The Cold Calling

XLI

Following Magda Ring towards the mellow farmhouse home of the University of the Earth, Maiden felt a spasm in his chest.

A brief tightening sensation was all it was, and the other bloke would have ignored it. But the other bloke was only aware of surface things. And the other bloke died.

Magda almost fell at the door, shoving in a long key. As though she was desperate to put that fat slab of oak between her and the smell of corrupting flesh tainting the grounds of Cefn-y-bedd. He could understand that. But he also understood that the tightening of the chest was a response to a deep-down feeling that this house enclosed something darker and worse. And personal. As if he’d followed a preordained trail and the trail ended not at the grave in the concrete, but here, in this quiet old house.

He followed her into a big, square hall with a wide wooden staircase, several doors leading off, a deep window halfway up the stairs.

And, on the only blank wall, almost exclusively lit by this window, a picture. A picture which sent a weight slamming into his chest, like a wrecking ball fracturing some old factory wall.

Turner. He was transfixed. J. M. W. bloody Turner.

His heart seemed to crunch.

Adrian had steak, done rare. Grayle, compromising with a ploughman’s lunch with cheese, was surprised.

‘See, most of the New Age people I know are vegetarians.’

Adrian groaned. ‘Oh … really, Grayle! An interest in earth-consciousness doesn’t necessarily make one New Age. Those people are doing our subject so … much … damage. As the cave-paintings so amply demonstrate, Neolithic people were hardly veggies. They hunted. They hunted to live and they lived to hunt!’

Lecturing again. The didactic side of him taking over, changing him from schoolboy to schoolteacher. It was beginning to irritate her. Grayle shook her hair out of her eyes. And also …

… also, apart from placing his hand over hers on the gear shift that time, his interest in her as a woman seemed actually to be receding.

No problem. Sure, a good-looking guy, and she was unattached, but anything of a personal nature could only be a complication and right now she had enough of those. It was just that a little recognition, that’s all, of mutual attraction, generally made things easier.

Ho-hum. Too late now. They’d soon be among a whole bunch of people, celebrating, having a good time. The pub was just outside Stow-on-the-Wold, and less than a dozen miles from the Rollright Stones. It was old, like the Ram’s Head at St Mary’s, but it had polished panelling and brass lamps, and it was full, suggesting a wealthier, more populous area.

‘Well, all right.’ Adrian sawing up pink steak, real efficient. ‘A lot of the people on the courses are, naturally, New Agers, and it’s my job to keep them amused. But, really … I mean, some of them are such incredibly silly, shallow, inconsequential people that it’s a struggle sometimes to hide one’s contempt.’

Jesus, was this Ersula or was this Ersula? ‘What about Janny and Matthew? They’re kind of New Age, aren’t they?’

A shadow crossed his eyes. ‘They’re nice people. They’re friends.’

Something here she wasn’t getting. ‘How’d you get into this stuff, Adrian?’ Grayle abandoned onto a side plate the cob of squelchy, white bread that came with her lunch.

‘Didn’t get into it.’ He pushed a piece of meat into his mouth. ‘Got into me. You don’t want that bread?’

‘Sure, help yourself. It?’

‘The Earth. Always aware of Her, of course.’ He grabbed the bread, took a bite. ‘Grew up in Wiltshire. Father was an army officer. Stonehenge was always there. Better seen from a distance, rather lost its magic with all the main roads and tourists. And the army, all manoeuvres, no real … Anyway. At least Avebury’s surviving. Despite the undesirables it attracts. At Avebury, I had a sort of vision. A calling, I suppose.’

‘In a church-minister kind of way?’

‘In exactly that kind of way.’

‘To go out and spread the word about earth-mysteries?’

‘But that’s not enough, is it? Everybody’s just living on the Earth. We should live in Her and She in us. We should move with Her, breathe with Her.’

Sounded kind of sexual. ‘Where’d you get this, Adrian? Where’d it come from?’

‘From?’ He looked surprised. ‘From the Earth, of course.’

‘No, I mean, which books, in particular?’

‘Books?’ He was almost shouting. Strands of steak clung to his teeth. ‘I received it from the Earth, Grayle. I received it.’

‘Yeah, sure, but …’ Feeling herself going red. ‘I mean … how?’

He looked at her for a long time, the way a teacher looks at the dumbest kid in the class when the kid reveals, by some inane answer, that it hasn’t grasped what the lesson was even supposed to be about.

