The Cold Calling

LI

Cold. The stones prickly with frost. She had to touch, just once, before she walked away, dug her hands into coat pockets.

Hallowe’en, night of the dead, didn’t seem like a good time for this. But, then, it wasn’t Hallowe’en any more. What did they call the day after Hallowe’en? Was that All Saints Day or All Souls Day? Anyway, the Celtic New Year, Cindy said, so that was OK. And a new moon, too. Must count for something.

And I’m still here, Grayle thought. What am I doing still here, waiting for the start of some stupid ceremony to rehabilitate a pile of rocks?

The pre-dawn wind was kicking at the grass, rattling the gorse bushes. There were no bad vibes around the place, but no good vibes either.

Just some old stones and a bunch of dysfunctional fruitcakes.

After two days of questions and statements and assuring them that she’d return in good time for the trial, Grayle had left Oxford in a fresh hire car. They’d found the little red Rover up against a field gate, couple of hundred yards from the path to the Whispering Knights. Backed up, ready to go. Another sign that Adrian had seen no reason why he wasn’t going to walk away from this.

At Duncan Murphy’s place, Grayle had spent a half-hour on the phone to her father. She told him Ersula was dead, murdered by a clean-shaven, nicely groomed, old-fashioned, well-spoken, all-round decent guy who loved his country. Then she burst into tears. Her father had not asked when she planned to return. Her father only ever had one daughter.

Precisely what Adrian Fraser-Hale had done to Ersula, Grayle did not, at that time, know.

Soon, the whole world would know.

Somehow, without quite figuring out why, Grayle had found herself driving west again. Tuesday night, she was back in her depressing old room at the Ram’s Head in the village of St Mary’s. Along the passage from an even crummier room occupied by one Sydney Mars-Lewis.

‘I should go home,’ she said to him in the bar that night. ‘But I feel so restless. So dislocated. So … so goddamned angry.’

‘A hundred years ago …’ Cindy was wearing his insouciant smile. ‘… he would have been hanged and his body brought back and laid out on the capstone at Black Knoll so that everyone damaged by him could walk up and watch him rot. Would that have helped?’

‘Get outa here,’ Grayle had said.

Now she looked at the High Knoll burial chamber and thought maybe this was what they were about to do. Kind of.

Someone put an arm around her waist. She looked up into an eyepatch.

Bobby Maiden hadn’t been back to Elham. He’d been in Hereford for two weeks, engaged the whole time on the Fraser-Hale case. Sitting in on the days of interviews with Adrian, who was co-operative and expansive and sometimes — although never quite, for Maiden — almost charming.

Different people kept listening to the tapes. ‘Load of balls,’ Armstrong would say periodically. ‘Whichever way you look at it, the feller’s bloody mental.’

Armstrong being the detective superintendent in charge now. Because Adrian was so polite and co-operative, Armstrong didn’t hate Adrian.

He hated Cindy instead.

‘I don’t understand where that mad Welsh poof comes into it,’ he’d say every time Maiden strongly suggested they consult Cindy about some arcane issue relating to earth-magic. Armstrong hated having Cindy in the same room. Seymour, the forensic psychologist inflicted on the team, hated having Cindy in the same county.

‘Don’t worry about it, lovely,’ Cindy said. ‘How would I have coped with all that fame at my age?’

He did send one letter to Superintendent Armstrong. It suggested they should never become blase or loosen the security around Adrian Fraser-Hale. That they should be very careful about which police stations or remand centres he was to be held in, which courtroom was to be used for his trial, which prison or unit for the criminal insane was to house him for perhaps the rest of his life. Cindy advocated the use of an Ordnance Survey map and a ruler.

Armstrong showed Maiden the letter before he shredded it. ‘Tell this old toerag if he pesters me again I’ll nick him for wasting police time.’

Maiden wondered whether he was going to quit the Job, officially, before or after the court case.

But he still wanted Riggs.

One night, he had a call from Mike Beattie to say his car had been found in Telford Avenue, jacked up on bricks, all four wheels gone, what did he want doing with it? Oh, and had he heard old Tony Parker was no more?

Sure. He’d heard it all from Andy, who’d given herself either two weeks’ holiday or a nervous breakdown, depending how Elham General wanted to play it. She was staying in the dairy cottage at Castle Farm to care for Marcus, who, in Maiden’s view, was playing weaker than he actually was. But not too weak to keep ringing Maiden up in Hereford, asking if they’d arrested Falconer yet.

