The Cold Calling cc-1

by Phil Rickman

  ‘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.

  XXX

  A scarred moon hung diffidently outside the stone-sunk mullioned window of room five. A moon which had seen too much of this and didn’t want to get involved.

  ‘But it’s OK,’ Em said. ‘Really.’

  Maiden felt his hand would leave a filthy smut on her skin and he took it away.

  She pulled it back. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Maiden said.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘I was half expecting it, you want the truth. Christ, when I think of all the things that happened to you … knocked down, beaten up … it’s a wonder you …’ Interweaving her fingers with his. ‘Anyway, it’s OK, it really is OK, Bobby. All right?’

  ‘I don’t think …’ He didn’t want to talk about it; all the words were like cardboard cut-outs. ‘I don’t think you understand.’

  ‘Come on, guv’nor, don’t say it never happened before. There isn’t a bloke alive it never happened to. Certainly not someone as messed up and threatened and … Bobby, relax. ‘

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And look, we’re here. I’m happy. Believe it. When you went away — ask Vic, Vic knows — I wasn’t functioning. I’ve thought about this a lot. I mean, I didn’t want to get this wrong, because I’ve got enough things wrong in my life …’

  ‘Listen, let me tell you, Emma, whatever else you got wrong was as-’

  ‘And I kept on asking myself, could it have been the excitement of it? Because it was exciting, all that Suzanne stuff; you create a fantasy and you want it to go on. I wanted to tidy up your flat, put your pictures on the walls … Christ, they were so lonely, those pictures. So, you see, I wanted to be sure it wasn’t the romance of all that. ‘

  ‘Romance?’

  ‘You don’t see it, do you?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘The loner? The misfit? Dark, good-looking, trapped in a world where he doesn’t belong … Oh, God, yes. And now an eyepatch. ‘

  Clutching his hand to her breast. The breast, surely, felt warm and wonderful; it was the hand that felt like dead meat.

  ‘We’re all Mills and Boonies at heart,’ she said.

  ‘That’s why so many women get murdered,’ Maiden said. ‘Didn’t you know? Fascination with the lone, moody … psycho.’

  ‘Crime-prevention hint number 486. Thank you, Inspector.’

  ‘No more inspector. That’s all over.’

  ‘I wonder if it is. Hey, listen, I think I want to meet your dad. I want to meet Norman Plod.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about him a lot. I reckon he’s probably got a secret. Something like the paintings, only different. Something he had to hide. He’s your old man, after all, he can’t be totally insensitive.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘All down to genetics.’

  ‘You’re wrong. He’s profoundly insensitive. If he was here now, he’d be sneering.’

  ‘I will never sneer. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh God, look,’ Maiden said, wanting to cry. ‘Piss off out of this while you can. Please?’

  ‘No chance,’ Em said softly. ‘No chance.’

  ‘I thought it was going to be all right, I was convinced tonight … But it’s not … going … to be … all right. I really want you to just, just … be out of it. Because-’

  ‘You’re full of shit, Bobby.’

  ‘You don’t know how much.’

  ‘We can get rid of it.’

  He said nothing. His lips felt dry and cracked. He was cold and without sensation. He thought he’d never felt as much hatred and contempt for anybody as he did for himself tonight.

  ‘You want to sleep?’

  ‘No! I mean … no. No, I don’t want to sleep.’

  ‘It’s just, when I talked to your friend the Sister, she said head damage, you need a lot of extra sleep to get over it.’

  ‘What else did she tell you?’

  ‘Not much. It’s a patient-nurse thing, I expect. How about I make some tea?’

  ‘Don’t go.’

  He held her hard against the full length of his body. His body — but, tragically, not all of it — had gone rigid at the thought of what would happen if sleep swallowed him.

  ‘All right. I won’t.’ She sounded just a little scared. ‘I won’t go.’

  ‘Oh God, Em, I …’

  ‘What?’

  He rolled onto her. Inside what was left of his head, buried between her breasts, he begged for help. Silently screaming into the cold void.

  ‘What were you going to say?’

  ‘Nothing, really.’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘It’s very much the wrong time.’

