The Cold Calling

XLIV

The circle was looking even more chewed up today, as if the stones had some degenerative disease.

Or maybe, once again, it was just the way she was feeling.

‘Limestone,’ the Reverend Charlie said. ‘This is what happens with limestone. They’ll still be here in another two thousand years, count on it.’

He didn’t look a lot like a reverend. He had on this really old fringed leather jacket and frayed, off-white jeans and sneakers with a hole in one toe, through which you could see he wasn’t wearing socks.

The sky had cleared now, late afternoon, or maybe this was a different climate zone or something. In the east, purplish clouds were forming like a mountain and the sun had a dull, dirty sheen.

‘Going to rain at some stage.’ Charlie had a mild, London accent. ‘Nothing surer. Always rains at my weddings.’

He grinned, showing teeth that were uneven, chipped and brownish.

A lot like the Rollright Stones, in fact.

Grayle had come out here, ahead of the party, because Charlie had to come get his stuff together. She’d gotten talking to him, told him about Ersula, and he seemed like a nice guy, and he’d offered her a ride over, in his van.

She’d explained to him what had happened. How the hire car had broken down and Adrian couldn’t fix it, but said he’d run back to the pub and call up the AA, and when he returned it was in a car with this couple who were headed for Chipping Norton. Made sense, Adrian said, if she went along with these people and he’d stay and wait for the AA, who sometimes took simply for ever, and he’d bring the car along to the Stones once it was fixed.

On the one hand, Grayle didn’t like to leave the hire car. On the other, she’d had enough, for one day, of Adrian and his lectures. And it was kind of him. So she’d unloaded her case and gone with the people in the car and Adrian had stayed with the Rover and his cricket bag.

In the hotel in Chipping Norton, not surprisingly, there was no sign of Matthew or Janny, and Grayle obviously didn’t know any other guests. Which was how she’d homed in on the individual with the dog collar.

‘You conducted weddings here before, Charlie?’

‘Actually, no.’ The reverend massaged one of the taller stones with both hands. ‘Weddings here tend to be of the pagan variety. Handfastings, that sort of thing. I’m here by way of a compromise. Friend of the family. And also just about the only ordained clergyman they could find willing to conduct an open-air wedding in a place this notorious.’

The last tourists, two spinsterish ladies in golfing-type checked trousers, walked out of the circle and didn’t look back.

Grayle said, ‘Notorious?’

‘Been some fairly unpleasant goings-on at the old Rollrights over the centuries.’ Charlie leaned against the stone. ‘Well, over this century, particularly. It’s because it’s so relatively accessible from Oxford and London.’

‘What kind of goings-on?’

‘Oh, you know, satanic rites. Sicko stuff. For instance, a spaniel was sacrificed here some years ago.’

‘That’s awful. What kind of people would do that?’

‘No-one I’d care to break bread with, Grayle, but these are difficult, desperate times. Everyone searching for a quick, cut-price spiritual fix. Could you help me with my altar?’

Charlie’s altar was a small wooden picnic table. They set it up at the far end of the circle, where the pine trees reared. It looked flimsy and lonely.

‘You have your church hereabouts, Charlie?’

‘Don’t have a church at all. I’m a sort of embarrassing Anglican mendicant. Travel around, begging for scraps. Wedding here, two-week locum post there. Few rock festivals in the summer. They’re great. Sunday morning worship … surprising how many crawl out of their tents for it, even if they’re too stoned to read the hymn sheets. No, poor as the proverbial, but then so was JC.’

Charlie took out a tin box, placed it on the altar and began to roll himself a cigarette.

Grayle said, ‘You think these are, uh, bad places, generally?’

‘Course not. Terrific places, some of them. Wild and spectacular, like Castlerigg in the Lake District. Awe-inspiring like Avebury. Just not awfully sure about this one. Feels polluted, somehow. But, then, these are the places we should be bringing a little light down on, don’t you think?’

‘You think they still have power?’

‘Absolutely. Why else would we have built most of our churches on the same sites? You can feel it while you’re working, you really can. When you stand in front of the altar in some tiny little country church and raise your arms … vroom!’

‘And maybe you see … things?’

Charlie’s eyes narrowed. He looked her up and down. After inspecting the other guests at the hotel in Chipping Norton — nothing formal, but lots of floaty stuff — she’d changed in the ladies’ room into a long print skirt and a scoop-neck blouse, thrown a woollen wrap around her shoulders.

‘What sort of things?’ Charlie said suspiciously.

‘Kind of … unexplained phenomena things?’ She pulled on the tassels of her wrap. ‘I think I may be a little crazy.’

The Reverend Charlie invited her to sit on his altar with him, offered a cigarette. ‘Good stuff. Only the best from a man of God.’

Grayle blinked. ‘Uh, not right now, thanks.’

He nodded. ‘You know, Grayle, it’s an odd thing, but I never saw a ghost. Problem with ghosts — and I believe in them, sure — they never seem to appear to people who really want to see one. Strange, eh?’

