The Cold Calling

XXXVIII

‘I, uh, I have a confession,’ Grayle said.

They were through Hereford, headed for the Malvern Hills. Adrian Fraser-Hale had his long legs stretched out, the passenger seat pushed back as far as it would go. He beamed.

‘You’re going to tell me you’re not really a journalist, your name isn’t Turner and in fact you’re Ersula Underhill’s sister. Am I right?’

Grayle damn near hurled the car into the hedge.

‘Hey, calm down, old girl.’ Adrian folded his hands behind his head. ‘Roger found out. He was bound to, you know.’

‘Oh Jesus.’ Grayle slowed down. ‘He talked to, uh, Marcus Bacton, right?’

‘You’re joking. Roger absolutely can’t stand Marcus Bacton. No, when you’d gone yesterday, he put in a call to the New York Courier. Roger is terribly paranoid. He thinks other academics are trying to steal his ideas or hijack his TV programme. The more powerful people seem, the more insecure they are. So anyone who shows up at Cefn-y-bedd, he wants to know who exactly they are and what connections they might have.’

‘Pretty stupid of me,’ Grayle said.

‘Anyway, the Courier said they didn’t have a Grayle Turner but they’d recently parted company with a Grayle Underhill. Wasn’t awfully hard to put two and two together.’

‘He’s mad at me, right?’

‘I suspect he isn’t terribly pleased, to be honest. He’ll get over it.’ Adrian grinned. ‘At least it means I won’t have to watch what I’m saying any more.’

‘The reason I didn’t just come and say who I was, I had a feeling of … well, of maybe something going on between Roger and Ersula. People told me all this stuff about what a ladies’ man he was.’

Adrian chuckled.

‘Well,’ Grayle said, ‘if she’d, like, got hurt — and I mean, when it comes to men, being this kind of hard-assed intellectual isn’t … you know what I’m saying?’

‘Actually, yes. One always had the feeling that behind that cool facade she was really a terribly vulnerable girl. I’m an old-fashioned sort of chap and a bit of a sucker for a lady in distress and … Well, you know, what can one say? I did rather fancy her myself. I’m afraid.’

That amiable buffoon, Adrian Fraser-Hale…

Oh, Jeez, poor Adrian.

‘Although it pretty soon became apparent that I wasn’t, you know, quite … shall we say, cerebral enough … to compete.’

‘With Roger?’

‘Roger.’ Adrian grimaced. ‘He really is such a frightful bastard.’

The Great Pyramid.

Well, a great pyramid. The one arranged in steps. All pyramids looked the same to Bobby Maiden, except this one, with the steps.

Roger Falconer was halfway up, vaguely listening to a short guy with a beard, who was having to breathe so hard to keep up with him that it was taking the edge off the theory he was airing. Falconer would listen to his companion’s stuff, with an occasional nod, and then do this expression that was nearer to a lopsided smile than a sneer but you got the idea, before sliding in some piece of superior knowledge like a stiletto, leaving the short guy spluttering.

‘Wrong episode,’ Cindy said. ‘Flick it forward half an hour.’

‘As we won’t see the end,’ Maiden said, ‘who wins?’

The phone rang. ‘Ignore it,’ Cindy said.

‘The little chap has a heart attack.’ Marcus reached for the phone. ‘But Falconer has to finish his piece to camera before calling for an ambulance, and so he dies. I’d better get it.’

‘Might be the police,’ Cindy said.

‘Better we know about it than they just show up here with their Armalites or whatever they’re sending the buggers out with these days.’ Marcus snatched the receiver. ‘Yes? Oh … Anderson.’

Oh God, Maiden thought. Really should have tried to call her at the hospital. She’ll have heard it on the radio, seen it on TV. Or someone will. Be all round the General by now.

‘… yes, I know that,’ Marcus was saying. ‘Absolutely not … If the bastard’s saying that, it’s a put-up job. Tell him where he can stick it … No, he’s all right, he … What name? … Right … No, don’t. Don’t worry … Yes, call me tonight.’

Marcus put down the phone.

‘Just reassure me that she was calling from the hospital,’ Maiden said.

‘Who’s this bastard Riggs?’

‘I told you about him.’

‘Oh, he’s the one. He’s been to see Anderson. Told her it’s an open-and-shut case and they need to put you away for your own good, that sort of thing.’

‘She tell him anything?’

‘Of course not. Solid as a rock, Anderson.’

‘And she was at the hospital?’

‘No, he came to her home. She waited for half an hour or so after he’d gone and then she went to a phone box.’

Maiden moaned.

‘For heaven’s sake, Maiden, they can’t tap every bloody phone box in the town.’

‘No. But what they can do is keep an eye on her. If she’s seen to enter a phone box at, say, nine-fifteen, they obtain from our friends at British Telecom a computer print-out of the numbers dialled from that particular box around that time.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How long before they get this address?’