‘The dreaming,’ Adrian said.

‘I’m sorry … You get guidance from dreams. Of course.’

‘Guidance? Instructions! Look, you don’t seem to realize, the dreaming is the University of the Earth. You’re surrendering your consciousness to the oldest teacher of all. And when you’ve been doing it for so long, when you’ve shown you’re ready to serve Her, the Earth will tell you what She wants from you.’

Ersula had written, What you are dealing with here is the unconscious and that must be lift to find its own route to what you would probably call enlightenment.

‘Adrian, how long you been doing this?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Several years. Put it this way.’ Adrian began to mop up the remains of his gravy with the remains of Grayle’s cob of white bread. ‘So far, I’ve spent … hold on, tell you exactly … seven hundred and thirty-eight nights in ancient sites.’

‘What?’

‘It was why I just had to have this job. I can take groups of students all over the country to sleep at sacred sites. Go alone, first, of course, to test them out.’

She had a picture of him, some big boy scout with his knapsack, leading a crocodile of well-heeled innocents in anoraks.

‘The sites know me now. Most of the guardians know me. Of course, if a certain guardian has a particularly fearsome aspect, I won’t take students there.’ Adrian grinned. ‘Wouldn’t do to lose one of the poor punters through a heart attack or something.’

Grayle recalled Matthew Lyall talking of the grotesque hag-like guardians invading your dreams, barring the way. Also recalled what Cindy had said about the death of Mrs Willis at the Knoll. A stroke.

‘Can be quite terrifying at first,’ Adrian said. ‘Mind you, it can also be a wonderfully healthy thing. Quite often, after a dreaming, you’ll notice that the subject’s health has improved.’

He looked past Grayle, at green hills through a window, his knife in one hand, the last of the bread in the other. ‘Funny thing. When I spend a night in an ordinary bed, I feel quite disoriented. Dislocated, you know?’

Dislocated? Jesus, was this any wonder after seven hundred and thirty-eight nights inside prehistoric ritual temples? According to Ersula, just a couple of experiences could blow your mind. Well, it was clear enough now: what this guy did, he OD’d … he OD’d on the dreaming. Turned himself into a dream-junkie.

‘But, Adrian, what happens when the dreaming experiment comes to an end? When all the stuff goes into the computers?’

Adrian threw down his knife. ‘It will never end. It’s already way beyond an experiment. Do you really think we can learn all the Earth has to teach us in a few years? In a lifetime, even?’

‘Let me get this right.’ Oh boy, just when you think all the world’s crazies are gathered in LA, with a small New York overspill … ‘You see the University of the Earth developing into some kind of channel … into like a universal planetary consciousness?’

‘Already is. And one day I’ll prove it. At present, She speaks to just a few of us, in our dreams. One day, quite soon, She’ll speak to everyone. You’ll hear Her. You’ll all hear Her.’

‘The EVP tapes? You think one day you’ll get to record the voice of …?’

‘Perhaps we already have. We just can’t understand it. Any more than we understand when She speaks to us in the wind, the sound of waves on the shore.’

‘Well,’ Grayle said. ‘I guess he even convinced Ersula.’

‘Who? Who convinced Ersula?’

‘Roger.’

‘Roger?’ Adrian pushed aside his plate. ‘What does Roger know?’ He stood up. ‘We’d better go. Do you need to use the loo or anything?’

* * *

Sky coming to the boil. Finger of lightning prodding languidly out of sweating clouds. Below, several sheep already struck down, a heavy tumble of bodies, milk-eyed heads flat to the plain.

A few yards away, the shepherd lying dead. His dog, back arched, howling a pitiful protest at the vengeful heavens.

Energy. The hideous energy of violent death. In this painting, only Stonehenge was truly in its element. Whitened, as though lit from within by electric filaments, the stones exulted in the storm.

Inside his tightening chest, Maiden felt he was howling like the sheepdog.

The print, gilt-framed, hung at the foot of the wide wooden staircase in the panelled hall at Cefn-y-bedd.

A phone was ringing somewhere then stopped when an answering machine collected the call. Maiden’s chest felt bruised with memory. His mind rewinding at speed. The lightning striking again and again. Revelation. Big lights, a distant roar. Hospital smells. He remembered, the evening he walked out of Elham General, seeing Turner’s painting of the angry sea around Fingal’s Cave. Feeling that same tightness in the chest. It had not been the same image, but the style … the elemental rage … that was the same. What did it mean?