  ‘No, it’s the right time. There’ll never be a better time. Please, Bobby. I’m thirty-three, I’m getting too cynical. Say it to me.’

  He closed his eyes on her, and something altered.

  Something altered. He imagined her body damp and cold under him like clay, her arms around him knobbly like roots, her breath turned brackish.

  And that — oh no, oh, please, no — was when he became suddenly and sickeningly erect.

  She said, not moving at all, as if she hadn’t noticed, ‘I love you, Bobby.’

  ‘No!’

  Almost exploding with self-hatred, he rolled out of bed and crawled away, in his shame.

  ‘What are you trying to say? What are you walking all around on tippy toes trying, God damn it, to say?’

  ‘We don’t know what we are trying to say,’ Cindy said. ‘We are both of us in the dark. And, when it comes down to any form of remedial action, I am afraid, powerless.’

  Grayle said, ‘You’re trying to say my sister is dead.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Marcus said gruffly.

  ‘Or maybe she’s insane, right?’ Grayle shrilled. ‘She got taken over by the goddamned Dark Forces of the Stones.’

  ‘Now see what you’ve bloody done,’ Marcus said to Cindy.

  ‘See, maybe …’ Grayle standing at the door, waving her arms. ‘… maybe the Ancient Evil of the Stones possesses everyone who sleeps there, right? And they’re cursed for ever, and when they die their spirits hover around the stones and roam the dark hills and it’s all … it’s all Stephen King. Oh, you guys, you sure don’t help a person just had their first psychic experience. Do I need this? Do I need an evening with the goddamned Brothers Grimm?’

  She started to cry.

  ‘I’ll drive you back to the pub,’ Cindy said.

  ‘Thanks,’ Grayle snuffled.

  In the grounds, there was a wooden bench by a stone well-head, capped now, so that you couldn’t see down below a couple of feet. Bobby Maiden sat on the bench beside the well, his leaden head in his damp hands.Bare-chested, barefoot. All he’d grabbed were his jeans.

  He lifted his head, looked up with his uncovered eye
at the shambling facade of Collen Hall. Mostly dark now, except for a small peachy light, a bedside table light, in a first-floor mullioned window.

  Room five.

  As he watched, the light went out.

  ‘No.’

  So tell her. Go back and tell her.

  Tell her? About the dreams of death? The body, your own body, rotting around you? Tell her about the fear of sleep?

  Tell her everything. Tell her what she’d be taking on.

  Yes.

  Inside the clanky old car, Grayle apologized.

  ‘Good heavens, child,’ Cindy said, ‘I think you were rather restrained under the circumstances.’

  ‘All too much. All at once. Plus, with all our preconceptions of England, everybody staid and reserved and bowler hats and stuff.’

  ‘Underneath it all, my love, we are a horribly weird nation.’

  The old car chugged under the castle walls. ‘But I’m gonna find her.’ Grayle tried to settle in the torn and lumpy, sit-up-and-beg passenger seat. ‘I mean it. I won’t leave until I find her.’

  ‘Leave St Mary’s?’

  ‘This country. She’s somewhere in this country. See, I’m going to this wedding tomorrow, there’ll be people there who know her. Maybe even … Jesus, maybe she’ll be there. It’s possible.’

  ‘You are a determined girl.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me … Shit, I’m sorry, there I go again …’

  ‘No, I am sorry. You must think we’re all batty. Me, with my shamanic fantasies, my obsessions. Getting old is what it is, Grayle. Getting old and getting nowhere. An old queen in search of a stable throne.’

  ‘And me? With my ghost fantasy?’

  ‘Fantasy now, is it?’

  ‘I couldn’t begin to say. Is it all in the mind? The brain pulling some scam?’

  ‘Is that what you feel?’

  ‘No. I feel … I feel it really happened.’

  ‘In that case, it really happened. You were a witness to the failure of the spirit of Annie Davies to return to the level from which she might go on. It’s quite true what they say. A traumatic death … an unfinishing … a snatching away. Causes a blip. The term “earthbound” …’

  ‘She … she’s out there …?’

  ‘She is out there.’

  ‘That’s scary. And real sad.’