggs. That would never do. So I didn’t tell him. Anyway, you start taking this seriously, you lose your bloody marbles.’

‘Too late,’ Maiden said.

‘For you maybe. Nothing wrong with me, sunshine.’ Emma Curtis drove slowly down into the village. ‘Gawd, you forget there are still places like this. That a Black Cat cigarette sign over the shop? This is not my car either, by the way. Hired. Mate of Vic’s. A gem, that guy. Takes an almost paternal interest.’

‘Good,’ Maiden said.

A silence. Nightfall nuzzled the high hedges on either side.

Em put the headlights on. ‘It’s not good, actually, is it, Bobby?’

‘Shows they’re worried, not sure which way to jump. What’s Tony’s position?’

‘Saying nothing. But I suspect, in the blackness of his heart of hearts, even he wants you popped now.’

‘Popped? ‘

‘Killed, then. Killed. All right?’

‘Absolutely fine.’

‘You know what I really wish? I wish he’d retire to Spain like any normal … businessman. He’s looking old. Not well.’

‘That an option? Some contingency plan there?’

‘Not for me to say, Bobby.’

‘You can say what you like to me, love, I’m out of it now.’

‘Or perhaps,’ Em said, ‘just biding your time until you can come back with enough to screw down Riggs and Pa in the same coffin and cover yourself with commendations?’

‘You’d like that?’

‘Riggs? Sure. Stake through the heart, whatever. Pa — retirement, don’t you think? I mean, he hasn’t done anything really bad. ‘

‘What? ‘

‘Well, he hasn’t!’

‘So, you’ll tell the junkies, then. And the dead junkies’ parents. And the small-timers who were fitted up to get them out of the picture. How they all seriously misjudged Father Tony of Calcutta Street. Em, you ever think maybe your old man lies to you a lot?’

She trod on the brakes so hard the BMW stalled and a Land Rover coming up behind had to swerve into the hedge.

‘All right.’ Hands flying off the wheel. ‘No more. Change of subject.’

‘You want us to be ordinary people?’

‘We can do that, can’t we? One night?’

He saw her face in the headlights of the Land Rover behind.

In the silly blonde wig.

‘Course we can,’ Maiden said.

Almost believing it.

Confirmation.

Even the goddamn dress was the same, with the print flowers. Looked faded, worn-not blue, sepia in the picture, obviously, but it was the goddamn same dress. The hair wasn’t in plaits, but it looked like the same hair, and the eyes …

The eyes weren’t dead, but they weren’t laughing either. Weren’t laughing, even then.

Grayle felt as if she’d been attached to some kind of emotional vacuum pump.

‘Listen,’ she said earnestly, straw-clutching. ‘This could be a delusion. Like that explanation they have for deja vu? Like, you see something and your mind does this kind of double take so that the first image, even though it happened only a fraction of a second ago, it’s become part of your memory and you recall it like it was years ago or maybe in another life. Yeah?’

Looking hopelessly at Marcus and Cindy the Shaman who’d kind of filtered into the room soon after Maiden left.

‘I mean, listen, I’m ready to go with that,’ Grayle said. ‘I don’t want you to believe me when I’m not too sure I believe myself, is what I’m saying.’

Marcus and Cindy looking at each other without a word.

‘Hey, come on,’ Grayle said. ‘Help me out here, guys.’

The eyes of Annie Davies gazed solemnly out of a photograph over three-quarters of a century old. In the background was the church of St Mary, looking not much different from today.

A slow, icy shiver went right up Grayle’s spine. A classic shiver, just as they were supposed to, just like in all the stories.

Marcus said, ‘Do you know why they had her picture taken with the church in the background? For the same reason they sent her there every day for most of a year, to pray. For forgiveness. For her own soul. Can you imagine that? The indignity of it? Like a juvenile felon checking in with the probation officer. For the crime of seeing the Virgin Mary at a heathen burial place.’

He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.

‘It’s true enough,’ Cindy said. ‘Just been quizzing them in the pub, I have. Still two sides in that village. Hard to credit. When I was about to leave, a very old woman caught hold of my sleeve.’

‘I know,’ Marcus said. ‘Funny eye.’

‘That’s the one. Funny eye. You know what she said? She said, You want to ask yourself why it happened on her thirteenth birthday …’

‘Bloody hell. People still saying that? You know, she never went to church again. A more Christian woman never walked this earth. But her holy place was High Knoll. The child in her, the healer in her, belongs to High Knoll.’