It meant this picture, this image, of stones and death, had been in his tumbling, dislocated dreams when Andy’s hands were around his head and the defibrillator was smashing at his ribcage.

Part of him came into you, Cindy said. Cindy, the has-been, end-of-the-pier shamanic joke.

Cindy had it right.

More crimes in heaven and earth…

Cindy, Godalmighty, was right. The intensity of it all made it impossible to stand still. He walked around the hall, arms and legs tingling with electricity, unable to pull his eyes away from the Turner: stones and energy and violent death.

‘It’s his favourite.’ Magda Ring glanced at him once, a flicker of uncertainty, as she shed her dusty Barbour on the hall floor. ‘Turner’s Stonehenge, 1828. You never seen it before?’

‘Not on a wall,’ Maiden said. ‘I’m sorry. I like paintings. You ready to talk now?’

Letting her think it had been a deliberate ploy, him appearing hypnotized by the print. A digression. Subtle, like a TV detective.

‘Prettier ones in here.’

Magda led him into a large, airy drawing room with a beamed ceiling and oak pillars, plush armchairs set out like a hotel lounge. And more Stonehenge prints: Girtin, Inchbold and Constable’s impressionistic sketch of the rain-washed megaliths with the double rainbow.

‘The sister called you in, I suppose.’

For a moment, he could only think of Sister Andy.

‘Grayle,’ Magda said. ‘Listen, Inspector, I didn’t know. I really didn’t know she was there. I didn’t know she was dead.’

‘I’m supposed to believe that?’ Detective-mode. ‘Why did you dig the hole? How did you know where to dig?’

‘Because …’ Her eyes flashed. ‘… to satisfy myself it was nonsense. I didn’t believe it for one minute, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. And this was the first chance I had to check it out. Adrian gone to his wedding, Roger up to town for the weekend. When he goes off in his helicopter, at least you can tell when he’s coming back.’

‘You must’ve grabbed the pick before he was over the horizon.’

‘Perfect time, I’m trying to tell you. Course starts next Wednesday. Staff — cleaners and people — start arriving this afternoon, get the place ready. No time to waste. Look, I had the pick ready round the back of the helicopter shed. I was going to allay my own fears once and for all. Oh God. I can’t believe it. It’s all destroyed, everything we worked for’s ruined. ‘

‘Magda, a woman’s dead.’ Before they left the scene, he’d placed concrete slabs back in the hole, covering the body. ‘You do know who it is, don’t you?’

‘The hair.’ Magda’s face puckered. She tightened her jaw, looked down for a moment. ‘Can I get a drink?’

‘Course.’

She brought whisky and tumblers from a stripped-pine corner cupboard. ‘You?’

He accepted a small one. Turned out to be the one which tasted of peat, damp and lonely, moorland meeting the sea, no visible horizon. It would be, today.

Sadness seeped through him. He saw Em, as Suzanne, sitting opposite, black hair, black eyes, mauve lipstick. The image crucified him.

Too much time passed and Magda was standing in front of him: tight black sweater, jeans with a spiked leather belt. Pale, but together.

‘Sorry?’

‘I said, What are you?’ Magda said. ‘You’re not an ordinary policeman, are you?’

‘No such thing as an ordinary policeman.’

‘I mean, not local.’

‘Serious Crimes Bureau,’ Maiden lied. ‘We …’ He hesitated. ‘We’re investigating a series of murders linked to prehistoric sites.’

‘Whaaaat?’ Magda Ring was aghast. Sank down, involuntarily, into one of the armchairs. He observed her: she was loosened with shock, rather than relief at finally being found out; there was an obvious difference.

‘Look …’ Stared at him, green eyes wide, the colour scared out of her face again. ‘For God’s sake … this is nothing like … This isn’t murder. ‘

‘How long have you known she was there?’

‘I didn’t know, I keep telling you. I half thought it was fantasy. Everybody who comes here inhabits a fantasy world. It takes you over. The unseen Britain. The spirit-country. The whole earth-mysteries game. It’s to do with romantic theories to make us feel … connected.’

‘So whose body is it?’

‘Ersula Underhill. I thought you knew. The sister-’

‘Grayle. Sure. I’ve spoken to Grayle.’