‘I may not stay for lunch.’

‘Better get the hell out now then, hadn’t you?’

‘But not before we watch the video.’ Cindy picked up the remote control.

‘Video? Are you mad, Lewis? Sorry, bloody stupid question.’

‘It’s a video little Grayle was given. Of Professor Falconer’s programme.’

‘Lewis, I wouldn’t watch that shit if the only alternative was The Generation Game. ‘

‘Sit down, Marcus.’

Maiden looked over at the window and then at the clock. ‘May be advisable to fast-forward where you can.’

‘But, like, hold on … I thought you were buddies … OK, coming at it from different directions, pretending to despise each other’s approach, but it’s all good-natured banter.’

‘That’s just for the punters,’ Adrian said. ‘Roger and I really don’t have much to do with each other. Don’t have much in common.’

‘But you live-’

‘I live in a bedsit over the stables. Roger lives in the house. When he’s here. Which isn’t actually that often. He can only stand so much of the countryside. He likes dinner parties, that sort of thing. Also, he’s very much of his generation. Sometimes smokes marijuana.’

Grayle stifled a laugh; he sounded so disapproving. Hard to believe England was still manufacturing men like this.

We just sort of need each other,’ Adrian said. ‘He needs someone who can get on with people and knows all about earth-mysteries, but isn’t otherwise terribly bright.’

‘Oh, Adrian!’

Well, it’s true. I come from a long line of solid chaps who are not terribly bright, but pretty practical. I’m a useful guy to have around. Turn my hand to most things. I rigged out the Portakabins, laid Rogers’s helicopter pad. Things like that.’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘It’s a way of earning my keep when there’s no course on. You see I need him, too. Who else would employ someone to take parties on outward-bound trips to ancient sites and supervise dreaming experiments, lie in stone circles all night with a tape recorder?’

‘You love it, don’t you?’

‘It’s my whole life,’ Adrian said. ‘I put up with Roger, for as long as it’s necessary.’

‘You said he was a bastard.’

‘He uses people. He’s unscrupulous. I don’t think there’s anyone he wouldn’t use — or anything he wouldn’t do — to put himself ahead of the field. His field. He has to be, you know, pre-eminent in his field.’

‘Archaeology?’

‘Bigger than that now, his field. Embraces anthropology, psychology and the more acceptable areas of parapsychology. He’s like one of these wealthy farmers who pulls out ancient hedges to develop this huge, private enclosure.’

‘Sounds almost scary. Megalomania.’

‘It’s OK,’ Adrian said. ‘It helps if you know how you’re being used.’

The wind is blowing Roger Falconer’s hair into his eyes as the camera tracks him to the summit of the small hill, not much more than a bulge in the middle of a green field.

Falconer turns to camera.

‘This Bronze Age round barrow is known, for no satisfactory reason, as Jed Balkin’s Mump. Whoever Jed Balkin was, the farmer who has to plough this field rather wishes he’d stuck his Mump somewhere else. But why did those prehistoric surveyors choose to put it here? Well. If we look to the west …’

The camera, following his pointing finger, goes into a zoom.

‘… we can see the tower of St Anne’s Church. Which, as we noted earlier, appears to have been built on another prehistoric burial mound. And if we look east …’

Falconer, back in the picture, spins round, the same arm outstretched like a signpost.

‘… we can see a small wood. Now …’

Close up on professional smile.

‘If I were some species of spring-heeled sprite … and I were to take a mighty leap in a dead straight line …’

Falconer braces himself.

‘… into the very centre of that wood …’

The screen fills with sky; Falconer’s voice-over.

‘… where do you think …’

A racing blur of greenery.

‘… I would land?’

The picture jolting and then settling on Falconer standing in the centre of a circle of small, stubby stones, enclosed by trees.

‘This is the Ninestones Circle — although, as you can see, there are only seven left. It’s a key feature of what even I have to admit is one of the more credible of thousands of alleged “ley lines” connecting ancient sites all over Britain. Our New Age friends would claim that this invisible line marks a flow of terrestrial energy across the landscape. The life-force of the Earth. If they’re right, I should be getting a stiff shot of the stuff through my system at this very moment.’

Falconer bending down to place his hands over a stone no more than two feet tall, smiling the kind of smile that says precisely what he thinks of this New Age garbage.

Close up.

‘To the New Agers, Stone Age and Bronze Age person was a wise and civilized soul, very much into peace and love and celestial harmony. He or she would probably have sat where I’m sitting now, meditating and being at one with nature.’

Falconer stands up.

‘Sheer nonsense, of course. The New Agers have reinvented the Stone Agers in their own image. In reality, words like “peace” and “love” would have meant nothing to these people. The key word for them would have been … “survival”.’

Falconer stalking through the woods, now, like an explorer.

