The Cold Calling cc-1

by Phil Rickman

  ‘I guess not. Could I pay you now?’ Not too much daylight made it into this bar, but what there was was painful.

  ‘And what will you do now?’ Amy was wearing another little black dress with a tiny, frilly apron.

  ‘Play it day by day, I guess. See where the trail leads. I’m looking in on this wedding. In Oxfordshire. Friends of Ersula’s.’

  ‘Sometimes the strangest people turn up at weddings.’ Amy pushed Grayle’s bill between the beer pumps.

  ‘Or, maybe, you know, she already went home, ahead of me. Maybe I just wanted a holiday. An experience.’

  An experience. The kind that was better looked back on, from across an ocean.

  ‘You look to me like you need a holiday,’ Amy said frankly.

  Grayle looked away. ‘Where’s, uh, Cindy, this morning?’

  ‘You tell me, my love. Didn’t come back last night. Room hasn’t been slept in. An odd person, that Cindy, I feel.’

  ‘An enigma. Like the pyramids. Hey, come on, this can’t be right?’

  ‘Too much?’

  ‘Come on. In the hotel in Oxford, they charged-’

  ‘A horrible little room, you had,’ Amy said. ‘I’m trying to do the place up, bit by bit, see. I can hardly for shame to charge you at all.’

  Grayle discreetly added another twenty pounds to what it said on the bill and put the money on the bar. In a strange way, she was finding it hard to leave. Probably, she was going to look back at yesterday as the most shockingly awesome day of her entire life. The day her mind blew. The day she learned there was more. The night she called up her own, warped version of Ersula and terrified herself into sleeplessness.

  Basically, the kind of memories that would attach her for ever to St Mary’s.

  ‘Well,’ she said awkwardly to Amy, ‘I hope you, like, get it together. Maybe I’ll come check it out one day.’

  ‘You be careful,’ Amy said.

  And somehow this wasn’t the same as You Take Care Now, which was just another way of saying Have A Nice Day. Jesus, it was just too easy in this place to get into the state of mind that made everything appear sinister. Grayle carried her case to the baby Rover, parked out in the village street.

  Brakes screamed. A big, green Land Rover pulled up lower down the street and then reversed until it was alongside Grayle’s hire car, the driver’s door swinging open before it stopped.

  Adrian Fraser-Hale jumped to the ground.

  ‘Grayle?’

  ‘Oh. Hi.’

  Adrian stood in the middle of the road. He looked severely startled, his haystack hair all mussed up. Maybe the way she’d looked when she saw what she saw in the rain at Black Knoll. Or maybe just normal, for Adrian.

  ‘What … what are you doing here, Grayle?’

  ‘I’ve been staying here. And now I’m leaving.’

  ‘Staying … here?’

  Uh-oh. It didn’t support the cover story too well, did it? Hardly the kind of joint normally frequented by New York journalists on assignment. Not that it mattered any more.

  ‘Local colour,’ Grayle said. ‘You stay in a big hotel, you don’t get the same local colour.’

  ‘Colour,’ Adrian said. ‘I see.’ He had on a green army-type sweater with patches at the shoulders and elbows; there was a camouflage fishing hat in his hand. He looked kind of cute and jolly and vaguely out of it.

  ‘Which is why I’m going to the Rollright Stones,’ she told him. ‘I figured, like, a New Age wedding … you know?’

  ‘Great fun,’ Adrian said. ‘Great fun. Which is why … I mean, I was looking for you, actually. We said we’d go together, didn’t we?’

  ‘Uh, right.’ Well sure, kind of cute, but two more hours of this heavy-duty, hearty Englishness when you had a lot on your mind … ‘Just, uh, as you see, I just checked out. That is, I won’t be coming back.’

  ‘That’s all right. Actually, I … Well, I was actually rather hoping you could give me a lift to Rollright. I’ve got two iffy tyres on this thing and the engine’s sounding more than a bit ropy. Fine for shunting around the lanes here, but I’d be rather anxious about the motorway. I mean, if you wanted to push on somewhere afterwards, that’s no problem.’

  ‘You mean, go in this?’

  ‘I can easily get a lift back with someone. Look, if you want to leave soon, I could zoom down to Cefn, toss a few wedding sort of clothes in a bag, be back here in no time at all.’

  ‘Isn’t Roger going?’

  ‘Oh gosh, you’re joking. Nice people, but not Roger’s type. I mean, you know, having them on the summer courses is one thing …’

  ‘And taking their money.’