Unlikely. Falconer was coming over dumbfounded. After all, just look at the chap, would you think he was capable? Does he look like a Peter Sutcliffe, a Charles Manson, a Jeffrey Dahmer, a Fred bloody West?

‘The University of the Earth will quietly fade away,’ Magda Ring predicted over a lunchtime drink in the Ram’s Head. ‘I’m expecting a lump sum from Roger. What I think is called a Golden Gag. Of course, I could probably equal it, were I to write the full story of Roger and Adrian for one of the Sundays.’

‘You really think he knew?’

‘How much did he know is the only valid question. I think he kept Adrian like zoologists keep apes. Do you know what I mean?’

‘They were going to write a book together.’

‘You mean Falconer was going to write a book about the Adrian Phenomenon. And may still, when he’s had time to disentangle himself completely.’

‘I’ll swing for the bastard first,’ Marcus said.

‘Ah. There you are, lovelies.’

Cindy wore a long, double-breasted coat and a tan fedora.

‘No feathery cloak?’ Maiden said.

‘Too cold. Brrrr.’ Cindy shook his arms. Bangles jangled. ‘Oh … while I remember.’ He slid a small package into Maiden’s jacket pocket. ‘There you are. You’ve got everything now, lovely.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s the cassette we recorded on the Knoll, when you slept on the stone. Your dream tape.’

‘Do I want to hear it?’

‘Well,’ Cindy said, ‘the truth is, most of it didn’t come out. I lied.’

‘What, that whole dream session …’

‘You can call it a psychological placebo if you like, but I am a shaman and I collected the soil, and I believe … Anyway, recorders and cameras and such items often do malfunction when something really quite significant is happening. Someone up there laughing at us. There is, however, something about a lady. Under a street-lamp.’

‘Oh, wow,’ Grayle said.

Maiden smiled. ‘That was my mum.’

‘Interesting,’ Cindy said. ‘Do expand.’

‘Well, actually, the truth of it came to me — bizarrely — when the fork lightning was coming down in the pines and Fraser-Hale was firing and I was struggling to find the bloody gate in the railings and failing. I didn’t think about it again until last night.’

‘Your mother’s death, perhaps, in the hit-and-run?’

‘My dad told me — and the inquest — that she obviously ran out to push me away from an oncoming lorry. While he was at work and someone left the gate open. Not quite how it happened.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Two. I … feel … that what happened was that my mum was finally leaving the old man. Because he’d hit her once too often.’

He’d dreamt about her again last night. A sputtering lamp in Old Church Street. Coming on, going off. A woman beneath it, lit up for a strobing second: a small woman in a light cardigan over a summer dress with bulls-eyes. A small, pale face, curly hair held back with clips that often fell out.

‘Claimed he wasn’t there at the time, but he was. He came back, maybe suspecting something, and she was waiting at the bus stop, with a small case. And me. She was taking me with her. It was a very quiet lane, almost in the country, no immediate neighbours. He got very angry. He hit her. She stumbled. And that was when I ran out in the road.’

‘How do you know this, Bobby?’

Bobby Maiden gave him back the brown paper parcel containing the cassette tape.

‘How the hell should I know? You’re the bloody shaman.’

A pale band had appeared in the eastern sky.

‘How you gonna handle this?’ Grayle wondered.

Cindy seemed a little despondent. ‘I’d hoped for more people, actually. We need to demonstrate that things have changed. Six of us, and all outsiders … Still, we can but try.’

‘So, how-’

Cindy tapped his chin and his bangles rattled. ‘Well, for a start, I thought it would be nice if one of us could go inside the chamber.’

‘It’s collapsed.’

‘Annie managed it. And, of course, the good Sister Anderson. Replaced a little weight since then, fortunately for her. I wonder who is the smallest of us now.’

‘Uh-uh. No way,’ Grayle said. ‘Let’s forget this right now.’

‘I should never have even suggested it. My apologies. I simply thought that, as only one of us has been permitted to see her … ’

It was 6.50 a.m. A thin, amber line over the Malvern Hills.

‘Hullo,’ Marcus said. ‘What’s this?’

A chain of lights coming up the rise. UFOs maybe, Grayle thought. Something for The Phenomenologist. She’d been thinking a lot about The Phenomenologist, what a piece of crap it was, although it didn’t have to be a piece of crap. With a little more cash behind it, a redesign. Some real journalism.