‘It makes me wonder,’ Cindy said.

‘Wonder what?’

‘What time did you see this, Grayle? Do you remember?’

‘Well, I … I’d been to the centre, left there maybe around three. Three-thirty? I can’t say for sure.’

‘Half past three.’ Cindy smiled thinly. ‘As her coffin was being lowered into the earth.’

‘What?’ Grayle jerked like her chair was wired up. ‘You’re saying the woman who was buried today was-’

‘She’s gone back,’ Marcus said breathlessly. ‘Might be planted in the churchyard, but her spirit’s up there. Liberated. And even bloody Falconer’s taken down his fence.’

Grayle felt like her whole body was made of ice. ‘You’re saying-’

‘And she’s young again. That’s the point, isn’t it?’

‘Oh gee.’ Grayle stood up, backed off. The crazy world of Holy Grayle was coming alive all around her, too much, too quickly; she couldn’t handle this. ‘Listen, I’m kind of overtired. Could I get a ride back to the inn?’

‘Wait.’ Cindy moved to block the door, tall and straight. ‘Young and free, Grayle? The apparition …’

Apparition. Jesus.

‘Did she seem young and free to you?’

Grayle stared at Cindy, wanting out of here and fast, but Marcus’s whisky had made her unsteady.

‘Give it to us unexpurgated,’ Cindy said. ‘What did you feel when you saw this … child?’

Grayle held on to the back of her chair. The room swam out of focus.

‘OK.’ She breathed in, breathed out. ‘There was no sense of freedom … no free spirit. Deep sorrow, real despair.’

Marcus looked sick.

‘What I saw, it … she … she was like … how can I tell you … drained? Like a dried flower? Like a leaf at the end of the fall, you know, when all the richness of the colours have gone, and there’s only the little stem things? Like the skeleton? And it isn’t pretty any more? I’m sorry. It’s what I saw. I’m sorry.’

‘Thank you,’ Cindy said. ‘Thank you, Grayle.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Marcus was on his feet, looking as unsteady as Grayle felt. ‘I don’t understand. What the hell are you saying?’

‘You should have listened,’ Cindy said. ‘You never listened. To the local people who said the Knoll was a dark place.’

The camp Welsh accent all but vanished.

‘The darkest evil will always gather round the perimeter of a holy place,’ Cindy said. ‘Sometimes someone lets it in.’

The lights were on in Abergavenny, under half an hour from St Mary’s, as they passed through the town. Then there were long, dark hills against the evening sky like oil tankers anchored in a steel-grey bay.

‘You must feel in a kind of limbo, down here, Bobby.’

‘No more here than anywhere.’

Big hills — mountains, the Brecon Beacons maybe — were in all the windows now, sponging up what remained of the light.

‘You could go abroad. Nah, forget that. What about the press? Not the Elham Messenger. Does the News of the World still do that kind of story?’

‘Not got the tits for it,’ Maiden said.

A bilingual sign came up on the left: Hotel/Gwesty.

Em ran the BMW into a gravel drive lit by small floodlights in the lawns to either side. She parked in a stone courtyard enclosed on three sides by what seemed to be a very old and opulent country house. Wrought-iron lamps at the entrance. Golden light spilling from deep-sunk windows.

‘Collen Hall,’ Em breathed out. ‘Thank Christ it’s still here. Would have been a real drag if it had been turned into a home for rural battered wives or something.’

‘You’ve stayed here before, obviously.’

‘Just the once,’ Em said.

‘With Mr Curtis?’

‘Would I do that to you? Or me, come to that. No, this was with Mr and Mrs Parker, actually. I was eighteen. We’d been to my cousin’s wedding in Swansea, stopped overnight on the way back to London. I remember they had this gorgeous Italian waiter.’

‘Both of them had him?’

‘I’ll rephrase that. An attractive Italian waiter was employed here at the time. None of us had him. Pa said he was probably a poof. Anybody good-looking, Pa always says that. And that’s definitely the last time he gets mentioned tonight, if that’s all right with you, Bobby?’

‘Whatever you want.’

‘You know what I want.’

With a lovely smile, Em stepped out into the courtyard.

‘I won’t have it,’ Marcus shouted. ‘I’m not fucking having it. I don’t want your loony speculation. I don’t want conjecture. Do you understand me, Lewis?’