‘Oh, I always wanted to see one. Back home. When I had this New Age newspaper column. But when I came over here, to find Ersula, when I was really alone in a strange place, no I did not want to see anything I couldn’t explain.’

Grayle sighed and found herself secondary-smoking the reverend’s dope.

Andy had dozed for a couple of hours on the sofa. Woke up feeling lousy and gave herself some Reiki. Called Marcus back. Wouldn’t put it past the old sod to stay away a couple of hours and then return. Too meek, come to think of it, the way he’d accepted the idea of danger.

But no answer from Castle Farm, so she made herself some soup and got ready for work. Having agreed to call in on Tony Parker on the way. Dispense more laying on of hands.

She’d asked him could he not just call them off, these bad guys.

‘If somebody sent them,’ Tony Parker had said, ‘if … hypothetically, and from my limited knowledge of such matters … some operatives had been contracted … then the hirer would not expect to hear from them again until completion of the contract. That’s the way of it. As I understand it.’

‘I’ll leave you to your grief, then.’

His colour was improved, no question of that. Jesus God, Andy thought, the things we wind up doing.

‘Well, Sister, whatever it was, I appreciate it,’ Parker had said as she stood up. ‘And that offer stands.’

Had to admit she’d never treated anybody — or at least any man — more receptive. Mostly, they were a wee bit nervous, or trying too hard. Tony Parker, both emotionally drained and entirely confident that nobody would mess with him in his own office, had submitted totally, and so had realized immediate and immense benefit. Better than pills, clearly, and no side-effects. So he wanted more, and he thought he could buy it.

‘You flatter me, Tony. Only, private nursing’s no my thing. I prefer to put it about, you know?’

‘You’ll come around. And we didn’t have no conversation, mind.’ Suspicious now. Wondering if the treatment hadn’t been some form of hypnosis to promote indiscretion.

‘No,’ Andy had said. ‘We didn’t. Listen, I’ll come back tonight, on my way to work, see how y’are.’

He’d brightened at that. She pitied him. A hard-looking young guy had peeked in on them earlier. Parker would be surrounded with people like this and the older he got the less he’d be able to trust them. Half of him would have wanted to bring smart Em into the family business, the other half to keep her the hell away from it.

‘Sister,’ he’d said as she left, ‘I ain’t decided whether I believe what you say about Maiden, but I’ll do what I can to suspend things meantime. Just that other parties got to be consulted.’

This didn’t entirely make sense. Who? Riggs? She’d ask him about it again, after giving him another treatment. She was out of her depth. Felt useless. Needed to be hands-on again.

Parking the car on a pay-and-display up the street from Parker’s club, she contemplated ringing in sick and driving down to St Mary’s. Like, she’d go to work as normal, park at the hospital, vanish into the building then out through the ambulance doors and away to the border. She’d know if they were tailing her. Wouldn’t she?

‘Mr Parker, please,’ she told the girl in the office next to the Biarritz Club. It was five p.m.; she could spare him half an hour. ‘I have an appointment.’

The receptionist looked at her with recognition. ‘You’re a bit late, Sister,’ she said without much feeling either way. ‘Mr Parker collapsed at his desk this afternoon. We’ve just heard from the General he died a short time ago.’

Andy just stood there, and her healing hands felt like dead meat.

‘He hadn’t been a well man, anyway,’ the receptionist said. ‘But you’d know that.’

Cindy pulled out tape III, switched off.

‘Let’s give it a rest.’

Maiden had no argument with that. It was starting to make him feel sick. Tape III recounted a killing even Cindy hadn’t discovered in the papers. Victim was a seventy-year-old church verger, near Worcester. His skull smashed on the edge of the twelfth-century stone font. The Green Man had learned in a dream that the medieval font had begun its working life as a Druidic sacrificial stone.

‘Seems to me, Cindy, that his dreams have become increasingly literal.’

‘Yes. I had noticed.’

‘Does this happen much in your experience? Where you actually dream about the place you’re sleeping?’

‘Oh, yes. Site-specific imagery is quite common. You also have an increasing number of lucid dreams — that is, dreams where you know you are dreaming. And then you might gradually learn to control your dreams. Which is when it gets complicated. Where is the borderline between a dream and a self-induced fantasy?’

‘So he could be dreaming what he wants to dream. Or convincing himself when he wakes up that his dream was significant to whatever nastiness he’s got in mind. What I’m really asking is, what effect is the sleeping on powerful energy … points …’

‘Nodes. Energy nodes.’

‘Whatever. What effect is that going to have on the mind of a psychopath?’

Cindy urged the grumbling Morris Minor past a tractor and trailer.