  ‘Quite.’ Adrian looked uncomfortable. ‘You won’t print that, will you? Golly, I’m so indiscreet.’

  Grayle smiled. ‘OK. How about I follow you down to the centre, get your stuff?’

  ‘Super,’ Adrian said. ‘I’ll buy you lunch somewhere.’

  ‘That’d be real nice.’

  And maybe it would.

  A single red circle had been drawn on the 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey map (Sheet 161 — Abergavenny and the Black Mountains) spread out on the desk, and Cindy tapped it with his fibre-tipped pen.

  ‘This is your Collen Hall, see?’

  The name spelt out in Gothic lettering.

  ‘Which suggests a site of antiquity,’ Cindy said. ‘Now, if we consult The Buildings of Wales, we find that Collen Hall is actually built on the site of a Norman Castle, destroyed during the Glyndwr rebellion in the fifteenth century. And the castle motte itself may well have been constructed around a prehistoric burial mound. Agreed, Marcus?’

  ‘Seems feasible.’

  ‘Indeed. So you see, Bobby, we have a site of considerable antiquity. Now if we look around for other evidence of ancient occupancy of this area, we find … ah … this is the rather phallic Neolithic stone outside the army camp at Cwrt-y-gollen … you see the recurrence of that name … Collen mutates to gollen in the Welsh. Probably a reference to the Celtic saint, Collen. Anyway a connection. All right, let’s follow the line …’

  Cindy encircled more spots on the map and then laid a perspex ruler along them and drew two straight lines.

  ‘Caer suggests a hill fort or enclosure. Often a holy hill, a place of veneration. The lines tend to cut across an edge rather than go through the centre. Cam is a cairn or mound, usually Bronze Age. And if we continue the line past Collen Hall we come to Llanwenarth Church, which I should imagine is quite ancient.’

  Maiden peered down at the map. ‘What you’re saying … this is a ley line, right?’

  ‘And here’s another one connecting a cairn, another caer, and passing through Collen Hall itself to the very summit of the Sugar Loaf, which is the highest mountain in the area. Now, Bobby, do you see the way I’m thinking?’

  ‘God, Cindy, what am I supposed to say to that?’

  He wanted them to go away. He wanted to sit here and look at objects and hear sounds.

  ‘Humour the creature,’ Marcus said. ‘He’s been praying to his own peculiar gods that one day a policeman amenable to his ideas would be sent to him.’

  ‘True enough.’ Cindy smiled coyly, nibbling the end of his pen.

  ‘All right,’ Maiden said.

  He straightened up. Said the most detective-like words he could think of.

  ‘What’ve we got?’

  Going over again why he’d had to dump his first theory about the two scumbags sent to the flat in Elham.

  Because, while these insects would cut and dice a copper any night of the week, for enough money, they would never, on pain of slow castration, harm Tony Parker’s daughter. They might tail her to find Maiden, but they’d wait until she’d gone before they did the necessary.

  No way would they follow them to Collen Hall — maybe going in via the public bar before closing time, unlatching a window for later — with a view to doing the job on the premises. Unbelievably risky.

  And awkward. The hotel rooms were s
elf-locking from the inside. The obvious way would be to tap on the door, cough politely, announce yourself as hotel management come with clean towels, fresh soap, whatever. And then, when it opens, you come in fast and hard.

  And noisily.

  Dangerously unprofessional. And you leave covered in blood.

  Besides which, whoever it was had gone in after Maiden had left the room to make himself an easy target in the grounds.

  Which raised the unthinkable: that Emma Curtis was the intended victim. Putting Maiden in the frame. A setup.

  Too complicated. Too many potential pitfalls between arrest and a life sentence.

  Surely.

  The only other solution was Cindy’s. A killer concerned less with the victim than the location.

  ‘A human being,’ Cindy said. ‘Not a supernatural force. Not an energy. An ordinary human being.’

  ‘Yeah, but does he know that? Because this is the thing with serial killers. They don’t think they’re ordinary.’

  Maiden inspected the map, in a cursory way, focused, but not concentrating.

  And it was suddenly incredible. The map was alive. Green hills flexing like muscles, bulging into brown. Roads and rivers wriggling. Black symbols translating themselves into groups of houses and telephone boxes and stone churches and Collen Hall in its neat square of tamed countryside.

  A pale glow around it. Like the glow around caer, carn, standing stone, church, the pencil line joining them replaced by a taut wire of white neon.

  He was tingling.

  ‘This guy would feel … connected? Right? Wired.’

  ‘Go on,’ Cindy said.