‘And do you want her spirit to rest, or to walk in torment?’

‘Look …’ Unease was crawling all over Grayle. ‘We’re getting carried away. I don’t need this … this Gothic stuff. Not tonight.’ Edging along the wall towards the door. ‘Would it be OK if I just left it here? If you could like tell me the way back to the inn, I’ll walk-’

Cindy said, ‘You’ve come all this way, my love. You mustn’t be frightened now. For your sister’s sake.’

‘My sister? What are you saying?’

‘I … Perhaps your sister can help us throw some light on a … complex situation.’

‘Complex? Jesus.’

‘I’m sorry, Grayle.’

‘You’re sorry? ‘

‘I want to help you-’

‘Then talk to me, for Chrissakes. Don’t I rate some answers? Like, who are you? Apart, that is, from some weird drag queen who says he has shamanic powers? Last night I asked you what you were doing here, and you were like disinclined to tell me, and now-’

‘Drag queen?’ Marcus roared. ‘Fucking drag queen? ‘

‘Shamanic tradition,’ Cindy said weakly.

‘This bitch is a man? ‘

‘You didn’t know? I thought you knew each other.’

Marcus sank back into the sofa, reached for the Scotch.

Cindy said to Grayle, ‘I told you half of it. I told you there were two sides to that place … High Knoll and Black Knoll.’

Marcus poured an inch of whisky. ‘You mean you’ve got bloody balls under there?’

We discussed how the image of the rotting man in your sister’s dream might have been the place-memory of some Druidic human sacrifice …’

Marcus sat up. ‘What’s this?’

‘Show him the letter,’ Cindy said. ‘Take his mind off having a deviant in his house.’

Carved oak panelling, deep-set window sills. On the wall beside the slanting wooden stairs, lanterns of black wrought iron held electric candles expensive enough to fool you at first. Very romantic. And four stars. You wouldn’t find many of those in Wales, Em said over dinner.

She was in a plain white frock, a gold locket around her neck, minimal make-up, no perfume. Blond wig gone, dark hair down. She shimmered. Took away his breath and most of his appetite.

This was better. This was close to real life.

Fiddling with a cooling Spanish omelette, he realized he knew almost nothing about her. What happened to her marriage? Did she have children? A job? A criminal record? To what extent was she still dependent on the person they weren’t mentioning … and on that person’s business ventures?

Em frowned for a moment.

‘Not at all. Not since I got out of university. Not since I found out what he was into. Before that, even. I mean, actually, that wasn’t too long ago. It really never occurs to you that your kind, generous, loving parent might be a … businessman.’

‘No,’ Maiden said. ‘I suppose it wouldn’t. If, like Tony, you’ve been lucky and never had to go away for long holidays.’

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘over the years I’ve been …’ Holding out her right hand, counting off on the fingers. ‘… an estate agent … a receptionist in a hotel in Devon — even posher than this one … a bit-part actor with walk-ons in Inspector Morse and a couple of soaps I absolutely refuse to name …’

‘Which is where the lovely Suzanne came from?’

‘Something like that. Then I was an English language teacher in the Dordogne … a partner in a small publishing house which we conveniently flogged to a big publishing house. Oh, and …’ She grinned. ‘… and a prostitute in Bayswater.’

‘And I have to guess which of those isn’t true, right?’ Maiden said. ‘Estate agent. You couldn’t have sunk that low.’

‘Oh, Bobby, you’re feeling better, aren’t you?’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m feeling all right, guv’nor. I’m feeling optimistic. Have some wine.’

‘I don’t need it.’

Because he was already high. Riggs was in another hemisphere. Cindy and the ley-line serial-killer fantasy, and the American girl who saw a ghost, that was in a parallel universe.

Above their table was another of those electric candle-lanterns with a glow-worm tip which flickered. Glancing at the tiny, pulsing filament, he caught an image of a blue-white streetlamp fizzling out and blinking on again.

Another woman. There’d been another woman in Old Church Street that night, under a faulty streetlamp. He couldn’t remember anything about her except that she hadn’t been Suzanne.

‘Bobby?’

‘Sorry.’ He smiled uncertainly. ‘Something came back to me.’

‘In connection with what?’

‘That night, before you came round the corner in Clutton’s car …’

She sighed.