‘That’s an interesting point, Bobby. And a most disturbing one. If we go back, see, to the first killing, poor Maria, in the New Forest, you’ll recall he’s operating almost instinctively. In killing Maria, he’s attempting to please the Earth, to get in tune, but he’s a little frustrated that he can’t have confirmation. He says something like, If only there was a way of speaking directly to the Earth and listening to Her instructions …’

‘So when he hears about this dreaming experiment …’

‘Which began, as I recall, in the eighties, with an earth-mysteries group called the Dragon Project Trust. If he read about this, he would try it for himself. It’s a free country. You can spend a night at virtually any prehistoric site you like, except Stonehenge. He would believe he had found it. A channel of communication with the Earth itself.’

‘And then, when he goes to work for Falconer, he introduces the idea. Which became very popular among the punters. Maybe he thinks they’re all going to start-’

‘God forbid! No, I think … I think he believes they will be educated. By the Earth …’

‘The University of the Earth.’

‘… into accepting the Old Ways.’

‘Seeing how he’s already influenced the great Falconer.’

‘Which I doubt the good professor would admit under torture. No, I don’t think he believes they will all become serial killers. He believes that to be a great honour. He is a chosen instrument. One of the Elect. You notice how he refers to himself-’

‘The Green Man “in his glory”, “in his majesty”.’

‘Exactly!’

‘It’s not untypical, Cindy. I’ve never heard of a modest, unassuming serial-killer. Delusions of superiority, uniqueness …’ Maiden leaned back as far as the seat would allow, which wasn’t far. He breathed out.

‘I think this is called assembling a psychological profile, is it not, Bobby?’

‘Yeah. Though what good it’s going to do … How far now?’

‘Tewkesbury and then the back road into the Cotswolds to Stow. Say an hour.’

‘And then what? What do we do when we get there?’

For a while, he’d felt like a copper again, the big jigsaw interlocking in his head. Yet the more he heard of the Green Man tapes, the less he felt up to it. Killers on this scale had absorbed CID teams from four, five divisions, heavy uniform back-up, incident rooms, the works. A damaged DI with a personal angle and an ageing actor-ventriloquist with dubious shamanic powers in a thirty-year-old Morris Minor for which sixty mph was a distant memory …

‘We find Grayle,’ Cindy said soberly. ‘If it’s not too late.’

‘I wonder what the bastard’s reaction was when he found out he’d killed the wrong woman.’

‘Bobby,’ Cindy said, ‘after the initial shock, I doubt if he’d consider your poor friend to have been the wrong woman after all. For him, everything is ordained. Collen Hall, on its energy node? However would he have been led to this magical place otherwise?’

‘In the end, the identity of the victim is not important?’

‘He believes the Earth will choose. This is underlined for him by the killing at Avebury, when he discovers his victim is a hairdresser, thus providing a link with the famous medieval Barber-Surgeon whose skeleton was found beneath one of the stones after, presumably, trying to damage it. A reverberation, through the ages. Vindication.’

‘You notice, how, although he might know his victim — Ersula … Grayle — as soon as he sets out to kill them, as soon as they become the quarry, he depersonalizes them. They become “the woman”. Like “the fox”, “the pheasant”. He’s not a murderer, he’s just a hunter.’

‘Not just a hunter, Bobby.’

‘Cindy, I’m going to have this cunt.’

‘Of course you are, lovely, of course you are.’

Marcus made himself a cheese sandwich and shut Malcolm in the kitchen with a bowl of water and four Bonios to keep him quiet.

He was a good dog, a brave dog. But very, very bad guys?

‘Stay,’ Marcus said.

He went out of the house and prowled the tumbledown buildings, in search of weapons. The best he could find was the head of a scythe, which he couldn’t hold without it biting into his hand, and a wooden-handled pitchfork with rusted tines, so badly eroded, in fact, that it was hard to tell if there was actually any metal beneath the rust.

Marcus straightened his bow tie and climbed over a short, broken wall to the remains of the only serviceable tower, the highest part of the castle. It was no more than about half of a sundered tower in the remains of the curtain wall. Possibly part of a gateway. Perhaps there’d been a portcullis here.

Could have used one now, all right.

Marcus climbed a treacherously narrow, dangerously worn spiral staircase inside the tower. Hadn’t done this in years; bloody steps would be beyond repair soon.

He turned a corner and came out in the sky. Always a surprise, the way the steps simply ended, broke off. A sycamore tree had grown up next to the tower, partly obscuring the view in high summer, but there was still quite an extensive vista of the Black Mountains, for once living ominously up to their name, filling the western horizon, like the massed tents of a dark army.

Once, raiders had come down from the mountains, from the poorer country into the lushness of the Golden Valley. The reason the castle had been built. But now the threat, presumably, was from the east. The only way to reach this place was by road from St Mary’s. From the tower, the road was visible for nearly half a mile before it dipped between the high hedges and the hills.

Marcus sat on the top step, adjusted his glasses and unwrapped his sandwich. Might as well go out on a full stomach. Joking, of course. Maiden and his urban thugs and his bent coppers. Nothing would happen.

The jagged walls of the castle sawed into a sky of sickly yellow, like tallow.