‘Stone Age man — and perhaps Stone Age woman, too — moved through the landscape like a guerrilla. In tune with the Earth? Well, of course he was. He recognized that the Earth was his provider, that a relationship was crucial to his continued existence. But let’s not beat about the bush. This was a relationship cemented …’

Tight into Falconer’s savage grin.

‘… with blood.’

A rustling in the undergrowth; the camera pans across the flight of a frightened rabbit into a bush. Falconer’s voice-over.

‘If anything sharpened the senses of Neolithic people, raised their perceptions, gave them an instinctive feel for the environment, it was … the hunt.’

Shots of familiar cave paintings showing lumpen, bovine creatures getting speared.

‘Hunting … killing … was a natural, pivotal aspect of a Neolithic lifestyle which would, one suspects, thoroughly disgust our New Age friends.’

Full-length shot of Falconer holding a twelve-bore shotgun.

‘Blood sports — hunting, shooting — are anathema to many supporters of the Green movement. But green and red are opposites which, throughout history, have been linked together. And there’s little doubt that the original Green Man was a hunter, a stalker, who understood that the true, undiluted life-force was a flow … a gush … of lifeblood.’

Falconer emerging from the wood into the field where Jed Balkin’s Mump swells like a boil.

‘It’s surely naive to deny the extent to which the religous beliefs and rituals of our remote ancestors were linked to violent death.’

Sound of hunting horn and shots of traditional hunt, red-coated men and women and yelping hounds.

‘The ritual aspects of the hunt, as practised by some of Britain’s oldest families, are inescapable. This is still the most dynamic example of a flow of real energy through the landscape.’

Cut to group of huntsmen. ‘Oh yes.’ An old guy with huge sidewhiskers. ‘There’s no doubt about it. The chase absolutely takes one over. I never feel more alive. Indeed, at the height of the chase, one feels … immortal. Godlike, I suppose. All I know is that when I can’t hunt, it’ll be time — ha ha — to put me in the ground.’

The old huntsman clambering onto his horse. Falconer’s voice-over.

‘So which is closest to the earth. This man? Or this woman?’

Cut to shot of flaxen-haired beauty in a cloak and headband sitting in Lotus position at the foot of a standing stone.

Cut back to Falconer, his back to a church wall, the tower rearing behind his head.

‘There’s now a body of opinion which maintains that, psychologically and sociologically, we took a wrong turning when we abandoned the spear and the bow for the plough. When we ceased to be hunter-gatherers and became farmers. Out of agriculture came urban life, a cauldron of constantly recycled energy. Out of urban life was born stress, frustration, crime, domestic violence. What we like to call civilization. Was this the Fall of Man? It’s an issue we’ll be debating in the studio in next week’s edition of Diggers. Join us then.’

Credits roll. A University of the Earth production for Channel Four.

Silence.

Cindy switched off the set.

‘Well.’ Marcus sat up. ‘No wonder he was guest of honour at the bloody Hunt Ball.’

‘Interesting, isn’t it, my loves?’

‘Notice he said “the original Green Man”. Not a million miles from the real Green Man.’

‘Some of the phrases are almost the same,’ Maiden said. ‘That about red and green. Of course, the Green Man may simply have seen that programme. Television puts ideas into people’s heads. This guy sees that programme, a week later he thinks it’s his own concept.’

Cindy slid the videotape into its sleeve. ‘The programme was transmitted, as far as I can make out, last July. The letter was received by Crucible nearly a year ago.’

‘Could have been the other way round, then. Falconer saw the letter. It fitted the angle he was after, so he developed the idea for his programme. Academics are terrible magpies, isn’t that right, Marcus?’

‘Vultures.’

‘It wasn’t printed, Bobby.’

‘Maybe somebody else printed it.’

‘Possibly,’ Cindy conceded.

‘The other alternative,’ Marcus said, expressionless, ‘is that Falconer wrote the letter himself. Why he’d do that, I don’t know. Maybe he was fishing for reaction.’

‘Well.’ Maiden stood up. ‘Why don’t we go and ask him?’

‘Yes. Get you out of the house, wouldn’t it, lovely?’

‘Why not?’ Marcus was on his feet. ‘Personally, I wouldn’t miss this for-’

‘I don’t think so,’ Cindy said. ‘I’d hate you to get over-emotional.’

‘Listen, Lewis, the bastard has some explaining to do. If there’s any basis to your crackpot theory, at the very least he’s going to have an idea of the kind of person stupid enough to be influenced by his ideas about the bloodlust of Neolithic man. Right?’

‘But at best,’ Maiden said, ‘all it does is link the letter-writer to the programme. The rest is conjecture. You’re both, in your separate ways, too close to this. I’ll go.’

‘Under what pretext, Maiden? As a copper? Or as the most wanted man in Britain, possibly unstable?’

‘I’ll have thought of something by the time I get there.’

‘You be very careful, Bobby …’ Cindy’s eyes were hooded, watchful. ‘In some ways, you are closer to this than either of us.’