‘Did you see a woman across the road, under a street-lamp?’

‘Only you, Bobby. Strolling casually up the street. If there’d been a tin can you’d have been kicking it and whistling. What were you thinking about?’

‘You.’

‘Balls.’

‘Are we sending for the sweet trolley?’

‘I don’t think I want the sweet trolley,’ Em said. ‘Do you?’

Marcus placed Ersula’s letter beside him on the sofa. ‘Look, she came to see me. Came here, to the house. With a briefcase, a personal organizer, a pocket tape recorder …’

‘That’s her.’ Grayle felt tearful. On top of it all she felt tearful. Get a hold.

Marcus said, ‘I found her, to be honest, rather pushy. As though she had a right to whatever information I could give her. You began to feel like a sucked lemon after a while, though you had to admire her persistence.’

Grayle said, ‘Did you try to discourage her from sleeping at High Knoll?’

‘No. Why should I? If it could bring out the healer in a naive thirteen-year-old girl, it couldn’t be the evil, heathen place of local superstition and ecclesiastical prejudice, could it? And it … She was clearly doing it for her own research, nothing to do with Falconer’s crowd-pulling schemes.’

‘Did you see her again after she spent a night there?’

‘No. I did ask her to let me know what happened, but … Well, she was looking for a scientific explanation of Annie’s vision. Electromagnetism in the stone, low-level radiation … anything which might have stimulated the brain into hallucination mode or whatever she called it. I presumed she hadn’t had any quantifiable results.’

‘She didn’t strike you as kind of … you know … unbalanced?’

‘Absolutely not. Girl was a human database.’

‘Did she say how she might follow through with all of this? Any other place she might have been planning to visit?’

‘While she was here, she seemed to be focused entirely on High Knoll. The vision of the Virgin, all that.’

‘The unknowable,’ Cindy said. ‘The ineffable light. Such things happen, lovelies. They do.’

‘Ersula was drawn to that,’ Grayle said. ‘The whole Virgin-goddess thing. Ersula has always been a feminist, right from about age two.’

‘Two sides,’ Cindy said. ‘The ineffable light and the unutterable evil. The question we should be asking is, what — or who — has tipped the balance towards the latter?’

‘The black light,’ Marcus said bleakly.

‘Indeed.’

‘Only mentioned it a few days before she died. If I thought of it, I suppose I regarded it as subjective. Psychological. A reflection of the state of her health.’

Well, dear.’ Cindy stood up, easing his feet out of the sensible walking shoes, gliding to the window and looking out into the nothingness of the night. ‘Perhaps it was. If she was drawing energy, inspiration, call it what you will, from the Knoll and the energy there had been negated …’

‘Then she’d be like a diver whose air pipe was blocked,’ Marcus said.

‘And if, the night she died, she went back there, determined to unblock …’

Marcus poured himself some whisky and drank it. ‘And now she’s dead and frozen out, just as she was for most of her life. Betrayed. Stuck in some sepia limbo. I can’t bear it.’

Suzanne would not have worn it.

Suzanne’s would have been short and black, possibly shiny.

This nightgown said, as explicitly as you could get, no more Suzanne.

She stood in the bathroom doorway, the light behind her. No lights on in the bedroom, where Maiden sat, still fully dressed, on the edge of the four-poster bed.

Out of place in a house this old, the four-poster was patently fake, with posts of ‘antique’ pine and dusky pink-frilled curtains. A bottle of house champagne, with a big, red bow, unopened on one of the bedside tables. A ‘quaint medieval’ sign warning, DO NOT DISTURB, hanging, undisturbed, from the door handle inside the room.

Naff trappings of the honeymoon suite.

But nothing naff about Em Curtis. Her hair was covering her shoulders, hiding the tops of her breasts. Her nightgown of magnolia silk, long enough to cover her feet, had long, wide sleeves ending in little ropes.

He stood up. He was shaking. She glided like some Tudor ghost down the two thickly carpeted steps from the bathroom and halfway into his arms.

‘I’m not questioning it,’ Maiden said hoarsely. ‘I died. I’m entitled to go to heaven.’

A finger on his lips.

‘Not another word, Bobby. Close your eyes.’

Bringing her lips close to his but not quite touching, except with her soft wine-breath.

Presently, he felt slender, ringless hands moving under his sweatshirt, skimming his skin.

Life after death. There was life after death.