‘Inspector, I believed … I swear to God I believed Ersula had gone back to the States. Because of Roger. And then the sister shows up, incognito, and obviously Ersula didn’t go back, and the sister suspects … something. Look, shouldn’t you be making phone calls? Summoning your forensic people. Whoever. Shouldn’t this place be buzzing?’

‘She’ll come to no harm down there.’

‘I want her out of here.’ Magda shuddered. ‘I want her safely stashed away in some path lab. I never liked her when she was alive. One of those … lofty, know-it-all Americans. Roger thought she was wonderful because she was so damn serious all the time, tons of extra gravitas to bluff the punters. Brings out the worst in me, though, that kind of attitude.’

‘That a fact?’

‘Look.’ Magda frowned. ‘If I’m going to have to watch every bloody thing I say, I want my solicitor here.’

Maiden sighed. ‘I’ve got no witness, you’re not in an interview room, you’re not being taped, and it seems unlikely to me that you killed her. All right?’

‘Delirious.’ Magda sniffed. ‘I’ve got to start looking for a job. It was good here, for a while. Until it got stupid.’

‘Why did it get stupid?’

She offered him more whisky; he shook his head.

‘Greed.’ Falling back in the chair, crossing her legs, the bottle on her lap. ‘Always bloody greed, isn’t it? He was the country’s most respected Neolithic archaeologist. Honorary fellow of Christ Church, etcetera, etcetera. And then he started doing TV. Wouldn’t think it could turn the head of a guy that educated, would you? Let me tell you, they’re the worst. Especially someone with a libido off the Richter scale who’s had to worry about the career risks involved in shafting too many students. Now, suddenly he’s getting fan letters on funny-smelling paper. Dear Professor, that shot of you stripped to the waist in the Roman villa just haunts me, so if you’ve got a spare place on any of your digs, I’d be happy to accommodate your trowel.’

‘The University of the Earth began as a supply-line for non-stop totty?’

‘Partly. Well, the big angle’s money, obviously. Roger wasn’t slow to pick up on the fact that a large proportion of the people writing in to the programme were New Agers and earth-mysteries fanatics trying to convert him. That’s where the real money is. People don’t want digs, where after six months you’ve uncovered some boring foundations and a few bits of pottery. They want the Ark of the bloody Covenant. So … he starts to compromise. The reason I know all this, by the way, is I was his producer at the BBC. Before he realized he could quadruple his income overnight by making his own programmes for Channel Four, and I went with him, naturally, because who wouldn’t?’

Magda looked defiant, drank some whisky.

‘And, no, he wasn’t fucking me. Needed me too much. Doesn’t sleep with anybody he might need in two months’ time.’

‘As the abrupt termination of a loving relationship often offends,’ Maiden said wryly.

‘Quite. Which is also why he didn’t sleep with … her … Ersula. Woman after his own heart, you see. Talked crap in a very learned, intense way. Everything she said sounded like a balanced argument resulting from years of study. He loved that. He wanted to employ her. He wanted her mind. I mean, on the payroll. Whereas — this was the problem — she wanted him. Body and mind.’

‘Was she …’ All he could see was the puffed-up, blistered, decomposing face in the concrete tomb. ‘… good-looking?’

‘Not good-looking enough. Anyway, she was throwing herself at him. Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the hunt? Sad. Like an undergraduate going for her tutor. Except this was a grown woman. Brilliant mind, sexual age of twelve. And she sets her sights on Roger Falconer? Save us! I mean, really clever woman, but not clever enough to realize what a sham he was. Have you seen his programmes?’

‘Just been watching one. About hunting.’

Magda nodded. ‘Good example. Very good example. That’s the one where he puts the esoteric case for blood sports?’

‘Linked to ley lines. Hard to tell whether he was serious or he’d just concocted it to take a poke at the New Agers. Interestingly, that same argument, about …’ He struggled to frame it.

‘Hunting feeding the earth?’

‘Mmm. It had been aired in a letter sent to this little pagan magazine some months earlier.’

‘God,’ Magda said. ‘You’ve really hit the spot, haven’t you? How long’ve you been looking into all this?’

‘Long enough.’ Sorry, Cindy.

Magda’s green eyes didn’t blink. ‘You’re right. It’s not his theory. He got it from Adrian. He gets everything from Adrian. It’s almost funny. I mean, have you met Adrian?’