  ‘I mean, he would feel that because he knows this secret countryside of glowing … glowing things, he’s … What am I trying to say?’

  ‘In touch with the spirit countryside,’ Marcus said.

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘A can of worms. But if you imagine another layer of existence … a numinous landscape both within and around the one we can see. If you imagine Lewis’s hypothetical assassin feeling himself to be somehow moving around in that separate country.’

  ‘As the shaman does,’ Cindy said.

  Marcus groaned.

  ‘But this is what the shaman does,’ Cindy insisted. ‘He or she …’

  ‘Or in your case both.’

  ‘… can move along the spirit-paths. Shamanic flight.’

  ‘Fuelled, no doubt, by a mug or two of magic-mush-room tea,’ Marcus said.

  Cindy ignored him. ‘This is what you are doing now, Bobby, in a limited way. You’re looking at the map and putting yourself into the landscape. But the map is not the real landscape, the map is a pattern of symbols your mind is able to use to create a landscape. Which may be even more vivid than what we call the real one. Does this make sense?’

  ‘In a way.’

  The glow around Collen Hall was twice as intense as the others because it marked the confluence of two lines.

  ‘This may be a naive question,’ Maiden said. ‘But why can’t he just enjoy the buzz? Why does he need to kill people?’

  ‘A policeman is asking this?’ Cindy was running his hands over the bookshelves.

  ‘I suppose what I’m looking for is something more meaningful. If this guy’s educated enough to research history and folklore and what have you … he’s not just a slasher, is he?’

  ‘See what you mean.’ Marcus sat astride an arm of the sofa. ‘Well, these are ritual sites. Most of them, at some time or another, have seen sacrifices, human or otherwise. Blood sacrifices. Blood is the life-force. Blood was shed to fertilize the land. Goes way back in most societies.’

  ‘We’re looking for an educated, primitive savage?’

  Savage.

  Took a blade to her. Em. Went in, in the dark, and she’s probably thinking it’s me. Perhaps he climbs into bed with her. Whispering the odd endearment. A little heavy breathing. Finds her throat with his fingers … slashes … and again and again again … until her head’s almost off. And then … what? Pulls back the bedclothes, because there’s blood everywhere by now and he can’t see what he’s doing. Sticks the knife into her exposed abdomen and rips upwards. Takes it out, puts it back and rips downwards, all the way to her-

  ‘Stop it, Bobby, you can’t change it.’ Cindy placed a book on the desk. Black. No dust jacket. Golden embossed title.

  Pagan Images.

  ‘I said you were close to him, Bobby. Look at his face.’

  Cindy opened the book.

  XXXVII

  It occurred to Grayle, as she waited on the forecourt at the University of the Earth, that she was going to have to come clean with Adrian.

  Problem with this wedding was that the bride and groom both knew whose sister she was; no way it wouldn’t get mentioned before or after whatever kind of ceremony this turned out to be.

  At least there wouldn’t be the embarrassment of having to admit to Roger Falconer that she would not be doing any kind of article on his project. Adrian had invited her in for coffee, but she said she wanted to get to Rollright in good time, get an idea of what kind of clothes people were wearing.

  Now he came bounding out of Cefn-y-bedd, still in his army sweater. Looking like the son of the house, some young officer, played in the movie by — yeah, yeah — Hugh Grant. Only a little beefier and with Redford’s hair. He was carrying his stuff in this ridiculous, sausage-shaped leather bag.

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘It’s a cricket bag,’ Adrian said, and she started to laugh, because this guy would just have to carry his suit in a goddamn cricket bag.

  Suddenly feeling better than she had since she arrived here. Adrian … well, he might be into dreaming on stones and recording EVP messages and all that Holy Grayle stuff, but he did it in this big-schoolboy way that was kind of infectious. Maybe the whole scene would be healthier if there were fewer stoned, wild-eyed beardies and more straight-up guys like this.

  Reversing on the forecourt, she glanced in the driver’s mirror and saw someone watching them from the porch. Falconer, with his ponytail and his denim shirt and his tight jeans. Some guy on the Courier had once said a ponytail was just a swinging dick you were allowed to wear outside your pants. Watching Falconer watching her, as she swung the little car out through the gates, she just knew that, at some stage of the game, this man had fucked Ersula.

  No big deal, unless he also fucked her mind.

  ‘The foliate face,’ Cindy said. ‘The Green Man. You saw one on St Mary’s church yesterday and it frightened you.’

  Maiden leaned over the book, hands flat on the desk. ‘This is a different face.’