Stupid, a pipe dream. She didn’t belong here.

‘Quite a few of the buggers,’ Marcus noted.

Andy said, ‘Probably the entire hospital trust come to drag me back.’

They came up the path taken, Cindy understood, by Annie Davies herself on a morning when the castle ruins hung damply in the mist around the yard, Annie sliding through the scabbed and knobbly remains towards the pinkening light. Not this time of year, of course, there would have been no chill then; it would be another hot day.

There were not a great many, fewer than there’d been at the funeral. By the light of the torches, Cindy recognized several of those who had been in the pub when Amy Jenkins had broken the village’s silence. Cindy spotted the old man in the flat cap, the fat woman with the hat and the old woman with the funny eye. And Amy herself, of course. Who would have rounded them up, badgered, cajoled, blackmailed, offered to wipe slates clean …

Cindy met her at the edge of the Knoll.

‘Amy,’ he said. ‘If I were a real man, I should ask you to marry me.’

Bobby Maiden spotted a familiar shabby figure looking slightly uncomfortable amongst all these yokels.

‘The lady in the pub said I’d find you here, no other police around,’ Vic Clutton said. ‘We need to talk, Mr Maiden.’

‘Always happy to talk with you, Vic. Saved my life, as I recall.’

‘Yeah,’ Vic said, like this had only just occurred to him. ‘I did, didn’t I? You heard about me saving anyone else’s life at all?’

‘Wouldn’t surprise me. But no.’

‘Really no?’

‘Really no.’

‘Or any other … incidents?’

‘Don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘So there’s no question of any of these … incidents … raising their ugly heads, sorter thing, in the future.’

‘Wouldn’t be because of me. Because I haven’t heard of them.’

‘Right … right. Erm … that time you suggested Riggs had Dean strung up …’

‘Mmm,’ Maiden said. ‘I don’t see us standing that one up either, I’m afraid. But there are other … issues … on which Riggs might be put away. And Beattie. And one or two others. Once you take away a few bricks … in a jerry-built place like Elham … you know what I mean?’

‘Got you. All right. I’ll be in touch.’ Vic nodded and turned away. ‘Be seeing you, Mr Maiden.’

‘Don’t go,’ Maiden said. ‘Stay for our little rustic ritual. Illegal drinks afterwards at the Tup. All nice, decent people. Oh … except for Marcus Bacton. The murderer.’

With the capstone only inches above her, the supporting stones on all sides and all the gaps between them blocked by the legs of the thirty-plus people standing in a circle around the monument, it was dark as hell in here. Ersula was right.

The claustrophobia can be intense. You start to scream inside. All you want is out of there. But, like I said, you have to stop your conscious mind getting a hold of you. What you are dealing with here is the unconscious and that must be left to find its own route to what you would probably call enlightenment.

Scary fun, huh, Ersula?

However, even without her coat, she found it curiously warm. She laid her head on her folded arms. Cindy was leading some kind of chant out there and it was kind of soporific. Maybe she fell asleep. Maybe she dreamed; maybe she didn’t.

When she awoke (or didn’t) her left hand was like on fire. And when she inched forward, it was suddenly so bright on her face that she had to shut her eyes.

In a long, long moment of amber radiance, Grayle’s body was suffused with a startling warmth.

Now, OK, this was crazy. By all the laws of prehistoric science this should not be happening, because this was 1 November and the chamber was supposed to be oriented to the midsummer sunrise.

The warmth settled around her like a fleece, but very lightly. And then she felt it inside her, in the lowest part of her gut like good brandy. She kept her eyes tight shut and lay very still. This was no hardship. In the closeness of the burial chamber on High Knoll, she felt she never wanted to move again, that she’d be quite happy to die here, in this long, ecstatic moment, at the age of … goddamn it, nearly thirty, and what had she done that was in any way worthwhile?

When she opened her eyes, she found herself at the very end of the tunnel, and what had seemed like a slit … well, because of the positioning of the stones and the people’s legs, it was now wide enough to be almost a doorway. She guessed that what had happened was that the capstone, having collapsed, had collapsed some more and the sun was coming in through some other slit.

Whatever.

The sun was a glorious deep red, made all the more intense by the frosty air, the starkness of the trees. You’d swear it was coming down.

Like just for her.

And Annie Davies.

‘Bullshit,’ Grayle whispered. Uncertainly.

Feeling, somehow, that she was not alone in here.