‘No.’

‘He seems quite ludicrously harmless at first. Minor public-school idiot. Caricature. Sort of chap you see in old black and white films. I mean, you know, a hunk, for heaven’s sake, although he doesn’t realize it. Too engrossed. You can imagine him, as a child, collecting pictures of standing stones like other kids collected stamps.’

Magda uncrossed her legs, started to uncork the whisky then changed her mind and put the bottle on the floor.

‘He’s somehow not of this … not of this age. Very polite, very … courtly. He paid court to Ersula. In awe of her. Supervised her dreaming sessions. And when she became obsessed with all that, he mistakenly thought he was going to be part of the package.’

‘He was pursuing her and she was …?’

‘Pining for bloody Roger. I don’t know how Adrian didn’t realize that from the outset. But, as I say, he’s not of this age. Poor sod belongs in Jane Austen, you know what I mean?’

‘OK.’ Maiden thought they were wandering from the point. ‘What happened to Ersula?’

‘Vanished.’ Magda said. ‘Well, sort of. I mean … not unexpectedly is what I mean. One night, near the end of the summer course, she was closeted with Roger in his study for a long time, over two hours. I stayed out of the way, I could guess the kind of things being said. Fairly self-evident when she didn’t come down to breakfast next day. She was due to go with Roger and a group of students in a couple of minibuses. He sent me over to the stables to see what was wrong with her. Too professional, surely, to let a little emotional hiccup … etcetera, etcetera. Bastard. So I’m knocking on her door, she’s shouting, Go away, leave me alone, sob, sob, etcetera. So I had to go and shepherd the idiots around. When we got back, it was after dark. I didn’t see her, but the following morning she’d gone. Suitcases, everything.’

‘You didn’t try to find out where?’

‘How could we? Where would we start? She was American. She probably went back to America, to nurse her broken heart in the family’s Long Island beach house or wherever. Anyway, we had to see all the punters off the premises, and we were all pretty knackered.’

‘While you were away, where was …?’

‘Adrian?’ She pushed both hands through her dark, curly hair, exasperated at her lack of perception. ‘Good old Adrian was otherwise engaged that day. Taking delivery of a few truckloads of ready-mix concrete for Roger’s new helipad.’

‘Oh.’

‘Adrian’s terribly practical. Laid it all out, himself. You see, there’s a very significant ley line in that area. Goes through the woods, connects eventually with St Mary’s churchyard. Adrian said the helicopter shouldn’t come down on the ley because the Earth wouldn’t like it. So only one edge overlaps the line — don’t tell me how he worked out precisely where it goes, he just did. And he marked it with a row of crosses raked into the surface of the concrete, so we’d know where the ley went and Roger could avoid it when he landed.’

Magda stood up and walked to the biggest window, overlooking the courtyard.

‘So, naturally, that’s where I went to hack it up.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Listen, I know the guy. It’s what he’d do. The ritualistic side of him. He was besotted with her. He’d want to put her in a place where her spirit could fly.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘And how do you think she died?’

‘She obviously killed herself. Someone that serious, that single-minded … and he spurns her, he says, Sorry, old girl, but you’re really not my type, have a drink … I don’t know how she did it. Pills or something. That’s for you to find out: Jesus, the stupidity of men.’

He waited.

‘This is Roger. This is the way he is. I know this is what happened. Wasn’t going to have a silly, hysterical girl’s suicide destroying his enterprise. I mean, the scandal, the publicity. You see, he has big expansion plans. More land-Castle Farm, when he gets old Bacton out. Wants that castle so badly, he’s drooling. A real little university. So he needs every punter he can get now, especially rich Americans.’

She stopped for a moment, working it out. She was an intelligent woman, Maiden thought. But she was wrong.

‘And they just buried her? Without a thought for the relatives?’

‘This is Roger Falconer we’re talking about. Of course he wouldn’t think about the relatives. And Adrian would do as he was told. He needs this job.’

‘What about her possessions, her cases?’

‘There’s an old forge out at the back. Adrian restored it last winter. Likes to make himself useful. Perhaps they burned the cases there, I don’t know.’

Maiden stood up. ‘I use your phone?’

‘Table in the hall.’

Maiden called Castle Farm. Cindy answered. Maiden said, ‘Cindy, get over here. Wear trousers.’