  ‘Oh, they’re all different. But substantially the same. An image which is half man, half vegetation. A woodland sprite, he is, or a fearsome giant, with leaves and twigs sprouting from every orifice. A personification of nature, with enormous energy and fecundity and … an absolutely ferocious life-force. He is a guardian of the earth, Bobby. A god of ecology, powerful and forbidding.’

  Maiden closed the book. ‘He doesn’t look the kind of guy who helps old ladies with their gardens.’

  ‘Looks inexplicably malevolent. Usually seen as a kind of mediator between man and nature who fertilizes the earth, but a woman called Kathleen Basford, who’s written a study of the chap, suggests he’s also a symbol of death.’

  ‘Violent death?’

  Cindy looked up. ‘Aggressive enough for it, isn’t he?’

  Poured himself a glass of spring water, and Maiden saw how tired he was looking. Up all night too, and he was not so young. There were cracks in the face make-up, the bangles hung from knobbly wrists.

  ‘Bobby, I asked if you’d seen the face in one of your unfortunate dreams and I don’t think you replied.’

  Wasn’t sure if it was a dream or not. Couldn’t remember. I can now.’

  H. W. Worthy’s funeral parlour at the bottom of Elham high street. A wreath on a mock grave. A sombre, dark-leaved wreath.

&n
bsp; ‘You know how you see things from a certain angle, and you sometimes make out a face. Clouds, coals in the fire, knots on the back of a door. I suppose, if you see a face in a wreath, it’s going to look like this.’

  Remembering when he saw the face in the wreath, what had happened to take his mind off the grotesque illusion.

  You look lost, Bobby …

  How good she’d looked in the back of the old Sierra, in the twilight, aglow in her orange sweatsuit, looking so happy to see him. Love-at-first-sight situation. Love at second meeting.

  Love.

  Life gets complicated, don’t it?

  He sat down again. ‘Tell me everything about this bugger.’

  And Cindy brought him the letter.

  The letter was word-processed in Old English type.

  ‘Came this morning,’ Cindy said.

  ‘Stick to the truth, Lewis. Post hasn’t even arrived yet.’

  ‘It was faxed, Marcus.’

  ‘I haven’t got a bloody fax!’

  ‘No, but I have. I brought it in from the car while you were getting what sleep you could manage. And then I telephoned my friend Gareth, from Crucible magazine, and prised him from his bed.’

  ‘Crucible magazine? What the hell is that?’

  ‘It’s a pagan periodical with a circulation no doubt approximating to The Phenomenologist’s.’

  Marcus scowled. ‘I’m going to make some more tea.’

  ‘But less credibility among elderly ladies,’ Cindy called after him. ‘Read the letter, Bobby. You’ll notice it begins, somewhat unusually for Crucible, with a polite “Dear Sir.” The more usual term of address being, one imagines, something more on the lines of “Hey, listen, man.”’Dear Sir,As a sporadic reader of your publication and other pagan periodicals, I must object to the assumption that those of us who believe ourselves to be more attuned to the living pulse of the earth must automatically be opposed to country sport.By ‘country sport’, I mean, of course, blood sport. While I deplore the use of the appendage ‘sport’, I can understand why it is applied. By equating the ritual shedding of blood with such pursuits as football and tennis, it gains a certain social respectability in these anaemic times.An essential element in the physical and spiritual equilibrium of a planet or country is the regular free-flowing of blood, in the open air.As your readers ought to know, blood is the original creative and materializing medium. It is the physical substance best capable of interpenetrating the planes. It has been used (and sometimes misused) by magicians throughout history to assist in the manifestation of spirits and daemons.It is also vital for the sustenance of the spirit of the earth. When a fox is killed, after the cumulative energy of the chase, it is a holy moment. The violent spurting of the blood equates with the climactic instant of orgasm. Both the energy and the blood itself are absorbed by the earth and converted to fuel both the planet and the human race.There are, of course, places upon the surface of the earth where the shedding of blood is most effective. And, for this logical reason, rites of sacrifice were practised by the oldest cultures of the earth. The insistence by many modern pagans that blood sacrifice is unnecessary and ‘barbaric’ is unbelievably stupid and damaging to all that your readers purport to hold dear.Green is the opposite colour to red, and therefore it follows that these two colours represent the essential friction without which we shall all weaken and perish.As long as it continues to embrace vegetarianism and oppose the killing of animals in the wild, the so-called ‘green’ movement, and the so-called ‘pagans’ who support it, is a dangerous sham.Yours faithfully,The Real Green Man.